Bitter Sweets

about as distasteful as that entreé 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 now. 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 diamondtucked 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 cornmissions 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