A Decadent Way to Die by G.A. McKevett Read Free Book Online Page B

warily.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Dirk Coulter.” Dirk took his badge from inside his jacket pocket, flipped it open, and showed him. “This is my friend, Savannah Reid. Are you the gardener here?”
He hesitated, as though having to decide whether or not to admit it. “Yes,” he said finally. “I am.”
“And your name is Tiago?” Savannah asked.
“Tiago Medina.” Again, he couldn’t appear less enthused about their presence.
“I hear you are el héroe , Tiago,” she told him with a dimpled smile and a slight fluttering of eyelashes.
He looked confused for a moment, then shook his head and glanced down at his worn work boots. “No. I’m not a hero.”
Savannah was slightly surprised that the dimple/eyelash business hadn’t worked. Even if the guy was at least ten years her junior, males from eight to eighty usually succumbed to the Southern Belle Double Whammy.
Maybe the old girl’s losing her touch? she thought. Naw, it couldn’t be that .
“But you saved Mrs. Strauss’s life when she fell down the cliff,” Dirk said, picking up where she had left off. “That makes a guy a hero in my book.”
Tiago shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Miss Helene has been good to me. She gave me a job, a house, for years. And my wife, too.” A momentary look of sadness crossed his face. “Miss Helene was in trouble. I helped.”
“I’ve seen that cliff,” Savannah said. “It’s very high, very steep. You risked your life saving her.”
He shrugged and smiled. “She would have done the same for me, if it had been me hanging there.”
Savannah thought it over for a moment and laughed. “Yes, I’ve only known Helene Strauss for a few minutes, and I agree. She’d probably climbed right down that cliff to get you.”
Tiago’s eyes twinkled. “She is like my grandmother in Ecuador. She is … what you say … a pistola .”
“Yes,” Savannah agreed. “A pistol. Your grandma, mine, and Helene, too.”
“And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Dirk mumbled, giving Savannah a nudge.
“Speaking of apples,” Savannah said. “Miss Helene baked some strudel for me earlier today, and I’d like to go back into her kitchen and look for something. She’s gone to her office, but she said you could let me back into the house. Would you mind, Tiago?”
“Miss Helene told you to ask me to let you into the house?”
“Yes. She said the gardener would open the door for me.”
“What did she say, exactly?”
“She told me, ‘You are family now.’”
He nodded, obviously satisfied. “Come with me. I’ll let you inside.” He headed down the path, back toward the main house.
Savannah and Dirk fell into step beside him.
“I suppose that’s some sort of code,” Savannah prompted him. “The business about me being ‘family’?”
“Yes,” Tiago said. “Miss Helene has lots of codes. Codes for everything. She trusts no one.”
“Why do you think that is?” Savannah asked, recalling the vision of Helene Strauss charging out of her mansion, gun in hand.
“She was a little girl in Bavaria during the war,” Tiago said. “The big war.”
“World War II?” Dirk asked.
“Yes.”
As they walked along, a sadness seemed to sweep over Tiago. His shoulders slumped, and he stared blankly ahead, down the path, as though seeing nothing.
Savannah suspected his change in mood had to do with his previous comment, so she decided to pursue it. “That must have been very hard for Helene,” she said, “a child, living through the horrors of that war.”
“It was very hard for her,” Tiago said. “She told me some things. Very bad things that happened to her family.”
“Was her family Jewish?”
“Some of them were.”
Savannah thought of the pain she had seen in Helene’s green eyes, the guarded wariness, even when the woman had been acting the perfect hostess, serving apple strudel at the kitchen table.
She thought of how those eyes had looked, sighting down the barrel of a gun.
She thought of