Death By Chocolate

Book 8: Savannah Reid Mystery

by G.A. McKevett

Genres: Cozy Mystery; Private Investigators; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Business has been a little slow at the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency, but full-figured P.I. Savannah Reid doesn't have time to drown her sorrows in a box of double-chocolate truffles. She's too busy watching the Gourmet Network--and drooling over the sinfully scrumptious confections that Lady Eleanor ("The Queen of Chocolate") whips up on-air. But someone isn't sweet on the Queen's charming chatter--and wants her to hang up her oh-so-quaint apron--for good. . . When Savannah hears that Lady Eleanor's been getting death threats, she jumps at the chance to be her round-the-clock bodyguard. It's a great chance to meet her idol in person--and maybe pick up some free chocolates, too! But her sweet dreams melt away the minute she meets Lady Eleanor. The woman is as rotten as last year's Valentine candy--and stingy with the chocolates to boot! After a few miserable days of her boss's put-downs and pettiness, Savannah finally understands why someone wants to put an end to Her Majesty's reign. But when the Queen of Chocolate bites into a chocolate and drops dead in the middle of her own live TV show, Savannah is horrified. After all, it was her job to protect Lady Eleanor--and now thousands of traumatized chocoholics know how horribly she failed. Talk about bad for business. If only to save her own reputation, Savannah has to figure out who's to blame for the Queen's untimely (and very ungraceful) demise. . .

Release date: October 23, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“You’re really not too bad-looking, you know, for a chubby old broad.”

Savannah resisted the urge to growl and bite her companion as the hair on the back of her neck bristled. “I beg your pardon, sir,” she said in her sweetest, most demure imitation of a Southern belle—a belle who might feed you your teeth after a back-handed compliment like that. “But I am not old. I’m . . . forty-something . . . and in my prime. And as far as chubby”—she turned in the passenger seat and stared at the driver’s more than ample midsection—“in the years since I met you, that belly of yours has gone from washboard-hard to duvet-poofy, so watch it, buddy.”

Dirk shot her a wounded, highly offended look as he steered his ancient Buick Skylark through the ever gathering morning rush-hour traffic. Though in the laid-back Southern California coastal town of San Carmelita, traffic didn’t exactly rush—at any hour of the day.

“Man, try to say something nice and you get your head handed to you,” he said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. “And as for the chubby part, I just meant that—dressed up like an old lady, even with that stupid gray wig on and the extra padding under that flowery dress—you still look okay.”

“I’m not wearing extra padding. This is all me.”

“Oh . . . sorry.”

She snatched the pack out of his hand. “You said you were quitting.”

“I said I was thinking about quitting. I’m still thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking about getting ready to start thinking about quitting for the past fifteen years.”

“Well, no point rushing into anything. Gimme those smokes, woman, before I fly into a blind rage.”

Sighing, she slapped them into his open palm. “Roll down the window and blow it outside.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . you and your smoke allergies. What’s the matter with you, Van? You’re moodier than usual.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but then snapped it closed. He was right; she was in a foul mood. Had been for several weeks. And her self-medicating regime of nightly bubble baths by candlelight and chocolate truffles had provided only the briefest respites.

Once, for half a moment, she had considered that she might be going through some sort of midlife crisis. But, of course, that would have meant admitting that she was “middle-aged” and maybe just a tad past her prime.

And if, indeed, her prime had come and gone, exactly on what day had she supposedly peaked? She couldn’t recall a twenty-four-hour period in the past forty years when she hadn’t felt fairly dragged out and grouchy.

Then she had an even more depressing thought: maybe a body only peaked for about five minutes. If so . . . she had missed the big event.

“Come on . . . what’s the matter?” Dirk asked, reaching up to scratch under his own ratty gray wig. “Is it because we didn’t nab somebody this time out?”

She looked down at the senior-citizen sensible black shoes and baggy hose she was wearing. The giant white patent-leather purse on the seat beside her. The monstrosity of a floral polyester dress that she had purchased at the local thrift store for a buck.

“I do feel a mite rejected,” she said. “There was a day when I could dress up in a black leather miniskirt and fishnet hose and hook any bad guy in fifteen seconds. Now I go out of my way to look the part of a sweet, totally vulnerable old lady hanging around the ATM with her big ‘Come Snatch Me’ white purse, and I can’t even get mugged. It’s a sad situation, Detective, this downward trend of mine. I used to have to fight the boys off with a stick. Now they don’t even get within smacking distance.”

“Eh . . . what do you need with more men in your life? You’ve got me.”

Mental pictures of Dirk with his feet propped on her coffee table every Monday night, swigging her beer, eating her pizza, watching Monday Night Football on her TV, shoving her potato chips into his face and spilling crumbs on her sofa, using her toilet and leaving the seat up, often missing the bowl.

He had a point there. Why would she want more men in her life?

When she didn’t reply, he nudged her with his elbow. “We’ll get ’em tomorrow morning, Van. If you’re up for going out with me again, that is.”

She gave him a sidewise grin, and he returned it, the smile softening his street-rough face. Being a cop had taken its toll on Dirk . . . as it had on her. Savannah Reid was all too glad to be a private citizen again without the “Detective” in front of her name. No badge, just a P.I.’s license and a lot less headaches—if you didn’t figure in the stress of self-employment. Or rather, the even more nerve-racking bouts of self-unemployment.

“Yeah, I’ll play decoy for you tomorrow, too,” she said. “We’ve gotta get this guy before he really hurts somebody. And as long as the San Carmelita P.D. is too cheap to assign you a partner . . .”

She was giving him the benefit of the doubt, blaming his single status on departmental frugality. Last she had heard, everybody else in the squad avoided partnering with Dirk with a vengeance. Having worked with him for more than fifteen years, on and off the force, she understood that Detective-Sergeant Dirk Coulter was an acquired taste.

She loved the crotchety geezer. But she couldn’t think of any reason why anybody else would.

“Really, we gotta get ’im,” Dirk said, the gleam of righteous indignation lighting his bloodshot eyes. “Even if it’s a water pistol he’s using, sooner or later one of these poor old ladies is going to fall over dead of a heart attack right in the middle of the robbery.”

She lifted her chin a notch and nodded, her own eyes glittering with the same icy warmth. “Don’t worry. We’ll put a stop to his nonsense, jerk a knot in his tail, and hang him up by it . . . somehow or another.”

For the first time in several days, she felt a sense of well-being trickle through her . . . along with the mental picture of herself slamming some scumbag over the head with that white purse, which carried not some vulnerable senior lady’s social security check, but a brick from her backyard. She’d stand by, grinning like a goat eating briars, while Dirk cuffed him and read him his rights. Yes, that would certainly brighten her day.

Maybe that was all that was wrong with her. It had been too long since her last “Get the Bad Guy” fix. Adrenaline and justice—it was a heady mix.

Dirk guided the Buick off the highway and onto a palm-tree-lined street that led up the hill and away from the ocean and the downtown area where they had been playing decoy.

“Hey, you’re not taking me home, are you?” Savannah said, suddenly alert and suspicious.

“Well, yeah.” He nodded but stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact. “You said you were hungry and wanted breakfast. I figured I’d get you home as fast as I could so that you could scramble up some of those Western omelet things you make and maybe some home fries and . . .”

“Don’t you even start with me, Coulter. You head this buggy for the nearest restaurant . . . like the pancake house on Luther Avenue. If I haul my tired butt out of bed and dress up in this garb and stroll up and down in front of an ATM for four hours, the least you can do is feed me.”

Dirk grumbled something under his breath, and even though she caught only a couple of words, she got his drift.

“No money on you is no excuse. There’s a bank right there on Luther, two doors down from the Flap Jack Shack. We’ll stop there first. And you’d better get a bundle while you’re at it, ’cause I worked up quite an appetite on that stroll.”

Rather than risk being charged a fifty-cent ATM fee, Dirk pulled the Skylark into a spot in the bank’s parking lot next to a meticulously restored 1963 Oldsmobile Starfire. “Hey, look at that,” he said. “What a beauty! Same year as my Buick.”

Savannah sniffed. “It ain’t the years, darlin’; it’s the mileage, and I can hear this poor jalopy of yours groaning with embarrassment just to be sitting next to that lovely machine.”

She waited for him to flare, as always, when she insulted his car, his driving, or his table manners. But he sat there, his hand on the door handle, staring at the bank’s rear wall.

Or more specifically, at one of the two small windows.

“Look at that,” he said.

“I’m looking.”

“What do you think?”

She studied the small, crudely scribbled paper sign that had been shoved between the glass and the venetian blinds in the window on the right. “I think somebody’s a bad speller,” she replied.

In writing that looked as if it had been done by a five-year-old with a large black marker were the words We’re being robed.

“Robed? Maybe they’re having a pajama party. But I doubt it.” Dirk reached inside the old flannel jacket that had completed his senior-citizen ensemble, and at the same time Savannah checked inside the waistband of the flowered dress for her Beretta.

“You don’t have to have a piece of this,” Dirk said. “I can call for backup and wait.”

“Maybe you can wait and maybe you can’t.” She squinted against the late morning sunlight that was shining on the glass door to the bank. She saw movement inside but couldn’t make out details. “Depends on what’s going on in there,” she said. “If somebody had time enough to write that sign and stick it in the window, it’s been going down for a while.”

“One thing for sure,” Dirk said, opening his door, “we gotta stop Grandma Moses there from joining the party.”

Savannah saw who he was talking about—an elderly woman shuffling toward the bank’s door with a walker. Considering her lack of agility, she was making pretty good progress and had nearly reached the entrance.

But Dirk was faster. He bounded out of the car and across the lot with Savannah right behind him.

“Hey, lady,” he called out to her, keeping his voice low. “Come back here. Don’t go in . . . I think the place is being—”

“Holy shit!” the old woman yelled as she stood outside the door and stared inside. “There’s a guy in there with a gun!” She turned, wild-eyed, to Dirk and Savannah. “There’s two guys in there! And they’ve both got guns! Really big ones!”

“Get away from that door. Come back here, honey,” Savannah called to her. But the lady was already on the move without aid of her walker, which she was holding straight out in front of her like a lion-tamer would hold a chair.

She ran up to Savannah, who grabbed her by the arm to steady her. “Is that your car, ma’am?” Savannah pointed to the Starfire.

“Yes.”

“Well, go get in it and drive away as quick as you can, okay?”

“You bet your sweet ass, I will.”

For the briefest moment, Savannah thought, Since when do grandmothers say “sweet ass” and “holy shit”? But then she heard a woman scream inside the bank, then another.

“We’ve gotta get in there,” she told Dirk. He nodded. Turning back to the lady, she said, “May I borrow your walker?”

Rodney Flynn had never robbed a bank before. Until this morning, he had stuck to knocking over all-night convenience stores and the occasional gas station. But his cousin, Ferris, had convinced him that if they hit just one bank a month, they’d make more money in ten minutes than they’d both made in the past ten years. Flipping burgers at Joe’s Grill wasn’t particularly lucrative for Rodney, and Ferris hadn’t actually worked a full day at a real job in his life.

Rodney had told him he was nuts, but then he got to thinking about how much money there was in those bank tellers’ drawers, not to mention what they might get ahold of if they could somehow get the safe open.

Besides, it would be on the news. They’d be on the news. Not their names, hopefully, but a story about the robbery. Rodney had been disappointed that his service station knockover hadn’t even made the newspaper. Hell, they’d probably run those little commercials on the L.A. stations: daring bank holdup in San Carmelita . . . daring robbers get away with millions . . . film at eleven o’clock.

Maybe we should have worn masks or pantyhose over our heads or something, he thought, as he stood in the middle of the bank pointing his gun at a huddled bunch of terrified employees and customers. In the corner of the room he spotted a little black box with a lens sticking out of it—pointed right at him. Damn it, Ferris should have thought of some kinda disguises. I got the car filled up with gas. I can’t do it all.

Ferris always acted like he was the boss, strutting around with his nose in the air, taking charge, telling everybody what to do, when to wipe their nose and not to. But what kind of a boss forgot something as simple as masks, huh?

“Get that ring off her finger, now!” Ferris yelled at him, waving his pistol in Rodney’s direction.

“But she won’t give it to me,” Rodney tried to explain. He’d already whacked the woman on the head with his own gun. She’d screamed bloody murder, but she still wouldn’t surrender the diamond on her finger.

“Then shoot her! Goddamn it, we ain’t got all day here!”

Rodney looked at Ferris hard, trying to see if he meant it. They’d already said they wouldn’t shoot anybody, except a cop.

He could tell Ferris meant it. Ferris had that same look in his eye that he’d had the night he cut Franky Caruso’s nose off with a broken beer bottle in a bar fight.

“You shoot that bitch or I will . . . and then I’ll shoot you, too, you faggot! See if I ever pull another job with you.”

Rodney felt his blood boil, his face flush red. He felt like he was ten years old again and Ferris was his big cousin, shaming him, making him feel weak and small. He hated that. He hated that more than anything.

He’d show Ferris. He’s show everybody on the eleven o’clock news.

Shoving his .357 magnum against the woman’s cheek, he screamed, “Give me the fuckin’ ring, woman, or I’ll blow your brains out. Right now!”

In some dark corner of his mind, Rodney heard himself hoping that she’d refuse. He’d shoot her there and then and the whole world would see; they’d all be watching on TV and—

The door opened right behind him and Rodney spun around to see an old lady and old man toddling in. The woman wore a bright flowery dress and was shuffling along with a walker. The guy was stooped over and moved slow and stiff, like he’d just pooped his pants.

Great, that was just what they needed. A couple more knuckleheads to contend with . . . a couple that probably didn’t have a dime between them.

“Hey, you two,” Rodney shouted at them. “Get over there with the others and put your hands up.”

The woman took several halting steps toward him. “Eh? What did you say? Sorry, but I’m a mite deaf in both ears.”

“What’s the matter?” asked her decrepit companion as he moved closer to Ferris. “Is the bank closed or something? We thought it was open this time of day.”

“You picked the wrong time to go banking, you old fart,” Ferris said as he swaggered over to the man and waved his gun in his face. Ferris swaggered everywhere, Rodney thought, with a gagging feeling in his throat. Ferris got a lot of girls with his tight jeans and wife-beater shirts that showed his muscles and that damned swagger of his.

Rodney would have loved to wear shirts like that, but he had too many pimples on his back and not enough biceps to pull off the look.

He glanced up at the camera and wished for a moment that he’d worn something nicer than his tie-dyed T-shirt with a hole in the front where his chest hairs stuck out.

The gal in the flowered dress with the walker came right up next to him and looked him up and down, like his grandma had before he’d left for school each morning when he’d been a kid. And like Grandma Flynn, she had a disapproving scowl on her face.

“What do you think you’re doing there, son?” she said. “You shouldn’t go waving a gun around like that. It might be loaded. You could put somebody’s eye out with that thing.”

Ferris gouged the guy in the ribs with his gun. Hard. The old man stood up a little straighter. “You and your wife better get over there with everybody else before we kill you both,” Ferris told him.

“Yeah,” Rodney said, feeling a surge of power that he’d never felt before in all of his twenty-two years. “Yeah, you’d better do what you’re told or I’ll shoot you . . . just like I’m gonna shoot this stupid bitch over here who doesn’t wanna give me her ring.”

He turned away from the grandma and returned his attention to the young woman with the big, sparkly ring on her finger. “I’m tired of waiting around for you,” he said. “I think I’ll just go ahead and blow you away. That way everybody here will know that we—er . . . that is—I mean business.”

He glanced over at Ferris. Ferris had a stupid little grin on his face, a grin that meant he didn’t think Rodney had the balls to do it. Yeah, well, he’d soon see....

“You don’t want to do that, son,” said the old woman behind him. “And I’ll give you three good reasons . . .”

Rodney turned and was somewhat surprised to see that she wasn’t looking at him; she was talking to him, but she was looking at the guy she’d come in with. The guy was looking back at her kind of funny. Like they had some sort of secret between them.

But Rodney couldn’t immediately figure out what it might be, so—like most things Rodney couldn’t understand—he ignored it.

“One,” the woman was saying, “when they catch you, you’ll be charged with murder instead of just plain ol’ bank robbing.”

“They ain’t gonna catch us.” But Rodney wasn’t as sure as he had been when they’d walked in. There was that camera in the corner, and there they were with their faces hanging out—no masks or pantyhose—plain as day.

“And two . . .” She fixed him with eyes that were startlingly blue. They cut through him like icy knives and made him feel sick and small, just like he had a second before Grandma had whacked him with Grandpa’s big leather belt. “It’s just wrong,” she said, “and if you do something as wrong as killing somebody, you’ll pay a really big price for it.”

“Shut her up!” Ferris yelled at the guy. “Shut your old lady up before I blow her head off.”

The man’s face changed; it actually twisted into some sort of an angry grin. And all of a sudden, it occurred to Rodney that—except for the gray hair and the baggy clothes—he didn’t look all that old, or weak.

“What was that you were saying, honey?” the guy asked the woman with the walker.

“I was saying . . . I have three good reasons why you shouldn’t be doing this. . . .”

Time seemed to slow down for Rodney. It was a moment he would play over and over again in his mind for years to come and remember every detail: the young woman who wouldn’t give up her engagement ring, softly sobbing behind him, the bank employees and other customers shaking and pale in a tight circle behind the counter, the gal with the walker, moving still closer to him, talking....

“Three reasons, and all of them good ones. Like I said: One, they’ll give you the needle when they catch up with you. Two, it’s just wrong, and three—”

Rodney didn’t know what hit him. At least, not at first. Later, much later, they would realize it was the old lady’s walker.

But at the time it was just a blur of silver, the gun flying out of his hand, an awful pain across his face, and the taste and feel of warm blood gushing out of his nose and down the back of his throat as he fell backward to the cold marble floor.

He was only dimly aware of a scuffle on the other side of the room. Ferris’s cry of pain. The dull thud as Big Cool Swaggering Cousin Ferris hit the floor, too.

Rodney felt the weight of somebody on him, mashing the air out of him. Somebody heavy. Strong hands grabbed his shoulders and flipped him over onto his belly. His bloody nose smacked against the floor, and for a moment he saw red and white stars of pain flashing through his head. The same somebody twisted his hands behind him, yanking his shoulders and elbows half out of their joints.

In the corner of his eye he could see just enough bright yellow and pink flowers to realize . . . it was Grandma!

He could hear Ferris yelling, “What? What the hell? What do you think you’re doing, Pops?”

“Arresting you, numskull. And don’t call me Pops or I’ll put these cuffs around your neck instead of your wrists and cinch ’em down good and tight.”

“Got another pair of cuffs?” he heard the woman on top of him say.

“Nope.”

“Here’s some duct tape,” said a male voice from the crowd behind the counter. “Will that do?”

“Sure. Just wind it around here if you don’t mind.”

Rodney heard the rip of the tape, saw some brightly polished black shoes appear an inch or so from his forehead. And some gray pinstriped trouser legs.

The bank manager had been wearing a pinstriped suit, he recalled, as the gravity of his situation began to press down upon him . . . along with the grandma’s knees in the small of his back. The old gal had thrown him around like she was some sort of sumo wrestler or something.

Shit, Rodney thought. It’s all on camera.

By tomorrow the whole country, everybody he knew or would ever know, would have seen his disgrace: Old lady and old man take out desperate bank robbers with nothin’ but a fuckin’ walker. Film at eleven.

Savannah sat on her sofa, pen and tablet in hand, jotting down notes furiously as she stared at the television screen, determined to miss nothing.

“Gourmet Network again?” Tammy Hart asked as she bounced across Savannah’s living room to the desk in the corner that served as “Control Central” for t. . .