Corpse Suzette

by G. A. McKevett

  Clare’s eyes misted with tears, and she nodded graciously. “Thank you. I’m sure she’ll turn up, but it’s hard waiting.”

  “I’m sure it must be just awful.” Savannah thought of her own sisters in Georgia. While some of them could be a major ache in the rump from time to time, she would be beside herself if any of them went missing for any length of time. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Just find her for me.”

  “We’re trying. Really, we are.”

  Clare turned and walked back into the living room. Savannah followed her.

  She noticed that the clutter on the coffee table had been swept aside and several photo albums were lying open on it.

  It occurred to her that, under the circumstances, she might be able to get more out of Suzette’s sister than Dirk had been able to do earlier. There was nothing quite like old family photos to open the memory floodgates.

  “May I sit with you for a moment?” Savannah asked her. “I’m tired myself, after the funeral today, what with the rain and all. You must be exhausted.”

  “I am,” Clare said. “I hate funerals. Even if I’m not all that...” Her voice trailed away as though she had reconsidered the wisdom of such candor. She sat down on the sofa and crossed her hands demurely in her lap.

  Savannah took a moment to glance over the woman, taking in her expensive and beautifully tailored suit. A cream-colored wool, it set off her blond hair and ivory skin to perfection. Her jewelry was one simple gold circle pin and button earrings. She wore an enormous diamond ring, but it was on her right hand. Her left was bare.

  She was a pretty woman, probably in her late forties, which would have made her a few years older than Suzette. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, and Savannah wondered if the tears had been for Sergio or Suzette or both.

  Savannah searched her face for any resemblance to either the Marilyn-Monroe-look-alike photo she had seen in the bedroom or DMV photo of Suzette that Dirk had shown her. The basic facial structure was the same: high cheekbones, a strong yet feminine jawline. But there, the similarities ended.

  “May I get you a glass of water?” Savannah asked. “Or maybe make you a cup of coffee or tea?”

  Clare shook her head. “No, thank you. I wouldn’t ask anyone to go into that kitchen. My sister, she’s a wonderful person, but housekeeping has never been her forte. I was going to clean it up, but I started looking at these...” she pointed to the photo albums, “…and I got waylaid.”

  “It’s probably just as well,” Savannah said. “I think Detective Coulter would prefer if we just leave things as they are, for the time being.”

  Clare’s eyes widened. “Oh, it’s okay that I came in, isn’t it? There wasn’t any of that yellow tape the police use across the door, saying I shouldn’t.”

  “No, it isn’t cordoned off,” Savannah said. “There’s no evidence that it’s a crime scene.” At the moment, she added silently. “So, if it’s all right with your sister that you’re in her house, it’s okay with him, I’m sure.”

  Clare looked even sadder. “I don’t know if it’s all right with her or not. I know where she keeps her extra key... under the big brown rock in the petunia bed, but I don’t know if I’m really welcome to be here or not.”

  Savannah nodded. “Detective Coulter mentioned that the two of you have been estranged for a while.”

  “It’s been a little over a year now since I saw her,” Clare said. She reached over and picked up the largest of the albums. Taking out one of the snapshots, she looked at it with a sweet, sad, loving expression on her face. “I miss her. Suzette and I were always very close.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking... what happened?”

  “He happened.” Suddenly, Clare’s face went hard and her eyes cold. “That piece of crap that we buried today. He happened.”

  “Oh. I see.” Of course, she didn’t see, and Savannah wasn’t sure exactly what to say in the face of such sudden vehemence. But this was definitely a conversational road she wanted to travel. “I was no big fan of Sergio’s,” she said choosing her words carefully. “And I can understand that you might not be either.”

  “I went to his funeral today just to make sure that he’s dead. That’s the only reason I was there today in the rain, listening to all those lies about what a great human being he was. I wanted to see that he’s dead and buried, once and for all.”

  “If you were close to your sister and he came between you—”

  “I was, and he did. I’ll never forgive him for that. Suzette is the only family I have left.”

  “I realize this is probably a painful topic, but may I ask how it happened? Your estrangement, that is.”

  Clare handed Savannah the photograph. It was of the two sisters, arms around each other’s shoulders, goofy, happy smiles on their faces. Behind them was a large neon sign that read, “Diamond Bill’s Casino.”

  “That was us,” Clare said, “my sister and I on our last outing. Sergio took Suzette, Jeremy, Myrna, and me out on his cabin cruiser for the day. We went to Santa Tesla Island, like we often did, to hang out in the casinos there, rent some mopeds and bop around the island, have a nice dinner, and then come home.”

  “Casinos?”

  “Yes, there are a couple of nice ones there and it’s a lot closer than Vegas. Plus Suzette loves the lighthouse. We always had to rent bikes and ride out to the lighthouse. She’s a nut about lighthouses.”

  “Some people are,” Savannah said. “And then...?”

  “And then we were on our way back home. Jeremy was at the helm. Myrna and Suzette were knocking back margaritas. So was I, to tell the truth. And I had one... or maybe even two... too many. I got a little sick and went below to wash my face and lie down out of the sun.”

  Clare paused, took a deep breath, and continued, “And that’s when Sergio came down, said he was checking on me to make sure his shipmates were all okay.”

  Savannah had a feeling what was coming, but she waited quietly for Clare to tell her story.

  “I was lying on one of the berths, still wearing my bathing suit, a cold, wet washcloth over my eyes. And the next thing I know, he’s sitting on the bed beside me, leaning over me, his hands...” She gulped, and Savannah could see she was trembling.

  “He started touching me inappropriately,” Clare said. “I couldn’t believe that he would do that. Not that he was above it. I knew he was a jerk where women were concerned. I always figured he fooled around on Suzette. But to try it with me! He should have known I’d never go for it. And with her right there on the boat with us! I still can’t believe he was that stupid.”

  “Oh, it’s pretty amazing how stupid men can be when their brains get deprived of oxygen. Did he stop when you told him to?”

  “I did more than tell him,” she said proudly. “I hit him. I slugged him in the face and bloodied his nose.”

  Savannah laughed. “My kind of girl. How did he explain that to the others?”

  “I got out of there, joined the girls on deck and didn’t say anything... at least, not then. He washed up and came up later, after he got the bleeding stopped. Needless to say, he didn’t mention it either.”

  Clare took the picture back from Savannah and looked at it for a long time, running her fingertip over it, as though caressing her sister’s face. “I agonized over telling her for three days after that,” she said. “Finally, I decided that I had to. These days, a promiscuous partner can cost you your life. And I figured if she had to find out, it would be better if it came from me. So, I dropped by here unexpectedly that Saturday morning, and I told her what he’d done.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “She told me that he had already told her that I had come on to him, thrown myself at him.”

  “And she believed him?”

  “Yes, she did.” Clare began to cry. She reached into her pocket and brought out a lacy-edged handkerchief. “At least, at that moment she did. She threw me out, said she never w
anted to see me again. I called her several times after that, left messages on her machine, but she never returned my calls.”

  The two women sat quietly for a moment, as Savannah allowed Clare a moment to compose herself.

  Finally, Savannah said, “This was a year ago, you say?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you aware that she did break up with him, toss him out on his ear, just about that time?”

  “I heard that they had split. I didn’t know when. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because if Suzette threw him out ten times, she would take him back eleven. He was some kind of sick addiction for her. I’ll never understand why.”

  “Me either,” Savannah said. She thought of her own sister, Marietta, in Georgia, who changed men constantly and just as frequently made terrible choices. “There’s just no accounting for taste or judgment.”

  “And Suzette’s smart, too. Not just in the obvious way, as a doctor with a thriving practice. She’s wise and kind. She can give you the best advice in the world when it comes to your own problems. She’s savvy in every area of her life, except with men.”

  “That’s a big ‘except.’”

  “Isn’t it though?” She shook her head in disgust. “I got over that ridiculous ‘bad-boy appeal’ business when I was in high school. Some women never learn.”

  Savannah thought of Dirk, and how—for all of his foibles—he was reliable, sensible, and loyal. Long ago, Savannah had come to realize just how sexy “responsible” could be.

  “You’re absolutely right,” she replied. “‘Predictable’ is highly underrated in a man.”

  “And that isn’t all,” Clare said. “That isn’t the only reason I hated Sergio or Leonard Roy, or whatever his name was. He hit my sister. She denied it, but I know he did. I saw her with more than one black eye and other bruises on her face, not to mention the fingertip bruises on her upper arms where he’d grabbed her. I know he abused her. And she tolerated that, too. She was way too smart for that! In her career she’s repaired several women’s faces, pro bono, after their husbands messed them up. She knows how dangerous domestic violence can be, and yet she kept going back to him. I’ll just never, ever understand her.”

  Savannah reached for one of the photo albums and began to flip through the pages, getting to know Suzette Du Bois better with each page. Her childhood, her adolescence. And on each page, memories shared with her sister.

  “Where do you think she is?” Savannah asked softly, hating the fact that she had to hurt this graceful woman even more.

  But Clare’s answer surprised her. “Oh, who knows? She’s hiding out somewhere, I’m sure. She’ll come back when she’s good and ready.”

  Savannah didn’t want to alarm the woman or even rob her of what might be a self-protecting state of denial. But she needed to get to the truth. “If she’s just hiding out, wouldn’t she have come to Sergio’s funeral today?”

  “If she knew about it. Usually she heads for the hills, someplace she can commune with nature, far away from phones and newspapers and televisions.”

  “Usually? She’s done this before?”

  “Oh, many times. When she was a teenager, she drove our mom crazy, running away any time she didn’t get her way or didn’t like what was going on around her. She’d just walk out, then come back a few days later, sunburned from lying on the beach somewhere, and relaxed, after making the rest of us nuts worrying ourselves sick about her. She spent most of her high school years grounded... at least theoretically. Enforcing it was a bit difficult. She could always climb out her bedroom window and shinny down Mom’s garden lattice.”

  “She sounds like a corker.”

  “Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”

  “So, do you think she’s lying on a beach somewhere, soaking up some sun?”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “But her new spa, Emerge, was scheduled to open. The promotion was at its peak—press ready and public interest high.” Clare shrugged. “That’s my sister for you. When things are the busiest, the stakes the highest, that’s when she freaks out and splits.”

  Savannah wasn’t going to sit and argue with a woman who knew Suzette Du Bois probably better than anyone on earth. And if Glare wasn’t worried, maybe they had no reason to be either.

  Perhaps it was just a weird coincidence that one partner in a business went missing and then another got himself murdered.

  But, of course, Savannah didn’t believe that for a moment.

  “I have two more things to ask you, Clare,” she said. “And please don’t take offense. Investigators have to ask these types of questions.”

  Clare looked wary, but she said, “Okay. What is it?”

  “You’ve mentioned about half a dozen reasons just now why you would hate Sergio D’Alessandro. And I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you did... but did you kill the guy yourself?”

  “No. But I’d like to thank the person who did when you find them.”

  “Okay. And the second thing is, do you believe your sister might have staged her own disappearance and murdered him herself?”

  Clare said nothing for a long, long time as she stared down at the picture in her hand. Then she raised her eyes to Savannah’s and said with calm conviction, “She may have. If she had decided to take him back, to try to trust him one more time, and then she found him with another woman, she might have killed him. Suzette’s a proud woman. She doesn’t take betrayal lightly. Look at what she did to me, and she only suspected that I had betrayed her. I’d like to think she’d be even harder on him.”

  Later, after Savannah had done what she had come for, she left the house hoping that Clare was right.

  She liked Clare and hoped that her sister truly was somewhere, sunning herself after murdering a guy who, as some Southerners might phrase it, “needed killin’.”

  Of course, she still intended to find Suzette Du Bois, and if that was indeed the case, bring her to justice. You couldn’t just go around murdering everybody who needed killin’ just because you had a mind to.

  But for Clare Du Bois’s sake, she sincerely hoped her sister was still in the land of the living.

  And maybe she was.

  Savannah had searched high and low, and there hadn’t been a trace of a black teddy bear named “Baby” anywhere in that house, plaid vest or otherwise.

  Chapter

  18

  By the time Savannah had finished at Suzette Du Bois’s house and returned home, it was late in the evening. She wasn’t expecting to see Tammy’s car in the driveway when she pulled up. Tammy was an early to bed, early to rise sort of girl. She had to be. Being Miss Perky took a lot of energy and recuperation time.

  But Savannah was a little surprised to see Dirk’s Buick there. Surprised, but pleased.

  She had figured he would sober up after a couple of hours and be on his way. But she was happy he hadn’t. He could use all the TLC his stubborn, male pride would allow him to absorb.

  Of course, that meant that sleeping arrangements might be a bit strained. With him in her bed and Abigail occupying the guest room, it had suddenly become a little crowded at Savannah’s Bed-and-Breakfast Hostelry.

  When she walked through the front door, she heard a stirring in the living room and found Abigail stretched out on her sofa, a cat under each arm, a pillow under her head, a blanket pulled up to her waist.

  “Hi,” Savannah said. “How nice of you to wait up for me.”

  “No problem,” she said, scratching under Diamante’s chin. “Tammy was tired and wanted to go home, but she asked me to stay up and keep checking Dirk until you got back.”

  “Thanks a lot. How is he?”

  “Same as when you left. He hasn’t moved an inch. Just lying there like a rock.”

  “Good. That’s what he needs. How’s his fever?”

  “Tammy checked him before she left, about forty-five minutes ago, and it was still down.”

  “That’s great. Boy, John’s toddies must really be pote
nt! I’ll have to ask him to make one of those for me sometime, whether I’m sick or not.”

  “It did look and smell really good, with the oranges and spices.” Savannah sank into her easy chair and kicked off her loafers. “What are you doing there on the sofa? You should be in bed, too, by now.”

  “I am. This is my bed for tonight. I took the sheets off, washed them, and put them back on, so they’re nice and fresh for you and—”

  “No. You’re my guest. You go sleep in the guest room like you’re supposed to.”

  “And let you sleep on the sofa? No way. Unless, of course, you’re sleeping with Dirk.”

  “Banish the thought.”

  Abby snickered. “That’s what I figured. So, here I am, and you’re in the guest room and that’s the end of that conversation.” Savannah nodded in acquiescence. “As you say, Lady Abigail.” She noticed that instead of a man’s sweatshirt and sweatpants—Abigail’s former sleep attire—she was wearing a lovely white cotton nightgown with tiny pink roses embroidered on the bodice and lace trimming the sleeve edges.

  “What a pretty nightgown,” she commented. “It looks Victorian.”

  “I bought it yesterday when the Emerge staff took me shopping. Jeremy says I should allow the feminine side of my nature to have expression as well as all other sides. I saw this gown and loved it, although, without his encouragement, I never would have allowed myself to wear anything like this.”

  “It’s most becoming. A good change from the sweatpants.”

  “The kitties like it,” Abby said, hugging the cats to her chest. Savannah half expected them to jump up and run away from her. Like her, they couldn’t stand any form of restraint. She blamed it on having handcuffed so many people over the years and maybe feeling a bit guilty about some of them. Not a lot. Just a few.

  But the cats stayed put. And Cleo even reached up and gave Abby a slurp with a wet, kitty sandpaper tongue on the left ear.