by Linda Turner
Stunned, she blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me,” he said impatiently. “Spare me the fake surprise. We both know you haven’t rented 2C. You couldn’t have. It’s already been rented to the Johnsons. They’re scheduled to move in next week.”
“But they can’t!” she cried. “I’ve already rented it!”
He snorted, unconvinced. “Yeah, right. And when was that?”
“Yesterday. I met with the landlord—”
“What time?”
He threw questions at her like darts, and she had to stop a minute to think. “Eleven!”
“You couldn’t have,” he said flatly. “She left for L.A. yesterday morning at seven-thirty.”
He sounded so sure of himself that if she hadn’t known better; Phoebe might have believed him. But she knew for a fact that the landlord was a man—she’d met with him herself yesterday when he’d shown her the apartment. Whoever this guy was, he obviously didn’t know what he was talking about.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly, “I don’t know who this woman is you’re talking about, but you’re mistaken. The landlord is Mr. Percy. He lives down the hall in apartment 1B and he already knows we’re moving in today.” The matter settled as far as she was concerned, she turned back to Robby and Becky and determinedly lifted her end of the bed. “C’mon, kids, let’s get this upstairs. If we’re going to get everything inside before dark, we’re going to have to hustle.”
Unable to believe her audacity, Mitch growled, “If you take another step up those stairs, I swear I’m calling the police.”
“The police!” she gasped, indignant. Her hazel eyes flashing, she dropped the end of the bed again, this time to dig in her purse. “I don’t know who you think you are, mister, but I have a lease. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Just give me a second to find it, and we can settle this once and for all.” Muttering under her breath, she finally found what she was looking for and stomped down the stairs to wave it under his nose. “See? It was signed yesterday and gives me permission to move in today. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to do just that.”
She did, indeed, have a lease. Written on plain white typing paper, it was simply done and appeared legitimate. The only problem was it was nothing like the legal document that all tenants of the Social Club were required to sign before they were allowed to move in.
Was she trying to pull a fast one or was she the unwitting victim of a scam herself? Mitch studied her face. Over the years, he’d dealt with his fair share of cheats and con artists, and they’d all looked him right in the eye and lied through their teeth. This woman made no attempt to avoid his gaze, but his gut told him she wasn’t lying. There was too much hostility in her hazel eyes.
Resisting her efforts to snatch the bogus lease back from him, he asked, “How much did you give this Percy fellow when you signed this thing?”
“The usual, of course,” she snapped. “First and last month’s rent. Not that it’s any business of yours,” she amended, shooting him a hostile look as he held the document out of reach. “Dammit, give me that!”
“Oh, I intend to,” he assured her smoothly. “After the police take a look at it.”
“Call the police if you want! I told you—”
“This isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” he told her quietly. “I don’t know who this Percy jerk is or how he got into 2C to show you the apartment, but he had no authority to rent you anything.”
“But he lives in 1B—”
“The landlord does live there,” he agreed. “But she’s a woman, and her name is Alice Truelove. She’s my aunt. My name is Mitch Ryan and I’m watching over things while she’s in L.A. for a family emergency. If you don’t believe me, knock on any door in the building. All the tenants will tell you the same thing.”
She didn’t want to believe him—he could see the struggle going on in her expressive eyes as they searched his, the denial she wanted to cling to—and he sympathized with her. He hadn’t forgotten the times he’d been taken in by a good liar. It hadn’t happened to him often, but it wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
“Look, why don’t you come in the office while I call the police?” he suggested. “You need to report this.”
It was that, more than anything, that seemed to convince her he was telling the truth. What little color there was left in her cheeks drained away, and with a nearly silent moan, she sank down onto the bottom step of the stairs. “Oh, God, it’s true! Now what are we going to do?”
Just about every penny she had was gone.
Unable to think of anything but that, Phoebe was still sitting on the stairs ten minutes later when a detective arrived and introduced himself as Sam Kelly. “I used to live here,” he informed her as she rose to her feet and shook his hand. “I understand from Mitch that you had some trouble with a scam artist renting you an apartment here at the Social Club.”
She nodded numbly. “Apparently so. He said he was the landlord. His name was Percy.”
She gave him a description of the man. “I had no reason not to believe him. He buzzed me up to the apartment when I arrived and already had a lease there for me to sign. I did think it was a little odd that he was showing the place before the other tenants had moved out, but he assured me he had their permission and they would have their things out by the time I was ready to move in. And they did. The apartment is empty.”
“The tenant died three weeks ago and the rent expired last week,” Mitch said. “His family was in the process of having an unauthorized estate sale this morning when I arrived. People were coming and going all over the place, taking God knows what out of the house, so I shut it down and the family got everything out by noon.”
“The tenant died?” Phoebe gasped. “Mr. Percy said he had bought a house and was giving up his lease.”
Not surprised, Sam Kelly nodded. “Apparently Percy—and that’s only one of the names he’s used—has said a lot of things. And not to just you, Ms. Smith,” he assured her. “Over the last four months, he’s pulled this same scam a number of times. He watches the obits in the paper, finds out where the deceased lived, and rents out their apartment to as many prospective tenants as he can line up before the family finds out what’s going on. How did you hear about the apartment here at the Social Club?”
“I saw an ad on the bulletin board at the grocery store,” she said simply. “Normally, I wouldn’t have looked twice at it, but I needed a place and it looked like a legitimate ad. And when I called the number listed, the receptionist answered, ‘Lone Star Social Club.’ I had no reason to be suspicious.”
“Do you remember the phone number?” She didn’t, but she still had the number in her purse and dug it out for him. He quickly jotted it down and the address of the grocery store where she’d seen the ad. “Was the receptionist a woman?”
Surprised, she said, “Yes! How did you know?”
“Our boy uses the same MO every time and he has a female accomplice. They never place an ad in the paper—that would be too easily traced—and they usually list the phone number of the deceased in the ad if the phone hasn’t been turned off.”
Straightening from leaning against the doorjamb, observing the questioning, Mitch said, “So what happens now? Apparently, nothing was stolen except the rent money, and that was in cash. How are you going to track the jerk down without a paper trail to follow?”
“I’ll check with the grocery store manager and see if he knows how long the advertisement has been on his bulletin board and who put it there. He probably won’t know anything about it, but sometimes people have to check with the store office before they’re allowed to put anything on the bulletin board.” Shutting his notebook, he tucked it into his jacket pocket. “It’s a slim hope, but it’s one of the few leads we’ve got. And then there’s always the phone company. Other than that, there’s not much I can do.”
“But what about the obituaries?” Phoebe asked, frowning. “If this guy restricts himself to j
ust renting dead people’s apartments, why can’t you just watch the obituaries and figure out where he’s going to strike next?”
It was a logical question, one that the detective unfortunately had an answer for. “It’s not that simple. Even if we had the manpower to check out the obits every day—which we don’t—the department just couldn’t afford it. Not when there’s no way to anticipate when or where this guy’s going to strike next. He’s been known to go as long as six months without pulling one of these scams, then hitting twice within one week. The only way he’s probably going to get caught is if he just screws up.”
Alarmed, Phoebe felt her heart drop to her knees. “So what are you saying? You’re not even going to try to catch him? What about my money?”
“Cash is almost always impossible to recover,” he said simply, regretfully. “Your best bet is to just write it off as a loss and go on with your life.”
“But you’re talking about nearly a thousand dollars!”
He winced. “I know. It’s a hell of a lot to ask a person to turn their back on, but I’d be as big a jerk as the creep who did this to you if I let you think you were ever going to see that money again. It’s gone, Phoebe. It was lost to you the minute you traded cash for a worthless lease and walked away.”
Deep down inside, a part of her had known—the second Mitch Ryan convinced her his aunt was the real landlord of the Social Club—that she was never going to get her money back, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it. She was an optimist right down to the tips of her toes—always had been and always would be. In the face of adversity, when nothing but trouble and sorrow seemed to lie ahead, she’d always before found comfort in the sure knowledge that with time, everything would work itself out.
But not this time. How could it? She had two children to support, no apartment, and she’d just been swindled out of every dime she owned.
“So that’s it,” she said flatly, her eyes stark with despair. “You’ve done all you can do.”
“I’m sorry,” the detective said gruffly. “No one hates this kind of thing more than I do, but the sad truth is there’s not a hell of a lot the police can do about scam artists. Not unless we’re just lucky enough to catch one in the act, and that doesn’t happen very often.” Taking one of his business cards from his pocket, he pressed it into her hand. “Call me in a couple of days. By then, I’ll have had time to follow up any leads I might get from the store manager on who put that ad on the bulletin board.”
She nodded, but they both knew there would be little point in calling. He’d already told her everything she needed to know. Her money was gone. Nothing else mattered.
The future loomed before her and the children like a dark, bottomless pit, and though she tried to tell herself they were going to be all right, she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. Nightfall was only two hours away, and she didn’t even know where they were going to spend the night. There were several shelters around the city that would take them in, but just the thought of being that desperate, that destitute, brought the sting of tears to her eyes and the slump of defeat to her shoulders. Dear God, how had she let this happen?
Mitch Ryan thanked the detective for coming and showed him out, but Phoebe hardly noticed. Lost in her painful musings and growing panic, she wasn’t even aware of how their sudden change in circumstances affected the children until Robby spoke up. Seated halfway up the stairs, where he and his sister had sat as quiet as mice during the entire conversation with Detective Kelly, he asked in a scared voice, “Now what do we do, Aunt Phoebe? We don’t get to live here, do we?”
Jerked back to her surroundings, Phoebe glanced up sharply and felt her heart constrict at the sight of him and his sister staring solemnly down at her. The mischief that invariably sparkled in Robby’s brown eyes was gone and in its place was a fear that didn’t belong in the eyes of a child his age. At his side, her freckles standing out starkly on her pale face, Becky was just as grim and on the verge of tears.
And she was the one who had brought them to this. They’d turned to her for stability and security, and she’d given them anything but that. Because of her, they didn’t know where they would sleep tonight or tomorrow or the night after that. They’d lost their parents, were separated from their grandparents by illness and distance, and now they didn’t even have a roof over their heads. She didn’t blame them for crying—she wanted to cry herself.
But when she started up the stairs to them, the smile she forced for them was playful and teasing. “Hey, guys, why all the long faces? There’s been a little bit of a mixup, but—” she assured them as she crouched down in front of them and enfolded them both in a fierce hug “—just wait. You’ll see. We’ll find another place just as nice as this one.”
Standing just inside the front door, Mitch watched her hug the kids again, then tickle them until they collapsed in a giggling heap against her. Another man listening to her musical laughter might have been seduced by the pretty picture, but the last time he’d been taken in by a woman’s smile, it had cost him more than he cared to think about. That wasn’t a mistake he intended to make again.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t sympathetic. He was. He would sympathize with anyone who suddenly found themselves in her position. But he was a realist and could easily predict what was coming next. Any second now, she would look around for someone to bail her out of her predicament. It was just the nature of women, especially those with children in tow, to play the helpless female whenever things got rough. It was genetic.
However, if the lady thought he was about to charge to her rescue like some kind of misguided knight, she’d find out soon enough that she was sadly mistaken. His armor was back in Dallas, tarnished, battle-scarred and retired from service. He didn’t run rescue missions anymore.
Or get taken in by big, sad eyes, he reminded himself. But he couldn’t forget the look on her face when she realized that she’d turned next month’s rent over to a con man. Stricken. There was no other way to describe it.
Guilt twisted in his gut, annoying him no end. He wasn’t responsible for the mess she was in, he thought irritably. He wasn’t the one who’d scammed her, and he certainly wasn’t the one who’d given her a lease, bogus or otherwise. If he started taking in every stray and her pups who’d fallen on hard times, the Social Club would be packed to the rafters.
But instead of turning to him with a helpless look when she heard his footsteps on the wood floor of the entrance hall, she released the kids and turned to look down at him with a composure that surprised him. He’d expected tears. “We’ll be out of your hair just as soon as we can get our things loaded back into the U-Haul,” she informed him coolly. Dismissing him, she turned back to the kids. “Okay, guys, you ready? Lift!”
He should have been thrilled. Instead, he found himself perversely aggravated. Where the hell did she think she was going? She’d just lost a bundle of money and an apartment, and she didn’t seem the least bit concerned about it. So why was he? He supposed she’d go back to wherever she came from and make some kind of deal with her old landlord when it came time to pay next month’s rent. Either way, it wasn’t any of his business. She was nothing to him and after today, he’d never see her again.
He should have returned to Alice’s apartment and left her to her task. Instead, he found himself starting up the stairs toward her, scowling all the way. “Here—let me help you with that. It’s too heavy for the kids.”
It was an instinctive offer—he’d been raised in a family of women, who had taught him to always lend a hand to a woman or child who needed his help—but she reacted as if he’d just insulted her. Lightning-quick, her chin set at a proud angle, she moved to block his path. “That won’t be necessary. We got it up here by ourselves. We can get it down.”
Standing two steps above him, her hazel eyes level with his and snapping fire, she gave him a look that dared him to lay so much as a finger on her possessions. At any other time, Mitch would have laughed. The
lady obviously didn’t know who she was messing with. She was barely five foot two and slender as a ballerina—if he had a mind to, he could snatch her up and haul her downstairs as easily as a sack of potatoes. Then they’d both see how tough she was.
But he’d always been a sucker for a dainty woman, and his gut clenched at the thought of touching her. Swearing silently at himself, he retorted, “What you’re going to do if you’re not careful is fall and break your pretty little neck. That’d be something for the kids to see, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“You’re damn right you’re not. Because you’re going to let me help you. Or call a mover. The choice is yours.”
He saw in an instant that she wasn’t a woman who cared for ultimatums. She stiffened, her mouth compressed with rebellion, and for a second, he actually thought she was going to cut off her nose to spite her face and call a mover. For one damn bed! But there was such a thing as carrying pride too far, and she obviously knew it.
Giving in with little grace, she grumbled, “I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. I’ve moved lots of times without anyone’s help, but have it your way. It’s your building. Which end do you want?”
“Yours.”
She knew what he meant. He wanted her to move to the opposite, lighter end of the bed so he could take the heaviest part when they started down the stairs. It was a logical suggestion and, she was sure, not intentionally suggestive. But the second the single word was out of his mouth, he realized as well as she did what he had said. Blue eyes that she would have sworn didn’t have so much as a glint of humor in them were suddenly warm with amusement, and with no warning whatsoever, her cheeks were on fire.
In the pregnant silence, Becky, watching the confrontation from four steps up, glanced at her brother and said in a whisper that seemed to echo to the rafters, “Why is Aunt Phoebe’s face so red? Is she mad?”
