Naughty Neighbor

  A moment later she yelled out to him. “It’s for you. It’s some guy named Kurt. Says you gave him my number.” She covered the mouthpiece and lowered her voice. “Who is this guy? He sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cousin from New Jersey.”

  Chapter 7

  Louisa pushed her tangled hair back from her face and wished she’d been more insistent about taking a shower after all their lovemaking. It was close to eight. The lights on the Duke Ellington Bridge lobbed by as the Porsche rolled over Rock Creek into Adams-Morgan. “Okay, tell me one more time about this Kurt person.”

  “I met him when I was working in South America, and we’ve stayed in touch.”

  “He’s a friend?”

  “Yeah. He’s a friend,” Pete said, “sort of.”

  “And you’ve hired him to tap Maislin’s phone.”

  Pete slid a glance in her direction, waiting for the inevitable follow-up.

  Louisa didn’t disappoint him. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Just exactly what does ‘pretty much’ mean?”

  He turned onto Columbia Road and the heart of the Hispanic community. “I think Kurt sort of operates on the fringe.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He didn’t know how to explain it to her…the way you just knew about someone. The way he knew about her. It had to do with trust and gut-level feeling.

  “Kurt’s too much of a patriot to be entirely outside of the law. Most likely, he’s one of those maverick CIA types.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “Technically, Kurt might be considered to be police.”

  “We’re gonna rot in jail.”

  Pete parked the Porsche in front of an Ethiopian restaurant. “We’re not going to rot in jail. Kurt’s the only one taking a risk, and believe me, this doesn’t rate high on the risk scale for Kurt.”

  He put a proprietary arm around her shoulders. It was cold and most of the restaurant crowd had dispersed. The streets were eerie with artificial light and the kind of late-evening desertion you found in a commuter city.

  “Here,” he said, maneuvering her through the double glass doors of a yellow brick apartment building. There was a small vestibule with a second security door. Mailboxes and intercoms were built into one wall. Pete pressed the button for number 315, no name.

  The voice on the intercom was flat and unwelcoming. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Pete.”

  Nothing else was said. The security door buzzed open. It was a five-story building with one elevator at the far side of a small lobby. The lobby carpet needed more than cleaning. The walls were painted rent-control-green. Pete shouldered Louisa into the elevator, punched the button to the third floor, and the elevator doors slid closed. The elevator smelled faintly of urine.

  Louisa imagined this as being the odor of poverty. She imagined substandard apartments with broken plumbing and roach-infested kitchens where immigrant families crowded chockablock, struggling to hold their lives together. They worked as dishwashers and cabdrivers, and many didn’t work at all. Some used drugs, some spent their welfare checks on alcohol, some sent their money home to relatives even more impoverished. They were individuals, she thought, each with their own set of dreams, their own set of skills, their own moments of despair. And they were united by a common odor that hung in the stairwells and corridors of government-controlled housing.

  Pete also sniffed the air, but his observations didn’t wax nearly so profound. Pete decided Kurt had recently used the elevator.

  “Why does Kurt live in this apartment building?” Louisa asked. “Doesn’t he have any money?”

  “Guess he likes it here.” And it was a place Kurt could become invisible. Not many questions were asked in a building like this.

  The doors opened to an institutional corridor. Apartment number 315 was to the right, halfway down. Pete knocked and waited patiently while dead bolts were slid free and locks were clicked open.

  “About Kurt,” he said to Louisa, “…be careful.”

  Louisa thought that was an odd thing to say about a friend. “Careful of what?”

  “For starters, don’t eat anything that isn’t cooked to a crisp.”

  The door swung wide, and Louisa found herself staring down the barrel of a Smith & Wesson forty-five.

  Kurt immediately lowered the gun and let it negligently hang at his side. “Sorry,” he said at the expression on Louisa’s face. “No sense taking chances.”

  Pete closed the door behind him and relocked it. “This is Louisa.”

  “I figured,” Kurt said.

  Louisa swallowed hard. The apartment consisted of living room, galley kitchen, bedroom, and bath. The furniture was utilitarian and clearly wasn’t the main focus of Kurt’s life. Newspapers littered the floor, clothing was strewn over chairs, crushed beer cans adorned every available surface, and fast-food wrappers gathered in corners like wax paper dust bunnies.

  Crates of electronic equipment were stacked against walls, an elaborate computer setup hummed in harmony with the refrigerator, and mysterious black boxes were wired to the computer. Switches clicked on, recorders whirred, digital messages flashed on a control console. A red light blinked, indicating a connection had been made, and a woman’s voice carried across the room, murmuring softly in Spanish.

  “An embassy?” Pete asked.

  Kurt clamped a hand to his crotch and yanked his privates up half an inch. “Phone sex. It goes with my cable hookup.”

  Louisa sank her teeth into her lip to keep from whimpering.

  The air was permeated with the aroma of stale cigarette smoke and gun oil. A heavy-duty cardboard carton caught Louisa’s eye. It was half in and half out the open bedroom door. Its top had been ripped off. Even from this distance Louisa could see the carton was three-quarters filled with smaller boxes. The lettering on the side of the carton told her it had been packed for shipping with twenty-four boxes of twelve each, ribbed, tipped condoms.

  Kurt bought bulk. Very thrifty, she told herself. No reason to panic. He was probably a very nice person. It was true, he looked like a serial killer and acted like a flaming pervert, but looks could be deceiving. And after all, he did practice safe sex—lots of it.

  Kurt ambled to the kitchen and came back with three beers and a large bag of pork rinds. He gave Louisa a beer and the bag and turned his attention to Pete.

  “I picked up something you might find interesting.” He took a CD from the top of his desk, slid it into a player, and punched Rewind and then Play. “Maislin made this call at five twenty-seven from his office, private number. It went out to a number in Kenton, Pennsylvania. The number is listed to a B. Dunowski.”

  Pete popped the top to his beer and chugged half a can while he listened to Maislin dial. The connection was made, the phone rang three times, and a man answered.

  “Hello.” The voice was nasal—the sort of voice you’d expect from a man with a broken nose.

  “You still have the stuff.” It was more a statement than a question.

  “Of course I’ve got the stuff.”

  “I’ve made arrangements,” Maislin said. “We’ll try it again, and this time pick out a healthy pig.”

  Pete looked at Louisa. “What are they talking about?”

  She shrugged. “They’re going to try it again.”

  Kurt rewound the tape. “Seems to me all you dudes gotta do is be there when they do whatever it is they’re gonna do for the second time, and you’ll know what it was they were trying to do the first time.”

  Louisa looked at Kurt. He made sense, but she didn’t know how they’d accomplish his suggestion. “Easier said than done.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard,” Kurt said. “You have friends in the building. All you have to do is go into Maislin’s office, nose around a little, plant a few bugs.”

  “Bugs? As in clandestine listening devices? Illegal clandestine listening devices?”

  “Yeah. Or even better, you could blackmail Maislin into giving y
ou a job. Then you could really snoop around.”

  “No way,” Pete said. “Forget it.”

  Louisa glanced over at him. “Why not?”

  “Because it would be dangerous, and I don’t want you involved.”

  “Suppose I want to be involved?”

  Pete slid his empty beer can onto the counter. “In this particular instance, it wouldn’t matter what you wanted.”

  Louisa narrowed her eyes. “You want to explain that to me?”

  “Intimacy brings certain privileges and responsibilities.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, I know more about this cloak-and-dagger stuff than you do, and you’re going to have to defer to my judgment.”

  This is it, she thought. This is where you make a stand or forever hate yourself for being a wimp. “No.”

  Now Pete’s eyes were narrowed. “What do you mean no?”

  “You’re not going to tell me what to think, or what to do, or what’s too dangerous for me. I have the right to make my own mistakes and screw up my own life. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  Pete looked over at Kurt. “This make any sense to you?”

  Kurt opened the bag of pork rinds. “Women.”

  “Sent by the devil,” Pete said.

  “Suppose I wanted to blackmail Maislin,” Louisa said. “How would I go about it?”

  Kurt slouched bonelessly against the counter. “You’d tell him you knew things he might not want spread around. Then you’d tell him how you need a job, and how you’re this great ‘team’ player.”

  Pete dipped into the bag of pork rinds. “I’m holding you responsible,” he said to Kurt. “This was your dumb idea, and you’re encouraging her. Anything happens to her, and I’m coming after you.”

  “Nothing’s gonna happen to her. If you’re that nervous, we’ll let her wear a wire.”

  He pulled a cardboard box out from under his desk and set it on the table. He found a pair of scissors and a roll of surgical tape. He searched through the box and came up with a small piece of plastic with three wires attached.

  “This is a flat-pack transmitter,” he told Louisa. “It’s two inches by one inch, weighs less than an ounce, and has an internal microphone.” He touched the slim two-inch wire protruding from the top end. “This is the antenna.”

  He attached a six-volt, flat-pack battery to the two wires at the bottom of the transmitter. The battery was about an eighth of an inch thick and three inches square.

  “The battery gets taped to your stomach, and the transmitter gets wedged into your cleavage. It’ll be invisible under your blouse.” He flipped a portable receiver to Pete. “You’ve worked with this stuff before?”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “I know how it goes.”

  They didn’t say a word for the entire ride home, but Louisa thought she could hear Pete grinding his teeth in the dark. “It’s not good to hold in all that anger,” she finally said. “You’ll get a hernia.”

  He parallel parked in front of the house. “I’m not sure it’s anger. I don’t know what it is. Frustration, maybe. Confusion.”

  He wrenched the car door open. “Okay, so maybe some of it’s anger.” And a lot of it was wounded pride, but he didn’t want to admit to it out loud.

  Louisa followed him up the cement stairs. “It isn’t going to work, you know.”

  “The wire?”

  “The relationship.”

  “It was working fine until you got it into your head to play Junior G-man.”

  It wasn’t working fine, she wanted to scream. They might as well be at opposite ends of the earth. The only things they really agreed on were sex positions. And to top it all off, there was Kurt.

  Kurt was a strange person, living in a disgusting apartment. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was doing illegal things. He answered his door with a gun in his hand. And he was Pete’s friend! How could she reconcile this? Kurt was a slimeball.

  She tapped in her security code and inserted her door key. Maybe Pete was a slimeball, too, she thought. Maybe he just hid it better because he had more money.

  The following morning Louisa swung through the doors of the Hart Building, wondering what had gone wrong. She’d intended to be firm about not making love. She’d slept in her own bed, alone. She’d gone through all her familiar rituals alone…making her coffee, reading the paper. Then when it had come time for Pete to wire her for sound, she’d lost all resolve. He’d popped the top button on her blouse, and she’d gone into sexual hyperdrive.

  She made a small disgusted sound and slid a glance in his direction. She suspected he’d seduced her as much out of sport as need. He was half a step behind her, with the receiver in his hand and his headset slung around his neck. He winked and smiled, and she felt like strangling him. He stopped to read a plaque on the wall when she turned into Maislin’s office.

  She’d called ahead to make an appointment, and Stu Maislin was waiting for her. He was a large man with a face like a bulldog and a personality to match. He wore a nine-hundred-dollar suit and a seventy-dollar silk tie with a gravy stain two inches below the knot. He didn’t look friendly. He motioned her into his inner office and closed the door behind them.

  “So,” Maislin said. “Let’s talk business.”

  Louisa unbuttoned her coat and resisted the urge to feel for the transmitter. “I need a job.”

  “Maybe I don’t have any job openings right now.”

  “Maybe I should look for a job in the Attorney General’s office.”

  “You trying to blackmail me?”

  “I’m trying to persuade you that I can be a team player.”

  He considered her answer and nodded. “You might fit into my office with an attitude like that. I could put you on as an aide.”

  “An aide would be fine. I can start tomorrow morning.”

  He gave her a long look. “Real go-getter, aren’t you?”

  “My rent is due.”

  “Just don’t get too ambitious, you know what I mean?”

  The threat inspired a rush of anger. She took a beat to calm herself and gave him a cool smile as silent acknowledgment that she understood his message.

  Pete was waiting for her in the hall. He caught the murderous look in her eyes and gave her wide berth. He didn’t attempt conversation until they were in the car. “That seemed to go well,” he said.

  “He’s an arrogant bully. He abuses his staff, throws his weight around in Congress like a Mafia don, and has no scruples.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He had a gravy stain on his tie.”

  “That clinches it,” Pete said. “I’m not voting for him.”

  “You can’t vote for him, anyway. You don’t live in his state anymore.”

  “I could move back.”

  It was a flip answer, but it stirred questions in Louisa’s mind. “Would you ever do that? Go back?”

  He didn’t need time to think about it. He shook his head. “No. Not to live. I can barely survive a four-hour visit.”

  Nothing had changed, he thought. There was the same feeling of fatalistic impotency, and he hated it with a passion. His father and brothers were old beyond their years. They complained, but saw no reason for change, no opportunity for improvement. His successes were suspect. What had been good enough for his father and grandfather, brothers, cousins, classmates, hadn’t been good enough for him. It generated confusion among his friends and relatives. Pete would have preferred resentment. At least resentment was an aggressive emotion.

  “Four hours isn’t very long.”

  “Ahhh,” he said, sighing, “it’s a lifetime.”

  Louisa thought the statement held finality and enormous sadness. “Is it that bad?”

  “I used to be afraid to take a vacation. I was afraid that if I stopped writing, even for a few days, I’d never get started again. It was much easier to believe in the power of inertia than in my own talent, my own ambition. For a long time, I was afraid to go
home, because I was afraid I might stay. Now I simply find going home to be…tedious. No one is comfortable with me.”

  Louisa winced. “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean to inspire pity. A lot of the discomfort is my own doing. I could refrain from trying to ram my ideas down the throats of others. It’d go a long way to make me more popular.”

  “Not your style,” Louisa said. “You’re a crusader.”

  He’d never thought about it exactly in those terms, but he supposed she was right. He wasn’t sure it was flattering. “Are crusaders annoying?”

  “Yes. That’s part of their charm.”

  He parked the car and they got out.

  “Do you think I’m different today?” Louisa asked him.

  He trailed after her, assessing the hint of her backside under the black wool coat. He looked at her hair, her shoes, her purse. She seemed the same. “Is this a trick question?”

  “I feel different,” she said.

  He curled his fingers into her lapels and pulled her very close. “I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t felt you yet.”

  Her jaw went slack. The man had a one-track mind. She gave him a look normally reserved for the perverts who hung out on Fourteenth Street. “Not that kind of feel.”

  He unlocked his door and ushered her into his lobby. “I know what you mean. You’re referring to the fact that you’re taking charge of your life. You’re being a little rebellious and very brave.”

  “Yes!”

  “It isn’t so much that you’re different. You’re still the same person. It’s just that you’re more of some things and less of others. You’re making choices about your personality.”

  He turned her in the direction of his stairs and gave her a little push.

  “When I was a kid I let my emotions rule me. Whatever I felt was out there for all to see—anger, frustration, childish exuberance. I was self-indulgent, did everything to excess, and was intolerant of anyone who did less. I stole more cars, went out with more girls, drank myself into oblivion at every opportunity, and was the worst student, worst soldier, worst reporter ever. I was also the best student, best soldier, and best damn reporter ever. I was fearless from bloated ego and lack of caring.