Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  * * *

  —

  When he awoke, it wasn’t his feet pinned but his head, and not in tar but in the odd space between the bed and the overhanging night table, into which he must have somehow jammed himself during the night. He forced a swallow down his arid throat and tried to blink the dream away, then carefully extricated himself and sat up. The bedside clock said it was past ten and he cursed himself for having slept so late.

  He considered again this ill-fitting table. He removed the clock and bouquet and set them carefully on the floor, and then the tablecloth, revealing a simple round slab of maple topped with glass. Alastair said his wife had been a tinkerer, always moving furniture around, but it was hard to imagine she’d have left this piece here very long. It wasn’t the missing table from the Architectural Digest spread—that had been rectangular, with at least one drawer—but the odd placement of this one made Waldo wonder where in the house that one had landed.

  He slipped on his clean set of clothes, grabbed the magazine and padded into the hallway, peeking into rooms in hope of finding the table that used to be in the living room and might have still been there the night of the murder. He’d scanned most of the house without success by the time he came to Alastair’s closed bedroom door. He knocked, called Alastair’s name, waited a few seconds, then opened the door carefully.

  The room was empty, the bed made. Alastair’s nightstand was also covered; Waldo shifted his digital alarm clock and assorted bedside knickknacks onto a bureau and removed the cloth, a solid royal blue. This table, rectangular with a light-colored wood top, maybe white oak, looked similar to the one that had been in the living room in the magazine photo, but for dark and irregular stains on top and a solid face instead of a drawer. Waldo was about to replace the cloth when he thought to reach around back, and there felt the drawer pull; this was it. He lifted the table from the wall and shifted it so he could open the drawer. It was empty, or seemed to be until he reached inside and ran his hand along its back wall and found a cheap-looking flip phone, probably a burner.

  It seemed not to have been used much: the security code hadn’t even been set and the call history was empty. There were some texts, though, all to and from one number. A whole bunch of incoming, mostly strings of unanswered question marks, and then this exchange:

  Outgoing: I miss you

  Incoming: U wouldnt know it

  Incoming: Miss U 2

  Outgoing: Come over

  Incoming: Really?

  Incoming: Now?

  Outgoing: Please?

  Incoming: Where is she?

  Outgoing: Gone all night

  There the messages stopped.

  The exchange took place on the date Monica Pinch was killed.

  * * *

  —

  When he arrived at the Johnny’s Bench soundstage, they were about to shoot, so Waldo took an unobtrusive spot behind the director again while he waited for the chance to talk to Alastair. The scene took place in a kitchen, where the actress, a striking light-skinned black woman with straightened and tinted hair, scrambled eggs at a working stove. Alastair entered behind her, dressed in a woman’s frilly pink bathrobe. “Good morning,” the actress said, looking over her shoulder and tittering at the robe. “Hey, that works on you—I should get you one of your own.”

  “Do. And keep it in your closet for me. I might want to make a regular thing of this.”

  “Johnny,” she said, warning. “If the DA finds out you’ve been involved with me all this time . . .”

  He reached around her, took the spatula from her hand and tossed it aside, then spun her and kissed her. Her desirous response looked like a lot more than a stage kiss, perhaps answering Waldo’s first question about the burner texts before he even got a chance to ask it. She was an eyeful, too, even by actress standards, and it was hard to imagine getting kisses like that from a woman like that and not wanting to bring your work home. Had she been to the Pinches’ house the day of the murder? The night of, even? He’d have to talk to her, too.

  The kiss ended and the lovers locked eyes for a long, profound moment. Waldo wondered how much of what he was witnessing was pure acting and how much was controlled exposure of a private reality, a silent sharing of actual history, actual secrets. Whatever, he couldn’t wait to hear what Alastair/Johnny was going to say to her next.

  What he said was “. . . Line?”

  The actress didn’t reply. Instead, the script supervisor, sitting beside the director again, called out, “‘I’ll recuse myself if I have to.’”

  Alastair said, “Shit!” and turned away from the actress, who stepped out of the counterfeit kitchen herself, covering her exasperation.

  “Cut,” said the director, doing almost as good a job of hiding his own.

  Alastair muttered to himself, “I’ll recuse myself if I have to, I’ll recuse myself if I have to.” Then he turned to the actress and said, “Deepest apologies, Naomi—I must have been distracted by your perfume.” The crew laughed.

  Naomi herself, not laughing, exchanged a private smirk with a new young and athletic camera assistant, presumably the replacement for the one Alastair had battered on Waldo’s first day. Waldo realized he’d been fooled again: in the cold light of cameras not rolling, the actress didn’t care much for her leading man at all.

  Unfortunately, that leading man had picked up on the wordless exchange. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “What?” Naomi said. “No . . .”

  Alastair looked at the camera assistant, then back to her. “Is that what you like? I have pimples on my arse older than that one.” Nobody laughed, though it was arguably funnier than his perfume line. Alastair marched over to the kid, his rising temper risibly incongruous with his frilly bathrobe, but nobody laughed at that, either. “This is my set, love, and I’d ask you to show me some respect.”

  The kid said, “I respect you, sir.”

  Alastair took umbrage at even that. “‘Sir’? How old do you think I am?”

  Before the kid could find the right answer, Alastair head butted him. Stunned, he tried to answer with a blind, wild left but Alastair dodged it and came back with another proficient combination, and the kid staggered and wobbled and dropped without having landed a single blow. Waldo scanned the stage, a crew of about seventy, all inspecting phones or fingernails.

  Alastair caught his breath and noticed something on the sleeve of the frilly bathrobe and called, “Wardrobe?” A tiny woman with a Mohawk scurried over and Alastair said, “I’m afraid we’ve gotten a spot of blood on this.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, reassuring. “We always have a double.” Alastair’s team knew what to prepare for.

  “I’ll be in my trailer while she fetches it,” Alastair called in the vague direction of the director on his way to the exit. Waldo decided not to follow him, figuring this wasn’t the moment for a confrontation about the burner; he’d have better luck with Alastair later, after the flush from his pugilistic triumph had worn off.

  To kill some time, Waldo took a turn around the lot. He was ravenous, not having eaten yet, so he stopped at the commissary. After an extended colloquy with a short-order chef over the provenance of the grilled vegetable medley, he settled for a banana, despite the thousands of miles it must have traveled and his misgivings about the repression of unionization efforts on plantations in Guatemala and Costa Rica.

  Nearing the far end of the lot, Waldo saw two parked black-and-whites up ahead with almost a dozen patrolmen in conference nearby. He could have veered away and avoided the inevitable hostility when they recognized him, but the old curiosity kicked in and he itched to know what kind of incident had drawn this many uniforms out to a studio lot. He kept his head down, hoping to catch some of their conversation. As he passed, one cop was saying, “. . . So I go, you change her diaper, she’s your fuckin’ mother,” and the othe
rs cracked up. Waldo slowed to hear more, preferably something more enlightening. A couple of the cops registered him and nodded friendly, unexpected hellos. That slowed him down, and now they all noticed him. But nobody seemed inhospitable; apparently, somehow, none of them recognized the infamous Detective Charlie Waldo. Maybe it was the beard, maybe the context.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Waitin’,” one cop said. “Shootin’ the shit.”

  “I mean, what are you here for?”

  “Oh, pilot. Delta Blues.” He said to Waldo, “You in the soup kitchen scene? I hear they might not get to it today.” Waldo glanced at the patrolman’s shoulder patch and saw it had a New Orleans insignia.

  “Thanks,” Waldo said and kept walking. He didn’t have any shit he wanted to shoot with a band of screen extras.

  Passing the backlot, the maze of bogus streets and building facades used for the filming of city scenes, he saw in the distance an unexpected pairing: the camera assistant Alastair had just beaten up having a laugh and a cigarette with his counterpart from the first day, both with bandaged faces now, reenacting punches, sharing war stories. As Waldo neared, another familiar face from the Johnny’s Bench set, a goateed assistant director with a headset resting on his neck, came up to the pair and handed today’s victim an envelope. They shook hands, the AD left, and the young guys started cutting up again.

  Waldo approached, putting on a laugh of his own. “That rocked,” he said. “Where can I get a gig like that?”

  They stopped laughing. Today’s kid looked especially wary. “Don’t know what you’re talkin ’bout, dude.”

  “I was on the Johnny’s Bench set. Come on—how much you get for letting that old guy kick your ass?”

  The two camera assistants shared a careful glance. Then one started laughing and the other did too. Today’s kid said to Waldo, “Get bent.”

  Waldo turned to his friend. “How are you still on the lot? Didn’t I see you get fired the other day?”

  “I’m on another show now.”

  “They move you guys around? And pay you extra to take a couple punches. Come on, how much?”

  “A grand.”

  “Larry,” said the other one, nervous now.

  Larry, full of himself, said, “Who gives a shit? We’re not gonna get in trouble.” He gave Waldo a what are you gonna do about it smirk; today’s kid fingered the envelope and fidgeted.

  Waldo figured he’d get more out of the cocky one. “How do they know Pinch’ll come at you? You get paid even if he doesn’t?”

  “He does, he always does. Gotta be the alpha dog or somethin’.” The kid couldn’t resist adding, “It’s a sweet deal, man. Dudes are linin’ up for it.”

  For maybe the first time, Waldo felt a twinge of empathy for Alastair. What a world the man lived in: phony friends with phony laughter, phony police walking phony streets, phony adversaries throwing phony punches after phony kisses from phony lovers.

  Knowing he’d never find a compost heap on the lot, Waldo tossed his banana peel into a garbage can and headed back to the soundstage. At least he thought it was a garbage can.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The rest of Alastair’s morning, which Waldo tracked via the sighs and grumbling of crew members, was an exercise in dilatory inventiveness, the star finding one excuse after another not to emerge from his trailer: first the replacement bathrobe, which he swore didn’t fit as well; then a headache, which he blamed on the wardrobe people who’d dragged him through so much tailoring; then a set of script revisions, which he claimed not to have received until the last minute and which he deemed inconsistent with backstory from an episode the prior season. At last the producers cried uncle and called the lunch break.

  Through all this, Waldo kept his distance, taking advantage of the dead hours to peel off members of the crew for one-on-ones, wild shots at teasing out new threads. He started with the beleaguered director and his script supervisor sidekick, then found the embattled costume designer and also managed a few minutes apiece with three producers of different stripes, these last behind closed doors in their nearby offices. The various interviews were uniformly cautious, nobody wanting to drop a stronger descriptor on Alastair than “intense” or “complicated.” The words Waldo kept hearing, unspoken, were “meal ticket.”

  After the producers, Waldo knocked on the screen door of the actress’s trailer, thinking that her relative irreplaceability might make her less reticent. “Is he finally fucking ready?” she called, confirming the instinct. He apologized for not being the production assistant she’d been hoping for and introduced himself. She invited him in.

  The trailer, or her half of it—the chunky actor who played Judge Johnny’s sardonic but fiercely loyal bailiff occupied the other half, with a separate entrance—took a similar approach to limited space as Waldo’s own cabin, cleverly loading a surprising array of amenities into its walls, from microwave to gas fireplace. The actress sat on the only chair and gestured toward the built-in daybed. Her name was Naomi Tompkins-Jones and she didn’t need a prompt to start complaining. “I’ve got a director meeting at four in Culver City. They promised me I’d be out by lunch.”

  “I just have a couple questions. I won’t slow down your day, I promise. Do you know Alastair well?”

  “Nobody knows Alastair ‘well.’”

  “Ever meet his wife?”

  “Sat next to her at the Golden Globes. That was a trip.”

  “How so?”

  “English girl got a mouth on her. And she was not happy to be there. You know that’s the only awards where they serve alcohol during the show, right? Plus they do TV right off, so then we’re all done and still got to sit there three hours, so everybody starts getting shit-faced.”

  “Is that what Monica wasn’t happy about? Having to sit there?”

  “Everything—sitting there, this show, L.A. Kept calling it the City of Angles. Said, with every award she could feel more brain cells dying. Finally I go, ‘Might not be the awards, girl—might be all them champagne cocktails.’”

  “What’d she say to that?”

  “She goes, ‘You fucking my husband, too?’” Waldo waited her out on that one. Naomi lowered her chin and her voice and said, “Not even close, honey.” She snorted.

  Waldo offered a conspiratorial grin to let her know he believed her. He said, “What’s it like, playing love scenes opposite a man accused of killing his wife?”

  “What do you think? I’m on the board of the L.A. Coalition Against Domestic Violence. You know what that means? All this shit’s messed up, is what it means.”

  A PA knocked and called from outside that they were ready to start up again. Waldo walked to the stage with the PA and the actress and watched her and Alastair get the breakfast scene right and then shoot another quick two-line scene in Judge Johnny’s chambers—the unsatisfactory new pages having been revised twice more—and then Alastair was released for the day.

  Waldo approached him while he was signing the end-of-day paperwork. The two men eyed each other; it was the first time they’d been together since the police took Alastair away, incredibly only thirty hours ago, and the energy between them had altered, profoundly and disagreeably. Alastair, unsmiling, looked much older. Waldo said, “Can we talk?”

  Alastair said, “If we must.” Softening an iota, he added, “I’ll get changed and you can come with me to pick up Gaby.”

  They didn’t speak during the walk to Alastair’s trailer, or while he changed in the bedroom, or as they crossed the lot to his Hummer and he handed Waldo the keys. It wasn’t like the silence of the first day, all unfamiliarity and uncertainty. This silence was soaked in mutual resentment: Alastair’s over the sense that Waldo not only had failed to protect him but had likely made things worse—no doubt Fontella Davis had fed that impression since the arrest—and Waldo’s over the burner phone and t
he likelihood that Alastair had been hiding at least one card from him.

  Waldo steered off the lot. He decided not to start with the burner. “Warren Gomes, Darius Jamshidi—you know either of them?”

  “No,” Alastair said, not missing a beat, “but Robert Blake called last night. He asked if I cared to play pinochle with him on Thursdays. He’s been without a partner since O.J. and Phil Spector went on their vacations.”

  Waldo had been through too much; there was nothing winning anymore about the mordant palaver. “Stop fucking around. Everyone else is sure you did it, and the only reason I have doubts is somebody keeps busting my horns. Me figuring out why may be the only thing standing between you and life without parole—so when I ask for your help, goddamnit, help.” He stopped for a light. He turned to Alastair and repeated the names: “Warren Gomes, Darius Jamshidi. Who are they?”

  Alastair stared forward, shook his head.

  Waldo watched him carefully. How much was this maddening bastard holding back, and how much did he truly not remember? Alastair still wouldn’t look at him. Waldo waited for the light to turn before asking, “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, did you invite anyone over to the house that night?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How can you be sure, when you don’t remember anything?”

  “Because I never just ‘invite anyone over to the house.’ That’s not part of my life.”

  He was lying. Yes, it was possible that the text exchange happened during Alastair’s blackout, too. If there was one—for all Waldo really knew, that was bullshit, too. But even assuming the blackout was real, at the very least he had to remember owning a burner phone that he used to talk to another woman, and he had to know that it was missing and that he hadn’t used it since the day of the murder.