Chapter 6: When They Realized It Had Gone Further Than Paint
The DA's office moved quietly.
Carol had told me to expect that — these things didn't announce themselves until they were ready.
But the couple next door seemed to sense that something had shifted.
The silver sedan stopped coming.
The cousin, apparently, had decided the distance between real estate closings and witness tampering was too far to travel.
Then, on a Thursday morning, a different car parked in front of their house.
Two people got out.
They didn't carry briefcases.
They knocked on the door, and the husband answered, and they went inside.
Dennis called me within minutes.
"Do you know who those people are?"
"No."
"I think they might be investigators," he said.
"The way they were dressed."
I called Carol.
"I know," she said before I could speak.
"My contact at the DA's office gave me a heads-up this morning.
They executed a records request.
Phone records, primarily." A pause.
"The wife made several calls the day before the painters arrived.
One of them was to the painting company.
One was to a number that hasn't been identified yet.
And one was to the previous attorney — the one who filed the original lawsuit against you."
"The lawsuit that was thrown out."
"Yes.
Which raises a question about whether any of this was ever spontaneous, or whether it's been a coordinated effort from the beginning." Carol let that sit for a moment.
"I want you to think back.
Before the lawsuit.
Before the HOA attempt.
Was there ever a moment where they seemed to know something they shouldn't have known?
About your schedule, your travel plans, anything like that?"
I thought about it.
"My travel," I said slowly.
"I mentioned to someone at the block party last summer that I was going to be away for two weeks in the fall.
I didn't think anything of it."
"Who was standing nearby when you said it?"
I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct the moment.
The folding tables, the paper plates, the smell of someone's grill.
"A few people," I said.
"I don't remember exactly."
"Think about whether the wife was one of them."
I thought.
And then I remembered, because she had been standing close enough that I had felt slightly uncomfortable, and I had moved a step away.
"She was there," I said.
Carol was quiet for a moment.
"So they may have been planning this since last summer.
Waiting for the right window." Another pause.
"That changes the character of what they did considerably."
The two investigators left the couple's house after about forty minutes.
The husband stood in the doorway and watched them go.
From where I was standing at my kitchen window, I could see his face.
He did not look like a man who believed he had improved the neighborhood.
That evening, the wife knocked on my door.
I saw her through the window.
I picked up my phone and started a voice memo, then opened the door.
She looked different from the last time I had seen her up close.
Smaller, somehow.
Her hands were clasped in front of her.
"I just want to talk," she said.
"Please.
Just the two of us."
I leaned against the doorframe and said nothing.
"We didn't think it would go this far," she said.
"We just — we thought if the house looked better, you'd see that we were right.
We thought you'd come home and be grateful."
"You thought I'd be grateful," I said.
"We were trying to help."
"You hired a painting company while I was out of town, without my knowledge or consent, and had them alter my property.
Then you asked my neighbor to stay quiet about it." I kept my voice level.
"And then you called that same neighbor and suggested he think carefully about testifying."
Her face changed.
"I never said —"
"He recorded the call," I said.
The color left her face so completely and so quickly that it was almost difficult to watch.
May you like
"I think," I said, "that you should call Carol."
I closed the door.
