Corpse Suzette

said,
“there’s only one thing in the world that smells like that.”
    “Yeah, a DB,” Dirk said,
wrinkling his nose. “My favorite call.” Savannah agreed. If there was anything
in the world that cops hated to hear on their car radio it was the term
“DB”—dead body—or just as bad, “suspicious smell.”
    In all her years on the
job, Savannah had seen and heard plenty of things that made her old before her
time, things that scarred her soul and kept her awake at night. But there was
only one thing that made her barf.
    And she was smelling it
now.
    The stench of death.
    “You go in,” she said,
holding her sweater over the lower half of her face. “You know I can’t take it.
I’ll hurl. I always do, and that makes things so much worse.”
    “Pansy.”
    She raised her hands in the
air. “I admit it. I have no pride in this respect. None at all. I’m a total
wuss.”
    “Sissy girl.”
    “I am. That’s me. Prissy
Pants, that’s me. You go in and I’ll owe you.”
    He shook his head, stood at
the door of the pool house, and opened it. Then he took a deep, deep breath...
and shuddered from head to toe.
    Dr. Liu had told her long
ago, “Here’s how you handle the smell, Savannah: just take a big deep gulp of
it, fill up your head and your lungs. It’s such a shock to the system, you
won’t smell anything else for hours.”
    Yeah, right, she thought. Maybe it
works for Dr. Liu and Dirk, but I’d rather bite a skunk in the ass and suffer
the consequences.
    “What is it? Do you see the
box?” she asked.
    He was frozen in the
doorway, staring, his mouth hanging open.
    “Well?” she asked, inching
forward, her curiosity getting the best of her. “What do you see?”
    “Oh, my god,” he said.
“Weird. This is so creepy! Van, come here! You gotta see this.”
    She might be squeamish
about smelling dead bodies, but Savannah’s primary character attribute was
nosiness. It overrode absolutely everything else in her system.
    She held one hand over her
mouth and with the other hand pinched her nose together. Then she ran over to
the door and looked inside.
    The interior was dim, lit
only by one small window. But the late morning sunlight was shining in enough
to illuminate the macabre scene.
    A woman sat on a folding
chair, pulled up to a card table. Across the tabletop was spread a game of
solitaire. She held a stack of cards in her hands.
    “What the hell?” Savannah
said, forgetting all about the stench.
    The woman was dead.
    No doubt about it.
    She was tied to the chair
with yellow nylon rope and was sagging limply against her bindings. Her flat,
milky eyeballs stared sightlessly at the opposite wall.
    She was wearing a white
physician’s smock and her platinum blonde hair was nicely coifed on one side,
and stuck to the other side of her head with a mass of black, matted gore that
Savannah knew was the result of a terrible head wound.
    On her smock pocket was a
small, black, plastic name tag.
    Savannah read it aloud.
“Suzette Du Bois, M.D.”
    She and Dirk stared at each
other for a long time. Finally, he said, “So, if this is Suzette... who do I
have handcuffed in there?”
     
    They ran back to the house
and rushed into the master bedroom, where the maid was offering the lady on the
bed a glass of water with a drinking straw. The woman pushed the water away,
spilling it across the bed.
    At her feet, Sammy the
poodle whined and licked the water off his paw.
    “Who are you?” Dirk
shouted, jostling her shoulder. “Devon? Clare Du Bois?”
    “No, go away,” the woman
mumbled with swollen, bandaged lips. “Get out!”
    Savannah looked down at the
woman’s hands. She was clutching the bedspread, digging her nails into the
fabric. Her long, bright red fingernails.
    Savannah had seen those
fingernails before... swirling a drink.
    “Myrna,” she said. “Myrna,
it’s you.”
    The woman on the bed began
to sob; it was a horrible, high-pitched shriek, like a hurt animal caught in a
trap.
    The maid backed into the
corner of the room, pulled her apron up over her head, and began to softly cry.
    Dirk looked at Savannah in
surprise. “How do you...? Is it her?”
    Savannah nodded. “It’s
Myrna,” she said. “The body in the pool house is Suzette. She killed her.”
    “But why?” Dirk said. “For
the money?”
    Savannah thought back on
the grisly scene that had been staged in the pool house. “I don’t think so,”
she said. “You wanted her to be alone, too, didn’t you,