Mystery of the Missing Landlord

Excerpt from a mystery novel

Flo was the first one to notice that Guido was missing. She had an almost psychic ability to sense the energy in our apartment building and one night in early November she perceived something jittery in the air.

"It's like electricity."  We sat in the laundry room waiting for our washers to end their cycles. Flo raised her voice above the clatter of the machines. "Don't you feel it?"

"I can feel the building shake," I shouted, but Flo was talking about something more ethereal. There was, she said, an undercurrent, an odd, tingling sensation that something tremendous was going on. Beneath the surface of things.

Her hand trembled as she lit a cigarette. She held the smoke in her lungs for a long pause, then let it out in a whistling white stream. "He's gone."

"Who?"

"Guido."  Flo reached to flick ashes in the laundry sink. She was a tiny woman in a rumpled gray sweatshirt, but behind the cloud of smoke, she loomed. "Think about it, Margaret. When was the last time you saw him?"

"Well.  I--"  Our washing machines clunked and then stopped, simultaneously. The sudden silence made the basement desolate. "I'm sure I don't know."  I set to stuffing wet sheets into a dryer. "Not too long ago. Three weeks, maybe. Or a month..."

Guido didn't live in our building, but he usually came by once a week to take out the garbage, which is more than you can say for most landlords these days. Whenever it snowed, I was awakened by the scrape of Guido's shovel against the sidewalk. On days like that I snuggled down beneath the covers, comforted by the sound of his heavy boots stomping across the porch. "Guido loves this building," I said. "He wouldn't just vanish."

"Not if he could help it," Flo said ominously.

I slammed the dryer door shut and slipped quarters into the coin slot.  "He'll be by on Friday to collect our rents." I gave the slot a push. It was stuck.

"Coin box is full," Flo said. "Guido hasn't emptied it in weeks."

"But Guido always empties the coin box."  I rattled it. "How could he forget the coin box?"

"Now there," Flo squashed her cigarette in the sink.  "We'll take care of those sheets." Nudging me aside, she pulled the linens from the dryer and carried them dripping across the basement. "Get the door--"

The door led to the boiler room, which was off-limits to tenants but Flo marched in and plopped the wet laundry on top of Guido's work bench.  "Find some chairs--"

Guido never threw anything away. The basement was a treasure trove of headboards and end tables and other castaways.

"Everything's dusty," I grumbled.

Flo dragged four chairs over to the boiler where she arranged them in a row. Then she shook out my sheets and draped them over the chairs. "They'll be dry in less than an hour," she said.

"You really think Guido is gone?" 

The tears that trembled in my voice weren't really about a missing landlord or soggy laundry, of course. Flo seemed to understand that. Her voice went husky when she said, "Margaret, it happens.  Sometimes men just -- leave."

So Flo and I flopped down on a discarded sofa--a musty old thing with stuffing puffed through tattered tapestry--and watched the blue glow of the gas flame beneath the boiler.

The boiler hummed like a purring cat. Guido tended to it like a treasured sports car, adjusting the water level and tinkering with the pressure setting.  What if, for some reason, it stopped running? What if the pipes froze and burst?  What if the weight of the snow collapsed the roof? What if sleet turned the sidewalks into a sheet of ice? What if no one came to plow the parking lot?

Any number of things can go wrong in a big old building, and when a building has nine apartments, like ours did, well, the potential for problems multiplies nine times over.  And if Guido really had gone AWOL, who could take command?  Not the students, who lived in the attic apartments. Not Mrs. Holbrook or her dying husband in 2B, or that twittering art history professor in 2A, or the philosophy professor in 1B, or--

Flo read my thoughts. "It's up to us, Margaret. We'll have to look after things."

"Until Guido returns," I said.

"If," Flo said.
By The Literary Landlady on September 3, 2010 7:40 PM


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