Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 19

"Yes, Honorable Sensei. That was masterful. There's tissues on your credenza and we can look away while you clean all the brown off your nose."

"Fuck you. I kept your case in our house."

"What happened to Margot? I liked Margot, better than Lorraine, anyway."

"I did, too. Jack said Margot bought a new car and kept taking it back to the dealership to adjust the brakes, until one day she and her car salesman took the car out for a test drive to Palm Springs and didn't come back for three days."

"Oh, my," Lauren said. "Maybe the accelerator stuck."

"I've had my brakes adjusted a time or two," Carmen said.

"Brake drums," Shane said. "Sometimes they go out of round."

'Don't you people have a new suspect to go violate the Miranda rights of?" Marybeth asked.

"On our way, chief," Lauren said, hurrying out the door with Carmen and Shane.

"Don't call me chief," Marybeth muttered, but they were gone. "And for god's sakes keep your zipper zipped. If it's not too late." She wasn't worried about McCutcheon; she was old news who had burned Lauren once before, and was a playa, not Lauren's style. It was the smart, cheery, bright-eyed one, the keeper. Good thing she lived in San Francisco, and spent most of her life far out to sea, well beyond the range of even a good but lonely street detective like Lauren.

***

Gladys Wilkinson opened the door just seconds after Lauren rang the doorbell of Tina and Beth's previous residence, a.k.a. the scene of the crime. She was still in her hospital scrubs.

"Hi, Detective Hancock, hey, Carmen. I saw you pull up out front. I'd say it was nice to see you again, but, well, you know. Circumstances."

"We understand," Lauren said, entering the living room. "I know you work nights, thanks for staying up late to talk to us. Gladys, I don't think you've met Shane McCutcheon. Shane, this is Gladys Wilkinson."

"Hi, nice to meet you," Shane said. "I used to live next door."

"With Jenny and Carmen," Gladys said. "Nice to finally meet you. Well, everybody, come on in, let's go to the kitchen. I'm having my sleepy-time tea, since I'm going to bed soon, but I can offer you real, honest-to-god, caffeinated coffee."

"That would be great," Carmen said. "Shane in particular could use a cup, I bet, and I could do with another one."

As they sat around the kitchen table Gladys picked up her cell phone and made a call. "Hey, it's me. They're here. Come on over." To Lauren, Carmen and Shane she said, "That was my neighbor across the back. She's coming right over. That's what this is all about. She saw something."

Before the coffee was ready there was a knock on the back door. "Come in," Gladys called out, putting cream, sugar, and artificial sweetener on the kitchen table. A tall, athletic woman with dark brown hair came in the back door. She was in her early thirties and was dressed in spandex bicycling gear. She offered her hand to everyone to shake.

"Hi, I'm Carol Marciano," she said.

"Lauren Hancock, LA County Sheriff's Department."

Shane and Carmen introduced themselves.

"Hey, everybody sit down," Gladys said. "Coffee's up." She started passing out coffee mugs as everyone settled in.

Carol started in without being asked. "'Kay, here's what happened. My husband and I moved in back there" -- she gestured over her should toward the house behind Bette and Tina's pool on the far side of the hedge line -- "a couple years ago, like, maybe a year before that girl's murder. Jerry's a lawyer and I'm an event planner, so we're hardly ever home much, and when we do get down time we go hiking and camping a lot. Long story short, we never got to know Betsy and Dina when they lived here. Then a few days before the murder I had this big week-long conference thing in La Jolla, and I was gone for nearly two weeks, and Jerry was pulling those 14-hour days young lawyers do, so we weren't around when it happened. 'Kay? So by the time we got home and heard about it, it was old news, and somebody was arrested, and we didn't think too much about it, because it was all over, you know? And then Gladys buys the house and moves in, and for a long time we don't ever meet her, either. And Gladys' backyard has this tall bamboo privacy fence along the back lot line, and it's like a thick jungle, so we never chat over the fence, you know? Because we can't, it's an impenetrable wall, so we don't know who lives on the other side. And then a few months ago Jerry and I decide to re-landscape our back yard and we remove some of the hedges and trees and stuff, and one day we're back there working when Gladys come home from the hospital and she's in her backyard and we're in our backyard. The old bamboo fence has deteriorated and Gladys is pulling it down to replace it, and lo and behold, we finally get to meet face-to-face. Of course, Gladys works nights and we work long, long days, but we get to see each other and wave once in a while, and then a few weeks ago Gladys invites me over for morning coffee and we become friends at long last. And we talk with Gladys and we put a little arbor-type gate between our backyards."

"We went out to dinner, too," Gladys said.

"Yes, you had that date with the hottie from radiology. We double-dated," Carol said.

"Trust me, he wasn't that all that hot," Gladys said, frowning but laughing. "Never mind him, keep talking."

"So anyway, I don't have any events this week so I finally get a little time off, and it wasn't until yesterday that I got some time to chat with Gladys. And I say, 'Hey, what do you know about the murder that I heard happened here?' And Gladys starts telling me about Betsy and Dina and the young woman who lived next door. Jill? Jean?"

"Jenny," Gladys said. "Jenny Schecter."

"Right."

"Before you go further," Gladys said, "I should tell you that Shane, here, was Jenny's roommate, and Carmen used to be her roommate, too. So they both knew Jenny very well. And they lived next door."

"Oh, okay. I'm very sorry for your loss," Carol said. "I guess this might be painful for you to talk about."

"We're okay," Carmen said. "It's been two years now. Please, don't stop. What happened?"

"So Gladys is telling me what she knows, and there was this party that night, and one of the other women at the party pushed Jenny off the deck and pushed her in the pool and killed her, and then was arrested for it the next day, and now she's in prison somewhere upstate."

"Her name is Alice Pieszecki," Shane said. "She's one of our best friends. For what it's worth, she didn't do it."

Carol nodded. "That what Gladys said you guys said. You're investigating the case all over again, and she tells me that. So then I say, 'Well, that's interesting they re-opened the case. I wonder if they can find that guy who was hanging around back then. And Gladys says--" Carol held out her hands, open, to Shane, Carmen and Lauren to answer.

"'What guy hanging around?'" Lauren said.

"Exactly. What guy. 'The Creep,' I said. That's what I called him. The Creep. See, the house behind your house was vacant at the time, and anyway, your backyard was almost as thick and fenced like Betsy and Dina's, so you probably never knew your neighbor back there, either."

"No, we didn't," Carmen said.

"But, see, that house is to me what Gladys' house was to you guys, side by side, with only a driveway between us, like on your side, so I can see my next door house easily, see who is coming and going. So now I'll come to the point. That house was vacant. It was owned by somebody in the military, and they got sent overseas somewhere for a while, and the house was for sale for a while, but then the owners took it off the market. So what I'm telling you is the house was vacant for, oh, I don't know, nine or ten months, maybe longer. And I knew the people who owned it slightly, and I kind of kept an eye on it for them. And when it was up for sale, some real estate people would come by once in a while and show it to somebody, and either Jerry or I would see them and everything was okay. And then one day this big work truck pulls into their driveway and there's this guy, he goes into the house, and he's some kind of workman. We kind of keep an eye on him and an hour or two later he leaves, it didn't look like he stole anything. He's got some tools and stuff. I don't know if he was a plumber, or electrician or what."

"Any name or logo on the truck?" Lauren asked.

"No, that's the thing. Just a plain panel truck, white."

"Of course," Lauren said. "A white panel truck. Just our luck. When was this?"

"The end of summer, I think."

"Okay. Then what?"

"Then a few days later he comes back," Carol said. "He walks around the house, he goes into the back yard. He's not trying to hide or anything, he doesn't seem to care if anybody sees him. Maybe he's some kind of maintenance guy, I don't know. But we start seeing him on a regular basis, or at least we don't see him but we see the truck in the driveway. And here's the thing. This isn't nine-to-five hours, because Jerry and I aren't home that much. We see the truck in the evening, sometimes late, it's there when we go to bed. Sometimes it's there first thing in the morning. It's there on weekends."

"What's this guy look like?" Lauren asked.

"Tall, maybe six foot, six two, something like that. White, or Caucasian, anyway, but maybe even Latino, but if so, not obviously Hispanic. Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably in his mid-fifties, but it was hard to tell. He always wore a baseball hat and sunglasses, and when the weather got cooler sometimes a hoodie and sunglasses. One time Jerry made a joke, and called him the Unabomber. You know that police artist sketch of the Unabomber guy? Like that."

"So you don't know hair color? Eye color, anything like that?"

"Nope. When he wore the baseball hat he might have had darkish hair but hard to tell. I mean, he could have been totally bald under the baseball hat, I'd never know."

"Tattoos? Any distinguishing marks?"

"Nothing we could see."

"The sunglasses? Anything about them?"

"Not really. Those tinted aviator types, that's all."

"Only a couple million men in California wearing them," Lauren said. "How did he dress?"

Carol shrugged. "Like some kind of workman. Jeans, usually, or work khakis. In January, February, he had on a jacket or a sweatshirt most times."

"Any logos on the sweatshirts or jackets?"

"Once, some kind of patch or logo, but I couldn't see it from my house. Dark blue sweatshirt, white patch, maybe a school. But could have been anything. One of the baseball hats might have been a Dodgers cap."

"That narrows it down," Lauren said, smiling. "What was his build? Fat? Thin?"

Carol laughed. "Medium. I know, big help, like the hat."

"Would you recognize him if you saw him again? Think you could pick him out of a line-up?"

"Not in a million years," Carol said, "not unless he was the Unabomber. You gotta remember, half the time it was night, or getting dark, or he was turned away from us, or just too far away, like on the other side of the house, or whatever."

"And you never got a license number of the truck?"

"No. I mean, he went in and out like he had permission, he had tools and stuff. Or at least what looked like some tools."

"But you told us you called him The Creep. Why was that?"

"Because a couple time he was in the back yard, at night. The first time I was a little startled, he was walking around out back, near the hedge and the back fence. And then he lit a cigarette and walked around smoking it, so I figured he just didn't want to smoke in the house, or wasn't allowed to, or whatever. So he'd take a smoke break and come out back. And he'd poke around at the hedges and fence, like he was looking at Jenny's house, your house," Carol said, looking at Shane.

"But something made you feel creepy," Lauren said.

Carol sighed. "Jerry thinks I'm crazy," she said.

"Because...?"

"I used to worry that he was spying on us. Our bedroom faces that house, you know? And our bedroom window faces out on the driveway there."

"So does ours," Shane said. Carmen said nothing, but remembered the time she had moved in with Shane and re-painted Jenny's bedroom, naked, and was seen by Bette and Tina from their kitchen window.

"So anyway, I was always careful about pulling the curtains whenever I was getting dressed or when we went to bed," Carol said. "And it wasn't like Jerry and I ran around naked all the time or anything, but we didn't. But Jerry would tease me, you know, sometimes when we were going at it, he'd say, 'I hope The Creep isn't watching us.' And that would creep me out a little. And then there's one other thing."

"What's that?" Lauren asked.

"I feel foolish even telling you this. I have no proof whatsoever. It's just something ... weird."

"Okay."

"The house next door? It's two stories, like ours. I think ... this is what Jerry teases me about. I think The Creep used to go up to the second-story back bedroom, at night, in the dark, without the lights on, and look out the back bedroom window."

"Why do you think that?"

"One night, Jerry wasn't home. I needed to take some garbage out to the trash cans. We keep them around back, you know? So it was late, like maybe 11 o'clock, and I go out the back door and I forget to turn on the back light, and it's dark, but I know right where the trash can is, and I go put the smelly garbage in it, and I don't know why, but I look up at the house and the back bedroom window facing Jenny's house, and, I don't know. Maybe I'm imagining it. But I think I see somebody up there looking out the window, but like I say, it's dark, and there's no light on in that bedroom, in fact, the entire house is completely dark, every room."

"Was the truck there?"

"Yes," Carol said. "I looked, because I was creeped out. The truck was there, the house was dark, and I thought I saw somebody looking out the back window. Jerry says I'm crazy, but you know, he's a guy, and that's how they are. But you know how sometimes you know something, and you get the crazy vibes and you don't know why? I think The Creep was looking out that back bedroom window. I can't prove that, or even offer a shred of evidence. But there is also no doubt he was in the house at that time, and all the lights were off. So draw your own conclusions. He was inside somewhere, and in the dark."

Lauren got up and went out onto the back patio of Gladys' house, and looked over at the house Carol was talking about. The fence that surrounded Bette and Tina's backyard was tall, and both backyards had a lot of plants and small trees. But from where Lauren stood, you could look over all the shrubbery and you could see the back of that house, which had two windows facing Jenny and Shane's house. If you went further into the backyard, near the swimming pool, the view was blocked. Lauren understood that Bette, Tina and their friends could and did skinny-dip in the pool, and couldn't be seen in the pool from either of the two houses in back. But Jenny and Shane's old residence was different. First, there was the garage back there that Tim had converted to a studio and sometime guest bedroom when he and Jenny moved in. From the second story of The Creep House -- as Lauren had now begun to think of it -- on the other side, you could look over the studio and onto the porch area of Jenny's house. You could look into its kitchen. If it was night and the kitchen lights were on, you could probably see who was in there. You could see the driveway between the two.

Carmen, Shane, Gladys and Carol came out and stood on the patio, too, and looked at The Creep House. "Anybody live there now?" Lauren asked.

"Yes, the military people came back from deployment. They are nice people, quiet. I know them to say hello to. But they were gone nearly a year and don't know anything about any workman being there, and they didn't even know about Jenny's murder until some relative of theirs asked them if they knew about a murder in their neighborhood."

"You talked to them about all this?" Lauren asked.

"Yes, sure," Carol said.

Lauren nodded, turned and walked up the stairs to the deck where Jenny had stood just a few seconds before she died. Carmen walked up the stairs and stood next to Lauren.

"Fuck," she said. "If you're in that house, you can see everything."

"Yep," Lauren said.

"I lived next door for eight months and never noticed," Carmen said.

"Did you ever fuck on the back patio?" Lauren asked quietly, so the others couldn't hear.

"No. That was probably the only place we didn't," Carmen whispered.

"Well, then, there you go. You never noticed because you had no reason to ever notice."

The deck was on the same upper level as the second story of The Creep House, and even though it was diagonally opposite, it took almost no effort to see the two back windows of the Creep House, and from the Creep House to see the deck of Glady's house. It was also clear that it was possible to see the back porch of Jenny and Shane's house. It was easy to see who was coming and going out of both back doors of both houses, even if you couldn't see into the pool area of Bette and Tina's house.

Shane walked up the stairs and stood next to them. "Okay, now this is creeping me out, too. Was somebody watching us?"

Lauren shrugged. "Looks like it. At least, it certainly seems possible. The sight lines all work out."

"Who? And why?"

"Let's break it down into parts," Lauren said. "First, I'm perfectly prepared to believe what Carol says, that there was some sort of workman in and out of the house over some period of time. I'm sure her husband will confirm it, and there's probably other people on that street who will, too. It's a bit of shoe leather and due diligence on my part tracking it down and getting confirmation, but that's just part of my job description. The second part is, who was that person and why was he there? Perhaps there is some innocent explanation. Maybe he was some sort of handyman or repairman. Maybe he was some sort of squatter."

"Is that what you think?" Shane asked.

"Not in a million years," Lauren said.

"Oh," Shane said.

"Then there's the third part," Lauren said. "He wasn't a squatter or handyman, and yes, it was some sort of surveillance post. Maybe he was FBI or CIA and there was an ISIS or al Qaeda cell across the street, and he wasn't looking out the back window at you guys but out the front."

"An ISIS cell," Carmen said. "Do we believe that?"

"Also not in a million years. I'm just laying out the possibilities, as ridiculous or improbable as they might seem."

"Gotcha."

"Next part. It was a surveillance outpost, and yes, it was facing this way, not across the street. So, who was being watched? Jenny? Shane? Jenny AND Shane as a unit? Bette? Tina? Bette and Tina as a unit? Or, I suppose, all four of you. And, of course, why? Let's break it down, Shane first, because you're the easiest."

"Because I'm a suspect?" Shane asked.

"No, quite the opposite. You're easiest because you're the least likely of the four to be watched for some reason. No offense meant, but you were a hairdresser. Nobody stalks a hairdresser. Granted -- and how can I put this diplomatically? -- you had a long and active sex life, and let's say somewhere along the line you acquired some crazed lesbian lover, or somebody you rejected, or somebody whose feelings you hurt, blah blah. Okay, but think about it. If there was some crazed lesbian ex, why would your stalker be a male, middle-aged handyman, and why would he watch you for a month or two, but do nothing?"

"I actually did have an ex-lover stalker, once," Shane said. "It was a long time ago, though."

Lauren looked at Shane. "You're giving me a migraine," she said. "Carmen, stop laughing."

"I'm laughing because I kinda stalked Shane myself. That's kind of how we got together. And didn't you stalk her, too?"