Boyfriend from Hell (Saturn's Daughters) Page 12

  I didn’t even know where Andre’s vacancy was. I didn’t know of any apartments along Edgewater Street, and he’d said it was just outside the Zone. I supposed being closer to work would save me time. And Andre’s nagging.

  Since it didn’t look like I was making it to class, anyway, I dug my cell phone out of my messenger bag. I checked to see who had called earlier, but it was an anonymous number. I dialed Discreet Detection and Cora answered on the first ring.

  “Girl, you gotta tell me what happened last night! Rumors are flying every which way.”

  “If I make up a really good story, will you find out if there are any vacant apartments down that way for me? Andre’s been nagging, and I’ve found a good renter for mine.”

  Cora hooted. “That man’s on the make. Watch out, girl. He owns a place just at the end of the street, one block up from the harbor, behind the storage depot. Nice place, too. Make him give you a good deal.”

  Curiosity, my besetting sin. A nice place?

  Before I could decide if I really wanted to do this, the doorbell rang. Jane looked at me questioningly, and I shrugged. Hanging up on Cora, I sauntered over to the peephole and checked out the newcomer. Crap, Schwartz. Maybe my new abode would be the county jail.

  I unfastened the door and let him in. “Just in time to be interviewed by the Baltimore Edition,” I warned him. “Need caffeine?”

  “No, thank you.” He glanced at Jane, who was hastily gathering her notebook and pen, even though she probably didn’t recognize her prey. He was wearing his tie today, and a long-sleeved blue shirt. Very official and quite yummy.

  I was definitely horny. Authority figures are usually not my cuppa, and cops were on my shit list.

  “Jane Claremont, Detective Schwartz. If you’re taking me to jail, Jane would like to have my apartment.” I checked my refrigerator for something Studly Doright might drink. “I’ve got tomato juice.” I wouldn’t try to guess how old. Max had liked an occasional Bloody Mary.

  “Water is fine. Good to meet you, Miss Claremont.” But Schwartz wasn’t looking at Jane. His gaze had fastened on me. On my untethered breasts, to be precise.

  Now that I was taller, he finally noticed I was female? Or had he been put off by my limp?

  “I need to ask a few more questions to clarify my report,” he said, dragging out his notebook.

  “I don’t think I’m any clearer on what happened this morning than I was last night,” I informed him, presenting him with a bottle of water. I was getting more careful about stocking the pure stuff.

  “Friend of yours?” He glanced at Jane with suspicion.

  He was warning me, but I had nothing to hide and Jane needed the story.

  “She’s good,” I assured him.

  Miraculously, he took me at my word instead of snarling, the reaction I usually got from cops.

  “Diane said the perp attacked her when she went out for a smoke,” he continued. “She fought him, but he held his arm against her throat. Then you arrived and struck him, apparently with the tire iron.” He looked up for me to confirm his statement.

  “Sounds right to me, although he was covering her mouth by the time I arrived. She was trying to scream. I almost didn’t go look. That’s a scary alley back there.” I didn’t mention I’d grabbed the tire iron out of a fear the Dumpster was screaming.

  He scowled. “You could have gone back inside for help.”

  “And he could have strangled Diane while I tried to get someone’s attention.” I glared back. I think my newly perfect hair had infected my brain. I shouldn’t have been arguing with an officer of the law. I knew better.

  Jane was discreetly scribbling, but Schwartz ignored her. Everything we said aloud was in the police report, available to the public. Jane couldn’t read our scowls.

  He returned to reading his notes. “So, he knocked you out, and the next thing you remember is waking up to find him sprawled in the alley, dead.”

  I hadn’t said that. He raised his baby blues to pin me into silence. Ah, maybe he did realize there was a reporter in the room, and he was planting his own version of the story. So who was he protecting, me, the Zone, or himself from the laughter of his fellow cops?

  “More or less,” I agreed cautiously. “Does the guy have a family?”

  “Not on record. He was just out on bond after a minor sex offense.”

  “A government official arrested for a sex offense, and he’s still got a job?” I asked in disbelief. “Who did he pay off for that and what does it have to do with the Zone?” My suspicion-ometer cranked up. Maybe Andre was right to be paranoid.

  Schwartz shook his head at me. He’d revealed as much as he’d intended.

  “We don’t know why he was down there.” He tucked his notebook back in his shirt pocket.

  The creep had been down there for me. Someone had sent a sex offender after me. Someone in government? Who wanted boxes? They didn’t have enough boxes of their own?

  Schwartz had come down here to feed me the story that would go into official reports, not to ask questions. How was I supposed to take that?

  With relief, for now. I didn’t need any more media haunting my hall. Which returned me to the task at hand. I gestured for the good detective to follow me to the front room. Jane tagged along. Still astounded that I was feeling no pain, I pointed out the Escalade in the parking lot. “One of yours?”

  He looked at me in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? The budget’s so tight even the chief is driving a Mustang. Cadillacs aren’t in the picture.” He took another look, frowned, and began prowling my living room, looking at light fixtures and electric outlets. “I changed my mind. Want to fix me a cup of joe before I head out?”

  Jane and I looked at each other. I caught on first. He was looking for bugs! Shaken, I played along with his act. “Sure, take it black?”

  He didn’t answer, so I rattled around in the kitchen. I turned on my MP3 speakers and added background music. Those bastards in the SUV were listening to me?

  They’d heard me talking about moving to the Zone. Crap.

  Jane started to speak, but I waved her quiet. “Cora says the vacancy’s been filled,” I told her, shaking my head to indicate it hadn’t. “Maybe you ought to move in here. I just need a place to sleep and the couch is comfortable. I can study down at the bar. With two of us paying rent, we’ll be able to get ahead.”

  Her eyes widened but watching Schwartz crawling around behind my furniture, she played along. “Really? You wouldn’t mind? That’s fantastic! Thank you so much!”

  She was kind of overdoing the enthusiasm but if anyone was listening, they wouldn’t catch that. Schwartz straightened and pointed at a device hidden in the outlet behind my couch. He began examining the overhead lights and found another in the burned-out socket of the kitchen light.

  “I have an old sleeper bed I can give you,” he said, as if he were part of the conversation. “I’d feel a lot better if you both had company. The world isn’t safe anymore.”

  It wouldn’t be safe for those creeps in the Escalade if I took a tire iron to their heads. But Schwartz had taken my weapon. He glared at me as if he knew what I was thinking. Maybe I could wish for legs that didn’t need shaving while I killed the eavesdropping creeps.

  Oh, holy crappola. I’d wished for stronger legs last night when I was beating off the swamp monster.

  So not helpful. I sighed and finished my coffee and tried not to remember what I had been thinking before Max combusted. “Gotta study, friends. I appreciate the support and all. Might take you up on that sleeper, Schwartz. If you have any more questions, give me a call.”

  He jotted a note and passed it over. I’ll check out the license plates. Don’t touch the bugs yet.

  I signaled agreement with a salute. The instant he left, I grabbed Milo by the scruff and added him to my bag. We needed to get the heck out of Dodge. Jane and I were going exploring for a new place to crash.

  14

  I sent Jane out t
o make a show of driving away, then had her circle back behind the block. Pulling on a rain slicker with a hood to conceal my easily identifiable messenger bag, I carried out a bag of trash, heaved it in the garbage, and kept on going, as if I were any of a dozen tenants scurrying for the bus stop. Maybe my new height and lack of limp would add further camouflage.

  She picked me up at the corner, and we wheeled away, hopefully without anyone following.

  “What was all that about?” she demanded as soon as we were out of sight of the tenement.

  “Absolutely no idea.” I threw back the stifling hood and directed her to the donut shop, where I sprang for an assortment. Sugar was definitely required to feed the adrenaline rush. “I asked you about the men showing up in the Zone. If those aren’t reporters stalking me, I have no clue who they are or who is bugging my apartment.”

  “Rich people,” she said through a mouthful of jelly cream. “Not us.”

  Yeah, I was getting that impression. The only rich people I knew of were Max’s family. Why would they be spying on me?

  I didn’t even bother questioning how they’d got into my place to bug it. The super had a key. They had money to stuff his pockets. Voilà. I’d never been concerned about lack of security because I never thought myself interesting enough to be a target of thieves, much less spies. The times, they were a’changing.

  “That seals it,” I said. “I’m finding a new place. When you move in, we’ll make a show of having some guys over to childproof all the sockets. You can wonder about the strange little devices and yank them out.”

  She nodded warily. “Okay, but how will you move without anyone knowing where you’re moving to?”

  “I’ll work on it.” I tore viciously at an apple fritter. I really wanted answers, but I had a gut feeling that I was the one who had to supply them. Me, the bonehead who wished for legs and miraculously got them, but didn’t know how. I just couldn’t comprehend events not covered in books. My legal mind preferred orderly explanations.

  Maybe Andre had a point about my permanent student status. A man who was occasionally right was pretty scary.

  Driving to the south end of the Zone and up a hilly street in the direction Cora had given us, we spotted the row houses at the same time. I had never been this far down the harbor. Had no reason to go there. Below us and along the waterline was the foggy miasma that covered the official environmental hazard zone of burned-out storage tanks. On high-humidity days, the vapors from the chemical plants hung low.

  Above the fog we could gaze at the fabulous view of fishing boats bobbing on white-capped water, and I vowed to explore the sights outside the Zone more often.

  At the top of the hill were grand old brick Victorian row houses with big bay windows on the second floor overhanging the wide porches on the first. The trim on all of them had been painted in funky rainbow colors, making me think different people owned each house, but chances were good in this neighborhood that they each contained several apartments. I didn’t see any vacancy signs.

  “I’ll have to track down Andre,” I said in disappointment. My heart had gone pitter-patter at the sight of these substantial homes, and my territorial instincts were screaming I want. For a change, it wasn’t Andre I wanted. I wanted a real home like these. One without electronic bugs and SUVs in the yard. But I was seriously resisting asking Andre for anything. I didn’t want to give him any ideas.

  “Maybe we could ask someone?” Jane said tentatively.

  She probably had as much house hunger as I did. She had a kid to think about, after all, and she looked as if she was about to drool, so I nodded agreement.

  She parked her rusting Kia across the street from the houses. This side of the street wasn’t very promising, consisting mostly of abandoned shops and warehouses with boarded up windows. Andre probably owned them, too. He seemed to own everything down here. That might be convenient in keeping out government nosiness, but not so much if Andre became my privacy-invader.

  Could he possibly own all the houses, too? Wondering which one might be his so I could avoid it, I perused my choices. I studied the windows, looking for ones without curtains.

  “The blue and green one,” I decided. “No window coverings on the second floor, and the flowers in the window boxes are dead.”

  Jane whistled admiringly. “You ought to be the reporter, not me.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s not get our hopes up. The foundation shrubbery is pretty tattered, so the whole house may be abandoned. Let’s knock and see if we can stir the spooks.”

  I think I meant that literally. Seeing these gorgeous homes sitting here amid the wreckage of an industrial slum was a little surreal, a little rainbow of optimism. True, this street was on a hill above the Zone as I knew it, but this end of the harbor had never been a good place to live, even before the chemical flood. Who built expensive homes above storage depots?

  Of course, if these really had been here since the late 1800s, then maybe the area hadn’t been that bad then. Maybe ship captains had lived here. I really needed to learn my Baltimore history.

  Milo peered out of my messenger bag as we crossed the street. The silence was awesome. It was too far from the interstate to hear the traffic, and the wrong end of the harbor to hear the equipment at the factories on the north side of the Zone. Still, I doubted my ability to afford the place, even if it was in a bad part of town.

  Crossing the street, dodging raindrops, I felt as if we were being watched, but between Andre’s tales and this morning’s electronic-bug discovery, I had good reason for my paranoia. At least there weren’t any news vans. I was already trying to figure out how I could move without anyone following me.

  “If I do this, you have to promise you won’t tell anyone where I’ve gone,” I said as we stepped up onto a spacious front porch dotted with clay pots of dead plants.

  “Yeah, I got that message,” Jane said with a shrug. “The only media tracking you now are the rags. And me. I have no incentive to aid my competition. I can’t help with the spies, though.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a new phone, too.” I was really liking the idea of being anonymous again. I looked for a doorbell and, not finding one, used the iron knocker and shivered a little. I refused to believe that it was from fear. It was just cool on the porch. I shouldn’t have left the slicker in the car.

  Jane was only wearing a tank top and didn’t seem to feel the chill. Maybe I was just feeling a little like a trick-or-treater on Halloween. Except my new legs and swishy hair reminded me that I was more likely the ghoul than the little kid at the door.

  Feeling sufficiently strange about not looking like myself, I nearly jumped out of my wedge-heeled sandals when the door finally creaked open a crack. One faded blue eye peered through the opening.

  “What do you want?” a querulous old voice asked.

  “I was told you might have a vacant apartment,” I replied insouciantly. Lying seemed to be coming to me naturally lately. Of course, given my current circumstances, who wouldn’t shade the truth a little?

  “Who told you?” she demanded.

  I could mention Andre and see if she slammed the door in my face or opened it wide. But I was tired of relying on my boss, and if invoking his name was the only way to get a place down here, I didn’t want any part of it. I shrugged and started to turn away. “If I’m wrong, sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Wait.” She fumbled at a chain lock. “You look like nice girls, but I don’t have anything with two bedrooms.”

  Not daring to hope, I turned back to the door. “Jane is just helping me look. I’ll be the only tenant.”

  The door opened to reveal a short stout granny with a head full of graying curls and no front teeth. “No boyfriend?” she asked suspiciously.

  Except in my mirror. “No, ma’am. Just me. I go to school and work, so you’ll hardly ever see me.” Until the week after finals, anyway.

  She narrowed her eyes and studied both of us but moved out of the way to let us in. �
��I’m real careful about tenants,” she warned. “I can’t do the repairs, so you have to be able to do your own.”

  I scarcely heard the warning. The foyer paneling was gorgeous dark hardwood. So was the magnificent staircase. I’d never lived in a place with so much wood and had no idea what kind it might be. It needed dusting. And waxing. Apparently she didn’t do maintenance, either. Cobwebs decorated the high ceiling and the ornate brass chandelier. Substantial six-paneled doors on either side of the foyer concealed the downstairs rooms. A hall beside the stairs led to the back of the house.

  “Spooky,” Jane murmured as the old lady limped toward the stairs.

  Max in the mirror was spooky. Cobwebs weren’t.

  “I’m Tina Clancy.” I introduced myself and held out my hand to the old lady. “Your home is lovely.”

  She straightened a little and shook my hand. “Pearl Bodine, dear. My lumbago won’t let me go upstairs anymore. I don’t know what you’ll find up there. The last tenant disappeared before his rent was up. I still owe him his deposit.”

  That wasn’t real promising, but the word deposit had me on edge. I didn’t have one if Jane couldn’t give me one. I still wanted to see what the place looked like. “Do I need a key?”

  She produced one from a hidden panel beneath the stairs. “Top of the stairs, on the right. I hardly ever see the tenant on the left. He’s so quiet, he won’t bother you. And the third floor has a separate entrance, so you’ll never see him, either.”

  An all-male boardinghouse, very interesting. No wonder the plants were all dead. We thanked her and hurried up the worn stairs. They really needed carpeting. The boards were cupped and precarious from use. And not once did I trip, falter, or feel the pull of weak muscles.

  “This is the most excitement I’ve had in years,” Jane whispered as we reached the landing, keeping me in the moment. “This is a fabulous house!”

  “Yeah, but we haven’t talked money yet. I don’t have any.” The key turned easily in the lock, and we let ourselves in.