Death by Chocolate (21 page)

Tony blushed. “Yeah, she
sent me a couple.... you know.... after...”

“After you and her got down
and dirty?” Dirk added. Nodding, he said, “Yeah. But it wasn’t dirty or
nothing. We were in love.”

“Were?” Savannah asked.
‘You’re not anymore?” Tears flooded his eyes. “Well, I am, but I don’t think
she is. She hasn’t called me, or ordered anything from the pharmacy, or left me
any more notes.”

“Let me guess,” Dirk said
dryly. “She fell out of love about the time you gave her the
phenylprophedrine.”

“I haven’t heard anything
from her since then.” His confusion deepened. “Why.... do you think that was
all she was after? But it was just stupid cold medicine!”

“Are you telling me that
you really don’t know what she wanted that stuff for?” Dirk was leaning so
close to Tony that their noses were nearly touching. “Don’t lie to me, damn it.
I can help you out here, boy, but if you lie to me, I’ll fry your ass, I
swear.”

“Her note said it was for a
cold. Really.” Tony suddenly brightened. “Hey, I’ve still got it. I kept the
letter. If you want to read it, you can.”

Dirk smiled. Broadly. He
gave Savannah a loaded look.

“Did Louise type her
letters or handwrite them?” Dirk asked.

“She typed them.... on her
computer, I think. And she signed it, ‘Love, Louise’ with a little heart to dot
the ’i‘”

“Oh, yes,” Dirk said. “We
definitely want to
look at that letter right away.”

Savannah didn’t have to ask;
she knew they were thinking the same thing. Wouldn’t it be interesting if that
note were written in a certain large Arial font?

Chapter

S
avannah recognized the tan
parchment st
ationery
even before
she got a look at the type of print on it. Tony was holding the paper out to
Dirk with a trembling hand, and in his other hand he held a cigar box with
several more letters on the same stationery. A treasure trove!

She could tell that Dirk
was trying hard not to show his excitement as he took the page from Tony with a
gloved hand and looked it over. He showed it to Savannah, and she, too,
swallowed a smile.

I gotcha, you rat-bitch,
Louise, she thought. Send nasty letters to your mommy, will you? Write a kid
love letters and get him to help you kill her, huh?

But she said nothing...
simply nodded.

Nothing felt better than
when you got a break in a case, unless the bad guy, or gal, was also somebody
you really, really disliked.

Tony seemed to sense their
satisfaction, and he stopped trembling for the first time since Dirk had picked
him up at the drugstore. After being questioned at the station, he had brought
them to his house in downtown San Carmelita, where he lived with his mother,
and invited them inside. He had practically run into his bedroom and then came
out with the cigar box in hand, eager to help in any way.

Dirk never exactly bubbled
over with gratitude, but he did lay a gloved hand on the kid’s shoulder and
say, “It’s a good thing you came clean with this, Tony. This letter puts you
pretty much in the clear and helps us with our case.”

Tony flushed with joy that
bordered on giddiness. Then a shadow of concern crossed his face. ‘You’re not
going to do anything to Louise, are you? It was just a couple of bottles of
medicine, right?”

Dirk shot a guilt-laden
look at Savannah, and she quickly stepped forward. ‘You can’t worry about
Louise, Tony,” she said. “If she’s got problems, she caused them herself.”

“What do you mean?”

Savannah weighed her words,
wanting to be honest with the young man, but not spill more than was necessary.
She had learned long ago that in the course of an investigation, you had to
dole out information strictly on a need-to-know basis.

“I mean,” she said, “that Louise
didn’t treat you very well, Tony, and you don’t owe her a thing. You just
remember that, okay?”

He nodded, still looking
confused. ‘Yeah, okay.”

At that moment the front
door of the house opened, and a woman who vaguely resembled Mildred the pharmacist
walked inside. She didn’t look at all pleased to see the gathering in her
living room.

She would be even less
pleased when she found out who they were and why they were talking to her son.

Dirk shoved a business card
into Tony’s hand and took the cigar box from under his arm. “Thanks a million,
buddy,” he said. “Give me a call if you have any questions. I’ll be in touch.”

As he and Savannah sailed
past Mom, she said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Public servants, ma’am,”
Dirk replied. ‘Just servin’ the public.”

“Protect and serve,”
Savannah added as they darted out the door.

They reached the sidewalk
and Dirk’s Buick without further interference.

“Pretty good,” he said as
they climbed inside. ‘The kid didn’t lawyer up, and he gave us our first big
break.”

“And his momma didn’t take
a bite outta your ass.” She smiled and looked at the cigar box which he was
slipping into a brown paper evidence bag. “All in all, not a bad afternoon’s
work.”

When Dirk found out that he
wasn’t going to be able to get a search warrant for Louise’s place until the
next morning, Savannah decided to call it quits early and spend some quality
time with her sister.

But upon arriving home, she
found the reception decidedly chilly. Cordele was sitting in Savannah’s
favorite reading chair, writing in a rather somber-looking black journal of
some sort and had little to say to her in the way of greeting. The cats sat on
the ottoman in their usual places, one on either side of her feet.

At least they were happy to
see her. They jumped off the footstool and ran to her, mewing, tails arched
like big black question marks.

As they tangled themselves
around her ankles, she bent and stroked their glossy coats, wondering as always
at the quality of unconditional love offered by animals.

“Okay,” she said as she led
them into the kitchen, “your love is somewhat dependent upon a never-ending
supply of food and a clean litter box, but...”

After scooping some smelly
goop into each of two bowls and refreshing their water, she went to the
refrigerator and looked inside. “Hey, you want a glass of lemonade?” she called
to Cordele. “I just squeezed it this morning. It’s the real thing.”

“Does it have sugar in it?”
came the first words heard from the living room.

“Ye-e-es.”

Whoever heard of lemonade
without sugar? she thought as she poured herself a tall glass. What a
chucklehead.

“I can make you some iced
tea,” she offered, trying to sound more generous than she felt. “No sugar.”

“With caffeine?”

She gritted her teeth. “I
wasn’t going to
add
any, but it’s just regular ol’ tea, so...”

“Then it has caffeine. No,
thank you.”

“At least she said ‘Thank
you,’ ” Savannah muttered. “Otherwise I might have had to beat her into a—”

“Are you talking to me?”

“No. Just mumbling to
myself.” She took her lemonade and walked into the living room, resisting the
urge to run upstairs to her bedroom and nail the door shut. “Are you hungry for
supper yet?”

“No. I’ve been working on
my journal this afternoon, and, to be honest, I’ve sort of lost my appetite.”

Savannah sank wearily onto
the sofa and propped her feet on the coffee table. To heck with it. Who cared
if one’s tabletop got scratched? Who cared if one’s younger sister sat on a
fence post and spun clockwise.... or counterclockwise, for that matter?

“Lost your appetite, huh?”
she said. “Been reminiscing again about rotten cats caught in briar patches?”
Cordele shot her a hostile, hurt look over the top of the journal. “No-o-o. My entries
are about painful, wounding events that are a little more recent.”

“How recent?”

“Yesterday. Today.”

“Damn, that’s what I was
afraid of,” Savannah mumbled and buried her nose in her lemonade glass, taking
a long, long drink.

As Cordele sat, radiating
disapproval, wrapped in silence, Savannah knew that she was expected to
inquire. She was supposed to ask about her transgressions du jour and then beg
for forgiveness.

Funny, she just wasn’t in
the mood to play the game. So, she sipped her lemonade and radiated her own
brand of silence. Gee, she was happy she’d come home early! Who would have
missed this?

“In case you’re
wondering...” Cordele began.

I wasn’t. Really. I’m not
that curious.

“…I’ve recorded the amount
of quality time you and I have shared since I arrived on Tuesday. It’s now
Friday. That’s four days. And in those four days”—she opened her journal and
scanned several pages before continuing—“we have spent a grand total of four
hours and fifteen minutes of semi-intimate time together. I flew all the way to
California for four hours and fifteen minutes with my oldest sister. Pretty
pitiful, huh?”

Savannah set her lemonade
on the coffee table. Screw the coaster. Who cared about circles when they were
about to commit murder?

“How about the barbecue we
had?” she asked. “That alone was four hours.”

“We weren’t alone. You had
your friends over. It wasn’t quality time.”

“How about the beach?”

“That was included.”

“And the mall?”

Cordele thumbed through a few
pages of her journal. “It’s in there. One hour and twelve minutes.”

Savannah snapped. She
turned on Cordele like a rabid squirrel. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve
been keeping track since you got here... right down to the minutes? Is that
what you’re telling me, Cordele Reid, that you’ve been counting the
cotton-pickin’
minutes
that we’ve spent together and writing them down
there in your little black book?”

Cordele hitched her chin
upward. Her lower lip trembled. “Yes, I certainly have. Writing in my journal
is a coping mechanism for me.”

Savannah drew a deep
breath. “Cordele, I want you to stop and think about this objectively for a
moment. Doesn’t that strike you as just a wee little bit anal-retentive and
petty, not to mention downright stupid?”

Okay, she had meant to say
that a tad more diplomatically, but.... the words were already out.... hanging
like lead balloons in the air between them.

“Not at all,” Cordele said,
tears glistening in her eyes. “I record things in my journal that are important
to me.
Family
is important to me.
You”—gulp... sniff
—“are
important to me.”

“You’re important to me,
Cor—”

“Not that I can tell.
You’ve been gone nearly the whole four days, and when you are here, you’re
distant, emotionally unavailable to me.”

Savannah looked upward and
silently prayed, Lord, help me understand my sister, like Gran said I should.
Please, give me patience.

“Cordele, honey,” she said
slowly, deliberately, “would you please tell me what it is that you want from
me? What is it that you need, darlin’, that I’m not giving you?”

Cordele looked at her in
wounded amazement. “What I
want
from you? What I
need?’

Lord, could you give me
that patience
right now?
‘Cause if you don’t, I’m going to strangle her
until her eyes pop out, and then I won’t even need it.

“Yes... what do you want
from me? Tell me, and I promise I’ll do my best to—”

Cordele burst into tears.
“Don’t you realize that the very fact that you would have to ask me such a question
shows how emotionally and spiritually distant we are?” Savannah considered
handing her the box of tissues that were on the end table, but that would
involve getting within reach of her, and she didn’t trust herself. So she just
allowed her to go on sniffing, tissueless.

“It breaks my heart,”
Cordele continued, “to think how close we used to be. How we used to talk for
hours about.... things...”

Savannah thought back,
trying to pinpoint those happy days. “You mean, when you first started college,
and we sat around trashing Mom and Dad all afternoon?”

“We weren’t trashing
anybody. We were exploring our feelings about our childhoods, evaluating our
formative years and how those experiences affected us.” Savannah nodded. “Yes.
I remember that after a lot of ‘exploring,’ we decided that Shirley and Macon
were basically crappy parents and that we were lucky that Gran took up the
slack. It didn’t take rocket science to figure that out.”

“How can you be so flip
about something so awful.... just dismissing the horrors of our upbringing that
way?”

“I’m not dismissing
anything, Cordele. I know there were some bad times with Dad on the road,
driving his rig, and Mom leaving us alone while she hung out at the bars. Her
coming home drunk and getting sick on the living room floor. Us cleaning her up
and putting her to bed. It wasn’t fun. But most of that was before you were
even born. Before Gran took us in.”

Cordele tossed her journal
onto the ottoman and crossed her arms over her chest. “So, what are you saying?
That you had it worse than I did, because you’re older?”

“This isn’t some kind of
sick contest, Cordele. For heaven’s sake, who gives a rat’s ass? So, you and I
both had it rough. Big deal. There’s always somebody out there who had it
better than you and somebody who had it worse. What does that have to do with
the present, and us sitting here in my living room in California, or whether
we’re going to eat pizza or broiled tofu for dinner?” ‘That’s so-o-o like you,
Savannah.... to live in denial.” Savannah felt it snap—her last string that
connected her to sanity. She jumped up from the sofa and grabbed her lemonade.
“That tears it, Cordele. If you want to call it denial, go right ahead. Label
me or my attitudes any damned way you want. But I’m not going to rehash ancient
history with you. I’m not going to sit around and feel sorry for myself. I
already did that. But sooner or later, I decided that if I was going to get
anything else accomplished in my life, I had to move on. And I’m not going back
there for you or anybody. If you want to interpret that as a rejection of you
as a human being... that’s your choice.”

She headed for the
staircase, her own bedroom, some privacy and sanctity. But she hesitated on the
bottom step and turned back to Cordele, who had stopped crying and was sitting
there with her mouth hanging open, eyes lightly bugged.