LITMIR.BIZ

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he’d say, and they’d take her away for murdering his partner. Okay, he didn’t have a partner unless he counted Newton, and nobody ever counted Newton, but still…. No wonder that book was a classic. Sam Spade got to nail her without a commitment and still feel good about himself when he dumped her. First, great sex, and then he walked out on her, free as a bird, a hero instead of a schmuck.

      Now there was a fantasy.

      Then the door opened, and he looked up, and she came in.

      Her hair was dark brown, and so were her eyes behind the veil, and her suit was pink instead of white, but everything else was pretty much his fantasy. The nose, the lips, the…

      “I’ll be damned.” With enormous effort, Mitch raised his eyes from her breasts to her face.

      “Probably.” Her low voice reverberated straight into his spine. “Are you Mitchell Peatwick?”

      “Uh, yeah.” Mitch swung his feet to the floor and stood up, wiping his sweaty palm on his shirt before offering her his hand. “Mitch Peatwick, private investigator. Listen, did you ever read The Maltese Falcon?”

      “Yes.” She ignored his hand as she surveyed the dingy office, her pout deepening as she took in the cracks in the upholstery and the dust. “Is this really your office?”

      That was the way the world worked. Anticipation tripped him up every time. If she’d just kept her mouth shut, she would have been perfect, but no…

      Reality. Nature’s downer.

      Mitch sighed and pulled his hand back. “Think of it as atmosphere. I do.” He sank into his chair and put his feet back up on the desk. “Now, how can I help you? Lose your poodle?”

      She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Would you be able to find it if I had?”

      “Just what I needed—a snotty client.” Mitch tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice, but it was hard. There was something about being snubbed in the middle of a heat wave by a beautiful woman with fantasy breasts that brought out the worst in him. And anyway, she wasn’t that beautiful. Her nose was actually pretty standard, and her lips didn’t really pout on their own, and her breasts…Don’t think about the breasts, Mitch told himself. It’ll only depress you.

      “From the looks of things, you could use any kind of client.” She surveyed the bottoms of his feet, propped up on the desk in front of her. “I’ve never actually seen paper-thin soles before. It’s amazing. I can tell the color of your socks from here. They have holes in them, too.”

      “Big deal.” Mitch smiled, world-weary and invulnerable. “Now tell me something really tough, like the color of my underwear.”

      “You’re not wearing any underwear,” she said, and Mitch put his feet down.

      “What do you want?” He glared at her through the dusty sunlight. “If you just stopped by to screw up my day, you’re done.”

      She looked around the office again and walked over to the coatrack with a hip-rolling step that strained the fabric of her tight skirt and lessened Mitch’s annoyance considerably. Then she picked up his linen jacket, walked back to the chair he kept for clients and dusted off the seat with it. Mitch would have been annoyed again, but she bent over to dust the seat, and while the lapels on her jacket were crossed too high to make the view really breathtaking, everything sort of moved forward against the loose, soft fabric, and he remembered that he really didn’t like linen that much, anyway. Then she walked back to hang up his jacket, and he watched her from the rear and thought again what amazing creatures women were and how glad he was that he was male.

      Then she sat down, and he tried to pay attention.

      She blinked at him, her eyes huge. “This has to be confidential.”

      Mitch snorted. “Of course it does. Nobody ever walks in here and says, ‘Listen, I want everybody to know this.’” He pulled a yellow legal pad toward him and picked up a pen. “Let’s start with your name.”

      “Mae Sullivan,” she said, and he wrote it down.

      “And what seems to be your problem?”

      She glared at him. “Someone seems to have murdered my uncle.”

      Her voice was snottier than he’d imagined a really sexy voice should be. It wasn’t easy being aroused and annoyed at the same time. It took a lot of energy, and he needed that energy to not think about the heat, which was another reason to dislike her. “Murder. Well, you know, the police are excellent at that sort of thing. Have you reported the body yet?”

      “The memorial service is day after tomorrow.”

      “So this isn’t exactly news to the police.”

      “The police aren’t interested.” Her brown eyes met his blue ones evenly. “Are you?”

      Mitch looked into those eyes and thought about murder instead of divorce work and sighed. “Yes. I’m going to be sorry, but yes, of course I’m interested.”

      She shifted in her seat, all her moving parts meshing in elegant, erotic motion, and Mitch thought, Thank God I don’t have a partner or she’d off him for sure.

      LYING WASN’T Mae’s strong suit, but she was considerably cheered by what she saw. Blinking up at her, groggy with the heat that blanketed his office, Mitchell Peatwick didn’t look as if he’d catch on if she told him she was one of the Pointer Sisters. He just lounged behind his Goodwill desk, his shaggy blond hair falling in his eyes, and smarted off to her while she snubbed him. When he wasn’t talking, he was sort of endearing in a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks kind of way, but he had an office right out of a dime-store novel, and his mind was obviously still in one. The Maltese Falcon? What a dreamer.

      But that was good. It was going to take a dreamer to buy her story. And he wasn’t completely impossible. He wore beat-up clothes of no particular style, and his hair could have used a trim, and his face had more jaw than it really needed, but he was solidly male, with that broad-shouldered, non-gold-chain-wearing, let-me-lift-that-car-for-you-lady kind of doofus sexiness that made women think that maybe they’d been too hasty with the liberation movement.

      And then, of course, he opened his mouth, and all those women went looking for the nearest lamppost to hang him from. If he’d just kept his mouth shut…

      “Tell me about your uncle,” he said, and his voice was patient, and she thought she saw sympathy in his eyes, which made her feel guilty for using him. Of course, maybe it only looked like sympathy. Maybe it was really a hangover.

      “He was murdered.” Mae leaned forward a little, just enough so that her breasts moved under her jacket. It had worked on him before, although she had to be careful not to overdo it. Sometimes men became jaded after too many minutes of shifting silk crepe. Or they got that glazed look. She peered into his eyes. Still fairly alert. Full speed ahead. “But nobody believes me when I tell them that.”

      “Including the police?”

      Mae tried to look defeated and vulnerable. He looked like the type who would go for defeated and vulnerable. Brigid O’Shaughnessy had done well with defeated and vulnerable. “I haven’t gone to the police. They wouldn’t have believed me. His doctor signed the death certificate. There’s nothing the police can do.”

      He picked up his pen again. “What was his name?”

      “Armand Lewis.” Mae watched as his hand moved across the yellow pad, making slashing strokes with the pen. He had strong, broad hands, and his movements were sure, and she was well down the road to her own fantasy when she realized what was happening and put a stop to it. There was too much at stake to blow on a nice pair of hands, particularly a pair hooked to a brain lame enough to buy her story.

      He looked up at her. “What did the doctor put on the death certificate?”

      “Heart attack.”

      He wrote that down and then said,

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