Death by Chocolate (9 page)

Obediently, Savannah
trudged up the stairs, her friend right behind her. ‘Yes, Dirk is easily
impressed.” Tammy nodded. “Especially with himself.”

Chapter

A
s Savannah drove to the San
Carmelita police station the next morning, she experienced one of those brief
but precious moments when she was truly grateful to be alive. The foothill road
that she took from her house to die station passed a number of orange and lemon
groves. The smell of the sun-warmed fruit reminded her of the previous
evening’s treat, and she marveled once again at its healing properties.

When she had awakened in
the morning, her head had been completely clear, and other than a nagging
sadness and an ache of guilt, she was happy to be in the land of the living.

In the distance, the sun
sparkled on the blue of the Pacific, and she could see the palm-lined streets
leading to some of the most beautiful beaches on the West Coast.

The station was centrally
located in town, on the older, more picturesque Main Street. Like most of the
mission-founded towns along the coastline, San Carmelita had begun at an old
adobe church a hundred or so years before. The town had grown gracefully,
filling the space from the ocean to the foothills with first citrus groves,
then stores and houses. From the tiny white bungalows with red-tiled roofs
crowded side by side on the beach to multimillion-dollar mansions perched on
the hillsides, the town had a lazy, gentle feel about it. And in the years that
it had been her home, Savannah had done all she could as a cop and an
investigator to keep it that way.

The older she got, the more
she realized the intrinsic value of “lazy” and “gentle.”

The thought that someone
might have been “less than gentle” with her most recent client was so
disturbing that she put the idea aside with an effort and promised herself not
to worry about it until she knew more.

She needed information. And
the police station— specifically, Dirk’s desk—was the place to start.

Every time she pulled into
the station-house parking lot, she felt a tug of nostalgia, a twinge of
resentment. She had worked hard at being a cop. She had been a damned good one.
But years ago she had investigated some people in high places and toppled a
couple of political icons and had been kicked off the force for her efforts.

The whole fiasco had been
horribly unfair. But she wasn’t bitter, and the resentment was only a twinge.
She loved her present life as a private detective, and if she hadn’t gotten the
boot, she’d still be on the force, answering to the schmucks who’d unjustly
fired her.

Through the glass front of
the building, she could see that the front desk was occupied by one of her least
favorite cops, Kenny Bates, a stud-muffin, at least in his own opinion. Kenny
didn’t seem to notice that for a womanizer, he led a fairly female-free
existence. Gals weren’t exactly lining up to take a bite out of his cupcake.
Savannah strongly suspected that Kenny Boy hadn’t had a nibble or even a sniff
in years.

The last time she had seen
him, he had been working the front desk at the coroner’s office. He must have
been promoted—or, considering it was Kenny, demoted.

“Hey, hey, hey, Savannah
baby!” he proclaimed as she walked through the door. ‘Just couldn’t stay away,
huh?”

She glanced at the
too-thick, slightly askew toupee, the uniform that was two sizes too small,
causing his buttons to strain across his ample belly. She caught the fairly
pungent odor of nacho cheese chips on his breath as he slid the clipboard
across the counter for her to sign.

“Oh, yeah.... Bates. I live
for these moments together.” She scrawled “Daisy Duck” on the ledger and passed
it back to him. She had been signing in with assorted cartoon character names
since she had been canned... and the vigilant Kenneth Bates had never even
noticed.

Ken lit up at her words.
She shook her head. Dissing him was just too easy, hardly any challenge at all.

“Really? Me too,” he
gushed. “Hey, why don’t you come over to my place tonight, and we can watch TV
together. I’ve got that new ‘adult’ channel—it’s channel sixty-nine! Get it?
Sixty-nine!” He guffawed at his own joke, reminding her of a buck-toothed
donkey she once knew in Georgia. “Maybe we can get us some ideas from watching
it, huh?”

She shoved the clipboard
back at him and took off down the hall, eager to breathe fresh,
non-nacho-scented air. “Eat dirt and die, Bates, you friggin’ maggot,” she said
over her shoulder.

“Yeah, well, if you change
your mind, give me a ring,” he called after her.

She found Dirk at his desk
in the squad room. As usual, he was fighting with his computer. Dirk had never
recovered from the shock of having to upgrade from his Underwood typewriter to
a computer keyboard and mouse.

“Damned thing,” he swore as
she walked up behind him and leaned over his shoulder. “It ate my document
again. I hit one button—I don’t even know which one— and poof! It’s gone. I
hate it when that happens. Stupid piece of crap.”

She reached over him,
scrolled to the bottom of the page, and hit the “restore” icon. His form
instantly materialized.

“It’s not the machine’s
fault. It’s operator error,” she said, pulling a chair from a nearby empty desk
and setting it next to his.

“Tell me something new,” he
grumbled. “What I really hate is when the darned thing freezes up on me and I
have to turn it off the old-fashioned way, you know— with the on/off button—and
then when I turn it on again it yells at me for not closing it down properly.”

“That is aggravating, it’s
true.” She looked around the room at the empty desks. Other than one guy whom
she didn’t even recognize standing at a filing cabinet on the other side of a
partition, Dirk was the only one in sight. “Where is everybody?”

“What do you mean
everybody? I told you, the cutbacks are wicked. We’re down to three detectives.
That’s it. Ray took his retirement last year, and Bruce went out this year, and
they haven’t replaced either one of them.”

“No wonder you’re always
asking me to go on stakeouts with you. You’re lonely, Coulter.”

“Lonely, my butt. I’m just
keeping you off the streets and outta the pool halls.”

She reached across him and
nabbed his coffee cup. “Hey, don’t drink outta that!” He tried to snatch it
back, but she was too quick. ‘You’ll give me your cold.” It was room
temperature. She grimaced and gave it back to him. “Lukewarm.... yum. I don’t
have my cold anymore. That toddy you made last night cured me.”

“Completely?”

“My nose is dry, and I
haven’t sneezed or coughed once since I woke up.”

“Wow! I’ve discovered the
cure for the common cold.”

“I think the Irish
discovered it long, long ago.” She studied the form he was filling out on the
screen. The words “Eleanor Maxwell” caught her eye. “What’re you working on?”

“Nothing,” he said, too
quickly. ‘Just the usual crap.”

“Did you get any sleep, or
did you stay up all night processing the scene?”

He frowned. “Bimbo-head
wasn’t supposed to tell you about that.”

“I pried it out of her—threaten
her with mutilation and she caves every time. What have you got?”

“Nothing. Really.” He
closed the screen and switched off the computer.

“Where’s the body?”

“Dr. Liu’s got it.”

“When is she going to do
the autopsy?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know for
sure. Could be today, tomorrow. Depends on how many bodies she’s got piling up
down there.”

She gave him a piercing
look. “Is she doing it right now, Dirk?”

“Yeah. She’s probably just
about done.” He sighed. “And I suppose you want to come with me to the morgue.”
She nodded, reached over and ruffled his hair. He hated that. It would take him
five minutes to get those precious few strands combed just right to cover the
thin spots. ‘You betcha. Let’s go. Now’s as good a time as any for good
news.... or bad.”

At the coroner’s office
Savannah and Dirk found Officer Rosa Ortez manning the front desk. Her smile
was bright, her manner professional as she asked them to sign in.

“So, you’re Kenny’s
replacement, huh?” Savannah asked as she wrote her own name, not Minnie
Mouse’s, on the sheet.

“Yes,” Rosa replied. “As of
Monday.”

“How’d that happen?”

Rosa grinned broadly. “He
pinched my butt; I took his job.”

Dirk laughed. “Sounds fair
to me. But now I have to look at his ugly mug over at the station every morning.
You were a lot easier on the eyes.”

She shrugged. “Sorry. This
is a lot closer to my babysitter. And Kenny hates working at the station, where
there’s actually something to do. Unlike here.” She waved her hand, indicating
the relatively silent and empty building. “Deadly quiet.”

“Oo-o-o-o, bad one.”
Savannah placed the pen back in its holder and waved good-bye. “Keep a stiff
upper lip.”

“Oh, like that’s any
better,” Rosa replied as they left the reception area and walked down the tiled
hallway toward the coroner’s autopsy suite in the back of the building.

There was no point in
stopping at Dr. Jennifer Liu’s office halfway down the hall. She was hardly
ever behind a desk. The swinging double doors that opened into the rooms where
autopsies were performed were both closed. That usually meant a procedure was
underway.

Savannah steeled her nerves
before opening the door. It was never particularly pleasant to watch an autopsy
performed, but she found it much harder when the body had belonged to someone
she knew. When she swung it open and looked inside, she was relieved to see
that the corpse on the table had already been wrapped in a white shroud and was
ready for the funeral home’s collection. From its general height and shape, she
figured it was the remains of Eleanor Maxwell.

Dirk followed close behind
her. “Dr. Liu?” he called. “Anybody home?”

A moment later, the county
coroner walked out of a back room and joined them beside the body on the
stainless-steel table. An exquisitely lovely, petite and slender Asian woman,
Dr. Jennifer Liu could have been cast as a runway model, a martial arts expert,
or a ballerina. But most people who met her would not have guessed she was a
medical examiner.

Her long, glossy hair was tied
back with a blue paisley scarf, and she wore green surgical scrubs and
disposable paper booties over her sneakers. The scrubs were bloodstained.

“Is this Maxwell?” Dirk
asked, nodding toward the body.

“That’s her.” She turned to
Savannah. “Hey, girlfriend. How’s it going? Haven’t seen you for a while.”
Savannah decided not to mention that fact that she considered rare visits to
the coroner’s office a good thing. Not that she didn’t like Dr. Jen, but...
“Things have been pretty quiet with me,” she replied, then added, “Until this,
that is.”

Dr. Liu nodded. ‘Yeah, Dirk
told me you were her bodyguard or something like that.”

“Apparently, I was more
‘something’ than guard.” The doctor gave her a warm, comforting smile. ‘There’s
no reason to suspect foul play at this point,” she said. “She died of a heart
attack, and she was being treated for a heart condition. Natural causes.”

“Oh yeah?” Dirk said.
“That’s good news, huh, Van?”

“I guess.”

Dr. Liu walked over to a
nearby table and picked up a manila folder. Opening it, she studied the papers
inside. “I talked to her physician, a Dr. Raymond Hynson, and he said she was
suffering from advanced heart disease.”

“Was she taking meds for
it?” Dirk asked.

“Dr. Hynson had prescribed
metosorbide for her. And once you inventory the contents of her medicine chest
at home, and I get the lab tests back, I’ll let you know if she was taking what
he’d prescribed.”

“She drank quite a lot,”
Savannah offered. “Isn’t that a no-no for people taking metosorbide?”

“Yes, it is.” Dr. Liu shook
her head and closed the folder. “What a shame. Some people just don’t realize
what they’re doing to themselves.”

Savannah remembered sitting
on the patio, gazing out at the dark sea with Eleanor Maxwell—the tears on her
cheeks, her comments about how little joy there was in her life.

“Maybe she did realize it,”
Savannah said. “There’s more than one way to commit suicide.”

“Was Lady Eleanor, Queen of
Chocolate, that unhappy?” Dr. Liu asked, looking at the bundled body on her
table.

“Oh yeah,” Savannah said.
“Definitely that unhappy. No doubt about it.”

Chapter

“S
o, it looks like you’re off
the hook,” Dirk said as k3he drove Savannah home. “Natural causes. Would have
happened no matter what you did, short of keeping her from drinking and
lowering her cholesterol.” Savannah watched the neighborhood whiz by the car
window, but she wasn’t seeing it. Her thoughts were elsewhere—on the plastic
bags she had given to Tammy the night before.

“Hey, I’m not just talking
to hear my own head rattle, you know?” he said, nudging her.

“What? Oh, yeah, right. I’m
off the hook. Except...”

“Except what? There isn’t
anything else you can do for her.”

“I still haven’t done what
she hired me to do.”

“What are you talking
about? She doesn’t need protection anymore, she’s—”

“I know.” Savannah sighed.
“But she didn’t hire me to protect her. She made that abundantly clear. In
fact, she was downright rude about it. All she wanted me to do was find out who
was writing her those threatening letters so that she could kill them.”

“Is that what she said?”
Dirk was instantly alert. “She was going to kill them?”

“I think she was speaking
figuratively.”

“Well, I certainly hope
so.”

“And I still need to do my
job.”

Dirk shook his head. “Savannah,
that’s dumb. Your client croaked.”

“Yeah, but she paid me in
advance. I think she’d still want to know who it was.”

Abruptly, he pulled the
Buick over to the side of the road and turned to face her. “Look,” he said, “the
gal’s dead. She ain’t ever gonna know nothin’, so—”

“Granny Reid says the
moment we pass over we instantly have all knowledge. It’s like a veil being
lifted, and once we leave the physical world and join the spiritual one, we see
everything clearly.”

“Then you don’t have to
find out anything for her. According to your grandma, she already knows
everything, right?”

Savannah turned and gave
him a long, hard look. “Okay, smarty-pants. Maybe I want to know for myself.”
He threw the car into drive and pulled back into traffic. “Well, hell, girl,
why didn’t you just say so in the first place? Let’s go back to the mansion and
check out that medicine chest.”

“And her dresser drawers,
and her desk and her closets and—”

“Anybody ever tell you
you’re a nosy old broad?” ‘Yeah. It’s a gift. And I keep telling you, boy...
I’m middle-aged.”

Dirk knocked at the front
door of the mansion, but when nobody answered, Savannah reached across him and
tried the knob. Just as she had suspected it would, it opened easily.

“They didn’t bother to lock
it before,” she said. “Not much reason to bother now.”

The tripping of tiny
toenails across the hardwood floors announced the arrival of the terrible
threesome.

“Meet my buddies,” she told
Dirk as she knelt on one knee and began petting first one, then the other.
‘They’re named Satan, Killer, and the little runt one is Hider.”

“Are you serious?” Dirk
offered his hand, but Satan snarled. “Stupid names for some barking rats.”

“Are you guys hungry?” she
asked. Then she noticed the bits of dog food in Killer’s tiny beard. Satan’s
whiskers were wet, so they had water. And they weren’t rushing out the door to
go doggy-wee-wee, so she assumed Marie must still be on duty.

“They look fine to me,”
Dirk said, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. It occurred to Savannah
that nothing short of a German shepherd or rottweiler was a “real” dog to Dirk.
But then, he hadn’t been bitten by one of these little ones, either. She still
had a bandage on her forefinger.

“Anybody here?” he shouted,
his deep voice echoing through the house.

The answering silence
seemed heavy and thick, as though the house itself knew that something had
changed.

Looking around at the
antiques, the heavy drapes, the dark fabrics, Savannah said, “I don’t think I’d
want to be here after midnight... in the middle of a thunderstorm—”

“With a psycho ax-murderer
on the loose from a local nuthouse.... yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve got some
imagination, Van. It’s just your average, run-of-the-mill mansion.”

“With a carousel horse and
a suit of armor in the living room?”

“Exactly. I’ve got the same
sorta stuff in my trailer.”

“Oh, yeah.... with your
TV-tray coffee table and your orange-crate bookshelves.” Savannah started up
the stairs. “Come on, I’ve been dying to see the master suite.”

When Savannah opened the
door to Eleanor’s bedroom and looked inside, her first thought was, Somebody
beat us to it. It’s already been searched.

The canopied bed was
topsy-turvy, a tumble of blankets, sheets, and pillows, some of it spilling
onto the carpet. Half of the dresser’s drawers were open, clothes hanging out.
The closet door stood ajar, the heel of a rhinestone-studded pump stuck beneath
it.

Every horizontal surface
was littered with food wrappers, empty booze bottles, jewelry and makeup and
assorted items of clothing, some clean but more dirty.

The room had a stale odor
about it, as though it badly needed a breath of fresh air.

“She really was depressed,”
Savannah said.

“Why didn’t the maid
straighten up in here?” Dirk shook his head as he looked around, taking in the
mess. “Hell, this is worse than my trailer. At least I keep all of my dirty
clothes in one pile.”

“Yeah, you’re quite the
Suzy Homemaker. I suspect that Eleanor wouldn’t let the maid—or anybody, for
that matter—in here. This was her cave, where she hid from the world.”

Dirk walked over to the
closet, pushed the door open, and looked inside. “What do ya suppose she was
hiding?” ‘The fact that she wasn’t Lady Eleanor.... queen of anything. She was
living in a world not of her own design. A lot of women do.”

“What?”

“Never mind. You get the
bathroom, and I’ll see what I can find in here.”

Savannah rummaged through
the dresser drawers but found only the expected brightly colored, plus-sized
muumuus, housedresses, and nightgowns. Judging from the amount of loungewear,
Eleanor spent more time lolling around than dressing up.

Not that Savannah would
judge her for that. Why not live in pj’s if you could? If you had to pour
yourself into one of those Victorian corsets and put on a heavy, hot wig every
evening... kick back the rest of the time.

The miscellaneous candy
wrappers, empty cookie boxes, and potato chip bags scattered about revealed a
diet that was relatively nutrient-free. Not the ideal for anybody, let alone a
heart patient. And Savannah counted at least half a dozen empty fifths of hard
booze.

She could hear Dirk
rummaging around in the adjoining bathroom. “What did you find?” she called out
to him.

“All kinds of crap she was
taking,” he said. “I’ve got a dozen prescriptions here at least... from several
different doctors.”

“Are you bringing them with
you?”

“Oh, yeah. How about you?”

“Nothing interesting.” She
walked over to the night-stand, which was covered with movie magazines and
romance novels as well as the ever present junk-food wrappers.

Opening the top drawer of
the stand, she saw a clutter of reading glasses, old
TV Guides,
and more
gaudy costume jewelry. Her practiced eye scanned the mundane contents, looking
for the unusual or the informative.

She found it: a journal,
leather-bound with loose-leaf pages. A purple felt-tipped pen was tucked
between the pages, and the writing throughout was in bold purple ink. The
handwriting was large with plenty of curly flourishes, and although the entire
book was obviously written by the same hand, the penmanship varied from neat
and formal to almost illegible.

Savannah didn’t have to
read more than a page or two to realize it was Eleanor Maxwell’s.

“Bingo,” she said. “Diary.”

Dirk poked his head around
the corner. “Really? Hers?”

“Yep. Could make
interesting reading, you know, if...” She didn’t want to speak the words aloud.
“If we find out she was murdered.”

“Exactly,” he replied.

He disappeared back into
the bathroom, and she continued to search the remaining drawers. But the journal
was the only thing of interest she uncovered.

“Are you about done in
here?” Dirk asked as he exited the bathroom, a paper bag in his hand containing
the medications he had found.

“Yes. I peaked with the
diary. Let’s go.”

They were just leaving the master
suite and entering the upstairs hall when they heard a noise on the lower
level.

“That’s too loud to be the
mutts,” Dirk whispered.

Savannah listened to the
heavy footsteps. “Definitely a two-footed critter. Maybe Marie.”

“Let’s see.”

The thick Oriental rugs
cushioned their steps as they made their way quietly down the hall. When they
reached the top of the staircase, they could see down into the foyer. Savannah
recognized the thick white hair and the pinstriped suit. This time Martin
Streck was wearing a purple shirt with an olive tie. She decided he must be
color-blind and single. No wife would let her man leave the house dressed like
that.

The accountant was holding
a large file box, and from the way he was carrying it, the thing was full and
heavy.

“Hey,” Dirk called as he
passed Savannah on the stairs and hurried the rest of the way down. “Whatcha
got there, buddy?”

Streck hugged the box
closer to his chest and lifted his nose a few notches. “Who are you, and what
are you doing here?”

Dirk reached into his
pocket, pulled out his badge, and flipped it open, displaying the gold shield.
“Detective Sergeant Coulter. I’m conducting an investigation. So I’ll ask you
again: What have you got in the box?”

One glance at Dirk’s face
told Savannah that he had exhausted his supply of “nice” and was entering
“cranky.” Dirk never bothered to stock a lot of “nice” on his personality
shelf, and he was frequently running out.

“I’m Martin Streck, the
late Mrs. Maxwell’s accountant. I need these files to settle her estate.” He
turned to Savannah. “What have you got to do with this?”

She smiled and shrugged.
“I’m just hanging out with what’s-his-face here.”

“Put the box down,” Dirk
said.

Streck stuck out his chin.
“I will not. These belong to my client and—”

“Belonged... belonged to
your client,” Dirk interjected. “She’s dead, and those files are part of my
crime scene. Put ‘em down. Now.”

“Crime scene? What crime
has been committed?” A fine sprinkling of sweat popped out on Streck’s
forehead, and his breathing sounded as if he had just run a hundred-yard
sprint.

“The one I’m investigating,
and that’s all you need to know.” Dirk handed the bag of medications to
Savannah, walked over and snatched the box out of Streck’s hands. “And you need
to leave before you interfere with my investigation.”

Streck sputtered a few
seconds, then said, “I’m going to have a talk with your superior, Detective.
This is most improper. I—”

“You are irritating me,”
Dirk told him, shoving his face close to the other man’s, “and that’s damned
close to interfering with me and my investigation.”

“Yeah, you’d better make
some tracks,” Savannah added. “Coulter here is very irritable. Almost as
irritable as he is irritating, and that’s saying something.” ‘You haven’t heard
the last of this.” Streck huffed and snorted as he stomped across the foyer to
the door and jerked it open. ‘You have no right to keep me from fulfilling my
duties to my client. I’ve never seen such a...” He left, slamming the door
behind him.

Savannah and Dirk both
looked down at the box in his arms. “He didn’t waste any time getting over here
and removing those files,” she said.

“He sure didn’t. All the
more reason for me to take a look at them.”

Savannah walked over to the
window and watched as Streck peeled out of the driveway, screeching his Lexus’s
tires as he left.

“He’s plenty hot and
bothered,” she said.

“Yeah.” Dirk grinned. “And
that’s why we’re going to give these files a long, thorough look.”