Four to Score (Stephanie Plum 4)

He stood on the porch and watched me angle into my car.

“Cute,” he called. “I like when a chick drives a sporty little car.”

I sent him a smile that felt a lot like a grimace and peeled away from the curb. I'd gotten the CRX in February, sucked in by a shiny new paint job and an odometer that read 12,000 miles. Cherry condition, the owner had said. Hardly ever driven. And that was partly true. It was hardly ever driven with the odometer cable connected. Not that it mattered. The price had been right, and I looked good in the driver's seat. I'd recently developed a dime-?sized lesion on my exhaust pipe, but if I played Metallica loud enough I could hardly hear the muffler noise. I might have thought twice about buying the car if I'd known Eddie Kuntz thought it was cute.

My first stop was the Silver Dollar Diner. Maxine had worked there for seven years and had listed no other source of income. The Silver Dollar was open twenty-?four hours. It served good food in generous portions and was always packed with overweight people and penny-?pinching seniors. The families of fatties cleaned their plates, and the seniors took leftovers home in doggy bags . . . butter pats, baskets of rolls, packets of sugar, half-?eaten pieces of deep-?fried haddock, coleslaw, fruit cup, grease-?logged french fries. A senior could eat for three days off one meal at the Silver Dollar.

The Silver Dollar was in Hamilton Township on a stretch of road that was clogged with discount stores and small strip malls. It was almost noon, and diner patrons were scarfing down burgers and BLTs. I introduced myself to the woman behind the register and asked about Maxine.

“I can't believe she's in all this trouble,” the woman said. “Maxine was responsible. Real dependable.” She straightened a stack of menus. “And that business about the car!” She did some eye rolling. “Maxine drove it to work lots of times. He gave her the keys. And then all of a sudden she's arrested for stealing.” She gave a grunt of disgust. “Men!”

I stepped back to allow a couple to pay their bill. When they'd pocketed their complimentary mints, matchbooks and toothpicks and exited the diner I turned back to the cashier. “Maxine failed to show for her court appearance. Did she give any indication that she might be leaving town?”

“She said she was going on vacation, and we all thought she was due. Been working here for seven years and never once took a vacation.”

“Has anyone heard from her since she's left?”

“Not that I know of. Maybe Margie. Maxine and Margie always worked the same shift. Four to ten. If you want to talk to Margie you should come back around eight. We get real busy with the early-?bird specials at four, but then around eight it starts to slack off.”

I thanked the woman and went back to my CRX. My next stop would be Nowicki's apartment. According to Kuntz, Nowicki had lived with him for four months but had never gotten around to moving out of her place. The apartment was a quarter mile from the diner, and Nowicki had stated on her bond agreement that she'd resided there for six years. All previous addresses were local. Maxine Nowicki was Trenton clear to the roots of her bleached blond hair.

The apartment was in a complex of two-?story, blocky, red-?brick buildings anchored in islands of parched grass, arranged around macadam parking lots. Nowicki was on the second floor with a first-?floor entrance. Inside private stairwell. Not good for window snooping. All second-?floor apartments had small balconies on the back side, but I'd need a ladder to get to the balcony. Probably a woman climbing up a ladder would look suspicious.

I decided to go with the obvious and knock on the door. If no one answered I'd ask the super to let me in. Many times the super was cooperative in this way, especially if he was confused as to the authenticity of my fake badge.

There were two front doors side by side. One was for upstairs and one was for downstairs. The name under the upstairs doorbell read Nowicki. The name under the downstairs doorbell read Pease.

I rang the upstairs doorbell and the downstairs door opened and an elderly woman looked out at me.

“She isn't home.”

“Are you Mrs. Pease?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure Maxine isn't home?”

“Well, I guess I'd know. You can hear everything in this cheapskate apartment. If she was home I'd hear her TV. I'd hear her walking around. And besides, she'd stop in to tell me she was home and collect her mail.”

Ah hah! The woman was collecting Maxine's mail. Maybe she also had Maxine's key.

“Yes, but suppose she came home late one night and didn't want to wake you?” I said. “And then suppose she had a stroke?”

“I never thought of that.”

“She could be upstairs right now, gasping her last breath of air.”

The woman rolled her eyes upward, as if she could see through walls. “Hmmm.”

“Do you have a key?”

“Well, yes . . .”

“And what about her plants? Have you been watering her plants?”

“She didn't ask me to water her plants.”

“Maybe we should go take a look. Make sure everything is okay.”