Death by Chocolate (24 page)

The next call would be less
pleasant, she knew.

Dirk had a growl in his
voice the instant he picked up at the station house. “Coulter.”

“Reid,” she responded,
equally brusque. “Still frosty around there?”

“Got icicles hanging from
my nose. She ain’t budgin’ from the ‘I was in rehab’ bit. What about the kid?”

“He never saw her. Said
that when he dropped off the pills at her place, she didn’t answer. There was a
typed note on the door telling him to leave it inside the screen.”

“Damn! Anybody could have
written that.”

“Yeah, on her computer
even, if she wasn’t home.” She heard the heavy sigh on the other end. ‘Just
like anybody could have written those letters on her computer, too. And if they
had a sample of her signature, they could have copied it at the bottom.”

“Believe me, I’ve thought
of all of that. I’ve also thought about the fact that nobody on that estate
seemed to ever lock their doors. I guess they figured the security gate took
care of everything. So anybody on the grounds could have come and gone from
that cottage pretty easily when Gilly was at school and Louise was rehabbing.”
‘You’re just full of sunshine and light,” he said.

“Hey, that’s the way the
cornbread crumbles. Did you get any confirmation from that clinic in San Diego
that she was there?”

“Yeah, she was there. Just
like she said.”

“Shit.”

“My sentiments exactly. I’m
gonna have to kick her loose, you know.”

Savannah’s stomach twisted
at the thought of Louise Maxwell winning the round—maybe even the fight. Yeah,
I know,” she said. “Suppose you could lose the paperwork for a little while?”

He chuckled. “It’s already
been misplaced for over an hour. Let’s see.... it’s almost seven now. I figure
it’ll show up about eight or nine.”

“You’re a bad boy.”

“You don’t know the half of
it, baby.”

Savannah heard a beep on
her “call waiting.”

“I’ve got another call.
Talk to you later. Chin up.”

”Yeah, yeah, yeah....”

She pushed the
flash
button. “Hello?”

“Savannah,” said a deep,
rich, female voice, “this is Angela Herriot.”

“Angela! How nice to hear
from you. Are you at work this late?”

“Always. Listen, I had some
paperwork come across my desk today, and I thought I should give you a call...”
Savannah sat, listening, for the next few minutes. Part of her—the
professional, the detective—was excited by what she was hearing. But the less
cerebral, more human side of her grieved.

That was the problem with
searching for the truth. Sometimes, often, in fact, when you uncovered a buried
secret, you wished you had just left it lying in its shallow grave.

Yes, she thought, it
probably would have been better for everybody.

Chapter

B
y the time Savannah reached
the Maxwell estate,
it was nearly eight o’clock in the
evening. After finding no one at home in either the mansion, the gatekeeper’s
cottage, or the chauffeur’s apartment, she approached the gardener’s cottage
where Marie lived... at least until Louise could legally evict her.

The door to the little
house stood open a foot or so, and Savannah could hear Marie’s gentle voice
coming from inside. She walked quietly to the door and peeked in. Marie was
sitting in her rocking chair with Gilly in her lap. Marie was reading her a Dr.
Seuss book. The child was munching on one of Marie’s amazing oatmeal cookies
and thoroughly enjoying the story and the attention.

Savannah hated to
interrupt.

She felt that she had
already interrupted this child’s life far too much, but....

Knocking on the door, she said,
“Excuse me, ladies, but could I have a word with you, Marie?”

Marie glanced up, startled.
But Gilly gave Savannah a bright smile.

“Hi, Savannah,” she said,
waving with her cookie. “Hi yourself, dumplin’.”

Gilly laughed. “Do you know
that you talk funny? You call people silly names.”

“Only people I like.” She
stepped through the door and into the cozy living room. “I was just wondering,”
she said to Marie, “if you happen to know where Sydney is? I knocked at his
apartment door, but he didn’t answer and I didn’t see the Jag in the garage.”

Something crossed Marie’s
eyes, a certain knowing sadness that Savannah herself could feel deep inside.

“Every evening after dinner
he goes to the Lucky Shamrock for happy hour. It’s a little Irish pub on the
beach north of here.”

“I know the place. He goes
there every night?”

“He has one beer and hangs
out with some guys there for a while. He usually comes home right about this
time. If you like, I’ll make you a cup of mint tea and you can wait for him
here.”

“Yes! ” Gilly said. “Stay
here with us and listen to the story. It’s about the cat in the hat.”

“I’d like to, Gilly.” She
turned for the door. “But it’ll have to wait until another time. You ladies
enjoy your book and your cookies. Thanks, Marie.”

Marie just nodded, the
sadness lingering in her eyes. It occurred to Savannah that an observant and
discreet housekeeper knew a lot, yet had no one to share that knowledge with.
What a lonely occupation, she thought as she left the cottage. What a
burdensome, lonely job.

The Lucky Shamrock didn’t
look much like a place that had been smiled upon by Lady Luck. Sitting directly
on the beach, it had no protection from the salt air and ocean winds that had
taken their toll on the once-white clapboard structure.

The pub’s single
ornamentation was a neon green shamrock that glowed in the window next to a
sign advertising Guinness. The Maxwells’ classic Jaguar was parked right by the
front door.

Savannah parked near the
back of the lot, got out of her car, and started to walk to the door. She
wasn’t exactly sure what she was going to say to Sydney Linton, or how she
would say it. But she figured the words would come, as they usually did, when
she needed them.

Before she reached the
pub’s entrance, the door opened and Sydney walked out with a friend. She
stopped where she was, standing in the shadows at the edge of the parking lot,
and watched.

The two men chatted for a
moment, then the stranger walked to a nearby pickup and drove away.

Savannah was about to
continue across the lot and call out his name when she realized he wasn’t
returning right away to the Jag. Instead, he stopped and looked around him in a
manner that she could only classify as “suspicious.”

Stepping deeper into the
shadows, she watched and waited to see what he would do next.

After seeing no one, he
walked quickly to the opposite side of the lot and toward the back of the
building, where a large Dumpster sat against a crooked wooden fence. Again, he
glanced around. Savannah held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t see or sense her
watching him there in the darkness.

As though gathering his
resolve, he sprinted over to the Dumpster and lifted the lid. He looked inside
for only a split second, then closed it and strode back to the Jaguar.

Savannah swallowed the
words she had been preparing for him. She wouldn’t need them. In the past
minute she had seen more than he would have ever told her, no matter what she
had said to him.

She waited for him to pull
out of the parking lot and disappear down the highway before she left her
hiding place and walked over to the Dumpster. Opening the lid, she could see
that it was brimming with typical “bar” garbage.

Mulling over the
implications, she left the container and walked across the lot and into the
bar. The smell of booze and stale smoke hit her as she walked through the
door—along with a belt of loud country music from the jukebox.

Several interested male
eyes followed her as she made her way to the bar, where a round, red-faced
bartender was drawing draughts into mugs.

“Whatcha drinking, ma’am?”
he asked.

“Nothing, thanks,” she
replied, leaning over the bar, practically shouting to be heard above the
music. “I was just wondering—when is your garbage collected?”

“What?” He looked at her as
if she were impaired. “First thing in the morning. Why?”

“What day?” she asked.

“Thursday. Tomorrow. Why?”

“So, that Dumpster out
there in your parking lot hasn’t been dumped since last Thursday morning?”

“Yeah. That’s right.
They’ll pick it up about six tomorrow morning. Why?”

She shrugged and gave him a
dimpled smile. “Aw, nothing. I just keep track of stuff like that.”

“O-o-okay. Whatever you
say.”

She walked out of the bar
and back to her car. Getting into the Mustang, she took her phone out of her
purse and called Dirk.

”You gotta meet me at the
Lucky Shamrock tomorrow morning before six,” she said, suddenly feeling tired,
and old, and used up. This job would put her in her grave. She should have
followed her childhood dream and become a go-go dancer. “And bring some rubber
gloves, boots, and overalls. You’re gonna need ‘em.”

Dawn’s early light found
Savannah, Dirk, and Tammy hip deep in garbage. Standing in the back of one of
San Carmelita’s finest refuse-collection trucks, they were sifting through the
Lucky Shamrock’s disposables. The truck’s three crewmen milled around in the
pub’s parking lot, sending poisoned glances their way, unhappy to have their
daily routine interrupted by a curt detective with a badge and a couple of
women in shapeless overalls and yellow slicker boots.

“Could be worse,” Savannah
said as she shoved aside some lemon peels, shriveled lime slices, and soggy
napkins. “Could be hospital garbage. Remember when we had to look for
hypodermic needles in Community General’s trash?”

“Now
that
was
scary,” Tammy agreed with a shudder. “Would you two broads can it?” Dirk
growled as he dug in with his yellow rubber gloves. “The last thing I need is a
couple of Pollyannas telling me that rummaging through a heap of stinkin’
garbage before I’ve even had my morning coffee is a good thing.”

“In your ear sideways,
Coulter,” Savannah replied, tossing a wad of wet paper towels in the vicinity
of his head. “At least I was smart enough to wait until the truck got here and
dumped the load upside down. You were ready to go combing through the whole
mess.”

“Yeah, and you’re just so
sure it was on the bottom of the Dumpster. What if it wasn’t?”

“Then I’m wrong. But I’ll
bet it is. I told you: The last time this trash was picked up was last
Thursday, a week ago today. Eleanor died a week ago Wednesday. I’m telling you,
Sydney dropped the empty bottles—and probably the empty capsules, too—in here
on Thursday night, when he came by for his nightly beer.”

Dirk grumbled under his
breath.

“What did you say?”
Savannah asked, straightening up and stretching the kinks out of her back for a
moment.

“I said—we’re going through
all of this crap just because you saw a guy walk over to the Dumpster and look
inside. Big deal.”

“Not only that. There’s
also the phone call from Angela. She—”

“Hey! I think I’ve got
something here!” Tammy shouted. She lifted up a white plastic bag that had a
familiar logo printed on the side.

“Rx Shop!” Savannah tromped
through the refuse to Tammy’s side and took the sack from her. Eagerly she
opened it and found two brown plastic bottles inside. They were empty.

Even Dirk’s scowl melted
into a grin as he glanced into the bag and read the labels on the bottles:
phenylprophedrine.

“All right!” he said.
“Let’s get these suckers over to the lab pronto.”

Savannah glanced at her
watch. “There won’t be anybody there yet. Not for a couple of hours.”

“So we’ll be there when
they open,” Dirk said, holding up the garbage-smeared bag with two fingers and
looking at it like it contained a winning lottery ticket.

“You’ll
be there when they open,”
Savannah said. “I’m going home to take a bath and drink a pot of coffee. And
you’re going to call me as soon as you know whether they lifted any prints. The
very instant—you hear me, boy?”

Dirk gave her an almost
sad, sympathetic look. “I thought you didn’t want it to be him.”

“I don’t,” she said. “But
at this point.... I just want it to be over.”

* * *

Savannah lay soaking in her
clawfoot bathtub, her favorite mountains of jasmine-scented bubbles up to her chin,
the blinds pulled against the midday sun, and candles lit.

But it wasn’t working.

The smell of garbage was
long gone, but her nerves were still twisted into knots. She kept glancing over
at her cell phone on top of the hamper, willing it to ring— and somehow hoping
it wouldn’t.

Until she heard the
words... she wouldn’t know for sure.

The phone rang, and she
jumped, her heart suddenly pounding so hard she could hear her pulse thudding
in her ears.

She grabbed it and punched
the
talk
button. ‘Yeah,” she
said.

“Three clear prints,” Dirk
said on the other end. ‘Two on one of the bottles. One on the sack.”

“His?”

“Yeah. One of them on the
bottle is a match to his DMV thumbprint.”

She swallowed hard. “Let me
go out there first and talk to him.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah. He’s not going to
hurt me, Dirk. He only had the one murder in him, believe me.”

The long silence on the
other end told her that Dirk wasn’t convinced. But finally, he said, “Will you
wear a wire?”

She didn’t need anybody to
tell her that a wire was a good idea and not just for her own security. There
was nothing like a taped confession to assure a conviction— if you could get
one.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll go
in wired. But I’m going to try to talk him into coming in on his own. And
you’ve gotta let me. Hear?”

With a microphone taped to
her chest and her Beretta in its holster beneath her blazer, Savannah got out
of her Mustang and walked across the parking area to the Maxwells’ garage.

“The Jag’s here,” she said
softly to the microphone in the vicinity of her left breast. “I’m going up to
the apartment.”

But having climbed the
steps and knocked several times on the door, she neither saw nor heard anyone.

“Gonna walk around the
grounds,” she told Dirk, Tammy, Ryan, and John, who were waiting just outside
the gates on the highway. They were inside John’s van, which was packed with
the latest high-tech surveillance equipment.

Dirk could have used
departmental issue microphones and receivers, but heck....John’s toys were more
advanced and therefore more fun to play with.

Not in a million years
would Dirk have admitted that he felt better having the two of them along with
him and Tammy, serving backup for Savannah.

“I think I hear somebody around
the side of the house,” she said as she walked between the mansion and garage,
passing an herb garden and a fountain bird-bath.

“Okay,” she whispered, “I
see him. He’s with Gilly-Looks like they’re... building something.”

As Savannah neared the spot
under a tree where they were, she could see that Sydney was on his knees,
painting a small house bright pink. Gilly stood nearby and looked as if she
were giving him directions as he brushed on the paint. Mona Lisa scampered at
her feet.