Invasion of Privacy

either.
    Then, driving back toward unit number 42, I caught a break.
    A man came out the townhouse’s front door, juggling a box and some paperwork as he pulled the knob closed behind him. He roughly fit the description my client had given me, and the burden of the box and paperwork slowed his walk down the path to a crawl.
    Pulling over and reaching under the newspaper on the passenger’s seat, I retrieved my camera. I’m not a terrific photographer, and the man I took for Andrew Dees was some distance away, but with a Pentax K-frame long lens, I can do simple, candid stuff well enough. I rolled down my window, the air much warmer again now that I was a few miles from the ocean.
    Dees showed clearly through the viewfinder: dark hair and prominent brow, straight nose and strong chin. I snapped off three head-and-shoulders portraits before he reached his car, a brown Toyota Corolla hatchback. Dees lifted the hatch, dropping the box and paperwork inside, then closed it and walked to the driver’s door. He turned once in my direction, and I got a fourth shot of him before he climbed behind the wheel and drove off toward the front of the complex.
    I was leaning down to slide the camera back under the newspaper when a male voice next to my window said, “You like to take pixtures?”
    If the voice had been normal, I probably would have jumped. But it was squeaky and shy, and somehow it didn’t startle me, despite being so close by. I looked up into the sort of face we’d have casually called “retarded” when I was growing up, the compressed features and crimped ears and hanging jaw of a Down’s syndrome child.
    Only the person standing next to my door wasn’t a child. At least thirty, on a stumpy frame of five-six or so, he had a few strands of gray in the brown hair that lay flat along the ears. I couldn’t see the rest of his hair because he wore a red, white, and blue New England Patriots ballcap down tight, almost to the eyebrows. The rest of his outfit was a one-piece maintenance jumpsuit in faded green, the name “PAULIE” stitched in yellow thread over the left top pocket. He had a rake in his hands, and I realized he was gripping the handle tightly, nervously.
    “Well, do you?”
    I said, “Do I like to take pictures?”
    A blink and a nod.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Me too.”
    “Paulie?”
    “That’s me.” He let go of the rake with his right hand and traced over the embroidery. “My last name’s Fogerty, but that’s not on there.”
    “You work here?”
    A blink and a nod again. “I’m the super.”
    Fogerty said it proudly, and I remembered Boyce Hendrix telling me he ran a lean ship except for the superintendents.
    “Mr. Eh-men-dor showed me.”
    “Who?”
    Paulie gestured toward the cluster of townhouses where I’d seen Andrew Dees. “Mr. Eh-men-dor.”
    “What did he show you?”
    A puzzled look. “How to take pixtures. With the camera.” He pointed at the newspaper on the passenger seat. “How come you hide your camera?”
    “I can’t always trust people to be honest.”
    He gave me a troubled look this time. “I’m honest. I don’t steal anything from anybody.”
    “I wasn’t worried about you, Paulie.”
    A hang-jaw smile. “Good. I’m not worried about you too.”
    I said, “Was that Mr. Dees who just left?”
    The blink and nod. “Why do you want pixtures of Mr. Dees?”
    “I don’t, actually. I’m just taking photos of the condos here. I spoke to Mr. Hendrix this morning.”
    That seemed to sit well. “Mr. Hend’ix hired me. I’m the super.”
    I swung my head around. “You do a fine job, too. The grass and bushes look great.”
    Another blink and nod. “I spend the whole week cutting and mowing and raking, and you know what?”
    “No, what?”
    “By next week, I got to start all over again.”
    “Well, if I had a place like this to run, I’d sure hire you.” The troubled look again. “Oh, no. No, you can’t. I work for Mr. Hend’ix. I’m the super.”
    “And you’re so good at it, I’ll bet you’ll be here a longtime”
    A more troubled look, as though Fogerty had never thought of not being there until I’d planted the idea. To set him off that, I said, “Mr. Dees lives in the cluster over there?”
    Now the look went back to puzzled. “Cluster?”
    “Those four houses with the yellow doors.”
    “Oh, yeah. He lives in the second one. But they’re units, not houses.”
    “Who else lives there?”
    “Mr. Dees lives by