Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  It took Waldo a moment to surrender to the embrace. But they fit, like they always had, and it was just like it used to be except it wasn’t.

  She said, “You ghosted me, Waldo.”

  He said, “I ghosted everybody.”

  “I know.”

  “It was a bad time.”

  She squeezed him tighter. After a moment she said, “You’re skinny. But you smell better than you look.”

  “You’re lucky—it was shower day.”

  She chuckled. So did he. She turned her face up to his. There was no doubt now: she did want him to kiss her. Seeing that, he was overwhelmed by a desire powerful and familiar, the desire to be left alone. So he said, “I do have to live like this.”

  She let go of him, stepped back and sighed, she registering the rejection and he registering what this visit had taught him: that whatever each of them might still be, together they would never again be young.

  “You got a bathroom, at least, before I drive back to L.A.?”

  Waldo, knowing she wouldn’t like it, told her, “It’s kind of in the shower.” She frowned but started for the cabin anyway, so he got more specific. “It’s a composting toilet—after you go, you take some sawdust and spread it on top . . .”

  She stopped. “There’s a gas station in Idyllwild.” She got into her Porsche, made a broken U, pulled up beside him and rolled down her window. “You can’t stay up here forever, Waldo.”

  “No?” he said. “Why not?”

  “Same reason you and I kept hooking back up,” she said. “Unfinished business is a bitch.”

  With that, she finally left him alone. Waldo watched Lorena disappear behind the trees and the dust, realizing how much he wished she had stayed.

  TWO

  Junk television was Waldo’s weakness, and he allowed himself an hour a day through his MacBook while preparing and eating his dinner and cleaning up. He was especially drawn to shows about lifestyles opposite to his—any of the Real Housewives or Rich Kids of Beverly Hills or, best of all, the old MTV Cribs. There was something irresistible and strangely soothing about watching Floyd Mayweather flaunting a twelve-person shower with, needless to say, no toilet built into the floor. Tonight, still roiled by Lorena’s visit the day before, he was grateful to stumble onto a rerun of one of his favorites, Adam Richman’s Man v. Food, and a particularly rewarding episode at that, the one where Adam conquers a twelve-patty cheeseburger.

  Waldo finished his stir-fried vegetables and went outside to the compost heap to scrape the leavings, and when he came back inside, a junk commercial was playing. He even liked those, though not so much this ubiquitous fitness guru, this aggressive Savannah Moon with her fierce abs and fingerless gloves, always shouting at him through the screen like she was now: “Face it, you feel like crap. You look like crap. I wouldn’t want to be you—why would you want to be you?”

  Waldo shook his head and muttered, “Believe me,” then washed his bowl with the last of the day’s water.

  As Waldo did every night to tire himself into easy sleep, he played four games of online chess against a computer opponent, choosing a setting too good for him to beat, believing that one didn’t get better by winning, only by losing less badly, that the only thing you got out of winning was gratification and gratification was fool’s gold. He lost twice as white and twice as black, countering a Ruy Lopez in the final game with a Berlin Defence and giving the AI a tougher go than usual before losing a bishop to a fork he should have seen coming. Per his own rules, Waldo played the game to the bitter end. Resigning was for cowards; it was almost like cheating not to pay for the loss in full by taking it all the way to the bittersweet taste of checkmate.

  This time of year Waldo could awaken with the sunrise, dress and get straight to the business of the day. He fed the chickens, collected their eggs and put them in the refrigerator, mended the fence around his garden, and gathered some arugula, potatoes, snap peas and turnips for the two meals he’d eat today. He carried a basket down to the grove and picked eight navel oranges, snacks for four days, eating the first right off the tree. He drew his daily water and scrubbed yesterday’s clothes clean, again pondering the problematic sock, currently on his left foot. The work complete, he took his daily hike through the woods, beyond his property line and on a loop through the undeveloped acreage beyond, six miles in all. It was the first day warm enough to go without his jacket.

  Then it was time for lunch, a perusal of the news online and, this being a Sunday, a review of his finances. Three years ago he’d taken the equity in his San Fernando Valley home, a bank-owned fixer he’d shrewdly bought during the worst of the crash and on which in only four years he’d turned a mid-six-figure profit, bought the Idyllwild acreage and the prefab cabin for cash, and had plenty left over to invest in an income-oriented vehicle within a family of socially responsible mutual funds. He kept his expenses to a minimum—mostly things like property taxes, internet fees, content for his Kindle and, literally, chicken feed—and well within what that fund threw off. Waldo checked the numbers weekly, made transfers to his local checking account when cash was needed, and on the first Sunday of each month, if his account sat above ten thousand dollars, made a contribution of the excess, to the penny, to one of several environmentally oriented nonprofits. Today that meant sending thirteen dollars and forty-seven cents to the Natural Resources Defense Council, with the usual “In Memory Of.”

  The work of the day complete, Waldo stepped outside, shed his flannel shirt and tee, tested the sunshine and decided to pull the floating lounge chair from behind the cabin and drag it toward the pond. Waldo thought of the chair as his one extravagance, the one Thing he could most easily live without. The day Rico delivered it, Waldo renounced his comb.

  He took his scrub brush and with pond water scrubbed off an entire winter’s grime from the chair, thinking this would be so much easier if he could cover the chair with a tarp, though he couldn’t imagine a Thing to part with that would justify that. Then he stripped to his boxers, settled into the floating chair with his Kindle, and pushed himself out into the middle of the pond to drift and read in the sunshine, the closest thing to luxury he knew anymore.

  Waldo read mostly history and biographies, each by its conclusion confirming his theory of the world, that even the greatest triumphs came with unintended consequences, usually tragic. Washington and Jefferson begat Gettysburg and the Wilderness. Curie and Einstein and Bohr begat Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gandhi begat half a million slaughtered in Hindu-Muslim riots. Now Waldo was halfway through David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, about how JFK attracted to Washington the finest minds in academia and industry, the candlepower that led us straight into Vietnam. In this way reading history made Waldo feel less alone.

  For the second time in three days he was startled to hear tires turning off the asphalt and onto the dirt hill, but this visitor burned up the road faster than Lorena did, noisier, too. Waldo foot-paddled to the pond’s edge, tossed his Kindle onto the grass and clambered to his feet.

  A vintage Corvette roared around the bend, kicking dust and wheezing black smoke. It halted by the pond and a brawny man with thinning blond hair climbed out wearing a rumpled suit and holding a half-eaten sandwich. He looked Waldo up and down, making Waldo think again about his own appearance, unshaven and dripping, underweight and almost naked.

  Cuppy shook his head, said, “Jesus, Waldo,” just like Lorena did, and stuffed the last of the sandwich into his maw. Then he crumpled the foil and paper and tossed them into the pond.

  “Shouldn’t do that.”

  “No? Call a cop.” Cuppy, who was still plainclothes LAPD, thought this was pretty funny. Then he pulled down his zipper and fished around for his dick.

  “What are you doing, Cuppy . . . ?”

  Cuppy pulled it out and began to pee into Waldo’s pond. “Dub Gerhardt says hello.”

  Dub Ger
hardt had been Cuppy’s partner. Post-Waldo, there had been an independent panel that wound up spending a lot of its energy on Gerhardt: nine of his busts had been overturned and, according to the L.A. Times, Gerhardt avoided prosecution himself only by agreeing to resign from the department without pension. Waldo marveled at how rarely Cuppy’s name surfaced in those articles; he’d always found Cuppy a bigger asshole than his partner and assumed he was dirtier, too. But here was Cuppy, still standing, and pissing in Waldo’s pond.

  “Tell me about Lorena Nascimento,” Cuppy said. “She was up here a couple days ago.”

  “I’ll have to check my visitor’s log.”

  “What she say about Don Q?”

  Lorena hadn’t said anything that sounded remotely like “Don Q,” but Waldo wasn’t going to share even that much. “That a person?”

  “I guess, if you’re not too particular about what you consider a person. He’s a captain of industry—pharmaceutical industry. Lorena works for him now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit. We got this guy wired so good, his balls itch, my cell phone rings. Notice baby girl’s ride? Where you think she gets that kind of cheese?”

  “Where does a cop with four kids get the cheese for a ’Vette?” Waldo pretended to remember. “Oh right.” Waldo thought back to the first time he saw the legendary Big Jim Cuppy, shooting craps in the woods at Griffith Park at the L.A. Police Protective League picnic, Cuppy and Gerhardt and a half dozen other detectives holding stacks of twenties an inch thick, talking shit and rolling dice for dirty money while their wives ate macaroni salad and their kids ran sack races. Cuppy had the biggest wad and the biggest mouth.

  Cuppy finished his whiz and zipped himself back up. “Your girlfriend took something that belongs to Don Q—not exactly recommended by the New England Journal of Medicine. What I think is, she came up here to leave the thing with you. And if you’re smart, you’re gonna give it to me.”

  “You know I always love to help you, Cuppy, but I haven’t seen her.”

  “Oh, she was here. Last thing she did on her computer was Google Map this asspile, and the last ping from her cell came through Idyllwild.”

  Waldo didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean, ‘last thing’? What, there a missing persons open?”

  “No; that would require someone gives a shit. What are you lookin’ at me? Even you didn’t give a shit. She came up here for help and you probably stood there like Grizzly Adams in your panties and told her to fuck off, am I right?” Cuppy opened his car door. “Anyways, this one guy, pissed off Don Q? He got cut in half.” He demonstrated with a hand, sawing the air in front of his waist. “Short way, like the Black Dahlia. Then Q mailed both halves to the guy’s parents, UPS. They were divorced, so it kinda worked out.”

  “Lorena can handle herself. Better than you or me.” Waldo wasn’t kidding. One time Lorena had gotten video of a client’s husband, a former NFL defensive end, taking two women into a motel room. After the lineman lost everything in the divorce, he was so angry he waited for Lorena in the garage of her apartment building with a few advantages on her, namely two hundred pounds, eleven inches and a hunting knife. He was the one who ended up in intensive care. When Waldo commented on the odds against a stun from her Taser giving the guy a coronary, Lorena said out of the side of her mouth, “Well, yeah—a stun.”

  Cuppy got into the Corvette and talked to Waldo through the open window. “Uh-huh. Could be she just blew out of town. And left her car in front of her house, and stopped using her phone.” He turned the ignition, and the black smoke billowed again. “Let me know if you get any packages.” He leaned out to spit near Waldo’s feet and drove off.

  Waldo found a fallen branch and lifted Cuppy’s sandwich wrapper from the pond. Then he went inside for his iPhone and dialed the last number he had for Lorena. It went straight to voicemail.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t until after he’d finished his veggie omelet that Waldo realized he’d been too distracted to even think about finding junk to watch over dinner. He did play his usual games of chess, losing badly and losing worse. It was early still so he lost two extra times before stripping to his shorts and tee and climbing up to bed.

  When he had moved into the miniature cabin, the sleeping loft was one of its most daunting features—an equilateral triangle at each end, three feet to a side, leaving him enough room to turn over but not much more. He slept with his head by the ladder the first night but found it cumbersome working his way in and treacherous climbing out, so the second night he started sleeping head-in, staving off claustrophobia by cracking the tiny window at the far end as much as the night would permit and, more important, by falling asleep quickly. There was a trick to that, too, he found: be physically active during the day, don’t ever nap, and tap out what’s left of your waking energy with chess. Most nights four games would leave him sleepy enough to drift off right away, wrapped in his cozy Cabela’s Mountain Trapper sleeping bag, one of his most treasured Things.

  Tonight, though, none of that worked. Cuppy’s hints and warnings besieged him. The loft seemed smaller, the triangle more oppressive. Lorena hadn’t asked him for help except on the Pinch case. Or was that code, was she trying to tell him something else he was too dense or too rusty to decipher? Was she inspecting him, testing him, trying to figure out whether he even had enough juice anymore to help her, and did he fail her test? Had she wanted to leave the thing Cuppy was looking for but decided Waldo couldn’t handle it?

  Or maybe Cuppy was just taking shots in the dark. And wanting to get to Waldo, that’s why all the hard talk, to put pictures in his head, pictures of Lorena as the Black Dahlia, sliced in half and naked, naked, naked Lorena, and something done to her, naked Lorena, incredible naked Lorena, dark everywhere, and then Waldo had all the other thoughts to torture him, the old ones that most nights he could outrun by falling asleep quickly, the ones that usually didn’t come until sleep began to wear off in the morning, at which point he could chase them by getting on with the day.

  The triangle was small and getting smaller. Waldo went to his last, best trick, the one he used on the other occasional nights when sleep didn’t come: chess, with its own minimalism, its white and black and sixty-four squares, infinity so economically packed into its own tight box. He tried to recall, in notation, all the moves from tonight’s game, to see if he could remember every single thing that happened before the bottom fell out.

  e4 e5

  Nf3 Nc6

  Bb5 Nf6

  Nc3 Bc5

  O-O d5 . . .

  It worked. Waldo lost himself in the middle game and slid at last into a sound and untroubled sleep, dreaming of nothing but pawns and diabolically pinned knights until he felt the sleeping bag starting to move underneath him and himself being yanked with it and then the body blow the cabin floor put on him after a seven-foot drop.

  THREE

  Everything hurt so much he couldn’t even tell what part of his body was injured. They found the light switch and he saw there were three of them. His instinct was to start marking details, but before he got a chance they grabbed the bottom of the sleeping bag, pulled it straight up and dumped him onto the floor, which at least clarified his left elbow as the locus of the pain. He reached for the ladder with his other arm, hoping to pull himself to his feet, but one of them stomped his hand with a work boot. “Get this bitch outside,” another said. “They ain’t room in this drum to kick his ass.”

  Waldo finally got a look: they were all in their late teens, twenty tops. One had dreadlocks dyed blond about halfway down, one was bare chested but inked all the way up his neck and even to one cheekbone, and the third had a grill and heavy gold ropes and a baseball cap on backward. All three were white.

  Grill took Waldo by the back of his T-shirt and Tattoo grabbed one of his arms and they yanked him to his feet. Dreads held
open the door and Grill, the biggest, kicked Waldo in the small of the back and out into the night. Waldo tumbled, rolled and scrambled far enough away to take a defensive crouch.

  Grill sauntered over. “Ready to do the duggie, Grandpa?” He lowered his shoulder but Waldo came up faster with a surprise right that caught Grill in the throat. Grill sputtered, struggling for breath. Waldo couldn’t resist a jab to the mouth, knowing the jewelry would mean a lot of blood.

  Tattoo came at Waldo next, swinging high but missing, letting Waldo pop him with a right and follow it with a left hook that struck home but made Waldo’s elbow howl. Waldo bulled him straight into the wheezing Grill and they stumbled over each other and both went down. These guys kind of blow, Waldo thought.

  He barely had time to look around for the third when something caught him hard across the side of the head, setting him spinning and leaving white spots where the rest of the world should be. As he fell to his hands and knees he heard Tattoo call, “What you hit him wit’, yo?”

  Dreads grinned and brandished Waldo’s cast-iron frying pan. “Rapunzeled him wit’ dis skizzay.”

  Tattoo was getting up. “Fuck’s a skizzay?” he asked.

  “Skillet,” Dreads said. “Skillet—skizzay.”

  “’At ain’t a skillet, yo. ’At’s a fryin’ pan. An’ nobody talk dat Snoop shit no mo’.”

  “I’m bringin’ it back,” said Dreads, adding thoughtfully, “Fryin’ pan—frizzay?”

  Waldo stayed down, dumbfounded by the chatter but tired of fighting. “Fuck do you numbnuts want?”

  Dreads said, “We want you to keep yo’ ass up on this muthafuckin’ mountain, ’at’s what we want. And stay away from ’at muthafuckin’ Alastair Pinch.”

  “You don’t, you gonna get mo’ visits from the Palisades Posse,” added Tattoo.