Chapter 20
Friday afternoon I came back to the apartment complex after completing two other surveillance jobs, serving three sets of papers, and thoroughly avoiding Malone while I ruminated on our arrangement.
On the one hand, I’d already agreed. Instinct told me fun would indeed be had by all if I joined Malone for some hot monkey sex.
On the other hand, best not to start something with Malone that he had no intention of finishing.
I wished I could say I could be casual, but it didn’t seem to be in my nature.
You could try casual. Other people seem to do just fine with one-night stands.
I was still arguing with myself as I walked up to the apartment building. Malone’s patio door was open, as was his apartment door. My heart sank to the asphalt between my toes. Was he moving out already? Had I missed my chance?
A quick peek into his apartment showed Malone looking at his phone while swatting away bugs. It was an infestation of some kind. One of the bugs in question flew past me with a flutter of wings. Another landed on my arm.
A ladybug.
“Uh, Malone?”
“Not now, Houdini. I have a situation,” he said without looking up.
The Houdini part stung, but that sting was quickly replaced with irritation. “Seems to me like the pot is calling the kettle black. And maybe if I had your number, I could’ve texted you to say I was on a job. Or, I don’t know, you could’ve texted me, Criss Angel.”
“Well, you couldn’t leave fast enough on Monday night, so I took the opportunity to get some work in.”
“What do you think I was doing?”
“Listen, Stark. I have a bit of a situation here, so can we schedule this argument for later?”
“Fine. Anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t know. Are you an entomologist?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“A person who studies bugs.”
I didn’t care for this sarcastic Malone, although I had to admit I’d be irritated, too, if I had an infestation in my apartment.
When he swatted another bug away, I noticed he still had a bandage on his left hand. That made me feel terrible all over again. The man had punched someone on my behalf, and what had I done? Ghosted him.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry to have disappeared on you like that. I had work to do, but I should’ve left my phone number with you at least.”
“That I could find if I wanted to,” he said while frowning at his phone.
True. In my first round of investigating all Malones—but mostly Blake—I’d confirmed that my Malone worked as a forensic accountant for a cybersecurity company. No doubt he had his ways of finding out anything he wanted to know.
“You just wanted me to give you my number.”
“Correct.”
His tone might’ve been nonchalant, but I’d definitely wounded him. Even worse? He looked positively delicious. I’d never understood the hullabaloo about gray sweatpants until that very moment.
“Come on, Malone. Let me help you with this”—I waved my hand around—“situation, and then we can talk this over.”
“Sure,” he said, his voice still flat. “You’re a PI. Tell me who sent that package.”
As I reached for the box he’d pointed to, three or four ladybugs dive-bombed my face as if they were in Top Gun and buzzing my tower.
If you’d asked me before today whether I thought ladybugs were a problem, I would’ve said no. I would’ve said they were cute. Turned out a swarm of them was disconcerting.
I finally picked up the box that sat on Malone’s recliner and felt inside gently. Nothing there. Even the outside didn’t give a return address. Beside the box, however, was a note: “If you don’t like Taylor Swift, then you deserve to be bugged by some ladies.”
I laughed. I wasn’t the only petty person in this apartment complex.
Malone shot me a dirty look. “It’s not funny.”
I swallowed any possible retorts. One, I didn’t want to accidentally swallow a ladybug. Two, the whole situation was comedy gold, but Malone would need some time to come to that realization.
Ladybugs kept landing on his shirt, undercutting both his stern expression and his uber masculine hands-on-hips stance. One landed on his nose, but he kept his commitment to scowling at me.
Respect.
I drew my phone from my pocket and snapped a picture.
“Hey!”
“C’mon, Malone. You’ve gotta admit it’s at least a little bit funny,” I said while holding my thumb and forefinger close together. “They’re ladybugs, not roaches or snakes or . . . deviant chinchillas.”
The corners of his mouth twitched.
I almost had him.
“Could be ferrets or alligators or”—here I paused to genuinely shudder—“rats.”
“Did you do this?”
“No.”
But I may or may not have put the wheels in motion.
I was still weighing whether I wanted to admit my culpability when someone at the door cleared their throat dramatically. Addie, arms crossed over her chest in a sassy pose, skewered Malone with a stare and said “Look what you made me do” before flouncing upstairs.
“What was that all about?” Malone asked.
I pressed my lips together in the hopes of not laughing. Oh, I was not the true Little Miss Petty of Bel Air Apartments. All I could say to that was what she herself might: Slay, queen, slay.
After a few minutes of research, which consisted of alternately scrolling down my phone and gently swatting the bugs that insisted on flying around my face, I finally asked, “Do you have a vacuum?”
“No.”
Of course he didn’t have a vacuum. The man didn’t have a kitchen table. Probably slept on a mattress on the floor like a frat boy who’d used his furniture allowance to buy beer.
“Do you have one?”
“Of course not. That was Ken’s vacuum cleaner. I told myself I’d buy one when I moved in, but I’ve had other pressing concerns.”
“What about Mrs. Q?”
I checked my watch. “We have four minutes before Wheel of Fortune or else we’ll have to wait until after it’s over.”
“I’m going.” Malone raced out the door but then popped back into the doorway. “Is there a special kind of vacuum cleaner that we need?”
“One that’s easy to empty,” I said. “Oh, and see if either she or April has a spray bottle.”
“Spray bottle?”
“Ladybugs don’t like the smell of peppermint, and I happen to have some essential oil.”
“Essential oil? Huh. Maybe then a massage?”
“The day’s not over,” I said. That got him in motion.
Vacuuming up the bugs and then taking them outside to release them was a laborious process. It took several trips. So many trips. On what we hoped to be the last one, Malone nudged me. “You know why ladybugs are the most observant insects, right?”
“No, why?”
“They’re always . . . spot on.”
I groaned. “How long have you been—and I use this word loosely—refining that joke?”
“Since the second trip outside,” he said with a grin.
“You’re incorrigible, Malone. Please tell me you don’t have any other puns.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that I have more puns.”
Once the bulk of the invaders had been escorted out, I mixed water and peppermint essential oil in one of the sprayers and went to town while Malone returned the vacuum cleaner. Once I’d carefully sprayed around the entrances, windows, and doors, I took the opportunity to do a little snooping.
If the apartment was kept for entertaining visiting guests, then Malone Construction needed to add more amenities to the entertaining spaces. A bare minimum of linens in the bathroom, almost no dishes in the kitchen, no table, one recliner, an older-model television—that’s all I could find.
The master bedroom was equally sparse, but I was gratified to see an honest-to-goodness bed frame. It looked new, and the lack of box springs also suggested the mattress was a newer edition. Malone, for his part, was fastidious other than a pair of socks that had missed the hamper.
In the second bedroom, I flipped on the light switch to see a massive computer setup. Multiple towers, three monitors, external hard drives, and equipment I didn’t even recognize, along with an ergonomic chair.
But then I saw something that made me gasp.
The writing was on the wall. Literally. Someone, presumably Malone, had written directly on two of the walls—a long series of dollar amounts and digits that looked like account numbers. Numbers ran almost from ceiling to floor. Sticky notes littered the closet doors along the third wall.
Holy shit.
Was he okay?
I turned off the lights and slipped out of the bedroom just in time to nonchalantly spray the hall as Malone entered the apartment.
Nothing to see here.
But on the inside? I was very chalant.
And Malone thought I was intriguing?
He closed the apartment door behind him. “Are we bug-free yet?”
“I think we’re down to the last of the stragglers,” I said as I plopped into his recliner.
Act normal, Stella. Act normal.
He paused by the chair. “I would say Grandpa needs to add more furniture to the place, but he’s getting rid of the apartment at the end of the year.”
Another reminder that Malone’s stay was only temporary. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I recommended it. Suggested he get rid of the company car program, too.”
“I bet you’re popular with all his employees,” I said.
“Not really. No one likes the bearer of bad news, but it’s better to cut perks than workers, and things like apartments and cars can easily be abused.”
Trista had mentioned that she and Blake had “visited” this apartment when they were dating, but how many guests could a construction company have coming through that they needed to permanently lease an apartment?
The whole idea seemed like a relic from an earlier time, but my earlier research had confirmed that the apartment lease was in the name of Malone Construction.
As I shook off such thoughts, he turned to me. “Bet you didn’t have pest control on your bingo card today.”
“Malone, I never have pest control on my bingo card.”
“Oh, then what do you have on your card for the day?” His tone was light. His lips curved into a smile, but his eyes? Shrewd. Calculating.
Reminded me a bit of myself.
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” I said.
“Pizza?”
“Maybe.”
“Other fringe benefits?”
“Maybe. Depends on why you ghosted me.”
He scowled. “I got called into work early Tuesday morning. It was an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation.”
It shouldn’t have been this hard to pick up where we’d left off, but I’d had time to think, time to wonder if I would be doing the right thing by hooking up with Malone. I didn’t know how to get back to where we’d been.
“What about you, Stark?”
“I got a job doing surveillance. It involved camping.”
“Fun!”
“Not fun. No campfire.”
“Bummer.”
We stared at each other while I grappled for a way to broach the subject of what I’d seen earlier.
Just ask him.
But how was I supposed to phrase that question? Maybe all forensic accountants wrote on the walls. Hadn’t I seen that in a movie?
“Come on, Stark. What’s . . . bugging you?”
I snort-giggled. “I may have peeked in your guest room, and I’m a little concerned.”
“Huh?”
“The numbers, Malone. And the sticky notes. At least there wasn’t a murder board with red yarn crisscrossing it?”
“Oh, that. Uh, forensic accountant stuff. I told you, it’d make you want to run.”
That he had. I considered. “You told me I’d want to run because it was unsexy, not because I would worry you’d gone all Beautiful Mind on me.”
He laughed out loud. “They’re just numbers. Usually, I do my analysis on my computer, but sometimes I like to step back and look at the whole picture. I figured if it worked for The Accountant, then it was at least worth a try.”
“The accountant?”
“Ben Affleck movie about a—never mind.”
Ah. That was the movie where I’d seen something similar. Come to think of it, I’d found Ben Affleck hot in that. Maybe I had a type.
“Do you have Blake Malone’s personal accounts on that wall, too?”
He frowned. “I have to plead the Fifth.”
“His wife called me, as I’d suspected she eventually would. He’s cleaned out several of their joint accounts.”
“Interesting,” he said. “But not unexpected.”
We studied each other. Unfortunately for me, Malone didn’t mind silence. I was the one itching to fill the void. “He stole from Malone Construction, too, didn’t he?”
“Of all the amendments, my favorite is the fifth.”
“Are you pretending to be Blake Malone as a part of your investigation into missing money?”
“As the great philosopher Dave Chappelle once sang . . . fifth.”
“Could you help Trista find the money that he took from her?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Just when I thought he was going to refer to his favorite amendment again, he simply said, “No.”
“But you’re one of the good guys?”
“I thought we were supposed to be naked for this interrogation.”
My stomach growled.
“Ah, I have to feed you first, I see.”
“That and I’d like a shower because I smell like a candy cane.”
“No problem. I love Christmas.”
“It’s June.”
“It’s always Christmas in my heart, Stark,” he said with a grin. “How about I order a pizza and meet you at your place in thirty?”