Sour Grapes

ya.”
    “Good.”
    At that moment, Savannah heard a door open to the right and, to her dismay, Marion Lippincott walked through it. There was nothing quite like lack of organization to spoil a perfectly good lineup.
    “Shit,” Dirk muttered. “What’s she doin’ back here? ... ruins everything.”
    Trent looked around him, a definite haziness in his eyes that spoke of too many nights spent partying and not enough studying. “What?” he said, equally concerned. He spotted Marion Lippincott “Oh, all you need is a positive ID, right?” he asked Dirk.
    Dirk froze. He gave Savannah a quick, I-Can’t-Believe-It glance, and said. “Ye-e-e-es.”
    “Okay, then... I recognize her,” Trent said, happy to comply if it meant this ordeal might be over. “That old gal there... she’s the one who was at that wine place when I dropped off the flowers. I recognize her. Okay?” Dirk and Savannah stared at each other, then back at Trent.
    “Well, what’re you waitin’ for?” Having performed his civic duty, Trent was getting antsy. “You got your positive ID. Now I’m outta here, right?”
    Dirk shook his head, still incredulous. “Boy, you gotta lay off sniffin’ that paint or whatever you’re doin’. You ain’t got much left upstairs.”
    Dirk replaced the cuffs, then walked over to Marion Lippincott who looked equally impatient. “I believe you can go back to your pageant now, Mrs. Lippincott. Thanks to Mr. Gorton, we’ve got all we need here.”

    Savannah stood behind the glass and watched Trent Gorton squirm in what was called the “sweat tank,” but politely known to the public as the interrogation room. And Dirk was one of the best when it came to making a suspect sweat.
    “So, why did you kill her? Was it because she broke up with you?” Dirk paced up and down behind the kid’s chair, the action designed to raise his anxiety level as much as to work off Dirk’s nervous energy.
    “She didn’t break up with me; I broke up with her. I’ve done told you that.”
    Dirk laughed. “Oh, yeah, a gorgeous gal like that... a scumbucket like you just up and dumps her. I’m sup posed to believe that, huh?”
    Trent shrugged his skinny shoulders and toyed with the enormous skull ring on his middle finger. “You can believe it, or don’t believe it. It don’t matter to me what you believe, you know what I’m sayin’, man? That’s what happened, I swear it on my mama’s grave.”
    Dirk reached over and gave him swat on the back of the head. “Your mama ain’t dead, peabrain, so you swearin’ on her grave don’t mean dick. Now you better start telling me the truth or I’m gonna start showin’ you some serious disrespect. We found your fingerprints on the flowerpot, so we know you were at Villa Rosa that night. And even better, we’ve got more of your prints on the windowsill. You left them there when you leaned in and poured the chicken blood on the bed.”
    “Okay, okay! So I did the chicken thing. I’ll admit that. But I didn’t kill Barbie. I didn’t even see her there that night. I just did that business with the chicken to get back at her, and then I left. That’s all I did.”
    “You didn’t figure you’d knock off the mother of your baby to make your life a whole lot simpler?”
    Savannah watched the kid carefully and saw genuine surprise dawn in his eyes. He hadn’t known. Barbie hadn’t told him.
    “Barb was pregnant?” he asked. “She was gonna have a baby?”
    “You didn’t know that, huh?”
    “No. She didn’t say nothin’ about it. But, come to think of it, maybe that’s why she was actin’ weird.”
    “Weird?”
    “You know, man, wantin’ to break up with me and all that.”
    “So, now she’s the one who wanted to break it off with you? Make up your mind. Usually, a girl who’s knocked up ain’t the one callin’ it off. Usually it’s the guy who wants out. Whose kid do you figure it was?”
    Trent jumped up from the seat, but Dirk pushed him right back down. “If Barbie was pregnant, it was my kid,” he said, slamming his fist on the table. “You understand me, man?”
    “I think you’re tellin’ me that you were so special that she wasn’t doin’ nobody else but you. That’s what you’re sayin’, right?”
    “Right! That’s exactly right. She didn’t need nobody but Trent. I was more than enough for that bitch.”
    Dirk walked around the table and sat down across from him. “Tell me something, Trent. What color is the carpet in