Corpse Suzette

drink.
    All around them, women in
their twenties and thirties strutted their far more youthful “stuff’ for the
equally young—or as Savannah preferred to think of them, “immature”—men who
were waiting on them, wearing only black spandex pants and black bow ties.
    Either the strutting ladies
didn’t mind the fact that most of the mega-muscled, gorgeous waiters were gay,
or they just preferred not to think about the fact that they wouldn’t have a
chance with them, no matter how charming their “stuff’ might be.
    Savannah didn’t mind the
fact that she was old enough to have mothered some of these gals. She had d-one
more than her share of strutting in her day. Now it was their turn. And while
she might miss the excitement and vanity boost of donning a sexy outfit,
sashaying around, and having people notice, she wouldn’t go back to that era in
her life for anything.
    Young and bouncy was fun.
But she wouldn’t have given up the life lessons she’d learned in the past ten
to twenty years for any amount of perkiness.
    Myrna, on the other hand,
didn’t appear to realize that it was no longer her turn.
    Her two-sizes-too-small
skirt and midriff-baring top looked ludicrous on a woman her age. But she
didn’t seem to notice the disparaging glances the younger women shot her way
as^ they passed by. And when she batted her eyes at the waiter and made an
overt pass at him, she didn’t appear to register the look of disgust that
flitted across his handsome face as he placed her gin and tonic in front of
her.
    “Do you have a boyfriend,
Savannah?” Myrna asked as she twirled her fingertip in her drink, then made a
show of licking a few drops from the end of her bright red fingernail in what
was, no doubt, intended to be a sultry gesture. “You must have, a pretty girl
like you.”
    “No boyfriend,” Savannah
replied, sipping at her own cola. “I have men friends, but no romantic
entanglements at the moment.”
    Myrna looked shocked and
mortified. “How sad!”
    Savannah shrugged. “Not
really. I don’t have the time or energy for all that rigmarole right now
anyway.”
    “But don’t you get lonely?”
    “Don’t have time for that
either.”
    Myrna shook her head, still
bewildered. “But at night, when you’re sleeping all alone, surely that must
bother you.”
    “Oh, I may not have a
boyfriend, but I never sleep alone.” Myrna’s eyes widened. “Oh, you mean you...”
    “Yes, I have two cats. If I
shut them out of the bedroom, they sit outside my door and howl all night.
Sleeping alone is a luxury I’ll never have as long as Diamante and Cleopatra
are alive.”
    “Oh.”
    Savannah could tell she had
just lost some major points in Myrna’s estimation. Nobody worth anything slept
alone if they could help it. Not in Myrna’s world.
    “Do you have a boyfriend,
Myrna?”
    A look of profound sadness
crossed the woman’s face. “Not anymore. He left me for... well... someone
else.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.
Had you been together long?”
    “Six years.”
    “That’s long enough. More
like a divorce than a breakup at that point.”
    Myrna nodded. “We were
doing fine, getting along really good. I thought he was even thinking about
marrying me. But then, I made a big mistake. I treated him to having some work
done at Mystic Twilight last year. Suzette did a great job on him. When she was
finished with him, he looked ten or fifteen years younger. Ran off with a girl
half his age.”
    “Ouch. That must have
really hurt. Especially considering the expense of your ‘treat.’ That sort of
gift doesn’t come cheap.”
    “Suzette let me work it
off. I work off all of my... procedures.”
    Savannah wondered how long
it had been since Myrna had gotten a full paycheck, if ever.
    “Speaking of Suzette,”
Savannah said, eager to get away from romantic gossip and on to the case, “can
you tell me about Suzette and Sergio?”
    “What’s to say? They’re off
and on, together then apart, year after year.”
    “And why would you say that
is?”
    “Simple enough. Suzette
loves Sergio. Always has. He uses her, then dumps her, then takes her back,
then dumps her. It’s ridiculous how much nonsense she takes from him. She could
do a lot better than him, but she doesn’t realize that, so . .
    “And how about Devon?”
    “Devon is nothing to
Sergio. She’s this month’s fling. Nothing more.”
    “How about Devon and
Suzette? How do they get along, considering...?”
    “They hate