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Cheryl walked faster. Lagging slightly behind allowed me to check out the estate. No buildings in sight, just greenery, and now the fountains’ ejaculations had drowned out the ocean. A few acres to the right the lawn sloped to a silver mirror: an unfenced, dark-bottomed swimming pool the size of a small lake. No birds. How did they keep them out?

No swimmers either. But for us and the glass cleaner, no humanity. The place had all the intimacy of a restricted resort, and I half-expected some officious sort to dart out from the shrubbery and check my membership card.

Cheryl turned onto a path, and we passed behind beds of tall, flowering pampas grass, hedges of variegated mock orange, a grove of two-story Hollywood junipers studded with blue-gray berries. The trees obscured the rest of the property, and I caught up with Cheryl. When her hip bumped mine a couple of times and I didn’t react, her jaw set and she surged ahead of me again. The junipers gave way to a planting of cattails, and I resumed sneaking peeks between the stalks.

Up ahead and to the right were high, peach-stucco walls. Black, angled court lights hinted at tennis, and a rubbery thump-thump said relaxed competition.

A sharp twist of the pathway revealed a building—a quarter mile up, at the terminus of a palm colonnade. More peach walls and an Italianate heap the size of the White House under a royal blue roof. The pathway forked, and Cheryl chose the route that took us away from the house, through an allee of orange trees. Several smaller buildings cropped up along the way—acres away, similarly colored, heavily plant-shrouded. Then a few people: women in navy blue uniforms sweeping the walkways. Stout, dark-haired women with bowed legs, dresses hanging below the knees. Norris and the parking lot dudes would be crushed.