A Decadent Way to Die

by G. A. McKevett

  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.”

  Chapter 6

  Savannah took bribery very seriously. And as soon as she got home, she hauled her bowls, measuring cups, and mixer out of the cupboards and got busy making chocolate chip pecan cookies.

  Dirk and Tammy kept her company, sitting at her kitchen table, watching, waiting, and offering advice.

  When Savannah dumped in a cup full of brown sugar, Tammy grimaced and took a swig from a glass filled with her favorite beverage—filtered, organic, pure, mountain spring water.

  Until Savannah met Tammy, she wasn’t aware there was such a thing as “organic” water. And she was pretty sure that, in spite of the high price and fancy labeling, the sparkling, crystalline stuff was coming from somebody’s backyard garden hose in Ox-nard.

  “You know,” Tammy said, “you could put honey and whole wheat flour in those cookies, and they’d be a lot healthier.”

  “Or …” Dirk added for good measure, “… you could triple the recipe and give me a care package to take home with me.”

  “Or I could ignore the two of you and do things the way I want to.”

  Tammy nodded. “That’s always an option. Not the best one, but …”

  “Hush up and drink your water, Nature Girl.” Savannah tossed twice the amount of chocolate chips into the dough. She’d learned long ago not to scrimp on the goodies when concocting a bribe.

  “How long till those things will be ready?” Dirk asked for the fourth time since he had sat down at her table.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she replied, “unless you ask me again, and then it’ll be five days.”

  “Five days?” His face fell. “How come five days?”

  “’Cause it’ll probably be five days before I’m in the mood to do more baking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Get a chicken leg out of the ice box and gnaw on that while you’re waiting.”

  “Okay!” He jumped up from the table and nearly knocked her over as he passed her on his way to the refrigerator.

  Tammy shook her head. “When it comes to food, Dirko, you have no dignity at all.”

  “What’s dignity got to do with anything?” he asked, pulling out a cellophane-wrapped plate of fried chicken.

  “He’s getting revenge,” Savannah said with a snicker.

  “What?” Tammy watched him bite into a drumstick with gusto.

  “Long story,” he mumbled. “And a private one, Savannah. Keep it to yourself.”

  “Do you really think someone’s trying to kill our client’s grandmother?” Tammy asked, watching Savannah drop the spoonfuls of batter onto a cookie sheet.

  Savannah smiled, thinking how sweet it was that Tammy referred to every person who walked through Savannah’s front door as “our” client. Poor girl. She got precious little payment for her labors on behalf of the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency.Whatever modicum of self-satisfaction she received from her mundane duties of answering the phone, doing paperwork, and computer research was well deserved.

  “I think it’s highly likely,” Savannah said. “And what really burns my biscuits is that they’re not only trying to do her harm, but trying to make her look like a doddering old fool in the process. I don’t cotton to that sort of mistreatment of the elderly.”

  Tammy grinned. “Granny Reid wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would she?”

  Savannah shoved the cookies into the oven with far more vigor than necessary. “I’m sure she’s a bit of a factor. When you’ve got somebody in your life, someone you love, who’s older, but full of life and vital, it makes you realize how disrespectfully our senior citizens are treated.”

  “Yeah,” Dirk said, “and the older you get, the more you realize you’re gonna be in the same boat someday. It makes you think.”

  Tammy nodded in solemn agreement. “That’s so true. And speaking of Granny Reid, when is she coming to see us again? I mi
ss her.”

  Savannah wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked to the refrigerator. She reached inside and took out a pitcher of tea. “Not for a while. She started taking a class on art appreciation at the community college over in Halderville, and that’s filled up all her spare time.”

  Tammy sighed. “I hope I’m like her when I’m her age.”

  “Heck,” Savannah said, “I’d be happy to be like her at my age.”