Invasion of Privacy

himself.”
    “I mean in the other hou—units around him.”
    “Oh. There’s Mr. and Mrs. Stepanian, Mrs. Robinette and Jamey, and Mr. Eh-men-dor and Kira.”
    Kira. Unusual enough name that.... “What does Kira look like, Paulie?”
    “She’s pretty.” Fogerty looked down, his cheeks flushing, his hands moving nervously on the rake again. “She’s very pretty.”
    “Does she wear black clothes?”
    Blink and nod. “Black, yeah. Lots of them.”
    “Do you think Kira’s home now?”
    “Yeah. Mr. Eh-men-dor is sick, and she takes care of him.”
    What the other girl, Jude, must have meant in The Tides about Kira’s father. “How about the Stepanians?”
    “They’re not sick.”
    “Are they home, though, do you think?”
    “Mrs. Stepanian, maybe. Mr. Stepanian goes to work. She does too, sometimes.”
    I was feeling a little guilty pumping Fogerty, but at least I couldn’t see it getting back to Hendrix. “How about Mrs. Robinette?”
    “She’s home a lot.”
    “And Jamey?”
    “He’s not home yet. He goes to school. Special bus, like me.”
    “Like you?”
    “Like when I went to school. This special bus came to my old house and picked me up.”
    “Where do you live now, Paulie?”
    He pointed at the prefab building near the tennis courts. “My new house. Mr. Hend’ix hired me. I’m the super.” * “Well, listen, you’ve helped a lot. Thank you.”
    “You going to see Mr. Eh-men-dor?”
    “ Probably.”
    The hang-jaw smile. “Good. He can show you how to use your camera to take pixtures right.”
    Paulie Fogerty walked off to tend his greenery, bouncing the tine end of the rake off the ground every other step, like he was counting cadence for himself.

5

    I drove toward the four-unit cluster I’d seen Andrew Dees leaving. His number 42 was second from the left. Given what Paulie had told me about the other residents, I figured Kira and her father were the most likely to be home and the Stepanians the least, with Mrs. Robinette in the middle. Taking my portfolio briefcase with the questionnaires in it, I walked up the path to number 41, the end unit next to Dees . Since STEPANIAN appeared under the button, I tried it first.
    Perhaps twenty seconds after an electronic bong, a woman opened the yellow front door. She was about thirty and slim, maybe five-five in flat shoes. Her black, shiny hair crept just slightly into sideburns, a faint duskiness above her upper lip as well. She wore a plaid skirt, the blouse red and picking up one of the minor colors in the skirt, the pantyhose blue and picking up one of the others. I had the immediate impression of someone who was all dressed up with no place to go.
    “Yes?”
    “Mrs. Stepanian?”
    “Yes.”
    “My name’s John Cuddy.” I took out the identification holder and held it up for her to read.
    “Private investigator?” Her face, shaped like an inverted teardrop with a dainty chin, clouded over. “What’s this about?”
    “I’ve been asked by another condo complex to look into how well the Hendrix company manages yours.”
    “How well?”
    “Yes. My clients are thinking about perhaps changing companies, but they’d like a discreet rundown on the possible alternatives.”
    “Oh.” Stepanian seemed to relax a little. “Well, that certainly is prudent of them, isn’t it?”
    She spoke the sentence neutrally, without any sarcasm. I put the ID holder back in my pocket. “Could I come in, ask you a few questions?”
    “I suppose that would be all right.”
    Stepanian ushered me through the little entrance alcove into her unit. In front of us was a living room that segued without walls into a dining area. To the right of the dining area was a squarish kitchen, behind it a sliding glass door leading to a rear deck. The space above the living room part was open air, the second floor overhanging only the dinner table and kitchen. A set of stairs with picketed balustrade rose to a catwalk above the first level. The catwalk provided access to a pair of doors fifteen feet apart, an indentation between them that I took for the upstairs bath. Most of the wall area was plasterboard painted a matte white, wainscoting in naturally stained oak covering the three feet from the bottom of the plasterboard down to the wall-to-wall carpeting.
    I said, “Very nice place,” meaning it.
    Stepanian moved to the center of the first floor and looked up and around, as though she were seeing the unit for the first time. “Yes, it’s just