Naughty Neighbor

Chapter 2

Louisa sampled a crab puff and smiled pleasantly at Sam Gundy. The man made shoes-lots of them. And he was telling Louisa exactly how it was done.

Louisa felt her eyes begin to cross and snapped herself to attention. She took a quick peek around the room. Everything seemed to be running smoothly.

Nolan was courting big business tonight, looking to replenish almost empty campaign coffers. He’d chosen his guests carefully. They were all good party members, all very wealthy, all very boring. Nolan knew better than to be upstaged when he wanted money. He always made sure he was the best dressed, best looking, most politically powerful person in the room when he made his pitch for support. And he always invited a few members of the press to his parties. It helped him achieve “star quality,” he said. Nolan was big on “star quality.”

Nolan was a man on the way up. And Louisa knew if she did her job well, she’d go up with him.

“You ever been inside a shoe factory?” Sam asked Louisa.

“No sir, I haven’t.”

“It’s pretty exciting.”

“I bet.”

Female laughter rose above the murmurings of polite society. Nothing alarming, but loud enough to catch Louisa’s attention. Nolan had a small staff, and they all wore several hats. Among other things, it was Louisa’s job to make sure social occasions ran smoothly. She adjusted the volume on heated arguments, poured coffee into drunks, and made sure under-the-table fondlings were kept discreet.

“I’d be happy to show you around my shoe factory if you ever get up to my neck of the woods,” Sam Gundy said.

Another ripple went through the room. Something was causing a stir. Louisa’s party radar clicked into hyperdrive. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said to Gundy. “I think I’d better check…”

She turned and bumped into Pete Streeter. He was wearing jeans with a hole in the knee, beat-up white tennis shoes, a black T-shirt, and a custom-tailored navy faille tux jacket. Nolan Bishop was no slouch when it came to looks, Louisa thought, but Pete Streeter made Nolan look like Buster Brown.

Pete draped his left arm over Louisa’s shoulders and leaned into her. “How’s it going, babe?”

Louisa swallowed audibly and put her hand to her forehead to make sure her hair roots weren’t smoldering. She was blushing, hot and furious. It was a first. Too young for the change of life, she thought. What was left? Extreme embarrassment and a sexual attraction that bordered on the ridiculous. “What are you doing here?” she asked Streeter.

“Thought I’d come check up on you.” Streeter turned his attention to Sam Gundy. “She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” he explained. He shook his finger at Gundy. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, luring a sweet young thing like this up to see your dirty old shoe factory. I guess I know what you have in mind.”

Gundy sucked in his breath. “I was going to show her shoes!”

“Yeah,” Pete said, “that’s what they all say.” He clamped a hand at the nape of Louisa’s neck to prevent her from wriggling away from him. “You look all flushed,” he said to her. “I bet you haven’t had dinner yet.”

“Crab puff,” she managed. “I had a crab puff.”

“You see,” he said to Gundy. “She really needs someone to take care of her. It’s a good thing I showed up.”

A woman walked up to them. “Aren’t you Pete Streeter?” she asked. “I saw your picture on the cover of GQ.”

“A lot of people make that mistake,” Pete said. “I’m not that person at all. We just have the same tailor. And it’s the hair. Really,” he told her. “I’m not him.” He gave Louisa a friendly pat on her bottom. “Don’t go away. I’ll get you some food.”

Louisa looked for a sharp knife, but there weren’t any within reach. Just as well. It’d be a shame to ruin the tux jacket. It was a masterpiece. So was Pete Streeter, she admitted, but that wasn’t going to stop her from mutilating him once they were alone.

Pete wandered over to the buffet table, took a plate, and wondered what the devil he was doing at this party. He’d told himself he was worried about the Porsche, but he knew that was baloney. The horrible truth, he decided, was that he’d had an intense, irrational craving to see more of Louisa Brannigan.

It was a frightening revelation. Even more frightening was the fact that he didn’t have a clue why he was so attracted to her. He couldn’t find anything redeeming about the woman, although she didn’t look bad in the silky suit. He loaded a plate with slivers of fresh fruit and a mound of tiny sandwiches. He snaked his way back through the crowd and handed the plate to Louisa. “Eat up.”

“I don’t-”

He popped a sandwich into her mouth. “Chew.”

“Mmmmmph.”

One of the media people sidled up to Pete and introduced himself. “I heard you were in town,” he said. “I heard you were doing something big, something controversial.”

“We’ll see,” Pete told him. “It’s still in the research stage.”

A man with a video camera appeared from nowhere and trained the recorder on Streeter. It drew more people.

Louisa felt a hand tug at her sleeve. It was Nolan. “Who is this guy?”

“Pete Streeter.”

“What’s he doing here? Did you invite him?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, get him out of here. Now! Take him somewhere and keep him there. He’s insulted Sam Gundy, wiped out the pâté sandwiches, and he’s monopolizing the press.”

“Right.”

“And find out where he got the tux jacket.”

“Yes sir.”

Half an hour later, Pete pulled the Porsche into Louisa’s designated parking space and cut the ignition.

“Maybe this is all just a bad dream,” Louisa said. “Maybe today never happened. I’m going to go to bed now, and maybe things will be better when I wake up.”

Pete followed her to the door and stood patiently while she opened it. “It’s not so bad, you know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one got hurt, and we got to go to a neat party.”

“You crashed that neat party. And you insulted poor Sam Gundy.”

“Hey, I even got dressed up. I wore my tux.”

Louisa let her gaze travel the length of him. “What about the jeans and sneakers?”

“What about them?”

Louisa unlocked her door and stepped into the foyer. Pete followed. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

“I figured you’d want to offer me a drink or something.”

“Nothing! I’m not going to offer you anything! And I don’t want you in my house.”

“How about coffee? Do I get a cup of coffee?”

“How about a knuckle sandwich? How’d you like that?”

He smiled and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “I suppose this means a good-night kiss is out of the question.”

“Out!” She pointed stiff-armed to the door. “Out, out, out.”

Pete came awake with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He lay perfectly still, waiting for the confusion of sleep to leave him, wondering what had nudged him toward consciousness. He felt the cat shift at the foot of the bed, heard it growl low in its throat.

Pete’s gaze fastened on the DVD display across the room with the LED lights glowing red in the darkness. The lights went black for a moment, then reappeared, and Pete knew someone was silently moving around his bedroom. A body had passed between him and the LED lights.

Reason told him to stay calm. Instinct told him to panic. Instinct won out. He sprang from the bed in one quick movement and hit the floor running, heading for the door. Halfway across the room he collided with the intruder, and they both went down in a heap on the floor.

Louisa sat at her kitchen table, elbows resting on the table, chin resting on her hands. She glumly looked at the clock on the wall. Three-fifteen. She couldn’t sleep. Once again, it was all his fault. The fiend upstairs was keeping her awake. This time he was stomping around in her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She sighed and slumped a little lower.

She was in bad shape. Pete Streeter had looked good to her earlier. When he’d made the crack about the good-night kiss, she’d actually given it a second thought. She pushed away from the table and shuffled over to the refrigerator. She opened the door and stared at the bottles and jars for a while before deciding on orange juice.

Hers was a normal reaction, she told herself. Streeter was gorgeous. Any healthy, sexually deprived woman would find Streeter attractive-unless she lived with him, of course. To live with Streeter was to hate him.

She drank her orange juice and padded back to the bedroom. She was about to crawl into bed when there was a loud thump overhead. It was followed by more thumping, then a crash that made her ceiling shake. He was at it again. The man had no consideration.

“Quiet!” she shouted. “Don’t you know what time it is? It’s three-fifteen in the morning!”

There was another ceiling-shaking crash, more thumping and scuffling sounds. “This is too much,” Louisa muttered. “I absolutely am not going to tolerate this any longer.”

She cinched her floor-length blue velour robe around herself with a vicious yank on the belt, stuffed her feet into her big furry slippers, and charged out of her bedroom. On the front porch she pounded on Streeter’s door.

“Open up!” she demanded. She gave the door another shot with her fist, it swung open, and she stepped into the foyer.

“Streeter, what the hell are you doing up there? I’m trying to get some sleep! I have to be at work early tomorrow!” Her only answer was more thrashing and grunting. The man was exercising!

“Streeter!”

Still no response. Big surprise, she thought. How could he possibly hear anything over the racket he was making. She flicked the light switch on, scooped her robe up into her hands, and climbed the stairs to his apartment.

Standing in the dimly lit living room, she realized Pete was rolling around in his bedroom in the dark, and had a brief flash of panic that he might not be alone, that he might be in the throes of passion. She did an eye roll and reminded herself that it didn’t matter what the man was doing; the point being he was doing it too loud.

She held her ground in the middle of the living room and yelled in the direction of the bedroom. “Listen, Streeter, you macho crumb-”

A four-letter word carried out to her, and two men tumbled through the bedroom door in a tangle of flailing arms and legs. They crashed into Louisa, taking her down with them, knocking the air out of her lungs. One of the men was clothed. One was naked. The naked one was Pete Streeter.

Louisa didn’t have time to ogle as the three of them rolled across the floor and down the stairs. They landed with a thud, smashing into a brass umbrella stand. The intruder scrambled to his feet and hustled out the door, down the steps, into a waiting car. Louisa and Pete lay dazed on the hardwood floor.

“So,” Pete finally said, “couldn’t sleep?”

“I’m afraid to ask what you were doing with that guy.”

“What did it look like?”

“It looked like you were fighting.”

Streeter stood. “That about sums it up.”

Louisa was relieved. She was afraid it had been something kinky. She pulled herself to her feet, ran her tongue over her teeth to make sure none were missing, and willed her eyes to focus above Streeter’s shoulders. It was hopeless. In her mind she was looking into his eyes, but in reality she was staring below the waist. “Jeez,” Louisa said.

Pete’s left eye was beginning to swell shut and he could taste blood in his mouth. He sighed. This was not a good time to be naked with Louisa Brannigan. “I’m not at my best,” he told her.

She was still staring. She couldn’t help herself. “Could have fooled me.”

Pete lifted a trench coat from a wall peg and buttoned himself into it. “I think there’s a compliment in there somewhere.”

“What was this all about?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to talk to the guy.”

“This sort of thing happen to you a lot?”

“You mean rolling down the stairs naked with two other people?”

She shook her head. “You look terrible. You want me to drive you to the emergency room?”

“Not necessary. I’ll be okay. I just need some ice.”

“How about if I do my nurse thing and pour salt in your wounds?”

He grimaced. He was half afraid she meant it. “Sounds like fun, but I think I’ll pass.”

She touched his hand. “I’m serious. Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. In a half hour I’ll have convinced myself I won.” He turned her around and pushed her out the door. “I’m going to stay here until I hear your bolt slide across.” And the next day he’d have better locks installed-and a security system.

Louisa crawled into bed with her robe still on and huddled under the covers. Now that she was alone, her teeth were chattering from fear and from the horror of seeing Pete Streeter cut and bruised. He was in trouble, she thought. Big trouble. She ordered herself to relax, to take deep breaths. The trembling stopped, but the panic remained, hollowing out her stomach, constricting her breathing.

She wasn’t sure if she was afraid for herself or for Streeter. Their lives suddenly seemed to be hopelessly entangled. And for all his annoying habits, she felt drawn to him. There was no denying it…the man had style. He was fascinating. He might even be likable under more favorable circumstances, although that was pushing it some.

The panic lifted and an equally potent but entirely different emotion fluttered in her stomach. She was smitten with Pete Streeter, she reluctantly admitted. Probably it wasn’t so bizarre as it seemed, she told herself. After all, it was probably normal to feel a certain intimacy after tumbling down the stairs with a naked man.

The memory brought a smile to her lips and another flutter in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes and reconstructed Streeter, vividly remembering every little detail…and one detail in particular that wasn’t little at all.

At ten-thirty the following morning Louisa returned home. She slammed her front door with enough force to rattle windows, flung her briefcase halfway across the living room, and dropped her dress-for-success coat on the floor and kicked it. She marched into the kitchen and rummaged through her cabinet for a dish that was chipped. Then she took the chipped dish and threw it at the wall. She paused and took several deep breaths.

Good. She was feeling much better. She was almost calm. Pretty soon she might even be rational. More deep breaths.

A tear rolled down her cheek, and she quickly wiped it away, furious with herself that she’d allowed it to surface. She poured herself a cup of coffee, heated it in the microwave, and took it to the little cherrywood kitchen table. She had to think.

Ten minutes later she found herself knocking on Pete’s front door.

He opened the door and squinted from behind a black eye. “I figured either you came home early or else there was a raging bull elephant loose in your apartment.”

“We need to talk.”

“Your place or mine?”

She thought about the pieces of broken crockery laying on her kitchen floor and decided she’d prefer he didn’t know she’d been deranged. “Yours.”

He moved slowly going up the stairs.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like I’ve been run over by a tank.”

The ground floor of the row house had been converted into a traditional apartment with living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. The second floor, Louisa realized, was essentially two rooms-the bedroom, and a large living room/dining room with the kitchen area to the rear. It had hardwood floors covered by Oriental carpets, big heavy furniture in muted tones, an odd assortment of tables, black-shaded brass lamps, and the largest flat-screen TV she’d ever seen. One wall was devoted to bookshelves, their contents spilling over into a workstation that held a computer and laser printer.

Pete turned to her. “Is this going to be serious talking?”

“Yeah.”

He led her to the kitchen table. “Did you get to drink the coffee you made?”

“How do you know I made coffee?”

“You heat coffee for one minute in the microwave. It comes through loud and clear.”

She nodded. “Actually, I forgot to drink it. I was thinking.”

He filled a mug and handed it to her.

She looked at it skeptically. It smelled like coffee, but she wasn’t sure. “How do you get it this consistency?” she asked. “It looks like motor oil.”

“The trick is to let it sit a few days.”

She took a sip and sucked in her breath. “Holy cow.”

“Too strong?”

“Don’t you worry about it eating through the bottom of the mug?”

He pushed a cookie jar in her direction. “So what’s your problem?”

“I’ve been fired.” She took a cookie and nibbled on it. “Nolan called me into his office, asked a few questions about my relationship with you, and next thing, I’m told my services are no longer needed.”

“Has to make you wonder.”

“I thought you might be able to shed some light on my sudden termination.”

“No advance warning?”

“None.” She watched him expectantly. If he said ‘bummer,’ she’d hit him.

Pete felt the anger knot in his stomach. They were going too far. He could understand trying to cover dirty laundry, but this went way beyond anything he’d anticipated. Not that violence and intimidation were unprecedented in American political history. It was that he’d never been the direct recipient, and now the harassment was spreading to people associated with him.

He leaned back in his chair and debated how much he should tell her. He didn’t know her very well. Instinct told him she was too goofy to be devious, but it wouldn’t hurt to be careful. He linked his hands behind his head while he thought for a moment.

“A couple weeks ago a newspaper article caught my attention. It was just one of those little filler things…boy bites dog stuff. It was about a pig that was running around loose in the halls of Congress. This probably sounds dumb, but I kept wondering about that pig. I kept wondering what happened to him.”

Louisa grimaced. “You must have a lot of time on your hands.”

He leaned forward. “You know anything about this pig?”

“Sure. The pig was supposed to be sent to Amsterdam as part of a goodwill animal husbandry exchange program. The program was sponsored by Stu Maislin. This particular pig had been bred in Maislin’s home state and genetically altered to have an incredibly low fat ratio. The pig was brought to Maislin’s office for publicity pictures. After the pictures were taken, the pig was scheduled to fly out of Dulles, but it got sick. My understanding is that everyone was scurrying around, trying to figure out what to do with a sick two-hundred-pound pig, and the pig mysteriously disappeared.”

“How could it have disappeared? It was in the Hart Building, for crying out loud.”

Louisa shrugged. “It was a Saturday. There weren’t many people around.”

“There were guards.”

“Maybe one of the guards took it home and barbecued it.”

“I thought of that,” he said. “I’ve talked to all of the guards working that day. No one would admit to seeing it. I posted a reward for news of the pig. I made it easy for the informant to remain anonymous.”

She paused and stared at him with her cookie midway to her mouth. “Why on earth would you go to all that trouble?”

“It didn’t add up to me. My curiosity was aroused.” That plus the fact that he was researching Maislin for his new screenplay and had heard some odd rumors about drug use and mob influence.

Louisa surveyed the man sitting across from her. He looked to be in his late thirties. He obviously had a lot of money and a certain amount of fame, but he had few pretentions. He didn’t drop names, didn’t wear flashy clothes, didn’t buy designer cookies. He made the world’s worst coffee, he wondered about pigs in Congress, and he looked great naked. She didn’t have a clue about his honesty, and she suspected his morals were shaky.

“You seem sort of obsessed by this filler.”

“I’ve written screenplays about the black market arms network, about Wall Street scandals, about open-air drug dealers,” Pete said. “I’ve interviewed murderers, madmen, child molesters. I’ve never before run into the kind of intimidation I’m getting on this pig thing. I started receiving threatening phone calls after I posted the first ad. I ran an ad in the paper, and someone tried to wreck my car. I’ve had my apartment broken into, and I’ve been attacked in bed. Now you’ve been fired.”

“Are you telling me I was fired because of a pig?”

“Can you come up with any better reasons?”

It sounded pretty farfetched. She was known for being gullible, but this strained the limits of credulity. And she definitely didn’t trust Pete. He looked like a man who would tell a woman anything. If he’d told her he was a drug runner, a known felon, a serial bank robber, she’d have believed him in an instant. The pig story was harder to swallow.

On the other hand, even a creative person like a writer would have a hard time coming up with something that bizarre on such short notice. And the bottom line was that it didn’t matter if she believed him or not-she didn’t have anything else. She recalled the shoving match between Maislin and Bishop outside the Hart Building and wondered if it was significant.

“Okay, I’ll go with it for a while,” she said. “What have you found out about the pig that I don’t already know?”

“Not much. I need someone on the inside. Someone like you. You want to join forces?”

“I’m not on the inside anymore. Security reclaimed my badge.”

“You still know people.”

It was true. She knew a lot of people, and she’d had something similar in mind when she’d stormed up the stairs. She intended to get to the bottom of this. Being summarily dismissed by Nolan would put a black mark on her résumé that would be hard to erase. She didn’t intend to be gracious about it.

She also didn’t intend to let Pete get the upper hand in their partnership. She’d seen his type before. He was a bulldozer. If she wasn’t careful, he’d be ordering her around, sending her off to chase down pigs. And even worse, if she wasn’t very careful, she’d find herself in his bed and wondering how she got there. She’d play it cool. Not look too anxious.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Honey, you’re unemployed. What have you got to lose?”

She chewed on her lower lip.

Pete pushed back from the table. “Don’t look so worried. I happen to know you already lost that.”

So much for cool, she thought. It was hard to be cool with a man who’d spent the last three weeks listening to her telephone conversations. “Okay, I’ll throw in with you. Just don’t get any wrong ideas.”

He was standing behind her, thinking she’d be on her feet and running down the stairs if he told her about some of his ideas.

He bent forward and whispered in her ear. “We are about to embark on an undercover operation-a pig hunt that could have a significant impact on national security and international relations. We have to trust each other, Lou. We have to work as a team. We have to…share.” He kissed her just below her ear and again at the nape of her neck.

She swiveled in her chair, coming nose-to-nose with him. She narrowed her eyes and poked a forefinger at his chest. “Back off.”

“I can’t,” he said, placing both hands on the table, trapping her. “I’ve developed an intense physical attraction to you.”

“Good grief.” It was a relief to know the attraction was reciprocal. It was disconcerting to have it put so bluntly.

A smile curved the corners of his mouth when he spoke. “I can tell you’re excited about this newfound intimacy.”

Terrified would be closer to the truth, she thought. An attraction was one thing, acting on that attraction was something entirely different. “I’m not going to have to spend all my time in a groping war with you, am I?”

“Not for the next few days. I’m going to let my body heal before I do any serious groping.”

Probably a lie, he thought, but it wouldn’t hurt to throw her off guard. He pushed away and grabbed his jacket from the elaborate oak coatrack at the top of the stairs. “Come on. Let’s do some detecting. Let’s check up on this Maislin dude. Let’s see if he lives with piggies.”

“Suppose we find Maislin has the pig. What does that prove?”

“I don’t know. It’s a place to start. I figure we’ll just keep poking around, picking up stray pieces, and then at some point maybe the pieces will start to come together. Besides, even if Maislin doesn’t have the pig, I’d still like to see his house.”