Kiss by John Lutz Read Free Book Online

broker who handled his car insurance. “I’m in the insurance business.” He nodded toward the new heavy-duty lock. “Theft insurance’d be a lot cheaper if more people put that kind of hardware on their door.”
    Mrs. Horton’s eyes stayed narrowed; Carver saw they might simply appear that way due to the fleshiness of her florid face. She didn’t offer her first name; she thought of herself as “Mrs. Horton,” and expected Carver to address her as such. Hers was a righteous and proper world.
    She said, “We had some burglaries in this area about six months ago.”
    “This building?”
    “Nope. But right down the block. Fella walked in on two punks ransacking his apartment. They gave him a bash on the head took twenty stitches to close. So I got in touch with the building owner—he lives in Miami—and told him I wasn’t gonna keep living here and managing the place ’less he furnished me and the other tenants with pickproof locks. He didn’t want to at first, but he gave in.”
    “A wise move on your part,” Carver told her. “And the owner’s. Statistics show the burglary rate’s up all across the country, but especially here in Florida.”
    “All them drugs, I reckon. People hooked on them’s gotta steal to support their habits.”
    “That’s a big part of it,” Carver agreed. “It costs my company plenty, I can tell you.”
    “That what you wanna see Birdie about? Insurance?”
    “Is that what her friends call her? Birdie?”
    Mrs. Horton nodded. Her shrewd eyes flicked up and down Carver, lingering for a moment on the cane; he wondered if she thought he should be wearing a dark suit and carrying an attaché case full of boring material.
    “Actually, all I wanted was to talk to Mrs. Logan about her statement on the crime she witnessed in February.”
    Mrs. Horton frowned, sniffed, and backed up a step. “Birdie’s last name ain’t Logan. And she ain’t no missus. Hell, she don’t look any older’n twelve. Little bitty thing, she is.”
    Carver gave her his alarmed, then puzzled expression. “Hmm. The main office told me to look up Mrs. Betty Logan, 126 Newport.”
    “This building only sides on Newport,” Mrs. Horton said with a hint of triumph, as if they were in a game and she’d made a point by knowing something Carver had gotten wrong. “Address here’s West Palm.”
    Carver leaned hard on his cane and wrestled his wallet from his hip pocket. He drew out one of his own business cards and stared at it. He said in an apologetic voice, “What they have written here is West Newport.”
    “Ain’t no West Newport. Street runs north and south.” She was smiling faintly; she was even one up on the bigger brains at the main office. Not a bad day for her.
    Carver shook his head and gnawed his lower lip, as if suddenly irritated. He stuck the business card back in his wallet, the wallet back in his pocket. “I’ve wasted a lot of time.”
    Mrs. Horton shrugged and backed away a few more steps, allowing Carver room to move around her toward the gate. There was no mistaking the gesture. Obviously he’d wasted some of her time, too, and she was calling a halt to it.
    He probed for firm ground with the cane and moved around her. She was wearing cheap, cloying perfume that mingled with the stale smell of perspiration. “At least I’ve seen some beautiful roses,” he told her.
    “Manager before me planted ’em,” Mrs. Horton said. “Damn things come back year after year.”
    “Perennials,” Carver said.
    “I ain’t sure what kind they are. Don’t know one rose from another.”
    He apologized again for invading her iron-fenced domain to see a tenant who wasn’t home and had a different name and lived on a different street and was someone else’s tenant. He stopped short of telling her there was no Betty Logan on Newport Avenue. It would have been small satisfaction.
    The landlady seemed to feel the same protectiveness toward Birdie Reeves that Kearny had displayed at