Naughty Neighbor - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,18

personality.

He finished his typing, stood, stretched, and looked over at Louisa. He raised his eyebrows in silent question.

“I’m done,” Louisa said.

“Find anything?”

She tore the top two sheets off a yellow legal pad. “I have two pages of possible connections between Maislin and Bishop. Most of the connections are pretty obscure.”

He moved behind her to pour himself a cup of coffee. “What looks good?”

“Actually, nothing looks good. It’s possible that Nolan was just bowing to Maislin’s wishes.”

He looked at her over the rim of his coffee mug. “Is Nolan that much of a wimp?”

“He’s that much of a politician. There’s a lot of information here on Maislin’s finances and business associates. Why?”

“I have an option on Judd King’s book, Power Players. It suggests misconduct among some of the most influential members of Congress. The book is fiction, but supposedly King knew what he was talking about. He died three weeks after the book hit the stores. Brain tumor…maybe. When I took the option on the book, I decided I needed to gather background information. Maislin’s profile fits one of the men in King’s book.”

“How does the pig figure into all of this?” Louisa asked.

“I haven’t a clue.” He took a jar of chunky peanut butter and a jar of marshmallow fluff from the refrigerator. He set out a couple plates and a loaf of white bread.

Louisa slid a glance at the gooey marshmallow and peanut butter.

“Lunch,” Pete said, smearing a thick coating of marshmallow onto a slice of bread. “This stuff is great. You can use it in everything.” He added a slice of peanut butter bread and slapped the two halves together. He put the sandwich on a plate and set it front of Louisa. He poured her a glass of milk and gave her a banana.

Louisa bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing. She felt as if she were back in grade school with her Snoopy lunch box and red plastic thermos. “Thank you,” she said politely.

Pete gave a sandwich to Spike. Then he made another for himself, settling into the chair across from Louisa.

“This is an interesting sandwich,” Louisa said, struggling to keep her tongue from sticking to the roof of her mouth. She drank half a glass of milk and secretly felt her fillings to make sure they were intact.

“If I get bogged down in a script, peanut butter and marshmallow always picks me up. It’s sort of inspirational.”

Louisa continued to chew. It wasn’t bad, but it needed chocolate. “So, did you eat this all the time when you were a kid?”

“Never. I was too tough to eat this sissy food. I ate burgers and beer and bologna sandwiches.”

“I mean when you were seven.”

He stared at her and for a moment his face lost its usual animation. His eyes seemed flat, his mouth tightened. Then the humor returned. “I was talking about seven.”

“You’re serious.”

“Pretty much. My mother died when I was five. I was raised in an all-male household.”

He thought back to the ugly yellow clapboard house on Slant Street in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. It hadn’t been a terrible childhood, but it hadn’t been great, either. Mostly, it had been lonely and lacking the soft touches a woman brought to a home. By the time he was in first grade, his two older brothers had already quit school and gone to work in the steel mill with his dad.

Back then, in his neighborhood, nobody cared about latchkey kids. Kids grew up fast on Slant Street, and it didn’t matter that no one was home to supervise homework. The future was preordained: The men worked in the mill. They married young, and there were no subtleties to the mating process.

It was a matter of personal pride and masculine obligation for every Slant Street male past the age of puberty to get his hand and whatever else he could manage under as many skirts as possible. When a girl got pregnant, she singled out her best prospect, they got married in full regalia at St. Stanislaus, had the reception in the firehouse, and settled into the tedium of premature old age.

And that would have been his future, Pete thought, but thanks to his good luck, none of the women who’d gone past his doorstep had gotten pregnant. And by the time he was eighteen, his reputation was so bad, his police record so lengthy with misdemeanors that he couldn’t get a job in the mill. Take it to the limit. Never do anything halfway. He’d been a