janet maple 05 - it doesnt pay to be bad (7 page)

“You did what?” Janet exclaimed.

“I swat the bastard. I was aiming for his head, but I’m too short, so I only got his shoulder and my swing wasn’t enough to make an impact. Still, it was enough for him to realize I was there. I think he was more scared than I was when he saw me. He cursed something inaudible and pushed me. It wasn’t much of a push, but it was enough to land me on the floor. He grabbed the painting and started making for the door. But Baxter wouldn’t let up. This time he must’ve gotten to the bastard’s shin because he screamed for dear life and dropped the painting. Then we heard your voices and he bolted for the door.” Mrs. Chapman took a deep breath. “There. I think that’s the whole story.”

“You’re a very brave woman, Mrs. Chapman. But please promise us not to fight intruders next time—just call the police. They’ll take care of it.”

Mrs. Chapman shrugged. “Fiddlesticks. The police can’t find their own nose with both their hands. I remember when my late husband got mugged and they never found who did it. Made a big deal out of writing it all down and filing a report. And then a big, fat nothing. A lot of good it did us.”

“Well, it’s not easy to find someone in a big city like New York,” Janet offered.

“I know it was hard to think straight at the time— But please, Mrs. Chapman, in the future, leave the criminals to the police,” Dennis added.

“I’m not as frail as I look,” Mrs. Chapman bristled.

“Of course not. You’re very brave,” Janet assured her. “I would’ve been scared out of my mind. I wonder why was he trying to steal our painting?” Janet got off the couch and kneeled on the floor to pick up the painting.

“Probably some crazy drug addict, eager to get his hands on any kind of cash,” Mrs. Chapman suggested. “He definitely didn’t act like an experienced burglar. He seemed really scared and unsure of himself. Looked like it was the first time he tried to rob an apartment. And I hope Baxter here taught him his lesson. Check the rest of the apartment to make sure there isn’t anything else that’s missing, but I doubt he had time to get his hands on anything else.”

“We don’t keep any valuables in the apartment. Just some petty cash,” Dennis said thoughtfully. “But something doesn’t add up—he must’ve timed his entrance with the doorman’s absence, which meant he had to have been scoping out the place. And then he got inside our apartment when you were away—he must’ve thought you left for the night. He’d planned everything right. He just couldn’t execute it.”

“Oh, no!” Janet exclaimed.

“What is it?” Dennis nearly jumped.

“Sorry for scaring everyone,” Janet apologized. “It’s nerves. The frame on the painting cracked. Such a shame—it was so lovely.” She held up the painting where the frame was banged up in the corner where it must’ve hit the floor.

“That should be easy to fix,” Dennis said. “There’s a gallery close to the office and I’ll take it over there tomorrow. And you know what? I bet they could help us with the appraisal also. I’m starting to get awfully curious about this painting.”

Chapter 6

“You’re both looking very chipper this morning,” Laskin greeted Janet and Dennis as he hovered in their office doorway.

“If you had the night Janet and I had, you’d be looking much worse,” Dennis shot back.

Laskin rubbed his hands together as he made his way inside the office. “What’s that I hear—an intrigue? Sounds exciting.”

“Actually it’s more scary than exciting,” Janet said. “Last night someone broke into our apartment.”

Laskin’s face turned serious. “Are you all right?”

Dennis waved his hand. “We’re fine. But we had to stay up till midnight to file the report with the police. I think Mrs. Chapman was right after all—they’re only good at filing paperwork.”

Laskin shook his head. “One thing at a time. Mrs. Chapman?”

“Mrs. Chapman is our neighbor. She was watching Baxter last night,” Janet explained. “Then we got home from dinner and Dennis noticed that the front door was left open—” Janet gave a quick summary of everything that happened the night before. She tried to be as quick and factual as possible, but it still took a good ten minutes to tell the whole story.

“Whew!” Laskin whistled when Janet finished her story. “This is something. I must say, I would’ve been scared witless.”

“And so were we,” Janet said.

“Let’s not exaggerate,” Dennis cut in. “Yes, it was unsettling and inconvenient, but no more than that. Mrs. Chapman got the worst of it—poor old thing was terrified.”

“Did you get a look at the burglar?” Laskin asked.

Dennis shook his head. “I couldn’t catch up with him. It’s all that rich food we ate in France. I need to get back to the gym.”

“I’m sure one of Tina’s moves would’ve come in handy last night,” Laskin said thoughtfully.

“Peter,” Dennis said sharply, “we have work to do.”

“Sorry, I’m just trying to be helpful,” Laskin apologized. “I’ll be in my office if you need me. Do you want me to take some of your cases? Tina is really catching on—she’s great help.”

“Thank you, but we got it,” Dennis said.

“Thanks, Peter. We really appreciate the offer though,” Janet added.

“And Peter, could you please keep this between us? I don’t want the whole office to know,” Dennis added in a lowered tone.

Laskin nodded. “Of course. Discretion is the name of the game,” he added as he turned to leave.

“Such a busybody—dear old Laskin never changes,” Dennis muttered after Laskin had left the office.

“He was just trying to be nice,” Janet said. “And I don’t understand why you wouldn’t accept his offer to take on some of our caseload. We’re swamped.”

“We’re not swamped. We’re just busy. And I’ll be damned if I compromise the quality of my work by dumping it on that rookie, Tina. Unlike Laskin, I have standards.”

“Then we’d better get to it,” Janet said. “Or we won’t have anything to report on to Ham. Oh, and we still have to find the time to stop by the gallery,” she added.

“What gallery?” Dennis asked distractedly, his eyes already glued to the computer screen.

“To find out more about the painting we brought from our honeymoon and to get the frame fixed.”

Dennis slapped his forehead. “That’s right. I remember. I’ll call and make an appointment right now.”

***

Tina Sloan toweled off her hair and headed for her locker to get dressed. The gym she belonged to had locations all over Manhattan, and luckily there was one only a few minutes away from her new job. She had just run five miles at an incline on a treadmill, jumped rope, and lifted weights—there was nothing better than a great workout to clear her head. She refused to admit it, but she’d been in a funk—her new job at Kirk & Associates wasn’t shaping up to be exactly what she’d expected it to be. The job itself was great, but the people weren’t exactly so great. One person, to be more specific—Dennis Walker—who had it in for her for no particular reason. Maybe it was because Tina had taken over his desk, but that wasn’t her doing—Ham Kirk had told her to share the office with Peter Laskin, and it was only temporary anyway. Peter Laskin on the other hand was a sweetheart—always there to offer a helping hand. Not that she needed to be hand-held—she’d caught on quickly—even Ham Kirk had been impressed. And Janet Maple seemed nice too—they had gone out for coffee several times. Janet had told her not to pay Dennis any mind—that he was just grumpy because of an old case—something to do with him getting kidnapped by a girl. Tina knew that Dennis had tried to sabotage her self-defense demonstration by coming at her from the wrong angle—of course the only one who’d gotten embarrassed was Dennis by landing on his butt. Tina smiled, the image flashing in her mind. She was a pro at what she did and it would take a lot more than the skills Dennis had, which were decent but nowhere near hers, to catch her off guard. They had made peace afterwards, but she wondered how long it would last. She really hadn’t meant to start off on the wrong foot with a colleague, and she didn’t savor the prospect of constantly having to watch her back. Maybe she was exaggerating—maybe she just needed to demonstrate her worth to the agency. Once she would no longer be the new kid on the block, Dennis would surely come around.

Tina shook her head—she’d been unable to stop thinking about work during her entire workout. Now Dennis Walker was messing up her workout routine. She went to the gym every night, in addition to a one-hour martial arts sequence she did every morning. It might seem like a lot to some, but she was actually cutting back, a lot. When getting ready for a tournament, she used to spend countless hours training. She had started competing in martial arts tournaments in high school, continued all through college, and kept it up for a while after graduation. She had loved every minute of it. Her father, on the other hand, not so much.

“Tina, that’s no life for a girl,” her old man kept preaching. “Your mother and I, we hardly ever see you. How’re you ever going to meet a nice boy and have a family if you keep running around like this?” Somehow her father didn’t seem to have a problem with her older brother, Drake, doing the same thing. Tina couldn’t remember the last time Drake had a steady girlfriend and the word marriage simply wasn’t in his vocabulary.

“Then let me come and work for you,” Tina would plead, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. A former FBI special agent—that was the extent Tina knew about her father’s past employment—and even that took a while to get out of him, David Sloan ran his own bodyguard agency. But despite the fact that she was more than qualified for the job, he wouldn’t hear of his daughter getting involved in the business. Too dangerous, was all her father would ever say. When Tina told him of thinking about joining the FBI, her old man nearly had a fit. Over my dead body, had been his exact response.

“Well, what do you want me to do if you won’t hire me to work for you?” Tina had argued. “I’m good at what I do. I don’t want my skills to go to waste.”

“You’re letting your skills go to waste,” her dad countered, “you have a degree in economics. You should put it to good use.” That was true—at her father’s insistence Tina had majored in economics, but she also had a degree in criminal justice, which she’d gotten at night by going back to school after she graduated. “Why don’t you get a nice little accounting job and settle down? Meet a nice fella and make me a grandfather. Where would I be without your mother? She’s my compass—kept my head straight my whole life. I want you to have someone like that in your life too.”

Getting married and having kids was about as high on her list of priorities as learning about the possibility of life on Mars—an interesting concept in general, but not of any immediate use, at least not to her. But when her old man started talking about family and kids, Tina knew better than to argue—the only thing to do was to shake her head and walk away.

Working for the FBI, on the other hand, was exactly the kind of work she was interested in. She knew she could do well there—if not in the field, then definitely behind the desk. If she was going to push paper, she’d much rather do it there than in some corporate office, which she had tried and hated. For a brief while, she’d worked as an analyst for a bank—it was a good job, with great benefits and pay—it just wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life. So she applied for an analyst job with the FBI—no action, just a paper pusher job, as a concession to her dad. She thought it best to keep it a secret from him—if she got the job, he would have no choice but to accept it. She should’ve known better—the old man had spies, or so called old friends, everywhere. Despite having a 4.0 GPA, relevant work experience, and passing all her tests, her application got denied—a gentleman with gray hair and a fatherly demeanor took her into an office and told her that although her credentials were excellent, they weren’t right for the bureau. He also told her that he’d had the pleasure of working with her father. At which point Tina got up from her seat and left, only to find her father waiting for her outside the building.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he’d grumbled. “What can I do to get this nonsense out of your head?”

“Get me a job where I can do something that matters,” she’d shot back.

She expected her father to ignore her as usual, but he’d finally caved in and talked to Ham Kirk, who was an old friend of his—that was how Tina got the job at Ham Kirk & Associates.

It was one thing to get a job, but it was another to keep it, and she wasn’t about to disappoint anyone, first and foremost, herself. She liked the investigative work they were doing at the agency, and she knew it was something she could be very good at. Dennis Walker could shove it, as far as she was concerned.

Tina finished getting dressed, quickly blow-dried her hair, and tied it into a ponytail. She grabbed her bag and was about to head home for a night of TV and Chinese food—an indulgence she allowed herself now that she was no longer competing. She had called and placed an order, but when the time came to pay, she reached into her purse for her wallet and came up empty. She had a moment of panic before she realized that she must’ve left her wallet at the office—she’d run out for a quick cup of coffee in the afternoon and stuck her wallet into her desk drawer, forgetting to take it out at the end of the day. Tina apologized and hung up. It was going to be yogurt for dinner tonight.

Oh well
, Tina thought as she headed back to the office. A small detour wasn’t going to make much of a difference. It wasn’t as though anyone was waiting for her in her studio apartment—a knowledge that she relished for the sense of freedom it gave her, but that also made her feel lonely at times.

About fifteen minutes later, Tina entered the office building of Kirk & Associates. She flashed her ID to a sleepy security guard and headed for the elevators. A quick elevator ride later, she exited onto the office floor. She was about to swipe her ID to walk inside when she realized that the light was on. Ham Kirk always insisted that the last person leaving for the night turn the lights off—he was frugal like that, and in her short time with the agency Tina had learned that his employees knew better than to cross him.