Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  “No, that would be news to me.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s what the L.A. Times is reporting.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “No, but if it is,” the host said, “what would that suggest to you?”

  Fontella Davis said, “It would suggest that the real killer knew what he was doing. We need to let the justice system do its work, and turn down the volume on the media circus—”

  Pricked by Davis’s hypocrisy—Waldo was too—the CNN host lit into her. “Oh, come on, Fontella—you live for the media circus. And if you want to turn down the volume, what are you doing putting out a press release about a million-dollar reward? And for God’s sake, what are you doing bringing in Charlie Waldo, from Lydell Lipps? Charlie Waldo? Seriously? Where did you dig him up?”

  Charlie Waldo, from Lydell Lipps. He turned the channel.

  * * *

  —

  Sixteen years earlier, while still a Police Officer III and prepping for his detective exam, Waldo had taken a call from dispatch about a robbery-homicide at a 7-Eleven on Oxnard. There were no cars out front; through the windows the store looked empty. His partner at the time, an unpleasant old-timer named Rusty Hollander with a comb-over and a candy-bar problem, clomped around to the back of the store and Waldo carefully edged open the front door. A decal on the glass read PREMISES PROTECTED BY SECURITY CAMERA, but the next morning he’d learn that it had been on the fritz for months; the owner, too cheap to fix it, was trying to protect the premises by decal.

  Waldo followed the metallic smell of blood and found the first two bodies on the floor between shelves of snacks: Manuel Uribe, a lineman crew foreman who’d been visiting his ailing mother in Arizona, and his wife, Vitoria, a pediatric nurse who’d just picked him up at the Bob Hope Airport. They’d each been shot in the face, as was the twenty-three-year-old behind the counter, Damien Banks, who’d been working nights to put himself through an accounting program at Cal State Northridge. The till was empty.

  Hollander spotted the fourth body before he did, but that’s the one Waldo never forgot: Manuel and Vitoria’s nine-year-old son, Lalo, slumped in the corner against a beer fridge, one eye blown out and the other wide open in what Waldo imagined was the terror that came with being shot last, a half-eaten, blood-soaked Hostess blueberry pie in his lap.

  The San Fernando Valley saw fifty or sixty homicides a year, give or take, but most of those were gang related or domestic, so the randomness, the brutality, the child, the decent neighborhood and the absence of witnesses or leads made this the crime of the year in the North Hollywood precinct, not to mention the Valley section of the Times. A raft of detectives were assigned, but after several fruitless weeks they began drifting away to more promising cases.

  Officer Charlie Waldo, though, couldn’t forget the faces of the victims, especially the boy’s. So he did all he could to keep the case alive, mentioning it to everyone on his beat, the junkies, the gangbangers, the guy who sold him tacos at lunchtime, asking over and over if anyone had heard anything at all about 7-Eleven. It was almost four months later, after he’d already aced his exam and passed the interview, that now-detective Charlie Waldo caught the break that made his career.

  Driving solo through Valley Glen on his way to check a lead on a chop shop that would probably go nowhere, Waldo swung a couple of blocks out of his way to give Grant High a once-over and recognized a low-level dealer talking to a couple of kids, a rawboned, gang-adjacent nineteen-year-old he’d arrested the previous year. The guy’s name was Lonnie Lipps and Waldo guessed he wasn’t hanging around Grant to go back and finish his math requirement.

  Lonnie was scoping the passing traffic carefully, so when Waldo pulled over in his unmarked, the kid spotted him right away and broke off from the others, sprinting toward the school. Waldo jumped out and gave chase on foot, yelling, “Police!” as often as he could, conscious of his new plain clothes. Lonnie scampered over a chain-link fence more nimbly than Waldo, stretched his lead to a good thirty yards, and would have gotten away were it not for one Cleanthony Gaines, an assistant football coach whose boss had just given him so much shit over Friday night’s defense against Verdugo Hills that he was in the perfect frame of mind to clothesline a punk running from a cop.

  Waldo found four gram bags of marijuana and seven loose joints in Lonnie’s jacket pocket. California hadn’t yet relaxed its three strikes law, so bad news for Lonnie, who already had two convictions for possession with intent and was suddenly looking at a lot of years for not a lot of weed.

  Which made Lonnie talkative. Sitting in an interrogation room, wrists shackled to the center of the metal table in front of him, he offered Waldo a handful of crumbs—which Crip just got his own crew, which tweaker robbed that liquor store on Saticoy—none of it, Waldo told Lonnie, worth enough to bother putting his suit jacket back on. Waldo felt in his gut that Lonnie was sitting on something better, that the kid wouldn’t have even mentioned trading if these scraps were all he had, and that if Waldo could figure out how to lean hard enough, Lonnie, third-strike desperate, was bound to give it up.

  Waldo’s simple play was to put the kid in mini-solitary. He told Lonnie he’d give him a few minutes to think about what else he might have for Waldo and what was in front of him if he didn’t. Then he left Lonnie there, alone and cuffed, for an hour, and another hour, and another, six hours in all, until Waldo, checking periodically through a one-way mirror, thought he could see Lonnie Lipps start to lose his mind. And then he gave him one more hour.

  When Waldo finally came back into the interrogation room, all he needed to say was “Well?” Lonnie Lipps looked at the floor and said, “7-Eleven—but no more till I get me a lawyer.” Waldo called the public defender’s to send somebody over, then, while he waited, climbed up onto the roof of the precinct to smoke a rare cigarette, look at the night stars and feel pretty fucking good about himself.

  Turns out Lonnie had been riding around with his wilder younger brother Lydell, who showed him a gun and said he wanted to rob the convenience store together. Lonnie resisted but finally agreed to wait behind the wheel while Lydell went in. The gunshots surprised him and pissed him off—in fact, he was still pissed, he told Waldo and the other detective taking the statement; he never would have gone along if he thought Lydell was going to do anything crazy-ass like that.

  In exchange for getting his would-be third strike dropped, Lonnie Lipps was the star witness in the triple-murder trial of his own brother Lydell, with their mother sitting right behind one son and crying through the other’s testimony. Lydell got twenty-five to life, on the light side because he had no priors and was just seventeen at the time of the murders, but got sent anyway to Pelican Bay, the worst of the worst.

  As for Detective Charlie Waldo, the good times were about to start rolling. The Times did a profile, which caught the eye of Brad Pitt, who convinced Warner to option the rights to Waldo’s story. The studio hired the flavor-of-the-month screenwriting team Pitt wanted, who, after cashing their checks, quietly pointed out to the studio exec that there was nothing intrinsically dramatic about waiting hours for a low-level drug dealer to rat someone out. But Pitt insisted he knew how to make it work and swore he’d make Waldo his next movie if they’d just move on to the next hot writer he needed. The process repeated itself for two years, burning through three-point-something-million studio dollars before Pitt lost interest and the option lapsed.

  By then Waldo himself had blown his own tiny fraction of that wasted money on a vintage second-generation Camaro, pineapple yellow with teal racing stripes. Appropriate, because he was about to leave his fellow detectives in the dust.

  He ascended the ranks quicker than anyone in memory, his clearance rate regularly the highest in the division. When a Valley crime got any kind of public attention, the precinct commander would usually pull Waldo off his regular rotation to help out, even loaned him
out to commands elsewhere in the city when downtown asked. One high-profile clearance led to the next two high-profile opportunities, a virtuous cycle, and Waldo played it for all it was worth.

  Not long after his inevitable transfer to the more intense and prestigious Robbery-Homicide Division downtown, Human Rights Watch began to make trouble about Lydell Lipps, pressing the state of California to offer Lydell, who’d been a model prisoner, a resentencing hearing in consideration of his age at the time of his crime and his spotless record before it, with the possibility of parole to follow. Trends in prison reform were creating that possibility for young offenders in California and across the country, in light of new notions of brain development and impulsive behavior in teens and the capacity for change. But Waldo, remembering little Lalo Uribe’s one terror eye and his parents and Damien Banks and not seeing a whole lot of difference between a seventeen-year-old shooting four people in the face and an eighteen-year-old shooting four people in the face, jumped in with both feet and found himself once again working with prosecutors to prepare the state’s case against Lydell Lipps, toward an upcoming hearing in superior court that had no business happening.

  The DA’s office believed that a vivid narrative would be the best counter to a plea for leniency, so Waldo and the lawyers worked at reassembling every detail, with special focus on whatever they might get that wasn’t already in the trial transcript. That led Waldo to Chuckawalla Valley State Prison to talk to his old friend Lonnie Lipps, who in the meantime, to no one’s surprise, had found a way to pick up his third strike without any help from Waldo and was now going by the name Rahman Hashim Abid.

  Waldo asked him if there was anything about that night he’d never told before, and Rahman/Lonnie, sinewy and tatted now, gave him a slow grin, and not a friendly one. “Shit, yeah,” he said, “I didn’t tell you that me and Lydell wasn’t nowhere near there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “7-Eleven. I made that shit up. Whole thing.”

  The room spun. “Why? Why would . . . ?”

  “Man, my girl Keesha was pregnant, and like two days before you busted me I found out it wasn’t mine, it was Lydell’s. I wanted to fuckin’ kill that little muthafucker. Then you there bustin’ my balls, lookin’ at life for a couple reefer? And sittin’ in that room all fuckin’ night? And you always askin’ everybody ’bout 7-Eleven—so I go what the fuck, two birds, know what I’m sayin’?” Rahman watched Waldo sweat, loving the shit out of the best moment he was ever going to have in here, maybe the best he’d ever have again. “I kept wantin’ to hug you, man, ’specially durin’ that trial, watchin’ that piece a shit Lydell gettin’ fucked like that, but I knew I couldn’t say nothin’. Guess I can thank you now, right?”

  Waldo vomited. Rahman Hashim Abid laughed at him.

  * * *

  —

  Charlie Waldo’s next surprise was how much harder it is to get an innocent man out of prison than to put a guilty man in. The district attorney and his people didn’t want to believe the brother’s new story, and why would they? A wrongful conviction would not only make them look incompetent but make them the latest poster boys for the growing racial narrative about prosecutorial injustice. Lydell got the backing of lawyers at the Innocence Project, but the DA took advantage of the claim of new evidence to get the original resentencing hearing postponed, and postponed again. Waldo and his superiors got pressure from Sacramento, too, where state officials worried about a lawsuit against the state for wrongful imprisonment and maybe an eight-figure payout.

  But that was nothing like the pressure Waldo was feeling from the PD itself, not least from his former colleagues at North Hollywood Division, still his closest friends in the department. Owning a mistake like that would be toxic to all of them, damage their credibility with the public, with the press, with the street, with their families, everybody. Besides, most of the North Hollywood cops didn’t believe it was a mistake, there being no reason to believe this guy was any more truthful now that he was Rahman Hashim Abid than when he was called Lonnie Lipps.

  Still, the pregnancy story had checked out, the girl corroborated everything, and besides, Waldo just knew. He knew how he’d scared a nineteen-year-old shitless, how he’d exploited sledgehammer-stupid laws to jam the kid so bad he’d say anything, how he’d been so hell-bent on solving 7-Eleven that he’d made himself the perfect buyer for the bullshit even a third-rate dealer knew to sell him.

  Waldo, whose only contact with Lydell Lipps had been the arrest and the original trial, drove thirteen hours up to Pelican Bay, near the Oregon border, not even sure what he’d say when he got there. It didn’t matter anyway; Lydell wouldn’t see him. He did all he could to help Lydell’s new lawyers and anything he could think of on his own, calls and letters to lobby the DA, the chief of police, the state and the city and even the US attorney general. He went on the record with the L.A. Times, which put it on the Sunday front page, above the fold. The chief himself called Waldo in after that one, warned him that if he didn’t go through Media Relations from now on, he’d be placed on indefinite administrative leave.

  But all the pressure worked: after a campaign of more than a year, the Innocence Project finally got a judge to grant Lydell a full retrial, with Waldo set to testify on his behalf.

  Thirty-seven days before the trial date, while pulling into a cheap Peruvian seafood place he liked for a quick lunch, Waldo took a call on his cell from one of the lawyers. Lydell Lipps had changed Waldo’s life once more, this time by sticking his stomach in front of a knife in the yard at Pelican Bay and bleeding to death.

  Lydell Lipps was thirty-one years old and had been locked up for the last fourteen of those years.

  * * *

  —

  Charlie Waldo quit the LAPD in a fury and talked to anyone with a microphone about those who needed to be held accountable. Some people burn bridges; Waldo burned the river. He set everything he could aflame—the DA’s office, the government and especially the department, whose opposition to getting it right was the betrayal Waldo could never forgive, and who deserved the worst hell Waldo could figure out how to wreak. The press ate it up, not just the Times and local TV but the big papers back east and cable news and the national magazines. Waldo kept talking, talking, talking, to anybody who’d listen.

  But, as happens, people got tired of listening.

  And in the silence, Waldo started to think more and more about the one person who should be held most accountable but hadn’t been. It was time to start wreaking hell on himself.

  EIGHT

  That same infomercial queen, in barely there workout clothes broadcasting her muscular perfection, pointed down at Waldo from a billboard over Ventura Boulevard:

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE YOU!

  He knew she was just a cynical huckster tapping into self-hatred and peddling superficial (if pricey) change; still, he contemplated this existential challenge she was posing and wished to God she were right.

  Gaby rode in back, silent and pensive. Alastair, sober at this hour, steered onto Chandler and quickly into a near-hidden entrance to the Stoddard School. “Welcome,” he announced to Waldo, “to Kindergartens of the Rich and Famous.” A slow-moving line of cars safely offloaded elementary schoolers, but Alastair apparently had other plans: he cruised around the line and glided into a space with a sign marking it as RESERVED FOR THE PINCH FAMILY. Actually, the Hummer laid claim to a chunk of the adjacent handicapped space as well.

  “What’d you do to deserve this?” asked Waldo.

  “The school auctions off a space every year at their insufferable fund-raiser. I put in a bid to allay the boredom.”

  “What it set you back?”

  “Thirty.” Alastair shrugged. Waldo chose not to ask thirty what.

  Gaby, freed from her car seat and distracted by the sight of her friends, jumped down and ran shouting into the playground, where she blended wi
th a hundred other kids in identical white polos and navy shorts, wealthy and clean, protected from the bad world by oaks and fences, attentive faculty and sacrificing parents. Waldo watched Gaby and another girl with buckteeth and braided pigtails find each other like magnets and hug like sisters after a long separation. What did this little pal know about Gaby’s mother? Gaby’s father? And all these other kids—had their parents told them? Or was news, even scandalous news so close to home, one more thing they were protected from?

  Every adult on the playground kept a careful eye on Waldo, a stranger and not a safe-looking one, strolling among their children alongside their presumptively lethal fellow parent. Only one approached, a reed-thin middle-aged man in rimless glasses, blazer and repp tie. Alastair introduced him as Dr. Sebastian Hexter, the headmaster, and left him to chat with Waldo while he collected Gaby and escorted her to her classroom.

  “I’m happy to answer any questions you have,” Hexter said, “but I don’t expect that I or anyone at Stoddard would have much to offer that could help you.”

  “At this point I’m trying to get a picture of the Pinches as a couple. How well have you known them?”

  “Not well. Gaby’s in kindergarten, so this is their first year at the school, of course. My early impression has been that they’d be generous financially, if not particularly involved. We rarely see him at all, and she’s more of a drop-off mom.” He corrected himself. “Was.”

  “Could I talk to Gaby’s teacher?”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t.” The bluntness was surprising. Hexter might look like an effete New England preppy transplanted under the California sun, but he was in command of his world and wanted to let Waldo know it. “This tragedy has rocked our campus, at least on the parent and faculty levels. There’s not much a headmaster can do in a situation like this, but I’ve been able to shield our students from the chaos, and I plan to keep it that way.” The children on the playground did indeed look untroubled playing tag and four square, but the headmaster’s pride rankled Waldo.