“Because she lived in her van.”
“That’s correct. A compliance officer had to go down to the beach and deliver the complaints to her there.”
“Would you have a record confirming that?” I asked.
“It should be in the computer. How do you spell that last name?”
I spelled out Wendy’s last name and Helen Drood punched the letters on her keyboard. The document popped up and I craned my neck to get a good look at the monitor. As she scrolled through the complaints, the same name and address kept appearing in the field for the complainant:
“Yes, we got confirmed delivery on all those complaints. March 22, April 6, and May 15.”
I jotted down the dates, as well as the address I’d seen on her monitor. “Thanks. That’s all we needed to know.”
Seventeen-seventeen Coast Boulevard turned out to be one of the ocean-facing condos overlooking the cove where Wendy had died. I took the stairs to the third-floor landing and knocked on the door marked
“Hello.” I smiled, doing my best to appear upbeat and efficient. “I’m following up on some complaints you made to the animal control department.”
He looked at me like I was a pile of smoldering excrement and started to close the door.
“Excuse me, sir—”
“I didn’t make any complaints.” The door slammed in my face.
I knocked again. When he didn’t answer, I spoke through the closed door. “Sir, I’m just trying to clear up a few details. Were you living in this residence in March, April, and May of this year?”
There was no sound from the other side of the door. Maybe he was hard of hearing.
“Listen,” I shouted, “I just need to confirm that in March of this year you—”
The door flew open. He glared at me, his eyes like poison darts. “It’s none of your damn business, but I’ve lived here since 1969.”
“And you’re Mr. Gunn?”
“Who?” He glowered and waved me off as if to swat away the stench of me. “Go on, get out of here.”
I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and turned to see a bare-chested man step onto the landing. His longish sandy hair and baggy shorts gave him a youthful look but the face that eyed me warily had seen at least forty summers without sunscreen.
“Is there a problem up here?” he said.
“Not at all,” I said reassuringly. “I was just asking Mr. Gunn—”
“My name’s not Gunn!” the old man yelled. “And yes, there’s a problem. This woman won’t leave me alone.”
The aging beach boy looked at me suspiciously. He had the deeply tanned, muscled torso of a surfer and would have been model material but for the lines on his face and his over-large, beaklike nose.
I explained, “I was just following up on some complaints this gentleman made to the animal control depart —”
“I did not make any complaints!” Color was rising in the old man’s crepey face and the beach boy-man stepped protectively toward him.
“He says he didn’t make any complaints. Who’d you say you were?”
“Animal control,” I muttered, slipping past him and heading down the stairs. “Never mind. I must have the wrong address.”
So much for that theory. Even if the old man in 303 had been the one making complaints about Wendy’s pig, he was pushing ninety and as weak as papier-mache. Thomas Gunn or whatever his name was could no sooner have chained Wendy underwater than he could have bench-pressed an SUV.
I walked across Coast Boulevard to my parked truck. All along I’d felt that Wendy had been murdered. Now doubts were creeping in. Maybe she had committed suicide. Hadn’t that
I looked back at the condominium. Shining with the reflected light of the midmorning sun, its windows now reminded me of mirrored sunglasses. The eyes behind the glass could see me, but I could not see them.
I had one last theory to test.
I got my beach towel out of my truck and walked down the stairs that led from the top of the cliff to the cove below. Dozens of sunbathers and swimmers lined the beach and bobbed in the water. Lots of swimming buddies today. I staked out a spot with my towel and stripped down to the bathing suit I wore underneath my clothes.
Three hundred yards from shore, the buoy floated in the water, marking the spot where Wendy had lost her life. How hard was it to swim from the beach to the buoy? Could an inebriated woman have pulled it off?
I waded into the surf, feeling at once free and handicapped without my mask, tank, and flippers. I fought through a strong set of waves, keeping my eye on the buoy. When I reached the deep water beyond the breakers, I knew I was swimming over the kelp forest. I felt no claustrophobia floating above the dense plants, but not being able to see what was teeming beneath my belly gave me a new kind of creeps.
