Naughty Neighbor Part 4

Louisa was apprehensive when she saw his choice. She balked at the door. "This is very nice, but I had something different in mind."

"What did you have in mind?"

No sense trying to be tactful, she thought. There really was no easy way to put it. "Something cheap," she said. "I'm unemployed."

"My treat."

"Nice, but no thanks. There's a sandwich shop on the next block..."

Pete slung his arm around her shoulder. He was becoming very fond of her. She was a good sport. She'd only whined a little on the way back to town, and he respected her honesty. There was nothing wrong with admitting you didn't have any money. He figured since she was so honest, she'd appreciate him being upfront with her.

"I've been to that sandwich shop. It's always busy, and it has bright lights and lots of noise." He leaned into her and nuzzled the nape of her neck. "This restaurant, on the other hand, has tiny tables and long tablecloths and is dark enough for-"

"This is not a date. And I don't...do whatever in public."

"Oh, man, give me a break, Lou. I quit smoking. Look at me, I'm in sensory deprivation. I'm going on frustration overload. I have appet.i.tes. I have needs."

She turned on her heel and headed out the door. "You're in big trouble if those needs can't be satisfied with a sandwich."

He followed her down Connecticut. "You're a tough woman, you know that? Where's your compa.s.sion? Where's your sense of charity?"

Louisa rolled her eyes. "Is that what you want? You want me to take pity on you?"

"Yeah."

She looked at him in amazement.

"It's a start," he said, grinning.

She opened the door to the sandwich shop and motioned him in. "You must really be desperate."

"I think I'm in love."

Her eyebrows raised. "Maybe I should buy you some cigarettes."

"I bet you're in love too," he said.

"You're an odious person. You steal, you lie, you're insensitive, inconsiderate, you're a womanizer, and you make horrible coffee."

"I could learn how to make better coffee."

Louisa slid into a booth and looked at the menu. "I'll have the number three club," she told the waitress.

"Steak sandwich," Pete said. He slouched into a corner and stretched his legs the length of the seat. "I'll concede to being all of those awful things, if you'll agree to list my good qualities."

Louisa stared at him. "Good qualities. This is going to be tough."

His smile broadened.

He was smug, she thought. Add that to insensitive and inconsiderate. She searched her mind for good qualities. She came up empty. A small frown developed between her eyebrows. Ridiculous as it seemed, she liked him. And it wasn't just s.e.xual, although the s.e.xual attraction was frighteningly strong. He was fun, and he was comfortable. He was impossible to insult. She wouldn't exactly call it a good quality, but it was a nice change of pace after years of Capitol Hill diplomacy. And she liked the way he was honest about lying.

"Well?" he asked.

"I'm thinking."

"Jeez. It's taking this long to come up with one good quality?"

"Maybe I just don't know you well enough."

"Okay, I'll help you out. I happen to have a wonderful sense of humor. I pay almost all my parking tickets. I like small animals and big children. I hardly ever cuss at old people. I've never shot anyone on the freeway. I gave a dollar to a b.u.m yesterday."

"This is very impressive."

"d.a.m.n right. I could go on, but I'm getting embarra.s.sed."

"I bet you're incredibly romantic too."

"Do bears do it in the woods?"

"I'm overwhelmed."

In truth, he worked very hard to keep his romantic inclinations under control. He allowed only a thin thread of romanticism to work its way into his screenplays, and he kept a tight lid on it in his everyday life. He felt screenplays grew maudlin with a surfeit of romance, and men became vulnerable. He didn't count candy and flowers and elegant restaurants as being high on the romance scale-they were cliches and more often than not impersonal gestures.

That didn't mean he wasn't above using them to achieve a desired result. He wasn't a stupid man, and he knew women expected the conventional niceties. But in his heart, he felt romance should be a very private matter.

"Maybe we should get back to serious talk," Louisa said. "I don't want to become so carried away with your good qualities that I lose perspective. It wouldn't do to spend the afternoon dallying around when there are pigs to be found."

Pete was becoming less interested in pigs by the minute. He was much more interested in the fact that Louisa Brannigan had flawless milk-white skin, a snippy little nose, a short fuse, and a large chunk of stubborn. He liked the way her eyes lit up when she smiled, and the way her nose wrinkled when she was mad. He couldn't imagine her towing the line as a congressional press secretary. He thought it must have been a strain on a personality that he suspected leaned toward the volatile.

Her voice sobered. "This is important to me. I've had my car trashed, I've been rolled down a flight of stairs in the middle of the night, and I've lost my job. I want to know why."

"You want to get revenge?"

"Nothing that dramatic. I just want to stay clean. I don't know the extent of Nolan's involvement. I don't want to turn out to be an unwitting accomplice to something ugly."

And while she didn't want to articulate it to Pete, other emotions were gnawing at her. The disappointment in Nolan was almost crushing. She'd believed in him, trusted him to do the right thing, had faith in his abilities. She'd put herself on the line for him, touting his potential with next-to-religious fervor. Even if he wasn't directly involved in whatever was rotten, he'd dismissed her too easily.

Her sense of betrayal was strong. She was an idealist, she realized. She suspected it was a term synonymous with young and foolish, but she was stuck with it all the same. Her moral and political indignation was aroused.

Pete's reasons for pursuing the pig cover-up had little to do with moral or political indignation. Simple curiosity had turned to certain knowledge that he'd stumbled onto a scandal of some sort. It was grist for his creative mill. It was a potential screenplay. It had also piqued his male ego. He had inadvertently opened up a can of worms, and the folks holding the can had misjudged him.

He wasn't the sort of person who yielded to pressure. He resented being threatened, and he was furious he'd been attacked in his sleep. The most serious mistake made was in firing Louisa. He hated to admit it, but he felt intensely protective of her. Not that she seemed to need protection-if she needed anything, it was restraint, Pete thought. If left to her own devices, she'd probably end up in a homicide lineup for death by broom handle.

"Okay," Pete said, "let's see what we have here. We know Maislin was the pig shipper. We know someone doesn't want questions asked about the little porker. And we know Nolan Bishop fired you because of your a.s.sociation with me. From this overwhelmingly d.a.m.ning evidence we're concluding that both Maislin and Bishop are involved in something nasty."

"Doesn't sound incredibly conclusive, does it?"

He made a noncommittal shrug. "What do Maislin and Nolan Bishop have in common?"

"They both belong to the same party."

"What else?"

Louisa thought about it. They were from different states. Maislin was from Pennsylvania. Nolan was from Maryland. Both lived in Potomac when Congress was in session. Maislin was a blue-color success story. Nolan was Harvard Law. On the surface they didn't have much in common, but both men were extremely ambitious. Both cared a great deal about public opinion.

"Are they buddies?"

"Not that I know of. Maislin's been around longer. Carries a lot more clout. He travels with the Big Boys."

"You ever have to sit on any bad publicity for Nolan?"

"Nope."

"Any s.e.xual indiscretions?"

"Nothing past the leering stage since I've been with him."

Conversation momentarily stopped while the food was served.

"How about Maislin?" Pete asked.

Louisa picked at her sandwich, eating the bacon first. "I don't know much about Maislin. As far as I know he keeps himself clean. He's on some powerful committees, his const.i.tuents are fond of him, and he's not too bright."

"There has to be more of a connection," Pete said.

"After lunch I'll go back to my office and clean out my desk. I'll get a profile on Maislin while I'm there."

It was dark when Louisa staggered up the porch stairs, carrying a large cardboard box filled with personal belongings, daily calenders, her Rolodex, and as much information as she'd been able to gather on both Maislin and Nolan Bishop. She fumbled in her purse for the key and let herself into the empty apartment. She slid the bolt on the lock, turned the light on with her elbow, and collapsed into an overstuffed chair with the box on her lap.

Her heart stopped beating at the sound of a key turning in her lock, and she let out a bloodcurdling scream when the door opened. It was Pete. She closed her eyes, clapped her hand to her chest, and sunk deeper into the chair. "Good Lord."

"Did I scare you?"

"h.e.l.l no. I always scream like that when people come into my apartment." She looked up at him. "How did you do that? How did you unlock my door?"

"I have a key. I own this place."

"Wonderful. That makes me feel so much safer. Not only do I have to worry about the pig people; now I have to worry about my sneaky landlord."

He took the box and tucked it under his arm. "Good thing I have a healthy ego. You're not the most supportive girlfriend I've ever had."

"I'm not your girlfriend."

He pulled her to her feet and pushed her toward the door. "Whatever."

"Where are we going?"

"My place. We'll brainstorm over dinner."

She followed him up the stairs to the kitchen area, and gaped at the big orange cat sprawled across the butcher-block table. It had one ear half chewed off and a p.r.o.nounced kink in its tail. "You have a cat on your table," Louisa said.

"Yeah. That's Spike."

Spike opened one eye and looked at Louisa. The eye was yellow and unblinking. It stared at Louisa for thirty seconds and closed, leaving Louisa with the impression she'd been less than interesting.

Pete set the cardboard box next to the sleeping cat. "Ten years ago Spike sort of adopted me, and we've been together ever since." He scratched the cat's head, but the cat didn't move. "He's very demonstrative," Pete said.

"I can see that."

Pete took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, filled a crystal winegla.s.s half full, and handed the gla.s.s to Louisa. "Were you able to get much on Maislin?"

She sipped her wine. "The usual whitewashed press release."

Pete slid three steaks under the broiler and threw two potatoes into the microwave. He accepted a blue folder from Louisa, flipped it open, and began reading.

"I can't see anything in here to help us," he finally said.

He scooped Spike off the table and replaced him with a tossed salad he took from the refrigerator. Spike dangled bonelessly from the crook of Pete's arm. He slowly opened his eyes, yawned, and yowled. Pete speared one of the steaks from the broiler, flopped it onto a plate, and set cat and steak on the floor.

Louisa couldn't keep the astonishment from her voice. "You're giving him an entire steak?"

"Hey, this guy's a stud. He has to keep his strength up."

"Is that good for him? I mean, shouldn't he be eating cat food? You know, a balanced cat diet?"

Pete put a potato and a steak on a plate for Louisa. "We don't eat steak every night. Sometimes we eat fish. Sometimes we order out for pizza. His favorite is hamburger with a lot of fried onions. We eat that a lot."

Tell me about it, Louisa thought. Everything in her apartment smelled like Pete's fried onions. The odor had permeated her wallpaper. His apartment, she noticed, had no such problem. His apartment smelled fresh and clean, slightly of coffee. She glanced at the vent over the stove. It was busy sucking away the broiler smoke, no doubt sending it directly down to her kitchen.

He put a container of sour cream on the table and topped her wine. "How about Maislin's staff? Do we have any information on them?"

Louisa pulled another folder from the cardboard box. She gave the folder to Pete and attacked her steak.

Pete read while he ate, but he didn't find anything useful.

"That was great," Louisa said. She looked at her winegla.s.s and wondered how it had gotten empty.

Pete took a quart of chocolate ice cream from the freezer and set it in the middle of the table. He gave Louisa a sterling silver iced-tea spoon and kept one for himself.

"Let's go over this again," he said, digging into the ice cream. "Why is everyone so touchy about this pig?"

Louisa took a spoonful of ice cream and let it melt on her tongue. It was smooth and rich. It was the brand she couldn't afford, the one that clogged arteries with b.u.t.terfat. Already, she could feel her thighs expanding. She took another spoonful, closed her eyes, and murmured approval. "This is wonnnnderful ice cream," she said, her eyes slightly glazed.

Pete stared at her. She was practically o.r.g.a.s.mic. "Are you okay?" he asked.