Corpse Suzette

orange.
    “Savannah,” he said, “be a
dear and get me some whole cloves, your sugar bowl, and your finest Irish
whiskey. I’m going to make the lad a hot toddy.”
    “I ain’t drinkin’ when I’m
on the job,” Dirk said, but he was scowling a bit less and his bleary eyes reflected
more than a passing interest.
    “I’m making you an Irish
toddy, and by god, you’ll drink it and like it,” John replied.
    As Savannah searched her
relatively sparse liquor cabinet for whiskey, John set to work, heating water
on the stove and cutting the orange crosswise, then studding the thin slices
with the cloves.
    He dissolved a couple of
spoonfuls of sugar in a cup of steaming water and floated a few of the orange
slices on the top, then added an obscene amount of the whiskey to the mixture.
    He took it to Dirk and set
the mug in front of him on the table. “Drink up, old chap,” he said. “It’s the
cure for the common cold. Works in twelve hours. You’ll be a new man by
tomorrow morning, I assure you.”
    Dirk lifted the mug and
sniffed it. “Really?”
    “Well,” Ryan said, “let’s
put it this way: If it doesn’t cure what ails you, at least you won’t mind
being sick half as much.”
    Dirk took a sip, grimaced,
and looked up at John, who was leaning over him with a parental, no nonsense
expression on his face.
    “Drink it down,” John said.
“Now.”
    Dirk did as he was told,
and even licked his lips afterward. “It’s not really all that bad,” he said.
“In fact, it’s pretty kickass.”
    Ryan laughed and turned to
Savannah. “We’d better get him upstairs and in bed right away,” he told her.
“That stuff’s going to kick his ass any second now, and then he’ll be
dead weight.”
    And Ryan wasn’t
exaggerating. By the time the three of them had Dirk up the stairs, peeled down
to his skivvies, and tucked between Savannah’s pink satin sheets, he was too
looped to even resist.
    But, being Dirk, he managed
to complain at least a little during the process. “I don’t want no gay guys
undressing me,” he said as Ryan removed his shoes and Savannah tugged his jeans
off.
    “Oh, hush up,” Savannah
told him. “Ain’t nobody here interested in what you’ve got. And you’re not
getting into my clean bed in those dirty, damp clothes.”
    John grabbed the hem of
Dirk’s Harley tee-shirt and yanked it over his head. “Not to worry, Dirk, old
lad. Ryan and I can resist ravishing such a fine model of manhood as yourself.”
He chuckled. “ ’Tis a hardship, to be sure, but we’ll bear up.”
     
    True to her word, Savannah
wasted no time once dinner was finished and hurried over to Suzette Du Bois’s
house. In her hand she had a checklist of the things Dirk had wanted her to
cover: numbers on her phone’s caller ID, last number dialed, and numbers
programmed for speed dial. She also needed to pick up Suzette’s address book
and look again for any sort of diary or journal.
    To satisfy her own
curiosity, she intended also to look for a certain black teddy bear wearing a
green and red plaid vest... the toy named “Baby” without which Sammy Du Bois
never left the house.
    It was still pouring rain
when she pulled up in front of the house, and she made a dash for the front
door. The feel of the cold rain on her skin brought back less-than-fond
memories of the funeral earlier in the day. No wonder Dirk had gotten sick.
“Depressing” and “cold” were a bad combination, especially when mixed with
“exhausted.”
    She was a little worried
about him. But his fever had broken before she left, and Tammy had promised to
check on him every hour or so until she returned, so she wasn’t overly
concerned.
    She unlocked the door with
the house keys she had nabbed out of Dirk’s leather jacket pocket and let
herself into the house. This time she went ahead and flipped on the foyer
lights. With Dirk’s expressed permission, she wasn’t exactly breaking and
entering this time.
    And while convenient, she
had to admit it was a little less exciting.
    Until she saw' the light on
in the living room and heard someone stirring in there.
    Instinctively, she reached
inside her raincoat and unsnapped her Beretta’s holster.
    A moment later, a woman walked
out of the living room and into the foyer. She looked Savannah up and down,
then said, “May I help you?”
    Savannah recognized the
platinum blonde, even without the big sunglasses she had been wearing at the
funeral. She was Suzette Du Bois’s