Michael's Baby

“Mr. Stephanopolis, are you in there? It’s Michael Janos.”

The elderly man slowly opened the door.

“What happened?” Michael demanded. “I heard someone scream.”

“It was me,” Mr. Stephanopolis replied testily. “I was in the shower and the hot water ran out. I nearly froze my private parts off! You’ve got to fix that hot-water heater before someone gets hurt.”

Michael was already hurt—his big toe was throbbing like nobody’s business. When he’d been six years old he’d broken that big toe by stubbing it on a stair—he only hoped history wasn’t repeating itself.

“Did you hear me?” Mr. Stephanopolis demanded, tightening his bathrobe more tightly around his toothpick body.

“I heard you,” Michael assured him wearily. It was barely six and he hadn’t gotten to sleep until two a.m. “I’m sure the entire building heard you screaming like that.”

“So what are you going to do about the hot-water heater?”

“You know I’ve placed an ad for a building supervisor to take care of repairs. Meanwhile I’ll call for a repairman, but it is Thanksgiving weekend.”

“A repairman already came out last weekend.”

And charged Michael plenty in overtime. “Look, I’ve got a couple people coming by today to interview for the super’s job. Hopefully one of them will know what they’re doing.”

Michael’s hope was fading by the minute as the handful of applicants came and went—each of them as dim as the light bulb he’d asked them to put into his stove as a test of their supposed handyman abilities. The most recent applicant had all but taken the stove apart in his quest to put in the damn bulb. Now Michael would have to call an appliance repairman in for that, too—in addition to everything else that was already on the fritz.

Meanwhile, the hot-water heater guy still hadn’t shown his face, or any other part of his anatomy, since Michael had placed the call at six that morning.

Mr. Stephanopolis had shown his displeasure with the lack of hot water by stomping around in his apartment with his army boots—remnants of the Second World War. He’d had his wife, who was built like a brick outhouse, join him in his protest march. Since Michael was directly below the marching stampede, there was no rest for the weary.

A timid knock on his door was a welcome diversion, until he saw who was outside. Mrs. Wieskopf and Mrs. Martinez stood side by side, clearly believing in the philosophy of power in numbers. The two senior citizens shared the apartment next door to his on the main floor. If their knock was timid, the look on their faces was anything but. “Mr. Janos, do you realize that there is no hot water in this building?” Mrs. Wieskopf demanded.

“I know. I’ve already called a repairman…”

“We do our washing on Saturdays, Mr. Janos. And we can’t get our whites clean with cold water.”

“A repairman came last weekend,” Mrs. Martinez added.

A fifteen-minute lecture on the responsibilities that accompanied being a building’s owner followed.

When he could finally get a word in edgewise, Michael said, “Look, ladies, I’m doing the best I can here.”

With a disapproving sniff, the two women returned to their own place.

Michael was ready to call it quits for the day when he remembered there was one more applicant to go. Glancing at his watch, he frowned. The guy was late. Not a good start.

As if on cue, Michael heard the strangled sound of the security buzzer, indicating that there was someone pushing the button in the building’s postage-stamp-size foyer. He couldn’t ask who it was because the damn speaker was broken, so he undid the locks on his door and strode outside. From his doorway he could see the postman through the glass beside the front door. The man looked as aggravated as Michael felt.

“Got a package for you here,” the postman said as Michael joined him in the foyer, his tone of voice making it clear that he disapproved of Michael getting packages and complicating his route. “And your metal mailbox thingamajig sticks. You better get it fixed.”

“It’s an old building,” Michael said.

“It’s a white elephant,” the postman snorted. “Axton was wise to dump it.”

He’d dumped it all right, right into Michael’s unwilling lap. Michael had carried David Axton as long as he could, but when Axton hadn’t paid for the security work Michael had done for his company almost a year before, Mi chael had finally taken him to court—and ended up with this monstrosity of a Victorian mansion-cum-apartment house while Axton had declared bankruptcy and taken off.

“It’ll be worth something someday,” Axton had told him before leaving the courthouse. “Just needs a little fixing up. That area in the near north side of Chicago is being rehabbed by yuppies. Hang onto the property, Janos, and you’ll find I’ve paid you back in spades.”

Right. And he probably had some swamp property Michael could buy for a song, too.

Michael had only been living in the building a few weeks and already he knew he was in for some big headaches.

The slam of the front door told him that the postman had moved on, leaving Michael standing there with the mysterious package in his hands. Frowning down at it, he hoped it wasn’t any more of the sex toys that David Axton had ordered before vacating the property.

No, the address label had his name written out in a spidery handwriting. In fact, it had his given name of Miklos on it. No one ever called him that.

Looking at the return address he couldn’t make anything out. But the stamps said Magyar Posta. He knew enough of his native language to know the stamps were from Hungary. But he didn’t know anyone in Hungary. Granted, his parents had come from there, but they’d emigrated to the States in the early sixties, when he’d been just a child.

The package looked like it had come via China by a slow camel train. Kind of the way he felt after a hellish day like today.

Lifting the package to his ear, he shook it and felt a pain splinter his head, making him wince—and making the door slip from his booted foot and slam, effectively locking him out of his own building.

Swearing in Hungarian for the second time that day, Michael yanked on the doorknob, only to end up pulling it out in his hand.

Brett Munro stared at the slip of paper in her hand before checking the address one more time: 707 Love Street. Yep, this was the place, all right. It looked more like a house than an apartment building, but then she knew that once, decades ago, this area off Fullerton had been an affluent neighborhood. Now it was struggling with urban renewal.

Brett knew all about struggling. And when she opened the outer door, she saw a tall, dark-haired man struggling, too—yanking on the doorknob of the inner door before ending up with the knob in his hand. The man had no outer coat on and had obviously just locked himself out.

“Maybe it would help if you buzzed someone else to let you in,” she suggested.

The man whirled to face her and she caught her breath at the dark attraction of his face. He wasn’t what you would call traditionally handsome, his face was too lean for that. It was carved in rakish angles with noble shadows beneath high cheekbones.

She was close enough to see the striking color of his eyes—a light hazel with unexpected depth. Brett blinked. She’d never seen eyes quite like that before. It wasn’t just the color, but also their darkly brooding expression that made her feel as if she’d just been lifted into the vortex of a tornado.

“Where did you come from?” he demanded.

“Outside,” she replied. “Would you like me to fix that for you?”

Michael clutched the doorknob to his chest, which was hard to do, since he was carrying a paper-wrapped box, and glared at her. “I’ve had enough people trying to fix things around here.”

“It’s a beautiful old building,” she said admiringly, noting the etched glass panel on one side of the inner doorway.

“It’s a security risk,” he replied, following the direction of her gaze. “The place is falling down around our ears.”

“Then why do you live here?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

She made no reply, knowing what it was like to have few options. But that life was behind her now. “So what are your impressions of the building’s owner?”

“The guy was a no-good con artist,” Michael growled, wishing David Axton were there so he could punch his lights out.