Just Desserts (26 page)

Ah ... another, higher highlight ... a fine parchment envelope with “Savannah” written across the front of it in that elegant, flowing penmanship she had admired before.

She couldn’t wait until she got into the house to open it. What would it be this time? An evening at the Greek Theater? A weekend at the Biltmore? A week on a cruise ship to—

Down, girl; get real!
she cautioned herself. But her hand was shaking, nevertheless, as she pulled out two sheets of paper. Unfolding the pages, she read the first one, a letter that had been written with the now familiar fountain-pen flourish.

My dear Savannah,

Here is a little present for you from Gibson and me. We wanted you to know we were thinking of you and wishing you all the best.

Affectionately,
Ryan Stone & John Gibson

The following page had only three typed lines. She stared at them for a long moment, wondering what Ryan had intended.

E
RIC
B
OWMAN
1453 Chestnut Ave. #245
San Carmelita

Could it be?
she wondered. Was this the name and address of her attacker? Somehow she knew it was. How typical of Ryan to beat her to the punch like this.

How could he have located the guy so quickly when she was still working on it? Amazing! She had to give him one thing: He was a hell of an investigator. Having always been proud of her own skill, she had to admit that he might even be better at this game than she was.

Might. Probably not, but maybe.

Feeling lighter on her feet than she had in days, Savannah strolled on into the house. After finding Ryan’s note, her interest in the Victoria’s Secret catalog had taken on a whole new perspective.

But the momentary reprieve ended when she saw Atlanta curled up on the end of the sofa, the telephone cradled against her cheek, a look of love-lust dulling her eyes.

Brain dead and horny, just like those chickie-poohs on the posters. She was also wearing a gold satin jacquard robe, Savannah’s newest acquisition. First old faithful, the terry-cloth robe, and now the one she had been saving for a special occasion.

Okay, she had to admit she’d been saving it a long time; lately special occasions had been few and far between. But that wasn’t the point.

Atlanta was so absorbed in her conversation that she didn’t even notice Savannah at first. When she did she jumped, mumbled something in the way of a quick good-bye, and hung up the phone.

Savannah didn’t need Ryan’s fancy call-return feature to know who had been on the other end of the line. But if she confronted her sister again this soon, the kid would only dig her heels in that much more deeply. Convinced that Savannah was nothing but a cosmic killjoy, Atlanta would automatically assume that anything her big sister didn’t want her to do must be something pretty wonderful.

Besides, Savannah had an ace up her sleeve named Dirk, and he had promised to drop by in a little while to assist Savannah in giving her sister a dose of reality therapy.

“I’m expecting a guest,” Savannah said as nonchalantly as possible. “Please go upstairs and get dressed.”

“I’m dressed,” she muttered, reaching for the television remote control. She flipped on MTV, propped her bare feet on the coffee table, and stared sullenly at the screen.

“You aren’t dressed. You’re wearing
my
robe. In the future would appreciate you at least asking before you borrow my clothes. Now, please go take that off. My partner, Dirk, is going to be dropping by any minute, and since you’ve never even met the man, I don’t think it’s very ladylike to greet him wearing lingerie.”

Atlanta’s lethargy vanished and she jumped up from the sofa. “Well, excu-u-u-use the hell outta me! I didn’t realize you had gotten stingy in your old age. Here’s your stupid old robe.”

Standing in the middle of the living room, Atlanta whipped off the robe and threw it on the floor at Savannah’s feet. Wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of panties and an equally tiny bra, she turned and began to stomp up the stairs.

Once she had gotten over her initial shock Savannah couldn’t help noticing that something was quite different about Atlanta’s skin color. Usually she was fair, with an ivory complexion like Savannah’s. But now she looked more orange than ivory, and the pigment seemed to be blotchy and uneven. Especially on her rear end, which she was wagging conspicuously from side to side.

“Hey, ‘Lanta,” Savannah called, unable to resist. The girl was already most of the way up the stairs; all Savannah could see were her feet, which paused briefly in midstep. “Nice sunless tan you got there. But your ass is all streaky. Maybe you’d better slap on some more of that orange crap.”

The feet pounded on up the stairs and down the hall. The guest bedroom door slammed, rattling the entire house. From the corner of her eye Savannah saw Cleopatra and Diamante scurry out the back door. “Wimps,” she called after them. “Can’t handle the heat, huh?”

She scooped up her robe from the floor, caressed the satin for a moment, then laid it lovingly across her favorite chair, entertaining a brief but vivid fantasy about Ryan Stone. Something about tying him to her bedposts with a pair of silk stockings and running the satin slowly over his naked body. A special occasion. Yes, she needed a special occasion. Badly.

Alternative electrical devices just weren’t cutting it anymore. If this dry spell continued, she’d have to buy stock in Energizer.

Sinking onto the sofa, she switched off the television, picked up the phone, and dialed Beverly Winston. She set a time with her to meet the next day to discuss her progress. Savannah decided not to mention her little bash on the head or the lead on Eric Bowman over the phone. She’d wait until she could see Beverly face-to-face and gauge her reaction. Not that Beverly Winston had especially readable reactions. Quite the contrary.

No sooner had Savannah hung up the phone, leaned back on the sofa, and closed her eyes for a momentary break, than a shave-and-a-haircut knock sounded on the door.

Dirk had arrived with the ammunition. She sighed ... a weary warrior. “Take cover all ye beasts: furred, fish and fowl,” she said. “Round two is about to begin.”

“I asked Dirk to do a little research for me,” Savannah said to Atlanta, who was once again curled into the corner of the sofa. This time she wore skintight jeans and a black halter top. Wow ... big improvement. But she wasn’t looking lust-besought. She appeared grandly pissed.

“Dirk is very good at research,” Savannah continued. “I think you’ll find that what he discovered is fascinating.”

Sitting on the footstool in front of Savannah’s chair, Dirk produced a manila envelope and handed it to Savannah. He looked a bit uncomfortable, and she was certain it had nothing to do with his awkward seating arrangement. Dirk wasn’t good at family squabbling—probably why his wife of twenty years had divorced him.

She reached into the envelope and pulled out some photographs and documents.

“Let’s see what we have here....”

Savannah could hear the sarcasm in her own voice and she hated it. Until Atlanta had called her from the airport that night she had considered herself a pretty nice person. Since when had she turned into a caustic bitch?

“Recognize this gentleman?” she asked, placing the mug shot of a rather seedy but marginally attractive man on the coffee table in front of Atlanta.

Savannah watched her sister’s face closely. Her orange skin quickly faded to a sickly gray. She did know him, whether she would admit it or not.

“This guy just got out of prison a year ago. He was in for statutory rape, using minors for pornography, pandering, good stuff like that. His name is ...” Savannah turned the photo over and read the back. “... Maximillian Turner. Of course, he’s also known as Max Russell, Mark L’amore, and Michael Lovejoy.” She turned to Dirk. “Kinda overt, don’t you think, like Trixie Delight?”

Dirk cracked a grin, but one look at Atlanta told Savannah that she didn’t get the joke. She still appeared to be suffering from shell shock at seeing her soul mate in a police mug shot.

Savannah decided to keep the ball rolling. Reaching into the envelope again, she produced a dozen or more photographs of young women, wearing little or nothing, posed in extremely compromising and demeaning positions. She fanned them out on the coffee table in front of her sister.

“I thought you should see some of the photographs that were used in evidence against Max-Mark-Michael. The authorities seized them when they raided your pal’s ‘studio.’ He’s quite the little artiste, huh?”

Savannah knew she was about to strike a low blow, but she had to make her point with Atlanta for her own mental health and safety. She chose a particularly abusive and graphic photo of a girl, chained to a whipping post, wearing bondage garb and a terrified look on her young face. The photo was in color, and dark red welts showed clearly across the girl’s white breasts and buttocks.

“Her name was Cindy and she was fourteen when that was taken,” Dirk told her, averting his eyes from the photograph. “The marks on her ... they weren’t done with makeup. They’re for real. Two days after Max was convicted Cindy threw herself out a window downtown. Her suicide note said it was because she had lost the only man she had ever loved.”

He paused, waiting for his words to sink in, before he added, “She didn’t look very pretty at all when they scraped her up off the sidewalk and into a body bag.”

“By the way ...” Savannah continued, pouring all available fuel on the fire, “... when Cindy testified at Max’s trial she told the court that he had said she was the most beautiful ‘woman’ he had ever photographed. That every man who saw her pictures would want her; every woman would envy her.”

“You’re lying!” Atlanta swept the pictures onto the floor and jumped up from the sofa, her eyes blazing. “He didn’t tell her that! He didn’t! He doesn’t say that to everybody. I
know
he doesn’t!”

“He also told her that she had a rare and delicate beauty,” Dirk said, the calm tone of his voice a direct contrast to hers, “that a sweet, sexy woman like her really touched his heart.”

“Shut up!” She started to cry, shaking her head in denial. “Why are you guys lying to me?”

“We aren’t, ‘Lanta, and you know it,” Savannah replied, feeling the tears begin to well up in her own eyes. “He invited her up to his apartment to watch the sunset and eat ice cream. Then he screwed her. She was fourteen, Atlanta. A baby.”

“Damn you, Savannah! I
hate
you for doing this! I really, really
hate
you!”

Savannah rose and hurried over to her sister, arms outstretched. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said, choking back her sobs as she reached to hug her. But instead of folding into her embrace Atlanta pushed her away. “I don’t want to hurt you like this, but I don’t want you to wind up like Cindy. And this Max creep will chew you up and spit you out, honey. He doesn’t care about you, no matter what he said or did. A guy like that only cares about himself.”

Still shaking her head and crying hysterically, Atlanta ran up the stairs and into the guest room, again, slamming the door behind her.

Savannah stood in the middle of her living room, arms and heart empty. She liked to think of herself as a pretty tough broad, but this was just one thing too many. Much more of this and she was going to just “cut her strings and go straight up,” as Gran would say ... whatever the hell that meant.

Dirk rose from the footstool and walked over to her. Sliding his arms around her shoulders, he folded her against his big, warm bear chest. “You had to do it, Van,” he said. “She’s feelin’ pretty rotten up there right now, but she’ll be feelin’ a lot worse if she keeps hanging around that scuzball.”

He patted the top of her head as though she were a cocker spaniel. It felt remarkably good. “You’ve warned her; now the rest is up to her.”

“She hates me,” Savannah said with a sniff, her face buried against his shirt. “My little sister hates me.”

Good ol’ Dirk
, Savannah thought as she leaned back and looked up at him. He didn’t seem to even notice that she was getting tears all over the front of his clean shirt. Now that was a friend.

“Naw ... she doesn’t hate you. She just hates the truth that you told her. And right now she’s too young to know the difference.”

“I appreciate you coming along for this,” Savannah said as she and Dirk climbed the stairs to the veranda of the old Victorian-style house.

San Carmelita had been built with citrus money at the turn of the century, and this section of town had been restored beautifully. The brass plaque on the front lawn stated that this house, as with many others on Santa Barbara Street, had been declared a California historical landmark.

“Nice place,” she admitted reluctantly as they approached the door with its beveled and stained-glass oval window. “I have to admit I would have felt better about this if he’d had his ‘studio’ off some dark alley in a tough part of town.”

“Why’s that?” Dirk rapped on the door with the heavy brass knocker in the shape of a horseshoe.

“Because criminals should look, talk, act, and live in bad places so that we can tell at a glance. Nowadays they’re getting so ‘respectable’ that you can’t tell the difference.”

Dirk knocked again, and Savannah was quiet for a moment, bracing herself for the coming confrontation. It felt good having Dirk beside her again, especially for something this emotional. She had to admit she really hated working alone.

The door opened and a beautiful young Asian woman opened the door. Dressed in a red silk kimono, her black hair flowing past her hips, she was incredibly striking. The only imperfection in an otherwise blemishless appearance were her eyes. They were empty, lacking the life and sparkle that should be there, considering her youth.