Naughty Neighbor

Chapter 8

Louisa didn’t like working for Stu Maislin. The atmosphere in his suite of offices was oppressive, his administrative assistant looked like a bookie, and she suspected her phone was bugged by both Kurt and Maislin. It was like living in a goldfish bowl filled with piranha.

She was on her third day on the job, and she was still wearing a wire at Pete’s insistence. He was outside, somewhere, listening to her every word. To say she had no secrets was an understatement.

“I wonder if I unplugged the iron?” she said into her chest. “Hope it doesn’t burn the house down. And did you remember to close the front door after you went back in for my briefcase? I bet the house isn’t locked up.”

She smiled, knowing she drove Pete crazy with these mutterings. It was the only fun part of her workday.

“Only kidding,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I unplugged the iron. I don’t think it would burst into flames, anyway, because I had it on a low setting because I was ironing my red silk teddy. You remember that teddy? The one I wore the night before last? The one with the wide, easy-lovin’ legs? I wore that teddy to the office today because I thought I might take an extra long lunch hour and”-she crinkled a paper, simulating static-“and when I was done with you, you’d be sitting funny for the rest of the afternoon.”

She allowed herself another smile and turned to the stack of mail on her desk, thinking he now had something to occupy his mind while she did some work. She was halfway through the mail when a check slipped through her fingers. It had been delivered earlier by a bonded messenger. Not an unusual occurrence. She’d signed for it and placed it in the priority bin. It was to Maislin, personally. And it was against a claim on his homeowner’s insurance, to the tune of slightly less than half a million. She did a silent whistle. It was a lot of money, and it piqued her curiosity.

She copied the claim number, the amount, the name of the adjuster and his phone number, and went down the hall to the public phone. She dialed the adjuster and introduced herself. She was new, she explained. She needed to be brought up to speed on Mr. Maislin’s claim.

Pete was at the water fountain behind her when she hung up. “Well?” he asked.

“Couldn’t wait until I got off work?”

“I was intrigued.”

“Maislin’s house was broken into five days before the pig incident. A very expensive pair of diamond earrings, a choker, and two rings were stolen. The thief also took several stamps which were extremely valuable. They were insured for big bucks.”

“Never found?”

“Never found,” Louisa said.

“You think the pig could have eaten them?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“I’m serious. Years ago, before Reuters sent me to South America, I did an article on insurance fraud. It’s common. If you’re a big roller and times get tough, you fake a burglary. That way you get paid twice. You collect the insurance, and then you turn around and you sell the family jewels under the table. Suppose Maislin needed money. Suppose he had Bucky steal the stuff and Bucky was supposed to feed it to Petunia. Petunia was being shipped to Amsterdam. Maybe there was a contact in Amsterdam, waiting to fence the jewelry and stamps.”

“The pig wouldn’t have any problem with customs.”

“Exactly.”

“Sounds pretty farfetched. How were they supposed to get the jewelry and stamps out of the pig.”

“That’s the beauty of the plan,” Pete said. “The jewelry and stamps would come out all by themselves. In one end, out the other.”

“Ugh.”

“It would have been brilliant if the pig hadn’t wandered off.”

“So now they’re going to try it again,” Louisa said.

“Precisely, Watson.”

“I don’t want to be Watson. Watson was fat and dopey. I want to be Holmes. You can be Watson.”

“You’re never satisfied.”

“This is my new assertive personality,” she said.

“Maybe we could take turns being assertive. You can be assertive on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and alternate Saturdays. I can be assertive on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.”

“It’s worth considering. I suppose I need to get back to work and keep my ear to the ground. We don’t want to miss any of this swiney intrigue.”

Pete watched her return to Maislin’s office. Now that the mystery might be solved, he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue. There were worse things in the world than insurance fraud. It was white-collar crime, and no one would be surprised to find Maislin guilty of such a thing. In fact, people sort of expected it of him. It was almost his most outstanding job skill.

Rationalization, Pete admitted. It all came back to Louisa. He didn’t want her involved in a sting operation. Was he willing to let Maislin off the hook to keep Louisa safe? Yes. He was a rotten patriot, but there it was. Louisa was his first priority. Not that it mattered. She’d sunk her teeth into this, and he didn’t think she was going to let go.

They stopped by Kurt’s apartment on the way home from work. They brought a pizza-double cheese with the works-and a six-pack of beer. They filled Kurt in on the insurance claim.

“Hard to believe Maislin needs money,” Louisa said. “He has a big house, expensive cars and clothes, an extensive portfolio. He’s a millionaire several times over.”

“On paper,” Pete said. “I checked him out. He has serious cash-flow problems.”

Kurt chugged a beer. “And an even more serious drug problem. I’ve been picking it up on the tap. He doesn’t get all that aggressive energy from eating a balanced diet. The man runs on speed.” He looked over at Louisa.

“I know what it is. Are you sure?”

Kurt nodded. “He’s made two buys this week alone.”

Louisa felt sick. She might be a little jaded when it came to glorifying a senator or a congressman, but she believed in the American political system. She’d been on the Hill long enough to know the vast majority of the elected officials took their responsibility seriously and worked long and hard. Sometimes a man got carried away with his own importance or succumbed to the pressure of the job, and a scandal ensued. She was always sad to see that happen.

In this case, there was little sadness for Maislin. She’d had a chance to observe him firsthand and had come to thoroughly dislike him and distrust him.

Pete saw the color leave her face. He covered her hand with his. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. I’m furious. How could he betray the voters like this? How could he be so stupid? So arrogantly corrupt as to put himself above the law?”

Pete grinned. “She’s going to be a lawyer someday,” he said to Kurt. “She’s going to be dynamite.”

“A lawyer?” Kurt said. “No kidding? Hey, that’s terrific.”

Louisa blushed. “It’s actually only in the planning stage. I haven’t even taken my LSATs.”

“Don’t worry about the LSATs. Pete and me’ll help you study. And if that doesn’t work, I can get into their computer. I can give you any grade you want.”

She was touched. She was also horrified, but she told herself Kurt’s intentions were good. Maybe Kurt wasn’t such a bad guy. Just a tad misdirected. She took another look at him. Who was she kidding? He might have a good heart, but his brain had mental deviant engraved on the frontal lobes. Kurt was frighteningly weird.

Pete watched the play of emotions on Louisa’s face and could hardly keep from laughing out loud. He knew exactly what she was thinking. He’d gone through the same thought process many times himself and had always reached the same conclusion about Kurt. In South America he’d worked with entire units of Kurt types-bottom-line personalities. The end always justifies the means. It was a convenient philosophy to take into combat.

Louisa slid another tray of chocolate chip cookies into the oven and set the timer. At four-thirty in the afternoon the sky was gun-metal gray and the outside air cold enough to make her kitchen window frost. Inside, the house was filled with the warm smell of freshly baked cookies and melted chocolate.

Louisa leaned against the counter and wondered why she was feeling so cranky. It was Saturday. She had the whole day to herself. She had her life under control. She had exciting plans for the future. She’d gotten her way with the pig project. She was sexually satisfied. Why wasn’t she happy?

She looked up at the ceiling. The source of all discontent, she thought. She was in love with Pete Streeter, and she didn’t like it. He was all wrong for her. In fact, he was probably all wrong for anybody. And she loved him. She rolled her eyes and flapped her arms. Love was stupid. It made no sense. After so many years of being so careful, she’d gone and fallen in love with Pete Streeter. Go figure.

She nibbled on a warm cookie. She was going to ignore the “L” word, of course. She absolutely was not going to say it out loud, and she especially wasn’t going to say it out loud to Pete. She was certain this was a temporary condition. All she had to do was wait it out.

Pete could smell the cookies baking downstairs in Louisa’s oven. She was torturing him, he thought. She knew he had to work, and since early morning she’d been producing the most distracting sounds and smells…sighs and stretches; rustles of clothing, snatches of tunes hummed between chores, and now the cookies. He looked at the computer screen in front of him and swore out loud. He was doing rewrites and e-mailing them to the coast, because he didn’t want to leave Louisa. Ordinarily, he’d be in L.A. by now, gearing up to go on location. In a few days they were going to start shooting, and he was going to have to be on call for daily page changes. It wasn’t the sort of thing he felt comfortable doing long distance.

Unfortunately, Louisa refused to give up the pig investigation. They’d tapped Maislin’s home phone and tagged his car with a transmitter. They’d alerted the insurance company and were working with a fraud investigator. In his opinion, Louisa was superfluous. The insurance investigator didn’t share that opinion. And Louisa wasn’t budging from her desk until Maislin was caught with the goods.

So here he was, torn between his work and Louisa Brannigan. It was frustrating, especially since he didn’t know why he was in this predicament. It wasn’t as if she needed him. Once she’d gotten it into her mind to take control of her life, she’d done it with a vengeance. He was the one who’d told her to cut the umbilical; now he felt like Dr. Frankenstein.

He saved his file, stood, and stretched. He was meeting her parents later that night. She’d been invited home to dinner, and she was dragging him along. He suspected it was one last vestige of cowardice, but he didn’t care. He was curious about the typical suburban family. As a kid he’d watched reruns of fifties and sixties family sitcoms and desperately wanted to be adopted by Donna Reed. As a teenager he’d struck out against the saccharine unreality of the heartland image, and as an adult he wondered if the coveted clean, harmonious, upper-middle-class, Cape-Cod-house, dog-sleeping-on-the-hearth family actually existed.

Two hours later he found himself shaking his head in disbelief. There it was in front of him-a white brick Cape Cod with black shutters, a white picket fence, and a flagstone front walk. Even in winter it was nicely landscaped with lots of big holly and azalea bushes bordered with silver-dollar wood chip mulch. It had a brick chimney, which he was sure led to a living room fireplace and had been designed with Santa Claus in mind. No disrespect intended-he really was very impressed.

The door flew open before they had a chance to knock, and the frame was filled with Louisa’s father, dressed in a knit shirt and sans-a-belt pants.

“Mike Brannigan,” he said to Pete. “Good to meet you.” The man was medium height and stocky, his complexion was ruddy, his outstretched hand was short fingered and meaty. He was a Brannigan through and through.

Louisa’s mother was close behind her husband. “Kathy Brannigan,” she said, extending her hand. Her hair was short and feathered with gray, her face was friendly. She was wearing gray University of Maryland sweats and red high-top basketball shoes. “You’ll have to excuse the way I look,” she said. “I just got back from the library.”

Louisa shook her head. “June Cleaver never dressed like that.”

“Who?”

“June Cleaver. Beaver’s mother.”

Kathy Brannigan gave her daughter a wan smile. “When you were five and Susan Fielding’s mother knitted a ski hat, I took up knitting. When you were seven and Carolyn Chenko’s mother made homemade bread, I gave baking bread a shot. I decorated cakes better than Amy Butcher’s mother, went on more field trips than Jennifer O’Neil’s mother, and baked better chocolate chip cookies than any mother in the history of the world. I draw the line at dressing like June Cleaver.”

“Mom’s gone back to college,” Louisa explained to Pete. “She’s a sophomore.”

“I missed it the first time around,” Kathy said. “I was busy doing the mother thing.”

Pete handed over his jacket and checked the hearth for a sleeping dog. He wasn’t disappointed. The furniture was dark wood and freshly polished. The couch was overstuffed and homey. The house smelled like woodsmoke and apple pie. He wouldn’t have believed any of this if he hadn’t seen it firsthand, he thought.

Louisa’s mother tapped Pete on the arm. “Are you all right? Your eyes look a little glazed.”

“It’s the pie fumes,” he said.

She led him into the living room and seated him in a wingback. “Don’t get too choked up over it. It’s one of those frozen ones that you just put in the oven and bake.”

He didn’t care. A pie was a pie.

Mike brought him a beer and set a basket of chips at his elbow. “I hear you’re one of those Hollywood types.”

“I write screenplays.”

“You know James Garner?”

“Uh, no.”

Louisa caught a glimpse of the dining room table. It was set for five. She looked at her mother and the question silently passed between them.

“Grandma Brannigan,” Louisa’s mother said. “She’s visiting for a few days.”

“Oh boy.”

“I heard that,” Grandma Brannigan called from the kitchen. “You always did have a smart mouth.”

Everyone in the living room exchanged looks of suffering.

“She’s really very sweet,” Louisa’s mother whispered.

“I heard that too,” Grandma Brannigan yelled. “And God’s gonna get you for lying, Katherine.”

She shuffled into the living room. She was a forbidding chunk of a woman with a square Irish face and a square Irish body. She had an apron over her gray wool skirt and white blouse, and she held a wooden spoon in her hand as if it were a weapon. “I’m not sweet at all,” she said to Pete. “Who are you?”

He rose and offered his hand. “Pete Streeter. I’m Louisa’s friend.”

She took his hand and squinted at him. “You look like a womanizer.”

He turned to Louisa. “Help.”

“Are you crazy?” Louisa said. “I can barely hold my own with her. Don’t look for help here.”

“So,” Grandma Brannigan said, “are you sleeping with my granddaughter?”

“Uh, well…”

Everyone sat up a little straighter and leaned forward ever so slightly, waiting for his reply.

He eyeballed the spoon in her hand. “You gonna hit me with that if I say yes?”

“I might hit you with it, anyway, just on general principle.”

“Well hell,” Pete said, “then I might as well deserve it.”

Louisa was on her feet, pulling him into the dining room. “Time to eat.”

Pete smiled lazily. “Thought you weren’t coming to my rescue?”

“You were going to hang me out to dry!”

He smiled and shrugged, and Louisa kicked him hard in the ankle.

He squelched a shriek of pain into a grunt.

“I get my violent nature from Grandma Brannigan,” Louisa said.

“Maybe I’ll take you home to Hellertown for Easter. You’ll fit right in. You can sucker punch my sister-in-law for first dibs on the potato salad.”

“Gee, I’m really looking forward to it.”

Pete slung an arm around her and hugged her to him. “I bet you got smacked a lot with that wooden spoon.”

“Not once. She’s all bristly on the outside and soft as marshmallow on the inside.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about a person,” her grandmother said. “And it’s a bald-faced lie. I’m hard as nails on the inside. Don’t you believe a word she tells you,” she said to Pete. “It’s from the Krueger side of the family.”

She slid a glance at Louisa’s mother and lowered her voice. “The Kruegers always had a time with the truth, if you know what I mean.”

He could hear Louisa’s mother sigh behind him, and it sent a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. He liked this family. Really liked them. They were a little looney and a little exasperated with one another. They were his kind of people.

“Cripes,” Louisa’s father said. “Lay off the Kruegers, will you, Ma?”

“Everybody knows…”

Louisa’s mother brought a platter of fried chicken to the table.

“Look at this,” Grandma Brannigan said, “she had this delivered. Can you imagine? A dinner party that comes from a cardboard bucket. Biscuits, coleslaw, everything.”

“I have an exam on Monday,” Louisa’s mother said. “I didn’t have time to cook.”

“You could have asked me,” Grandma said. “I would have made a roast.”

“I asked you. You said we should order chicken.”

“Lies. All lies.”

Everyone sighed together.

Pete loved it. It was just as he’d always imagined. He took a piece of chicken and two biscuits and wondered if it was too late to get adopted.

Louisa picked at her skirt in the dark car, on the way home. “Sorry I kicked you so hard. I got carried away.”

“It wasn’t that hard. It just caught me by surprise. You can make up for it when we get home.”

“You have something specific in mind?”

“Did I ever tell you I have a video camera?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Oh dear.”

On Sunday it rained and Louisa felt caged. She paced in Pete’s apartment while he typed at the computer. Kurt had been over earlier with tapes from Maislin’s home phone. Maislin had called Bucky and given him a date. Tuesday.

She cracked her knuckles and cleared her throat. She was nervous. They didn’t have enough information. If more information wasn’t forthcoming over the phone lines by the next afternoon, it was going to be up to her to get it. She splayed her hands on the cool windowpane and stared out at the wet road. She was in over her head, and there was no turning back.

Pete saw the apprehension in the set of her shoulders. Finally, she was scared. Good. Fear would make her careful. He looked at the printed words on the screen and then at the woman huddled at the window. He had hours more work, but he couldn’t concentrate. He swore to himself and saved his file.

“You got a raincoat?” he called.

“What’d you have in mind?”

He took her hand and pulled her from the window. “The zoo.”

They walked the distance. They wore slickers and rain hats and were dripping wet and half frozen by the time they got to the entrance. They pressed on, through the big iron gates, up the wide cement pathway. They headed for the elephant trail.

They didn’t talk. They barely looked at the habitats. They kept their heads down against the rain and the wind until they reached the cavernous building that housed the giraffes and hippos. They blew through the doors and stopped short, almost knocked over by the steamy heat and rich scent of animal hide and dung. They shook off the rain and stared at each other, with purple lips and chattering teeth.

“I love Washington weather,” Pete said. “It makes you so miserable, you forget all your other problems.”

Louisa nodded and stomped her feet, trying to get some feeling back. “Puts things in perspective.” She looked up at him, a little shocked. “Do you have problems?”

He blinked once, very slowly. “You. You’re my problem.”

It wasn’t a surprise. She’d seen him trying to sandwich his work into days that were spent babysitting her. And she knew there was more. He was undoubtedly caught in the same emotional turmoil she’d been fighting. There was an incredibly strong attraction between them that had no basis in good sense.

“Hmm,” she said, because she didn’t have a decent answer.

They watched the giraffe eat, watched the elephants get hosed down. They stared at the hippos half submerged in tepid water. Then they put their hats on, zipped their slickers, and went back outside. They ran most of the way home, splashing through puddles in their haste, soaking their jeans from the knees down.

They were breathless when they reached home. They stripped at the top of the stairs, fell into Pete’s bed, and made love like there was no tomorrow. When they were done, they sat at the kitchen table and ate hot dogs and baked beans and a half gallon of coffee ice cream.

“So, you think I’m a problem, huh?” Louisa asked.

He knew she’d get back to it. “You’re a problem with no apparent solution. No matter what I do about you, it’s wrong.”

She could read between the lines. She felt the same way. That didn’t mean she liked it. Being a problem wasn’t exactly flattering. It was one thing for him to be a problem. That was understandable. He was far from perfect. She, on the other hand, was much closer. Yeah, right. She did some mental eye rolling, and thought the ugly truth was they probably deserved each other.

She felt the nagging crankiness beginning to return, and she pushed it away with a change of topic. She moved the conversation to the one area they had in common-the pig.

“There’s something I don’t understand about this pig thing,” she said. “What happened to the first pig? We know it got sick and wandered away. We know Maislin still has the jewelry. We know they didn’t want you asking questions. So, what happened to the pig?”

“Probably Bucky found it and was able to sneak it out of the Hart Building. My guess is he’s got his freezer filled with pork chops.”

“Are you going to make this into a screenplay?”

He shook his head. “Nobody’d believe it…and there’s not enough violence.”