Below the Line Read online

  The sun was beginning to set as Waldo bypassed Idyllwild, the eccentric little mountain town in which he’d barely set foot, and headed straight for his property on its outskirts. As soon as he veered off the asphalt and started bumping along his private dirt road, he began to feel like himself again, the man who’d lived for three years virtually without human contact.

  He checked on his chickens first, saw that they looked healthy and were still well fixed for food and water. Then he went into his cabin, the prefab that became his home when he entered self-imposed exile over a tragedy for which he blamed himself. It was tiny, a mere 128 square feet, but he never felt cramped by it, especially with his acres of woods and his pond right outside. Indeed, it was something of a cocoon. And the features most extreme in their compactness—the bare-bones kitchenette, the combination shower and composting toilet—weren’t just environmentally sound but reassuring in their efficiency.

  It was too late in the evening to do much else, but, as Waldo always did at his cabin to drain the last of his mental energy, he played four games of computer chess against a level powerful enough that he could be sure in the end it would pick him apart. Then he climbed into his tiny, prism-shaped sleeping loft, that cocoon within the cocoon. But this time, when he settled into his sleeping bag, he did something he hadn’t done in years: he recited aloud the canon he’d composed at the time of the original move.

  “Don’t want,” Waldo said to himself, “don’t acquire, don’t require.

  “Don’t affect.

  “Don’t hurt.”

  In those first days, he’d spoken those words last thing every night and first thing every morning, until he’d perfected his design for living, until actual articulation was superfluous because the whole thing had become self-sustaining and automatic.

  The next morning he resumed his daily mountain routine—tending to the chickens, drawing water from the well, picking meals from his garden and doing the gardening itself, and then the repairs and the daily hike and the reading atop the floating chair on his pond.

  There was one new element now: a couple of daily phone calls with Lorena. To make room for those, he pared not his hour-long ration of soothingly insipid TV, his treasured Hoarders and Kardashians, which he watched through his MacBook, but rather his consumption of news. That was all too dismal and tedious now anyway, with this chaotic new president himself fresh off a reality show, and one of Waldo’s least favored at that (excepting, of course, the nonpareil seasons with Gary Busey).

  Those calls of Lorena’s, though, and her half-dirty texts, unsettled his routine more profoundly than he could have imagined, making his mountain existence distinctly less hermitical yet somehow also more so. He had never felt lonely in his first three years up there, but now the desolation was palpable: at unexpected moments his body literally ached for her, not just in the obvious zones but in random innocent spots—a shoulder, a leg, a finger—that recalled her touch.

  His cabin and his woods had restored enough of his equilibrium that he knew he couldn’t give in to her appeals to abandon them and move back to L.A. So Lorena drove up to Idyllwild instead, a brief visit of only moderate success, the moments of delight offset by Waldo’s freak-out in the hotel shower. By the time she left, there were more new questions than answers.

  Not long afterward, though, Lorena learned her husband would be leaving town again—for a fashion shoot in the Azores—and invited Waldo down for a visit of his own. This time they managed to solve the food problem, at least, with a little planning; the L.A. Farmers Market wasn’t all that far from Lorena’s place, offering culinary variety far greater than he had in his woods, and nearly as sustainable. Minor disputes about the nature of Things aside, on this visit, it was working—they were working—as well as they ever had. That, coupled with her earnest plea, made his decision to spend an extra day in town an easy one.

  * * *

  • • •

  With Lorena off to work in Newport Beach and her husband flopping about in the kitchen, Waldo couldn’t hang around the house, so he showered quickly and slipped out. His daily ablutions didn’t take long, as he hadn’t cut his hair in three years and had decided to let his beard, shorn by a different woman the last time he’d been in L.A., grow out again. It felt of a piece with the rest of his design for living and made him feel more like the self he’d grown comfortable with.

  As soon as he rolled out onto St. Andrews Place on his Brompton, carrying the backpack with all of his traveling Things, he began to regret the extra day in town. Early in his time in the woods he’d devised a routine to give shape to his unfettered hours, attending, in strict sequence, to his property, his body and his mind, and the days passed in their simple, fruitful way. Back in L.A., though, time seemed shapeless and unhealthy. Except when he was with Lorena, he never quite knew what to do with himself.

  He rode down to Melrose and headed east, away from its funky-chic stretch, to an indie coffee joint called Shauna’s, which he’d stumbled onto a few days earlier when he noticed its mismatched, salvaged-looking furniture and a sign in the window that read, WE COMPOST, not exactly the savviest or most appetizing come-on for most, but catnip for Waldo. Indeed the place was empty when he first visited, and its eponymous owner, a flower child born at the wrong time, had too few customers, leaving her free to chat. Shauna was committed to bringing a new level of sustainability to the L.A. coffee business, doing the roasting right there in her shop and buying beans not only organic and Fair Trade Certified but shade-grown, thus preserving habitats for migratory birds, and shipped exclusively in reusable bags. She offered a fifty-cent discount if you brought your own cup, and if you didn’t, you had to drink from one of her ceramic mugs; disposables were unthinkable here, even the greenish ones. Waldo wanted to kiss her. Shauna knew the business would be tough going, that a price point of five-fifty for a medium would scare off a lot of people. When Waldo said, “Not me,” she grinned and told him that if he could go eight bucks, she could hook him up with a surprisingly flavorsome cup made with beans grown, believe it or not, right up the 101 in Santa Barbara.

  Today he took a table by the window and sipped that tasty local from a BPA-free travel mug he’d recently bought, after donating his cabin drinking cup to Goodwill. He browsed the day’s news on his phone, then took out his Kindle and dove into a history of Winston Churchill’s tragic attack on the Dardanelles in World War I, a blunder that led to the slaughter of forty-six thousand Allied troops, more men than the US lost in the entire Korean War. Churchill never shook the specter of that disaster: it became part of him, played a role in forging the man who’d save the free world a generation later. Maybe there was something hopeful in the story.

  A limping passerby caught a glimpse of Waldo and doubled back. He rattled the glass with both hands until Waldo looked up at him and, when he did, came inside. “I know you. You’re Charlie Waldo.”

  But Waldo didn’t know him. The man was pudgy and middle-aged with salt-and-pepper hair shagging out from under a pink fishing hat at irregular lengths, like he’d cut it himself. Waldo was accustomed to being recognized by strangers, to the occasional gaze lasting way too long, but actually being accosted was unusual. The first time he was semifamous, after Lydell Lipps, it was as a fire-breathing madman; even the people who thought he was a kind of hero steered clear. And since this second time, he simply hadn’t been out in public much.

  “It’s you, right?”

  “Do we know each other?”

  The pudgy man dragged his bad leg closer to Waldo, too close, and now looked straight down at him. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” His thick-lensed red plastic glasses were askew and he sniffled. Waldo wondered what he was on. “Monica Pinch—it’s bullshit, right? I’ve been following it all on the internet.” Waldo had seen the conspiracies online and knew what was coming. “Those guys who bought the network just wanted to keep Alastair Pinch out of jail, so they ha
d that other guy murdered so he couldn’t defend himself. You weren’t anywhere near there when the guy got shot, but they’re blackmailing you not to say anything, right? With more information about the black guy.”

  Waldo was actually able to follow every twist of the pronoun-laden gibberish, familiar as he was with this fun-house-mirror perversion of his two famous cases, a conspiracy theory launched in the wilds of cyberspace that had spread so quickly on social media that it had become a story in itself, reported as a curiosity by mainstream outlets and then joked about in late-night monologues, irresistible given Pinch’s celebrity. All that amplification had somehow given the ludicrous proposition a weird sheen of half-facetious credibility, so that now, according to CNN’s polling on the subject, this nonsense was believed by twenty-three percent of the American public, or about three times the number who believed the US government faked the moon landing.

  “What the cops are saying isn’t true, right? You can tell me, I won’t repeat it. I just have to know.” He sniffled again. Maybe it was just allergies and the guy just a wack job.

  Waldo said, “If there were a trial, you’d see it was the truth.”

  The guy squinted through his thick glasses, then seemed to decide that Waldo was confiding in him in code. “I hear you,” he said with another sniffle. “Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.” The guy started out, then paused in the doorway. “Thank God we have the internet, right? The legal system just wants to fuck us.” Limping back out to the street, he smacked the doorframe with his palm, taking out on Shauna’s shop his rage at the soulless cabal out there working day and night to bamboozle us all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Waldo was used to a long daily hike when he was on his mountain, five miles or more, but today he replaced it with a bike ride, Melrose into Santa Monica and all the way to the ocean, then south past the pier, along the Pacific to Venice Beach. He found a bench on the boardwalk and killed the rest of the afternoon people watching and reading more about Gallipoli. Then it was back to Santa Monica and the restaurant on Main Street, where he was to meet Lorena at six. Arriving a few minutes early, he peeked inside and saw she wasn’t there yet, so he sat at a bus stop and disassembled and bagged his bike before going in.

  The place was called Caffe Ecco, the extra f and c a little pretentious for his taste, but otherwise all he could ask a restaurant to be: run entirely on solar, carbon neutral, all dishes prepared with local-sourced ingredients, deliveries made only by foot or bicycle and in plant-based compostable boxes. They even recycled their cooking oil to power their owner’s modified Jetta. Lorena, more the gastronome, gave the cuisine a C-minus, but, as even she said, you didn’t really eat at Caffe Ecco for the food.

  The hostess seated Waldo at a rectangular four-top in the corner. He browsed the menu, decided on the pasta with crab, Broccolini and cherry tomatoes, and had just pulled his Kindle from his backpack when he realized a young blonde with a pale pink braided streak was hovering at his table, fingers drumming the chair opposite his. “Are you Mr. Waldo?” She was very thin, seventeen, he’d guess, but dressed older, a halter top under an open diaphanous shirt that showed a lot of midriff and a belly-button ring, a short skirt and oversize sunglasses. If she were his daughter, he’d tell her to go back to her room and change. He nodded and she sat down without being invited. Apparently she wasn’t a waitress.

  She propped the sunglasses on her head, revealing smoky eye makeup with copper glitter. “I’m Stevie Rose. Ms. Nascimento said to meet you guys here.” Waldo waited for more. “She didn’t tell you about me?” Waldo shook his head, disconcerted. She said, “Don’t be scared,” with a flirty, pursed smile so immodest that he recalculated: maybe she was much older. “I need to hire a detective. Ms. Nascimento said you work with her sometimes.”

  Waldo half shrugged; it wasn’t really true, not in any practical way, and anyhow Lorena shouldn’t have ambushed him like this.

  “She said I should come here and meet both of you.” She put her sunglasses on the table and peeled off the top shirt, showing even more skin as she stretched, then laid it over the empty seat beside her and, all golden hair and bare, slender shoulders, leaned across the table toward him. “Can I call you by your first name?”

  “People call me Waldo. Like a first name.”

  “Waldo. Waldo.” With that coquettish smile again she tried it out a couple of more times, like she was testing how his name felt in her mouth.

  “Why don’t you tell me why you need a detective.”

  “Before Ms. Nascimento gets here? We don’t want to start having our own private secrets, do we . . . Waldo?” That pursed smile again.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Waldo started to raise his hand and ask for the check, then remembered he hadn’t ordered yet. He said, “You go to school?”

  “Stoddard. In the Valley. You know it?”

  In fact, he knew it well. It was where Alastair and Monica Pinch’s daughter went to kindergarten. It was her teacher, Jayne White, who’d given him that shave, though Jayne White was long gone. “Yeah. You live in the Valley?”

  “Sherman Oaks.” That would be an hour trip in rush-hour traffic. “I took an Uber. So are you and Ms. Nascimento like a couple, or do you just work together?”

  “Why don’t we talk about why you need her help.”

  “Yours, too. Do you have a cigarette?”

  “L.A. County—can’t smoke in a restaurant.”

  “It’s for later.”

  “You’re fifteen.”

  She leaned in again. “I won’t tell anyone. Promise.” She knew he wouldn’t give her a cigarette; now she was just screwing with him. “If you order a glass of wine for yourself, can I share it with you?” The way she held his eye suggested she’d be up for raising the stakes beyond that.

  He was tiring quickly of her challenges. He held a flat look until her boldness wilted and her self-possession cracked. She started drumming again with her left hand and looked away. Sounding more like a scared fifteen-year-old, she said, “I don’t know where my brother is.”

  “How long has he been missing?”

  “Like a week? Sometimes he stays late in the library, or I thought maybe he had a date or something, so I didn’t take it too seriously at first?” Now that she was back to being a teenager, she slipped into the verbal tic of making most of her sentences sound like questions.

  “Where are your parents?”

  She shook her head. “They died. Car crash, like two years ago? Terrence became my guardian.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-three now. He’s always been like super-responsible, honor student at UCLA, prelaw, the whole thing.”

  “Still, I’m surprised the court went with that, if he was only twenty-one.”

  “My parents had it in their will. They wanted to make sure we didn’t get split up.”

  “So, what—you’ve been staying home by yourself all this time?”

  Now it was her turn to half shrug. “My friend Dionne’s mom drives me to school. People, like, always want to do stuff for me, since . . .” She trailed off and looked at the silverware. Since her parents got killed. He was getting it now: she was an orphan, playing grown-up because she had no choice, because she had to keep selling the world on her maturity. With nobody to tell her to go back to her room and change.

  Waldo asked, “Other relatives?” She shook her head. He felt the urge to fix it all for this kid, though he knew it was probably better left to the authorities. “How did you get Lorena’s name?” he said, then clarified: “Ms. Nascimento.”

  “Yelp.”

  Lorena was at the front door, scanning the restaurant. She saw him and headed to the table. She seemed unsurprised to see the girl with him, which reminded him of his annoyance that she’d bushwhacked him with a client.

/>   Waldo had Stevie repeat her story. He angled his chair so that he could watch Lorena listening. She seemed thrown by Stevie’s appearance; he could tell this tarted-up teen wasn’t the foundling she’d been expecting. When Stevie got to the end, he asked her why she’d called Lorena instead of the police.

  “My brother’s into drugs a little? I don’t think anything serious, but especially with the whole legal-guardian thing, I didn’t want to end up getting taken away and put in, like, a foster home?” The ice she was drawing them onto was looking thinner and thinner. He tried to catch Lorena’s eye but she didn’t look away from Stevie.

  Lorena asked for grilled swordfish and Waldo got that crab pasta. Stevie, despite Lorena’s entreaties to order something more substantial, would accept only an appetizer salad. Her dressing on the side went unused and she mostly picked at her lettuce. Waldo noticed that Lorena left half her fish uneaten, too.

  Stevie took out an envelope and said that it had five hundred dollars in it. She told them that she and her brother both had access to a checking account, that their father had arranged things so that there would always be money for them on the first of the month and that they were fine. Lorena told Stevie that her agency’s fee was one hundred dollars per man-hour plus expenses and that she usually began with a one-thousand-dollar retainer but would accept Stevie’s five hundred in this case. Waldo’s instinct was not to take the money, but he kept that to himself. Lorena took a small ledger from her bag and wrote out a receipt.

  Waldo asked what else Stevie could tell them about her brother. Not much, it turned out: she didn’t know many of his college friends very well, and those she did were gone from Los Angeles, having graduated and moved on while Terrence took his time off.

  “What about girls?”

  “I know he has hookups. Once in a while some girl spends the night—we’ve got, like, a hot tub and everything? But I kind of try to stay out of the way?”