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