Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  TWENTY-THREE

  They made love again and it was even better but he woke up the second time in a panic, remembering his bike, which he’d forgotten about in the trauma and the intoxication of the previous night. He vaguely recalled dumping it along with his backpack before confronting Don Q. Jayne was in the shower, so he suffered ten horror-filled minutes imagining some little schoolkid finding his Beretta before she got out and reassured him: the football players who brought him to the nurse’s had retrieved his belongings too, and his backpack was in the trunk of her car downstairs and his bike in a rack at the school. She hadn’t thought at the time to look through his bag for a lock, but the school entrance was secured at night and the bike would almost certainly be safe until they got there.

  Jayne didn’t keep much on hand that Waldo could eat for breakfast, but he let her give him an apple and a tomato after she vowed they’d been brought home in reusable bags. They drove to school together, Jayne singing to Katy Perry and Carly Rae Jepsen on the radio. Waldo’s thoughts drifted back to the case and the dead end he’d reached when Alastair couldn’t—or wouldn’t—shed light on the Gomes and Jamshidi connection. There were few threads left for him to pull on beyond the riddle of why people were intent on him not pulling on them. The only other utility he could see for himself was to keep picking at the initial police work, dredging up sand for Fontella Davis to toss in the jury’s eyes—hardly what he’d signed on for. He wondered if it was time to step away from the case. But Jamshidi’s interference had to mean something, and so did the Palisades Posse’s, and he’d feel feckless abandoning Alastair with both of those left unexplained, especially when none of the actor’s other supposed advocates believed in him.

  He and Jayne had pleasurably distracted each other into a later start than she usually managed, so the campus was already crowded by the time they arrived. She pointed out the rack across the playground from the teachers’ parking lot—it was too far for him to be able to identify his own bike among the several it held—and told him again that she was late. He said, “I’ll call you soon.”

  She said, “I know you will,” and headed for her classroom.

  He was halfway across the yard when Gaby came running up to him. “Mr. Lion! What are you gonna do?”

  “About what?”

  “You lost half your mane!” She laughed at her joke and ran back to her friends. He stroked his clean-shaven face. It felt good.

  It was a huge relief to see his bike, but when he tried to wheel it out from between two others, something interfered: a large yellow envelope someone had apparently stuck between the spokes. He yanked it out and looked it over. MR. WALDO was hand printed in thick marker, surrounded by sparkly stickers, like some kind of child’s art project made with a teacher’s help. He wondered if it was a gift from Gaby. That notion evaporated instantly, though, when he saw what was inside: a folded sheet of paper and a DVD, a pornographic parody of a historical drama called The King’s Peach. The actress on the cover had her hair in tightly pasted 1930s curls and was naked but for heels and a large feathered hat, and she was straddling a man of whom little could be seen but an English bowler of the same period.

  The naked actress was Jayne.

  Unmistakably Jayne.

  Waldo fumbled at the paper, on which was written, also in marker:

  Wonder how “Jayne” got hired with no teaching experience?

  Maybe you should “investigate” how well she knows the Headmaster!

  He looked around: was anyone watching him read this? Not that he could spot. Studying the cover again, he went dizzy and heard a sudden, insistent ringing. It took the frantic scurry of kids to their classrooms to make him realize that the bell wasn’t sounding in his head.

  Who is who they are?

  And who had sent him this, and why?

  Waldo walked his bike across the freshly emptied schoolyard to her classroom at the far end of the campus. By the time he got there the door was closed. Through the window he saw that her kindergarteners were already in their seats and Jayne in front of the whiteboard, beginning the day. He caught her eye and she smiled, delighted at what she assumed to be bonus affection, an extra good-bye. She winked, then turned back to her students.

  His phone buzzed and he took it from his pocket: an email. It looked to be a typical come-on from an unfamiliar address, [email protected], with a blind subject line that read Mammoth Opportunity! Discomfited by Jayne and the DVD, he automatically dismissed it as junk or phishing, but he paused before deleting it, if only because of its novelty: he almost never received emails, even spam, since he’d unsubscribed from everything back at the beginning, corresponded with no one, and so rarely bought Things. He idly wondered how some marketer might have snagged his email of late and was about to wipe it to trash when he caught a second look at the address and subject lines, put them together and, dumbfounded, said aloud, “Son of a bitch,” and opened the email.

  There was no link or attachment, just a simple message:

  you never know what you might find in your trunk

  “Motherfucker!” he shouted, loud enough to draw dirty looks from two moms coming out of a second-grade classroom. He jumped on his bike, screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and, too exhilarated to be hindered by his injuries, bolted the campus.

  * * *

  —

  She was alive. He didn’t know where she was, how it was possible, let alone how to keep her that way, but she was alive. Her last words before driving from his cabin reverberated: Unfinished business is a bitch. Had she phrased it that way deliberately, knowing it would stay with him like it did, so that it would make an impression and she could call it back later? She must have cached something in the elephant sculpture, a bit of legerdemain made possible by the way her appearance on the mountain had unnerved him. Every bit of the gambit was so quintessentially Lorena—the boldness, the craftiness, the wordplay. He was so giddy that he didn’t even care that she was taunting him by calling it a mammoth again. And of course he was dying to know what she’d hidden there.

  His curiosity made the two legs of the Greyhound trip back to Banning all the more interminable. Resting his ribs on the bus helped and he was able to bike the flats out there more easily than he’d handled North Hollywood. The worst of the ride was ahead, of course, but he was sure elation and curiosity would carry him, even with his wounds, and by the time he coasted into the low grade at the base of 243 he knew that this trip up the mountain would be manageable. All he’d need was more frequent rest than on the last trip, maybe a five-minute breather every twenty and he’d be fine.

  That confidence lasted until his muscles’ first cry for oxygen. As the huffs grew deeper, the stabbing in his side grew sharper, until the agony was so great that each breath brought tears. When he couldn’t take it anymore he stopped.

  He lay the bike on the shoulder and sat beside it until he regained control of his breathing and the throbbing subsided. He was hoping he’d bitten off at least three or four miles with this first push, though he truly had no idea; the agony had been so all consuming as to scramble any sense of time or distance. He took out his phone to estimate. If the app was right, he’d gone just under a mile. One lousy mile, twenty-three to go, and almost all of them steeper than the first. He was in trouble.

  He took apart the Brompton and bagged it and stuck out his thumb. A Range Rover didn’t slow. Neither did the string of motorcycles that passed a minute later, nor any of the next score of cars. He wondered how long he’d be out here. As a former cop, he sure wouldn’t recommend picking up any hitchhiker screwy enough to be out on this death trap, let alone one who hadn’t had a haircut in three years. But maybe he’d get lucky and some unreconstructed Idyllwild hippie, lightly stoned, would take him for a kindred spirit.

  Salvation came in the form of a Chevron tanker, of all things, its driver lonely for someone to talk at. The trucker’s comp
laints about the weekly run up this road and his wife and the Lakers weren’t quite compelling enough to distract Waldo from the animation playing in his head, the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide and unburned hydrocarbons and other particulate matter defiling the desert sky by the second. It was unforgivable, the damage these two men were doing together, especially that for which Waldo was alone to blame, the marginal atmospheric destruction unleashed when the truck stopped for him and reaccelerated after picking him up. He kicked himself for not anticipating the impossibility of biking in the first place and arranging a zero-footprint option ahead of time.

  Still, thanks to the lift, he reached his property with a good half hour of daylight remaining. He rode along his dirt path, noting with relief that the corpse had been removed, dropped his bike outside the cabin and set out into the woods. In his excitement he pushed a little too hard, reigniting the pain.

  Light played color tricks on the metal, and when Waldo reached the clearing, the evening shadows had turned the sculpture as close to an elephant’s natural hue as it would be all day. Waldo reached up into its raised trunk and stuck his fingers into the hollow, an indentation a few inches deep that he’d never even noticed before. There he found some leaves and muck, and something else too: a blue plastic USB flash drive.

  I want my Mem.

  He rested his back against the metal elephant’s haunches and slowly sunk to the ground, respite for his legs, and controlled his pain with breaths just deep enough to be useful. He intended to rest there only a few minutes so he could make it to the cabin before the last of the daylight was gone but fell asleep with the memory stick in his fist. When he awoke hours later he had to navigate back in the scant moonlight that managed to permeate the high foliage.

  In the cabin he set the computer on his table and turned it on, then plugged the flash drive into the USB port. It contained only one file, a Word document. Waldo tried to read it but got a pop-up instead:

  Enter password to open file.

  Waldo had no idea where to begin. He tried “Nanook.”

  The password is incorrect. Word cannot open the document.

  He tried “Don Q.” Same.

  “Lorena.” Nothing.

  He knew maddeningly little about the trafficker, nothing to inspire a guess. He tried all the interesting words he could remember Q using: “Inuit,” “pejorative,” “Bowflex.”

  “Mem.”

  He tried all uppercase, he tried all lowercase. No luck.

  He assumed the protected file contained incriminating details about Don Q’s business, likely in code and meaningless to Waldo even if he could open it. Still, Don Q must have feared the possibility of it falling into the wrong hands—Cuppy’s? He was desperate enough to kill for it, or at least to let the police believe he’d killed for it.

  Believe he’d killed.

  Waldo thrilled at the reminder: she was alive.

  Fucking Lorena.

  But how had she gotten her hands on this flash drive, and what had she been planning to do with it? Cuppy claimed she was working for Don Q; was that looking more plausible? And why would she run this kind of risk? Again—what had she become in these three years? A blackmailer—could it be? Or was she maybe holding the flash as some kind of insurance, protection because she’d already gotten on Don Q’s bad side for something else?

  Regardless, she had gone to ground now and it was on him to clear the way for her to come back. Maybe he could trade the flash drive for her safety. Of course, even reaching out to arrange a parley was risky; once Don Q knew he was holding the Mem, this whole thing could easily end with Waldo himself the next rotting message on somebody else’s lawn. He’d have to dream up a hell of a play just to get the conversation started.

  He knew that kind of inventiveness wasn’t likely while he was in this condition. Before he could sleep, though, he wanted the Mem out of the cabin, in case he got any more visitors. He took his flashlight and trekked back to the elephant, replaced the thumb drive in the trunk, and on the way back stopped to pick a few vegetables from his garden for a late-night snack, much needed.

  He needed a return to routine, too. Late as it was, he played his four games of chess, putting up admirable resistance in three of them before succumbing to the computer’s inexorable, reassuring crush.

  He climbed into his sleeping loft, the cocoon gladly received after the disconcerting exposure of Alastair’s capacious rooms. Snug, exhausted by the day and drained by the chess, he was sure he’d drop quickly into a deep slumber.

  But it didn’t happen. There was one bit of nettling business wedged in the deeper recesses of his consciousness, hiding for most of the day behind the excitement and mystery and exertion and danger. Or maybe all that excitement had just given him permission not to let it out. Now, in the quiet of the night, there was no more avoiding it.

  Surrendering, he climbed down from the loft and slipped The King’s Peach into his computer’s DVD drive.

  The first surprise was the production values. No basement paneling or bad lighting here: The King’s Peach was a full-on period piece made at some expense, a parody of the Oscar winner about the stuttering king of England, only in this version the speech therapist was a woman, equipped with a whole different set of exercises with which to teach His Majesty to relax his jaw muscles and strengthen his tongue, as well as a bevy of other goodies for incentive in his training. Jayne, playing the therapist, performed under the name Kandi Krush.

  It was an odd sensation and then some, seeing things he’d seen only the night before, albeit now from third-person angles and sometimes augmented by the big feathered hat. Yet somehow it didn’t feel like it had anything to do with them, because this didn’t feel like her. This Kandi was someone else entirely, someone wholly other than the Jayne he’d been starting to fall in love with.

  Until.

  There was this one moment, several scenes in: the speech therapist was about to be taken from behind by the king’s remarkably endowed chancellor of the exchequer (here the plot deviated from the original) and just before it happened Kandi looked over her shoulder at her lover with a fetching glimmer of vulnerability that brought Waldo up short. The camera had been placed near enough to the man’s point of view that Waldo in that instant was seeing exactly the Jayne he knew, and either way—whether Jayne had been acting for Waldo the night before, or whether Kandi had been letting some kind of truth into her performance (shades of Alastair and Judge Johnny)—it tore him up, and he had to press the eject button and stop the scene.

  He climbed back into his sleeping bag and tried to force his way out of consciousness. He reconstructed the opening of his last chess game but couldn’t keep a grip on it. There was too much else competing: Jayne and Kandi and a murder charge still to face and Lorena and Don Q and Alastair and Hollywood and acting and stardom and the Mem . . .

  . . . and suddenly lightning struck his undersense and he had the play. He scrambled down from the loft again and went back to the computer and pounded and clicked, clicked and pounded, until he found everything he was looking for. Then he dialed a cell number.

  Someone answered the line with an unintelligible grunt.

  Waldo said, “That you, Nanook?”

  The Inuit grunted again.

  “Tell your boss I got his goddamn Mem. I’ll be in Hollywood tomorrow afternoon, two o’clock. Tell him to meet me at Alex Trebek and don’t be late.”

  He hung up, nestled back into his cocoon and slept like a baby.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In his gravity-fed shower, he released just enough water, hauled earlier that morning from his well, to lather his hair with the all-natural shampoo he’d ordered from Oregon, made with wind power from hand- and sustainably harvested bladder wrack seaweed. Even with the most eco-friendly product on the market, he still couldn’t wash his hair without getting the willies, thinking of everythin
g he’d spent decades massaging into his scalp without a care and then flushing into the ecosystem: sodium laureth sulfate, ammonium chloride, methylchloroisothiazolinone. Poison, poison, poison.

  A smidgen of shampoo stung his eye and he was reaching for the handle and a sooner-than-planned rinse when the shower door flung open and a black-gloved hand flicked out and popped his nose. Through the water and burn he could dimly make out a figure clad in black from balaclava mask to footwear. He was a naked man confronting a ninja.

  Instinctively he dropped his arms to shield his damaged rib cage, allowing the ninja to grab him by his long, lathery hair and wrench him from the tiny stall and out into the cabin proper. The ninja gripped a wrist and wrenched it backward, pinning Waldo’s face and naked front against a wall.

  “Listen to me,” said the ninja in an unexpected voice: a woman’s. Of the too-many recent altercations, this was surely the most humiliating in every regard.

  “Let me guess,” said Waldo. “You want me to stay on my mountain.”

  The ninja hesitated before saying, surprise in her voice, “. . . Yeah.”

  “And especially stay away from the Pinch case.”

  That disconcerted her more. “. . . That’s right.”

  “Who are you? Who sent you?”

  Confidence returning, she said, “Doesn’t matter. Just don’t come back to L.A. unless you want more of this.” Her voice was starting to ring familiar. But before he had time to place it she walloped him again, launching ripples of fresh agony from the small of his back and his ribs through his limbic system and cerebral cortex, which converted it into a preternatural animal ferocity that drove the pain from his mind long enough to fling himself from the wall and the lady ninja from his back. By the time she caught her balance, he had somehow gotten hold of the top of her balaclava and jerked it off. That same primitive instinct told him to flee to the woods, to exploit his knowledge of the terrain and find a safe hollow where he might nurse his wounds, so he whacked his predator with his MacBook and made for the door.