A Decadent Way to Die (6 page)

“Every bite is a kind of revenge?”

“Exactly.”

“And here I thought it was my granny’s blue-ribbon recipe.”

“That, too.”

They had entered a garden filled with wild flowers, artistically placed rockery, and a pond brimming with water lilies.

The smell of lavender and star jasmine scented the air, and Savannah had to pause and savor the experience.

“Ah,” she said, breathing deeply, taking it all in, “it just makes life worth living, a moment like this.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he replied. “I’d probably get more out of it if I wasn’t going to a henhouse.”

“And speaking of … there it is.”

She pointed ahead, through some trees, to a tiny structure that looked like a playhouse for children. Like the main house and the cottages, it was festooned with decorative gingerbread and even had shutters and window boxes.

But having been raised in a rural area, Savannah recognized the telltale signs that identified it as a bonafide chicken coop: the miniature gangplank leading up to a small door, the yard surrounded by wire fencing and covered with protective netting.

Not to mention the four red hens and three white ones pecking and scratching contentedly among the scattered straw in the yard.

“I don’t see a rooster,” Dirk said with so much relief in his voice that Savannah couldn’t help giggling.

They did, however, see a young Latino, walking toward the henhouse, carrying a fresh bale of hay.

He was an attractive man with a strong jaw, pronounced cheekbones, thick hair, and a physique that appeared to be naturally muscular, the result of hard work rather than hours spent at a gym.

When he saw them, it occurred to Savannah that he didn’t appear particularly pleased or at all surprised.

Since the advent of cell phones, she had found it harder and harder to sneak up on people.

“
Hola
,” Dirk greeted him.

He tossed the bale onto the ground next to the coop’s wire fence and dusted his palms on his jeans. “
Hola
,” he replied warily.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter.” Dirk took his badge from inside his jacket pocket, flipped it open, and showed him. “This is my friend, Savannah Reid. Are you the gardener here?”

He hesitated, as though having to decide whether or not to admit it. “Yes,” he said finally. “I am.”

“And your name is Tiago?” Savannah asked.

“Tiago Medina.” Again, he couldn’t appear less enthused about their presence.

“I hear you are
el héroe
, Tiago,” she told him with a dimpled smile and a slight fluttering of eyelashes.

He looked confused for a moment, then shook his head and glanced down at his worn work boots. “No. I’m not a hero.”

Savannah was slightly surprised that the dimple/eyelash business hadn’t worked. Even if the guy was at least ten years her junior, males from eight to eighty usually succumbed to the Southern Belle Double Whammy.

Maybe the old girl’s losing her touch?
she thought.
Naw, it couldn’t be that
.

“But you saved Mrs. Strauss’s life when she fell down the cliff,” Dirk said, picking up where she had left off. “That makes a guy a hero in my book.”

Tiago shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Miss Helene has been good to me. She gave me a job, a house, for years. And my wife, too.” A momentary look of sadness crossed his face. “Miss Helene was in trouble. I helped.”

“I’ve seen that cliff,” Savannah said. “It’s very high, very steep. You risked your life saving her.”

He shrugged and smiled. “She would have done the same for me, if it had been me hanging there.”

Savannah thought it over for a moment and laughed. “Yes, I’ve only known Helene Strauss for a few minutes, and I agree. She’d probably climbed right down that cliff to get you.”

Tiago’s eyes twinkled. “She is like my grandmother in Ecuador. She is … what you say … a
pistola
.”

“Yes,” Savannah agreed. “A pistol. Your grandma, mine, and Helene, too.”

“And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Dirk mumbled, giving Savannah a nudge.

“Speaking of apples,” Savannah said. “Miss Helene baked some strudel for me earlier today, and I’d like to go back into her kitchen and look for something. She’s gone to her office, but she said you could let me back into the house. Would you mind, Tiago?”

“Miss Helene told you to ask me to let you into the house?”

“Yes. She said the gardener would open the door for me.”

“What did she say, exactly?”

“She told me, ‘You are family now.’”

He nodded, obviously satisfied. “Come with me. I’ll let you inside.” He headed down the path, back toward the main house.

Savannah and Dirk fell into step beside him.

“I suppose that’s some sort of code,” Savannah prompted him. “The business about me being ‘family’?”

“Yes,” Tiago said. “Miss Helene has lots of codes. Codes for everything. She trusts no one.”

“Why do you think that is?” Savannah asked, recalling the vision of Helene Strauss charging out of her mansion, gun in hand.

“She was a little girl in Bavaria during the war,” Tiago said. “The big war.”

“World War II?” Dirk asked.

“Yes.”

As they walked along, a sadness seemed to sweep over Tiago. His shoulders slumped, and he stared blankly ahead, down the path, as though seeing nothing.

Savannah suspected his change in mood had to do with his previous comment, so she decided to pursue it. “That must have been very hard for Helene,” she said, “a child, living through the horrors of that war.”

“It was very hard for her,” Tiago said. “She told me some things. Very bad things that happened to her family.”

“Was her family Jewish?”

“Some of them were.”

Savannah thought of the pain she had seen in Helene’s green eyes, the guarded wariness, even when the woman had been acting the perfect hostess, serving apple strudel at the kitchen table.

She thought of how those eyes had looked, sighting down the barrel of a gun.

She thought of that little girl growing up in such turbulent, horrible times with family members who were Jewish.

Shaking her head, Savannah said, “Who knows what that woman has experienced in her day? No wonder she has trust issues.”

Chapter 5

S
itting in the passenger’s seat of Dirk’s decrepit, old Buick Skylark, Savannah had to suppress a chuckle. It never failed to amaze her how much trouble he would go to just to avoid having to face Eileen Bradley alone.

A tough cookie—and an all-around great gal, in Savannah’s estimation—Eileen ruled the county forensics lab with a fist of steel, usually covered by a surgical glove. Few people, other than Savannah, genuinely liked her. But most folks respected her and everybody was afraid of her.

And that was exactly the way Eileen liked it.

“Pathological people-pleasing” was nowhere to be found on her list of character flaws.

Eileen had a number of personality types she disliked. Anyone with a lazy streak, even a very small one, offended her. She had no use for people who wasted her precious time. And she hated anyone who pushed her for speedy lab results.

Dirk wasted copious amounts of her time by calling constantly, trying to get his evidence processed before anyone else’s. So, she loathed him.

As Savannah rode along, savoring the warmth of the California sun on her face, listening to the breeze rustling the palm trees that lined the street, and seeing the light glimmer on the dancing fronds … she just couldn’t resist annoying him. He was such an easy target. And she firmly believed you had to take your pleasures in life wherever you found them.

“You really could have just dropped this stuff off at the lab yourself,” she said, giving him a sly, sideways glance. “You didn’t need me to tag along.”

He grunted and reached for a plastic bag on the dash. Some time back, he’d given up cigarettes and substituted cinnamon sticks. He smelled so nice—a bit like apple pie—that she had decided not to tell him how silly he looked, sucking on them.

Far be it from her to interfere with personal growth. Silly looking or not, she was enormously proud of him. Him giving up cigarettes was as monumental as her giving up chocolate. And she knew that was never going to happen.

Popping a stick in his mouth, he said, “Eileen’s not gonna be all that jazzed about running tests on a cocoa tin and a sugar canister, especially when we don’t even have a crime yet.”

“We have a crime! Attempted murder of a dear old lady. That’s a felony in my law book!”

“You have nothing, Van, and you know it,” he said. “You’ve got a woman who took a tumble off a bike and nearly killed herself, then accidentally took too much of one of her medications with her hot chocolate. There’s nothing felonious about that.”

“What about that dug-up dirt on the trail?”

“You’ve got a soft spot on a path. Maybe a dog buried a bone there or whatever.”

“Helene Strauss didn’t accidentally take that many extra pills. That woman’s got her act together more than you or I’ll ever have. I’d venture to say she never did anything accidental in her whole life.”

“She’s old, Savannah. Sometimes older people—”

“Hold it right there, buddy! If Granny Reid’s taught me anything, it’s that old folks aren’t any different from anybody else, except that they’ve been around longer! And if anything, that makes them smarter, not dumber!”

“Whoa!” He held up one hand. “I know your granny, and I totally agree with you. I’m just making the point that sometimes, the older you get, the harder it is to remember stuff. You know, senility and all that.”

She snorted. “‘Senility’ is a word a lot of people throw at an older person when they don’t agree with what they’re saying. Somebody who’s getting along in years speaks their mind and if someone else finds what they’re saying to be inconvenient, they label them ‘senile.’ And that’s just downright disrespectful and cruel.”

Dirk reached over and gently patted her knee. “I’m sure that happens sometimes, and I agree, it’s very wrong. I’m just saying that these … mishaps … could have been accidents.”

“Helene Strauss is a hundred miles from senile.” She took a deep breath. “True, the bike business might have been an accident. And there may be some other explanation for the soft area in the path. But there’s no way on God’s green earth that Helene mistakenly swallowed a bunch of pills instead of one. It didn’t happen. I know it, sure as I’m sittin’ here with my teeth in my mouth.”

“Okay. I believe you.”

She gave him a searching look. “You do?”

“I do.”

“Because …?”

“Because I trust your judgment.” He gave her a warm grin. “And because I can clearly see you’ve got your teeth in your mouth.”

“Good.”

They drove along several more blocks in silence.

Finally, he said, “I never did understand that teeth-in-the mouth thing you always say.”

Savannah smiled and shrugged. “In the town where I’m from, people don’t have a lot of money to spend on preventive dentistry. They do well to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. Teeth in, teeth out … for a lot of folks, it’s optional.”

“Oh, okay. Gotcha.”

“I hate this stupid place,” Savannah said as she and Dirk walked across the parking lot and up to the nondescript gray door of a nondescript gray building that was part of the massive gray, nondescript complex known as the San Carmelita Industrial Park.

“Ambiance” hadn’t been high on the list of priorities when the so-called park had been erected on the edge of town ten years ago.

Savannah and her fellow, environmentally conscious San Car-melitans had carried signs and protested loudly as the orange groves had been hacked down and strawberry fields uprooted so that this cement and asphalt wonder could be erected. But progress could not be halted, and in spite of their best efforts to prevent it, Los Angeles had “sprawled” across this end of their picturesque community.

Savannah had never gotten over it, and she seldom passed or entered this area without muttering unladylike comments under her breath.

“Dammit, there used to be strawberry fields here,” she said as they approached the door with its official county seal.

“I know,” Dirk said. “You tell me that every time we come here.”

“And orange groves. You know how sweet an orange grove smells, the fruit and the blossoms all warm in the sunshine?”

“You’ve mentioned that a time or two.”

“Asphalt in the sunshine smells like a wet dog’s butt.”

“Well, I haven’t smelled a lot of wet dogs’ butts, but—”

“Let me do the talking here.”

They walked up to the door, and he pushed the buzzer button.

“You said that before,” he grumbled. “I have every intention of letting you do the talking. Why do you think I brought you along?”

They both looked up at the camera mounted above the door and plastered too-broad smiles on their faces.

Grinning ear-to-ear, teeth gritted, she whispered, “Try hard not to piss her off this time.”

“Who me?” he mumbled back. “Who do you think I am?”

“I know exactly who you are. That’s why I’m saying watch it.”

A sharp, brusque female voice crackled through the speaker mounted beside the camera. “What the hell do you two want?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do you want?’” Dirk snapped back. “We gotta have an engraved invitation to come here? Huh?” He took out his badge and held it up to the camera. “There ya go. That’s a gold shield, sister. That’s our frickin’ invitation.”

He held the badge high for a moment, then glanced down at Savannah.

Her blue eyes were glacial as she glared up at him.

Slowly, he lowered the badge and tucked it back into his jacket, cleared his throat, and shifted from one foot to the other.

Savannah took a deep breath and shook her head.

The door buzzed and swung open. She elbowed him aside and walked through. “In case I forget later on,” she said over her shoulder, “remind me to slap you.”

Just inside the door stood a large, sixty-something woman with long silver hair that curled softly around her face. But her hair was the only soft thing about Eileen.

Eileen had been head honcho of the county forensic lab since before Savannah had joined the police force. And she ruled her kingdom with an air of authority born of experience, knowledge, and supreme confidence.

Eileen had strong opinions on everything, and Savannah had never known her to be wrong.

Except today.

“So,” Eileen said, sticking her nose a bit too close to Dirk’s, “you’re here to lean on me to process something for you ASAP—as in, push it to the front of the line, ahead of everybody else’s.”

Savannah tapped her gently on the shoulder. “Uh, actually, he just came along with me today. I’m the one asking for a favor.”

Instantly, Eileen melted and turned a smiling face toward Savannah. “Oh, well … in that case …”

Dirk bristled. “Look how nice you are to her! When it’s me, you just assume the worst and—”

“And the worst is what I always get from you,” Eileen tossed back at him. “When are you
ever
not a pain in the ass?”

Dirk opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

Savannah cleared her throat. “He’s usually pretty agreeable when he’s eating my cooking.”

“Yeah, well”—Eileen sniffed—“who isn’t? Stick one of your chocolate chip pecan cookies in my mouth, and I’ll perk right up, too.”

Savannah opened her purse and pulled out a plastic zipper bag. “How about cherry oatmeal?”

“That’ll do.” Eileen snatched the bag out of her hand, opened it, and smelled the contents. “Oh, my God … I can feel my mood rising already.”

At a nearby computer, a young red-haired woman watched and listened, eyeing the bag. “Enough in there to share?”

“Yes,” Savannah said, “but whether she will or not …?”

“You work here over forty years, like I have,” Eileen told her, “you can accept bribes, too. Till then, get back to those prints.”

The redhead sighed and turned back to her computer screen, where a pair of latent prints were being analyzed and compared.

To the right, a young man sat at a lab bench, staring through a microscope. On the wall to the left, another guy was examining a bed sheet with an ultraviolet light.

Savannah cringed to think what he was seeing through his goggles. Years before, she had made the mistake of looking at a hotel bedspread with a UV light. And ever since, when she’d spent the night somewhere other than her own bed, she had packed her sleeping bag along with her pajamas and toothbrush.

Too much knowledge could ruin almost anything.

“So,” Eileen said around a bite of cookie, “what have you got for me?”

Savannah reached into her purse and pulled out four small, brown evidence bags. Handing them to Eileen, she said, “I have a client, a wonderful lady, eighty-plus years old, who thinks somebody’s been trying to kill her. And I think she’s right.”

“That bites.”

“Darned right, it does. I’ve got a granny that age.”

“My mom’s eighty-five. If somebody tried to hurt her, I’d take them out in a heartbeat … in the most painful way possible.”

Dirk perked up. “And what way would that be?”

“Like I’m going to tell
you
.” Eileen shot him a look, then turned back to Savannah. “What’s in these bags?”

“Food from her kitchen. She drank her nightly hot chocolate and passed out cold. They took her to the hospital, where she slept for hours.”

“And you think somebody put sleeping pills, or whatever, in her drink?”

Savannah nodded. “We took samples from her cocoa tin, sugar canister, and her half-and-half carton, and a bottle of vanilla.”

Eileen opened one of the envelopes and peered inside. “Any idea what we’re looking for?”

“She had a prescription for a sleep medication called Zolpe-done,” Dirk said. “But when we counted the pills and compared them to what’s left, it didn’t look like any were missing.”

“Okey dokey.” Eileen popped the rest of the cookie into her mouth. “We’ll get on it.”

“You’ll get on it right away?” Dirk asked.

Savannah nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. She gave Eileen a bright smile. “It would probably take me a few hours to go home, bake up a batch of those chocolate chip pecan cookies you’re so fond of, and get back here.”

Eileen returned the smile. “The universe is just filled with coincidences. That’s exactly how long it’ll take us to run these samples.”