by Marc Jedel
After I showered and ate, I took a Rover to Larry’s house. Getting out of the car, I was disconcerted to see Larry’s car parked in his driveway like nothing was wrong. I stood there looking at it, half expecting Larry to step out of the driver’s side to greet me. Gazing at his car sparked some questions. How had Larry gotten to the Santa Cruz park without it? Had he gone with someone? Why hadn’t they called 9-1-1 to save him?
The neighbor’s screen door banged open, startling me out of my introspection. I looked up to see an old woman standing in the doorway with both arms perched on her hips. I’ve learned not to ask a woman her age, but some of her wrinkles had wrinkles.
“Stop standing there looking at the car and come help. I’m too old to do everything by myself, you know.” She spoke in a pleasant, if direct, voice.
I walked the few steps to her porch, then stopped in confusion as she stepped outside and pulled the screen door closed behind herself.
“Well now, sonny, I don’t got me all day. We’ve got to get ready for this here shiva thing for tomorrow for dear departed Larry.”
“I’m sorry …”
The woman gave a friendly laugh and patted my shoulder. “Oh, that’s all right. You can call me Carmela. I’ve lived in this house for over forty years now. I sit in the front yard most of the day and talk like this to everyone and everything that walks by my house. Keeps me from getting lonely. I don’t care if it’s a girl, boy, woman, dog, cat, squirrel or even a man. I say hello to all of them and give them a little poke to make sure they’re paying attention. Wakes them right up now, it does.” She burst out laughing.
Although still confused, I noticed where men fell in her hierarchy. “I’m Marty. I’m here to—”
Carmela interrupted, “Of course you are. Of course. Come on, you can help me get some extra chairs from Larry’s house.” With a slight limp, she eased down the porch steps and headed next door.
“Why are we getting the chairs? Aren’t we holding the service at Larry’s house?” Despite Carmela’s slow pace, I still felt left behind in this conversation.
“You haven’t been to his house, now have you?”
At my head shake, Carmela cackled. “You’ll see, you’ll see, soon enough.” She laughed again, enjoying her surprise in advance.
I followed her slow, halting steps to Larry’s house. Instead of continuing to the front door, Carmela turned down the path alongside the house, heading to the backyard.
“Wouldn’t the front door be easier?” I asked.
Carmela only responded with another chuckle before repeating, “You’ll see, you’ll see.”
Carmela had an odd sense of humor. Yet, if I had to grow old, I wanted to be as happy as she was. Amusing myself wouldn’t be anything new to me. I hoped I would reach her age. After all, the alternative was far less appealing.
When we reached the back door after passing Larry’s pool, Carmela paused and glanced at me. “Ready?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye, stepping aside to let me enter first.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside his kitchen. My mouth fell open as I stopped dead in my tracks. Stacks of stuff were balanced everywhere. The table, counter, and chairs were overflowing with stuff. Junk, actually. Paper goods and cardboard boxes from Costco, some still full of unopened cartons of food, took up almost the entire kitchen.
Larry had been a hoarder. I never knew.
Sure, his college dorm room had been cluttered, but so was mine. I couldn’t remember ever visiting his place in recent years, although that wasn’t unusual. We typically met for a meal or at a sports bar to watch a game. His hoarding did explain why he’d always refused to host our poker nights at his place, though. Each time, he had a different excuse—remodel, furniture getting donated, cleaners hadn’t come, and so on. He’d been so consistent in his refusals that it had become something of a standing joke, and we eventually stopped asking. After seeing this, I felt bad for making fun of him. Was it possible to feel retroactive embarrassment?
I didn’t notice any open food around, so Larry wasn’t a slob, just a hoarder. Cases of Red Bull were stacked everywhere. I had thought only engineers got hooked on Red Bull, not biologists. Chugging Red Bull was almost a rite of passage during late-night college coding sessions. Our professors had told us that before Red Bull came out, they’d gotten hooked on Mountain Dew when they were young. That just seemed gross.
Maybe Red Bull also powered crazy nights grinding away in the lab doing gene editing as biologists like Larry came up with wilder and wilder ideas for new creatures. Scary thought.
After edging out of the kitchen, a musty, dusty odor hit me and I stifled a sneeze. Larry had converted his home into a storehouse of bookshelves, stacks of boxes, and folders full of paper. He’d created aisles out of all the stacks, some leading off a main route in neat rows, others winding around the room’s nooks and crannies. A few paths meandered around outsized pieces of broken electronic equipment in various stages of disrepair. Some of the stacks of boxes, books, and papers rose well over my head, almost touching the eight-foot ceiling.
Baited rat traps guarded the aisles. Fortunately, they all looked empty to me. My parents’ etiquette lessons were effective enough to get me to help out for a close friend’s shiva and carry some chairs, but I drew the line at cleaning out rotting rat traps.
In his organizational obsessiveness, Larry had stuck neat hand-printed signs on different stacks, almost like his own version of grocery store aisles. No numbers yet, so he hadn’t quite reached the point of inventing a new Dewey Decimal System. I browsed the aisles, more in amazement than anything else.
I paused at the stack labeled “San Francisco Giants,” because, well, Giants. Larry had clipped newspaper articles about Giants’ players going back for years. Careful to avoid toppling the stack, I pulled out a folder from a carton at random and got absorbed reading about a long-ago favorite player.
Carmela startled me by clearing her throat. I looked up from my reading to see her standing in the aisle not far from me. “This is something, isn’t it? I’ve only been in here a few times myself. I can’t rightly say how he and that dog both fit in here.”
All I could do was nod. Although I’d heard of hoarding, I’d never known anyone who did it. Well, at least I hadn’t realized I’d known a hoarder.
Carmela shuffled a few feet farther and pointed a gnarled finger over the top of a shorter stack. “You can see why we came in the back.” She laughed again, pleased with herself.
I looked in the direction she pointed. Piles of unsorted clothes, books, mail, and other objects surrounded the front door. They almost enclosed the doorway, as if Larry had created stacks all the way out his front door, leaving no clear path to the rest of the house. Another maze of stacks, high enough to block the view of the upstairs landing from below, disappeared up the stairs.
Carmela followed my glance. “Yeah, it continues upstairs, but not as bad.”
A sign for Sirius Innovation was taped onto a large stack a row over from where I stood. Navigating to it, I found that Larry had folders labeled by month and year piling up nearly to the ceiling. He’d started a second stack for Sirius, this one only chest-high, that had more recent paperwork. Curious, I pulled the folder off the top and fanned through it. He had printouts of company memos, scientific reports, emails, and all sorts of random documents. I could understand keeping a copy of something important that you worked on, but why keep random presentations or documents that weren’t even yours? An obsessive collection of worthless paperwork. I yawned just thinking about it.
Perhaps this explained what happened to all those random faxes and printouts that always seemed to accumulate by the company printer. Although I tried to grab my printouts immediately, sometimes I got distracted. If I made it to the printer much later, they were always missing. They never seemed to be in the nearby recycling or trash bins, especially if there was an urgent need for that printout. At Sirius, Larry must have served as the collector of last res
ort.
Pondering who served this role at Rover led me to wonder if Larry had any materials about my company now that Sirius had decided to buy us. I started flipping through the pages in the top folder, looking for any mentions of Rover.
“Hey, I know this guy.” The name of my colleague, Raj, was listed on a weekly calendar printout for a meeting tomorrow with Doug Samerson, CEO of Sirius Innovation.
Raj, a recent immigrant from India, was my closest friend at work. I enjoyed his company, and he seemed to like mine. We sat next to each other at work and often ate our lunches at our desks together. Raj was super smart, spoke multiple languages, and had a few degrees. A brilliant engineer, he also had a good sense of humor. Just like me.
I didn’t understand why he would be meeting with Doug Samerson, who was building a reputation as an eccentric, and somewhat successful, serial entrepreneur. He hadn’t yet achieved the status of Steve Jobs of Apple, or Elon Musk of Tesla, but not for lack of trying. Whenever I checked out his keynote speeches online, he came across as a bit wacky. Not surprising, as most executives had a screw loose somewhere. The ones aspiring to be visionary leaders often had a carton of screws rolling around inside their heads.
So why was Raj meeting with Samerson? And why hadn’t he said something to me about it?
Carmela was tired of standing around. “Now sonny, don’t you be going all crazy in the head like ole Larry. Let’s leave all his junk alone and git on out of here before my heart gives out from all this standing.”
I set the folder on the stack. There was no point making her suffer. Neither Raj’s name nor mine appeared on the next pages—various legal forms and scientific reports—so I followed her out of Larry’s overstuffed house. At Carmela’s request, I picked up four folding chairs from Larry’s kitchen to take back to her house.
Locking the back door behind us, Carmela bent down and placed a key in a fake rock at the side of the back porch. As she creaked back up, she waggled a finger at me. “Now don’t you be telling all the criminals how to break into Larry’s house. That wouldn’t be neighborly of you.”
If she’d ever met my mother, she would have known she didn’t need to tell me not to steal, even though, technically, I wasn’t Larry’s neighbor.
Sneaking into his house brought another question to mind. “Have the police been here yet?”
“I surely haven’t seen any stop by, and I would know. They called me yesterday around supper from way down in Santa Cruz and asked about anyone living with Larry. I told them it was just Larry and his dog.”
Deciding it was best not to share my as-yet-unproven theories about Larry’s untimely demise, I only responded, “Just wondered.”
Carmela and I continued to chat about Larry as we ambled around the side of his house and into his small front yard while I lugged the four folding chairs.
A woman in her thirties wearing workout gear that highlighted her muscular, toned build burst out of the house on the other side of Larry’s and hustled to her car.
Carmela called out to her, “Gloria, you’re always on the run now.”
“I have to get to a class.” Gloria didn’t even look up.
“Will you be able to make it for Larry’s shiva service tomorrow? I’m sure it will be lovely.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.” As Gloria dismissed Larry with a wave toward his house, her keys flew out of her hand. She frowned and stomped around her car to retrieve them. When she noticed me standing next to Carmela, she asked, “Is this guy taking his damn dog?”
Carmela gave a belly laugh. “Goodness no, he’s helping me get ready for the shiva. I told the police that I’d take care of the dog for a few days so they could contact Larry’s family.” She snorted to herself. “I surely know you don’t want him. Not after—”
Gloria jerked up out of her crouch. “Stop! We agreed not to talk about the poisoning.” As she realized her slip in front of me, she cursed.
Startled, I looked more closely at her. “You poisoned his dog? Or Larry?” I didn’t remember Larry mentioning anything about poisoning. Had Gloria tried to kill Larry, or his dog, before? Had she been more successful yesterday in killing Larry?
“Like it mattered if one got poisoned before the other. That dog licked his plates. And Larry always let it lick him on the face. It was disgusting.”
Although she hadn’t answered my question, I had to agree with her. All sorts of disgusting things went into dogs’ mouths. They’d lick or sniff everything—the stinkier, the better. People who let their dogs lick their plates, or their faces, were just asking to get sick.
Then, something she had said struck me. “How did you know the dog licked his plates?”
Gloria’s face reddened as she fumbled with her keys, trying to unlock her car door.
Carmela said, “Never mind all that. What’s done is done. No sense digging up buried secrets.” Then she blushed at the incongruity of her words right before Larry’s memorial service.
I was still bothered by the idea that Gloria might have wanted to kill Larry, at least once before. “When did you do this? And where were you yesterday?” Had Gloria poisoned Larry again and dumped his body in the woods? She looked fit enough to carry him.
Gloria blew a raspberry at me. “Ask that damn dog of his. Yesterday, it barked at me all day long. Always running in circles around his pool, barking at everything. No room for a dog in that house anyway.” She blushed again, then continued before I could interrupt. “Barking at all times of the day and night. Enough to drive a person crazy. He never did anything about it.” She looked at Carmela. “How come it never drove you crazy?”
Carmela reached up to her right ear and pulled out a tiny hearing aid. “When I want some peace and quiet, I turn off my hearing aids. Blessed silence. Praise be.” She made a gesture to the heavens and then pushed the hearing aid back into her ear. Tugging at my arm, she said, “Come on, sonny, help me back home. I’ve got to sit down again before my heart plumb gives out.”
I still wanted to ask how Gloria knew so much about what happened on the other side of a six-foot fence. Had something gone on between her and Larry? Or had she finally decided to pay Larry back for not quieting his dog?
Before I could finish formulating my question, Gloria scrambled into her car and roared off. I’d have to follow up another time.
As I escorted Carmela on her slow journey back to her house, I asked, “Is Gloria a student somewhere?”
Carmela thought this was funny. “Oh silly, she was talking about some exercise class. Crosstown? Maybe it was crosswords?” She laughed at her own poor memory.
“CrossFit?”
Carmela nodded. “Yeah, that sounds right. She got into that big time a few years ago and lost a lot of weight. Right after she and Larry … Well, never mind all that. Did you know she works at Sirius too?” Carmela snorted and shook her head as she muttered something quietly to herself.
My folks would have been proud of my manners. I made sure Carmela got safely inside before taking out my phone. I needed to leave another voicemail for Mace and then call Raj. I signaled for a Rover car to pick me up while I composed my thoughts.
Gloria and Larry both worked at Sirius, the same company that was buying Rover and would soon be paying my salary. She and Larry had an unexplained past that involved poison. And she kept secrets. Sometimes, people were killed because of secrets.
And why did Raj have a meeting with the CEO of Sirius tomorrow that he hadn’t told me about? Friends didn’t keep secrets like that from each other.
As my Rover car pulled away from the curb, I sat back, still staring at my phone, pondering whether to tell Mace that Gloria might have killed Larry out of rage over his dog or if something else had happened between them. Before calling Mace this time, I would try my hardest to do a good job on the message.
Gloria, I think I’ve got your number.
4
Sunday Afternoon
My mother never taught me the proper etiquette
for whether you should go out with a new girlfriend during the same weekend you discover a friend’s body in the woods. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered a disturbing number of lessons my parents left out of my upbringing.
Meghan, who was new enough as my girlfriend that I wasn’t even quite sure if I should describe her like that, had insisted we keep our plans to take Laney and Skye out for dinner on Sunday, especially now that Laney had broken her ankle. I’d been married before, and dated other women, so I knew that settled things. Besides, it felt good that she was trying to make me feel a little better about Larry’s death by distracting me.
I couldn’t even talk to the rest of the poker group about Larry. When the EMTs had dropped me off, they relayed instructions from the deputies insisting that I wait until Monday morning before telling anyone else what happened. Something about needing to wait until news of his death was officially released and ongoing delays with autopsies at the county coroner’s office.
As if an entire troop of Girl Scouts and their mothers wouldn’t be telling everyone what happened. Not to mention Carmela and Gloria. I didn’t want to, yet I followed their rules, although I still decided to exercise some minor civil disobedience by telling Meghan and Laney. After all, I was still pissed at the deputies for how they treated me.
Although going out might not have been proper etiquette to Ms. Manners, it cleared the bar for Meghan. Not that a quick stroll through the mall with my girlfriend followed by a burger with my sister and niece made for an especially romantic or elegant date.
Meghan and I had met only last month when she became a suspect in my sister’s attempted murder. Our relationship had a rough start that got worse when my niece, Megan, discovered that Meghan shared her name, but chocolate chip pancakes quickly resolved that situation. Meghan was an environmental scientist with a PhD. She was smart, ingenious, and had an obvious sense of humor since she seemed to like me. I liked her too. We made a good team. That was as deep as I usually got.