Buried In Buttercream

minute here. I didn’t kill anybody! Not even her !”
    “Sounds like you had a better reason than most,” Dirk returned. “And you just admitted that you threatened to.”
    “Threatening to and doing it are two way different things! I’ll admit that if I was gonna kill somebody, it would’ve been her, but it wasn’t me!”
    “Then do you have any idea who it might have been?” Savannah asked. “Give us somebody else to look at, and we might not look at you so hard.”
    “Yeah,” Dirk added, “at the moment you’re number one on our suspect list.”
    Francie appeared to be thinking hard, her forehead scrunched up, her eyes narrowed. Finally, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I’d say her husband. He was even madder than I was when he found out what her and Arlo had been up to.”
    “It wasn’t her husband,” Dirk said.
    “Then it must be Arlo.” Francie nodded vigorously and looked momentarily relieved. “Yeah, he probably had it done. He knows a lot of people who’d do it for a six-pack of beer. And before he went to jail, she was driving him crazy with all the phone calls, trying to get back together with him. Arlo’s got a temper on him. If she rubbed him the wrong way one too many times ... Pow! He’d either do it or have it done.”
    “Pow?” Savannah raised one eyebrow. “Does Arlo have a habit of going ... pow?”
    “Oh, yeah. He beat the crap out of me at least once a week.”
    Savannah looked at the woman and shook her head. “He beat you once a week, fooled around on you, and you think he’s capable of murdering another woman ... but you want him back as soon as he gets out of jail?”
    Francie got a sappy look on her face that made Savannah want to go ... pow ... herself, to try and knock some sense into her.
    “You don’t know what he’s like when he’s in a good mood and everything’s going right. He can be so sweet, too.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “No, he can! And he’s sooo good in bed, too. Way better than even Willy is.”
    Suddenly, Savannah’s ankles started to itch. And then her shins, and on up to her knees. The sensation wormed its way up her body, until she had a sneaking suspicion she was going to have to refill that cream prescription again.
    An old proverb about “going to bed with dogs and getting up with fleas” ran through her mind.
    Fortunately, Dirk was fishing a business card out of his pocket and handing it to Francie.
    “If you think of anything that might help us, please give me a call at that number,” he said.
    She shot him a flirty grin as she tucked the card safely between her generous breasts.
    “Maybe I’ll give you a call whether I can think of anything helpful or not,” she breathed up at him, batting her spidery eyelashes.
    “No,” he said. “Don’t do that. Business calls only.”
    She giggled. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

    “You know she’s gonna call you,” Savannah told him as they walked out of Willy’s and across the parking lot to his car. “And it’s gonna be a booty call, for sure.”
    “I know,” he said with a sigh.
    They reached the Buick, and he opened the door for her. “Maybe she’ll lose the card.”
    “Naw. That’s just wishful thinking. She’s got it tucked nice and safe, right next to her heart. Sooo sweet.”
    He snorted. “Hell, she could shove a typewriter in there and not be able to find it later.”

Chapter 13
    W hen Savannah and Dirk dropped by her house an hour later to refuel on whatever the invading hoards might have left unmolested in her refrigerator, they apparently didn’t make enough noise coming through the front door. Because Savannah hadn’t had time to put her purse on the foyer table before they overheard a lively conversation going on in the living room.
    And it was all about them.
    “I don’t think they’re even going to get married,” said a voice that sounded a lot like Marietta’s to Savannah’s trained ear. “That Savannah’s gonna mess this up and wind up an old maid, you mark my words.”
    Another voice—Savannah was pretty sure it was Cordele—replied, “If you’d ever picked up a psychology book instead of that crap you’re always reading, you’d know that Savannah has major abandonment issues, brought on by an absentee father figure and an alcoholic mother.”
    “Naw, she’s just too set in her ways to ever be able to live with anybody. You wait and see. She’s gonna die alone here in this house with nothing but her