Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  “I’ll hold you to that.” To Waldo he said, “I’m done for the day, Detective. Do you have plans? Where do you live?”

  “I’m a civilian now; you don’t have to call me that. And I’m only in town for the night. I’ll find a hotel.” Alastair turned to Sikorsky, confused. Waldo added, “I haven’t said I’d take the case.”

  As if fearing another Alastair outburst, Sikorsky amended that quickly. “Waldo’s with us for the day as a consultant. But I’m hoping we can convince him to stick around.”

  Alastair said to Waldo, “You don’t need a hotel, love. You’ll stay at my house tonight. It’ll make everything easier—scene of the crime and all that.” He unbuttoned and unzipped and stepped out of his pants. “You don’t mind sleeping amidst the yellow tape, do you?”

  Waldo tried to imagine what this could mean, how the police could have let Alastair back into the house if they were still collecting physical evidence and how the man could be so casual about it all, when Sikorsky broke up laughing, recognizing the joke a second late but still before Waldo. “This fuckin’ guy,” said Sikorsky. Alastair grinned in his boxers, then disappeared into the bedroom and shut the door. Sikorsky said to Waldo, “Nobody like him,” as if this were a wonderful thing, then said he had a sitcom run-through to get to and gave Waldo his business card again before leaving him alone in the trailer.

  Waldo entered all Sikorsky’s info onto his phone so that he wouldn’t have to take his card, then inspected Alastair’s refrigerator and kitchen cabinets, finding mostly liquids of varying proof. The actor emerged from the bedroom in jeans and polo and sport jacket, a GQ page, and Waldo’s toe again fussed with the hole in his sock.

  Alastair suggested Waldo follow him home in his own car. When Waldo said he had a bike, Alastair pursed his lips, considered him anew, then asked if he had an aversion to riding in a car. The question froze Waldo. On the one hand, Alastair’s car would be neither public transportation nor self-propelled, so it was theoretically off-limits; on the other, if Alastair were going to be driving it anyway, then riding along wouldn’t actually add to Waldo’s carbon footprint, so why not. “I can go with you,” he answered.

  They crossed the lot to the Admin Building to fetch the bike, an eccentric pair drawing discreet double takes. Waldo unlocked the bike chain and stuffed it into his backpack and walked the bike alongside Alastair toward the parking lot nearest his trailer. Waldo knew this time with the suspect ought to be the moment to start his investigation but found himself stymied, unable to initiate even a simple conversation after the years of solitude. He wanted to ask about the night of the murder but figured that would be easier once they got to the spot where it happened. He thought about attempting light chatter about Alastair’s work but couldn’t imagine how to broach what he’d just witnessed on the soundstage without putting Alastair, his theoretical client, on the defensive. The very word “client” stopped Waldo’s thoughts dead. The silence was becoming oppressive, and it was apparent that Alastair wasn’t going to help. Waldo finally decided to open with the problem that had brought him here in the first place. “You know a bunch of white teenagers, try to act black?”

  “That’s all of them, isn’t it?”

  “These ones want me to stay away from your case. Any idea why?”

  “Perhaps they don’t care for my telly program. Can’t say I blame them.”

  Waldo blanched when they arrived at Alastair’s car: a big yellow Hummer, the original four-ton H1, unapologetically straddled across two spaces in the closest corner of the lot, A. PINCH stenciled on both concrete parking stops. Alastair slapped the side of the behemoth like the proud owner of a Belmont winner and said, “If I’m going to cost myself a knighthood playing a cracker magistrate on some American ‘procedural’”—those last two words dripping with mocking disdain—“I owe myself a vehicle the size of Manchester, don’t you think?”

  Before Waldo could tell him that he’d rather ride behind after all, Alastair opened the rear for the bike and asked, “Do you mind driving?”

  “I don’t have a driver’s license anymore.”

  “That’s all right, neither do I.”

  Waldo considered the amount of vodka he’d seen Alastair consume, extrapolated that across the rest of Alastair’s working day, and accepted the keys. He lifted his bike into the Hummer’s massive cabin and started for the lot exit at about eight miles per hour and, he was certain, fewer than that per gallon.

  He followed Alastair’s directions through Toluca Lake and Valley Village. He hadn’t driven anything for a while, and never anything bigger than the Crown Victoria black-and-white that LAPD had put him in as a rookie, so the Hummer made him overcautious as well as self-conscious. It was wider than his lane and he had to keep choosing between road hogging or risking a sideswipe on the right, and the rush-hour slowdown on Moorpark made him feel even more piggish. At least the streets were familiar, even if the merchants weren’t. “That was Henry’s Tacos forever,” he said to Alastair at one corner, distracted enough by driving to forget his conversational inhibitions. “I can’t believe they let that change.”

  “Yes, you Angelenos and your profound cultural attachments. They demolished a Bob’s Big Boy, one of the producers carried on like it was Westminster Abbey. It amused my wife no end.”

  It was an opening, at least. “Monica?”

  “Monica.”

  “Tell me about your marriage.”

  “My marriage?” Alastair sighed. “When a woman is killed, the husband is always the first suspect. That tells you about everyone’s marriage.”

  They turned left onto Laurel Canyon and Alastair said they’d be turning right on Fryman, a couple of miles up the hill, so Waldo edged into the right lane when he had a chance. At one of several long waits for the light at Ventura he had the feeling of being watched. There was a Smart car next to him, and indeed the woman in the passenger seat was looking up and staring. She rolled down her window, worked up a loud gob of spit and hocked a loogie that hit Waldo’s window at eye level, leaving Waldo simultaneously pissed off, embarrassed, sympathetic and impressed. If Alastair saw what happened, he didn’t let on.

  That two-mile crawl took a good ten minutes. Waldo didn’t know whether he was just unused to traffic, whether this was a particularly bad day or whether it had all gotten worse while he was gone. He remembered a conversation with an L.A. Department of Transportation exec he once had to arrest for bloodying a protester’s nose with a clipboard when a community informational meeting about extending the Green Line devolved into a full-blown melee. “People bitch about rail construction disrupting their neighborhoods,” the guy told Waldo as part of his statement, “but if they could see the studies we see, what L.A. traffic is going to look like in twenty years? People would be rioting in the streets.”

  After the turn onto Fryman they were rid of the other cars and it was just another few minutes up into the hills until they got to Alastair’s Tudor, a two-story baronial spread. Alastair raised the garage door with a remote and Waldo docked the oversize Hummer into the normal-size bay with excruciating deliberation but eventual success, to the delight of his British host. “Well done, sir!” he said. “I strip off a bit of molding twice a week.”

  They entered the house through a mudroom into a grand kitchen with two full-size refrigerators, four ovens and a marble center island that could comfortably sit sixteen. “How big is this place?”

  “A little over eight thousand square feet. Monica and I were going to add on. If the show makes it to syndication and if I’m still living here—as opposed to, say, San Quentin—I might still.”

  “How much more do you need?”

  “Twice the size should do.”

  Waldo couldn’t stop himself from running the numbers in his head or from sharing the results. “Eight thousand more feet. That would emit another four hundred thousand pounds of CO2 a year.”

&
nbsp; “Would it.”

  He could tell Alastair didn’t want to hear it, and why would he? Even people who’d recoil at the thought of driving a Hummer didn’t want to reckon with the facts about how their comfy and seemingly harmless homes were quietly destroying the planet. Waldo’s compulsion to talk about this was, he realized, one more reason he’d be better off sticking to his woods. Still, the malignancy here, the shamelessness, affronted him too mightily to keep it to himself. “That’s what five hundred Kenyans produce in an entire year. Or eight Australians.”

  The notion seemed to amuse Alastair, who apparently hadn’t much use for the latter. “Eight Australians, eh? I’ll take the Kenyans.” He headed toward another room. “Come, let me show you where I found my wife.”

  Waldo followed him through an oversize family room and through the vaulted foyer into an even larger and plusher living room. “It was in here.” Alastair paused, taking in the space. “She did all our decorating herself. She was particularly proud of this room. It was in Architectural Digest.”

  “Walk me through that morning.”

  “It was a Saturday. I woke up—‘came to,’ the uncharitable might say—in my study upstairs. It must have been around eight thirty. The first thing I noticed was that I had no recollection of the previous night.” Alastair, as if reading Waldo’s mind, or perhaps simply accustomed to the public’s disbelief, said, “I’ve been a highly seasoned blackout drunk since my youth, as many can attest. So this incident has precedent in kind, if not in degree. Generally just the odd chipped tooth or paternity suit, that sort of thing.”

  The glibness was discordant, here in the room where the man’s wife had lain dead on the floor, and though it might not confirm the actor’s guilt, it wasn’t endearing. Waldo kept the thought to himself and let Alastair find his own way back to his narrative.

  “Anyway, I went to the kitchen”—he tilted his head to indicate the part of the house they’d come from—“made myself an espresso, came in here and found Monica.” He gestured toward a spot on the floor near the middle of the room. “There was so much blood, and a shattered vase . . .” He trailed off, took a moment to collect himself. “She was obviously gone. So that’s what I told the 911 woman, and they sent the police instead of an ambulance. The officers asked me some questions and had me sit out in the garden while they poked about for a few hours. Then the coroner came and took her.”

  “They let you stay in the house after that?”

  Alastair shook his head and said, “They let me pack a few things and kept me out for four nights, I think it was, while the forensic boys had at it. It took another two days to clean up after them. Nasty stuff, fingerprint dust. But that was that, except for the indignant dudgeon on cable television, the impassioned talk of Bringing the Villain to Justice,” pronouncing the words with capital letters.

  “Who else had a key to the house?”

  “Besides Monica and myself? To the best of my knowledge, only Rosario, our nanny—and she was in Venezuela, visiting her family.”

  “Nanny? There were kids in the house?” It was the first Waldo had heard of children.

  “We have one child, Gaby, and she was sleeping at a friend’s. She likely wasn’t the killer, either—but she’ll be back from kindergarten soon enough, if you think it’s worth trying to wrest a confession.”

  Waldo finally had to say something. “You know, being that flip won’t help you with the indignant dudgeon.”

  Alastair dropped the ironic curl and looked him straight in the eye. “The world is certain I murdered my wife, Mr. Waldo, and I can’t even tell you the world is wrong. If you know a man who’s handled similar with an élan of which you more approve, point me to him and I’ll gladly emulate.”

  “Ever think about trying to stop drinking?”

  “With every sip.”

  They heard footsteps outside and a key in the front door lock. A yellow-haired five-year-old pushed the door open, her pained visage a disquieting echo of her father’s. The actor shouted, “Princess Ozma!” He lifted her and swung her in a circle, father and daughter not mere centers of each other’s worlds but their totality. In seconds, miraculously, both were giggling. Waldo and the solidly built, fiftyish Venezuelan nanny, insignificant intruders both, exchanged wordless acknowledgment of each other’s existence.

  “Daddy, remember ‘Brush Every Morning’? I said it in front of the class today!”

  “Of course!”

  Gaby recited: “Brush every morning, brush every night, I brush and I brush so my teeth will be white. Teeth can be shiny, teeth can be gold—”

  Alastair joined her for the last line. “I hope I still have some when I’m very old!”

  “Do you like that poem?”

  “I certainly do. It’s a most excellent bit of verse.” Lowering her to the floor and turning her to face their guest, he said, “Gaby, meet our new friend Mr. Waldo.”

  “He looks scary,” she said. “Like a lion.”

  “He is a lion,” Alastair said, “but not a scary one. In fact, you can barely get him to growl.” He grinned at Waldo.

  Gaby frowned and studied every inch of him, shamelessly, as only a little girl can. Finally she turned to her dad and said, “Can I show Mr. Lion my school tomorrow?”

  Waldo answered her himself. “I’d love to see it.” Alastair looked at him, surprised. Waldo said, “You never know what you might learn at school.”

  “All right, then,” Alastair said to him. “Rosario will show you to your room. Gaby and I are going to spend some Daddy time before bed.” He lifted her again and tossed her over his shoulder. “Wait!” he said. “Do I see a slice of upside-down cake?”

  “No!” she squealed and giggled.

  “I do see a slice of upside-down cake! I’m going to have to eat it!” He held her by the feet and buried his face in her tummy, tickling her with his scratchy chin, and she squealed some more. Then he slung the little girl over his shoulder and turned back to Waldo. “You and I can drive Gaby to school together in the morning, Mr. Lion, and we can continue our conversation after that.” Then, remembering, he said, “Oh right: you haven’t yet agreed to take the case.” The girl squirmed in his arms to look at Waldo. Alastair asked, “What say you, Detective? Will you retreat to your mountain and leave me to the fates? Or will you extend your stay in the City of the Angels long enough to see that the authorities get it right this time? Whatever right may be.”

  Get it right this time. It had been Lorena’s angle, too, a prod at the old wound, only on the mountain it had been theoretical and here it was real, with this fascinating entertainer and now this daughter, whose life had already been darkened enough. Waldo said, “What time do we leave for school?”

  Alastair, pleased, said, “Seven twenty-five sharp,” and again tucked into his upside-down cake, carrying his daughter away in peals of innocent laughter, your typical loving dad with a six-million-dollar mansion who couldn’t happen to recall whether he’d bludgeoned the life out of his little girl’s mother.

  SEVEN

  Is all right?” asked Rosario, showing him the palatial guest suite, with silk bedding, sitting area, thirty-six-inch flat-screen and expansive marble bathroom with sunken tub.

  Waldo said, “It’ll do.”

  He put his backpack in the corner, wondering how long the case would keep him away from his chickens. He’d left them a completely full feeder and left both waterers in the shade, adding a couple of teaspoons of vinegar to keep them from going sour, so they’d probably be all right for a while, but this would be his first time away for more than a day.

  There was a magazine on the coffee table, Architectural Digest. He thumbed it to see if it was the issue featuring this house, and there it was, six pages, the two largest photos showing off the room where Monica died, more or less as it still was. There was a smaller photo of Monica and Alastair in their garden, sharing
love, laughter and a pot of tea amid white roses, looking like they’d last forever. The issue was dated the previous August.

  It was still early but Waldo was spent. The news van’s intrusion this morning already seemed like it had happened a week ago. He realized he’d eaten nothing all day except the two oranges but decided he’d rather hold out until breakfast than find his way back to the kitchen and poke around for whatever he’d feel least self-conscious helping himself to. Better to distract himself with a little junk TV and drift off to sleep, too tired even to access the chess website on his phone.

  He had to search for the television remote, found it camouflaged by the tablecloth and half-hidden by a bouquet on a circular bed stand a little too large for its corner of the room. As he waited for the TV to come to life, he found himself annoyed by the way the round tabletop hung over the edge of the bed. He tried to slide the piece away, gently so as not to topple the floral arrangement, but it was flush with the far wall and wouldn’t budge. Waldo was struck by how inefficient people could afford to be with their space when they lived in this kind of monstrosity.

  There was a soccer game on. Unfamiliar with Alastair’s cable system, Waldo had to scan channel by channel to find something more to his liking, ideally a program about some celebrity’s house even bigger than what Alastair had in mind for this one. Instead he stumbled onto the program Fontella Davis had wanted him to go on with her.

  “I’m hearing there could be an indictment as early as tomorrow,” the aggressive CNN host was saying. He’d never seen the woman before, but she looked like she was angling to be the next Nancy Grace.

  Fontella Davis said, “We have not been told that.” Waldo wondered whether there was any reason to believe Fontella, on TV or otherwise.

  “Well, have you been told that according to the LAPD, there were no unidentified fingerprints found anywhere in that living room?”