Sugar and Spite (6 page)

“Well, we see who came out on top of the pack,” Savannah muttered under her breath. “The beta male jackal himself.”

Dirk shot her a look that told her he understood the reference. Everyone knew that although Lieutenant Jeffries spent half his time exploiting his limited authority and making life unpleasant for his underlings, he spent the other half applying his puckered kisser to the seat of Chief Norman Hillquist’s trousers. Jeffries wanted to be chief of police of San Carmelita when he grew up someday; Hillquist wanted to be mayor. Watching them interact with each other, the city council members, and everyone else with money or influence was nauseating for less ambitious people like Savannah, Dirk, and the other cops who were just trying to stay alive and do a decent job.

Jeffries gave Savannah a curt nod and pulled a chair up to the head of the table. He sat down and rested his elbows on the table, folding his fingers in a judicious pose.

“So, I get top-notch service,” Dirk said, not bothering to hide his sarcastic tone. “You’re going to squeeze me personally, huh?”

Savannah winced inwardly. Dirk seemed to have a gift for making a bad situation worse. “Diplomacy” wasn’t a commonly used word in his personal lexicon.

Jeffries fixed him with cold gray eyes that would have cut through a man with less chutzpah than Dirk Coulter. “We take officer-involved shootings very seriously in this department, Sergeant. I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Especially in an election year when the chief’s trying to bump up to mayor and you’re trying to fill his spot, huh? Don’t want any bad PR for the department right now.” Dirk leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his barrel chest—the picture of defiance. Savannah longed to reach over and slap some sense into him. This wasn’t the time to be cute.

Jeffries’s eyes narrowed and his mouth pulled into a tight line. “Election or no, there’s never a good time for a cop to blow away his ex-wife,” he said smoothly, with a deadly lack of inflection. “It’s almost always frowned upon by the local citizenry. Especially the female population.”

“And that’s more than half the voters.”

Savannah couldn’t stand it. She kicked him under the table and landed a solid one on his shin. He winced, but dropped a bit of the tough-guy facade. “I didn’t kill her, Lieutenant,” he said with a convincing degree of sincerity. “I know it looks bad, my trailer, my gun… her being my ex, but it was an intruder.”

“The intruder you wrestled with and disarmed… as in, you had your gun in your hand, but he still got away?”

“My hands were wet, and I dropped my weapon. And I hesitated a couple of seconds to check on Pol—the victim… and he ran out the door. I chased him, but it was dark and… well…” He shrugged. “I’m not happy about it, but that’s the way it went down.”

“Uh-huh.” Jeffries stood and began to pace the floor behind Dirk. It was a move designed to make the interviewee feel intimidated, having questions fired from behind by an unseen interrogator. Savannah had seen Dirk use it many times. She was surprised that Jeffries would use it on a veteran.

Jeffries stroked his chin thoughtfully. She didn’t like the arrogant, assured look on his face. The expression was a common one for him, but all the more disturbing, considering her friend’s rear end was in the wringer. And it appeared Jeffries was the one turning the crank. “And nobody saw this mysterious intruder running around outside,” he continued. “They didn’t see anyone outside except you, that is. Naked.”

Dirk’s face flushed angrily. “I was in the shower when I heard the shot. I came out of the bathroom and found my ex-wife bleeding all over the floor. What I was—or wasn’t—wearing at the time wasn’t a big concern of mine.”

“What was your ex-wife doing there in the first place?”

Dirk turned in his chair to face Jeffries. “What are you talking about? There’s something wrong with my former old lady dropping by to shoot the breeze?”

“But you weren’t shooting the breeze. You were arguing… loudly. Your neighbors heard you. What was the fight about?”

Dirk released a long, weary sigh and shook his head. Savannah could tell that he was exhausted, and it worried her; Dirk wasn’t at his best when he was tired. And under the circumstances, he needed to be top-notch.

“I thought she had come by to… you know… touch base, to hang out for old times’ sake,” he said. “She gave me a flower, because of Valentine’s Day comin’ up. But then she admitted that she was in trouble… again… and wanted me to bail her out. I got pissed off and told her, ‘No way.’ I was sick of her using me.”

Jeffries walked back to his chair and sat down again. “What kind of trouble did she say she was in?”

“She didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I just told her I wasn’t going to be her patsy this time. Money, or whatever it was she wanted, I wasn’t interested. I told her to take a hike; then I took a shower.”

“And she got shot. With your gun.”

“Well, maybe you take your weapon into the shower with you. I don’t. It specifically says not to in the manufacturer’s manual.”

Jeffries said nothing, but made a five-second attempt to stare Dirk down. It didn’t work. The lieutenant was the first to look away.

“I’m tired,” Dirk said. “I’ve had the day from hell, and I want to leave now.” He stood and shoved the chair against the table. “I told Jake McMurtry everything I could think of at the scene, and I’ll write you a two-hundred-page report before the end of the day. But right now, I’ve gotta lie down somewhere, or I’m going to fall down.”

Savannah stood with him. “He’s going to my place. He’ll be there if you need him; just call.”

It isn’t going to work
, she thought. No way would Jeffries cut him loose after only half a dozen questions.

“All right. Go get some sleep,” Jeffries said. Savannah braced her jaw to keep it from dropping. “Have your report on my desk by five.”

Savannah hurried to Dirk, grabbed his elbow, and hustled him toward the door before the lieutenant could change his mind.

“One more thing,” Jeffries said before they could make their exit.
Uh-oh
, Savannah thought.
There’s always a catch.
“Don’t talk to the press. Not one word, or I’ll haul your ass back in here so fast it’ll make your dick spin.”

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I’m not talking to nobody ‘bout nothin’,” Dirk said.

Savannah shoved him through the door and closed it behind them. In less than thirty seconds she had him out of the station and was leading him, like an obedient cocker spaniel, across the parking lot, toward her Camaro.

“So, after all these years,” he said, “you’re inviting me to spend the night with you.”

“Only because your place is a crime scene,” she told him, slipping her arm through his. “And don’t get frisky on me. You’re sleeping in the spare room.”

He leaned down and placed a quick kiss on her forehead. “Don’t worry, kiddo. I just want to drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and quietly pass out. Any horizontal surface will do. Believe me: Frisky’s the last thing on my mind.”

* * *

“I know that you never liked Polly,” Dirk said as he poured himself the fourth shot of the evening. And the evening—at least the drinking part—was only thirty minutes old.

Savannah watched, a little concerned as his unsteady hand replaced the bottle on her coffee table. He didn’t spill it, but he definitely set it down with more force than necessary. Dirk’s depth perception was always the first sense to go when he became inebriated. Which wasn’t all that often. He liked an evening beer with his Whopper or Big Mac, but she had seldom seen him show his liquor.

But there was a first time for everything, and Savannah figured the night a guy watched his ex-wife die was as good a night as any to get stinking drunk. Excuses didn’t get much better than that.

Besides, there were only a couple more hours of the night left. The green digital readout on her VCR said it was 4:25
a.m.
. She figured she would get him soused, then drag him upstairs and throw him into her guest bed. He could sleep all day… as long as he woke up in time to generate a report for Lieutenant Jeffries.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll admit it. Polly wasn’t one of my favorite people. But then, I didn’t know her as well as you did. Apparently you saw something in her that wasn’t obvious to me.”

Heaven knows what
, she added silently as she settled back in her easy chair and petted the ebony, green-eyed purring machine that was curled in her lap.

Dirk tossed back the shot and grimaced as it went down the hatch. Then he leaned back on the sofa and propped his feet on the coffee table. Savannah had told him a thousand times to keep his shoes off her furniture. A thousand and one times, he had forgotten.

“Polly could be sweet, when she wanted to be,” he said. “At least, she was in the beginning. She’d say, ‘Pretty please,’ and butter me up when she wanted something. And when I gave it to her, she acted all grateful, like I was some fantastic sort of hero who’d rescued her.”

Savannah listened quietly, stroking Diamante, remembering something that her grandmother had told her once. Granny Reid had said, “It’s not so much the person we fall in love with… as much as it’s the way they make us feel about ourselves.”

Perhaps that wasn’t such a grand and glorious commentary on the human heart, but the older Savannah got, the more she realized how true Gran’s words were.

So, Polly had made Dirk feel like a knight in shining armor, rescuing a fair damsel who was perpetually in distress. Sometimes her dragons were real, other times imaginary, but they were always of her own making. A fact that seemed to elude Dirk.

But the maid-in-trouble routine had worked all too well for Polly. She had never been without male company. Usually she had dangled several on a chain at once.

Savannah tried to recall the last time she had felt a tug on her own chain. Ages. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of asking knights to wield their swords on her behalf. Maybe she should take some lessons from Polly on carefully cultivated helplessness.

But then, defenseless Polly was lying in the morgue, next in line to be autopsied. So much for surrendering your personal power to avoid personal responsibility. If she hadn’t come over to Dirk’s to try to finagle him into bailing her out of some sort of problem, she would probably still be alive and irritating people.

“Do you have any idea what she wanted from you?” Savannah asked, sipping her own hot chocolate, which, for once, wasn’t laced with Bailey’s or anything else alcoholic. One of them had to stay sober to negotiate the stairs later. And there was another reason for someone to keep a clear head… a reason she didn’t want to think too much about right then.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t there to cozy up to me—that’s for sure,” Dirk said with a sigh as he poured another shot. “Whatever she wanted, it wasn’t to kiss and make up.”

For the first time, Savannah realized that Dirk had actually hoped, at least briefly, that Polly’s appearance, Valentine rose in hand, might have indicated a desire to reconcile on her part. She also realized that he might have welcomed that. The revelation didn’t sit well with her.

“If we could find out what sort of problem she had, we might know why somebody wanted to kill her,” Savannah said. It wasn’t the time to talk shop, but she couldn’t help herself. Her mental cogs were already whirring. If things went as badly as she was afraid they would for Dirk, he was going to need some help… a lot of help to clear himself of Polly’s murder.

He tossed back the shot and shuddered. “Right now… frankly, my dear… I don’t give a rat’s ass.” As he wiped his hand across his eyes, Savannah thought how tired, how gray he looked. She needed to get him into bed soon. “I guess I should care,” he added, slurring his words a bit, “but I don’t. I figure I’ll care later. Tomorrow or maybe the next day.”

Savannah scooped Diamante out of her lap and placed the cat gently on the footstool. The miniature leopard didn’t even open an eye. “I think I’d better get you upstairs and into your bunk, cowboy,” she told Dirk, “before you pass out on me and I have to haul your mangy hide up those steps with brute strength.”

He stood on wobbly legs and took a careful step toward her. “Yeah, I think I’ve enjoyed about as much of this day as I can stand. Let’s put an end to it.”

With his arm slung over her shoulders and hers wrapped around his waist, she helped him up the stairs and down the hallway to her small, but adequate, guest bedroom. She knew he must be exhausted when he didn’t even complain about the room’s feminine, tulip-spangled quilt and lace curtains.

She barely had time to pull back the spread and sheets before he collapsed across the bed. “Come on,” she said, tugging his sneakers off and tossing them on the floor, “we might as well make you comfy. Get out of those clothes.”

In much the same way as she would have undressed one of her nieces or nephews, she removed his socks, shirt, and jeans. Although he didn’t help her much, he didn’t resist. She decided to leave on his boxers. Seeing him naked once in a twenty-four-hour period was enough.

“Bathroom’s down the hall on the right if you need it,” she told him. “The door on the left is a closet, and if you ‘drain your dragon’ or ‘hang your rat’ on my linens there, you’re dead meat.”

She waited for a reply but got only a cursory grunt as he snuggled into the covers and bunched the pillow under his head.

“Sleep tight, buddy,” she said as she leaned over and gave him a peck on the forehead. “If you need anything, give a holler.”

When he offered no response, she figured he was already a goner. But after she had turned out the light, as she was softly closing the door behind her, she heard him say, “Thanks, Van… for everything.”

“You’re welcome, sugar,” she whispered. “You’d do it for me.”

“I would,” he said. She could hear the drowsiness in his voice as sleep overtook him. “You know, Van… if you needed me, I’d rescue you, too. And I wouldn’t resent it, like I did with Polly. I’d be glad to help you out.”

Savannah felt a little catch in her throat that seemed to squeeze some unexpected moisture into her eyes. “I know you would, darlin’,” she whispered. “Hush now and get yourself to sleep.”