Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 26

"We have a suspicion the person who killed Jenny was a smoker, and that he may have spied on her house from your backyard, while you and your wife were overseas."

"The squatter?"

"Beg your pardon?"

"The squatter. My wife and I think there may have been a squatter here when we were in Germany. That's where I was deployed, Ramstein Air Base, for a year. That was when Jenny was killed, a few months before we came back."

"What made you think there was a squatter?"

"We weren't even sure there was one. It was just little stuff. When we came home Betsy said she thought someone had been smoking in the house. Not recently or anything. But she has a good nose for cigarette smoke, since she was never a smoker herself. She can meet a stranger and tell if they smoke just from smell in their clothes. Me, I can't tell. And then there was the lock on the garage door."

"What lock? What about it?"

"Come on, I'll show you." They walked down the driveway to the rear of the property, where there was a single-bay, single-story garage. The house and the garage had originally been mirror images of Jenny and Shane's house and garage when they were first built, one street over. It was Jenny's boyfriend/husband/now ex-husband/widower Tim Haspel who had converted their garage into a writer's office/guest bedroom more than eight years earlier, before Carmen had transformed it into a recording studio/sex playpen. Scofield's garage had stayed a garage. There was a door on the side near the front, facing the Scofield's backyard. It had four window panes on the top half, and was locked with a padlock hasp and a combination padlock.

"The lock and hasp are new," Scofield said. "Well, a year-and-a-half, since we got back from Germany. When we got home, the old hasp and padlock were here, but somebody had pried it open from the jamb, so you could open the door without messing with the padlock. When it pulled away from the jamb, the screws ripped out some wood. Somebody had patched it with caulk. The four screws that held the hasp in were still in the screw holes, but somebody had cut them on the back side, so the screw was basically just the head, so it would give the appearance of being screwed into the jamb, but it wasn't."

"They were trying to make it look like it was locked. But they could go in and out whenever they wanted."

"Yes, exactly. So when I discovered it I got a new hasp and new padlock. The screws I put in are a lot longer, and nobody's going to pry it open without destroying the entire jamb."

"What's in the garage, if you don't mind me asking?"

"That's the weird thing. Nothing much. And nothing was missing. Come on, I'll show you."

Scofield spun the knob on the padlock combination, left, right, left, and it popped open. He removed it, opened the door, and hung the padlock on its loop in the door. He went in and flicked on an overhead light. "Come in," he said.

Lauren and Carmen entered the garage and looked around. Like Carmen's studio it was an extra-wide single-bay building, large enough for one car as well as generous space for storage and a workbench, but not quite big enough for two cars. In the center of the room were two large pieces of gym equipment, a walking treadmill and a weightlifting bench with a rack of weights and barbells. They looked more than a few years old.

"Where are you stationed now, if I may ask?" Lauren asked.

"Down at LA Air Force Base," Scofield said. "Only we're not much of a base. Mainly a big PX, and a lot of offices. We're just a couple blocks south of LAX. I shoot down La Cienega, pick up the 405." He gestured at the equipment. "Betsy and I like to work out in here. She walks on the treadmill. I work out with weights. I don't know, I guess whoever broke in could have stolen some of this stuff, but as you can see it's pretty heavy, and not easy to move. I mean, you could cart it off in the back of a truck, if you wanted. But apparently he didn't want to. The rest of the stuff, well, go look at it. It's not worth anything, even to a squatter."

Lauren and Carmen walked behind the gym equipment and looked around: A home-made workbench with a pegboard wall with old tools on it. Some tools on the workbench, bins and jars of nails and screws. A modest collection of Harry-Homeowner stuff, nothing fancy, new, or expensive looking. A couple of rickety-looking storage racks with cans of paint and spray cans of WD-40. Turpentine, paint thinner. Tubes of caulk. A former pickle jar with paint brushes. An ancient 3-gallon gasoline can next to a gasoline lawnmower, not ancient but not new or upgraded up with a self-starter, $200 new at Home Depot, $25 bucks at a yard sale. Some empty Mason jars. Three different-size cardboard boxes, one with rags. A quart of two-cycle oil for the lawnmower, two quarts of 5-W30 oil for a car. A jug of antifreeze, a jug of car window-washer fluid, nearly empty. A plastic paint bucket with two baseball gloves, two ancient softballs, and two baseball bats in it. Two bicycles, suspended upside down from big hooks screwed into the overhead rafters, not new, but they looked to be in good working condition. Two blue fold-up camping chairs, one in a carry bag, one loose, and a folded up beach umbrella; Shane and Carmen had once had one almost exactly like it. There were also the three trash receptacles used in West Hollywood, a blue one for recyclables, a green one for lawn and yard waste, both supplied by the city, and an ordinary one anyone could buy for their non-recycle trash. Just the usual homeowner stuff you'd find in maybe ten million other garages. Twenty million. Nothing worth stealing that didn't weight much. Some of it was dressed in cobwebs.

"Can we look around out back?" Lauren asked.

"Sure. Help yourself."

They went out into the backyard.

"Fuck," Carmen murmured quietly.

"What?" Lauren asked.

"That," Carmen said. "New fence."

"Oh, yeah. We put that in last fall," Scofield said. "Betsy got on me. The old privacy fence was pretty old, falling down. It was ugly, too. Just these unpainted pickets. Actually, it was on the other property, I guess Jenny and Shane's property, and we had to look at that back side of it. So one day we said enough's enough, and we bought this fence, and put it up on our side of the lot line. Jenny was right: we needed landscaping. Eventually the people who moved into Jenny's house took down the old rotten fence on their side of the line."

They stared at the new fencing. It was bright white, made out of some kind of plastic. It was very nice, pleasant to look at, and six feet tall. Along its base Scofield and his wife had landscaped flower beds with shrubs and plants, with smooth, white pebbles filling in around them. It looked very nice. The landscaped flower bed ended at the side of the garage. Lauren walked back there and looked at the gap between the fence and the back wall of the garage. It was only about 18 inches wide now, and had once been only about two feet wide before the new fence went in. There were white pebbles covering the ground all the way to the far side. Carmen walked back and took a peek, too.

Lauren turned to Scofield. "What used to be back here?"

"Nothing," he said. "Weeds. Dirt. It was an eyesore, but nobody ever went back there. We dumped a lot of weed killer back there and put down the pebbles for ground cover. That way rainwater gets through."

"Got it," Lauren said. She and Carmen drifted along the back lot line, but had given up all hope of finding anything. She turned to Carmen. "Well, it was worth a shot."

Carmen frowned.

They looked at the fence, the back of what had been Shane and Jenny's house, and to the right side the back of what had been Bette and Tina's house.

"Car?"

"Yeah?"

"If you were staking out Jenny and Shane's house, would you stand back here?"

Carmen looked at her. Then she caught on. "If it was chilly out, like it can get in January, it'd be cold."

"Especially if it was breezy. Wind chill."

"If you wanted a cigarette, somebody of the other side might see your cigarette lighter when you lit up."

"They might see the glow from your cigarette."

"There's no place to sit. You'd have to stand all the time."

"Hours and hours of standing. Maybe hundreds of hours standing."

"The old fence is still on the other side," Carmen said. "Imagine how it was before this fence went in. You could see over a five-foot fence easy enough. Suppose it starts to rain. It doesn't rain all that often, but still, it really does rain in Hollywood. So you stand in the rain, getting soaked, smoking your rain-sodden cigarette. No. No, it just plain doesn't work."

"No, it doesn't. Captain, can we go back into the garage?"

"Sure."

They went back into the garage, and Lauren and Carmen walked to the back window and looked out. "You can see, but not very well," Lauren said, referring to Jenny and Shane's back yard, patio and the back of their house.

"No," Carmen said. She turned and went to the weight-lifting bench, and dragged it over near the window. Then she got one of the fold-up camping chairs, the one not in the carrying bag, brushed cobwebs off it, unfolded it, and placed it on top of the weight-lifting bench. She carefully climbed up and sat in the chair. She had a perfect perch from which to look into Jenny and Shane's back yard. Scofield was taller than Lauren, and Carmen's line of sight on the rig put her eyes a good foot higher than his. If she reached up, even while sitting, she could just touch the overhead beams of the garage ceiling. The killer -- Gabe -- was at least five or six inches taller than Carmen, and would have had an even better view.

"Damn, girl," Lauren muttered.

"You could sit here for hours and hours," Carmen said, looking out the back window from her perch. "You could have a brewski or a cold Mountain Dew, and sit here dry and warm as happy as a clam for hours and hours. You could see Shane and Jenny and all their friends, lovers and acquaintances come and go. If anybody fucked in the kitchen, you could see some of that, too, if it was on the table. If it was on the countertop, that would be harder to see, but you might catch some of the foreplay. If Jenny or Shane or anybody else went to the refrigerator, you could see what they were wearing or not wearing."

Carmen didn't mention the number of times she'd walked down the hall, fresh from an orgasm in Jenny or Shane's bed, to fetch a couple of bottles of water from the fridge, wearing only her golden caramel-colored, cum-stained skin. Had Scofield ever seen her from the upstairs back bedroom window? He gave no indication he ever had.

"I can just see the corner of Bette and Tina's pool," Lauren said, looking out the back window from the extreme left side.

Carmen climbed down, pulled the weight-lifting bench two feet to the left, and climbed back out and sat down in the beach chair again. "You can see the shallow end, maybe only two or three feet," she said. "But you can see who is going in and out. Who's there, if they walk up or down the steps into the pool. You can't see the deep end or the diving board."

Carmen had fucked Jenny in the shallow end once, on those steps. But as a rule, she and Jenny preferred fucking in the shower. She and Shane tended to fuck in the pool, in the deep end, one or the other of them hanging onto the diving board overhead. Shane was a much better swimmer than Jenny, more comfortable in deeper water. Tina, Bette, Alice, and anybody else who'd been in the pool fucked all over the place. Jenny had once confessed to Carmen that on the evening of the day she had first moved in she had peeked through the fence and watched Shane fuck some girl in the pool, before she had ever met Shane. She had assumed the two girls were Bette and Tina. Jenny had never said anything to Shane, but one night she had confessed to Carmen that the very first time she had ever set eyes on Shane she was fucking some girl in Bette and Tina's pool. Welcome to West Hollywood.

Had Carmen ever been spied upon in that pool, she wondered. Carmen had put in a lot of quality time in that pool, and in that backyard, some of it naked or semi-naked and X-rated, but most of it PG-rated and purely social. After-work glasses of wine with Bette, Tina, or usually both. Cookouts. The party for Dana right after she came home from her double mastectomy, right after she and Shane had gotten those matching bird tattoos on the backs of their necks. That was PG-rated up until the moment she had dropped her bikini bottom to show Bette, Alice and Tina her legendary pubic flower box tattoos.

Had anyone been spying on them? Carmen felt sure the answer was no. She'd have felt it, somehow. And Shane, whose sensory powers were off the charts, would have sensed it. So no. Whatever they'd done in the pool, in the studio, on their own back porch, or in their kitchen had gone unobserved. That was a good thing. There had been quite a bit of action, back in the day. She saw Lauren looking at her, grinning. "Memories?" Lauren asked quietly, her back to Scofield, so he couldn't hear.

Carmen smiled. "I don't kiss and tell," she said, also keeping it away from Scofield.

"Bullshit," Lauren whispered.

"Try to focus, Detective Hancock," Carmen said under her breath. She turned to the workbench and the back wall of the garage. "I'm spending a lot of time sitting up on my raised beach chair, looking out the back window," she said, in a normal voice. "Rain or shine, day or night. And one day or evening I'm sitting here and what do I see? I see famous film actress Niki Stevens, who I have seen here before, walk up the driveway from the street and go in the back door. She's carrying some sort of large bag, or cardboard box, or something, and it's heavy. I don't know what's in it. Niki gets the back door key under the rock, she opens the backdoor, and goes in. She comes out a little while later, and it's somehow easy to tell the bag or box is now empty. She leaves. You know Jenny and Shane aren't home, and deduce they aren't coming home anytime soon, because Niki Stevens seems to know that. She's not hurrying or feeling pressured to leave before somebody comes home. So Niki leaves, and I'm sitting here. What do I do?"

"I'm wondering what Niki dropped off," Lauren took up the narrative. "Laundry? Groceries? Strap-on dildos? What was in the bag or box? And maybe she made two trips in and out, not one. Two bags or two boxes. Ten big film canisters might have taken two trips."

"Lauren," Carmen said.

"Yes, grasshopper?"

"There were no fingerprints on the canisters. Anyway, not Niki's. Not anybody's who were unexplained."

"No. So Niki was wearing gloves."

"We never asked her."

"No, we didn't."

"But suppose she was?" Carmen asked.

"I'm sitting her watching her drop off something, and I see she's wearing rubber gloves, latex gloves. Can I tell that from here? Suppose it's dark."

"There's the back light on the porch," Carmen said. "It's on a motion sensor, so it comes on. Otherwise it's daylight. All you have to see is just one second that she's wearing gloves. And maybe she's not wearing those transparent gloves, maybe she's wearing those flaming yellow dishwasher gloves. Blue gloves. I've seen a lot of pale blue gloves in doctor's offices. My gyno uses blue gloves."

"Mine, too," Lauren said. "So I'm sitting her and I see she's wearing gloves of some kind. It's early February, worst case a balmy 55 or 60 degrees, so nobody's wearing gloves or mittens. But Niki's wearing gloves, so now I'm suspicious as hell. Now I know she's not dropping off something innocuous."

"One other thing," Carmen said. "Maybe I know Jenny and Niki spent the night fucking their brains out just a few days earlier. Maybe I saw Niki leave in the morning. Maybe I saw Niki leaving but not in a friendly way. Maybe she left yelling something at Jenny. Or at least very unhappy."

"Okay, a problem. Did they tend to go in and out the front door, or the back door? In my experience there's front door people and back door people. I know people who almost never use their front doors, and people who almost always use their back doors. Which were they?"

"I hope you aren't suggesting anything naughty," Carmen said. They laughed, and Scofield did, too.

"Don't look at me, I'm not here. I didn't hear a thing," he said, laughing.

They all laughed again.

"Focusing, focusing," Carmen said. "They were back door people. They always parked in the side driveway and came around the back. They always went in and out that way most of the time." She was careful to say "they" and not "we." Lauren understood.

"I have to be curious about what Niki dropped off," Lauren said. "More than curious. Really, really curious. Because I saw she was wearing gloves. No fingerprints. So what did she take into the house?"

"I think I'd have to go look," Carmen said.

"Me, too," Lauren said. "So I go in and look around after she leaves. What do I find?"

"Nothing," Carmen said.

"No?"

"No. I look around, but I don't touch anything. I look in every room. There is nothing sitting out that was obviously dropped off. I think about it for a minute, but I don't solve it. Whatever it was, it was put away somewhere. Not left out somewhere, on a table, bed or chair. Maybe not hidden, per se, but certainly not out in the open. And it would take a while to search the whole house, so I leave. I come back here, and wait to see what develops."

"And if it was a bomb, the house explodes and kills somebody. But it wasn't a bomb and nothing explodes. Nobody dies. There is no apparent reaction from Jenny or Shane."

"Meaning the delivery was either basically harmless, or else hidden."

"We're getting ahead of ourselves," Lauren said, "because we already know it was hidden."

"Okay, that's fair," Carmen said. "I need me a smoke." She mimed getting out a pack of cigarettes from her breast pocket, fishing out a cigarette, putting it in her mouth, lighting it with an imaginary lighter. She mimed taking a drag and then flicking ashes onto the garage floor. "See, here's the next problem. My Uncle Mike was a lighting technician for the movie studios. Years ago they were allowed to smoke on the job, but they weren't allowed to just flick their cigarette butts anywhere they pleased, like most smokers, and they couldn't just flick ashes around. They were on movie sets, you know? So you know what they used to do? They'd carry around a small metal film canister, any kind of small container, in their pockets or tool belts, and flick their ashes into it. And when they were done they could just drop the butt into the container, and put the cap back on. That would extinguish the butt if they didn't stub it out, and it would solve the problem of a butt being a fire hazard, because nothing burns as easily as a Hollywood movie set. They are all wood and canvas and paint. They go up, poof. So the tech people carried around their own little, portable cigarette disposal systems. I probably ate Gerber strained peas and Gerber strained peaches, and Uncle Mike used my baby food jars for his cigarette butts."

"The History of Hollywood, Part Nine Hundred Eighty-Seven, Behind the Scenes," Lauren said. "I saw it on PBS."

"I must have missed than one," Scofield said, smiling.

"It wasn't a biggie," Carmen said from her perch. "Lauren, would you get me a babyfood jar for my ashes, please?"

Lauren caught on, and turned to look around.

"Oh, Jesus," Scofield muttered. They all looked at his work bench. There were a dozen Mason jars, pickle jars and mayonnaise jars with various, sundry and random Harry Homeowner parts in them. There were baby food jars, too, some with labels still on them. They held nuts, bolts, screws nails, staples, washers, maybe a dozen of them. Some had lids, some didn't.

"Lauren," Carmen said. "I'm sitting here smoking. I don't know how long I'm going to be here. Maybe weeks, even months. I could use a baby food jar, and take it with me when I leave, empty it, and bring it back for use next time. Or I could get a bigger jar, a pickle or mayonnaise jar, and just leave it here for next time. It would hold more butts than a baby food jar. I'd need a lid on it, to put the cigarette out and also keep it from spilling in my jacket pocket."