“Go now,” Ryan said.
Savannah turned around and saw that her friend had a wide smile on his handsome face. “But your birthday? The cake?”
“Hey,” he said, “a homicide case and a paying gig for the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency? That tops a birthday party all day and all night.”
Savannah weighed one against the other for two whole seconds.
A friend’s party versus looking at a dead body?
Birthday cake or a homicide case?
It wasn’t until she was in her ’65 Mustang, speeding toward the Papalardo estate in Spirit Hills that she paused to consider what it might say about her character, or lack thereof—how quickly and shamelessly she had made that decision.
Murder takes the cake. Any ol’ day.
Chapter 3
As Savannah drove her classic Mustang through the posh, gated community of Spirit Hills, she tried not to notice the dark smoke appearing in her rearview mirror, coming from the ’Stang’s tailpipe. During the car’s last garage appointment, it had been given a grim prognosis from Ray, her mechanic. “You’re gonna need a ring job soon, Savannah, and maybe the valves ground, too. And that’s gonna set you back some serious cash. You might consider trading her in while she’s still running as good as she is.”
The thought of getting rid of the ’Stang made Savannah’s heartstrings twang with a sour resonance, and she usually managed not to think about it, not to notice the billowing black cloud behind her. One of her life mottos was: If you don’t see it, it ain’t there. But while that level of denial might work when it came to the size of one’s buttocks, it was harder to maintain when you could look in your rearview mirror and see that you were a one-woman pollution machine in such a beautiful locale as Spirit Hills.
As she passed one palatial mansion after another with their vast property allotments, it was all too apparent to Savannah that she was a “have-not” in a “have-a-lot” community. She passed Tudor and Greek revivals, Spanish haciendas, and the odd sprawling contemporary, but not a single driveway contained a smog factory like the one she was driving. Not even close.
“Eh, some people just got no taste for the classics,” she muttered in a voice that sounded a lot like her Granny Reid’s. “It takes a person of refinement to appreciate an objet d’art like you,” she told the car, lovingly patting its dashboard.
As though on cue, the Mustang sputtered and spewed an especially foul emission from its rear.
“Knock it off!” she said, swatting the steering wheel. “You mess with me, you’ll wind up with nobody to talk to but a junkyard Rottweiler.”
But she knew she was no closer to getting rid of the Mustang than she was of dumping Dirk. Even though they were both guilty of the occasional objectionable “emission,” she was loyal.
Often too loyal for her own good.
But her grandmother had taught her to walk that extra mile with a friend, and then another if they needed the company. And sometimes she felt like she had walked all the way around God’s green Earth. Several times.
She wanted to believe that it was a mission of friendship that she was on now, coming to this crime scene to help her old friend. But she knew it had less to do with camaraderie and more to do with truth, justice, the American way…and the pure joy of catching a bad guy. It made her blood race faster than a three-pound box of gourmet assorted chocolates.
And, predictably, her pulse quickened when she saw, at the far end of the road, a Spanish-style mansion with half a dozen black-and-white police cruisers in front of it. She didn’t need to scan the mailbox numbers to know that this was the Papalardo estate. Even without the parked units with their flashing red and blue lights, she recognized the mansion from pictures she had seen in magazines and on television. The seashell-pink walls, the ornate wrought-iron balcony railings, the red-tiled roof, the sheer size of the house, made it distinctive, even among the other mansions in this neighborhood.
It was a house fit for a diva. And no one fit that persona better than Dona Papalardo.
Only four years ago, Dona had been the queen of Hollywood, having won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her roles as a steamy temptress in several television remakes of film noir classics. With her wavy blond hair, broad swimmer’s shoulders, and svelte figure, Dona looked as though she had stepped right off the old silver screen into America’s living rooms. And a new generation had been snared by the appeal of the classic femme fatale who used her sensual, womanly wiles to lure a perfectly good, unsuspecting, and overly horny guy down the path to perdition.
But for some reason, about which the public could only speculate, Dona had disappeared from the Hollywood scene, taking her leave almost immediately after receiving her major accolades. No one heard or saw anything of her…until the tabloid blitz began about a year later.
DONA PAPALARDO THE LARDO.
BEAUTY QUEEN PORKS OUT
DONA P—BIG AS A BUS!
The headlines at the grocery store checkout stands were ruthless, displaying candid and horrifically unflattering shots of the actress at her higher weight. The paparazzi ambushed her, even on her own property, photographing her from every possible angle to maximize her now-generous proportions.
Savannah had winced, seeing the pictures, reading the copy, and imagining how painful it must be for a woman once hailed as one of the most beautiful people on earth to be vilified in such a way.
She liked Dona. Having seen her interviewed many times, she had always been struck by how down-to-earth and purely likable the woman seemed.
And no one deserved to suffer that sort of abuse.
Just because a person’s job happened to be acting, that didn’t make them hurt any less when they were maligned and ridiculed. Savannah felt sorry for Dona Papalardo and angry on her behalf that her fans were so fickle. They had held her in such high regard, proclaiming her one of the greatest actresses of her time. Had the woman suddenly lost her ability to act just because she had put on some pounds?
The tabloids, the gossip columnists, the late-night talk show hosts had all been merciless. There seemed to be nothing too insulting, too hurtful for them to say, as long as it got a laugh. And the world was enjoying a big laugh at a woman they had only a short time ago claimed to admire, even idolize.
And now this.
Once again, Dona Papalardo was the center of media attention. At least a dozen camera crews were milling about in front of the house. Their vans, bearing the call letters of their miscellaneous television stations, were parked helter-skelter along the roadside in front of the mansion.
Several policemen were lined up in front of the driveway, allowing none of the press to set foot on the property.
Among the SCPD cruisers in the driveway, Savannah saw the van with the county coroner’s seal on the side. Dr. Jennifer Liu and her crime-scene technicians were already there, searching for evidence, collecting and processing whatever they found.
Savannah was grateful she could be here in the preliminary stages of the investigation. A fresh scene had so much more to tell than a stale one.
Dirk’s old Buick was parked near the van, but she saw no sign of him among the white-smocked technicians or the uniformed police who were wandering around in the driveway in front of the mansion. But only a few of them were actually inside the yellow cordoned area directly in front of the house.
“Red marks the spot,” Savannah whispered as she spotted the coroner’s telltale drawings on the blood-splattered brick driveway. She had been hoping they hadn’t removed the body before her arrival, but Dr. Liu and her team were both fast and thorough. No doubt, the victim was already securely bagged, inside the van, and ready