The Perfect Neighbor Read online

  “Some of them do,” Ryan told her. “But none have angles that clearly show this house.”

  Jessie nodded, wondering how likely it was that the lack of footage of this home was a coincidence.

  “Can you stand just outside the bedroom door?” she asked him as she stepped over to Gail Bloom’s dresser.

  Ryan stepped outside and turned back to her. She turned to face the dresser.

  “Okay,” she continued. “Now walk slowly toward me, as quietly as you can.”

  She closed her eyes as he approached. After about five seconds she heard the creak of a floorboard and whipped around. Ryan was less than six feet away.

  “That must have been what tipped Garland off,” Ryan noted. “But by the time he heard it, the guy was almost on top of him, too late to do anything.”

  Jessie agreed. She turned back to the dresser where her mentor had been standing less than twenty-four hours ago. He had to have been facing this way to have been taken so unawares. What was consuming his attention to the point that an attacker was able to get so close without him noticing?

  She opened the top drawer. It was filled with women’s underwear, bras, and a few pairs of workout ankle socks. It looked like they’d been quickly rifled through. She wondered if that was what Garland had been wondering about. Had Priscilla Barton’s killer had some kind of fetish for stockings and been in here with them when he’d heard the neighbor come in the house? Maybe that was what the reference to “missing h” meant—Gail Bloom’s missing pantyhose.

  If he was up here, ogling the homeowner’s underwear, that meant he hadn’t invaded the home after Barton arrived. He was already here. He had already made himself comfortable.

  As Jessie tried to recreate what Garland had been thinking last night, she began to get into a rhythm. It was like she was having a silent conversation in her head with Garland, asking him questions that his actions and notes attempted to answer.

  The effect it had on her was both reassuring and troubling. One part of her was comforted. This interaction with his mind and memory brought her closer to him. But it also made the pain of his loss, of knowing they’d never interact this way again in life, all the worse.

  “I think we’ve got all we can from the house for now,” she said suddenly. “Maybe we go outside and talk to some neighbors?”

  “Sure,” Ryan agreed.

  Once outside, they decided to split up to cover more ground.

  “Just remember,” Ryan said delicately, “one of these folks might be our killer. You’re not in any condition to take someone on right now. So please don’t go into anyone’s house. Invite them outside to talk. Better to be curt than caught.”

  “Did you just make that up now?” Jessie asked.

  “I did. What do you think?”

  “I think they should teach that at the academy,” she teased. “You really missed your calling, Shakespeare.”

  “Hey, you know I’m a sensitive soul,” he countered, pretending to be wounded.

  “All right you. Take your sensitive soul and go south. I’ll take the houses that head north toward El Porto Beach.”

  Ryan faux-pouted as he stomped off dramatically. Jessie went in the other direction, skipping the home of Garth Barton. She knew he was at work now but she’d been warned to steer clear even if he was around.

  The next hour was instructive even if it didn’t move the investigation forward as much as she would have hoped. Jessie learned from multiple residents that many locals rented out their homes for part of the summer while they went on extended vacations.

  “Technically, it’s a municipal violation to do that without jumping through a series of administrative hoops,” a middle-aged guy three doors down from the Blooms told her. “But many folks do it on the down low, skirting regulations and making off-the-books deals.

  “The problem,” he continued, “is that when something untoward happens, whether it be a theft or just a noise ordinance violation, there’s no formal record of who is staying in any given house or where to reach the homeowner. It makes enforcement challenging.”

  Worse, according to some, it changed the “vibe” of the community. One retired widow described it in coded terms that made Jessie squirm uncomfortably.

  “Suddenly our charming beach town gets overrun with strangers, and not just the ones expected during the day when the masses swarm the beaches. But also in the evenings, when leisurely evening strolls lead to encounters with people who don’t value the ‘specialness’ of the community.”

  “It really sucks to go to the local coffee shop in the morning and not recognize half the people there,” one irked, forty-something bleached blonde woman wearing a massive diamond ring said obliviously. “It detracts from the homey feeling I like.”

  Jessie got a distinct NIMBY sensibility from almost everyone she spoke to. Sometimes there was a racial undercurrent. But other people seemed to want to keep the place clear of anyone who wasn’t local, no matter where they came from.

  She could feel the angst rising in her again. Even though most people she interviewed were pleasant, chill folks who simply enjoyed the slower pace of living by the beach and walking around their neighborhood barefoot, there were the others. Approximately every third interviewee reminded her of the people who made her Orange County existence so fraught.

  Part of why she’d chosen to live downtown was because even the wealthy folk there embraced a kind of grittiness that felt more real than the plastic lives of these people, living in their cookie cutter mansions and worrying that they might encounter an interloper in the line for coffee.

  She reached the last home before Bruce’s Beach, a park which served as a kind of informal dividing line before the next stretch of homes. The closest mansion was a good hundred yards farther north and it seemed unlikely that anyone that far away would be of much use as a potential witness. She decided that after this house, she’d turn around.

  The place was set farther back from the Strand than many of the others. It had an actual, full-sized yard with a beautifully landscaped garden than ran on either side of the walking path to the front door. To get to that door, she had to open the wooden gate and walk up a series of uneven pavers. She felt very exposed, especially so far from the Strand and its constant crowds.

  She knocked and waited, marveling at the work it must take to keep the yard in such immaculate shape. She was tempted to walk around the side of the house to see just how far back the foliage went. But just then, the door opened to reveal a thirty-something man with a burly chest and an even burlier belly. He wore board shorts, a loosely buttoned Hawaiian shirt, and a thick, gold necklace that disappeared under the shirt. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it dangled all the way down to his navel.

  “Yeah?” he said by way of greeting.

  “Hi. My name’s Jessie Hunt. I consult with the LAPD, which has been brought in to help investigate the recent deaths in your neighborhood. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Some cop already came by yesterday,” he said, sounding somewhere between agitated and surly. “I already told him we don’t know anything. He said this all happened on Monday night, early evening, right? We were on our boat out of Redondo Harbor then.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said non-combatively. “We appreciate those details and we’re running them down. Of course, there was more than one death.”

  “But I heard the other one was in the middle of the night. How am I supposed to give you proof of an alibi when I was asleep?”

  “We’re not asking for an alibi at this time, Mr.…?”

  “Jules. Cory Jules.”

  “Okay, Mr. Jules,” Jessie continued. “As I said, right now, I’m not trying to lock down resident alibis so much as get a feel for the area. My understanding is that during the summer, there are a lot of extra renters.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Jules muttered. “I can’t keep track of the East Coast usurpers who come out here every June to muck the plac
e up. If it’s not them, it’s an army of entitled fraternity brothers who want to see if they can break the Guinness record for keg stands or some Wisconsin tractor company owner and his five kids with cheese coming out of their pores.”

  Jessie didn’t comment on the irony of the rotund man in front of her commenting on someone else’s weight or sense of entitlement. Instead she tried to refocus him.

  “I’m wondering if you noticed anything that wasn’t so much annoying as out of the ordinary,” she said. “Did you see anyone recently who was behaving, not obnoxiously, but more …suspiciously?”

  Cory Jules scratched his wild, patchy hair as he thought about the question. After a few seconds, his eyes lit up.

  “There is someone,” he said excitedly. “It was last week so I forgot about it. But we had to fire our gardener for peeping.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah,” Jules said, obviously enthused to be retelling a story he’d shared more than once. “It was last Thursday, I think. My wife, Peg, said she was changing in the house and she saw the gardener—I forget his name—looking at her through the window. She didn’t want me to call the cops and make a scene. Instead, she had me call the landscaping company—they do a lot of homes here on the Strand. They fired him the same day.”

  “And you think this man is capable of something as involved as a murder?”

  “I don’t know,” Jules said, though it sounded like he believed it. “But I could imagine him peeping at Priscilla Barton. She had a pretty hot bod and she liked to show it off. If he got caught doing that sort of thing a second time, I could see him worrying that he might get more than just fired. Maybe he’d get arrested. I could see him wanting to shut her up in a moment of panic. It doesn’t seem crazy to me. But you’re the cop.”

  Jessie didn’t correct his misimpression. Instead she asked for the name of the landscaping company, which he went back into the house to get. As he walked down the hall, Jessie saw who she assumed was Peg Jules poke her head out briefly. In that short moment, Jessie saw something unsettling in her eyes. Fear? Apprehension? Whatever it was, it was clear that there was more going on here than met the eye.

  A moment later, Cory Jules returned with a bill in his hand. Jessie wrote down the company’s name and phone number. As she thanked him, she studied him closely. But as before, he looked like just another coddled, self-righteous beach dude.

  If he was something more nefarious, he was doing a great job of hiding it. And if he was that great an actor, what else was he capable of?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They were a long way from the beach.

  As they headed inland, Jessie watched the temperature gauge in Ryan’s car slowly creep up. But as the temperature rose, her spirits sank listening to Ryan describe his interviews with neighbors. They yielded stories similar to hers but nothing concrete to advance the investigation.

  By the time they arrived at the Boyle Heights home of Carlos Fogata, the temperature was approaching a hundred degrees. They had gotten his address from Beach Cities Landscaping, which apparently maintained the yards and gardens of nearly a quarter of the homes along the Strand.

  When Jessie called, the company proudly informed her that they had a staff of eighty-six. So it was likely no big deal for them to fire Mr. Fogata, the Jules’ primary gardener. And it may have explained why they let him go without any kind of administrative review of the merit of the allegation. As Shelly, the perky public relations liaison Jessie spoke to, said, “We don’t take chances when it comes to alienating the community.”

  They pulled up to the address Shelly had given them and stepped out of Ryan’s air-conditioned car into the sweltering midday heat. They were standing in front of the Shady Palms Mobile Home Park, just a few miles east of their own downtown police station. They approached the park’s main office, where the on-duty manager gave them the lot number where Carlos and May Fogata lived.

  As they trudged along the dirt path that served as a road, the dust rose up all around them, sending Jessie into a coughing jag that made her body shake and her back sting. When she recovered, she pointed at the dead trees that stood forlornly at random locations.

  “Not much truth in advertising,” she noted. “Those aren’t palms and they’re not very shady either.”

  Ryan smiled wryly.

  “I have a feeling that most folks who live here long ago made their peace with the incongruity of the name and the reality. I know I did.”

  “What do you mean?” Jessie asked.

  “My family lived in a mobile home for three years when I was a kid. At one point there were six of us sharing a space smaller than your apartment living room. I still remember the smell of grilled onions on the stove and playing football outside, using different trailers as yard markers. They’re some of the best memories of my childhood.”

  “You never told me any of this,” Jessie said.

  “Well, considering your upbringing, I didn’t think mine was especially hardscrabble.”

  “Ryan,” she said reproachfully. “It’s not a competition to see who had the most challenging childhood. I’m just happy to get a peek at the little fella behind that manly facade.”

  Ryan’s face was suddenly bright pink and not because of the sun.

  “It looks like we’re here,” he said quickly as they arrived at the Fogata home, knocking before she could reply. A moment later the door was answered by a petite woman in her early thirties with her hair pulled back in a bun. She was drenched in sweat.

  “Is Carlos here?” Ryan asked. “We’d like to speak with him.”

  The woman nodded and called into the home for Carlos. He appeared a few seconds later, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, which was soaked through. He looked slightly older than the woman, maybe mid-thirties. He had the lean body and leathery skin of someone who worked outside all the time. His hair was starting to recede and he had little scratches and scars on his fingers and wrists that Jessie recognized as the telltale defense mechanism of rose bushes. He wore a worried expression.

  “Hi, Carlos,” Ryan said. “I’m Detective Ryan Hernandez with the LAPD. This is my colleague, Jessie Hunt. Do you have a moment to answer some questions about an incident that occurred last week in Manhattan Beach?”

  Fogata’s concerned look immediately turned to annoyance.

  “Let me guess. Is it related to Margaret Jules?”

  “It is,” Ryan confirmed. “May we come in?”

  Fogata gave them both a once-over.

  “With that suit you have on, I think you’d rather we talk outside. We don’t have air-conditioning. You’d be cooking in your own juices in that thing.”

  “I appreciate it,” Ryan said. “Maybe you could lead us to the coolest spot?”

  “Give me a second,” Fogata said, disappearing from sight.

  Ryan didn’t flinch but Jessie did notice him snap the holster cover off his weapon and rest his hand casually in its general vicinity. But when Fogata reappeared, the only thing he’d added was a Dodgers baseball cap.

  He hopped down from the trailer and motioned for them to follow him as he walked up a small hill to a picnic table in the middle of the park. There were a couple of preschool-age kids sitting there, drawing pictures on construction paper with worn down crayons. Fogata plopped down next to them and motioned for Ryan and Jessie to take seats across from them.

  “These are my twins, Joe and Mariah,” he said, rubbing the boy’s head vigorously. “They’ll be four next week.”

  Jessie smiled at the kids, who looked at her with matching expressions of mild curiosity before returning their attention to their art.

  “You okay having this conversation with them around?” Ryan asked.

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he assured them. “And as long as you’re not too graphic, they won’t have a clue what’s going on. Besides, this is the only place in the park that gets a breeze and I don’t want to make them move.”

  “Fair enough,” Ryan
said. “So you’re obviously aware of the complaint filed by Ms. Jules last week.”

  “Obviously,” Fogata confirmed. “That’s why I’m sitting here instead of on the job today. Did you guys really come all the way out here from the beach just to question me over an ‘incident’ she wouldn’t even file a formal police complaint about?”

  “You say ‘incident’ like it’s a dirty word,” Jessie said, speaking for the first time.

  “No, I say it like it’s a load of crap.”

  “You’re saying it didn’t go down that way?’ Ryan asked.

  “Not even close, man,” Fogata said. “That lady has been eyeing me for months.”

  “What does that mean?” Jessie asked, though she had a clue.

  “It means she was constantly giving me the look. She always found a way to end up sunbathing in the yard while I was working. It got so awkward that I requested getting switched off their house. But the company said no, that Mrs. Jules was adamant that I did the best work. After that, I never even stepped on their property without sunglasses and a hat that covered the top half of my face. I tried to avoid eye contact at all costs. I didn’t want any trouble.”

  “You’re saying she came on to you?” Ryan said.

  “Not flat out in direct words, man. But she was always getting in my personal space, squeezing my hand when she thanked me, inviting me inside for a glass of lemonade. I know that sounds like she was just being polite. But half the time she was in a bikini. And she never did it when her old man worked from home, only on days when he was at the office. How convenient is that?”

  “What about last Thursday?” Jessie asked.

  “Right. So the husband’s off at work. The kids are at school. And she does her regular routine, this time deciding she’s gonna do some outdoor yoga right as I’m trimming the hedges. I do my standard thing—covered face, sunglasses, headphones—pretending not to notice her bending into a pretzel ten feet from me. Then I go around to the side of the house to cut back the ivy along the walls. I’m on the ladder near a second-floor window that looks into one of the kids’ rooms. I take off my hat and sunglasses for a second to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. And guess what I see?”