Invasion of Privacy - Jeremiah Healy Page 5

  Only the person standing next to my door wasn't a child. At least thirty, on a stumpy frame of five-six or so, he had a few strands of gray in the brown hair that lay flat along the ears. I couldn't see the rest of his hair because he wore a red, white, and blue New England Patriots ballcap down tight, almost to the eyebrows. The rest of his outfit was a one-piece maintenance jumpsuit in faded green, the name "PAULIE" stitched in yellow thread over the left top pocket. He had a rake in his hands, and I realized he was gripping the handle tightly, nervously.

  "Well, do you?"

  I said, "Do I like to take pictures?"

  A blink and a nod.

  "Yes, I do."

  "Me too."

  "Paulie?"

  "That's me." He let go of the rake with his right hand and traced over the embroidery. "My last name's Fogerty, but that's not on there."

  "You work here?"

  A blink and a nod again. "I'm the super."

  Fogerty said it proudly, and I remembered Boyce Hendrix telling me he ran a lean ship except for thesuperintendents.

  "Mr. Eh-men-dor showed me."

  "Who?"

  Paulie gestured toward the cluster of townhouses where I'd seen Andrew Dees. "Mr. Eh-men-dor."

  "What did he show you?"

  A puzzled look. "How to take pixtures. With the camera." He pointed at the newspaper on the passenger seat.

  "How come you hide your camera?"

  "I can't always trust people to be honest."

  He gave me a troubled look this time. "I'm honest. I don't steal anything from anybody."

  "I wasn't worried about you, Paulie."

  A hang-jaw smile. "Good. I'm not worried about you too."

  I said, "Was that Mr. Dees who just left?"

  The blink and nod. "Why do you want pixtures of Mr. Dees?"

  "I don't, actually. I'm just taking photos of the condos here. I spoke to Mr. Hendrix this morning."

  That seemed to sit well. "Mr. Hend'ix hired me. I'm the super."

  I swung my head around. "You do a fine job, too. The grass and bushes look great."

  Another blink and nod. "I spend the whole week cutting and mowing and raking, and you know what?"

  "No, what?"

  "By next week, I got to start all over again."

  "Well, if I had a place like this to run, I'd sure hire you."

  The troubled look again. "Oh, no. No, you can't. I work for Mr. Hend'ix. I'm the super."

  "And you're so good at it, I'll bet you'll be here a long time."

  A more troubled look, as though Fogerty had never thought of not being there until I'd planted the idea. To get him off that, I said, "Mr. Dees lives in the cluster over there?"

  Now the look went back to puzzled. "Cluster?"

  "Those four houses with the yellow doors."

  "Oh, yeah. He lives in the second one. But they're units, not houses."

  "Who else lives there?"

  "Mr. Dees lives by himself."

  "I mean in the other hou—units around him."

  "Oh. There's Mr. and Mrs. Stepanian, Mrs. Robinette and Jamey, and Mr. Eh-men-dor and Kira."

  Kira. Unusual enough name that .... "What does Kira look like, Paulie?”

  "She's pretty." Fogerty looked down, his cheeks flushing, his hands moving nervously on the rake again. "She's very pretty."

  "Does she wear black clothes?"

  Blink and nod. "Black, yeah. Lots of them."

  "Do you think Kira's home now'?"

  "Yeah. Mr. Eh-men-dor is sick, and she takes care of him."

  What the other girl, Jude, must have meant in The Tides about Kira's father. "How about the Stepanians?"

  "They're not sick."

  "Are they home, though, do you think?"

  "Mrs. Stepanian, maybe. Mr. Stepanian goes to work. She does too, sometimes."

  I was feeling a little guilty pumping Fogerty, but at least I couldn't see it getting back to Hendrix. "How about Mrs. Robinette?"

  "She's home a lot."

  "And Jamey?"

  "He's not home yet. He goes to school. Special bus, like me."

  "Like you?"

  "Like when I went to school. This special bus came to my old house and picked me up."

  "Where do you live now, Paulie?"

  He pointed at the prefab building near the tennis courts. "My new house. Mr. Hend'ix hired me. I'm the super."

  "Wel1, listen, you've helped a lot. Thank you."

  "You going to see Mr. Eh-men-dor?"

  "Probably."

  The hang-jaw smile. "Good. He can show you how to use your camera to take pixtures right."

  Paulie Fogerty walked off to tend his greenery, bouncing the tine end of the rake off the ground every other step, like he was counting cadence for himself.

  =5=

  I drove toward the four-unit cluster I'd seen Andrew Dees leaving. His number 42 was second from the left. Given what Paulie had told me about the other residents, I figured Kira and her father were the most likely to be home and the Stepanians the least, with Mrs. Robinette in the middle. Taking my portfolio briefcase with the questionnaires in it, I walked up the path to number 41, the end unit next to Dees. Since STEPANIAN appeared under the button, I tried it first.

  Perhaps twenty seconds after an electronic bong, a woman opened the yellow front door. She was about thirty and slim, maybe five-five in fiat shoes. Her black, shiny hair crept just slightly into sideburns, a faint duskiness above her upper lip as well. She wore a plaid skirt, the blouse red and picking up one of the minor colors in the skirt, the pantyhose blue and picking up one of the others. I had the immediate impression of someone who was all dressed up with no place to go.

  "Yes?"

  "Mrs. Stepanian?"

  "Yes."

  "My name's John Cuddy." I took out the identification holder and held it up for her to read.

  "Private investigator?" Her face, shaped like an inverted teardrop with a dainty chin, clouded over. "What's this about?"

  "I've been asked by another condo complex to look into how well the Hendrix company manages yours."

  "How well?"

  "Yes. My clients are thinking about perhaps changing companies, but they'd like a discreet rundown on the possible alternatives."

  "Oh." Stepanian seemed to relax a little. "Well, that certainly is prudent of them, isn't it?"

  She spoke the sentence neutrally, without any sarcasm. I put the ID holder back in my pocket. "Could I come in, ask you a few questions?"

  "I suppose that would be all right."

  Stepanian ushered me through the little entrance alcove into her unit. In front of us was a living room that segued without walls into a dining area. To the right of the dining area was a squarish kitchen, behind it a sliding glass door leading to a rear deck. The space above the living room part was open air, the second floor overhanging only the dinner table and kitchen. A set of stairs with picketed balustrade rose to a catwalk above the first level. The catwalk provided access to a pair of doors fifteen feet apart, an indentation between them that I took for the upstairs bath. Most of the wall area was plasterboard painted a matte white, wainscoting in naturally stained oak covering the three feet from the bottom of the plasterboard down to the wall-to-wall carpeting.

  I said, "Very nice place," meaning it.

  Stepanian moved to the center of the first floor and looked up and around, as though she were seeing the unit for the first time. "Yes, it's just perfect for Steven and me."

  "Steven is your husband?"

  "Oh, yes." She walked me around the plushy, khaki-colored furniture to an entertainment center that occupied one wall with television, VCR, CD-player, and so on. Pointing to a posed family portrait of her and a tall, slim man, she said, "We've been very happy here."

  I made a show of admiring the photo in the stand-up frame. Mrs. Stepanian was smiling, and I realized that I hadn't yet seen her teeth, because in the photo they were tiny, with little gaps between them. Steven Stepanian seemed a m
an who smiled reluctantly, only grinning with a slight strain noticeable around the comers of his mouth. He had the same dark, shiny hair and dainty chin as his wife. Whoever contended that opposites attract had never met the Stepanians.

  I said, "Have you lived here long?"

  "Nearly six years."

  Which meant they would have bought at the top of the market, back before the crash in real estate prices. "In that case, you'll be an ideal person for me to interview. If you have the time."

  She seemed to consider that, almost solemnly. "Well, yes, I guess so. I'm also on the condominium board of trustees, so I deal with Boyce more than most."

  "Terrific. I saw him this morning at the office in Marshfield."

  Stepanian paused. "Boyce didn't tell you who was on our board of trustees?"

  Uh-oh. "I told him I wanted to just visit the complexes he manages on my own, get kind of a random sampling. Once I was here, I would have asked about who was on your board, partly to see how well Hendrix keeps residents informed, but you happen to be my first stop."

  "Oh." Again the relaxation. "Well, you haven't seen any of our units, then?"

  "Just from the street."

  She glanced around, frowning. "I'm afraid our place is a mess, as usual."

  I glanced around with her. Everything seemed to be in perfect order, and I wanted to be able to picture the interior of Dees' unit next door. "How about just a quick tour?"

  The frown relented. "All right. And then you can ask me your questions."

  "That would be a real help."

  Stepanian gestured. "All of the townhouses here at the Willows follow this same basic design, though the unit next door would be the mirror image of this one. That's so the plumbing for the kitchens and the downstairs half-baths share a common wall. I guess you can tell this is the living room and dining area?"

  "Functional."

  "Yes, it's really easy to prepare and serve meals without being cut off from conversation with Steven in the living room." She pointed to one door. "Closet." And another. "Half-bath."

  Then Stepanian led me farther back. "This is the rear deck. I was reading when you rang the bell."

  Or bong. The deck was wood-planked, about fifteen feet square with a low railing around its perimeter. I could see two webbed lounge chairs, a white resin table between them and a kettle grill with barbecue utensils off to the side. On one of the chairs lay a hardcover Joyce Carol Oates, a bookmark stuck near the end of it.

  Stepanian gestured again. "Every unit has a deck like this, though where the kitchen is kind of dictates which side the sliding glass doors will be on." My guide turned and took an extra step to pass well away from me. "The second floor is the master bedroom and the guest bedroom."

  I followed her up the stairs. The catwalk was wider than it appeared from below, though the Stepanians had left it bare except for the carpeting. She opened the door closest to the top of the staircase.

  "Master bedroom." Big and rectangular, a sloping ceiling toward the back wall. "That door's the master bath, the other a walk-in closet." Stepanian came out past me, taking that extra wide step again. At the indentation, she said, "Second bath, and"—beyond to the other door on the catwalk—“guest bedroom, though we use it as a study." Smaller, square, filled with desktop computer stuff and some peripheral gadgetry. Like the first floor, there wasn't so much as a knickknack out of place.

  I gave her the extra margin this time as she came out and went down the stairs and around to the kitchen. "This door leads to the basement. Just workspace for Steven and the utility closet."

  “Washer-dryer?"

  "And the rest of the 'guts,' like heating, air-conditioning, and so on."

  Stepanian brought me back to the living room. "Please, sit down and be comfortable?

  I took one of the plushy easy chairs, thinking as I sank into its cushions that "plushy" wasn't quite generous enough. The thing nearly swallowed me, as though there were room for another person underneath the cushions. Stepanian seemed unable to take advantage of her own hospitality, instead perching on the edge of the matching sofa like a seventh-grader attending her first coed dance. I unzipped the portfolio and handed a questionnaire to her, putting another on top of the portfolio as a writing surface.

  The clouded look again. "What's this?"

  "I want to be able to have a consistent interview with each person I visit in each complex, so I figured my working from a form and writing on it would make more sense. That copy's so you can see what the questions will be, and maybe save us both some time in answering the earlier ones. If you notice anything on there that troubles you, please let me know."

  She scanned the questionnaire.

  I said, "Okay?"

  Her eyes came up from the paper. "I suppose so."

  "FULL NAME?"

  "Lana L. Stepanian."

  "HOMETOWN?"

  "Do you really need that?"

  Stepanian was proving to be good dress rehearsal for using the questionnaire on Andrew Dees. "My clients thought it would help them to judge how people from different parts of the country might view their condo management company."

  I wasn't completely convinced myself, but Stepanian said, "Solvang, California."

  "Can you spell that for me?"

  "S-O-L-V-A-N-G. It means 'sunny field' in Danish."

  "You're from Denmark?"

  A small smile, showing me the smaller teeth. "No. Mexican-American. Solvang is northeast of Santa Barbara."

  "MAIDEN NAME?"

  "Lopez, with a Z."

  "EDUCATION?"

  "Boston University."

  "SPOUSE?"

  She glanced down at the form. "Steven, as I said. With a V, not a P-H."

  "And his HOMETOWN?"

  A pause, as though these details seemed increasingly strange to her. "Idaho, somewhere?

  A little vague, but I didn't want to push my luck.

  "EDUCATION?"

  "University of Idaho."

  Smiling as warmly as I could, I looked up at her. "How did you two meet?"

  "A party, when I was at BU." A cocking of the head, as though she thought that was the strangest question yet.

  "Mr. Cuddy, why do you—"

  Move to firmer ground. "Now, you said you've lived here for six years?"

  "Almost six, yes."

  "Did you PURCHASE outright OR RENT?"

  "Purchased, from the first developer."

  "The first?"

  "Yes.” Stepanian seemed to redirect herself. "Well, I guess the only developer, technically. We were buying at a bad time, when it looked as though everything was going up and up and what we had in the bank was shrinking from about ten percent of a purchase price to more like five. Steven and I had almost given up hope on a normal life."

  "Normal?"

  "Owning our own home." The neutral voice again. "Then we saw Plymouth Willows, and really liked it, and so we offered the asking price on this unit and just beat two other couples to it. Or so we thought."

  "I don't get you."

  "Well, the project was in trouble. The developer had kind of squirreled away some of the bills, getting people to buy in the hope that he could pay them off. But in the end, he had to sell at a discount to a lot of investor-owners, not owner-occupants."

  "So the absentee owners began to rent out to tenants."

  "And the developer did too, Which wouldn't have been so bad, except it got to be more than fifty percent of the units."

  "At which point . . . ?"

  "The banks didn't want to lend to new buyers if the current owners weren't occupying, so the banks made the new buyers come up with twenty, even twenty-live percent down payments?

  "Which was tough."

  “And got worse. Once the real estate market went into a spin, the prices started tumbling, and the investor-owners couldn't rent the places for what they were paying to carry them. We had trouble getting those owners to send in their monthly maintenance fees for the grounds and all, and once th
e foreclosures started, we had even more trouble getting our money."

  "The banks that foreclosed wouldn't contribute the monthly maintenance?"

  Stepanian wagged her head. "It was the developer who did most of the foreclosing, because he'd taken back mortgages from a lot of the original purchasers who were perhaps a bit . . . shaky on their financial statements? Then the owner-occupants we did have started losing their jobs to the recession, and that meant more foreclosures, and oh, it was terrible."

  I looked around. "You and your husband came through it well."

  "Oh, yes," she said in the neutral voice. "The unit may never be worth what we paid for it, which kind of ties us to Plymouth Willows. And I do just temporary work, because I like to be in charge of my own schedule. But Steven is a research chemist, and fortunately, his job is quite secure. We get along nicely."

  A "normal" life, as she'd said before. I went back to the form. "Have you ever had any FAMILY MEMBERS come visit you here?"

  The cocking of the head. "What difference would that make?”

  "My clients want to know how the complex seems to outsiders so they can judge how potential purchasers would see their places toward resale."

  A pause as she considered something. "I wouldn't be able to help you there.”

  "No?"

  "Steven's parents are dead And when we got married, him being Armenian-American, and me Mexican, as I said . . . well, let's just say my folks back home didn't approve."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Not your fault."

  Stepanian again said it in her neutral way, without sarcasm or even irony.

  I put my pen on the next question. "We've already covered OCCUPATION, SPOUSE. How about your DEALINGS WITH THE HENDRIX COMPANY ?"

  "Well, when the developer finally went broke, the units he still owned—either because he hadn't sold them or he'd had to foreclose on them—got auctioned somehow. I'm not quite sure how all that worked in the technical, legal sense—I wasn't on the board then—but I had the impression that the FDIC or some other federal bank agency had them and then auctioned them off, with a realty trust buying most of them."

  Olga Evorova had mentioned that, and I thought I ought be solidify my cover story with Stepanian toward asking her about Andrew Dees. "Which realty trust?"