Corpse Suzette (13 page)

“Do you know of anyone who
would want to do either or both of them any harm?” Dirk asked.

“Well...” She mulled it
over for a moment. “I guess there were some people who weren’t all that pleased
with the results of their surgeries. Some patients have very high expectations.
They think they’ll achieve some sort of physical perfection and then their
lives will be much happier. And of course, that’s an unrealistic expectation.”

“Anybody in particular more
disappointed than normal?” Dirk asked.

“Maybe a couple.”

“Could you give us their
names?” Savannah said.

Bridget looked horrified at
the very thought. “Oh, we guard our patients’ anonymity very carefully at the
Mystic Twilight spa. If word got out that we had released their names—”

“Look, Nurse Bridget,” Dirk
interjected. “I appreciate the fact that you want to protect your patients and
all that noble stuff. But we have a dead person, maybe two, and I don’t have
time to worry about whose face-lift is going to be public knowledge, if you
know what I mean. If you can think of anybody who was upset with either Dr. Du
Bois or Mr. D’Alessandro, you’d better spit it out.”

“I’ll make a list for you,”
she said, “if you promise me that you won’t tell where you got it.”

“I’ll cover you,” he said
with sudden and unexpected kindness. “Don’t worry about it. I like nurses. I
have a lot of respect for what they do. They took good care of me when I got
shot in the line of duty.”

Oh, no,
Savannah thought.
Here
we go again.
The “Bullet in the Ass” story that she’d heard a few hundred
times too many. She liked to think she was as compassionate and empathetic as
anyone. But when it came to Dirk’s barely-grazed right buttock, she had run out
of sympathy in 1999.

“Here we are,” she
announced brightly as they reached the door to D’Alessandro’s office. “Let’s
check in here first.”

They entered the office,
and after a quick look around, Savannah decided that it looked just the same as
it had when she had last been in here. It had the neat, tidy appearance of a
worker who did precious little work. Nothing appeared to be out of place. Not a
pen or pencil in sight.

“Let me ask you something
bluntly, Nurse Bridget,” Dirk said. “To the best of your knowledge, did Mr.
D’Alessandro use illegal drugs?”

The nurse looked genuinely
shocked at the very idea. “No, not at all. He drank socially.” She paused, then
added, “And he was... well... very sociable. But other than that, nothing.”

“How about prescription
drugs?” Savannah asked. “Was he on any sort of medication that you know of?”

“No, and if he were, I
think I would know. I’m in charge of our med inventory and I would know if he
was taking anything out of the cabinets.” She looked quizzically from Dirk to
Savannah and back. “Why do you ask?”

“There were some injection
marks on his thigh,” Savannah said.

“Oh, those.” A light dawned
on Bridget’s face. “The B1? shots.”

“What are those?” Dirk
asked.

“He gave himself B,, shots,
claimed they kept his strength up. I gave him a couple when I first started
working here, but then he got the nerve to start doing it himself.”

“And he did this
regularly?”

“Yes. Once a month.”

“Did he do this here at
work or at home?” Dirk said.

“Here. It’s handy. We have
the needles and syringes and gauze, and we keep his vials of B
₁₂
in
the drug cabinet.”

“Which room is the cabinet
in?” Savannah asked.

“Exam Room One, where I
draw blood,” she replied.

Dirk gave Savannah a quick
glance. She knew the look: He was onto something. Or at least he thought he
was.

“Let’s go there,” he said.
“Nurse Bridget, you lead the way.”

* * *

Exam Room One wasn’t much
bigger than a closet. In one corner was a chair, the sort that kids sat in at
school with a half desk in front of them. A blood pressure machine hung on the
wall, and the smell of alcohol hung in the air.

Locked cabinets filled with
large bottles and tiny vials lined another wall, and a counter held the
supplies, cotton balls and swabs, gauze squares and bandages, all in spotless
glass and stainless steel containers.

“So, if he recently
injected himself here at the clinic,” Dirk said, looking around, “it probably
would have been in this room?”

“Most likely,” Bridget
replied.

“Go through it with us,
step by step, how he would have done it.”

“Well, he would have opened
this drawer and taken out a syringe. One like this,” she said, going through
the motions. “Laid it over here on this tray. Gotten one of these alcohol wipes
and laid it here, too. Then he would have used his key to get into this cabinet
and taken out a vial of the B
₁₂
.” She removed one of the small
bottles of clear liquid, the one nearest her in the box, closed the cabinet and
locked it.

“Then he would have loaded
the syringe like this, tapped it to get the air bubbles to rise, pressed the
plunger to expel the air and laid the syringe on the tray. He would have rolled
up his pant leg, or dropped his trousers and cleaned the spot on his thigh with
the alcohol wipe. Then he would have injected it into his thigh, right here in
the muscle.”

“And what then?” Dirk
wanted to know.

“He would have thrown the
needle into the biowaste can under the cabinet there.”

“And the empty vial?”

“Tossed there, in the
regular trash can.”

Eagerly, Dirk reached for
the can and looked inside. But Savannah was a step ahead of him. She had
already donned a pair of surgical gloves. She took the can from him and began
to rummage among the small amount of garbage inside.

In seconds, she had found
it—a small vial with printing on the side. “Is this it?” she asked, holding it
up for Bridget’s inspection.

“Yes, that’s it.”

Dirk pulled a small brown
paper bag from his jacket pocket and held it open for Savannah to drop it
inside. He promptly sealed it and began to scribble the date and other
pertinent information on what was now an evidence bag.

Savannah continued to
scrounge around until she had found the rest of what she was looking for. “Is
this the top from that bottle?” she asked, showing it, as well, to their
resident nurse.

Bridget studied the top for
a moment, then nodded. “That’s it.”

“Good job, ladies,” Dirk
said, as he opened a second bag for Savannah.

“Oh, so for now we’re
ladies and not broads?” Savannah asked teasingly as she watched him seal that
one, too.

“Nope,” he said. “No broads
around here at the moment. You two definitely qualify as ladies in my book.
Now, let’s see if you dames can help me find that syringe, too.”

Chapter

Savannah decided to be kind
and not mention that Tammy’s VW Bug was about ready to be swatted and put out
of its misery. The car was on its last tire and had been for months. When you
had to pour in more oil than gas on a regular basis, it was time to start
thinking about trading up to a later model... say, from the seventies or
eighties. As much as the Moonlight Magnolia team loved their classics, a car
that got you places “most” of the time didn’t cut it.

“No problem,” she said. “I
wanted to drop by there and nose around anyway. This gives me a good excuse.”
She turned to Abigail, who sat glumly in the seat next to her. “Another
appointment with that hotty, Jeremy... that can’t be too dreary a prospect.
Huh, Abby?”

To her surprise, a tiny
smile appeared on Abigail’s lips and a soft look came into her eyes. “I like
Jeremy,” she replied. “He’s kind. He treats me with respect.”

“Of course he does,” Tammy
said. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“People don’t always do
what they should,” Abigail replied. “Take that jerk in the car ahead....”

Savannah studied the
bomb-mobile in front of them, an old sedan with four different colors of primer
instead of paint, and bumper stickers galore that bore witness to the driver’s
extensive travels. According to the faded, torn banners, he had visited all of
the world’s great wonders: Old Faithful, the Stardust Casino, the Tuscaloosa
Rattlesnake Farm, and Joe’s Catfish Shack in the Heart of the Ozarks.

But smack in the middle of
all the others, one of the bumper stickers was all the more obvious because it
was bright yellow and not as faded. Apparently a new addition to the montage, it
read:
save a whale—harpoon a fat chick.

Savannah cast a sideways
look at Abigail and was surprised to see tears in the woman’s eyes. It was a
disgusting sentiment, no doubt, but the world was full of such insults. She was
taken aback by Abigail’s sensitivity to such insensitivity.

“It should be against the
law to put something like that on your car,” Abby said, her voice shaky. “Don’t
you agree?”

Savannah shrugged. “I can
see why it upsets you, but I’ve always thought that a body should be able to say
whatever’s on their mind without it being illegal. How else are we going to be
able to tell the assholes from the good folks? That yahoo puts a thing like
that on his car, we know he’s an idiot from a block away. Forewarned and all
that.”

But Abigail shook her head
vigorously and said, “No, it should be illegal. Can you imagine the uproar if,
instead of saying ‘Fat Chick’ it said ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Black Man?’ Somebody would
shoot his tires out. Somebody else would sue him for two-hundred and fifty
thousand dollars and win. The ACLU would be all over it. Because society has
decided not to tolerate that sort of thing. But you can bash a fat woman at
home, at work, on late-night talk shows, and people everywhere will laugh.”

Tammy spoke up from the
backseat, her words soft and hesitant. “I guess it’s because society believes
that a lesbian is born a lesbian, and a black person is born black. But they
think a fat person chooses to be that way.”

“Sure they think that,”
Abby said. “They think we’re all a bunch of lazy slobs who do nothing but lie
around all day, shoving junk food into our faces. They think a simple change of
lifestyle would just fix everything. Eat right and exercise! Yeah, right. That
works for most people, but not for all of us. It’s a lot more complicated than
that.”

Savannah wasn’t going to
argue with her. Years ago, when she had been at war against her own body, she
had tried every diet in the world. But after months and months of counting
every calorie, exercising herself half to death, eating nothing but “wholesome”
food and still gaining weight, or going to bed hungry night after night and
losing next to nothing, she had decided her body had other plans.

One morning she looked in
the mirror and saw a barely thinner, miserably unhappy, sallow woman whose hair
was falling out, who couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without nearly
fainting, who hated the world and everybody in it... and she had decided to
love her body and herself more than that.

She had never dieted
again—in spite of the yahoos with insulting bumper stickers, late-night TV
comedians and their hurtful jokes, the constant barrage of commercial ads that
hawked one weight-loss solution or another, and fashion designers with their
stick-thin models.

And she was fine with it.

She only wished that young
women like Abigail could be fine with it, too.

“It’s too bad,” Abigail was
saying, “that in this world there are more jerks like that one in front of us
than there are people like Jeremy.”

“But you’re on your way to
see Jeremy,” Savannah reminded her. “You’re choosing to spend your time with
someone like him. And that guy in front of us... you can just chalk him up as
an idiot; give him the mental finger and keep walkin’.”

Abigail gave her a long,
thoughtful look. “Is that what you do?”

“No, I’m a Southerner. I
mentally lop his head off with a great big sword, watch it roll across the
ground, kick it into a ditch, and spit on it.
Then
I walk away. Us
Georgia gals are a little more mentally violent in the way we deal with people
who irritate us.” Abby laughed. “I love it! I think us Yankee gals might have
to follow your example. Maybe I’ll mentally push him onto a subway track and
watch the train run over him.”

“Whatever it takes to get
the job done,” Savannah replied. “As long as you maintain your inner spiritual
tranquility.”

“You guys are weird,” Tammy
said from the back seat. “And a little scary.”

“And don’t you forget it,”
Savannah reminded her.

“Yeah, don’t mess with a
fat chick,” Abby added. “You never know when we might act out one of those
violent fantasies of ours. You could wind up headless
and
under a subway
train.” Savannah lifted a militant fist. “Amen, sister.”

The moment Savannah pulled
into Emerge’s parking lot, her cell phone rang.

“You ladies go on in,”
Savannah told Tammy and Abigail. “I’ll take this and follow in a few minutes.”

As they got out of the car
and headed inside, Savannah answered the call. It was Dirk.

“What’s the news?” she
asked. It was safe to assume there was some sort of business to discuss; Dirk
never called just to shoot the breeze.

“Lab just called me about
that bottle and syringe we dropped off,” he said. “They found something good.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Yeah, but they’re just
his. No big deal there.”

“Anything suspicious in the
vial?”

“Nothing. It was clean. Not
even residue from the vitamins that should have been in it. Like somebody
washed it out really good before they pitched it. Same with the syringe.
Nothing but water inside.”

“So what’s the good word?”

“The cap. It had a trace of
something else on the inside.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“The gal at the lab wasn’t
sure, but she said it looked like botulism.”

“Botulism?” Savannah
started to grin. “You mean like Botox, the stuff they use at plastic surgeons’
clinics?”

“No, she said she checked
that and it isn’t Botox. Similar, but not the same. She said that Botox is
relatively safe. In order to kill somebody with Botox, you’d have to inject
them with something like thirty-five vials of the stuff. And at four hundred and
fifty bucks a vial, the cost alone would be prohibitive.”

“Not to mention trying to
hold a victim down long enough to inject them with thirty-five vials of
anything.”

“Right. But this stuff she
found, she said it’s a lot more concentrated than Botox. She’s not sure what it
is.”

Savannah looked up at the
brass sign and its fancy “Emerge” logo. “Well,” she said, “I just happen to be
sitting in the clinic’s parking lot. Let me go inside and see what I can find.
I’ll get back to you.”

“Thanks, babe. I owe you
one.”

“Oh, sugar, you owe me
way
more than one.”

* * *

Once inside, Savannah found
Myrna alone at her desk. She looked tired and bored, but happy to see Savannah.

“Hey, girlfriend,” she said
as Savannah walked over to her and stuck out her hand. “You about ready to go
out for another drink?”

“Any time,” Savannah
replied, shaking her hand heartily. “For you, any time at all.” She looked
around at the clean desk, the bottle of red nail polish and file, the hand
cream. “Not much going on, huh?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.
But I guess that’s to be expected. With one owner missing and the other one
dead, what do you expect? I’m just going through the motions. We all are.”

“Like having Abigail come
in for her meeting with Jeremy?” Savannah asked.

Myrna smiled sweetly. “That
was Jeremy’s idea. He likes Abby, thinks he can be of help to her. He asked me
to call her this morning and have her come in for a stylist consult.”

“Where are they?”

“He just took her and Tammy
out to the patio for a nice lunch. You can join them if you like.”

“No, I’d rather talk to
you.”

Myrna seemed pleased.
Savannah got the idea that the receptionist might not have a lot of friends.
The woman had an air of loneliness about her.

“Good. Pull up a chair and
let’s chat.”

Savannah settled herself in
the offered chair and glanced around to see if they were alone. There was no
one in earshot except the butterflies.

“How much do you know about
the medicines they use here?” she asked.

Myrna looked a bit sad.
“Probably more than I should... personal experience and all. Why? Which meds do
you want to know about?”

“Botox.”

“Botox? Why? Are you
considering some injections for those forehead wrinkles of yours?”

“No. I like my wrinkles. I
earned every one of them. I was just wondering if they use Botox here... or
something like it.”

“They used to use Botox.
But lately Suzette had switched to something else, a new product she was raving
about.”

“Do you know the name of
it?”

“No, but I can look it up
for you.” She turned to the computer on her desk. “I’m sure it’s listed in our
inventory.”

After a minute or so of
searching, she found it. “Here you go. That’s right; I remember now. It’s
called Bot-Avanti. It’s the latest thing on the market.”

“And why would Suzette have
switched to it, if you know?” Myrna gave a little sniff. “It’s cheaper.”

“It costs less per bottle?”

“Well, no. It’s actually
expensive initially. But it’s much more concentrated.”

Savannah nodded. She couldn’t
wait to get back to Dirk with this little tidbit. “And they keep a good stock
of it here at Emerge?”

Myrna squinted at the
screen. “Actually, there’s only a few bottles of it here. Most of it is at
Mystic Twilight, our old spa. That’s where Suzette did most of her work.”

“What’s going on there
these days?”

“Not much there either.
It’s as dead as here.” She lowered her voice. “Between you and me... Mystic
hasn’t had a real client in months now. Suzette and Sergio had pretty much
turned their backs on the old place and invested all of their time, energies,
and money in this new one. That’s why we were so hoping this opening would make
a big splash.” She sighed. “I guess now it’s more like a belly flop. We’re all
going to have to start looking for jobs around here. It’s so sad. We all had
such high hopes for the new place.”

Savannah studied the
receptionist, her face with its overworked, windblown look, her swollen lips
that looked like she’d had an allergic reaction to a new lipstick. She thought
how hard it must be to live Myrna Cooper’s life, even without losing one’s job.

“Are you going to be okay?”
Savannah asked her.

Myrna’s eyes sparkled. She
smiled and it occurred to Savannah that, in that moment, Myrna was a lot
prettier than any plastic surgeon could make her. “Oh, don’t you worry about
me,” she replied with a toss of her head. “I’m like a cat. I always land on my
feet. Always.”

Savannah laughed and patted
her shoulder as she stood to leave. “Glad to hear it. And when I’m finished
with this whole Suzette/Sergio business, we’ll go out again and since I won’t
be ‘working,’ I’ll have a margarita.”

“One big enough to take a
jacuzzi in. My treat.”

“It’s a date.”