“I’ll talk to Rex.”
“I could really use the help. It’s gotta be done right.”
“Tell you what, I’ll come out for sure and I’ll bring the tech we’ve got working on the boat. That way we have some continuity. Just let me know when you’ve got the warrant signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“Will do.”
Stilwell disconnected. He liked the cooperation he seemed to be getting from Sampedro. But he knew it was fragile. Ahearn was the senior partner and could change the level of openness at any time.
He had seen no one come or go from either the front or the side of the BMC during his short vigil. He suspected that the next day, when the weekenders started coming in, things would get busy. He turned the cart around on Crescent and headed back up to the golf course. The Sandtrap was nearly empty when he entered, and there was no sign of Leslie Sneed, but another server told him that she was in the break room and pointed him through the kitchen. Stilwell went through a swinging door and found Sneed at a table near the back. She was counting tips.
“How’d you do today?” he asked.
“Not bad for a Thursday,” she said. “But I need a big weekend.”
Stilwell pulled out another chair at the table and sat down. There was no one else in the break room.
“I thought you said we had to go down to the station,” Sneed said.
“We will,” Stilwell said. “But I wanted to ask you a few questions first.”
“Okay.”
“You said Leigh-Anne stopped staying with you a couple months ago?”
“Yeah, just stopped coming or paying me.”
“Did she come back for her things or leave anything behind?”
“I kept her shit. I changed the lock and told her she could have her stuff when she paid what she owed.”
“So her stuff is still at your apartment?”
“That’s right. I guess it’s all mine now.”
“What’s there?”
“Just some clothes and some books. I think what she really wanted was her phone charger, but I told her she could have that when she paid her back rent. She hung up on me and that was the last time I heard from her.”
It seemed unlikely to Stilwell that a phone charger was what Moss wanted back.
“Do you remember when that was?” he asked.
“A couple Saturdays ago,” Sneed said. “I remember I was here when she called. She had tried to sneak into the apartment ’cause she knew I worked mornings on Saturdays. She hadn’t counted on the lock being changed.”
“So she didn’t get her things?”
“Uh-uh.”
“And she had her own bedroom there?”
“It’s not really a bedroom. More like an enclosed porch. My place is kinda small.”
“Could we go over there first? I want to see what she left.”
“I guess so. I need to be back by four thirty to set up for the dinner shift, though.”
“I’ll have you back in time for that. Can you leave now?”
“Yeah, I told my boss. He said it was okay as long as I was back to work dinner.”
“Good. I’ve got a cart, so we can go.”
Leslie Sneed lived in Eucalyptus Gardens, an apartment complex on Banning Drive. In his year on the island, Stilwell had slowly been learning the characteristics of Avalon neighborhoods. He knew that Eucalyptus Gardens was one of five low-income-housing projects where many people in the tourism and service industry lived.
Sneed’s apartment was small and sparsely furnished, with a Taylor Swift poster taped to the wall over a hand-me-down couch that might have been older than its owner. Swift was holding a cat in the poster and there was an undeniable smell of litter box to the apartment.
The living room connected to a kitchenette that had a half-size refrigerator and a two-burner stove. There was an adjoining bedroom, a single bathroom, and a small porch off the living room that had been enclosed with louvered windows. There was no door to the porch, but a curtain had been hung across the entrance for privacy. Sneed pulled the curtain back and held out her hand to signal Stilwell in.
“Sorry about the cat litter,” she said. “I have to close up when I go to work.”
She walked onto the porch and started cranking open the windows. The litter box was in the corner, and a black cat was sleeping on a daybed on the other side of the porch.
“So this was Leigh-Anne’s room?” Stilwell asked.
“Yep,” Sneed said.
“Is the cat hers or yours?”
“He’s mine. I just moved the litter box in here when she stopped coming.”
There was no closet, but there was an old wooden cabinet against the wall next to the bed.
“Do I have your permission to open the cabinet and look through this room?” Stilwell asked.
“Have at it,” Sneed said. “If you find drugs, they were hers, not mine. I’ve been sober since I moved out here.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not looking for drugs. Where’d you move out from?”
“I grew up in the San Fernando Valley.”
“What part?”
“Panorama City.”
Stilwell nodded. He didn’t know much about Panorama City except that it had drive-through drug markets. Moving to an island to get away from it was probably a smart idea.
Stilwell pulled a set of disposable gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. He opened the cabinet’s two doors. The left side had shelves, and the right side had a hanging bar for clothes. There were a few blouses and pairs of black chinos on hangers. He searched the pockets of the pants first but found them empty. He checked the labels on the blouses and saw nothing recognizably expensive.
“How long have you lived on the island?” he asked.
“Four years in July,” Sneed said.
“And you’ve been in this apartment the whole time?”
“Not at first. You have to live on the island for ninety days to qualify to live here. So I sort of stayed on couches until I could get in. Sort of like what Leigh-Anne was doing.”
As she talked, Stilwell noted the folded clothes on the cabinet shelves as well as a few cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo. One shelf held a small collection of books stacked on their sides.
“How did you connect with Leigh-Anne about renting out this room?” he asked.
“I had a friend who worked at the Black Marlin and he connected us,” Sneed said.
“Who was he?”
“Just a guy who worked at the Trap but then got a job there for a while.”
“He’s not there anymore?”
“No, he went back to the mainland. A friend of his opened a bar in Studio City and he went to work there.”
“What’s his name? I might want to talk to him about Leigh-Anne.”
“Todd Whitmore. I can’t remember the name of the place he works at now.”
Stilwell took one of the Amazon boxes off the shelf and opened it on the bed next to the sleeping cat. It contained various unopened hair products, including two tubes of Colors hair dye. Both had purple screw-on caps and were labeled NIGHTSHADE. Stilwell thought of the purple wildflowers that grew on some of the island’s hillsides.
“Nightshade,” Sneed said. “She loved that color. Like the flower. I said to her once, ‘Don’t you know that nightshade is poisonous?’ But she didn’t care.”
Stilwell closed the box and moved on to the next one.
“So you said she wanted to get her stuff but you wouldn’t let her in,” he said.
“That’s right,” Sneed said. “She owed me two fifty for the last month she did stay here — that was March — and then I told her it was another two fifty for the month she stopped staying but didn’t tell me. I could have tried to find somebody else if I had known.”
The second box was more personal-care products. After looking through it, Stilwell put it back on the shelf.