“We should give him a name to call him by while he’s with us.”
“You name him,” she said magnanimously.
I didn’t have to think. “Pippin. From the Lord of the Rings. He’s small, cute, and he likes to eat, just like the hobbit Pippin.”
“Pippin he shall be, then.” And she was out the door with a wave of her hand, her heels clicking, Pippin following her smartly on his pink leash.
I was slower to leave and Jackson caught me at the elevator.
“Do you need a ride home?”
“If it’s not out of your way,” I said, delighted. That way I could save my one MetroCard ride for the morning.
“I’m headed to Kensington for an assignment.”
“My parents live there!” Maybe I could borrow Dad a twenty to top my card with.
He smiled. “I know. I spent a lot of time in your house when I was growing up, remember.”
I raked my brain for any recollection of him, but the boys had all looked the same to me. “You were good friends with Travis?”
“Anything beat my home.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Jackson drove a ten-year-old, steel gray Toyota Camry sedan. It was the kind of car that fit in everywhere without drawing attention—much like the owner himself. He seemed to have an eye for details like that.
“It’s cleaner than I expected,” I noted, eyeing the interior of the car. “I thought it would be littered with fast food wrappers and empty soda cans.”
He smiled. “You caught us on a good day. I’ve just had her cleaned.”
“What made you choose to become a cop?” I asked when we were on our way, infinitely curious.
“It was either that or a life of crime.”
“You don’t look like an ex bad boy.” I kept my tone light to hide my surprise.
“Looks can be deceiving.”
They certainly could. And I was beginning to think his were deliberately so.
Rush hour was heavy, but Jackson seemed to know all the less congested streets and it took us only a little over half an hour—for the fifteen minute ride—to reach Kensington. It was a long and narrow neighborhood in the middle of Brooklyn, a nice old working class residential area that hadn’t been gentrified yet, with mixed demographics and safe streets.
My parents lived on the East 4th Street in a typical one-family foursquare from the early 20th century. It was a white clapboard, high and narrow, with a porch and a tiny yard in the front, with bushes and flowerbeds that mother took pride in, and a slightly larger yard at the back. A living room, a dining room and a kitchen downstairs, and four small bedrooms upstairs—Tessa and I had had to share until Travis moved away from home. With one bathroom, it was like all the other houses there, small, functional, and cozy. And every time I visited I was struck anew with wonder: how the hell had we all fit in there?
Jackson pulled over outside the house without instructions from me. “It looks exactly the same as it did—” He paused to calculate: “Seventeen years ago when I was here last.”
I gave the house a fond look. “I know.” Then I hesitated. “Would you like to come to dinner? There’s always plenty.”
“I have fond memories of your mom’s cooking,” he reminisced.
“It’s Dad cooking these days. He got bored after he retired and learned to take care of the household.”
He looked impressed. “If you’re sure I’m not intruding.”
“No one’s ever intruding in our house. But Dad’s cooking can be a bit … experimental.” This made him laugh.
I led him in and to the kitchen at the back of the house, where we found Dad. He was still the same handsome Irish devil he was in their wedding photo, tall and straight-backed, even if there was softness around his bright blue eyes that hadn’t been there when he was on active duty, and his dark hair had turned gray.
“Smells great,” I said by way of greeting, making him smile.
“What brings you home in the middle of the week, pumpkin?” He gave me a hug and noticed Jackson. “Who’s this, then?” He frowned. “You’re Jackson … Dean, aren’t you?”
Jackson offered Dad his hand and they shook. “Well remembered, sir.” I was impressed too, but then again, Dad had an adult’s view to the children who had swarmed in his house. Moreover, as a cop, he had necessarily needed a good memory for faces.
“You were a bit of a handful, if I recall,” Dad said.
“I grew out of it.”
“Jackson’s a P.I. now and he’s my new boss. I’m the apprentice P.I. in his detective agency.”
This brought the full force of Dad’s impressive—and knee-shaking—stare on me. “What?” He didn’t look at all delighted by my news, which surprised me a little. He had never liked me waitressing. I told him about my day.
“But a P.I., Tracy? Are you sure? It can be a really rough job,” he said, his graying brows furrowing in worry.
“I’m fairly sure Jackson won’t give me anything I can’t handle at first.”
Before Dad could argue more, Mom came home and we sat to dinner. She was a shorter and curvier version of me—or rather I was a taller and leaner version of her—except that she had nice strawberry blond hair and green eyes, and I had Dad’s blue eyes. She was a nurse at a nearby maternity clinic, a regular nine-to-five job she’d had for as long as I could remember. And if you think that being surrounded by babies all day long had made her immune to wanting grandchildren, you’d be wrong.
Her eyes lit up when she saw Jackson and I knew the look. She hoped that I had—at long last—brought a nice man to meet them. I hated to disappoint her, but I had learned my lesson. There would never ever again be a nice man I’d introduce them to.
She hid her disappointment when she learned who Jackson was, but not about me losing another job. She took a practical view, however. “It’s not like you can keep it more than six months.”
“Hey! I stayed at the Café Marina for over a year,” I said, offended.
“And that truly is a miracle.”
“It’s not my fault I was fired from those other jobs.”
“It never is.”
I glanced at Jackson to see how he took that, but he just smiled. “Thank you for the dinner. It was excellent,” he said to Dad, and looked like he meant it, even though the gravy had been lumpy and much too salty. “I’m afraid I have to go to work now.”
“Can I come too?”
I shot up without waiting for his answer. Wherever he was headed, it had to be better than an evening with my parents, watching their disappointed faces and being lectured about my life choices.
Chapter Five
Ten minutes later we were back in Jackson’s car. I was dressed in my jeans I’d forgotten at my parents’ and one of Mom’s T-shirts—I couldn’t very well go on an assignment in my waitressing uniform—and armed with a thermos of coffee and sandwiches Mother had made us. Jackson eyed them with delight.
“It’s nice to have someone looking after you.”
That sounded lonely. “If only they wouldn’t meddle with my life otherwise.”
“You can’t cherry pick with families,” he said mildly, but I detected a bitter undertone. He probably hadn’t had a nice childhood if he’d been on a path to juvie. I really wanted to pry, but I’d only just met him.
I’d ask Travis.
“What’s the job?” I asked instead.
“A husband thinks his wife is having multiple affairs while he’s gone, so I’m keeping an eye on their house.”
“Multiple, huh? What happened to regular affairs?”
Jackson smiled. “So far I haven’t seen any men go into the house, and this is the second time the husband’s been away from town. I’m beginning to think he’s imagining the whole thing.”
Our target was one street over and a half a street down from my parents’, and I knew the house well. A grandfather of a friend of mine had lived there before he’d moved to Florida a couple of years ago, when house prices start
ed to rise in this area. It was narrower than my parents’ house and painted red in a past so distant it had faded to pink.
“I see the new owners have done nothing with the place,” I noted. Jackson made to pull over a couple of houses down the street, but I prevented him.
“Not here. Mrs. Bradshaw who lives in that house will call the cops if a strange car is parked outside her house for more than ten minutes.”
Jackson grinned, but chose another spot. “You’ve proven yourself useful already.”
I tried to hide my pleasure, but probably failed.
“Surveillance in a nice neighborhood like this can actually be trickier than in a shady one,” he noted when he had parked the car. “People here pay attention to strangers.”
“Hence the car that fits everywhere.”
He smiled. “You noticed.”
It was close to seven, but the sun wouldn’t set for a while yet and there was enough light to keep an eye on the house from a distance. There wasn’t a car in the driveway, so either Mrs. Jenkins, the wife, wasn’t home, or she had parked on the street.
“Curtains are drawn,” I noted. “Highly suspicious in this neighborhood at this hour.”
“She should be home. She works as a pediatrician at the University Hospital of Brooklyn. Nine to five hours.”
“Tessa is an ER doctor there!”
“She’s a doctor? I always thought she’d become a supermodel.” He had that dreamy look in his eyes men always got when they thought of my gorgeous sister. I was used to it and didn’t mind.
Much.
“She actually put herself through college and med-school by modeling.”
All my older siblings had paid for their education with scholarships and work. I didn’t have accomplishments or skills that would’ve merited a free education, so my parents had had to pay for mine, but since I’d only done one year in college, it hadn’t been that straining for them. And I intended to pay them back one day.
“That’s impressive.”
It was, but it hadn’t done my self-confidence good that it had been constantly pointed out to me when I was a gangly and insecure teenager. Mostly by aunts and uncles, though; not by my parents.
We settled to wait. The sun set and it started to become dark, but there was no movement in or out of the house. Light shone through a crack in the curtains, however, so Mrs. Jenkins was home. I wouldn’t have minded chatting, but Jackson had withdrawn into some sort of zone where he barely registered the outside world, his eyes trained on the target. I didn’t dare disturb him, even though I had tons of questions. Like, where had he learned to do that, and could I learn too? My guess was in the military. Maybe he’d been a sniper. I’d heard they were trained to do that.
At some point I opened the thermos, which roused him, and we had the coffee and sandwiches. “If you were looking for excitement, this is pretty much it,” Jackson said, smiling. “Stakeouts can be mind-numbing.”
“I get to sit down and have coffee, and no one’s harassing me. It’s already better than waitressing.”
The last light had faded when a car finally pulled over outside the pink house. Jackson lifted his camera to take a look through its long lens. A woman exited the car dressed in a sleek, dark pantsuit, and high-heels that were unnecessary for someone as tall as her. She was easily six foot tall in them, but she didn’t slouch a bit.
“I think it’s the same woman who visited Mrs. Jenkins yesterday, but it was too dark to see her face clearly then too,” Jackson said, annoyed.
The woman took an overnight bag from the back seat of her car and walked to the door of the pink house with a practiced ease that told me she was accustomed to wearing heels. Mrs. Jenkins opened the door and the two women were briefly illuminated by the light coming from the foyer behind her. Jackson fired the camera a couple of times, and the women disappeared indoors. Jackson checked the photos and shook his head.
“Nothing.”
“Can’t we go closer and see if we couldn’t get photos through a crack in the curtains?”
“That would be illegal, I’m afraid.”
“P.I.’s do that all the time in movies.”
“We’re not in a movie. And besides, we’re here to prove that Mrs. Jenkins is having an affair.”
I gave him a slow look he probably didn’t see in the dark, so I used my sarcastic voice: “And she couldn’t possibly be having an affair with a woman?”
Jackson pulled up straight, stunned. “What?”
I shook my head, amazed at his amazement. “A woman wouldn’t receive a sister or a friend dressed in a negligee that barely covered her lady bits. And the other woman was carrying an overnight bag.”
“But she’s married to a man.”
“Like that’s never happened before. Either she’s found herself later, or was afraid to come out and married just to keep up appearances.”
Jackson was quiet for a few moments and then snorted out a laugh. “Mr. Jenkins is in for the surprise of a lifetime.”
“Provided we can prove it.”
Lights came on in the upstairs bedroom. “If you’re right, I don’t think they’ll emerge until morning. There’s nothing we can do here tonight.” He started the car. “I’ll drive you home.”
“Drop me at my parents’ instead. I need to let them know I’m fine.”
Trevor was watching a CSI rerun on TV in the living room when I got in. At thirty-one, he still lived home, because he said he couldn’t afford a place of his own, but I think he just liked having someone to cook and clean for him. Besides, this was an easy distance from his precinct.
He was a taller and more broad-shouldered and muscled version of Mom, with her strawberry blond hair—neatly cut—green eyes, and a fair complexion lightly dusted with freckles. I didn’t have freckles, and his stronger features made him quite handsome, but you would never mistake us for anything but siblings. He’d got his education by way of the Marine Corps and a stint in Iraq, after which he’d become a cop. He’d been a plainclothes homicide detective for a little over a year now, and he loved his job.
“Don’t you get enough of that stuff at work?” I asked as I slumped on the couch next to him.
“This is comic relief,” he said, reaching out to pull me into a hug and then mess my hair with his knuckles as if we were still children. “Are you staying the night?”
“No, I just came to tell Mom and Dad that I’m okay and heading home.”
“I’ll give you a lift.”
I’d hoped for it, because public transportation between my home and my parents’ was so lousy it was practically nonexistent. A few minutes later we were in Trevor’s black Ford Edge, driving towards Midwood, a neighborhood next to Kensington, with leftovers from dinner and my waitressing uniform, freshly washed and still warm from the dryer.
“Dad says you’re working for Jackson Dean as a P.I. now.”
“Is that derision I detect in your voice?”
“Not at all.” But I could see his mouth quirk. “Only slight amusement. What brought that about?”
“I saw his ad and thought I’d be great.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Thanks.” I decided to take his words at a face value, despite his amusement.
“What do you think of the guy?”
I gave it a thought. “He’s nice, but slightly intimidating, and seems to know his job. Why did he quit policing?”
“He was in homicide, and this job can get really stressful. When his partner got shot in the line of duty, he decided he’d had enough. He inherited the agency from an uncle around the same time, so I think it was an easy choice.”
There was definitely more to my new boss than met the eye.
Trevor pulled over outside my building and leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You’ll do fine in your new job, little sister, don’t worry. Now, do you have everything you need?”
I almost said yes. I didn’t want to admit I had used up all my money, but I couldn’t afford
the pride. “Actually, could you lend me a twenty? I’m all out and it’ll take a few days before I get my last paycheck from the café.”
He dug out his wallet and gave me two twenties. “Here. Ask for more if you need.”
“Thanks, big bro, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
I exited the car and he waited until he saw me enter the building. Jackson was right: it was nice to have someone looking out for me, even if they occasionally irritated me. So I blew Trevor a kiss before I disappeared indoors.
Chapter Six
I lived in a seven story redbrick from the 90s at the corner of Avenue J and Ocean Avenue, only two blocks away from Brooklyn College—not that I’d lived here when I did my one year there. It was a nice building with a live-in janitor that could be trusted to fix a leaking faucet, clean up the hallways, and keep out unsavory characters. It smelled of cleaning detergent, exotic spices, and cabbage. My neighbors all seemed to be able to cook the dishes of their native countries and did so regularly—or when they got homesick. But best of all, it was rent stabilized.
My apartment was on the fifth floor. It had two small bedrooms, a nice bathroom, and a kitchen-living room combo. Jessica and I had furnished the common area together and she had left most of the furniture for me when she moved away, because Harris, her boyfriend, already had everything. It was an eclectic collection of old pieces we’d got from relatives and found at the Salvation Army thrift store, very 70s chic: strong colors, easy to clean, and durable. It was my first own home—my scumbag of an ex and I had never got around to starting one, because we’d been touring with his band—and I loved it.
I was home earlier than most evenings, and the day—at least the latter part of it—had been lighter than normal, but I was utterly beat. I barely managed to do my evening wash-up before I dropped on my bed. I was instantly out.
I woke up when Mrs. Pasternak, my next door neighbor, banged on my bedroom wall from her apartment and yelled that I’d be sorry if the alarm went off one more time, because her son Olek, who was a baggage handler at JFK, had been on a night shift and needed his sleep. Apparently misdirecting luggage was an all-night operation.
Tracy Hayes, Apprentice P.I. (P.I. Tracy Hayes 1) Page 3
