Harper Allen - Woman Most Wanted

“It’s not working.” She pushed the mass of hair back from her face and turned to him. “Why isn’t the stupid thing working? Can’t anything go right today?”

Those honey-and-cinnamon tones sounded decidedly peevish. Two seconds ago she’d written off her life savings with the calm saintliness of a Mother Superior, he thought, bemused. Now she was getting cranky because her key wouldn’t fit smoothly. He handed her back the can, picked the keys up off the cracked linoleum floor and tried the first one in the lock.

“This one’s obviously the key to your own apartment,” he said. “That’s why it wouldn’t fit.”

Behind him, he heard her taking a deep breath.

His sisters always had problems with keys. Privately he was convinced it was built in with the XX chromosome, although the one time he’d run that theory by his older sister, Carmela, she’d hit him over the head with her physics textbook.

He straightened up in abrupt annoyance. “The stupid thing’s not working. Which apartment does your super live in?”

Jenna took her keys back and pressed a button on the intercom board. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t have a problem this morning. I forgot my bus pass, and I had to let myself back in to get it.”

She gave the buzzer another halfhearted little tap and turned back to him without waiting for a response. “He’s not home. Let me try the keys again. Men always have trouble with keys.”

“Trust me—they don’t work.” Biting off the words with unnecessary emphasis, Matt jammed his thumb on the buzzer and kept it there. Whatever information she had for the Bureau, he thought wearily, it had better be good. By the time they got into her apartment and she spilled her big secret it would be midnight, at the rate this meeting was going.

He felt a twinge of guilt. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t shown up on time, he told himself. And if his evening wasn’t turning out exactly the way he’d planned, hers had been a disaster. She’d been mugged, for God’s sake. She’d been left penniless by some creep who’d knocked her down and taken her purse, and she was right—the money was going to be the least of her problems. Replacing credit cards and identification would be a major headache.

No wonder her serenity was beginning to crack a little.

“What do you want, mister?” The man who opened the door was about fifty. He was shorter than Matt’s own six-two by about a foot, but he had the bad-tempered pugnaciousness of a bantam rooster. Under the dirty white T-shirt he was wearing strained the hard potbelly of a serious drinker, and his tattooed biceps, stringy as they were, looked as if they’d served him well in decades of barroom brawls.

He didn’t even glance at Jenna, but instead kept his glare pinned on Matt. “If you’re a goddamn salesman for something, buddy, you’ve got about five seconds to get your butt off—”

“Mr. West, my key’s not working.” Jenna didn’t seem intimidated by his stream of invective. “When I moved in last week you said you’d get a spare set cut for me. Can I use them tonight and have some copies made tomorrow?”

He swung round to her, the scowl on his face deepening. “And who are you, lady? What is this, some kind of freakin’ scam?”

Matt had been watching the super, ready to step in if the man’s hostility crossed the line into action, but this newest tactic caught him by surprise. Flashing a quick look at Jenna’s dumbfounded expression, he realized that she was as taken aback as he was. Her polite smile had faded into confusion, and her cornflower-blue eyes widened.

“I’m Jenna, Mr. West—Jenna Moon, from 2B. Remember, you helped me move in my futon and I dropped it on your foot? And last night I gave you an aloe plant and told you how it could heal burns and cuts?” She gave an uncertain little laugh. “You were going to fix my faucet this weekend.”

“You’re crazy, sweetcheeks.” West looked from her to Matt and grunted. “Get your flaky girlfriend out of here before I call the cops.”

He started to close the foyer door, but Matt had had enough. Swiftly he stepped forward and shoved his shoulder and right arm through the narrowing space between the door and its frame, his ID and badge already open and dangling from his fingers.

“I am the cops,” he said in a flat voice. “And the lady’s a tenant of yours. How about you start showing some cooperation here, buddy?”

He could have sworn he saw a flash of something like fear behind West’s hard stare, but that was a common reaction. Men like him always had something to hide, Matt thought with disgust. Usually their dirty little secrets had nothing to do with the case on hand, but as soon as they realized they were dealing with the authorities they started lying automatically, unwilling to give a straight answer to any question.

West was probably just a mean drunk who’d drawn a temporary blank on his newest tenant. But Jenna—what had she said her last name was?—Jenna Moon didn’t need any more problems tonight. She was doing that deep-breathing thing again, he noted resignedly.

“Just let her into her apartment. I’ll even sign for the key if you want some kind of official receipt.” He forced a civility into his voice that he didn’t feel, at the same time exerting enough pressure on the half-open door to make the surly superintendent step back. Giving Jenna a slight nod, he kept his body between her and West as she nervously slipped past him to the short flight of stairs leading to the second floor.

“Look, mister.” West dropped his voice and darted a look at her, now climbing the stairs. “I’m being straight with you—that little sweetheart don’t live in 2B or any other freakin’ apartment here. If I have to, I’ll prove it to you.”

His attitude had changed from abrasiveness to an unpleasant kind of man-to-man confidentiality. For a second, Matt wondered if there was any way the man was telling the truth. His earlier impression of Jenna resurfaced.

West had called her flaky. During her brief phone call to the Bureau, he’d figured himself that she’d sounded like a kook—secretive, refusing to give him any hint of what her vital information was and hanging up after that unconventional description of the dress she was wearing. Her reaction to losing her life savings hadn’t been normal, and even her appearance was a little offbeat. He frowned. On the other hand, this lowlife superintendent was just the type to run some kind of scam himself, and, with her obvious openness and artlessness, he would have pegged his new tenant as an easy mark. The last thing he would have expected was for her to show up with an FBI agent in tow.

“There’s someone in my apartment!” Jenna’s voice was outraged, and glancing up to the first-floor landing he saw her bent over and peering at the crack under the door. “There’s a light on. I didn’t leave any lights on when I left this morning!”

“Okay, that’s it.” Matt jerked his head grimly at the man in front of him. “You’re going to let the lady into her apartment, and if we find anything missing you better be ready with some real fast explaining. What is this, some sweet little deal you’ve got going with a few light-fingered friends?”

West gave a short bark of humorless laughter, shedding the false bonhomie he’d displayed a few seconds ago as if it had never been. He rubbed his unshaven jaw thoughtfully, a thin smile on his lips. “You’re as crazy as she is. But I don’t want no trouble with the feds.” He shrugged and started for the stairs, reaching around the back of his belt for the collection of keys that hung on a steel ring there. “Come on, let’s see how Miss Looney Tunes explains this.”

They were close enough now to Jenna that she overheard this last remark, and the expression in those wide, guileless eyes made Matt think of a deer, shot without warning. She’d obviously trusted this jerk. He felt a sudden spurt of irritation at her naiveté. Where the hell had she been all her life, that she seemed so ill equipped to deal with the real world? She had to be twenty-three or twenty-four—not a susceptible teenager anymore. It was as if she’d been living in some peaceful utopia up until now, where everyone could be taken at their face value, and the sordid side of life—money, violence, dishonesty—never intruded.