A Body To Die For

by G. A. McKevett

  “I see you’re quite a reader,” Savannah said as she glanced over the titles that ranged from history texts, science fiction, murder mysteries, and more than a few that she recognized as Pulitzer Prize winners.

  “Yes,” Rachel replied dryly. “I’m a New Yorker. We read.”

  Savannah couldn’t resist. “I’m a Californian. We read, too.”

  Rachel didn’t reply. Didn’t crack even a semi-smile. She just stood there, giving Savannah a deadpan, somewhat condescending look.

  Okay, so much for the friendly chitchat, Savannah thought.

  “Do you mind if we sit down?” Dirk asked with a nod toward the sofa.

  “I mind that we’re even having this conversation,” Rachel replied, “but on the phone you gave me the impression I didn’t have much choice.”

  “You really don’t,” Dirk replied as he walked over to the sofa and plopped himself down on it. “You can choose not talk to us. But this is a homicide investigation. A man’s been murdered, so we’re not just going to go away. And if you’re uncooperative, then when somebody says something accusatory about you, we’re a lot more likely to believe them.”

  She bristled. “Who’s accusing me of what? Clarissa? Screw her. She’s the one who’d better be worried about being accused.”

  Sitting down next to Dirk, Savannah said, “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she’s the one with a dead husband, the one with the motive to kill him.”

  “And what motive is that?” Dirk asked.

  “She was mad at him. Outraged that he’d leave her, for anybody, let alone me—her fat, loser sister.”

  “And Bill was going to leave Clarissa to be with you?” Dirk said.

  “Yes, he was. Is that so hard to believe?”

  “Not at all,” Savannah replied softly. “People choose to be with other people for all sorts of reasons. I’ve met Clarissa. It isn’t so hard to understand why Bill might want to be with someone else.”

  Rachel seemed to soften a bit. She pulled an old folding metal chair closer to the sofa and sat down on it. “It was an enormous blow to Clarissa’s overinflated ego, Bill choosing me over her.”

  “And you look all guilt-ridden about it,” Dirk said with a smirk.

  Rachel’s temper flared again. “Not one bit. And if you knew how she’s treated me over the years, you wouldn’t blame me.”

  “Tell us about it,” Savannah said. “How did the affair between you and Bill begin?”

  “I prefer to call it a relationship.”

  “Okay, where and under what circumstances did your relationship with Bill start?”

  A soft, dreamy look passed over Rachel’s face and, for a moment, she looked much sweeter, kinder…even happy.

  “He came to New York to see me. Actually, Clarissa sent him to straighten me out. I was trying to negotiate for a larger share of the profits from our business arrangement—”

  “You and Clarissa had a business arrangement?” Dirk asked.

  “Yes, we did. From the very beginning. She said that if I helped her get her fitness plan going, she would pay me a share of the profits. And she did for awhile. But then, it took off, she got to be well-known, the money started to pour in, and she really started to resent writing me out those big checks.”

  “So, you told her you wanted more?” Savannah said.

  “I told her I was raising a kid and living in the city, which is very expensive, and if she was getting filthy rich, I didn’t see why I should have to just scrape by, serving pizza in a hole in the wall in the Village.”

  “The village?” Dirk asked.

  “Greenwich Village.” Rachel gave him a scathing look. “Let me guess,” she said. “You don’t read much.”

  “Actually, I read three newspapers every morning with my coffee,” Dirk said. “But none of them is the New York Times.”

  “Imagine that.” Rachel crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair.

  “You were saying that Bill came to New York at Clarissa’s request, and the two of you became lovers?” Savannah asked.

  “Not right away. He was there for the weekend. He came to my apartment first, and we talked. Then we went out for dinner and talked. We had a lot in common.”

  “Like…?” Savannah prompted.

  “Like hating Clarissa. As it turned out, she was making both of us miserable. Her withholding money from me and her bossing him around, controlling everything he did and said. She held the purse strings for both of us, and let me tell you, she enjoyed having that power. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s what Clarissa is all about, power and control over everybody around her.”

  “But she didn’t control what happened next…between you and Bill, that is,” Savannah said.

  Rachel chuckled. “No kidding. She had no idea. She sent him across the country to scare me, to tell me to stay down in that dark hole and hide from the world, for her convenience, and we wind up lovers. It was great.”

  Savannah couldn’t help but wonder if a large part of Rachel’s attraction for Bill lay in the fact that he was her hated sister’s husband. And maybe “payback” had something to do with Bill’s feelings for Rachel, too.

  In certain circumstances, passive aggression could be a powerful aphrodisiac.

  “Let me get this straight,” Dirk said. “You’re claiming that your sister legitimately owed you money. Do you deny blackmailing her?”

  “Blackmail? Are you kidding?” Rachel’s eyes filled with fury. “Is that what she’s claiming, that I blackmailed her? I only asked for what she’d agreed to give me, back when she was first starting out and needed my help.”

  “When you posed for the ‘before’ shot for her fitness campaign?” Savannah said.

  “Yes. I posed for the picture. So what?”

  “Well, it’s a bit of a fraud, don’t you think?” Dirk asked.

  “I posed. What she did with the picture, that’s her business.” Rachel leaned so far back in her chair that Savannah wondered how much it would hurt when the chair tipped over backward and spilled her onto the floor.

  “How about the threatening letters?” Savannah asked her. “Why did you send her those?”

  “I didn’t send her any letters, threatening or otherwise. When I wanted to talk to her, which wasn’t very often, I just called her on the phone. We’d scream at each other and hang up.”

  It occurred to Savannah that, like her sister, Rachel looked quite pleased with herself, as if she had her answers well-rehearsed and was happy to be delivering them.

  “Let me get this straight,” Dirk said. “The letters that threatened to expose this little scheme of hers, the ones postmarked from New York City, they weren’t from you.”

  “Nope.”

  “You and Bill were in love,” Savannah said, “and you weren’t blackmailing your sister, just asking for what you had coming to you.”

  “Yes. And I never threatened to give her what was coming to her.”

  Dirk was looking more irritated by the moment, and Savannah didn’t like the way this interview was going. They really hadn’t learned much, except that Rachel was a liar. And they’d suspected that back in San Carmelita, before they had trucked across the desert and wasted most of a day.

  “Listen,” Rachel said, “you don’t know what it’s like, having a sister like Clarissa. Do you know how many times I was serving somebody their pizza and they’d say, ‘Hey, you know who you look like? That girl on television, the pretty, skinny one with the big mouth, the pain equals gain gal.’ I’d have to just smile and say, ‘Yeah, I hear that a lot.’”

  When neither Savannah nor Dirk answered right away, she continued, “Bill knew what that was like, living in her shadow. Everywhere he went, he was Mr. Clarissa Jardin. We had a lot in common, because of her. But he was going to leave her and be with me. He had my son and me move here from New York, just so that we could be closer to him. That way it would be easier for him to come see us. We were moving to Las
Vegas. He’d already rented a house for us there. And the three of us were going to finally be a family and be rid of her.”

  “Right.” Dirk looked around the room. “Where is your son, by the way?”

  An instant change came over Rachel at the mention of her boy. Her eyes filled with tears, and she uncrossed her arms and clasped her hands tightly in her lap.

  “He isn’t here right now,” she said, her voice trembling.

  “Where is he?” Dirk asked.

  “He’s at a friend’s house.”

  “We’re going to need to talk to him, too,” Dirk said. “Especially with you claiming that you weren’t the one who sent those letters to Clarissa from New York City.”

  “Tanner didn’t do anything wrong. He’s just a kid!”

  “Kids do wrong things all over this world every day,” Dirk told her. “Where is he? Really.”

  “I told you. At a friend’s.”

  “We can’t leave without talking to him,” Dirk said, “so we’ll just wait here until he comes back. Whenever that might be.”

  Rachel stared back at him and clutched her hands together so tightly that Savannah could swear her fingers were turning white.

  “Rachel, where is Tanner?” she asked gently.

  The tears in Rachel’s eyes spilled down onto her cheeks, and she took a deep breath. For a long time she didn’t speak. Then she said, “I don’t know. I don’t. He’s missing. Like Bill was.” She started to sob. “I’m so scared. I’m afraid that maybe he’s been…”

  Savannah got up from the sofa, hurried over to Rachel, and dropped onto her knees beside the woman’s chair. She reached for her hands and held them between her own.

  “How long has he been missing?” she asked her.

  “He disappeared the same night that Bill did.”

  “Rachel,” Dirk said. “Tell us what happened that night and maybe we can help you find him.”

  “Okay.” She fought back her tears and regained control of herself. “We had gone to San Carmelita to meet Bill. He asked me to come because he wanted to talk to me about our future, about us all moving to Las Vegas. You know, to solidify our plans.”

  “Did he sound positive or negative? Was he upbeat or more like…‘we have to talk,’?” Savannah asked.

  “He sounded fine, happy. So, we drove there, Tanner and me. We checked into the Blue Moon Motel in San Carmelita and waited for him to call us, tell us where to meet him. We waited and waited, and he didn’t call. Finally, I went to sleep. And when I woke up, there was a note from Tanner saying that he’d gone out for a while. Bill didn’t call and Tanner didn’t come back. And I haven’t seen either one of them since.”

  “Do you have any idea where Tanner might have gone?” Savannah said.

  “Yes. I do. Every time we went to San Carmelita or anywhere near there, he’d beg me to take him by Clarissa’s house, that old ranch. He was obsessed with seeing it, seeing how she lived. I think he had it in his mind that, once Bill and she were divorced, we’d just slip into Clarissa’s place, live her life. He really wanted to see that ranch.”

  “You think he went out there?” Savannah asked.

  “I think so.”

  “How would he get out there?” Dirk said. “It’s too far to walk, even for a curious teenaged boy.”

  “He’s a New York City boy,” Rachel said with more than a hint of pride in her voice. “He knows about taxis. And he took twenty dollars from my purse. He’s never done that before. He’s a good boy.”

  Savannah patted her hand. “We’re going to help you find him. Do you have a picture of him that we can borrow?”

  “Yes, I’ve got one in the bedroom.” Rachel got up from her chair and disappeared into the other room. In just a moment, she returned with a school photo of a gangly, freckle-faced boy with a mop of curly red hair.

  She placed it in Savannah’s hand. “I want that back,” she said.

  “I’ll get it back to you. I promise.” Savannah looked down into the child’s face and then into his mother’s. They looked a lot alike. They also looked like Clarissa. “Why were you at your sister’s house?” she asked.

  Rachel looked startled. “How do you…? Did she tell you I was there?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Savannah told her. “We know for certain that you were there. Why were you there?”

  “I had called her, several times, asking her if she’d seen Tanner. Asking her what had happened to Bill. She kept hanging up on me. So I went out there to confront her, face-to-face. You two came to the house while I was there, so she told me to hide in the bedroom. I did what she said.”

  Dirk stood up, came over to stand by them, and took the boy’s picture from Savannah. He looked down at it for a long time, then said, “Are you telling me that you think your sister hurt your boy?”

  “Hurt him? I’m telling you…I’m hoping that’s all she’s done.”

  Chapter 18

  Once Savannah and Dirk were on their way back to San Carmelita—the desert scenery whizzing past as Dirk exceeded the speed limit by a wide margin—Savannah took the Morris boy’s picture out of her purse and looked at it.

  “I hate it when it’s kids,” she told Dirk. “I mind a little less when adults are in trouble. A lot of them deserve the trouble they’re in, or at least they’ve done things to land them in the doghouse. But kids…kids break my heart.”

  “Mine, too.” He shook another cinnamon stick out of the plastic bag. “All kids mess up. It’s part of growing up and figuring out who they are. But when they do things that ruin their lives, before their lives even get started, that’s sad.”

  She looked at the picture, the eyes wide with innocence, or maybe naïveté, the freckles and red hair, so like his mother’s. She thought about Rachel, who, even though she’d never win awards for her scintillating personality, appeared to care deeply about her son.

  “Why didn’t she report him missing?” Savannah said.

  “What?”

  “If my kid went missing, I’d call the cops.”

  “And tell us what? That you were blackmailing your sister, screwing your brother-in-law, and were going to run away with him? That the brother-in-law’s missing and…oh, yeah, murdered. If you’re doing crap like that, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”

  “She’d do it for her kid.”

  “If she told us what was going on, it would hit the news and then her sister’s career would go up in flames. She might hate her sister, but it wouldn’t be in her best interests to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs and all that.”

  “If she thought her kid’s life was in danger, she’d report it, get us looking for him.”

  “So, why didn’t she?”

  Savannah stared out the window for a long time, looking at the scenery, but not seeing it. “I think she didn’t tell the cops he was missing because she’s afraid he did it. She’s afraid her son murdered her lover. She’s also hoping he did.”

  “Afraid he did it? Hoping he did it? Why the hell would she hope a thing like that?”

  “Because thinking that your kid is a murderer is better than thinking he’s dead.”

  “Lousy choices.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  Before Dirk took Savannah home, he dropped her by San Carmelita’s juvenile hall facility. He waited in the car as she hurried inside, Tanner Morris’s picture in her purse.

  “My name is Savannah Reid,” she told the young woman at the reception desk. “I’d like to see Rebecca Shipton if she has a minute for me.”

  “Do you have an appointment to see her?”

  “No, but please tell her it’ll only take a minute. I know how busy she is.”

  As the receptionist called Shipton’s office, Savannah looked around at the stark white walls, gray linoleum tiled floor, and worn blue chairs that had seen better days—a few decades ago.

  The county didn’t spend a lot of money on wayward kids. At least, not decorating for them.

 
But then, juvie hall shouldn’t be a nice place to go, Savannah thought. It was intended to be a lesson to kids who were headed down the wrong road—a lesson that even grimmer surroundings might be in their future if they didn’t shape up and fly straight.

  But that was the hardcore kids, Savannah reminded herself. A lot of the children who came to this place really hadn’t been given a chance for a good life. And she wondered if they would find a fresh start here.

  She had her doubts.

  “Ms. Shipton will be with you in just a moment,” the young woman told her. “You can sit down if you want.”

  Savannah took a seat, but had barely chosen a magazine, when a tired-looking, middle-aged woman walked into the waiting area. She was attractive, with large, expressive eyes and thick salt-and-pepper hair that lay in natural, neat waves. A tall, large-boned woman, the social worker gave off the air of someone who could be trusted, but not someone to mess with.

  And seeing her, Savannah had the encouraging thought that it was the people, compassionate, tough-minded professionals like Rebecca Shipton, who made a difference in kids’ lives inside this institution…whatever color its walls might be.

  “Savannah,” Rebecca said, hurrying across the room to greet her. “It’s so good to see you. What a nice surprise.”

  She embraced Savannah warmly and gave her a peck on the cheek, which Savannah returned.

  “I know you’re always up to your gazoo in work,” Savannah said, “so I won’t keep you. But we’ve got an unofficial report of a missing kid, and I was wondering if you’d take a look at his picture and tell me if you’ve seen him.”

  “Unofficial report?” she asked.

  Rebecca’s sharp eyes and ears missed nothing. In her business, she couldn’t afford to.

  “Yeah, it’s a long story,” Savannah said as she removed the boy’s photo from her purse.

  She held it out to her, and Rebecca studied it carefully before answering. “No,” she said. “We don’t have him, and I haven’t seen him.”