The Girl Next Door cr-3 Read online

  With my head fully inside, I craned my neck to the right. At first, I saw nothing. It had been brighter outside than it was in the garage, and my eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness. But I was a patient trespasser, so I gave my pupils time to fully dilate.

  Sometime during the next minute, as I waited for more distinct shapes to emerge from the darkness, I thought I heard a noise. I told myself it was nothing, maybe just the hum of a storage freezer that had been stuck out in the garage. But it got louder and, with a sudden sense of doom, I realized what it was: a car engine, coming up the driveway. The Jackmans were home. Time to disappear.

  But as I went to pull my head out of the door and make my escape, I lost that perfectly parallel angle I had upon entry. I kept yanking, but either the back of my head or my chin was getting caught every time. The geometry just wasn’t working anymore. I twisted. I tugged. I pulled. But the more I struggled, the more it felt like the door itself was getting in the way.

  Short of decapitation, there was no way out.

  I was stuck. And screwed. The floodlights had already come on. The car was at the top of the driveway and was now idling in the turnaround. The occupants were probably trying to figure out why a headless human shape was sprawled by the side of their house. Then I heard a car door slam and a very official-sounding voice say:

  “Sir, I’m with the Mendham Borough police. I’m going to have to ask you to take your head out of the garage so I can place you under arrest.”

  * * *

  Getting myself unstuck turned out to be something of a trick. When it became apparent I had reached an impasse on my own, the cop started offering some helpful tips, going about the thing with a calm, professional demeanor I found impressive, given that I doubted he had ever come across a suspect with his head jammed in a cat door. Finally, after some exertion, I worked myself free and, relieved, faced my arrester for the first time.

  He was a veteran whose buzz cut was going white, and he looked at me with a certain amount of resignation. After all, here I was, a nearly middle-aged man-not some stupid kid-and on top of that, I was well dressed, apparently sober, perhaps even educated. Shouldn’t I have known better?

  “We’re going to do this the easy way, right?” he said, taking his cuffs out of his belt.

  “Yeah, I’ve had enough,” I assured him, sticking my hands out in front of me.

  “Nope, got to do it behind,” he said apologetically, and I turned around.

  “Sorry about this,” I said, because he seemed like a genuinely nice guy and I felt bad for putting him through the trouble of arresting me.

  “I’m sure you are,” he replied as he secured the cuffs.

  “I assume someone inside the house called you?”

  He didn’t answer, and I began going over all the things I probably did wrong before arriving at the obvious conclusion:

  “I guess that camera out front wasn’t a fake,” I said.

  “Nope,” he said, allowing himself a small guffaw as he opened the back door to his patrol car and helped me inside. I never knew this before-this being my first arrest-but it’s not easy to get into a car without the use of your hands.

  “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something?” I asked as I settled in.

  “Don’t have to,” he said. “You need two elements for Miranda: custody and interrogation. I’m not planning on asking you any questions. Frankly, I don’t even want to know what you were doing in there.”

  He shut the door and I thought we’d soon be on our way to the station. Instead, he went up a walkway that led to the front entrance of the house. It left me alone in the idling car, giving me some time to gain perspective on this entire episode.

  On the one hand, it was a bit embarrassing. Okay, a lot embarrassing. I suppose technically, now that I had been suspended, I was an amateur. But did that really mean I had to go acting like an amateur?

  Mostly, though, I just found it funny. I realize this is not, perhaps, the prevailing attitude among men who have just been unfairly suspended from their jobs and then gotten their heads stuck in cat doors. But one of my core beliefs, while not necessarily found in any major world religion, goes like this: one sign of a well-led life is that you have great stories to tell when it’s over.

  And there was no doubt that, someday, this would make for a hysterical story-assuming that I didn’t end up having to tell it to fellow inmates during my daily hour of yard time.

  After ten minutes, the cop came back out, followed by Jackman, who ventured as far as the end of the walkway, close enough to take a look at me. Next came his wife. She was a brittle-haired blonde who actually looked a lot like Jackman, except her manicured nails had colored polish on them. She stared at me with this look of horror on her face, like I was a dangerous animal that had been captured and caged. If I had just a bit more sense of theater, I would have started slobbering and thrashing around like the Tasmanian devil. Instead, I just grinned and waved.

  Once the Jackmans were done gawking at the deranged criminal, they turned away and spoke briefly to the cop, who nodded and followed them back inside. Clearly, there was some irony to this: the perhaps-murderer was free to return to his home while the trespasser was in handcuffs. I thought about saying as much to the cop when he returned to the car. But really, what would that accomplish? You know, other than get me evaluated by a prison psychologist.

  So I just asked, “Is he going to press charges?”

  “Looks that way,” the cop replied. “He doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

  The feeling is mutual, I thought but did not say. Even if I hadn’t been Mirandized, I didn’t want some loose, wiseass comment like that coming back at me if there was a trial.

  We made the drive to the Mendham Borough Police Department, a brick building with a peaked roof and glass doors that looked more like a gynecologist’s office than a police station. Once inside, I was led through the booking process, which included fingerprinting and photographing. I gave the photographer my best smile, if only because I knew-if I ever got myself reinstated-some wiseacre like Buster Hays would get his hands on my mug shot and plaster it around the newsroom as a gag. Or at least that’s what I would do to Buster if he ever got arrested.

  I could only hope my mother’s golfing group never heard about this.

  Eventually, I was tossed into one of the two small holding cells they had in back. In the cell next to me there was a guy who looked dead and smelled worse. My belongings had been taken from me when I came in, so I had no idea what time it was. But I would guess an hour or more passed by the time my cop came back to me.

  “This is your summons,” he said, handing it to me on a clipboard with a pen. “Your court date is on there. You sign at the bottom to say you received it. It’s not an admission of guilt.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I charged you with trespassing rather than breaking and entering. You got the ‘breaking’ part, but I’m not sure you ever quite got to ‘entering.’”

  Great. I was such an inept criminal even the cop was making fun of me.

  “Now the good news,” he continued. “I was able to get the judge on the phone to set bail for you. I suppose you know whose house that was and so did the judge. So, given the circumstances, he couldn’t R and R you”-release me on my own recognizance-“but he set it pretty low, five thousand.”

  “That’s the good news?”

  “The alternative is I couldn’t get the judge on the phone and you would have spent the night in the county jail.”

  “Good point,” I said. “So what do I do now?”

  “Well, a five-thousand-dollar bail means you have to post ten percent. You got five hundred dollars on you?”

  “That depends: Will you let me run to an ATM machine?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I think I need to make a phone call.”

  Before long, he set me up at a phone. I ran through my options-Mom and Dad definitely not being among the
m-and realized there was really only one person I could call without needing to do a whole lot of explaining. And fortunately, I had Tommy’s cell phone number memorized.

  “Mmph?” he said sleepily. I didn’t know what time it was, but guessed it was now after midnight.

  “Hey, Tommy, sorry to wake you up but I need a Venti-sized favor.”

  “Wha … you woke me up because you need coffee?”

  “No, no. I’m at the Mendham Borough police station and I need someone to post bail for me.”

  This instantly brought Tommy to life. Of course, rather than express heartrending concern for my well-being, he just laughed at me.

  “Oh! My! God! The clean-cut prep-school boy gets locked up with all the rough-and-tumble outlaws,” he cackled. “It’s like gay porn come true!”

  “Nice. Very nice.”

  “Are the fellas being gentle? Remind them you’re thin-boned and that you’ve never done this before. Maybe they’ll give it to you tender instead of rough.”

  “Sorry to inform you and your dirty imagination, but this is Mendham. They have zoning ordinances that ban rough-and-tumble outlaws. Besides, I’m in a cell by myself.”

  “Oh, too bad,” Tommy said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Well, what can I do for you?”

  “Think you can scrape together five hundred bucks and come post bail for me?”

  He thought for a moment. “If I max out my ATM and get a cash advance on my credit card, I think I can get to five hundred. Oh, and I’m going to need to stop at an all-night drugstore, too.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can get you some soap on a rope.”

  * * *

  Sometime during the next hour or two, they rousted my comatose neighbor and sent him off to the county jail. And not a moment too soon: his body odor was starting to seep into my clothes. Still, even after he departed, his scent lingered, which was among the things thwarting my efforts to grab a nap-along with the thin mattress, the dank air, and the constant squawking coming from the dispatch. In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.

  By the time Tommy arrived and completed the necessary paperwork to secure my freedom, it was after two A.M. I had been a guest of the Mendham Borough police for roughly four hours. And while that should have been long enough for me to reconsider my life of crime, all it really did was redouble my resolve to ensure that Jackman spent a lot more time-like, the rest of his life-staring at prison walls.

  After receiving my belongings, I entered the lobby to find Tommy slumped in a chair. He was wearing the same clothes as he had been earlier in the day-black shirt, gray pants-but they were far more rumpled.

  “I suppose a mere ‘thank you’ probably doesn’t cover this one, does it?” I said.

  He stirred and gave me an up and down.

  “You look almost as bad as I feel,” he said, then wrinkled his nose. “And you smell worse.”

  “Yeah, I’m planning to lodge a complaint with management about the pillow mints, too,” I said. “And, you know, they don’t even give reward points here?”

  “You sure? From what it sounds like, they’re looking to give you a free extended stay sometime soon.”

  “We’ll see, I guess. It’s a fourth-degree crime and I don’t have a prior record.”

  “Yeah, and you might get off when they decide you’re too nuts to stand trial. When I announced I was there to post your bail, the desk sergeant goes, ‘Oh, you mean the Peeping Tomcat?’ I’m sorry, what the hell were you doing with your head stuck in a pet door?”

  As we walked out to his car and started driving back toward mine, still parked down the street from Jackass’s place, I gave Tommy a full recap on what I had learned about Jackman, finishing with how finding a large black SUV would be a potentially crowning piece of evidence.

  “Why didn’t you just do a little stakeout in front of his house and see what he drives to work in the morning?” Tommy asked when I was done.

  “Everyone knows you don’t commute in the same vehicle you use to commit vehicular homicide,” I replied. “Besides, I’m impatient.”

  Neither Tommy nor I knew Mendham very well, so it took us a few wrong turns before we got on course. He had to drop me off at my Malibu, which meant we ended up cruising past Jackman’s black-gated driveway.

  “That’s his house,” I said.

  “Looks dark.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure everyone is fast asleep after the excitement of the evening.”

  Tommy said nothing, but a small kernel of an idea had suddenly plopped itself down in my head. It quickly germinated, dug in its roots, and started reaching out its stalks, and before I knew it, I was opening my mouth to give voice to it.

  “You know, you could sneak in there right now and have a little look,” I said.

  Tommy’s head whipped in my direction.

  “What?”

  “It’ll be easy. I’ve already scoped it out and made every possible mistake. We know about the camera, and besides, there’s no one awake now to be looking at it. It was just bad luck I got caught in the first place. It’s not like you’d be breaking into the Louvre.”

  “Forget it.”

  “C’mon, if you get caught, I’ll have them wrangle up some of those rough-and-tumble outlaws you were fantasizing about.”

  Tommy made a face like someone replaced his entire shoe collection with white Reeboks-the kind with Velcro.

  “Haven’t you broken the law enough for one evening without being an accomplice to another crime?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a flashlight in my car. You can shine it in there, take a quick look at the bumpers, and be out before anyone knows you were ever there. You’re much sleeker and stealthier than I.”

  “That’s true,” he said, letting the thought drift along for a second before swatting it down. “No. No! Are you crazy? Absolutely not. I’m not getting my head stuck in some stupid cat door.”

  “No way you get stuck. Your head is much smaller. Look at this big coconut of mine. It’s practically Jupiter. Yours is more like, I don’t know, Mercury or something.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to go along with an idea you’re pulling out of Uranus.”

  We both stopped to snicker. Hard to resist a Uranus joke.

  He pulled up alongside my car. Decision time was here.

  “I’m going to get my flashlight. When I get back, I want you to be in the passenger seat.”

  I climbed out, expecting that as soon as I was clear, Tommy would gun the engine and put down a fresh layer of rubber in his haste to get away. But no, as I retrieved the small flashlight from my glove compartment, I heard the driver’s side door open and close. And when I returned, he was riding shotgun.

  “Hurry up before I change my mind,” Tommy said. “I’m only doing this because of those pocket squares Jackman wears. He gives pocket squares a bad name, and I’ll not have anyone besmirching an otherwise wonderful accessory.”

  “Thanks ag-”

  He held up a hand. “Just drive. Go by slowly so I can get a good look at it, then drop me off down the street.”

  I did as instructed. Before he departed, I reminded him about the security camera and the motion-sensing lights over the garage.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied. “I don’t plan to screw this up like you did. Just stay here.”

  “Leave your cell on. I’ll keep a lookout for cops.”

  He didn’t answer, taking off at a brisk jog before I even killed the engine. I waited in the dark, staying alert for Mendham’s finest. But there was no traffic of any sort. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Mendham likes to get its shut-eye.

  Ten minutes later, Tommy jogged back and jumped in the passenger seat.

  “Nothing,” he said, panting a little.

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “No SUV.”

  “Are you sure? Could you see that well?”

&nb
sp; “Sure I could see. I walked right inside and turned the lights on.”

  “You what?”

  “While you were busy playing cat burglar, you missed the most obvious fake rock in the world just to the left of the door. It had a key inside with the security code written on it-8331, in case you care. So I used the key, shut off the security system, and walked inside. There’s a silver Lexus and a tan Ford. Neither one is an SUV, neither one is black. Would you like their license plates and VIN numbers? I got those, too.”

  I started the car, rolling past Jackman’s still-dark house.

  “So, what, I guess he must have had someone do it for him? A hired hit?”

  “Or a rented car,” Tommy said. “Either way, it’s not in his garage. Can I go home now? If I miss too much REM sleep, my skin breaks out.”

  * * *

  I have scant memory of driving to Bloomfield, showering, or getting under the covers. But I must have done all those things, because I was at home, in bed, and smelling unlike rot when my cell phone rang at precisely nine the next morning.

  I was in the midst of one of my usual anxiety dreams, the one where I’ve shown up for the final exam in a college French class, and I suddenly realize I don’t speak a word of French. So, at first, the phone was ringing in the middle of the dream, just as the professor was passing out the exam.

  When I finally figured out who I was, where I was, and that I shouldn’t answer with “bonjour,” my phone had rung three times. I tapped the answer button and tried to say my name, but with my vocal cords still asleep, it came out as, “Carr Rahh.”

  “Carter, it’s Jim McNabb.” His voice boomed through my earpiece. He had me on speakerphone, and like most people of a certain age, he felt he needed to yell at it to be heard. It was loud enough that Deadline, who had been pressed up against my thigh and doing his best impression of a stuffed animal, actually lifted his head to investigate. Usually, it would take the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse having a hoedown at the foot of the bed to stir such curiosity.