Scarlett Beauregarde
Scarlett Beauregarde is a porcupine chocolatier in We Can Fix Pawbert and the killer at the center of the W-Series episode "Bitter".
Background
Beauregarde is middle-aged and compact, and she works out of a converted apartment above a long-closed print shop in Otterdam. Her front room has been given over to a workshop scaled to her: a tabletop roaster, a stone grinder, a tempering machine, raw cacao in a sealed cabinet. What she makes is heritage chocolate, produced the way it was for three centuries before the enzymatic detoxification process existed, which means it still carries its full theobromine load. She sells to forty clients by word of mouth, every one a species she has personally verified can tolerate the compound. No canines. No felines.
Personality
She is a craftsman first, and the workshop shows the same precision as the product. She meets a search warrant without protest and an arrest without a change in posture, and she declines an attorney. Her composure gives way only when the chemistry is walked back to her own formulation; asked to state for the record what her dark chocolate does to a wolf, she answers plainly that she knows.
Series History
W-Series
In "Bitter", Conrad Salt — the gray wolf who financed her operation and took thirty percent — moves to cash out for a venture that requires clean books. He prices his stake at ninety thousand dollars against an operation grossing eleven thousand a year, and tells her that if she cannot pay he will give the regulator her records and her client list.
She makes him a box of her strongest dark truffles and packages them as Furrero, a brand he would open without thinking, counting on his body weight and his habits to do the rest. When Luther, Nick, and Judy trace the freight account to her address, the foil, embossing tools, card stock, and ribbon are already gone, and she watches them fail to find what she removed. The chemical match to her varietal and percentage is what she cannot clear away, and she is arrested and charged with Salt's murder.
Key Relationships
Conrad Salt
Salt made the workshop possible and then made it disposable. Beauregarde's account is that his final valuation was never a calculation of worth but of what it would cost her to be rid of him.
Trivia
- Beauregarde is named for Violet Beauregarde of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; several characters in the episode carry Wonka-derived names.