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  “Hm-m-m,” Dirk said, “I see what you mean. But what about that?” He pointed to a large plasma TV that dominated the far wall. “That sucker’s gotta be fifty-eight inches and it’s high definition. Something like that would set you back between five and six grand!”

  Savannah had to admit the monstrosity did stand out—obviously a “boy toy” in a room that was otherwise relatively “sissified.”

  “It’s new, too,” she said, as she walked over to a stack of packing materials that had been stashed behind the sofa. Styrofoam, clear plastic wrap, bubble pack, and a stack of manuals and other printed materials announced the fact that the TV was a recent acquisition.

  “Either some guy is living here with her,” Savannah said, “or she’s trying to lure some guy into living here with her.”

  Dirk chuckled. “You get a fifty-eight inch screen like that one, and I’ll move in with you!”

  She shot him a look of pure horror. “Thanks for the warning,” she said. “I’ll cancel my order.”

  They passed through the living room, the dining area, and the kitchen. All were relatively “lived-in” but neat. The dishes were done, counters bare. On one counter, an answering machine blinked with two messages.

  Dirk pushed the button and the first one began to play. It was a male voice. “Hey,” he said, “you there? Pick up. We have to talk. Tonight! Call me back as soon as you get this. We may have some problems. Well…you may. Call me.”

  The second call was female and sounded older. “Penny, are you there, honey? It’s Mom. I haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. Pick up if you’re there. Daddy’s been sick. I need to talk to you. Call me. Love you.”

  “Penny? Who the heck is Penny?” Savannah said. “Are you sure the cutie at the front desk gave you the right address?”

  “The key opened the door, didn’t it?”

  “True. Maybe Penny is the not-so-girlie roommate.”

  They walked into a short hall that led to a tiny bathroom and one bedroom.

  Dirk poked his head into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and looked in the cupboard under the sink. “Guy living here,” he said. “Or at least staying over. Triple-blade razor, shaving cream, Road Racer deodorant, and condoms.”

  Savannah was already checking out the bedroom. The bed was made with a comforter fringed with row upon row of eyelet ruffles. And a dozen decorator pillows were carefully arranged in an attractive manner. Some of the linens appeared to be hand-embroidered. On the floor beside the bed lay a pile of plastic bags, labels, and cardboard inserts. Apparently the bedclothes were new, too.

  In the closet she found mostly women’s clothing, but several men’s shirts, jeans, and slacks hung next to the rest and a few pairs of men’s shoes jostled for space among the high heels, sandals, and sneakers. Savannah picked up one mud-encrusted men’s boot, and looked at the size. Ten. “Common enough,” she muttered, replacing it.

  “Anything in there?” Dirk called from the bathroom.

  “Men’s stuff in the closet.” She noted the size of the pants and shirts. “He’s a bit smaller than you. Better taste in clothes.”

  “Gr-r-r-r-r.”

  She left the closet and walked over to the dresser, which was covered with a long, lacy runner. In the center of the dresser was a modest jewelry chest filled with costume jewelry. But beside it was a small, black, velvet-flocked box. She opened it and saw a pair of diamond earrings winking back at her. Set in white gold, the princess-cut stones had to be at least half a karat each.

  More new acquisitions, she thought. New, expensive toys at that. Somebody came into some money recently. Some real money.

  At one end of the dresser, a clear, plastic shoe box caught her eye. She could see through it and tell that it was filled with papers.

  Opening it, she found assorted bills and on top of the stack, a checkbook and bank statement.

  Her investigator’s heart took an extra beat as she reached for the statement. She was happy to see that the envelope had already been opened. It saved her the trouble of having to break the law or wait for Dirk to come into the room and do it.

  It was the most recent statement and a stack of canceled checks…more than Savannah wrote in an entire year.

  She thumbed through them and saw they had been written to everything from nail salons to exclusive women’s boutiques, to jewelry shops, to a tire place…top-of-the-line steel-belted radials.

  “Again,” she mumbled. “Somebody must have won the lotto recently. She was wading though this money like it was warm, shallow water.”

  “What?” Dirk asked as he entered the bedroom.

  “She was spending cash like her pocket had a hole in it.” Savannah’s eye ran down the “credits” column of the statement, seeing only the occasional, modest, deposits that must have been earned from her job at Dona Papalardo’s.

  Then she found what she was looking for…a deposit for $44,000, made about six weeks before. “Hey, take a lookie at this,” she said, handing Dirk the statement. “How does a personal assistant come up with a little bonus like that?”

  “That’s a lot of bucks to drop in out of nowhere. Maybe she settled some sort of lawsuit.”

  Savannah shrugged. “Oh, sure. There are some perfectly legitimate ways to score a sum like that.”

  “But a lot more illegitimate ways.”

  “You’re so cynical.”

  “Practical. Honest. I see things as they are, not through rose-colored sunglasses.”

  She stuck out her tongue at him, then reached into the box and took out the checkbook that was folded between some of the bills. “When was that deposit?”

  “On the fifteenth,” he said, “last month.”

  She thumbed through the checkbook’s registry and found the credit noted in a woman’s clear, artistic handwriting…both the amount and the source of the check she had deposited. “Well now,” she said. “Ain’t that just interestin’ as all git-out?”

  “What’s that?” He looked over her shoulder.

  “We may not know ‘why’ yet, but we know ‘who.’”

  “Who?”

  “Who paid her all the money she’s been spending around here. The forty-four thousand dollars.” She stuck the checkbook under his nose and tapped her nail on the entry.

  “So, who’s that?” he said reading the name. “Who’s Miles Thurgood?”

  Savannah grinned. “The thlot plickens…” she said, “…Miles Thurgood is Dona Papalardo’s agent. Her former agent. And better yet, the former agent whom she’s suing and who’s suing her.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dirk nodded, remembering. “She told me about him. In fact, when I asked her who she thought might want her dead, he was the first one she mentioned, a step ahead of her ex-boyfriend.”

  “I guess you’d better check him out.”

  Dirk grinned his “nasty” grin and stuck the checkbook into his inside jacket pocket. “He was next on my list anyway. Now him and me…we’ve got us somethin’ to talk about!”

  Chapter 9

  As Savannah and Dirk left Kim Dylan’s house and drove down the dusty road through the orange grove, they discussed their next moves.

  “I can’t believe we went through the whole house,” Savannah said, “and couldn’t find one piece of paper with that guy’s name on it. His clothes and shoes are in the closet, his underwear in a drawer, but not a piece of mail, a note, nothing with his name. That was just downright aggravating.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m going to call in,” Dirk said, grabbing his cell phone off the dash. “Maybe the new gal’s had time to run those names for me.”

  Savannah couldn’t help but notice the sappy little grin that appeared on his puss the moment he mentioned the “new gal.” Over the years, she had watched him develop these little crushes from time to time. And while she didn’t want to admit for a second that she experienced even a twinge of anything resembling “jealousy,” she did feel better somehow when she reminded herself that she had b
een head-over-knickers in lust with Ryan when she had first met him. And there had been that hunk who modeled for the covers of romance novels—another almost-romance that had lasted no longer than the common cold.

  They had reached the end of the dirt road, and as they were pulling onto the main highway, Savannah spotted a small stucco house, nearly hidden in some lemon trees across the road. An elderly lady was trimming rosebushes in the yard.

  Her sunbonnet, simple cotton dress with a small floral pattern, and the elbow-high leather gloves reminded Savannah of her grandmother. Her heartstrings twanged, and she reminded herself that she owed Gran a phone call.

  “Pull over,” she told Dirk. “While you’re talking to the front-desk bimbo, I’ll do some real work and have a chat with that lady over there.”

  “About what? Rose pruning?”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Oh, I’m sure I can think of something other than that. Besides, Granny Reid already taught me all I’ll ever need to know about pruning roses. ‘Cut ’em short, feed them a banana peel, and don’t let ’em bite you.’”

  He pulled over to the edge of the road. She opened the door and said, “While you’re flirting with cutie buns there, ask her to run ol’ Bleak for me.”

  “How did you know she’s got great buns?”

  She snorted. “Call it a lucky guess.”

  She slammed the door and walked over to the woman, who appeared surprised to see her—or anyone for that matter. Savannah got the impression that visitors were few and far between for this lady.

  “Hi, my name is Savannah,” she said brightly as she approached the woman and her rose garden. “And how are you doin’ today?”

  “Well, I’m all right, I guess,” the woman replied, peering at her suspiciously from under the broad brim of her sunbonnet. “What do you want?”

  O-o-okay, Savannah thought. Not all old ladies are as sweet as Gran.

  “I was wondering if I could just talk to you for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. You’re tramping down my lawn!”

  Savannah looked down at the ground beneath her feet. Bare dirt, a few brown weeds, some rocks and broken glass. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She saw a spot with fewer weeds a couple of feet away. She hopped onto that. “There. Is that better?”

  “I asked you what you want.”

  “So you did. Yes, you sure did.”

  This was going to be tough, Savannah decided then and there. She also decided that maybe there was a perfectly good reason why this lady seldom had company. What did the rest of the world know that she was just now discovering?

  “I was wondering about your neighbors, the ones who live down there.” Savannah pointed to the dirt road.

  “She’s dead,” the woman snapped, emphasizing her statement by snipping off a particularly thick branch from a rosebush. “Got herself shot right there in front of that place where she works. I read about it in the paper this morning. And it was on the Los Angeles Wake-up Show, too.”

  “Yes.” Savannah nodded somberly. “That’s true. But I was wondering about him.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes, the guy who’s been hanging out there. Her boyfriend,” she added, deciding to venture an educated guess. After all, it was a one-bedroom apartment and there were condoms in the bathroom.

  “Oh, him!” Another, even more violent snip with the pruning shears. “I can’t stand him.”

  Savannah’s heart beat a little faster. “Really? Was he rude to you, or…?”

  “Rude to me? He’s rude to everybody, riding that noisy motorcycle in and out of here at all hours of the day and night. Rattles my windows! Wakes me up out of a dead sleep at seventy-thirty!”

  “That early in the morning?”

  “No, seven-thirty at night! I’m dead to the world at that hour!”

  “Oh, I see. That’s just plumb rude of him!”

  “That’s what I said when I called the cops on him.”

  “You called the police? Did they come out and talk to him?”

  “They said they would, but they didn’t. I sat right there on my porch all day long and watched, but they didn’t bother.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Savannah said, and she meant it. If the SCPD had sent someone out, there might be a record with the motorcyclist’s name on it. “You wouldn’t happen to know what his name is, do you?”

  “No. Don’t give a tinker’s damn either. I just want him to stop riding that infernal thing in the middle of the night.”

  “What does he look like?” At least she could get a physical description. Not nearly as good as a name, but better than going back to Dirk empty-handed. She had to do at least as well as the bimbo at the station desk.

  “I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Of course I’ve seen him.”

  “Then…?”

  “He’s always wearing that big black helmet. And a black leather jacket and jeans. That’s not going to tell you much about him, now is it?”

  “Uh. No, it’s not.” Okay, maybe she could go back with squat. Lord knows, it had happened before. Maybe the front-desk chickie-poo had struck out, too.

  “But I do have his license number. The license plate on the back of his motorcycle. I wrote it down.”

  “You do? You did!” The sun shone brighter. The birds sang louder. Nearby orange blossoms burst into bloom. “Would you mind terribly giving it to me?”

  “Why? I don’t even know you. What do you want it for?”

  Savannah thought fast, a dozen lies racing through her mind. The truth just seemed so…complicated. “I want to make sure he gets what’s coming to him,” she said.

  “For racing through here like a Hell’s Angel and waking up an old woman who needs her sleep?”

  Savannah nodded. “For that, and for anything else he’s done that he oughtn’t.”

  The woman smiled, a big and somewhat unpleasant smile. “You just wait right here,” she said, laying her pruning shears and gauntlets on the ground. “I’ll be right back!”

  Savannah suppressed a chuckle. “And I’ll be right here waiting.”

  “So, there!” Savannah shoved the piece of paper under Dirk’s nose the moment she got into the car. “Call your little desk muffin and give her that plate to run, and we’ll find out who Kim’s mystery man is.”

  Dirk took the piece of paper, looked at it, then cleared his throat and scowled. “Well, maybe we will and maybe we won’t,” he grumbled.

  “What?”

  “The desk gal, Jeanette…she looks better than she is.”

  Savannah was devastated to hear that, but she figured she could get over it. A hot fudge sundae would probably do the trick. “Really? What a shame. She didn’t run those names for you?”

  “I guess she tried, but she couldn’t even find Kim Dylan, other than this address. And I already had that from the ID in the victim’s purse.”

  “What do you mean, couldn’t find her?”

  “No record. Not even a Social Security number.”

  “No Social?”

  “Or driver’s license in any state.”

  “It’s an alias.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. That or Jeanette is a lot dumber than she looks.” He flipped open his cell phone and punched in a number. As he waited for an answer, he added, “You’ll be happy to know, though, that she was able to locate your new brother-in-law. And other than a couple of trespasses on private property last year, he’s clean.”

  “Trespasses?” She’d been hoping for an outstanding warrant for a parole violation. “What sort of trespasses?”

  “He broke into a mortuary one time and somebody’s crypt another time. Didn’t take anything, or hurt anything. So it was just trespassing.”

  “Oh,” she said, sagging deeper into the Buick seat. She should be happy for her sister. She knew it, and she felt guilty for feeling disappointed. But she couldn’t believe this slapdas
h marriage was a good thing. And she was hoping that maybe it could end quickly and cleanly before Jesup got any more deeply involved with this character, while there was still time to just get a nice, easy annulment. Maybe even before Granny Reid or the other relatives back in Georgia had to know about it.

  But she couldn’t see Jesup leaving her new husband in a huff over some trespassing charges. Heck, Jessie herself had done worse than that. Way worse.

  She listened as Dirk read the motorcycle plate number to the woman on the other end. It was pretty obvious from the flat tone of his voice that his infatuation level had plummeted at least seventy degrees. Dirk liked a female who filled out a sweater or a tight skirt nicely, but a woman who couldn’t run a good background check wasn’t going to be high on his list for long. It might have taken a lot of years for his priorities to rearrange in that order, but he had eventually evolved.

  This time Jeanette seemed to have done better. He was actually smiling when he hung up from the call. “Okay,” he said, “we’ve got a name. Not a familiar name, but a name.”

  “What is it?”

  “James Morgan. Ring a bell?”

  She shook her head. “Nary a tinkle.”

  “Me either.”

  “Did she give you an address?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She did.” He sighed. “This one.”

  As they pulled back onto the road, Savannah called Tammy on her cell, and Tammy answered right away.

  “Hi,” Savannah said. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. Earlier, I had to run off a batch of reporters who came to the door and were demanding to talk to Ms. Papalardo, but now I’m having a nice cappuccino with Dona’s housekeeper. She’s very…uh…friendly.”

  “Chatty?”

  “Yes.”

  Savannah could practically hear Tammy smiling. “Good girl,” she said. “Squeeze everything you can out of her. In fact, ask her right now if she knows a James Morgan.”

  She heard Tammy ask and the negative response.

  “Oh well,” Savannah said. “It was worth a try. What’s Dona doing?”

  “She’s upstairs in her bedroom. She’s been sick all day. Called down for a glass of water earlier and that’s all we’ve heard out of her.”