Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy by Jeremiah Healy Read Free Book Online Page B

rake with his
right hand and traced over the embroidery. "My last name's
Fogerty, but that's not on there."
    "You work here?"
    A blink and a nod again. "I'm the super."
    Fogerty said it proudly, and I remembered Boyce
Hendrix telling me he ran a lean ship except for thesuperintendents.
    "Mr. Eh-men-dor showed me."
    "Who?"
    Paulie gestured toward the cluster of townhouses
where I'd seen Andrew Dees. "Mr. Eh-men-dor."
    "What did he show you?"
    A puzzled look. "How to take pixtures. With the
camera." He pointed at the newspaper on the passenger seat.
    "How come you hide your camera?"
    "I can't always trust people to be honest."
    He gave me a troubled look this time. "I'm
honest. I don't steal anything from anybody."
    "I wasn't worried about you, Paulie."
    A hang-jaw smile. "Good. I'm not worried about
you too."
    I said, "Was that Mr. Dees who just left?"
    The blink and nod. "Why do you want pixtures of
Mr. Dees?"
    "I don't, actually. I'm just taking photos of
the condos here. I spoke to Mr. Hendrix this morning."
    That seemed to sit well. "Mr. Hend'ix hired me.
I'm the super."
    I swung my head around. "You do a fine job, too.
The grass and bushes look great."
    Another blink and nod. "I spend the whole week
cutting and mowing and raking, and you know what?"
    "No, what?"
    "By next week, I got to start all over again."
    "Well, if I had a place like this to run, I'd
sure hire you."
    The troubled look again. "Oh, no. No, you can't.
I work for Mr. Hend'ix. I'm the super."
    "And you're so good at it, I'll bet you'll be
here a long time."
    A more troubled look, as though Fogerty had never
thought of not being there until I'd planted the idea. To get him off
that, I said, "Mr. Dees lives in the cluster over there?"
    Now the look went back to puzzled. "Cluster?"
    "Those four houses with the yellow doors."
    "Oh, yeah. He lives in the second one. But
they're units, not houses."
    "Who else lives there?"
    "Mr. Dees lives by himself."
    "I mean in the other hou—units around him."
    "Oh. There's Mr. and Mrs. Stepanian, Mrs.
Robinette and Jamey, and Mr. Eh-men-dor and Kira."
    Kira. Unusual enough name that .... "What does
Kira look like, Paulie?”
    "She's pretty." Fogerty looked down, his
cheeks flushing, his hands moving nervously on the rake again. "She's
very pretty."
    "Does she wear black clothes?"
    Blink and nod. "Black, yeah. Lots of them."
    "Do you think Kira's home now'?"
    "Yeah. Mr. Eh-men-dor is sick, and she takes
care of him."
    What the other girl, Jude, must have meant in The
Tides about Kira's father. "How about the Stepanians?"
    "They're not sick."
    "Are they home, though, do you think?"
    "Mrs. Stepanian, maybe. Mr. Stepanian goes to
work. She does too, sometimes."
    I was feeling a little guilty pumping Fogerty, but at
least I couldn't see it getting back to Hendrix. "How about Mrs.
Robinette?"
    "She's home a lot."
    "And Jamey?"
    "He's not home yet. He goes to school. Special
bus, like me."
    "Like you?"
    "Like when I went to school. This special bus
came to my old house and picked me up."
    "Where do you live now, Paulie?"
    He pointed at the prefab building near the tennis
courts. "My new house. Mr. Hend'ix hired me. I'm the super."
    "Wel1, listen, you've helped a lot. Thank you."
    "You going to see Mr. Eh-men-dor?"
    "Probably."
    The hang-jaw smile. "Good. He can show you how
to use your camera to take pixtures right."
    Paulie Fogerty walked off to tend his greenery,
bouncing the tine end of the rake off the ground every other step,
like he was counting cadence for himself.
 

    =5=
    I drove toward the four-unit cluster I'd seen Andrew
Dees leaving. His number 42 was second from the left. Given what
Paulie had told me about the other residents, I figured Kira and her
father were the most likely to be home and the Stepanians the least,
with Mrs. Robinette in the middle. Taking my portfolio briefcase with
the questionnaires in it, I walked up the path to number 41, the end
unit next to Dees. Since STEPANIAN appeared under the