Loe raamatut: «Undercover with the Mob»

1

NATALIE DORSET WAS enjoying her usual Saturday morning breakfast with her landlady when her life suddenly took a turn for the surreal.

Oh, the day had started off normally enough. She had been awakened at her usual weekend hour of 8:30 a.m. by her cat, Mojo, who, as usual, wanted his breakfast—and then her spot in the still-warm bed. And then she had brewed her usual pot of tea—her Fortnum & Mason blend, since it was the weekend—and had opened her usual kitchen window to allow in the cool autumn morning. And then she had fastened her shoulder-length brown hair into its usual ponytail, had forgone, for now, her usual contact lenses to instead perch her usual glasses on her usual nose and, still wearing her blue flannel jammies decorated with moons and stars, she had, as usual, carried the pot of tea down to the first floor kitchen, which Mrs. Klosterman and her tenants generally used as a general meeting/sitting area. It was also where Natalie and Mrs. Klosterman had their usual breakfast together every Saturday morning, as usual.

And now it was also where Mrs. Klosterman was going off the deep end, psychologically speaking. Which was sort of usual, Natalie had to admit, but not quite as usual as the full-gainer she was performing with Olympic precision today. You could just never really tell with Mrs. Klosterman.

“I’m telling you, Natalie,” her elderly landlady said, having barely touched her first cup of tea, “he’s a Mob informant the government has put here for safekeeping. You mark my words. We could both wake up in our beds tomorrow morning to find our throats slit.”

Mrs. Klosterman was referring to her new tenant, having just this past week let out the second floor of her massive, three-story brick Victorian in Old Louisville. Now, only days after signing the lease, she was clearly having second thoughts—though probably not for the reasons she should be having them, should she, in fact, even be having second thoughts in the first place. Or something like that. Mrs. Klosterman did have a habit of, oh, embellishing reality? Yes, that was a polite way of saying she was sometimes delusional.

Natalie had lived in Mrs. Klosterman’s house—occupying the third and uppermost floor, where her landlady claimed the first for herself—for more than five years now, ever since she’d earned her Masters of Education and begun teaching at a nearby high school. Other tenants who had rented out the second floor had come and gone in those years, but Natalie couldn’t bring herself to move, even though she could afford a larger space now, maybe even a small home of her own. She just liked living in the old, rambling house. It had a lot of character. In addition to Mrs. Klosterman, she meant.

And she liked her landlady, too, who didn’t seem to have any family outside her tenants—much like Natalie herself. Because of the tiny population of the building, the house had always claimed a homey feel, since Mrs. Klosterman had, during its renovation into apartments, left much of the first floor open to the public—or, at the very least, to her tenants. At Christmastime, she and Natalie and whoever else was in residence even put up a tree in the front window and exchanged gifts. For someone like Natalie, who’d never had much family of her own, living here with Mrs. Klosterman was the next best thing. In fact, considering the type of family Natalie had come from, living here with Mrs. Klosterman was actually better.

Of course, considering this potential throat-slitting thing with regard to their new neighbor, they might all be sleeping with the fishes before the next Christmas could even come about. And their gifts from the new guy might very well be horses’ heads in their beds. Which, call her stodgy, would just ruin the holiday for Natalie.

Putting aside for now the idea that she and her landlady might wake up with their throats slit, since, according to her—admittedly limited—knowledge of medicine, a person most likely wouldn’t wake up had her throat indeed been slit, and the relative unlikelihood of that happening anyway, she asked her landlady, “Why do you think he’s a Mob informant?”

Really, she knew she shouldn’t be surprised by Mrs. Klosterman’s suspicions. Ever since Natalie had met her, her landlady had had a habit of making her life a lot more colorful than it actually was. (See above comments about the sometimes-delusional thing.) But seeing as how the woman had survived all by herself for the last twenty of her eighty-four years, ever since her husband Edgar’s death, Natalie supposed Mrs. Klosterman had every right to, oh, embellish her reality in whatever way she saw fit. She just wished the other woman would lighten up on the true crime books and confession magazines she so loved. Obviously, they were beginning to take their toll. Or maybe it was just extended age doing that. Or else Mrs. Klosterman was back to smoking her herb tea instead of brewing it. Natalie had warned her about that.

“I can just tell,” the older woman said now. She tugged restlessly at the collar of her oversized muumuu, splashed with fuchsia and lime green flowers, then ran her perfectly manicured fingers—manicured with hot pink nail polish—through her curly, dyed-jet-black hair. Whenever she left the house, Mrs. Klosterman also painted on jet-black eyebrows to match, and mascaraed her lashes into scary jet-black daddy longlegs. But right now, only soft white fuzz hinted at her ownership of either feature. “I can tell by the way he looks, and by the way he acts, and by the way he talks,” she added knowledgeably. “Even his name is suspicious.”

Natalie nodded indulgently. “What, does he wear loud polyester suits and ugly wide neckties and sunglasses even when it’s dark out? Does he reek of pesto and Aqua Velva? Is his name Vinnie ‘The Eraser’ Mancuso, and is he saying he’s here to rub some people out?”

Mrs. Klosterman rolled her eyes at Natalie. “Of course not. He wouldn’t be that obvious. He wears normal clothes, and he smells very nice. But he does talk like a mobster.”

“Does he use the word ‘whacked’ a lot?” Natalie asked mildly.

“Actually, he did use the word ‘whacked’ once when he came to sign the lease,” her landlady said haughtily.

“Did he use it in reference to a person?” Natalie asked. “Preferably a person with a name like ‘Big Tony’ or ‘Light-Loafered Lenny’ or ‘Joey the Kangaroo’?”

Mrs. Klosterman deflated some. “No. He used it in reference to the cockroaches in his last apartment building. I assured him we did not have that problem here, so there would be no whacking necessary.” Before Natalie had a chance to ask another question, her landlady hurried on, “But even not taking into consideration all those other things—”

Which were certainly incriminating enough, Natalie thought wryly.

“—his name,” her landlady continued, “is…” She paused, looking first to the left, then to the right before finishing. And when she finally did conclude her sentence, she scrunched her body low across the table, and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “His name,” she said quietly, “is…John.”

Now Natalie was the one to roll her eyes. “Oh, yeah. John. That’s a Mob name all right. All your most notorious gangsters are named John. Let’s see, there was John Capone, John Luciano, John Lansky, John Schultz, Baby John Nelson, Pretty John Floyd, Johnny and Clyde…”

“John Dillinger, John Gotti,” Mrs. Klosterman threw in.

Yeah, okay, Natalie thought. But they were the exceptions.

“And it’s not just the John part,” Mrs. Klosterman said. “His full name is John Miller.”

Oh, well, in that case, Natalie thought. Sheesh.

“But he tells everyone to call him ‘Jack,’” her landlady concluded. “So you can see why I’m so suspicious.”

Yep, Natalie thought. No doubt about it. Mrs. Klosterman definitely had been smoking her herb tea again. Natalie would have to find the stash and replace it with normal old oolong, just like last time.

“John Miller,” Natalie echoed blandly. “Mmm. I can see where that name would just raise all kinds of red flags at the Justice Department.”

Mrs. Klosterman nodded. “Exactly. I mean, what kind of name is John Miller? It’s a common one. The kind nobody could trace, because there would be so many of them running around.”

“And the reason your new tenant couldn’t just be another one of those many running around?” Natalie asked, genuinely anxious to hear her landlady’s reasoning for her assumption. Mostly because it was sure to be entertaining.

“He doesn’t look like a John Miller,” she said. “Or even a Jack Miller,” she hastily added.

“What does he look like?” Natalie asked.

Mrs. Klosterman thought for a moment. “He looks like a Vinnie ‘The Eraser’ Mancuso.”

Natalie sighed, unable to stop the smile that curled her lips. “I see,” she said as she lifted her teacup to her mouth for another sip.

“And even though Mr. Miller was the one who signed the lease,” Mrs. Klosterman added, “it was another man who originally looked at the apartment and said he wanted to rent it for someone.”

Which, okay, was kind of odd, Natalie conceded, but certainly nothing to go running around crying, “Mob informant!” about. “And what did that man look like?” she asked, telling herself she shouldn’t encourage her landlady this way, but still curious about her new neighbor.

Mrs. Klosterman thought for a moment. “Now he looked like a John Miller. Very plain and ordinary.” Then her eyes suddenly went wide. “No, he looked like a federal agent!” she fairly cried. “I just now remembered. He was wearing a trench coat!”

Natalie bit her lower lip and wondered if it would do any good to remind Mrs. Klosterman that it was October, and that it wasn’t at all uncommon to find the weather cool and damp this time of year, and that roughly half the city of Louisville currently was walking around in a trench coat, or reasonable facsimile thereof. Nah, Natalie immediately told herself. It would only provoke her.

“I bet he was the government guy who relocated Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman continued, lowering her voice again, presumably because she feared the feds were about to bust through the kitchen door, since in speaking so loudly, she was about to out their star witness against the Mob, who would then also bust through the kitchen door, tommy guns blazing.

“Mrs. Klosterman,” Natalie began instead, “I really don’t think it’s very likely that your new tenant is—”

“Connected,” her landlady finished for her, her mind clearly pondering things that Natalie’s mind was trying to avoid. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for. He’s connected. And now he’s singing like a canary. And all his wiseguy friends are looking to have him capped.”

Natalie stared at her landlady through narrowed eyes. Forget about the tea smoking. What on earth had Mrs. Klosterman been reading?

“You just wait,” the other woman said. “You’ll see. He’s in the Witness Protection Program. I just have a gut feeling.”

Natalie was about to ask her landlady another question—one that would totally change the subject, like “Hey, how ’bout them Cardinals?”—when, without warning, the very subject she had been hoping to change came striding into the kitchen in the form of Mr. Miller himself. And when he did, Natalie was so startled, both by his arrival and his appearance—holy moly, he really did look like a Vinnie “The Eraser” Mancuso—that she nearly dropped her still-full cup of tea into her lap. Fortunately, she recovered it when it had done little more than splash a meager wave of—very hot—tea onto her hand. Unfortunately, that made her drop it for good. But she scarcely noticed the crash as the cup shattered and splattered its contents across the black-and-white checked tile floor. Because she was too busy gaping at her new neighbor.

He was just so…Wow. That was the only word she could think of to describe him. Where she and her landlady were still relaxing in their nightclothes—hey, it was Saturday, after all—John “The Jack” Miller looked as if he were ready to take on the world. Most likely with a submachine gun.

Even sitting down as she was, Natalie could tell he topped six feet, and he probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. He was dressed completely in black, from the long-sleeved black T-shirt that stretched taut across his broad chest and shoulders and was pushed to the elbows over extremely attractive and very saliently muscled forearms, to the black trousers hugging trim hips and long legs, to the eel-skin belt holding up those trousers, to the pointy-toed shoes of obviously Italian design. His hair was also black, longer than was fashionable, thick and silky and shoved straight back from his face.

And what a face. As Natalie vaguely registered the sensation of hot liquid seeping into her fuzzy yellow slippers, she gaped at the face gazing down at her, the face that seemed to have frozen in place, because Jack Miller appeared to be as transfixed by her as she was by him. His features looked as if they had been chiseled by the gods—Roman gods, at that. Because his face was all planes and angles, from the slashes of sharp cheekbones to the full, sensual mouth to the blunt, sturdy line of his jaw. And his eyes…

Oh, my.

His eyes were as black as his clothing and hair, fringed by dark lashes almost as long as Mrs. Klosterman’s were in their daddy-longlegs phase. But it wasn’t the lashes that were scary on him, Natalie thought as her heart kicked up a robust, irregular rhythm. It was the eyes. As inky as the witching hour and as turbulent as a tempest, Mr. Miller—yeah, right—had the kind of eyes she figured a hit man would probably have: imperturbable, unflappable. Having taught high school in the inner city for five years, she liked to think she could read people pretty well. And usually, she could. But with Mr. Miller—yeah, right—she could tell absolutely nothing about what he might be feeling or thinking.

Until he cried, “Jeez, lady, you tryin’ to burn me alive here or what?”

And then she realized that it wasn’t that Mr. Miller had been transfixed by her. What he’d been transfixed by was the fact that hot tea had splashed on him. Which was pretty much in keeping with Natalie’s impact on the opposite sex. Long story short, she always seemed to have the same effect on men. Eventually, they always started looking at her as if she’d just spilled something on them. With Mr. Miller she was just speeding things up a bit, that was all. Not that she wanted any things to even happen with him, mind you, let alone speed them up. But it was good to know where she stood right off the bat.

And where she stood with Jack Miller, she could tell right away, was that she was stuck on him. In much the same way that melting slush stuck to the side of his car, or a glob of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. At least, she could see, that was the way he was feeling about her at the moment.

“I am so sorry,” she said by way of a greeting, lurching to her feet and grabbing for a dish towel to wipe him off. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

Hastily, she began brushing at her new neighbor’s clothing, then realized, too late, that because of their dark color, she had no idea where her tea might have landed on him, or if it had even landed on him at all. So, deciding not to take any chances, she worked furiously to wipe off all of him, starting at his mouthwateringly broad shoulders and working gradually downward, over his tantalizingly expansive chest, and then his temptingly solid biceps, and then his deliciously hard forearms. And then, just to be on the safe side, she moved inward again, over his delectably flat torso and once more over his tantalizingly expansive chest—you never could be too careful when it came to spilling hot beverages, after all—back up over the mouth-wateringly broad shoulders, and then down over his delectably flat torso again, and lower still, toward his very savory—

“What the hell are you doing?”

The roughly—and loudly—uttered demand was punctuated by Jack Miller grabbing both of Natalie’s wrists with unerring fingers and jerking her arms away from his body. In doing so, he also jerked them away from her own body, spreading them wide, giving himself, however inadvertently, an eyeful of her…Well, of her oversized flannel jammies with the moons and stars on them that were in no way revealing or attractive.

Damn her luck anyway.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Miller,” she apologized again. “I hope I didn’t—”

“How did you know my name?” he demanded in a bristly voice.

She arched her eyebrows up in surprise at his vehemence. Paranoid much? she wanted to ask. Instead, she replied, “Um, Mrs. Klosterman told me your name?” But then she realized that in replying, she had indeed asked him something, because she had voiced her declaration not in the declarative tense, but in the inquisitive tense. In fact, so rattled was she at this point by Mr. Miller that she found herself suddenly unable to speak in anything but the inquisitive tense. “Mrs. Klosterman was just telling me about you?” she said…asked…whatever. “She said you moved in this week? Downstairs from me? And I just wanted to introduce myself to you, too? I’m Natalie? Natalie Dorset? I live on the third floor? And I should warn you? I have a cat? Named Mojo? He likes to roll a golf ball around on the hardwood floors sometimes? So if it bothers you? Let me know? And I’ll make him stop?”

And speaking of stopping, Natalie wished she could stop herself before she began to sound as if she were becoming hysterical. And then she realized it was probably too late for that. Because now Mr. Miller was looking at her as if the overhead light in the kitchen had just sputtered and gone dim.

Although, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t the overhead light in the kitchen that had sputtered and gone dim, Natalie couldn’t help thinking further.

Oh, boy…

“Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman said politely amid all the hubbub, as if her kitchen hadn’t just been turned into a badly conceptualized sitcom where a newly relocated former mobster moves in with a befuddled schoolteacher and then zany antics ensue, “this is my other tenant, Ms. Natalie Dorset. As she told you, she lives on the third floor. But Mojo is perfectly well-mannered, I assure you, and would never bother anyone. Natalie,” she added in the same courteous voice, as if she were Emily Post herself, “this is Mr. John Miller, your new neighbor.”

“Jack,” he automatically corrected, his voice softer now, more solicitous. “Call me Jack. Everybody does.” He sounded as if he were vaguely distracted when he said it, yet at the same time, he looked as if he were surprised to have heard himself respond.

For one long moment, still gripping her wrists—though with an infinitely gentler grasp now, Natalie couldn’t help noticing—he fixed his gaze on her face, studying her with much interest. She couldn’t imagine why he’d bother. Even at her best, she was an average-looking woman. Dressed in her pajamas, with her hair pulled back and her glasses on, she must look…Well, she must look silly, she couldn’t help thinking. After all, the moons and stars on her pajamas were belting out the chorus of “Moon River,” even if it was only on flannel.

But Mr. Miller didn’t even seem to notice her pajamas, because he kept his gaze trained unflinchingly on her face. For what felt like a full minute, he only studied her in silence, his dark eyes unreadable, his handsome face inscrutable. And then, as quickly and completely as his watchfulness had begun, it suddenly ended, and he released her wrists and dropped his attention to his shirt, brushing halfheartedly at what Natalie could tell now were nonexistent stains of tea.

“’Yo,” he finally said by way of a greeting, still not looking at her. But then he did glance over at Mrs. Klosterman, seeming as if he just now remembered she was present, too. “How youse doin’?” he further inquired, looking up briefly to include them both in the question before glancing nervously back down at his shirt again.

Okay, so he wasn’t a native Southerner, Natalie deduced keenly. Even though she had grown up in Louisville, she’d traveled extensively around the country, and she had picked up bits and pieces of dialects in her travels. Therefore, she had little difficulty translating what he had said in what she was pretty sure was a Brooklyn accent into its Southern version, which would have been “Hey, how y’all doin’?”

“Hi,” she replied lamely. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. Except maybe “You have the dreamiest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, even if they are what I would expect a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program to have,” and she didn’t think it would be a good idea to say that, even if she could punctuate it with a period instead of a question mark. After all, the two of them had just met.

“‘Yo, Mrs. Klosterman,” Jack Miller said, turning his body physically toward the landlady now, thereby indicating quite clearly that he was through with Natalie, but thanks so much for playing. “I couldn’t find a key to the back door up in my apartment, and I think it would probably be a good idea for me to have one, you know?”

Mrs. Klosterman exchanged a meaningful look with Natalie, and she knew her landlady was thinking the same thing she was—that Mr. Miller was already scoping out potential escape routes, should the Mob, in fact, come busting through the door with tommy guns blazing.

No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. She would not buy into Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suspicions and play “What’s My Crime?” Mr. Miller wanted the key to his back door for the simple reason that his back door, as Natalie’s did, opened onto the fire escape, and—let’s face it—old buildings were known to go up in flames occasionally, so of course he’d want access to that door.

“I forgot,” Mrs. Klosterman told him now. “I had a new lock put on that door after the last tenant moved out because the other one was getting so old. I have the new key in my office. I’ll get it for you.”

And without so much as a by-your-leave—whatever the hell that meant—her landlady left the kitchen, thereby leaving Natalie alone with her new mobster. Neighbor, she quickly corrected herself. Her new neighbor. Boy, could that have been embarrassing, if she got those two confused.

The silence that descended on the room after Mrs. Klosterman’s departure was thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. Although, all things considered, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy to use. In an effort to alleviate some of the tension, Natalie braved a slight smile and asked, “You’re not from around here originally, are you?”

He, too, braved a slight smile—really slight, much slighter than her slight smile had been—in return. “You figured that out all by yourself, huh?”

“It’s the accent,” she confessed.

“Yeah, it always gives me away,” he told her. “The minute I open my mouth, everybody knows I’m French.”

She smiled again, the gesture feeling more genuine now. “So what part of France do you hail from?”

His smile seemed more genuine now, too. “The northern part.”

Of course.

She was about to ask if it was Nouvelle York or Nouveau Jersey when he deftly turned the tables on her. “You from around here?”

She nodded, telling herself he was not making a conscious effort to divert attention from himself, but was just being polite. Somehow, though, she didn’t quite believe herself. “Born and bred,” she told him.

“Yeah, you have that look about you,” he said.

“What look?” she asked.

He grinned again, this time seeming honestly delighted by something, and the change that came over him when he did that nearly took her breath away. Before, he had been broodingly handsome. But when he smiled like that he was…She bit back an involuntary sigh as, somewhere in the dark recesses of her brain, an accordion kicked up the opening bars from La Vie en Rose.

“Wholesome,” he told her then. “You look wholesome.”

Oh, and wasn’t that the word every woman wanted to have a handsome man applying to her? Natalie thought. The accordion in her brain suddenly went crashingly silent. “Wholesome,” she repeated blandly.

His smile grew broader. “Yeah. Wholesome.”

Swell.

Oh, well, she thought. It wasn’t like she should be consorting with her new mobster—ah, neighbor—anyway. He really wasn’t her type at all. She preferred men who didn’t use the word “whacked,” even in relation to cockroaches. Men who didn’t dress in black from head to toe. Men who weren’t likely to be packing heat.

Oh, stop it, she commanded herself. You’re being silly.

“Sorry about the tea,” she said for a third time.

He shrugged off her concern. “No problem. I like tea.”

Really.

“And don’t worry about your cat,” he added. “I like cats, too.”