Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [3]
“Huh,” was all I managed. Money-wise, the job wasn’t in my top tier, but then, my grandparents’ house was small even by the neighborhood’s standards, just two stories. It had a nice-size backyard, though, for a rowhouse. My grandmother had grown tomatoes and herbs and summer squash on that little patch of land.
“The first thing I want to do is get a parking pad back here,” my client said, sweeping a hand over what was now an overgrown patch of weeds, the chain-link fence sagging around it. “I’ve been told that will increase the value of the property ten, twenty thousand.”
“You a flipper?” I asked. More and more amateurs were getting into real estate, feeling that the stock market wasn’t for them. They were the worst of all possible worlds, panicking at every penny over the original estimate, riding my ass. You want to flip property for profit, you need to be able to do the work yourself. Or buy and hold. This woman didn’t look like the patient type. She was young, dressed to the nines, picking her way through the weeds in the most impractical boots I’d ever seen.
“No, I plan to live here. In fact, I hope to move in as quickly as possible, so time is more important to me than money. I was told you’re fast.”
“I don’t waste time, but I don’t cut corners,” I said. “Mainly, I just try to make my customers happy.”
She tilted her head, gazing at me through naturally thick and black eyelashes. It was the practiced look of a woman who had been looking at men from under her eyelashes for much of her life, sure they would be charmed. And, okay, I was. Dark hair, cut in one of those casual, disarrayed styles, darker eyes that made me think of kalamata olives, which isn’t particularly romantic, I guess. But I really like kalamata olives. With her fair skin, it was a terrific contrast.
“I’m sure you’ll make me very happy,” was all she said.
I guess here is where I should mention that I’m married, going on eighteen years and pretty happily, too. I realize it’s a hard concept to grasp, especially for a lot of women, that you can be perfectly happy, still in love with your wife, maybe more in love with your wife than you’ve ever been, but it’s been eighteen years and a young, firm-fleshed woman looks up at you through her eyelashes and it’s not a crime to think: I like that Not: I’d like to hit that, which I hear the young guys on my crews say. Just: I like that, that’s nice, if life were different I’d make time for that. But I had two kids and a sweet wife, Angeline, who’d only put on a few pounds and still kept her hair blond and long, and was pretty appreciative of the life my work had built for the two of us. So I had no agenda, no scheme going in. I was just weak.
But part of Deirdre’s allure was how much she professed to love the very things whose destruction she was presiding over, even before I told her that the house had belonged to my grandparents. She exclaimed over the wallpaper in their bedroom, a pattern of tiny yellow roses, even as it was steamed off the walls. She ran a hand lovingly over the banister, worn smooth by my younger hands, not to mention my butt a time or two. The next day it was gone, yanked from its moorings by my workers. She all but composed an ode to the black-and-white tile in the single full bath, but that didn’t stop her from meeting with Charles Tile Co. and choosing a Tuscany-themed medley for what was to become the master bath suite. (Medley was their word, not mine. I just put the stuff in.)
She had said she wanted the job fast, which made me ache a little, because the faster it went, the sooner I would be out of her world. But it turned out she didn’t care about speed so much once we got the house to the point where she could live among the ongoing work—and once her end-of the-day inspections culminated with the two of us in her raw, unfinished bedroom. She was wilder than I had expected, pushing to do things that Angeline would never have tolerated, much less asked for. In some part