Bitter Sweets

by G. A. McKevett

  “How did you get to be so wise?” Tammy asked. Savannah could hear the sincerity in her voice. It both flattered her and made her ashamed.

  If I were all that damned smart, Lisa Mallock would be alive right now and her little girl would be safe, her lacerated conscience whispered. But she didn’t need to place any of her own guilt on Tammy. Judging from the kid’s hunched shoulders and bowed head, she was toting more than a full load already.

  “I’m not wise. Just old,” Savannah replied. “Let’s say, I’ve been around the Monopoly board a few times more than you.”

  For several long moments, neither woman said anything. At last, Savannah was pleased to hear Tammy take a sip of the cognac-laced, whipped cream-topped, hot chocolate she had made for her earlier. A little hedonism, once in a while, was good for everyone.

  “What are you going to do now?” Tammy asked. “I mean, what’s next?”

  “I’ll talk to Brian O’Donnell and make sure he doesn’t hear about his sister on the news. Then I’m going to find Earl Mallock.” Again, she gripped the windowsill, but this time the gesture wasn’t one of weakness, but anger. “And when I get my hands on him, I’m going to send him directly to hell.”

  Brian took it better than Savannah had hoped. Much better. In fact, he was so calm and matter-of-fact about the whole thing that she entertained a few doubts about his own agenda.

  “Are you absolutely sure that her ex-husband did it?” he asked.

  “At this point, I would say it’s likely. But you never know until a case is closed,” she replied.

  “I think I’ll stay in town until then. . . . until you know for sure.”

  “We’ll stay in touch.”

  Other than the usual “hello” and “good-bye” pleasantries, that was the extent of their conversation, and Brian O’Donnell was on his way.

  As Savannah watched his rental car pull out of her drive and disappear around the corner, Tammy appeared, a bunch of computer printouts in her hand and the glint of a smile showing on her tear-swollen face.

  “I decided I was wasting time and energy feeling rotten about what happened to Mrs. Mallock,” she said, pulling Savannah over to the sofa and forcing her to sit. “So, I got busy. You’d be surprised what you can find out about a person with just a computer and a modem. . . . when you put your mind to it and stop feeling sorry for yourself, that is.”

  Savannah glanced over the papers and was duly impressed. “Good work, Ms. Hart. Don’t let anyone call you a blond bimbo. You are extremely talented and intelligent. Don’t ever forget it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, Earl Mallock held a city business license?”

  “That’s right. An antique shop, downtown on Harrington Boulevard. And he had a partner named Alan Logan. It went kaput a few months ago.”

  “We’ll have to get Mr. Logan’s address and have a talk with him.”

  Tammy grabbed the papers, sorted through them, and proudly produced a sheet with the information. “Here you go. Alan Logan’s home address, new business address, and unlisted telephone number. By the way, his credit rating is the pits. . . . filed bankruptcy six months ago, after the business bit it. Got a divorce two months ago.”

  “Is that all you have?”

  Tammy jumped up from the sofa and headed toward the office. “You just go talk to him,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m on a roll here. By the time you get back, I’ll know if he wears briefs or boxers.”

  Savannah drove past the high school, with its hordes of loitering teenagers that made her homesick for her Georgia siblings, and turned left on Lester.

  Less-than-picturesque Lester Street ran parallel to the prestigious Harrington Boulevard from one end of the downtown area to the other. But only geographically speaking. Both thoroughfares were located in the quaint, Los Angeles tourist trap part of San Carmelita, the area that surrounded the old mission. The only difference was: Harrington Boulevard had been renovated back in the eighties—palm trees planted, sidewalks widened, wrought-iron streetlamps installed—and Lester Street hadn’t been touched.

  The fact that Alan Logan’s antique shop had once been located on Harrington, but was now situated on Lester, told Savannah that he had been forced to slide down a peg on the business ladder. Intuition told her that he probably wasn’t too happy about it.

  Glancing at her watch, she decided to give Dirk another call to find out what, if anything, was happening on his end. Punching in his car phone number on her own mobile phone, she watched the street signs, looking for Alan Logan’s shop.

  Dirk didn’t answer. Well, that wasn’t so unusual. He had a way of ignoring almost everything in life that he considered a nuisance, and his phone was certainly one.

  She tried the next most plausible possibility.

  “San Carmelita Police Station.” Bette, with the fake French accent, was on the board. Somewhere on the distant shores of her gene pool, Bette boasted a Parisian grand-mère, and she seemed to think this lineage gave her additional sex appeal. No one else seemed to hold the same opinion. . . . but Bette didn’t seem to notice.

  “Sergeant Coulter, please.” Savannah tried to douse her Southern accent and sound official, so she wouldn’t be recognized. The last thing she needed right now was to have a long, boring chat with Bette.

  “Savannah? Is that you?”

  Savannah stifled a groan. “Yes. Oh. . . . is this Bette?”

  “Yes! Where are you?”

  That was a funny thing to ask, Savannah thought. Usually Bette would launch into some nonsense about her latest boyfriend, her annoying neighbor, or some other equally less-than-fascinating topic.

  “Just running some errands,” Savannah replied curtly.

  “Yeah, but where?”

  “Here and there. Does it matter?”

  “Ah. . . . so, what’s it like, being a lady of leisure, your own boss and all that?”

  Savannah bit her lower lip. “I really wouldn’t know. Is Dirk in?”

  “I wouldn’t know either.” Suddenly, Bette sounded a little icy around the edges. “Hold on.”

  “Reid, is that you?”

  When Savannah heard the grating, nasal voice of Captain Bloss, she almost wished she could transfer back to Bette.

  “Yes, I think Bette got her lines switched. I need to talk to Dirk.”

  “I’ll just bet you do. But I want to talk to you.”

  “Why? I don’t want to talk to you.” She was past pretending to be polite with this jackass. Their mutual hatred had been openly declared long ago.

  “This ain’t social, Reid. This is business.”

  Warning bells went off in her head, like her smoke detectors at home the last time she had burnt a skilletful of liver and onions. The prospect of “talking” to Bloss was about as distasteful as that entrée had been.

  “We don’t have any business,” she said.

  “How about a nice little chat about you being charged with ‘accessory to homicide’?”

  She could hear the glee in his voice, and it made her want to slap him hard enough to make his ponderous jowls flap. It also made her pulse race, because she knew he wasn’t bluffing. That son of a bitch would do it, if for no other reason than to make her life miserable for a while.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “So, come in and tell me to my face how ridiculous I am. And while you’re at it, tell me what you were doing at the murder scene.”

  “Murder scene? What murder scene?”

  “Come in.”

  “Why?”

  “Come in, Reid, or we’ll bring you in.”

  “All right, all right. I’m coming.”

  “When?”

  Savannah glanced at her watch again. It was a quarter to five. Bloss liked to charge out the door at a minute to five and absolutely no later. But she knew he would wait for her. He wouldn’t miss the opportunity to grill her for the world.

  “I’m in. . . . ah . . . . LA right no
w. I can be there in . . . . oh, say. . . . an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

  She grinned as she heard him mutter something under his breath. “One hour,” he said. “I’ll wait until fifteen to six, but you damned well better show.”

  “See you then,” she said sweetly.

  Switching off the phone, she pulled the Camaro into the parking lot behind a modest shop, bearing the sign: Logan’s Collectibles.

  “Yeah, right,” she said, climbing out of the car. “I’ll see you, Captain Bloss, when assholes like you can toot ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ ”

  The moment Savannah walked into Alan Logan’s antique store, she instantly wished she had ten thousand dollars in pocket change. Maybe more. This was exactly her kind of stuff: Victorian velvet settees, Tiffany lamps, wing chairs with diamond-tucked hunter green leather, rolltop desks, and ornately carved French beds with matching armoires.

  Dirk had once accused her of having decorating taste that was “more gaudy than a whore’s drawers.” She had reminded him that not everyone had his distinctive flair for furnishing a house trailer with cardboard boxes and rusted TV trays.

  “Mr. Alan Logan, please,” she told the young woman who accosted her before she had gone ten feet.

  “Al is busy right now. Perhaps I can help you.” The guarded look in the saleswoman’s eyes told Savannah that either commissions were a rare and coveted commodity in this establishment, or the lady had a thing for “Al” and didn’t want to share him with another female. Not even a female customer.

  “I’ll wait,” Savannah replied, then turned to study the deliciously secret cubbyholes in a nearby rolltop, oak desk.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Savannah watched in her peripheral vision to see if the woman would go alert Logan to her presence. She didn’t, so Savannah decided to do it herself.

  Ignoring the woman’s raised eyebrow, she marched past her and into the back room, where a fortyish, well-built man in stained jeans and a pleasantly tight tee shirt was scraping layers of paint off a piecrust table.

  The fumes from the remover hit her with a wallop, and she decided to breathe through her ears for a while.

  “How could anybody have done that to such a pretty piece of furniture?” she said as his blade curled up the layers of green paint with gold accents, revealing a rich mahogany woodgrain underneath.

  “It’s a crime,” he replied, pausing to pull a red shop cloth from his back pocket and swipe it across his wet brow. The sweat was causing his dark chestnut waves to curl in a manner that she could only describe as “cute.” “But then, I love peeling it off and seeing what I’ve got.”

  “My gran back in Georgia has a table just like that one,” she said, dropping to one knee to examine the item more closely.

  “So, maybe I can sell you this one. . . . ?”

  She smiled, giving him the full benefit of the famous Reid dimples. “Naw, Gran said she’d leave it to me in her will. Although I’m in no rush to get it,” she added quickly. She wasn’t exactly superstitious about such things, but with Granny Reid being eighty-three, you had to be careful what you said.

  “I’m Alan Logan, owner of this place.” He waved a stained hand, the gesture proudly sweeping his domain. “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I’m not exactly furniture shopping today,” she admitted.

  “I see.”

  Of course, he didn’t see, but his hazel eyes looked vaguely interested behind his paint speckled, wire-framed glasses, and that was a start.

  “You used to be over on Harrington Boulevard,” she began, then reconsidered the wisdom of her opening gambit when she saw him scowl.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “And when you were, you had a partner named Earl Mallock.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Mmmm. . . . well, I need to speak to him, very badly, and I was wondering if you might know how I could reach him.”

  Logan returned to his furniture stripping, and Savannah noticed that his hand was gripping the scraper far harder than necessary. His knuckles were literally turning white.

  The excess blood seemed to have flowed to his face, which was bright crimson.

  “I’ll do you a favor,” Logan said through a tight jaw, “I’ll give you the best advice I can. Stay away from that bastard, and save yourself a lot of grief.”

  “Believe me, my intentions aren’t romantic or even social in nature.”

  He perked up immediately. “Oh, really? Are you a bill collector or something?”

  “An ‘or something.’ I’m a private investigator.” She pulled her identification from her pocket and flipped it open so he could read it.

  “You’re a P.I.?” He glanced her up and down with renewed interest. “I thought those were all ugly guys with gum on their shoes.”

  She lifted her loafer and showed him some residue which she had collected on her way in from the parking lot. “One out of three?”

  He chuckled, and it occurred to her that he was rather attractive when he smiled.

  “I don’t know where Earl is,” he said. “Haven’t seen him since the day I dragged him into court. I won, too. But I can give you the name of somebody who does know where he is . . . . whether she’ll admit it or not.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “Not so fast. First you have to promise that when you find ol’ Earl, you’ll give him a message from me.”

  “A verbal message?”

  He laughed, but he didn’t sound amused. “Yeah, no lead or steel involved.”

  Savannah considered the deal. A few words delivered in exchange for a valuable tip. It seemed acceptable. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a pad and paper. “Okay, I promise.”

  “There’s a crazy bartender, six feet one inch, with purple hair who—”

  “Purple?” Savannah just wanted to make sure she had heard correctly.

  “That’s right. Bright purple. She works at the Shoreline Club at the bottom of El Camino Boulevard on the beach. Her name’s Vanessa. For some reason I could never figure, she’s nuts about Earl. And Earl. . . . well. . . . he’s just plain nuts. I’m pretty sure that she won’t tell you, but she’ll know where he is.”

  “Okay, thanks a lot.” She scribbled on the notepad. “And what’s the message?”

  His friendly, hazel eyes went suddenly cold; the transformation was startling. “You tell him that he and Alan Logan still aren’t even. Not by a lo-o-ong shot.”

  When Savannah got back into her car, she decided to give Dirk’s mobile phone another try. This time he answered.

  “Yo.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Have I ever told you that your particular telephone salutation makes you sound like a cracker?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, several times. But considering you eat stale cornbread crumbled up in buttermilk with a dash of salt and pepper, I’m not going to lose any sleep over what you think of me.”

  “It’s good in regular milk, too . . . . without the pepper.”

  “Yuck. What do you want?”

  She headed the Camaro homeward. A hot cup of coffee and a piece of raspberry cheesecake would give her some fuel to run on for the rest of the day. Maybe a bit of chocolate sauce drizzled across the top.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” she said.

  “Body’s at the morgue. Dr. Liu is finished with her.”

  Savannah winced, having seen Jennifer Liu perform more than a few autopsies. More than anything else, Savannah had never gotten over the shock of seeing how a brutal act committed by one person could turn another living, breathing, human being into a piece of dead meat.

  If it were the result of an accident or disease, one could more easily chalk it up to Divine Will, karma, or simple destiny. But murder went against the rules. There was no way to believe it was good or a natural occurrence.

  “What did she find?” Savannah asked.

  “Cause of death was the gunshot to the head.”

  In spite of
herself, Savannah recalled the grisly details of the wound. “Yeah, no shit. We didn’t need Dr. Jennifer to tell us that.”

  “Her wrists and ankles had been wired like that for at least six to eight hours before she died.”

  Savannah’s stomach twisted a few notches tighter, and she nearly drove through a red light. “Great. I’m sure I’ll dream about that one. Any hair or fibers?”

  “The victim’s. Some longer red ones that might be the kid’s.”

  There was more; she could hear it in his voice. “And?”

  “And a couple of medium length dark brown. . . . almost black. . . . and curly.”

  Unconsciously, Savannah reached up to her own head and fingered the thick, dark locks that she had tied back with a scrunchy. Distinctly, she remembered bending over the body. It was amazing how easy it was to transfer material from one source to another. “Oh, joy,” she said without enthusiasm. “What else?”

  “Bloss decided to get involved in this one personally. . . . it being the daughter of a friend of the chiefs and all.”

  “Yeah, he never misses an opportunity to kiss the back ot Hillquist’s trousers.”

  “The secretary at the resort gave us up, told him there were three of us there this morning. Of course, he recognized your description right away.”

  “Of course. Did you know that he told me to come in and ‘talk.’ ”

  Dirk took too long to answer. “Ah. . . . yeah, Van. I heard.”

  “How serious is he?”

  Again, too much silence. “He. . . . um . . . . he told me to bring you in.”

  “You?” Her south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line, rebel temper flared. “That son of a bitch. Of all the others he could have sent, he had to rub salt in the wound by picking you.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “You what?”

  “Damn it, Van, if anybody’s gotta do it, I thought it should be me.”