THE PERFECT HOUSE

by Blake Pierce

  “Offense kind of taken,” Eliza replied.

  “Sorry,” Jessie said, though it was clear to both of them that she wasn’t.

  “I have to tell you, Ms. Hunt, you are seriously crushing my buzz.”

  Jessie didn’t reply but instead walked down the hall to the garage, grabbed a nice pitching wedge from Gray’s golf bag, and opened the laundry door. Eliza poked her head out from the living room and waved the phone to indicate she was ready.

  Jessie nodded, opened the door that led from the laundry room to the lower level, turned on the flickering light, and took her first step down the rickety wooden stairwell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  Jessie wasn’t sure the stairs would hold.

  Each step creaked loudly, warning anyone potentially down below of her presence and making her fear the wood would simply crack, sending her hurtling toward the floor.

  Despite her misgivings, the stairs did not collapse. When she got to the bottom, she turned on the light switch attached to a wooden support beam. The light it offered was an unimpressive, dull, flickering yellow which sent weak, unpenetrating rays through what turned out to be one large, unfurnished room filled with boxes, supplies, and furniture. She noticed that the unsteady flickering of the light bulb exacerbated the pain in her head.

  With the pitching wedge held behind her shoulder like a baseball bat, Jessie approached the one window in the place, along the back wall which abutted the hillside. She walked over and saw that the single latch-style lock was in place.

  She put down the gold club and tried to push the widow open, just in case. It didn’t budge. She quickly grabbed the club again and spun around facing the room. Just because the window was locked now didn’t mean someone hadn’t come in earlier and done it themselves.

  She moved methodically around the rest of the room, checking behind large boxes and the water heater. The room seemed unoccupied. She was about to return up the stairs when she noticed that what appeared initially to be a decorative design along the far wall was actually the narrow door of a small closet.

  She moved toward it slowly, trying to breathe silently so that she could hear if there was anyone doing the same behind the door. When she was close, she grabbed the handle with her left hand while maintaining a strong grip on the golf club with her right. Without pausing to reconsider, she yanked it open and stepped back.

  There was no one there. In fact, the closet was sparsely populated by an old vacuum cleaner, a few wobbly lamps, an old broom, and a battered-looking, soft-sided suitcase in the back corner.

  Jessie was about to close the door when her eyes fell again on the suitcase. She noticed that it was bulging slightly in the middle, as if there was something inside it. That wasn’t unusual. Jessie shoved duffel bags and backpacks inside her luggage to save space in her apartment.

  But something about the shape of the bulge felt familiar in a way she couldn’t quite place. She used a dangling string to turn on the overhead light in the closet. Then she pulled a tissue out of her pocket and used it to slowly unzip the suitcase.

  Inside the luggage was a tub of bleach. On the front was the name Green Clean, the same eco-friendly brand that Ryan had said was used to clean the knife that killed Penelope; the brand he’d said was hard to find, even in this neighborhood.

  Jessie involuntarily gripped the club tighter. She closed the door and started back up the stairs, trying to calculate the odds that this particular brand of bleach just happened to be stored in a closet in the home of people suspected in the murder of their neighbor.

  She stopped midway up the stairs to see if her phone had any service so she could text Brady and Ryan about her discovery. She wasn’t surprised to find there were no bars. When she got to the top, she half-expected to find Gray Longworth standing there with a bloody kitchen knife in his hand. But there was no one.

  She glanced around the laundry room, looking for another tub of the Green Clean bleach. None was immediately visible. She opened the cupboard above the washer and found nothing there either.

  Increasingly unsettled and feeling mildly nauseated from the ache in her head, she headed back down the hall to the living room where she found Eliza standing in the kitchen, munching on popcorn in a bowl on the counter with one hand while still holding the phone in the other.

  “Everything okay?” she asked. “Do I need to call nine-one-one or was the window locked?”

  “It was,” Jessie said. “Nothing to worry about on that front.”

  “Then why are you still holding the golf club?” Eliza asked, nodding at the pitching wedge Jessie was still clasping tightly.

  “Oh. I figured it would have to do in place of a gun. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” Eliza said as she put the phone back in its cradle. “But just be careful where you swing it. Our art isn’t expensive but I’m still fond of it.”

  “No problem,” Jessie said as a series of thoughts began to bombard the edges of her brain. “Do you think I could wash my hands? They got a little dirty down there. And I’d love some ibuprofen if you have it. My head is killing me.”

  Eliza handed her a cup and a bottle of pills sitting on the counter, then waved her in the direction of the kitchen sink with a faux ostentatious flourish. Jessie walked over, rested the pitching wedge on the ground against the cabinet, and turned the faucet on. She rubbed her hands into a soapy lather as the sound of the water worked as a kind of quiet noise, helping her organize her pinballing thoughts.

  The bleach is hard to find but the victim’s next door neighbors have it. They didn’t keep it in the laundry room but stuffed it in a suitcase in a little-used closet in a rarely accessed basement-style room.

  She recalled her initial questioning of Eliza Longworth, when the woman had said that Gray didn’t even know how to do the laundry.

  How likely is it that he’d even know they had bleach, much less where to find it?

  Then she recalled how Eliza had said, only minutes earlier, that she’d changed the locks and the security code to the house the same day that she’d discovered the affair, when Penelope was still alive. The bleach knife-cleaning hadn’t happened until the following morning, when Gray didn’t even have access to the house.

  A creeping sense of unease settled over Jessie. As she dried her hands, she glanced over at Eliza, who seemed oblivious to her, tossing popcorn in her mouth as she watched one of the Real Housewives shows.

  Just then, her phone pinged multiple times in row.

  “Whoa,” she said, pulling it from her pocket.

  “That’s probably all of your messages coming in at once,” Eliza said without turning around. “For some reason, cell reception is best in the kitchen. That’s why I spend half my time in here.”

  “Good to know,” Jessie said as she scrolled through the five messages that had all arrived at once. She saw that she had multiple voicemails as well.

  The first text was from Captain Decker, reaming her out for not being at the hospital to meet him. The second was from Ryan, saying that he would meet her at her apartment in twenty minutes. Apparently he didn’t know what had happened when he sent it. The third text was from Decker again, threatening to suspend her if she didn’t respond to him ASAP. The fourth was from Ryan, saying he’d just talked to Brady and was on his way to Eliza’s house to help keep an eye on things. He made no mention of the incident at the apartment, meaning he either didn’t know or had decided to let it go. The final text was from Brady. It read:

  Found Longworth. Was drunk in a bar. Phone was dead. No threat to wife. You can stand down.

  “You’re a popular girl,” Eliza said, glancing over at her.

  Jessie gulped silently, realizing that the woman standing in front of her was almost certainly not what she seemed. She tried to respond casually.

  “Maybe too popular,” she said, noticing a slight quiver in her voice. “It seems my apartment was broken into tonight.”

  “Oh, that sucks,” Eliza said,
turning to face her. She looked more clear-headed than she had earlier.

  “Thanks. Bad news for me. But I have good news for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Detective Bowen texted. It looks like your husband isn’t after you after all. They found him in a bar, drowning his sorrows in a glass. His phone had died, which is why they couldn’t get hold of him.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Eliza said insincerely. “Then I’m safe?”

  “It appears you are. So that means I can get out of your hair. You can go back to the Real Housewives and I can go deal with my apartment break-in.”

  Eliza nodded. She was no longer looking at Jessie but staring blankly off in the distance. After a moment, she returned her attention to Jessie. Her non-popcorn hand rested on a dish towel on the counter.

  “You know, don’t you?” she said, her voice a mix of apprehension and acceptance.

  Jessie studied her without speaking. Eliza looked alert, despite the multiple vodkas. Her eyes were fixed on Jessie, who noticed that there seemed to be a bump under the dish towel, as if there was something resting underneath it on the counter. Glancing over, she saw that the cutlery block in the corner was one knife short.

  She looked back at Eliza, realizing that her next words could change both their lives.

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  “Know what?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice breezy even as her pulse quickened.

  Eliza seemed to be debating how to respond. She had stopped eating popcorn and her right hand still pressed on the dish towel with the suspicious bump below it. Finally, she replied, with a tone of resignation.

  “As soon as you said you were going to check the lower level of the house, I knew I had a problem,” she said matter-of-factly. “I hoped that if I went down there with you, I could distract you. But you were so concerned for my safety, I had to let it go and hope you were sloppy. But you weren’t, were you?”

  “What are you talking about, Eliza?” Jessie asked innocently, forcing herself not to glance over at the pitching wedge leaning against the counter a few feet away. “I said there was no one down there.”

  She knew this stalling wouldn’t work much longer but she needed a few seconds to formulate a plan before Eliza got direct and things escalated.

  “You have to understand,” Eliza insisted, ignoring Jessie’s protestations, her voice rising in volume and intensity. “It was never my plan for it to go down like it did. I really thought I could move past what happened. But then I saw her and she wasn’t as contrite as I thought she should have been. She should have oozed remorse. She knew what I’ve been through. You know what I mean, Ms. Hunt?”

  “I do, Eliza,” Jessie said, trying to compensate for the other woman’s obvious angst by acting as calm as possible.

  “When I was in college,” Eliza continued, clearly not assuaged, “I was…victimized. Penny helped me through it. She was my rock. So to then have the person who most understood my vulnerabilities callously disregard them? It really stung. I mean, that doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was crushing. It was like an earthquake only I could feel. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “It does,” Jessie soothed. “I get it. Remember, I’ve been where you were.”

  Eliza answered, though it wasn’t clear she had even heard Jessie.

  “But I didn’t feel the appropriate shame or penitence coming from her,” she said, her voice getting dangerously quiet. “And, I don’t know, this fury just erupted in me and I gave in to it.”

  “You’re admitting to me that you killed Penelope,” Jessie said, deciding that being direct would have to replace being cagey as a tactic.

  “Might as well, right?” Eliza said, forthcoming in a way that Jessie found disquieting. “We both know you saw the fancy, eco-friendly, super-expensive, order-it-from-Amazon, easy-to-trace bleach. And who keeps bleach in their basement but not their laundry room, right? I wanted to throw it out but I knew you guys had officers watching me. Even if I dumped the whole thing down the drain, I’d still have to dispose of the empty tub somehow. No one noticed it when they did that rush search of the house the other day. But I knew they’d be back. Still, I hoped that I could do it in a few days, when everything settled down and no one was following me around.”

  “So you cleaned off the knife and decided to toss it on the trail to make Gray look guilty?”

  The frenzied look in Eliza’s eyes seemed to fade a bit as she recalled the particulars of how it had played out.

  “I wish I could say I planned all that out,” she admitted. “After I killed Penny—it’s weird to say that out loud—I took the knife home to clean the prints off and check that I didn’t have blood on me. I was surprisingly clean considering what I’d just done.

  “I was actually coming back for the yoga lesson, hoping to both use it as an alibi and put the knife back in the cutlery block before Beth got there. Looking back, it’s strange how cool and collected I was in the moment. It was like I was watching myself from above, like it wasn’t really me doing all that stuff. Is that what usually happens when you kill someone? This is my first time.”

  “I don’t know,” Jessie said softly, unsure how to respond, uncertain what might set the other woman off.

  “Anyway,” Eliza said, resuming her story as if she was telling a girlfriend about her day, “then I saw Gray’s car on the way over and realized he must have gone for a run. That’s when I thought it was worth a shot to throw the knife on the trail. I didn’t know which route he took but it would look suspicious either way, right?”

  Her voice was clear, but she was talking fast, with a manic edge.

  “Right,” Jessie agreed, trying to slow everything down. “So it really was just a crime of passion? You didn’t plan it all out?”

  “God no,” she said, genuinely shocked at the idea. “I was winging everything. I had to pray that Beth didn’t see me come around from the back of the house when she was driving up. I caught a break there. And I lucked out in that there were so many other suspects—Penny’s slimy husband, my slimy husband, other guys she’d slept with over the years. I started to think I might actually get away with it. You know, so it could eat at me silently for the rest of my life.”

  “And now?”

  “I think you know what now,” Eliza replied, her voice suddenly steely as her hand tightened the item beneath the dish towel. “I can’t have this come out. I can’t go to jail and be taken away from my kids.”

  Jessie started to speak but Eliza held out her free hand. She wasn’t done.

  “I was thinking while you were downstairs. And it occurred to me that if you were killed with a knife and I was badly injured as well, the whole path of the investigation might change. I could tell the police that it was a masked assailant. Then all the talk of the killer being someone she knew would go away. They’d start looking at local break-ins and random violent crimes in the area. It could actually be a lifesaver; my life, of course.”

  “But here’s the problem with that,” Jessie said carefully, trying to keep things conversational so Eliza’s grip on the big knife under the towel didn’t get any firmer. “It won’t work.”

  “How can you be sure?” Eliza demanded.

  “You’re not thinking clearly. I understand—you’re in a desperate situation and you’re looking for any way out. But, Eliza, these detectives are smart. They’re not going to just accept the theory that it was a random attack. They’ll look at the angles of the knife wounds in me. They’ll be able to tell that yours were self-inflicted. Detective Hernandez will figure out that I discovered something in this house that set you off. He knows me.”

  “He certainly seems as if he’d like to get to know you better,” Eliza said, her tone barbed.

  “Let’s keep the focus on your future, Eliza,” Jessie said firmly. “Because you can still have one.”

  “How do you figure? I slaughtered my best friend.” Her voice cracked as she said it.

 
“In a fit of passion,” Jessie reminded her. “Then you tried to cover it up after the fact. That’s all true. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. If you go to trial, your attorney could likely make a compelling case for temporary insanity. Your best friend of twenty-five years was having an affair with your husband. You snapped. Anyone could understand that. I guarantee you I could. I wanted to wring my husband’s neck. And had he not already murdered his mistress, I might have. You could get off.”

  “I think we both know that’s unlikely,” Eliza said, though her voice suggested she wasn’t totally convinced.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Jessie said, keeping the pressure on. “You never know with juries. Even if they convict you, it might be on a lesser charge. That’s not unusual with crimes of passion. The prosecutor might not even want to go to trial because you’re a sympathetic defendant. They might worry about jury nullification and offer a plea. There’s a reasonable chance that you could get out in a few years and still be around to watch your children grow up.”

  “But…” Eliza said, sensing there was a “but.”

  “But not if you pick up the knife you’re hiding under that towel. Then you’re attempting to commit a second murder. And whether you succeed or not, you’ll be caught. And no one will buy the ‘wronged wife’ defense anymore. You’ll just be someone who went after a member of law enforcement to cover your ass—no mitigating circumstances. They’ll throw the book at you.”

  She sensed Eliza turning it over in her head and continued, wanting to keep the momentum going.

  “If you’re successful in killing me, and you won’t be,” she said with a confidence she didn’t feel, “you’ll go to jail for decades. Gray, the man who betrayed you, will raise your children and they will have their own babies before you ever get out. And if you did actually kill a criminal profiler for the Los Angeles Police Department, you’d probably be looking at the death penalty, even in California. If I were you, I’d pick door number one, step away from the knife, turn around, and get on your knees. It’s the only way to see your family again soon from anywhere but behind glass.”