Chapter Nineteen
It was the newspaper delivery guy who spotted the dead man in the swimming pool and called 911 just after sunrise. Awakened by the noise of the ambulance at the front gate, Vish stepped out of his front door, looked down at the courtyard, and saw the body floating facedown in the water.
Mariposa came out of her apartment, clad in her nightclothes and her fuzzy pink slippers, and wordlessly joined him. They propped their elbows against the railing and watched the paramedics. One waded right into the water to check the drowned man’s pulse. The dead man had blond hair, darkened by the water, and he wore shorts and a red shirt patterned with yellow hibiscus flowers.
“Wow,” Mariposa said. “That’s really awful. He doesn’t live here, does he?”
Vish shook his head. His mouth was dry. He had to swallow before answering. That Hawaiian shirt… “I don’t know. I can’t tell who it is.”
Police arrived immediately thereafter, two squad cars and a medical examiner in a white coroner’s van. They photographed the body from all angles, then fished it out of the pool and laid it on a gurney. Vish and Mariposa remained standing at the second-floor railing, out of the way but observing the action. Mariposa seemed simply curious, neither upset nor ghoulishly intrigued.
A uniformed officer climbed up the stairs. “You live here?” she asked.
“I’m in this apartment right here, Mariposa’s next door,” Vish said. He looked at the officer. A familiar face, lovely and grim, wearing a short-sleeved uniform, legs bare and smooth beneath her shorts, on a clammy morning. Mirrored sunglasses on, even though the sun was still hidden behind the heavy marine layer. “Officer Guerrero?”
She looked startled, then slowly nodded. “You’re the guy who got mugged at the beach last week. Sure. You had a strange name.”
“Viswanathan. Well, Vish,” he said.
“That’s it. Either of you know who was in the pool?”
“I don’t think he lives in the building. This place is pretty empty right now,” Mariposa said.
Officer Guerrero turned her attention to Vish. Vish hesitated. “I don’t know. Without seeing his face…”
Another nod. “You want to follow me?” she asked.
“Should I come too?” Mariposa asked.
Officer Guerrero shook her head. “Sit tight. I just want to check with Vish about something.”
Vish trailed her down the stairs and over to the gurney, where the dead man’s blanket-draped corpse lay. At a gesture from Guerrero, the medical examiner pulled back the blanket.
Death and submersion had turned the man’s face gray and mottled. Vish stared at him for a moment. His eyes were open and sightless; rigor mortis had pulled the skin back from his purpling mouth, revealing long teeth and white-gray gums. Not young—in his forties maybe, with graying stubble across his chin.
“He look familiar?” Guerrero asked.
Vish hesitated. “I don’t think so. But his clothes…”
“His clothes make you think he could be one of the guys who jumped you?” Officer Guerrero regarded him. Vish wished she didn’t have the sunglasses on. If he could see her eyes, maybe he’d have a better idea what she was thinking. “You mentioned the Hawaiian shirts in your report.”
“Yeah. I mean, I can’t say either way. He’s dressed like how they were dressed, but I don’t recognize him specifically. But I didn’t really get a chance to look at them closely.” he said.
“If it’s him, and if he wound up dead in your swimming pool, it seems like the sort of thing that’d have some connection to you.”
“I agree. It does, though I have no idea what that connection could be.”
She kept staring at him. At long last, she spoke. “You know, I talked to your girlfriend. Troy Van Whatever.”
His heart stuttered a bit. “Oh?”
Officer Guerrero nodded. “Yeah. Stopped by her place. Nice girl. She served me tea and everything. She said she didn’t know the guys you’d seen on the beach. Seemed pretty sincere. She said she didn’t think you’d be involved in anything weird, either. Said you weren’t the type.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Her roommate said you were square.”
Vish didn’t answer. At least Troy hadn’t called him evil.
“I guess she’s on a television show or something?”
“Interstellar Boys. I’m one of the writers.”
“Never watched it. I think my brother’s mentioned it.” She smiled. “He’s got a crush on one of the actresses. Probably your girlfriend.”
She seemed to have unbent some. Maybe his connection to the glamour of Hollywood, tenuous as it was, made him seem respectable in her eyes. She considered.
“Okay,” she said. “Until we ID this guy, I don’t know how else you can help us. You think of anything important, don’t be shy about giving us a call, okay?”
“Can I ask you something? Do you know if the guy just drowned, or if…?” He trailed off.
She took off the glasses at that. She had gorgeous eyes, huge and brown and limpid, like they belonged to a cartoon doe. “Or if something happened to him before he went in the pool?” she asked. “Got any reason to think that might be the case?”
“No. It just seems like a lot of police showed up here, if it was just a simple drowning.”
She shook her head. “Call us,” she said again. She nodded at the medical examiner, who pulled the blanket over the corpse, then walked over to the edge of the pool and stared down into the water. Vish returned to his apartment and drew the curtains so he couldn’t see the activity outside. His phone was lying on the floor under his window. Huh. Not sure why it was there. He plugged it into the recharger in his bedroom and forgot about it.
The police stayed around into early afternoon. After they left, Silas stopped by. Vish heard him banging on each of his tenants’ doors in turn, heard his muffled conversation with Mariposa and her mother, before he moved on to Vish’s apartment.
“I suppose you heard about the body,” Silas said.
“Yeah, I saw it. Pretty awful,” Vish said.
Silas looked glum. Not surprising. A death in the building, even an accidental drowning, could bring trouble in the form of lawsuits or negligence charges or loss of income from renters reluctant to stay there any longer. “Just wanted everyone to know, it looks like someone’s been squatting in apartment four. It’s vacant, but cops noticed the lock looked funny, so I let them in, and they found some blankets and empty cans there. Could be whoever ended up in the pool.”
Apartment four was on the ground level, the unit directly beneath his. “Kind of scary,” Vish said.
“Yeah.” Silas shrugged. “You’re not leaving the gate unlocked or letting strangers into the complex, are you? The security fence exists for a reason, you know.”
“I haven’t. I haven’t noticed anyone around who doesn’t belong here,” Vish said.
Silas looked mournfully over the railing at the pool. “Shouldn’t have filled that damn thing,” he said. “Knew it’d be more trouble than it was worth.”
He moved on to the next unit. Vish closed the door behind him, then stood in his living room, lost in thought.
It was hard to know what was connected and what was coincidence. One of the surfers who jumped him on the beach had maybe ended up dead in his pool. Maybe it’d been an accident, or maybe something more. And the guy had maybe been squatting in his apartment building before that. Maybe he’d been here to keep an eye on Vish.
A sudden, unwanted thought. His phone had been someplace he hadn’t left it… Vish went into his bedroom, picked up his phone, and browsed through his history of recent calls. Since Troy had dumped him, he hadn’t used it all that much. There shouldn’t be anything new.
No. Apparently he’d made a call last night shortly after one. A local number, 310 area code.
He hadn’t called anyone. He’d gone to bed early…
Fingers started to feel a little thick and numb. A landslide of dread slid over him.
If someone else had made that call, had used his phone, had been in his apartment while he was asleep…
He scrolled through the features of his phone in search of clues. No recent text messages, either sent or received. He flipped through recent photos…
Vish’s mouth went dry, because there was a photo of a dark room. His bedroom, to be specific. This was a photo of himself lying asleep in his bed, his comforter pulled up to his shoulders, his profile identifiable against his white pillowcase.
He almost dropped the phone. Someone broke into his apartment last night, used his phone to make a call, and took a picture of him while he was asleep.
And someone, maybe the same person, had ended up dead in the pool.
It was a violation, plain and simple. More, it was a message to him. Someone had expected him to find the photo; someone had wanted to provoke a response. Whoever snapped that photo would expect him to… what? Freak out? Hide? Go to the police?
He stared at the number someone had dialed from his phone. He didn’t dare dial it himself, but maybe there was another way to figure out to whom it belonged. He went online and typed it into a search engine.
Success. The number came up in an online directory of payphones. Payphones were a dying breed, but there were still some out there, and someone had used his phone to place a call to one located at a restaurant called Mulgrew’s in El Segundo. Mulgrew’s, Vish discovered through a quick online search, was located close to the ocean on Vista Del Mar. Its website described it as a roadhouse; the menu offerings included fried clams and fish tacos and pitchers of beer.
He grabbed his keys and his wallet and headed out the door. Adrenaline kicked in; his knees felt shaky. The urge to move, to flee, was strong.
It wasn’t any better being outside. The exposed, panicky feeling intensified. Being on the sidewalk was almost unbearable. Without quite understanding why he was doing this, he hopped on a bus. Heading south, heading toward El Segundo.