Page 57 of The Perfect People

“This is a great party,” he said to one of the catering servers, keeping his straw boater hat low to cover his face. “Is the hostess around? I’d like to congratulate her.”

“I think she may have retired for the evening,” the server said. “Her husband said she had a few too many martinis and took her up a little while ago.”

“That’s too bad,” Wade said, trying to sound disappointed. “Maybe I’ll go thank him instead then.”

Wade did indeed go look for Steve Dorman, but not to thank him. He needed to make sure that Lola’s husband was nowhere near the bedroom. Only when he was confident of that could he go up there to do the work. It was especially important that tonight went well.

After the last two nights, he knew that the police would be out in force. He’d already seen more officers than usual patrolling the Strand. He’d made the calculated risk that it was wiser to deal with Mrs. Dorman earlier rather than later in the night and use the party crowd to his advantage. Leaving a house around midnight with a crowd of people would look a lot less suspicious than skulking out alone at three or four in the morning.

Of course, that meant a greater chance of someone walking in on him. It was a chance he’d just have to take in order to make Mrs. Dorman pay for what she’d done. Just like the others had been made to pay for what they’d done. It was a matter of honor more than anything else. And Wade Cronin was nothing if not a man of honor.

As he pushed through the crowd, looking for Steve Dorman, he reminded himself that it didn’t have to be this way. When he first signed on with Beach Plumbers after moving south from Bakersfield three months ago, he thought it would be a fresh start. He had hopes of getting a tan, learning to surf, and generally leaving behind the unpleasantness of life in the San Joaquin Valley, where he’d spent all his life.

He’d extricated himself from his domineering single mother, his sneering, abusive older sister, Wanda, and from Jem, the on-again, off-again girlfriend he’d been seeing since high school, who only called him when she was pissed at her husband, sick of her kids, and three vodka and cranberries in.

With the $7,100 he’d saved over the last five years working plumbing jobs, along with some construction on the side, he’d loaded up his pickup and moved south, with the confidence that he’d find a place to live and that his skill set would get him work. It only kind of worked out that way.

He did find a place to live, but it was crashing on the couch in an old high school friend’s one-bedroom apartment in Gardena and paying half the rent for the privilege. He couldn’t get a full-time position with Beach Plumbing, but they let him fill in when other guys were sick or didn’t show up, which was often. The same was true with South Bay Plumbing Systems. And Beach Cities Pipe Masters. He filled in whenever there was an opening, hoping to be offered a permanent position with any of them. It never came.

Whatdidcome was the arrogance and the abuse. While the customers he dealt with in Bakersfield generally lacked the wealth of the people in these beach communities, they also lacked the attitude. It seemed that almost every job he went on here required the homeowner to make a sarcastic or belittling remark. It got to the point that, when a customer was plain old nice, he was genuinely surprised.

He probably would have just kept his head down and dealt with it if not for a series of events in the last few weeks that made him realize that life was too short for him to put up with all the crap. First, his mother, admittedly a shrew of a woman, got a severe case of pneumonia and died within a day of being admitted to the hospital.

Not long after that, he learned that his sister had recently convinced their mom to change her will and cut him out completely as punishment for leaving town and “abandoning the family.” As a result, he lost his half of their inheritance. It turned out that it was only $12,000 and her trailer, which sold at auction for $6,000. But still, that money would have come in handy. And it was more the principle of the thing. His only remaining relative had intentionally screwed him when it came to their mother’s death.

Lastly, he’d learned just last week that the husband of Jem, the old girlfriend he’d been intermittently sleeping with, had discovered her infidelity, though not that Wade was her partner. He’d come home and shot her four times, then turned the gun on himself, leaving their three children orphaned. It had been a rough few days.

With all that bouncing around in his head, he’d gone to the home of Shasta Mallory on Monday of this week, along with two other guys from Beach Plumbing, to deal with a clog in her kitchen sink. She was particularly anxious because she had a huge party on Thursday night. One of the other plumbers told him that it was part of a whole thing that went on around here, where the super-rich who lived along the Strand threw massive blowouts over long summer holiday weekends.

But no party justified Mrs. Mallory screaming at him for putting his gloved hands on her butcher block after removing a corroded pipe. The exact phrase she had used was “Keep your goddamned E. coli mitts off my food prep area, you filthy sewer rat.”

She had actually grabbed a kitchen dish towel and swatted at his hands with it, as if he was a fly that had snuck in through a window and needed to be squashed.

“Sorry,” he had muttered in the moment, glad that neither of the other plumbers was in the kitchen at that moment to see the incident and report his error to the day manager, which could have resulted in him losing work.

But later that evening, when he had time to mull over what happened, the rage started to ferment inside him. What kind of person reacted that way to an honest mistake, especially by someone who had come to her home to try to help her with a problem that she couldn’t solve on her own? What made Shasta Mallory think she could treat another human being this way?

When he got back to his place—really just his couch— he did a little research on Mallory and discovered that she wasn’t just this way with service people. She was a surly, hateful person with just about everyone she interacted with, save for her famous music star clients. She reminded him a lot of his sister, Wanda, who never met a person she didn’t try to make feel small.

Wade spent that whole night lying on the couch, staring up at the stained ceiling, thinking about how Mallory had wronged him, just like Wanda had wronged him. It occurred to him as he tossed and turned on the uncomfortable couch that Shasta Mallory was far from the only customer who had been abusive to him.

There was Ed Koftic, who had gotten pissed that their work fixing his overflowing toilet interfered with watching the Dodgers game. Milton and Reyna Craig didn’t like how slippery their recently installed water-softening system made their dishes and pestered him relentlessly for a discount he wasn’t authorized to give. But those bits of obnoxiousness were within the bounds of normal customer behavior. Shasta Mallory’s was not.

Neither was the behavior of Nicole Boyce, who never said a single word to him the entire time he was there helping a guy from South Bay Plumbing Systems unclog an outdoor shower station that had become so blocked up with sand that the water was gurgling up and spilling into the living room. She had simply pointed out the issue to him and his partner, never bothering to get off the phone to greet them or explain the particulars. She didn’t even make eye contact. It was as if direct communication with the help would somehow infect her.

The whole time they were there, she remained on the phone, involved in an intense argument with someone who Wade later determined through his research was her husband, whom she apparently had a volatile relationship with. She yelled at him almost every minute that they were there, and only acknowledged their existence with an occasional, dismissive pointing or waving gesture. She wasn’t as overtly hostile as Mallory but she still made Wade feel less than a person. Lying on the couch that night, he added her to his list.

Lola Dorman’s conduct was also not acceptable. She had been one of the first customers he’d helped service. Her husband was a city council member, and she was a prominent real estate agent, as he would later learn. But at the time he joined the team from Beach Cities Pipe Masters, which re-piped her guest house, he was just “stubble boy” who needed to be “spoken to” about tracking sand into the house and reminded that if the workmen’s port-a-potty was occupied, then he should “go in the ocean or piss his pants, but he can’t use the facilities in my home.”

It was when Wade did a quick web search at 3 a.m. on the couch that late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, that he learned that each of those women usually hosted a Strand party over Labor Day weekend. The rest of the plan sprouted from there. Oddly, the decision to kill them wasn’t that momentous. It felt like a no-brainer.

If they treated him like this, he could only imagine how many other people they stomped to dust over the years. They were like his sister, Wanda, only with real power and money. Each of them deserved it. He moved almost immediately past that to the planning.

He only had a few days to prep. To hide his identity he had to get disguises, and in some cases, literal costumes. He had to buy latex gloves so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. He had to review his plan of attack.

That was easy for Shasta Mallory, whose house he’d just visited. But he was at Nicole Boyce’s place two weeks ago. And he hadn’t been to Lola Dorman’s home in three months, and even then, he’d only entered the main house on that one ill-fated visit to use the bathroom.

And yet, so far it had all worked out. The Shasta Mallory killing had been perfect. He’d spent so much time ensuring everything would go smoothly that when he finally got to wrap his hands around her neck in her bedroom and stare into her eyes, he was unprepared for the rush of excitement it would give him as her eyes bulged in panicked terror.

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