Fat Free and Fatal Read online

  “Which means he’ll be here in an hour and ten minutes,” Tammy said. “He can smell your fried chicken and hear it calling to him from the other side of LA.”

  Savannah stood and began to clear the dishes. “Everybody ready for cake and ice cream?”

  Ryan looked at John. “Oh, we can wait…for Dirk, that is.”

  “Most certainly,” John said. “’Tisn’t truly a party without him.”

  Savannah chuckled. Yes, they might be dysfunctional, but they were a family, this strange circle of hers. “We’ll wait then,” she said as she carried their dirty dishes to the sink. “But I’ll go ahead and give you your gifts now that—”

  The phone rang. Savannah wiped her hands on a towel and reached for it.

  The voice on the other end was gruff and abrupt. Typical Dirk. He had never gotten the hang of “hello” and “good-bye.” Pleasantries were a waste of time—unlike fishing and watching heavyweight bouts on Savannah’s HBO.

  “This sucks,” was his greeting and pithy report.

  “Oo-okay,” she replied. “Details?”

  “Come see for yourself.”

  “Really?” Savannah nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Savannah glanced over at the guests sitting around her table. Of course she couldn’t just leave in the middle of Ryan’s party, but—

  “Uh, I can’t right now.”

  “You sure? I got you a job here if you want it,” Dirk said.

  “A job? A paying job? Don’t you toy with me, boy.”

  “It’s yours if you want it. I told this spoiled rotten movie star bimbo that she needs a bodyguard. I told her either she hired somebody or I was going to assign my ugliest, meanest, nastiest cop to do the job. She fought me about it at first until I told her I knew a gal who could do it. You know, that you could watch out for her, even though you’re a chick.”

  “Ah, how generous of you.” Savannah reminded herself to crack him in the head with a skillet sometime when he least expected it. “But really…” She lowered her voice. “…I can’t right now. I could come over later after—”

  “Go now,” Ryan said.

  Savannah turned around and saw that her friend had a wide smile on his handsome face. “But your birthday? The cake?”

  “Hey,” he said, “a homicide case and a paying gig for the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency? That tops a birthday party all day and all night.”

  Savannah weighed one against the other for two whole seconds.

  A friend’s party versus looking at a dead body?

  Birthday cake or a homicide case?

  It wasn’t until she was in her ’65 Mustang, speeding toward the Papalardo estate in Spirit Hills that she paused to consider what it might say about her character, or lack thereof—how quickly and shamelessly she had made that decision.

  Murder takes the cake. Any ol’ day.

  Chapter 3

  As Savannah drove her classic Mustang through the posh, gated community of Spirit Hills, she tried not to notice the dark smoke appearing in her rearview mirror, coming from the ’Stang’s tailpipe. During the car’s last garage appointment, it had been given a grim prognosis from Ray, her mechanic. “You’re gonna need a ring job soon, Savannah, and maybe the valves ground, too. And that’s gonna set you back some serious cash. You might consider trading her in while she’s still running as good as she is.”

  The thought of getting rid of the ’Stang made Savannah’s heartstrings twang with a sour resonance, and she usually managed not to think about it, not to notice the billowing black cloud behind her. One of her life mottos was: If you don’t see it, it ain’t there. But while that level of denial might work when it came to the size of one’s buttocks, it was harder to maintain when you could look in your rearview mirror and see that you were a one-woman pollution machine in such a beautiful locale as Spirit Hills.

  As she passed one palatial mansion after another with their vast property allotments, it was all too apparent to Savannah that she was a “have-not” in a “have-a-lot” community. She passed Tudor and Greek revivals, Spanish haciendas, and the odd sprawling contemporary, but not a single driveway contained a smog factory like the one she was driving. Not even close.

  “Eh, some people just got no taste for the classics,” she muttered in a voice that sounded a lot like her Granny Reid’s. “It takes a person of refinement to appreciate an objet d’art like you,” she told the car, lovingly patting its dashboard.

  As though on cue, the Mustang sputtered and spewed an especially foul emission from its rear.

  “Knock it off!” she said, swatting the steering wheel. “You mess with me, you’ll wind up with nobody to talk to but a junkyard Rottweiler.”

  But she knew she was no closer to getting rid of the Mustang than she was of dumping Dirk. Even though they were both guilty of the occasional objectionable “emission,” she was loyal.

  Often too loyal for her own good.

  But her grandmother had taught her to walk that extra mile with a friend, and then another if they needed the company. And sometimes she felt like she had walked all the way around God’s green Earth. Several times.

  She wanted to believe that it was a mission of friendship that she was on now, coming to this crime scene to help her old friend. But she knew it had less to do with camaraderie and more to do with truth, justice, the American way…and the pure joy of catching a bad guy. It made her blood race faster than a three-pound box of gourmet assorted chocolates.

  And, predictably, her pulse quickened when she saw, at the far end of the road, a Spanish-style mansion with half a dozen black-and-white police cruisers in front of it. She didn’t need to scan the mailbox numbers to know that this was the Papalardo estate. Even without the parked units with their flashing red and blue lights, she recognized the mansion from pictures she had seen in magazines and on television. The seashell-pink walls, the ornate wrought-iron balcony railings, the red-tiled roof, the sheer size of the house, made it distinctive, even among the other mansions in this neighborhood.

  It was a house fit for a diva. And no one fit that persona better than Dona Papalardo.

  Only four years ago, Dona had been the queen of Hollywood, having won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her roles as a steamy temptress in several television remakes of film noir classics. With her wavy blond hair, broad swimmer’s shoulders, and svelte figure, Dona looked as though she had stepped right off the old silver screen into America’s living rooms. And a new generation had been snared by the appeal of the classic femme fatale who used her sensual, womanly wiles to lure a perfectly good, unsuspecting, and overly horny guy down the path to perdition.

  But for some reason, about which the public could only speculate, Dona had disappeared from the Hollywood scene, taking her leave almost immediately after receiving her major accolades. No one heard or saw anything of her…until the tabloid blitz began about a year later.

  DONA PAPALARDO THE LARDO.

  BEAUTY QUEEN PORKS OUT

  DONA P—BIG AS A BUS!

  The headlines at the grocery store checkout stands were ruthless, displaying candid and horrifically unflattering shots of the actress at her higher weight. The paparazzi ambushed her, even on her own property, photographing her from every possible angle to maximize her now-generous proportions.

  Savannah had winced, seeing the pictures, reading the copy, and imagining how painful it must be for a woman once hailed as one of the most beautiful people on earth to be vilified in such a way.

  She liked Dona. Having seen her interviewed many times, she had always been struck by how down-to-earth and purely likable the woman seemed.

  And no one deserved to suffer that sort of abuse.

  Just because a person’s job happened to be acting, that didn’t make them hurt any less when they were maligned and ridiculed. Savannah felt sorry for Dona Papalardo and angry on her behalf that her fans were so fickle.
They had held her in such high regard, proclaiming her one of the greatest actresses of her time. Had the woman suddenly lost her ability to act just because she had put on some pounds?

  The tabloids, the gossip columnists, the late-night talk show hosts had all been merciless. There seemed to be nothing too insulting, too hurtful for them to say, as long as it got a laugh. And the world was enjoying a big laugh at a woman they had only a short time ago claimed to admire, even idolize.

  And now this.

  Once again, Dona Papalardo was the center of media attention. At least a dozen camera crews were milling about in front of the house. Their vans, bearing the call letters of their miscellaneous television stations, were parked helter-skelter along the roadside in front of the mansion.

  Several policemen were lined up in front of the driveway, allowing none of the press to set foot on the property.

  Among the SCPD cruisers in the driveway, Savannah saw the van with the county coroner’s seal on the side. Dr. Jennifer Liu and her crime-scene technicians were already there, searching for evidence, collecting and processing whatever they found.

  Savannah was grateful she could be here in the preliminary stages of the investigation. A fresh scene had so much more to tell than a stale one.

  Dirk’s old Buick was parked near the van, but she saw no sign of him among the white-smocked technicians or the uniformed police who were wandering around in the driveway in front of the mansion. But only a few of them were actually inside the yellow cordoned area directly in front of the house.

  “Red marks the spot,” Savannah whispered as she spotted the coroner’s telltale drawings on the blood-splattered brick driveway. She had been hoping they hadn’t removed the body before her arrival, but Dr. Liu and her team were both fast and thorough. No doubt, the victim was already securely bagged, inside the van, and ready for transport to the morgue.

  Savannah found a spot about a hundred feet away, at the end of the media’s impromptu parking lot, to leave the Mustang.

  As she made her way through the throng of reporters, she had no problem elbowing them aside. As a cop, she had run the media gauntlet many times before. And while she realized that reporters had to be rude and relentless—it was their job—that didn’t mean she had to be anything other than rude and relentless back to them.

  “Nope, I’m nobody,” she said in answer to their questions about her identity and her connection to the scene. “Nobody at all. So move out of my way and nobody’ll slap you upside the head. That’s it. Thank you very much. Step aside. You’re too kind.”

  “But you aren’t supposed to go onto the property,” a particularly prissy anchor-type woman said to Savannah as she started up the driveway. “That policeman over there said nobody is supposed to go past the property line.”

  “And I’m just the nobody who can do it,” Savannah returned, flashing her an icy smile. She looked the reporter up and down, taking in the designer suit, big hair, perfect makeup, and three-inch heels. “You, on the other hand, are obviously somebody, so you’d better stay where you are.”

  “What?”

  “Eh, don’t trouble your head about it. I know I’m not going to.”

  “What?”

  Savannah chuckled and hurried on up the brick driveway to the white van and the tall, attractive Asian woman standing beside it. The lab coat did little to disguise Dr. Jennifer Liu’s curvaceous body, and only an inch or two of a black miniskirt showed below the jacket’s hem. Her long, black hair, although swept back and held with a bright aqua and green silk scarf, made her look more like a fashion model than a medical examiner.

  To be sure, at first glance, one might think the good doctor was straight off the pages of Victoria’s Secret, not on her way to an autopsy suite to cut up and evaluate dead bodies.

  Until one looked into her eyes and saw a no-nonsense gleam of macabre fascination with the world of the dead that only someone who was truly called to do such work could have.

  Though she did smile slightly when she saw Savannah coming her way.

  The two women had bonded over chocolate so many times that they had formed a sisterhood of two. And a kinship born of and founded upon PMS cravings was as intimate and strong as any sorority could be.

  “Hey, Dr. Liu,” Savannah greeted her, foregoing their usual hug since the doctor was surrounded by subordinates…not to mention the press.

  “Hi, yourself.” The coroner pulled a pair of surgical gloves off her hands and dropped them into a paper bag that one of her assistants was holding. “Did Dirk give you a call?”

  Savannah nodded. “He says Dona Papalardo may be in need of a bodyguard.”

  Dr. Liu glanced inside the open door of the van at the bagged body inside. “Yes,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I’d say that some personal protection for Ms. Papalardo is a very good idea right now.”

  Savannah stepped closer and looked inside. The body bag’s zipper had a lock on it.

  And Savannah knew all too well…nobody ever wanted to end up in a body bag with a lock on it. Locked body bags were always bad news.

  No one had a key to that lock, except Dr. Liu herself. When foul play was obvious, or even suspected, the chain of custody demanded that absolutely no one have access to the body until a thorough autopsy had been performed. If any trace of evidence was found and any charges brought, the prosecutor would want to be sure than no defense attorney could claim contamination of the evidence.

  The last thing the state’s attorneys would want would be someone suggesting that hairs, fibers, or any other sort of debris had been planted or even innocently transferred.

  “So,” Savannah said, “you think the other members of the household or staff could be in danger?”

  Dr. Liu looked over at the reporters and stepped closer to Savannah. “Oh, I’m pretty sure of it,” she whispered. “Dirk and I would both place a big bet that whoever shot the victim thought she was Ms. Papalardo.”

  “Really? Does she look that much like her?”

  “From a distance, yes. Both of them are blondes, about the same size and height. And the vic was wearing that—” She nodded toward the front of the van.

  Savannah had to step around the vehicle to see what Dr. Liu was referring to. And she gasped when she first saw it. It was a bloody, gory thing that at first looked like a slaughtered animal.

  She had seen something like that once before, many years ago, in Georgia. Her brother had shot a rabid fox in the woods behind her grandmother’s house with a shotgun. And he had brought the corpse home to show to everyone before burying it.

  Savannah had seen that poor, mangled body in her dreams for months afterward. Such a beautiful animal, so graceful in life and so hideous in death.

  The bloody pile on Dona Papalardo’s driveway looked just like that dead fox.

  “That’s Ms. Papalardo’s fur coat,” Dr. Liu told her. “Red fox. She loaned it to her assistant, Kimberly Kay Dylan, for the evening. Kimberly had some sort of special date, and Dona let her wear the coat and one of her evening gowns. She also allowed her the use of her private limousine. The limo pulled up, here in front of the house, Kimberly walked out in the gown and coat, and was shot right over there.” She pointed to the crime techs’ markings on the driveway that showed where the body had fallen.

  Savannah walked over to the spot. An impressive and depressing amount of blood covered the ground, and quite a number of individuals had tracked through it, spreading the gore for at least twenty feet in all directions.

  It was hardly a virginal crime scene. Assorted medical garbage was strewn about; bloody gauze, discarded gloves, torn wrappers, bits of sparkling silver fabric, and even a stained brassiere lay among the forensic scribblings that marked distances and the locations where significant evidence had been found.

  “Paramedics,” Savannah said. She knew the signs of first-response critical care all too well.

  Dr. Liu nodded. “They worked on her really hard,” she said, “but it was pointle
ss. If they’d had a surgical unit set up right here in the driveway they couldn’t have saved her. It looks like it was a direct shot, through the back, right to the heart. She probably exsanguinated in less than a minute. Two minutes tops, I’m sure.”

  Savannah looked around, scanning the area for places where a shooter could hide, lying in wait and then fire. “Any idea where it came from?” she asked, noticing that someone could have gotten a clear shot from at least three of the neighboring mansions, not to mention numerous tall trees and a brushy hill to the side of the house. And, if they had a scope on a rifle, from a dozen more.

  “Dirk thinks the shooter was up there,” Dr. Liu said, nodding toward the sage-and marguerite-covered hill. “He had me send a couple of techs up there to look for a casing.”

  “Anything yet?”

  “No. But they found some fresh footprints, and we’ll be making casts of those. Looks like a man’s size-thirteen hiking boot. Could be our shooter.”

  “Or it could have just been left by a guy who was hiking in boots,” Savannah said.

  Dr. Liu grinned. “That’s what I like about you, Savannah, always looking on the bright side.”

  “Hey, Dirk’s always accusing me of being a Pollyanna.”

  She sniffed. “Well, next to him, you are. Anybody is.”

  Savannah chuckled. “Speak of the devil, I’ve got to go find Mr. Morose. And Dona Papalardo, too. I can’t believe I’m going to get to meet her. She’s always seemed like such a nice person in TV interviews. I’m a big fan of hers.”

  Dr. Liu glanced at the front door of the mansion. “I’m sure she is under normal circumstances, but Dirk had his hands full with her earlier. She came unglued, was a real basket case for the first hour or so after it happened. Last I saw, Dirk had her there in the library and was trying to get her to calm down long enough to question her. I guess she and her assistant were very close, and she watched her friend bleed to death right here in her driveway…died in her arms, quite literally.”