11-Corpse Suzette Read online

  “In the dead of night.”

  “You betcha.”

  “You gonna start tonight?”

  “Just waiting for the sun to set and the moon to rise. You want something to eat or drink?”

  “No. I want a lead on where this gal is. The captain threw me a real homicide, a drive-by over in the east end. Some druggie’s momma got herself shot, sitting and watching TV, eating a pizza and minding her own business.”

  “You figure they were gunning for him and got Mom instead.”

  “Ain’t that just the way it always happens. Some innocent kid sitting on a porch, behaving themselves, some guy walking with his baby down to the corner store for a quart of milk. And then, blammo. Anyway, I don’t have time to mess with this Du Bois thing, when we don’t even know for sure if it’s foul play or her taking an unscheduled trip to Vegas.”

  Savannah studied her old friend and noticed the dark circles under his eyes and how he seemed to have no energy at all. Maybe he was getting burned out. He couldn’t pull all-nighters anymore without paying a price.

  And if he refused free food and beverages, he might be worse off than she had thought.

  “You okay?” she asked, her voice soft with affectionate concern.

  “Who me? Yeah. Sure. Why?”

  “You look tired.”

  He shrugged and grunted. “Hell, Van. I’ve been tired since 1990. What else is new?”

  She tried to remember. “What happened in 1990?”

  “I don’t know. Just made that up. Lemme talk to that Abigail chick so that I can go get a nap before I go back to the drive-by scene.”

  “She’s out in the backyard with Tammy. I’ll get her.”

  He started to hoist himself off the sofa. “I’ll go out there.”

  “No you don’t. You stay here.”

  “I’m not that tired. You’re sweet, but you worry too much.”

  She sniffed. “I wasn’t offering for your sake. I want you to question her in here, where it’s easier for me to eavesdrop. In fact, move in to the kitchen table. I’ll pretend to make chocolate chip cookies while you squeeze her.”

  “Pretend? Just pretend?”

  He looked interested. She started to relax; Dirk wasn’t ready to go toes-up on her any time soon.

  “Do I need a lawyer here? Is this a real interrogation or what?” Abigail wanted to know as she faced off with Dirk over Savannah’s kitchen table.

  “Naw,” Dirk replied, “if it was a real interrogation I’d have you handcuffed to your chair and I’d be smacking you with a telephone book. This here is just a friendly chat.”

  For once, Tammy had decided that she would help Savannah bake, even if it meant touching the toxic white substances— sugar and refined flour. She stood next to Savannah, stirring the sugars and shortening together in a mixing bowl.

  Savannah leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “How’s it going there, Betty Crocker?”

  “Sh-h-h. I want to hear this.”

  Savannah chuckled and went back to measuring the dry ingredients.

  “So, what do you want to know?” Abigail asked, her arms crossed over her chest, an ugly frown on her face. “Whatever it is, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I want to know how your day went yesterday.”

  “Minute by minute?”

  Dirk returned the sullen look. “For right now, I’ll settle for hour by hour.”

  Abigail sighed and rolled her eyes. “Savannah got me up about seven-thirty and gave me breakfast. Then Tammy took me to Emerge.”

  “Did you go inside with her?” Dirk asked Tammy.

  “Yes, for a few minutes,” Tammy replied.

  Dirk turned back to Abigail. “And what happened when you got to Emerge?”

  “We went in and that trashy blonde receptionist, Miranda or Maria or whatever her name is...”

  “Myrna,” Tammy supplied. “And she was really sweet, even though she... well, you know.”

  “Looks like a tramp.” Dirk nodded. “And Myrna did what?”

  “She greeted me; congratulated me for winning the makeover.” Abigail made a face that looked like she had just sucked on a wedge of lemon. “Then she led us down the hall to a waiting room.”

  “Yeah, it was really neat,” Tammy said. “They had these really cushy couches with fancy pillows and a fireplace going—a fake one, but it looked homey and cozy—and they had fresh fruit in bowls for us to eat and a pitcher of water with ice and slices of fruit and—”

  Savannah shot her a “button your lip” look, and Tammy went back to stirring. “Anyway, it was neat.”

  Dirk sighed. “Now that we’ve established how ‘neat’ the waiting room was, can you tell me what happened next?” he said to Abigail.

  “We waited for at least a half an hour. I was getting pretty sick of it. You can only eat so much fruit and drink so much water. Then a gal named Devon came in and introduced herself. Said she was public relations, or something like that, and apologized for the delay. She said that Dr. Du Bois was late, but was expected to arrive soon. Then she gave us a tour of the place.” Tammy brightened and opened her mouth. Savannah gave her another look, and she snapped it closed.

  “I’m sure the rest of the place was ‘neat’, too,” Savannah whispered. “But Dirk’s just not that big on décor.”

  “Gotcha,” Tammy whispered back.

  “How long did the tour take?” Dirk wanted to know.

  Abigail shrugged and looked at Tammy. “I don’t remember exactly. Maybe an hour?”

  Tammy nodded. “That’s about right.”

  “And then?” Dirk asked, scribbling on a small notepad he had taken from his inside jacket pocket.

  “And then I left,” Tammy interjected.

  “Good.” He gave her an irritated glance, then turned his attention back to Abigail. “But you stayed?”

  “Yeah. A nurse took several vials of blood from me. They weighed and measured me. All of that sucked.”

  “I’m sure it did,” he replied.

  “But after that, it was sorta nice. They gave me a pretty good lunch and served it outside on a patio. And Jeremy ate with me.” Savannah watched as Abigail’s face changed at the mention of the style consultant’s name. She looked quite pretty when she smiled. Her eyes had a dreamy quality, and as Savannah recalled Jeremy Lawrence’s handsome features and quiet charm, she couldn’t really blame Abby.

  “Jeremy?” Dirk asked. “You mean Jeremy Lawrence, the hairdresser?”

  “Yes, but he’s not a hairdresser,” Abigail replied. “He’s a stylist; a person who helps you find the best ways to express who you really are inside through the way you dress, act, decorate... all kinds of things like that.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Dirk kept scribbling.

  Abigail bristled. “No, not whatever! Jeremy Lawrence is a really classy, special person. He treated me with dignity and respect. We talked for more than two hours about me, about what I like, about what I want from my life, about how I would like the world to perceive me. We talked about clothes, among a lot of other things, and the whole time he was making suggestions and giving me advice. But he never once said anything like, ‘Wear this because it will make you look less fat’ or ‘Big women shouldn’t dress like this because it makes them look even bigger.’ He didn’t even mention my size.”

  She paused to take a breath from her outburst, and a heavy silence hung in the room.

  Savannah broke it by placing a pitcher of lemonade on the table. “I talked to him, too, and he seemed like a very intelligent, charming person.”

  “Eh, he looked gay to me,” Dirk said with a sniff.

  Savannah’s nostrils flared, but she kept her tone even when she replied, “Now, Dirk... you think that everyone who’s intelligent and charming is gay. So, we can’t go by you.”

  “I don’t think he’s gay,” Abigail added. “He told me that I’m a beautiful woman and that he was going to help me find new ways to reveal that to the world. And he ha
d a certain gleam of interest in his eyes when he said it. I think he likes me.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Dirk replied. “So we’ve established that Jeremy Lawrence is a peach. A straight peach. What else?”

  “Then that Myrna gal showed up and said that since Dr. Du Bois still hadn’t shown up, I could just hang out there at the spa for the afternoon. Get a massage, a facial, manicure and pedicure... stuff like that.”

  “And did you?”

  “I skipped the massage and went for the rest.”

  “Then you came back here?”

  Abigail glanced away, hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, not straight back here. I took a cab downtown and walked around a little. Looked in some of the antique shops and boutiques. Then I took a stroll on the boardwalk and had dinner at one of the restaurants there.”

  “Which one?”

  “What do you mean ‘which one’? I thought you wanted to know if I could give you any new leads on what happened to Dr. Du Bois, but you’re actually checking me out here. You’re trying to see if I have an alibi.”

  Savannah stuck a panful of cookies into the oven and set the timer. “Don’t get riled, Abby,” she said. “Dirk checks everybody out. He’s sorta like you New Yorkers. He doesn’t trust anybody.” Abby turned back to Dirk. “Okay. I ate at a Mexican restaurant there on the beach. Maria de... something or the other. I had a beef tamale and a chicken enchilada with extra cheese and two margaritas. Okay? So it wasn’t exactly lowfat or low-carb, but—”

  Dirk held up one hand. “I don’t give a damn what you had to eat or drink. Cheez, chill out.”

  “Are we quite done?” Abigail rose from the table and pushed in her chair.

  “Did you come back here after dinner and stay here until you went to bed?”

  “Yes, I did. Ask Savannah if I didn’t.”

  “I will.” He flipped his notepad closed. “We’re done here. And thank you for your cooperation.”

  Abigail turned on one heel and marched outside.

  Dirk shook his head. “Tammy, I gotta tell you, kiddo, your cousin is one bristly bit—”

  “Watch it. That’s my family you’re talking about,” Tammy said.

  “Yeah, and my houseguest,” Savannah added.

  He stood and tucked his notepad and pen back into his pocket. “Can I take a couple of those cookies to go?” he asked wearily. “If I don’t get horizontal soon, I’m gonna pass out.”

  “Sure.” Savannah stuck a few into a plastic bag and zipped it closed. She handed it to him as Tammy walked out the door, following her cousin. “You’re right, you know,” she said. “Abby is bristly.”

  “And she’s a bitch, too.”

  Savannah smiled. “Yes, she is. But then, the value of good, honest bitchiness is highly underrated in our society.”

  He just grunted.

  She slipped her arm through his and guided him toward the front door. “Go home and take a nap, sugar,” she told him. “You know you’re not worth shootin’ if you don’t get enough pillow time. Go home, put on your Mickey Mouse jammies, crawl into bed and—”

  “You know I don’t wear pajamas! Real men don’t wear pajamas.”

  “Yeah, yeah... or wipe their feet at the door, or use a napkin, or drink wine, or...” She smiled. “You bad, Dirk. We all know it. You ba-a-a-ad.”

  Chapter

  6

  Savannah stood in the middle of Suzette Du Bois’s tumbled living room and closed her eyes. Unlike Granny Reid, whom everybody knew had a psychic streak, or as Gran preferred to call it, “the good Lord’s gift of knowledge,” Savannah didn’t claim to know anything above what her five senses told her.

  Yet, more than once, she had stood in the center of a crime scene and felt something that her high school science teacher couldn’t have explained. She had sensed the victim’s fear, horror, and pain as palpably as any human touch on her skin.

  But tonight, although she closed her eyes and willed her mind and her own emotions to be still and open to impression, she felt nothing out of the ordinary in the doctor’s home.

  All she felt was a creeping uneasiness at being in a place she wasn’t really supposed to be, doing something relatively illegal.

  Downright illegal, she reminded herself. There's police tape over that front door and you crossed it, girlie. That's a definite no-no.

  Then she chuckled to herself. Funny how the voice of reason and caution in her head always had a soft tone with a strong Georgian accent... just like Granny Reid’s.

  Savannah had left Tammy and Abigail sitting on her sofa with a big bowl of popcorn and a couple of movies. She had told Tammy where she was going and Tammy had begged to join her for a bit of “sleuthing,” as Tammy-Wanna-Be-Nancy-Drew called it. But neither of them thought it a good idea to share the details of their investigation with Abigail, and they couldn’t think of any plausible excuse to leave her at home by herself.

  So Tammy was at the house, pouting and watching chick flicks with her grumpy cousin while Savannah had all the fun.

  If you want to call this fun, she thought, as she looked around at the mess that had once been Suzette Du Bois’s home. Still might be her home for all I know, she reminded herself. And she might come waltzing in here any minute and want to know who I am and what I’m doing he re.

  But Savannah didn’t waste much time thinking about that. She had lied her way out of far too many situations in the past to suffer any serious pangs of conscience or angst at this late date.

  She did have to admit, however, that she would like to have Tammy with her tonight. The silence in the empty house was deafening. And even if she didn’t feel any spiritual residue of recent evils committed inside the walls, the place was still creepy enough for her to wish she had some company.

  Dirk was busy on his drive-by shooting case. And when she had called and invited Ryan and John, they had gracefully declined, having tickets to a dinner theater production that they had been looking forward to for months.

  So, she was on her own and not particularly enjoying her own company.

  As best she could, she shook off the feelings and concentrated on the job at hand, which was hard enough even when you didn’t have the heebie-jeebies. Trying to find something, when you didn’t have the slightest idea what you were looking for, was always a challenge.

  She had already gone over the living room, looking for anything she and Dirk might have missed before. Finding nothing, she decided to check the bedroom next.

  Down the hallway and to the right, she found the master bedroom. She flipped on the wall dimmer switch, then quickly lowered the light. There was no point in announcing to the neighbors or passers-by that someone was home.

  Especially if the “someone” wasn’t the homeowner.

  As Dirk had said, the bedroom was a disaster, like the rest of the house. Originally it had been decorated in a rustic but elegant old-Spanish style, with a mixture of dark, heavy furniture, cream-colored plaster walls, and light, gauzy fabrics. The four-poster bed was draped with a sheer white canopy and the floor-to-ceiling windows were framed with the same delicate material.

  The paintings on the walls were of exquisite old-world gardens in the Mediterranean.

  But that was where the loveliness and grace ended.

  Like the rest of the house, the room was a muddle of clutter and confusion. As she walked around, she distinguished between what was simply bad-housekeeping—the dirty dishes stacked on the bed tables, the piles of books and magazines beside the bed, the crumpled clothes tossed in the corner near the bathroom door—versus the results of what she assumed was Sergio’s searching: dresser and chest drawers open with clothing tossed onto the floor, the desk in the corner emptied, and the closet doors opened with clothing and shoes piled in a heap just outside.

  “Thanks for making my job even harder,” she whispered to the unseen Sergio. If he had just left everything as it was, she would have had a much better reading on what was going on with Dr. Suzette right before she eva
porated.

  She walked over to the nightstand that had a phone and alarm clock on it. Experience told her that if you wanted to know which side of the bed the head of the house usually slept on, look for the phone and alarm clock.

  Opening the drawers of that stand, she was somewhat surprised at the contents. There was the usual array of reading glasses, antacids, and sleeping pills, an address book, pens, and a couple of notepads.

  What she wasn’t expecting was the array of pictures, magazines, calendars, and other memorabilia, all dedicated to one woman.

  Marilyn Monroe.

  While she might have understood such a collection in the bedroom of a sixty-plus-year-old man, it was unusual in a woman’s nightstand. Especially a woman who was born after the actress’s death.

  Two pictures in particular interested Savannah. One was a close-up of Marilyn, dressed in typical silver screen glam, a white fur stole around her bare shoulders and flashy earrings with emerald-cut sapphires surrounded by diamonds.

  The other picture appeared at first glance to be a duplicate. But after taking a second look, Savannah realized that it wasn’t Marilyn at all, but a very good look-alike. This woman lacked the charismatic sparkle and sensual quality that Marilyn had exuded in her prime, but the features were markedly similar and the clothing and jewelry an exact replica.

  Although Savannah hadn’t been shown a picture of Suzette Du Bois, she didn’t need anyone to tell her that this was the doctor, striving to look like her idol.

  It struck Savannah as somehow pathetic.

  Suzette was obviously a pretty woman in her own right. Why would she want to look like someone other than herself? And why Marilyn Monroe in particular? Marilyn had been a beautiful woman, but...

  Savannah had heard of people who sought out plastic surgeons who would cut and stitch them into a facsimile of some famous person, and she had always thought such folks must be sad, lost souls with little going on in their own lives. Who would have thought a talented doctor, famous for her own abilities and accomplishments, would have been tempted to do such a thing?