Death by Chocolate

became final
about a month ago.” Dirk shoved back from the table and stretched his arms.
    “A lot of things come to
light during a divorce,” Tammy said. “Do you suppose either Eleanor or Burt
figured out what Martin was up to?”
    Savannah shook her head. “I
guarantee you that Eleanor didn’t know. She was the sort of gal that, if she
had found out somebody was cheating her, she’d have chopped them up into paté
and fed them to those hounds of hers.”
    “Maybe Streck hadn’t yet
been exposed, but was afraid he would be,” Ryan suggested. “Perhaps he thought
if he knocked off Eleanor, he could rig the books to hide his tampering from
Burt.”
    “He was taking off with
these files when we caught him,” Dirk said. “And that maid, Marie, told you
that we should be lookin’ at him.”
    “Yes, but she wouldn’t say
why.” Savannah took a blank sheet of paper and drew a small box at the top. “I
suppose that if I’d been cashing in my client’s CDs, selling off their stocks,
and dipping into their bank accounts and skimming off their savings, I’d be
pretty nervous about getting caught.”
    “Nervous enough to kill
somebody?” Tammy said. Savannah glanced into the living room, where Cordele was
curled up in the big chair with her book. “Oh, sure,” she said. “If there’s
fifty ways to leave a lover, there’s gotta be a thousand reasons to commit
murder.”
    She scribbled Martin
Streck’s name in the box at the top of the page. He had just been promoted to
“Suspect Number One.”

Chapter

14
     
     
     
    S avannah had often wondered
how Greenwoods Cemetery had gotten its name. Standing among the grave markers
that lay flush with the earth was the occasional palmetto. But there wasn’t a
woods, or even a leafy tree, in sight. And since the drought-inspired water
restrictions had required southern Californians to shower together, flush only
when necessary, and water the lawns not at all, Greenwoods Cemetery wasn’t
looking particularly green, either.
    Long ago, Savannah had
decided that when she kicked the bucket, she wanted to be carted back to
Georgia, where she could lie beneath the weeping willows near her beloved
grandfather.
    She had attended a
depressing amount of funerals in this cemetery. And today’s ceremonial burying
was equally somber, as they laid Lady Eleanor Maxwell to rest.
    Surveying the crowd that
stretched from the open grave, surrounded by chairs across the beige lawns to
the road, she wondered how many of the mourners had actually ever met Eleanor
in the flesh and how many were simply groupie gourmets.
    “Quite a crowd,” Dirk
remarked. “I’ll bet there won’t be anywhere near this many when I go toes-up.”
    “Unless it’s in the line of
duty, and then there’ll be cops from here to San Diego,” Savannah replied.
    When he didn’t answer, she
turned and looked at him. He was just staring at her. “Don’t even say that,” he
told her. “It’s bad luck.”
    “Oh, pooh. Gran says that
if you speak an evil out loud, it won’t come true. Besides, you’re too mean to
die. You’ll live to be a hundred and four and irritate us all the whole time.”
    He lowered his voice. “Nice
theory, but it didn’t work for her.” He nodded toward the casket that hung on
thick canvas straps over the grave.
    “Sh-h-h.” She glanced around,
but the only one who had overheard was Tammy, who was standing on the other
side of Dirk.
    “Keep it down, Dirko,”
Tammy told him. “It’s customary to only say nice things about people at their
funerals.”
    “Yeah,” Savannah added.
“You keep the really juicy, nasty stuff to yourself and save it for the evening
of the funeral, when everybody’s comparing notes about who took it hard and who
didn’t seem to give a hoot.”
    Tammy’s mouth dropped open.
“I haven’t been to a lot of funerals. Do people really do that?”
    “Oh, absolutely,” Savannah
told her. ‘You can’t win with the gossips. If you cry too much, they’ll say you
‘just plumb fell apart and made a spectacle of yourself,’ and if you don’t cry
enough, they’ll claim that you ‘never did give a fig anyway’ about the recently
departed. You’re damned if you do and if you don’t.”
    “Wow.” Tammy shook her head
in disbelief. “I’d think that how someone grieves is a personal matter.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s what you
get for thinkin’,” Dirk said. “And speaking of who’s taking it hard and who
ain’t...” He