Corpse Suzette Page 10

  Savannah thought of Tammy back at the office. Tam probably had those numbers memorized by now as she tried to find the bank they belonged to.

  “I don’t know. We’ll keep shaking the tree and see what falls out.” With a sly grin she added, “These things have a way of working out. If the good Lord thinks you deserve that money, I’m sure you’ll get it back.”

  His eyes narrowed. He looked about as comforted as she had intended him to be. “But,” he said, “you think she used the word ‘rosarita’ as the password for the account where she stuck my money?”

  “I reckon she did.” Again, she couldn’t hide a smile. Suzette was a corker; Savannah’s kind of gal. “I figure Miss Suzette chose that particular password to make a point.”

  “Yeah, she made her point all right.” He sighed. For a moment Leonard/Sergio looked much older than his age, in spite of all the plastic surgery. “I screwed Devon at ‘our’ hotel, and now I’m screwed.”

  Savannah nodded. “That’s about it... in a pe-can shell.”

  Chapter

  8

  After Savannah finished speaking with Sergio D’Alessandro, she was more than eager to leave Emerge. As lovely as the establishment might be, architecturally speaking, the place felt creepy to her. A few too many dark secrets seemed to cast a gloom over even the most beautifully decorated and sunlit interiors.

  She was walking across the parking lot to her Mustang when she spotted Devon Wright, who was approaching her Corvette. Before the younger woman climbed into the convertible, she glanced around, as if to see whether anyone was watching her. Fortunately, she didn’t look Savannah’s way, or she would have seen that, indeed, she was being observed.

  What’s with the paranoia, girlie? Savannah thought. What are you up to that you don’t want anyone to know about?

  As Savannah got into her own car and started the engine, she decided to follow the publicist and find out.

  She would have to tail her at a distance; the bright red Mustang wasn’t exactly a low-profile vehicle. More than once Savannah had considered trading it in for something less conspicuous. Something that got more than nine miles to a gallon of gasoline, had air bags, and didn’t need a carburetor tune-up every month to run smoothly Ah, the joys of owning a classic.

  But just thinking of getting rid of the ’stang broke her heart. Years ago, she had made the mistake of selling the Camaro she’d had since high school. The loss had plunged her into a depression so deep that only those who owned a collectable muscle car and were continually challenged to race while sitting at stoplights could possibly understand.

  No, the Mustang was here to stay. She’d just have to stay a couple of blocks behind anyone she wanted to tail. And fortunately, she knew every street, alley, nook, and cranny of San Carmelita, so it was fairly simple keeping track of her quarry.

  Devon drove along the edge of the foothills, then headed toward the downtown area. Lined with palm trees, mission-style boutiques, antique shops, and souvenir stores that sold what Savannah affectionately called “that glued-together seashell crap” to the Los Angeles tourists, Main Street was picturesque and quaint.

  But Devon Wright drove right through the picturesque part, past the quaint section and into the grungy side of town. Here the cute shops gave way to X-rated video stores, tattoo parlors, strip clubs, and pawn establishments.

  It was in front of one of those hock shops that Devon parked her convertible. Savannah was more than a little surprised that she would leave such a nice vehicle in that sort of neighborhood, especially with the top down.

  But there was no accounting for naiveté.

  Savannah watched from a block away as Devon and her black leather miniskirt disappeared into the store. Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, a satisfied look on her face. Apparently, her business had been accomplished.

  As Savannah watched her get into the Corvette and drive away, she considered what she should do—continue to follow her, or go into that store and find out what the publicist had been up to.

  Fortunately, Savannah knew the owner of the store, a sweet old Jewish fellow named Saul, who had helped her and Dirk a number of times on other cases. Once he had even helped them solve a murder, so he was high on her list of favorite citizens.

  She decided to scoot inside and find out what Devon Wright had pawned. She could always tail that gal some other time if she ran out of other leads and needed an excuse to stay away from home and sweet Cousin Abigail.

  “Saulie,” she exclaimed as she entered the front door, setting the string of silver bells hanging from the ceiling tinkling. “What’s shakin’, sugar?”

  Saul rounded the corner, his arms outstretched. “Savannah, my dear! How have you been? Where have you been? I thought you and I had something special, and then I don’t see you for months! My heart, it’s broken, broken, I tell you.”

  For effect he clasped both hands to his chest and shook his head, gazing mournfully heavenward.

  “Oh, Saul, don’t give me that. You’ve got a harem of women, bringing you food, doing your laundry, picking out ties for you, and god knows what. You’re the most eligible bachelor in town.” Saul’s wizened face split with a wide grin. “That’s true,” he said. “The women, they flock to Saul’s store, his house. They think I’ll give them some of my treasures here.” He waved an arm, indicating the glass counters filled with both new and estate jewelry.

  “And tell me, Saul,” she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “do you barter favors from the fairer sex with all of these shiny baubles of yours? Come on, you can tell me.”

  The old fellow laughed so hard she thought he might fall down. “Ah, Savannah, you do me good. I’m flattered that you think I would still benefit from such ‘favors,’ as you call them. But I’m past all that.”

  “No man is ever truly past all that, until he’s six feet under. So don’t give me that line of hooey. Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy the legs on that gal who was just in here. The one in the leather miniskirt.”

  He giggled again. “I looked, yes. I enjoyed, true. But beyond that...?” He shrugged. “What can I do for you today, dear Savannah? You want something sparkly for yourself? I’ll give you a good deal. I have a pendant, a London blue topaz, the exact color of your beautiful eyes. Let me get it for you. You look and see, and you won’t be able to live without it.”

  He shuffled over to a counter, slipped behind it, slid the door in the back of the display open and reached inside.

  “No, no, no, Saul. I can’t afford any of your pretties, so don’t even tempt me. I came in to ask you a question.”

  His bottom lip protruded, but his eyes twinkled. “And here I thought you came into my shop to see me and ask me to run away with you to Acapulco.”

  “If I ever get a yen to run away to Acapulco, Saulie, I promise it will be with you and no other. But meanwhile, would you mind terribly telling me why that young woman was in here?”

  “The one in the miniskirt with the great ankles?”

  “That’s the one. Did she buy something or hock something?” He stroked his scraggly beard with one hand and his smile faded slightly. “Neither one. She sold me something. And you’d better not tell me that it wasn’t hers to sell. I checked the sheets the policemen give me, the lists of things that have been stolen. There was nothing on there about sapphire and diamond earrings. Nothing at all.”

  Sapphire and diamond earrings?

  A bell went off in Savannah’s head. And it sounded very, very sweet. Rather like the bells of the old mission in town when they rang on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.

  “Would you mind if I took a look at those earrings, Saul? Pretty please with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top?”

  Reluctantly, he reached behind him and took a small black velvet box from the top of a desk. He slid it across the counter to her.

  She could feel the shot of adrenaline hit her bloodstream as she opened the lid. It made her knees weak, the ultimate high f
or a junkie like her. These were the moments she lived for.

  Yes. There, nestled against the black velvet were a pair of exquisite earrings. At least two carats each of emerald-cut sapphires, surrounded by diamonds, set in white gold.

  Marilyn Monroe had owned a pair just like this.

  And more importantly, so had Dr. Suzette Du Bois.

  “Saulie,” she said, trying not to be too happy, considering the kindly old fellow’s misfortune. “I hate to tell you this, honey, but you need to hold on tight to these earrings. Don’t sell them, don’t even touch them until I get Sergeant Coulter over here to look at them.”

  Saul looked bewildered. “But that young lady. She seemed nice, like a good girl. You don’t think she stole these, do you?”

  Savannah lifted one eyebrow. “At the moment, Saul, my man... I don’t know what that girl’s capable of, but I intend to find out.”

  As Savannah and her new-found girlfriend sat across from each other in a booth at Cache, Savannah wondered why Myrna, a woman in her sixties, would have chosen this glorified ladies’ strip joint as a place to meet for a drink.

  All around them, women in their twenties and thirties strutted their far more youthful “stuff’ for the equally young—or as Savannah preferred to think of them, “immature”—men who were waiting on them, wearing only black spandex pants and black bow ties.

  Either the strutting ladies didn’t mind the fact that most of the mega-muscled, gorgeous waiters were gay, or they just preferred not to think about the fact that they wouldn’t have a chance with them, no matter how charming their “stuff’ might be.

  Savannah didn’t mind the fact that she was old enough to have mothered some of these gals. She had d-one more than her share of strutting in her day. Now it was their turn. And while she might miss the excitement and vanity boost of donning a sexy outfit, sashaying around, and having people notice, she wouldn’t go back to that era in her life for anything.

  Young and bouncy was fun. But she wouldn’t have given up the life lessons she’d learned in the past ten to twenty years for any amount of perkiness.

  Myrna, on the other hand, didn’t appear to realize that it was no longer her turn.

  Her two-sizes-too-small skirt and midriff-baring top looked ludicrous on a woman her age. But she didn’t seem to notice the disparaging glances the younger women shot her way as^ they passed by. And when she batted her eyes at the waiter and made an overt pass at him, she didn’t appear to register the look of disgust that flitted across his handsome face as he placed her gin and tonic in front of her.

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Savannah?” Myrna asked as she twirled her fingertip in her drink, then made a show of licking a few drops from the end of her bright red fingernail in what was, no doubt, intended to be a sultry gesture. “You must have, a pretty girl like you.”

  “No boyfriend,” Savannah replied, sipping at her own cola. “I have men friends, but no romantic entanglements at the moment.”

  Myrna looked shocked and mortified. “How sad!”

  Savannah shrugged. “Not really. I don’t have the time or energy for all that rigmarole right now anyway.”

  “But don’t you get lonely?”

  “Don’t have time for that either.”

  Myrna shook her head, still bewildered. “But at night, when you’re sleeping all alone, surely that must bother you.”

  “Oh, I may not have a boyfriend, but I never sleep alone.” Myrna’s eyes widened. “Oh, you mean you...”

  “Yes, I have two cats. If I shut them out of the bedroom, they sit outside my door and howl all night. Sleeping alone is a luxury I’ll never have as long as Diamante and Cleopatra are alive.”

  “Oh.”

  Savannah could tell she had just lost some major points in Myrna’s estimation. Nobody worth anything slept alone if they could help it. Not in Myrna’s world.

  “Do you have a boyfriend, Myrna?”

  A look of profound sadness crossed the woman’s face. “Not anymore. He left me for... well... someone else.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Had you been together long?”

  “Six years.”

  “That’s long enough. More like a divorce than a breakup at that point.”

  Myrna nodded. “We were doing fine, getting along really good. I thought he was even thinking about marrying me. But then, I made a big mistake. I treated him to having some work done at Mystic Twilight last year. Suzette did a great job on him. When she was finished with him, he looked ten or fifteen years younger. Ran off with a girl half his age.”

  “Ouch. That must have really hurt. Especially considering the expense of your ‘treat.’ That sort of gift doesn’t come cheap.”

  “Suzette let me work it off. I work off all of my... procedures.”

  Savannah wondered how long it had been since Myrna had gotten a full paycheck, if ever.

  “Speaking of Suzette,” Savannah said, eager to get away from romantic gossip and on to the case, “can you tell me about Suzette and Sergio?”

  “What’s to say? They’re off and on, together then apart, year after year.”

  “And why would you say that is?”

  “Simple enough. Suzette loves Sergio. Always has. He uses her, then dumps her, then takes her back, then dumps her. It’s ridiculous how much nonsense she takes from him. She could do a lot better than him, but she doesn’t realize that, so . .

  “And how about Devon?”

  “Devon is nothing to Sergio. She’s this month’s fling. Nothing more.”

  “How about Devon and Suzette? How do they get along, considering...?”

  “They hate each other, of course. Suzette tried to fire her when she found about the two of them, but Sergio wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “And he’s the boss when it comes to that sort of thing?”

  Myrna snorted with disgust. “Sergio is the boss when it comes to anything. And why that is, I’ll never know. Suzette is the surgeon, the one with the skill and the credentials. He does nothing but sit in that office of his and pretend to manage things. Suzette could replace him in a heartbeat, but he’s having a heck of a time filling her shoes.”

  Savannah set her drink down abruptly. “What? He’s trying to replace her already?”

  “Oh, he’s been trying to pull in another surgeon since the day she went missing. Making calls all over Beverly Hills, Malibu, Santa Monica, even talking to New York doctors, trying to sell them on the idea of a practice in sunny California. Right now, Emerge doesn’t have a surgeon. We’re out of business until we do.”

  Savannah toyed with her straw and waited for a group of young women to pass by their booth and out of earshot. Then she leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “Myrna,” she said. “What do you think has happened to Suzette? What’s your best guess?”

  Myrna looked sad and thought for a long time before answering. “I don’t want it to be in your paper that I said this, okay?” Savannah nodded. “I promise that absolutely nothing you say to me will wind up in any paper.”

  “I’m not sure what’s happened to Suzette,” Myrna said. “Either she got fed up with Sergio, once and for all, and just took off somewhere. Like a mini-nervous breakdown, and she’s sitting in some hotel somewhere sobbing her eyes out and letting him worry. Or... worse.”

  “And by worse, you mean...?”

  “Foul play. Someone has hurt her... or worse.”

  “And who would have hurt her? Could you make a guess? Just between us girls, of course.”

  Again, Myrna considered her answer carefully, then said, “If I had to guess who might murder her—and that’s what we’re talking about here, murder, right?—I’d say that Devon is the most likely to have done it. After all, she threatened to kill Suzette. Maybe she did.”

  Savannah froze, her glass half way to her lips. “Devon threatened to kill Suzette? When? Where?”

  “In the parking lot, the night before Suzette went missing. They were screaming at each other because
Suzette had caught Devon and Sergio together at some hotel. And Devon told Suzette to back off or she’d be sorry. When Suzette asked her what she meant by that, Devon said, ‘Back off or you’ll find out. I know people who would take care of you for fifty bucks and as far as I’m concerned, it would be money well spent.’” Myrna paused and took a breath. “That sounds like a threat to me. How about your

  Savannah recalled the sapphire and diamond earrings in Saul’s pawn shop and the satisfied smile on Miss Devon Prissy Pants’s face when she had strolled into his place that morning.

  “Yeap,” she said with a thoughtful nod. “Sure as shootin’... sounds like a threat to me, too.”

  “Hey, this rabbit food ain’t too bad,” Dirk said as he buried his face in the toasted pita sandwich that Tammy had prepared for them. “Considering that a bimbo made it,” he added.

  “It is good, Tam,” Savannah said. “I didn’t know you could cook... other than cutting up celery and carrot sticks and pouring mineral water, that is.”

  From the other end of the table, Tammy beamed as she passed a bowl of salad to Abigail, who sat silently beside her, staring at her plate with open disgust. “Why, thank y’all,” Tammy said in a fairly dreadful imitation of Savannah’s southern drawl. “I figured you’d cooked for me plenty of times, and since Abby’s here, I should make dinner for a change.”

  “I like Savannah’s cooking better,” Abigail said.

  Everyone paused, momentarily stunned by the blunt comment. Then Savannah shook her head and said, “What’s the matter with you Yankees? You don’t have the good manners that God gave a jackass.”

  “I don’t eat crap like this,” Abigail replied nudging the pita on her plate with one finger, like a kid would a dead bug to see if it would wiggle.

  “It’s good,” Dirk said. “There’s little shrimps and some kind of melted cheese in there with all that green grass-stuff. It ain’t half bad.”