Beggar of Love by Lee Lynch

Author:Lee Lynch [Lynch, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781602823648
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mitchell Para’s day job was in a building on the West Side. Instead of hanging around it, risking a return of the despair inactivity brought on, Jefferson decided to storm the office. Mitchell had explained that it was a small food-brokerage firm called Faster Foods that had been founded by his straight, cigar-chomping brother Morton. No one was at the front desk, so she peered around the paneled partition that screened seven men at desks clumped so close together she couldn’t imagine they’d be able to hear anyone on the headsets that clung to their heads. Every one of them was smoking. There were two doors with frosted windows, both closed to the warm spring air. Her heart beat faster to think Mitchell might be inside one of those offices.

One man looked up from his computer screen. “Help you?”

“Mitchell Para?”

He motioned to the office behind him on his right.

Jefferson threaded her way through the desks, waste baskets, and electrical wiring. Classy place to work, Mitch, she thought and buried her hands more deeply in the pockets of her hoodie. The men barked into their phones, punched at keyboards, yelled questions at each other. She breathed in so much cigarette smoke she coughed as she knocked on the door.

“Yeah!”

It wasn’t Mitchell, but a shorter, heavier look-alike who had adopted the shoddy day-old-beard look.

“I know you?” he asked.

A trembling started inside. “Jefferson. I’m a friend of Mitchell’s. Is he here?”

“What kind of friend doesn’t know he’s on his honeymoon?”

Her face went cold. Now she was trembling all over. “Honeymoon?”

“Might as well be. Shacked up with a woman, no phone, announced he would be gone two months.”

“Where?”

“The Caribbean? Brazil? Who knows with my meshugana brother? Why? He owe you money?”

“No.” She’d tried to come up with explanations on her way there, but not seriously, half expecting to see Mitchell, to hear that Ginger was staying with him until she found her own place. “Who did he abscond with?”

“The little faigele finally got himself a woman. What’s her name, some Irish redhead.”

She reached to the desk to steady herself.

“You want to leave a message?” He was watching her. “Hey, wait a minute. You’re the two-timing girlfriend. The one she was leaving, aren’t you?”

When Jefferson didn’t respond, Mitchell’s brother said, “You people. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Sleeping with anything that moves. You girls are as bad as the guys.”

“Where did they go?” she asked again, refusing to break eye contact.

“I need this like loch im kopf. I can’t tell you. Mitch would break my neck.”

“I want to know she’s safe.”

He gave a disgusted-sounding laugh. “With my brother, believe me, she’s safe.”

She placed her hands on the desk and looked down at the man. “I can go to the police, tell them I think she’s been kidnapped.”

“What are you doing? Threatening me?” He carefully chose a cigar. “You think the police would rescue a woman who went willingly with a man and bring her back to a creature like you? They would laugh you out of the station.

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