She was glad that he didn’t mind driving because she was over it. Besides, the trek allowed her to get in a much needed nap. The only downside was that when she woke up, she discovered that she’d been slumped backward and her top had adhered to her back. Peeling it away from her raw skin without screaming out loud was an accomplishment.
After parking at the police station, they made their now-familiar walk back to the Strand. As they did, Jessie thought about Cory Jules, the homeowner who’d demanded Carlos be fired. She wondered if his squirrelly demeanor was an indication of something more than just being an entitled jerk.
She found it hard to believe that a guy with his physical proportions could move stealthily around the Bloom house without being noticed by neighbors. She found it even harder to imagine that he could get the jump on Garland, who was older but still a very alert, reasonably spry guy. Though she didn’t completely dismiss him, she thought they needed to look at other possibilities and Ryan agreed.
“Maybe we should talk to some folks south of the pier,” she suggested. “It seems like everyone in this area knows each other. Maybe someone in that direction noticed something unusual. I don’t think we need to just stick to the couple of blocks near the crime scene.”
“Good point,” Ryan said, smirking slightly. “We can see if the people on the other side of Manhattan Beach Boulevard reveal their nosiness and prejudice differently than their friends to the north. I wonder if they consider themselves to live on the wrong side of the tracks.”
“Very funny,” she said as they walked along a stretch of the Strand she hadn’t visited before. “Should we split up again?”
“I don’t ever want to split up,” he said, smiling goofily.
She knew what he was doing. Ryan was trying to take her mind off the fact that she was exhausted, sore, and weighed down by grief. It wasn’t entirely working but she appreciated the effort.
“Then let’s start out together,” she replied.
They began knocking on doors. Since it was still early afternoon, they didn’t get many answers.
“I wonder how many of these people are at work and how many are just out of town,” Ryan mused.
“Either way, it makes our job harder,” Jessie muttered.
After three failed attempts, they came to the front unit of a massive, fancy, four-unit condo complex. There was no need to knock on the door because the apparent owner of the beach-adjacent unit, a sixty-something man wearing only shorts, was sitting out front on a wooden bench, holding what looked like a massive margarita. His skin was deeply bronzed and crinkly and the white hair on his chest formed tight little curlicues.
“No trespassing,” he growled as they approached, though he appeared delighted to see them.
“Getting started on the evening early?” Ryan asked, nodding at the man’s drink.
“How do you know I ever stopped?” he asked grumpily, before looking at Ryan’s suit and adding, “You’re wasting your time. I don’t want to be saved.”
“We’re not actually here for that,” Jessie said, trying not to be charmed by the gruff disdain the guy seemed to have for them. “We’re with the LAPD, investigating the deaths up the way. I assume you’ve heard about them.”
“Do I seem like the kind of guy who would have heard about them?” the man asked before taking a generous sip of his drink.
“Actually, you do,” Jessie assured him. “May I ask your name?”
“May I ask yours?”
“Of course,” she replied sunnily. “I’m Jessie Hunt, a criminal profiler for the department. This is Detective Ryan Hernandez.”
“Jessie Hunt,” the man said, playing with his silvery goatee. “I know that name. Aren’t you the gal who wrote all that crap about your cop bosses on Facebook and got crushed for it?”
Jessie was surprised. Most people fixated more on the hacked racist and anti-Semitic comments falsely attributed to her than the ones where she supposedly called her superiors corrupt.
“That would be me,” she conceded.
“Too bad it turns out you didn’t really write them,” he opined. “It would have been fun to watch the crap fest that could have played out in public if you really had called them out.”
“It’s been a pretty sizable crap fest despite the comments being faked,” she told him before trying again. “So what’s your name?”
He looked like he was going to continue to be combative, but then seemed to change his mind.
“My full name is Randall Horatio Fuller. But my friends call me Randy. My enemies call me Full-Of-It.”
“Do you have a lot of enemies, Randy?” Jessie asked playfully.
“I sure do. I’m kind of a one-man neighborhood watch around here. And as it turns out, my neighbors don’t take too kindly to being watched.”
“Seen anything interesting lately?’ Jessie asked, fully aware that he was dying to share everything he knew.
“You could say that,” he replied, making a token effort to be coy.
“Why don’t you go ahead and say that,” Ryan suggested.
“Well, here’s the thing, Detective Hernandez,” Randy offered. “It’s real easy to pick out the troublemakers in the wintertime around here. Everybody’s living in their own homes, leading their normal lives. It gets chilly, so you don’t get all the inlanders coming down. And it gets dark earlier so anybody out and about when they shouldn’t be draws notice. But the summer’s a different story altogether.”
“How’s that?” Ryan asked.
“For one thing, you got all the rabble-rousers coming in from the city, looking to blow off steam. They go crazy, bugging folks who are just relaxing on the beach, getting in the way of surfers and then getting pissed when a board knocks ’em in the head.”
“They should know better,” Ryan said, egging him on.
“You get it,” Randy said, before glugging some more margarita. “Those types are bad enough. But what’s worse is when residents take off for the summer. Some of them leave their places unattended and the yards get all gross. That’s a whole other story. Then there are the folks who rent out their places. Now, all of a sudden I have to deal with a different breed of rich troublemakers who think they own the town, treating the locals like crap and the streets like their own personal garbage dump.”
“Sounds like a real nightmare,” Jessie offered, trying to sound sincere.
“It is,” Randy agreed enthusiastically. “And then I get the worst of both worlds.”
“Like what?” Ryan wondered.
“For example, there’s this couple that lives two doors down, Carl and Eileen Landingham. She’s the worst so I don’t mind when she’s gone, which she is right now. But Carl—who’s not actually a terrible guy—he’s got this chippy he likes to bring around when Eileen’s away. The girl has no regard, playing music too loud, that kind of thing. Carl thinks he’s being all sneaky but everybody knows what’s going on.”
“Sounds rough, Randy,” Jessie said, feeling that she’d buttered him up enough to get more specific. But before she could ask her real questions, Randy’s eyes went wide. He pointed behind them.