Free Death Loves a Messy Desk by Mary Jane Maffini Page B

anxious. Plus I wanted to get this situation over with, apologize to Barb, and assure her of Fredelle’s innocence as well as my own. Soon after that, with any luck, I would never have to set foot in Quovadicon and see any of its employees again, especially the toxic and tarty Dyan.
    The door to 4B stood wide open.
    I braced myself for the conversation that would follow, knocked, and called out. “Ms. Douglas? Are you there?” I waited. I told myself the shiver down my spine was just because of a nasty memory of another open door and had nothing to do with this visit.
    But if she wasn’t answering, why was the door wide open? A mischievous wind lifted my flirty skirt and answered the question. The wind must have blown it open. After another two minutes, I whipped out my small notebook and wrote my name and phone number and a short message asking her to call me to discuss a misunderstanding. I was debating whether to drop it on the floor, where it might get blown away, or in the mailbox, where it might not be seen, when I heard feet thudding behind me on the stairs. As happened all too often lately, I jumped.
    “Sorry,” a cheerful male voice bellowed. “Guess I sound like a bull in a china shop.” A white-haired man somewhere in his sixties puffed up the rest of the stairs, grinned, and held out his hand. “I’m Jim Poplawski, Barb’s landlord, or as my wife calls me sometimes, the lardlord.” He patted his substantial paunch, threw back his head, and shook with laughter.
    I laughed, too, couldn’t help myself.
    “Don’t mind me. I’m just jumpy lately. I was just about to leave Ms. Douglas a note. Would you be able to give it to her?”
    “Barb must be home. Her car’s here.”
    I shrugged. “But she doesn’t answer.”
    “Gee, that door’s wide open. I gotta get around to fixin’ the latch. Sure, I’ll give her the note. But why don’t I just show you the thing?”
    “What?”
    “Seems a shame for you to have to come back again. You can save yourself a trip if it doesn’t suit. Don’t worry. I won’t make you carry it down the stairs yourself.” The staircase seemed to shake with each guffaw.
    I knew the honest approach at that moment would be to say there’d been a misunderstanding. No one’s perfect. I followed Jim “the lardlord” through the open door and into a bright and airy apartment.
    “One minute. Just in case.” He boomed, “Barb, honey, you better not be in the shower ’cause I’m here with a bunch of sailors droppin’ by to say hello.”
    I blinked.
    “Well, guess she must be out on the town.” He chuckled. “Normally, that’d get a rise out of her.”
    “I’ll bet,” I muttered.
    “So what do you think?” He stood watching me and obviously waiting for a response.
    “It’s beautiful,” I answered truthfully.
    “Not so bad.” He smiled, apparently pleased with my response.
    Of course, I just had to blunder on. “I love the windows.”
    It was his turn to blink. “It doesn’t have windows.”
    Had everyone in Woodbridge lost their mind? I said, “Of course, it does. Are you kidding me . . . Jim?”
    He frowned, puzzled. “No ma’am.”
    I said, “But . . .”
    He cut me off. “Never saw a piano with windows. And I bet you never did, either.”
    “A piano?”
    “Well, what did you think we were talking about?”
    “The apartment. It’s beautiful. So bright and open and all those lovely trees you see through all those windows that are definitely here.”
    He went back to booming. “That’s pretty funny. The apartment. Yup, I think I made not too bad a job of it. Should have seen upstairs before we bought the place. Thirty-year-old wall-to-wall carpet with all the original dirt still in it.”
    I shuddered.
    Jim just kept talking. “I resanded all this hardwood myself. And the wife picked the colors for the walls. This one’s called Butter Pecan, although it looks like Taffy to me. The trim’s called Vanilla White.”
    Butter Pecan? “It’s