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  Lorena said, “Tell us more about the drugs.”

  Stevie pushed her salad around the plate. She said, “I don’t want him to get hassled over it, okay?” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lorena nodding. The cop in him knew that was a tough promise to make. “He smokes a lot of weed. Especially since our parents? But he definitely does too much Adderall, you know? He says it’s for school, but he takes more than he can get with a prescription.” Lorena kept nodding.

  Waldo said, “Enough that you think he might get in trouble for it?”

  Stevie said, “It’s really more the guy Terrence buys from—I think he might sell more than that? They’ve been hanging out a lot.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  Stevie put down her fork and shook her head.

  Gently, Lorena said, “Stevie, we can’t help you if you don’t help us.”

  The girl took a deep breath, looked at Lorena and said, “It’s this guy, Mr. Ouelette? He’s a history teacher at our school? We both had him—Terrence in ninth grade, and then me last year.”

  Waldo said, “At Stoddard?” Stevie nodded. “And he still works there?”

  “He’s, like, the cool teacher, you know? But maybe, like . . . a little too cool?”

  THREE

  I’ll split the five with you. It probably won’t go any further than that.”

  He’d barely shut the passenger-side door of her Mercedes and she was already talking money. “I was surprised you took it at all.”

  “This ain’t a charity, Waldo. It’s how I make my living. How my ops make their livings, too.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hey, if you want me to keep all of it—”

  “What we should be doing is calling child services.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’ll help. Put a girl looks like that in a foster home, even temporarily?” She was right; it was a tragedy waiting to happen. “Let her stay in her house by herself a few more days. It’s not like it’s hurting anybody. She’s going to school.”

  They stopped for a light. Waldo watched a cluster of well-dressed diners compete for a valet’s attention outside one of the tonier restaurants on Main, then watched them scatter as a white-haired wild man staggered down their sidewalk shouting something about fascism. Santa Monica.

  Waldo’s silence made Lorena defensive. “We could find this kid, you know. Could be in a hospital. Could be he got tired of being twenty-three and having to play dad, so he’s with a girl somewhere blowing off a little steam. There are a dozen explanations that could end with these kids getting to stay in their house.” When Waldo still didn’t answer, she said, “Really, you want to fuck up this girl’s life even more? God, she looks terrible.”

  She’d looked a lot of things to Waldo, but terrible wasn’t one of them. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you see her arms? They’re like twigs.”

  “She’s fifteen. Give her time, she’ll put some meat on her bones.”

  “She’s anorexic, Waldo. She’s putting lettuce on her bones. She didn’t even eat the fucking tomatoes.”

  Chastened, he decided this wasn’t the time to bring up the way Lorena had sprung Stevie on him in the first place. But that’s what bothered him all the way to the Malachite, the supposedly ultra-green hotel Lorena had found overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, in among the expensive joints on Ocean Avenue.

  Lorena checked them in. The Malachite’s self-satisfied vibe made him dubious and he perused the hotel brochure. The very fact of its glossy finish was a tell that the eco-friendliness was more sales job than substance. Some of the gestures—vegan beer at the lobby bar and headboards made of recycled barn wood—were almost laughable.

  Nonetheless, they were gestures, and meant Lorena was trying. So what if they stayed one night at a hotel whose commitment to the Earth was less substantial than it pretended? He was going to have to start compromising, start making exactly this kind of tiny bend, if he was going to try to build something with her.

  So he gritted his teeth and said nothing as they rode the elevator—an elevator? to go up two floors?—Waldo with his backpack, Lorena rolling an overnight bag. He opened the door to their room. The barn headboard looked ridiculous. He peeked into the bathroom, which indeed featured a waterless urinal, but the toilet paper was far too snowy to be recycled. Jesus, these people.

  “What?” said Lorena, annoyed, his moral judgment apparently cutting through his silence.

  He deflected by turning to the withheld grievance about Stevie. “You shouldn’t have dropped her on me like that.”

  “It wasn’t deliberate. She called this afternoon and said she needed to see me right away. I didn’t want to cancel our dinner after you’d hung around town all day. And it sounded like the kind of thing you might work with me on—Gary Cooper stuff, right? No motel windows. Come on, it’s good for us. Trial run.”

  If he were going to bail, this was the moment. But he said, “If we’re dry after a couple days, we bring in CFS. We shouldn’t be leaving her on her own for weeks without telling anybody.”

  “Deal.” She grinned, triumphant.

  He couldn’t abandon an orphan, and the case had found Lorena, not the other way around. Still, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d been played. Fucking Lorena.

  She said, “I’m the one who knows you, Waldo,” and took the collar of his jacket between her thumb and forefinger. “Relax into it. Trust me. You’ll see: we can make all of it work.” She gave him a quick peck on the lips, took a few things out of her overnight luggage and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door. “Oh,” she said from the other side, “I didn’t have a chance to tell you—I crushed it in the O.C.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Rich asshole from Newport Beach—first day on the job, caught him having a nooner at the Best Western right next to Disneyland. Gets a room you can see the Matterhorn out the window, probably even the dwarfs walking around. You think that gets some people hot?” He understood why she was buzzed on the day—a quick win in an enclave like Newport Beach could mean word of mouth with a big upside—but he always found this sort of Lorena war story vaguely distasteful. “Could you imagine if I got it rocking down on that Gold Coast, had a second set of ops? Anyway,” she said, “I was feeling so good about myself, I bought something for you.”

  That pushed him past the edge. The whole night was already feeling wrong—the unexpected case, the eco-bullshit hotel—and now she’d done it again: another Thing? “I told you,” he said, “I don’t want anything else. It’s too hard for me to find something to get rid of. Why can’t you listen to what I’m—”

  The bathroom door opened and she cut him off. “Stop being a fuckhead.” The fixture over the sink backlit her but he could hear the smile in her voice. When she stepped deeper into the room, she had on a pink scoop-neck bodysuit he’d never seen before. His breath stopped; his huff dissipated. She said, “This is what I bought for you,” and did a turn, modeling the hardly there back. “Guess what else? You know that old Dodgers sweatshirt I keep in my trunk?” He nodded. “I stopped on Ocean Park and gave it to a homeless woman. So my Things? I’m still at an even Ten Thousand.”

  Waldo laughed, at himself and with her, enchanted in every way.

  * * *

  • • •

  They luxuriated in the ocean breeze and in each other well into the morning and barely made the noon checkout. Waldo had little to do until late afternoon, anyway: they’d agreed that Lorena would dig around UCLA to see what she could learn about Terrence Rose, while Waldo would brace the teacher Victor Ouelette after he came home from work.

  But first he had chickens to deal with.

  He kept a coop up on the mountain, five hens and two roosters, their output a principal source of his nutrition but a ceaseless responsibility. When he came down from the mountain the first time, almost two months
ago, he’d left them water and a full feeder, but the whole time he was away he was nagged by the fear that something could go wrong. Abandoning them again, possibly regularly, required a sturdier solution, complicated by the fact that he’d lived his years up there without meeting a soul other than his letter carrier.

  His first thought had been to find a local vet who might recommend an enthusiastic high schooler whom Waldo could hire to check on the coop every couple of days. But he learned there were no vets atop the mountain; he’d have to look to Banning or maybe even Palm Desert, and there wasn’t much chance of finding a kid willing or able to make the long haul up 243. There was no choice but to do something that would have been unthinkable just months earlier, before his experiences with Alastair Pinch and Jayne White: hike down his long dirt drive and out onto the public road and attempt to meet his neighbors.

  All the properties nearby were large—Waldo himself owned a dozen acres—so the entrances were set pretty far apart. The nearest driveway, well down the road from his, on the opposite side, turned out to be composed of perfectly laid brick and lined with flowers. He walked its length, finding, around a bend to the right, a wooden chalet, big enough to support at least four bedrooms. The grounds were impeccably tended. He rang the doorbell but no one answered. He peeked in the windows and was stunned by the opulence, a plush set of sofas arranged around a large stone fireplace and an open floor plan revealing an eight-chair dining table beyond. It was probably some big shot’s weekend spot, a million-dollar home, maybe multimillion, in shouting distance of his austere cabin. Waldo had lived across the street for three years with no idea. He circled the manse, scoped the black-bottomed pool and spa behind, then hiked back out into the road.

  In sharp contrast, the second driveway hardly merited the name; it was more like a pair of tire indentations through overgrown weeds, the path leading not even to a mini-cabin like Waldo’s but to a rusty Airstream with a single cheap folding lawn chair beside it. A family of raccoons watched Waldo from beyond the trailer, which surprised him, because he’d never seen any on his own land, and unnerved him, because raccoons had always held the spot just above bats and just below opossums on his private list of the world’s creepiest animals. He also knew that, despite his careful system of fencing and locks, raccoons were clever and persistent enough to pose a danger to his chickens and even to his cabin itself if they took up residence on his land while he was away.

  The door to the trailer flung open and a seventyish woman came out brandishing a broom in Waldo’s direction, though he was a good twenty yards away. Amazingly, the raccoons didn’t flinch. She wore a tattered housedress and was in all ways a good physical match for her driveway.

  Waldo introduced himself as her neighbor and she engaged in tentative conversation from a safe distance. As her paranoia subsided she told him that her name was Hilda Flitt, that she’d lived here for decades, and that the raccoons clustered on her property because she fed them regularly. She’d come to treat them almost like pets, not only naming them but becoming surprisingly involved with their physical and even emotional lives. She called the mother Grace Slick and believed she was suffering from a urinary infection. The older child, Rascal Face, wasn’t much interested in cleaning himself, and the little girl, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, wasn’t growing as fast as she should. Hilda told him that the father, Egg McMuffin, was prone to anxiety attacks.

  Waldo figured that so devoted an animal lover, however nutty, might be as good a match for his needs as he was likely to find. He suggested that she look after his coop when he was out of town, in return for which she could take the eggs, plus he’d compensate her in chicken feed to pass on to the McMuffin brood too. Hilda agreed and also suggested a neighborly exchange of keys to each other’s homes, for safety reasons. Beyond the premature intimacy, that would also mean, of course, a problematic additional Thing. Waldo demurred on the latter grounds, explaining to her his minimalism and the Hundred.

  Hilda Flitt screwed up her face and said, “Holy moly, man. That’s freakin’ bonkers.”

  * * *

  • • •

  After checking out of the Malachite, Waldo tried calling Hilda several times and, when she finally answered, told her that he’d be down in Los Angeles for at least a couple of more days and asked her to keep tending the chickens until he let her know he was back on the mountain.

  Then he looked up Victor Ouelette on his phone. It was an unusual enough name and when he found one with an apartment in Valley Village, not far from the Stoddard School, he figured he had his man. Just to be sure, he called the school posing as a prospective landlord doing a routine check, gave the secretary Ouelette’s name and address and got confirmation of employment.

  He decided to bike all the way from the beach, up through the Sepulveda Pass, and reached the address around four thirty. It was an unspecial stucco building on Whitsett, north of the 101, each unit accessible via one of several stair-and-catwalk arrangements, each of those secured by a locked iron gate with a set of door buzzers. He chained his bike to a parking sign and rang the buzzer for Ouelette.

  A neighbor stood on a third-floor catwalk and watched him. It made him self-conscious about announcing himself through the intercom by his real name, especially after the conspiracy theorist at Shauna’s, but there wasn’t much choice; he was too well known to pretend he was anyone else; any detective work from now on would have to be as that Charlie Waldo.

  This time, at least, the name worked, drawing the teacher out of his apartment immediately. Ouelette trotted down the stairs, saying, “Oh my God!” He was in his midthirties, smallish, with dark hair, a neatly trimmed beard and clear plastic aviator glasses that were either ironic or just out of date. “I can’t believe it! You’re my biggest fan!” Waldo had no idea what that meant. “I mean, I’m your biggest fan! I teach you—did you hear about that? Is that why you’re here?”

  “No, I’m actually— What do you mean, you teach me?”

  “At Stoddard. I teach a sociology course, and we do a whole section on Lydell Lipps. Come in, come in.”

  Waldo followed Ouelette up the cement steps and into his apartment, a crappy one-bedroom that smelled of tuna. There were a lot of books, personal photos mostly of a younger Ouelette and an older woman who was probably his mother, a lava lamp and framed posters of Pearl Jam and Weezer concerts. He wondered if Stevie would still describe Ouelette as cool if she saw where he lived. Then again, to a fifteen-year-old this might seem cool in the way of a really good dorm room. Actually, that’s what the place looked like to Waldo: the home of a guy who didn’t get enough college in college, still trying to live what he missed.

  “Look!” said Ouelette, thrusting an overstuffed manila envelope at him. “Boy, if there were ever a way you could come in and talk to the students . . .” Waldo slid out the top item, three typed and stapled sheets, and gave it a quick look. It was a homework paper with “B+” at the top in red; Waldo’s name appeared five or six times on the first page. “You’re a hero. The kids love you, the way you stuck it to the Man.”

  What was this? Years back, Waldo had devastated the life of an innocent man: Lydell Lipps, sent on the strength of Waldo’s policing error to Pelican Bay, where he languished for more than a decade. When Waldo realized he’d gotten the case wrong, he spent months battling with his own supervisors and the legal bureaucracy, pissing into the wind to no avail, until tragedy struck again and Waldo went off the rails.

  Anyway, he sure didn’t feel like someone who’d stuck anything to anyone. This new brand of attention was too much to deal with, so he didn’t. He said, “What can you tell me about Terrence Rose?”

  The teacher blinked a couple of times. “I don’t know a Terrence Rose.”

  The straight denial surprised Waldo; he’d expected something more artful. “He was in one of your history classes at Stoddard? About nine years ago?”

  Ouelette said, “I’ve had a
lot of students since then.”

  Waldo’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He reached in and pushed a button, forwarding the caller to voicemail. “How about his sister? Stevie Rose? I think her real name’s Stephanie.”

  “Stevie, sure—Stevie Rose was in one of my ninth-grade sections last year.” Ouelette shifted his weight, angling away from him.

  “How much do you know about their family situation?”

  Ouelette shrugged ignorance, but his eyes were all caution. He had to know about the Roses’ tragedy: a school that small, a kid’s parents get killed in a car crash, everybody knows. Just like they all knew about Monica Pinch. He was hiding something, and he wasn’t good at it.

  “Victor—can I call you Victor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever sell any pills, Victor?”

  “No,” he said, acting offended. “What kind of pills?”

  “Adderall? Anything like that?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Relax, Victor, I’m not looking to bust you. I’m just trying to talk to Terrence Rose.” He didn’t want to reveal that Terrence was missing; if Ouelette had nothing to do with that, Waldo didn’t want the teacher tipping the school that Stevie was unsupervised and setting the child services wheels in motion, not before he and Lorena decided it was time. “Tell you what,” Waldo said, “if you should happen to ‘remember’ anything about Terrence Rose, or if his name should even come up in conversation, give me a call.” He borrowed a pen and wrote his cell number on a corner of the envelope full of Waldo homework.

  Ouelette shut the door quickly behind him. Waldo walked down the steps and out the gate to the street and checked his cell: the incoming call had been from Lorena. He unchained his bike and pedaled a couple of blocks away from Ouelette’s place before phoning back.

  He told Lorena, “Teacher claims he’s never even heard of Terrence Rose.”

  “I got you beat,” she said. “Neither has UCLA.”