Death by Chocolate

investigating a murder? Tony’s
a good kid. He’d never—”
    “I didn’t say he would,”
Dirk replied. “Where is Tony right now?”
    “Out making a delivery.”
    “When will he be back?”
    “Anytime now. Sometimes his
old car breaks down and he’s gone a long time, but I think it’s been running
better lately.”
    Dirk nodded. “Right. Well,
before he gets back I need you to do something else for me. I need to know how
many times Tony has made deliveries to a customer of yours, Louise Maxwell, and
the dates of those deliveries.”
    “But... but...” Now
Mildred’s lower lip was trembling, and her hands shook as she replaced the box
of phenylprophedrine on the shelf. “I don’t want to get Tony in trouble. Like I
said, he's a good boy, my cousin's oldest son.”
    “Don't worry about it,
Mildred,” Dirk said with only a touch of sympathy warming his words. “I've got
a feeling that, with or without your help, Tony's already in trouble.”
     
     
    “Don’t tell me you don’t
know Louise Maxwell, Tony, because I hate people who lie to me,” Dirk told the
teenager, “and you don’t want me hating you right now. I’m the only friend
you’ve got.”
    Tony Doyle was doing
exactly what Dirk intended him to do in the “sweat box”: sweat—profusely. Of
course, with the temperature in the eight-by-ten-foot room being a balmy 85,
Dirk, Tony, and Savannah were all three damp of brow and moist of armpit. Tony
was sitting at a stainless-steel table, his hands clasped tightly in front of
him.
    Savannah had pulled a chair
into the corner where she sat... and observed.... and listened. Watching Dirk
in action was always an entertaining pastime. With his flair for the dramatic,
he could have played Hamlet onstage. Only his aversion to tights and tunics had
kept him from a promising acting career.
    He paced, as much as the
tiny room would allow, back and forth behind his interviewee, leaning over him,
raising his voice until it bounced off the gray walls and rattled the kid’s
nerves.
    “You delivered drugs to her
house six times last month alone. And almost every time your ‘car broke down’
and you were gone for hours, right?”
    Tony shrugged his
shoulders, which were broad for his age. He had the build of a football player
and was definitely what girls his age would have called “cute.” Savannah could
imagine women her own age—and Louise’s—thinking the same thing. With his curly
dark hair, bright green eyes, and muscular body, she understood why Louise
might have kept ordering from Rx Shop.
    The question was, what else
had she asked him to do?
    Dirk was getting around to
that.
    “Did she give you an
extra-special tip?” Dirk said, leaning over the boy’s head and talking down at him.
“Was that why you were so late getting back to the store... because you were
busy collecting?”
    “I don’t know what you’re
talking about,” Tony insisted. “I deliver a lot of stuff to a lot of people,
and most of them give me a tip.”
    Dirk walked around the
table so that he could face Tony and let the kid read his expression when he
said, “You deliver a lot of phenylprophedrine? You have a lot of people who ask
you to sneak that out of the back room for them.... or is Louise the only one
who offered you a little nookie in exchange for that?”
    Bull’s-eye. The boy’s face
turned a lovely shade of crimson. He stared down at his hands and clasped them
even tighter.
    “N-n-n-oo,” he stammered.
    “Oh, yeah. You did.” Dirk
leaned his hands on the table and stared at the boy, his face only a foot away
from his. “She asked you to get her a couple of bottles of phenylprophedrine,
and you did, and you got lucky. We already know that. We know all about it. Why
else do you think we dragged you in here?”
    Tony’s eyes darted to Dirk,
to Savannah, and back. “I.... I don’t know why. I mean.... even if I did.... it
was just two bottles of some discontinued stuff. Is the shop saying I stole
from them? I can pay them back. They can take the money out of my paycheck.”
    “We’re not worried about
petty theft here,” Dirk said. “Together the bottles were probably worth less
than ten bucks. It’s what they were used for.”
    Savannah watched, noting
the confusion that flooded his face. Tony was a cutie, but he wasn’t clever
enough to be a good liar.
    “What do you mean? It was
cold medicine. She had a runny nose and a cough.”
    “Is that what she told
you?” Dirk