Corpse Suzette

had nothing to add
to the conversation.
    “Maybe Dirk’s right. Maybe
these middle-of-the-night revelations aren’t all that reliable. But Granny Reid
says we’re more intuitive in the moonlight than when the sun’s shining.”
    She stared at the window,
at the winter moonlight shining through the lace curtains and painting silver
patterns on her bedspread, her arms, her hands, and the cats.
    Intuition, or the musings
of an exhausted, perimenopausal woman?
    She decided to wait until
the morning light to make the call.

Chapter

13
     
     
     
    T ammy sat at Savannah’s
rolltop desk, Sergio’s computer in front of her, a scowl on her face. Savannah
stood over her shoulder, staring at the screen, looking just as irritated.
    She didn’t know exactly why
she was irritated. But Tammy was out of sorts, and when Lady Sunshine and Light
was in a funk, things had to be bad.
    “No luck so far, huh?” she
asked her.
    “Not really. Sergio was a
pretty boring and predictable guy, judging from his files here,” Tammy replied.
“Lots of porn—as I suspected there would be. He had... uh... exotic tastes. A
lot of matchmaking services of the sleazier variety.”
    “Searching for his soul
mate?”
    “More like trying to
connect with somebody—or bodies— with equally exotic tastes in the bedroom.”
    Tammy clicked a couple of
times and a picture popped up on the screen. Savannah stared at it a few
seconds, turning her head to the right, then the left several times, before she
could finally decipher what the threesome were doing to each other and
themselves. She thought that after working a stint in vice in West Hollywood,
she’d seen it all.
    She hadn’t.
    “Well, isn’t that lovely,”
she said. “People are just so... resourceful... when it comes to that sort of
nonsense. What else was ol’ Sergio into?”
    “Sports cars, luxury boats,
home movie theaters—the usual big-ticket boy toys,” Tammy replied. “Quite a bit
of stock market research, although he obviously didn’t know what he was doing.
And... wait a minute...”
    “What? What is it?”
    “A whole folder here full
of info off the net about how to create a new identity.”
    Both women went from grouchy
to excited in two seconds. Across the room, Abigail sat on the sofa, watching
the news on television. Both cats were in her lap, begging for petting with a
degree of enthusiasm that they usually reserved for Savannah alone.
    “Did you hear this?” she
said, pointing to the TV. “Now they’re saying that the government grossly
overestimated the effects of extra weight on a person’s overall health.”
    “What sort of things are in
that folder?” Savannah asked, pulling up a chair so that she could sit next to
Tammy.
    “How to get a fake birth
certificate, for one thing,” Tammy told her. “It’s shockingly easy in some
states. All you have to do is supply the basic information by phone and order
it, and you get it in the mail in a couple of weeks.”
    “They’re even saying here
on TV that it’s actually better for you to be moderately overweight than to be
as thin as those stupid charts say you’re supposed to be!” Abigail laughed—a
chuckle that sounded like it was right out of an old Vincent Price horror film.
“Wait ’til I tell some of those bony-assed friends of mine about that!”
    “And there’s info here,”
Tammy continued, “about how to set up anonymous bank accounts.”
    “Anonymous accounts? Like
in Switzerland, where you don’t even have to give them a name when you open the
account?” Tammy nodded and laughed out loud. “Aha! That’s why I couldn’t find
his account! I was looking at all the mainstream banks’ websites. I swear, I’d
tried to log into them all with that stupid number and password. Dead ends everywhere.”
    She reached for a sheet of
paper in a stack on the desk and showed it to Savannah. It had at least fifty
bank names and their Web sites listed. Every one of them had been scratched
off.
    “Hey, get a load of that !”
Abigail interjected. “This reporter says that the research behind those
previous claims was funded by companies selling weight-loss products. Figures.
I hate those people. They suck.”
    “I didn’t even think about
the anonymous banks.” Tammy crumpled the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket
under the desk.
    “But that makes perfect
sense,” Savannah said. “If he was going to stash ill-gotten gains, especially
in that big a sum, it wouldn’t be at a