Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  Waldo absorbed it. Maybe he’d be back in Idyllwild sooner than he thought.

  Freddie said, “Seriously—three years off the grid, and you come back for this piece of shit?” Waldo looked up at his old friend, whose annoyance had liquefied a bit, a glimmer of empathy peeking through. “You ran out of money, right?”

  TEN

  Waldo spent two hours diving deep into Freddie Dellamora’s files, sitting undisturbed in the spare modernist courtyard of the Los Angeles Cathedral, an old favorite retreat where he used to grab a quiet moment on either side of a downtown court appearance. He scrutinized every page, then stuffed the files into his backpack and rode the Metro back to the Valley, nettled by a couple of dissonant points but mostly discouraged for his client and wondering how he’d gotten sucked into giving a shit about what a likely killer was facing.

  That was, after all, exactly the aspect of PI work that had made him sneer at Lorena’s original offer, the inherent corruption of the investigation, which ran counter to his constitution. He was built and trained to attack a case without prejudice, to rely on his intuition to inform but never to guide, let alone determine; the very notion of a “client” was anathema to all that. Still, there was no quitting before he was sure Alastair was guilty: if there was one thing he’d learned hard, it was to play it to the end and make sure the answers weren’t just quick but righteous.

  Back in the Valley after wasting a dollar on a second Metro card, he got on his bike and, for lack of a plan, started west on Chandler while he moved on from private eye work’s moral compromises to its practical ones. As a police detective, he’d start by examining the murder scene in its raw state; needless to say, the uncorrupted location wasn’t available to him anymore, nor was whatever the police might have gleaned before turning it back over to Alastair. As a police detective, he’d comb the neighborhood for potential witnesses; he could still do his own canvass, though it wasn’t likely to be very fruitful in a neighborhood built for privacy, gates and hedges dividing one big lot from the next. As a police detective, he could work from forensic reports much wider ranging than the coroner’s; he’d never see any of that, though, as nobody else would be as helpful as Freddie, at least not until it moved toward trial and the DA was obliged to share with Alastair’s lawyers during discovery, long past the point Waldo hoped to be gone from the case. In all, working as a PI would mean working without any of the normal investigative assets he was used to.

  Coming at it from another direction: what would he be doing next, if he were still LAPD, and if those investigative assets had already been properly mined by the police and if they had indeed pointed to Alastair’s certain guilt, as they seemed to? He’d focus on Alastair, on breaking him down and looking for the hole in his story, to prove not only that he’d killed his wife but that he remembered full well doing it, toward helping the DA prove intent and secure a tougher sentence.

  Of course, that objective would be contrary to his actual intuition; Waldo’s read, admittedly without factual backup, was that even if Alastair had killed his wife, he truly had no memory of it. So in that sense his current obligation to his client squared—more than his old job would have—with his instinct for what would actually constitute justice. The recognition gave him his first glimmer of peace since the encounter with Freddie. Could he find an approach to the case, a way in, that could build on that comfortable moral ground?

  No doubt the first impressions on the PD—the locked house; the truculent alcoholic; that the husband is, as Alastair said, always the first suspect—were powerful. Also powerful would be the temptation to arrest and convict a killer as shiny as Alastair Pinch, all the more given the perverse irony of his representing justice itself to America every Wednesday night. Might those powerful forces have influenced the police investigators, even subconsciously?

  Maybe that was the way he could serve both his client and the truth and be square with the work: he could question whether the police had gone about their business with the requisite level of dispassion. How did the investigation begin? What were the first minutes like? Who was on the scene? How much information had they gathered before they made up their minds that Alastair was the doer?

  Basically, did anybody fuck up?

  Of course, there was only one place to begin asking those questions, and it was the last place he thought he’d ever visit again: North Hollywood Division. Not only would he have to return to that river he’d burned, but they’d see him coming with a can of gasoline and a book of matches, ready for another go.

  Tires screeched and a black Toyota SUV bore down on him. He swerved into a hedge, then popped to his feet, bracing for an attack—the Posse in a new ride?—only to see a mom behind the wheel, holding a cell phone and mouthing apology. Waldo gave her a baleful glare, though he knew he himself hadn’t been paying full attention either and might have drifted too far toward the middle of the road.

  In fact, he realized as the woman drove on, in his distraction he’d absently cruised along old routes into his former Valley Village neighborhood, where he’d lived for his last five years in L.A. Trying to convince himself he wasn’t just forestalling the trip to division, he rode the two blocks to his old house on Cantaloupe to take a look.

  It was a two-bedroom stucco bungalow on a dead end, with purple trim that had been white when Waldo sold it. He got off his bike and leaned it against an overflowing blue recycling bin on the street awaiting pickup. There was a basketball hoop attached to the garage now, a tricycle in the driveway and a couple of yellow Adirondack chairs. Like the Camaro, this house had meant so much to him once: first an emblem to himself of early accomplishment and great future, and later of pride and corrosive ambition. It was the place where he and Lorena had spent so many indelible nights together, including that mendacious final one, when he knew what he was about to do but couldn’t bring himself to tell her. In the end, it was the agent of liberation, the canny investment that gave him the freedom to quit the world cold. Now it was just a structure, essentially interchangeable with hundreds of others near it, a structure where a family of strangers kept their many, many Things. Waldo, who’d once spread his solitary life over two whole bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and a full kitchen and one and a half bathrooms and a garage, was almost physically ill, mortified and disgusted by his decades of consumption and waste.

  “Get out of here or I’ll call the cops!” someone shouted from across the street, and Waldo turned to see his retired neighbor, Marty Schraub, standing outside his front door. “And stay out of my recycling!”

  Before Waldo could identify himself, Marty’s wife, Gerta, called from inside the house, “Who’s out there?”

  Marty turned toward their screen door and said, “Some bum, stealing the Faustos’ recycling.”

  Waldo took a step in his direction, into the street. “Marty . . .”

  “Get away from me! I’m calling the police!” He turned and fumbled open the screen door, but Gerta had appeared in the doorway, blocking him, and was peering around him toward Waldo, wearing her bathrobe even though it was almost lunchtime. “Get inside!” Marty barked at her.

  Gerta said, “That’s Waldo, you dummy. Charlie Waldo, from across the street.” She waved. “Hi, Waldo!”

  “Hey, Gerta.”

  “Waldo?” Marty said, as if it couldn’t be true. He turned and looked at him.

  Waldo nodded.

  Marty walked out into the middle of Cantaloupe Street, squinting, studying him and finally screwing up his face. “Jesus, Waldo.”

  * * *

  —

  Across the street from the North Hollywood Division driveway, Waldo straddled his bike and took inventory of the relationships he’d enjoyed over his LAPD career, trying to decide which of his closest friends was most likely not to despise him. Freddie Dellamora’s wariness troubled him even more than Big Jim Cuppy pissing in his pond. The truth was, if Waldo�
�s mission was to focus on the police work itself, to investigate the investigation, even the guys who were totally his guys back in the day—Conady, Dinkley, Segura—wouldn’t be his guys anymore.

  A cruiser pulled out and passed him. Neither of the uniforms looked in his direction, nor did either look familiar. He tried to recall how fast the division turned over and wondered how many people in the building would even know him.

  He stared at the entrance. He was here, he needed to go inside, but he didn’t have the play yet.

  His phone dinged with a text from a number he didn’t recognize. It read:

  I know who killed Monica Pinch.

  It had been years since he’d even received a text. He wrote back, Who is this?

  The answer came back quickly. Meet @ yr cabin.

  In LA—let’s meet here.

  This time the person at the other end made Waldo wait for a long, long minute. Finally:

  Cabin. And then, Tonite.

  There was the possibility that this was some kind of ambush, of course, but he didn’t see any option other than the long trek back to Idyllwild. There’d be time for North Hollywood later.

  ELEVEN

  The pedal up 243 was even worse than he’d anticipated, the lactic acid setting his legs on fire, his heart hammering so hard he could hear it. He tried to remember the tips he’d read online on the bus back to Banning, to keep his breath steady, to bend forward and keep a low center of gravity, to slide back in the saddle to leverage more force from his glutes. But if any of it helped, his thighs weren’t getting the message.

  His canteen was empty before he hit the top of the mountain and he considered stopping in town to refill it with tap water, but the sun had almost disappeared and, as it was, he’d probably be managing the last stretch to his house in the dark, so he rode on, parched and spent. He’d tested his mystery informant with four more messages over the course of the day, proposing they establish a specific time to meet and keeping him—Waldo was thinking of him as a male, based on the curtness of the initial texts—apprised of his progress toward Idyllwild, but the informant never responded. Now he worried that after all this, the guy wouldn’t show.

  He indeed had only the light of the gibbous moon to guide him when he turned onto the dirt road to his property. Approaching, he heard voices from his cabin. So there was more than one. He hoped they wouldn’t be the dipshits from the Palisades again. He pedaled faster, the pain in his legs returning as he gained speed, but then his front wheel rammed something and he wiped out, landing on his elbow, still swollen and aching from the last night he was here.

  He rolled over, hoping to leverage his good arm to raise himself up, and found himself inches from what looked like the back of a man’s head, or what was left of it. He got to his feet and poked the body with his toe to roll the corpse onto his back for a better look. He still didn’t look familiar.

  Waldo pushed his bike out of the dirt path and made his way toward the cabin, from which the noise had not abated, treading as silently as he could. There was an SUV parked outside, a black Escalade, which he hadn’t been able to see at a distance.

  He found two men waiting for him inside his cabin and his possessions trashed and scattered. He recognized one as the bodybuilder who’d been eyeing him at the bus station, wearing the same kind of muscle shirt. The other was a head shorter, a wiry, thirtyish Hispanic in a print guayabera, with one small hoop earring, wisps of a chin beard and carefully landscaped sideburns. He was holding Waldo’s Kindle. “How you like this thing? I’m tryin’ to decide between this and a Nook.”

  “You can get a Nook cheaper, but Kindle’s better for content.”

  The short man considered the device carefully and said, “Uh-huh. How’s their tech support?”

  Waldo said, “Excellent.”

  “Good.” He picked up Waldo’s hammer and smashed the screen. He tossed it aside, turned to Waldo and twirled the hammer ominously. “I’m Don Q. You hearda me?”

  Waldo nodded and took stock of the situation. Body on the lawn notwithstanding, if they were here to kill him, they probably would have gotten right to it without the dialogue. Then again, if they were here to make some kind of point, he was pretty sure it wasn’t going to stop with his Kindle. They were in close quarters, three in the tiny room. He flashed a peek at Don Q’s gorilla on his right, wondering if he might be too muscle-bound to block a coldcock left to the Adam’s apple and whether Waldo’s own healing elbow had enough left in it to make it worth the trouble.

  As if reading his thoughts, Don Q introduced his associate. “This is Nini. You do not want to fuck with this man: he was the number one ranked Inuit light heavyweight, and that was before he started goin’ all apeshit on the Bowflex.”

  Waldo turned to Nini. “Inuit? That the same as Eskimo?”

  Don Q answered for him. “Not exactly. All Inuits are Eskimos, but not all Eskimos are Inuits.”

  Waldo, still looking at Nini, said, “Then you are an Eskimo.”

  Don Q said, “Well, see, Nini’s from Canada. You can say ‘Eskimo’ in Alaska, but in Canada, they ain’t down with that. They want to be called ‘Inuit.’ To them, Eskimo is pejorative.” In case Waldo didn’t comprehend, he added, “That means it’s insultin’.”

  Waldo nodded to indicate he’d be sensitive to the ethnic nuances.

  Nini sucker punched him in the jaw.

  “Fuck!” said Waldo, realizing that Inuit, Eskimo or Australian aborigine, he didn’t stand a chance against him.

  “Thing is, Waldo, as you may have already surmised, all this chitchat ’bout heritage ain’t the reason we visitin’ your castle. So. Where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  Don Q nodded at Nini, who telegraphed it this time but still drove a lead fist into Waldo’s stomach. Waldo doubled over, gulping for wind, which came even harder now than it did on the hellish slog up the mountain.

  Don Q twirled the hammer some more while he waited for Waldo to stop heaving. “The item Lorena left with you.”

  Waldo, hands still on his knees, looked up and wheezed, “I’m starting . . . to think . . . you’re not here to tell me . . . who killed Monica Pinch.”

  “Waldo, Waldo, Waldo. You just give me the muthafucker, we’ll go on our way and you’d hardly know we was here.”

  “Except for . . . the lawn ornament . . . you left me . . .”

  “Oh, you met that gentleman.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Business associate of mine. Former.”

  “Why’s he here?”

  “Why’s he here? Shit, Waldo, he’s here to tell you somethin’.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s that? That I’m one fuckin’ serious individual, that’s what’s that.” Don Q looked around the cabin. “Thing is, there ain’t even much here to look through. This the only property you got? Where you keep all your possessions? Mementos, knickknacks, what have you.”

  “This is everything.”

  “Come on, man. You know that ain’t true.”

  “I’m a minimalist.”

  “Minimalist? Fuck’s that? Like those artists, with that white on white and shit?”

  Waldo squinted at him. Apparently traffickers had gotten more erudite since he’d left the force. “It’s a lifestyle. I’ve divested. I’m only allowed to have one hundred Things.”

  “Allowed? By who? You in one of those funky-ass churches be hidin’ up here?”

  “Not a religion. Lifestyle. Self-imposed.”

  “Self-imposed?” He looked around the cabin again. “A hundred things. That’s fucked up, Waldo. Especially if one of ’em is mine.” He said to Nini, “Backpack,” and the Inuit yanked it from Waldo’s shoulders. “Pockets,” he said, and Nini went through Waldo’s pants while Don Q dumped the contents of Waldo’s bag onto the floor and rifled through its comp
artments. “So what you tellin’ me—this, like, all your clothes?”

  Waldo nodded.

  “Paira socks,” Don Q said. “That one thing or two?”

  “One.”

  Don Q raised an eyebrow. “Kinda cheatin’, ain’t it, Waldo?” Before Waldo could decide where to begin, Don Q said, “I’m becomin’ convinced that you ain’t storin’ my item on the premises after all. What I’m thinkin’ now is, you stashed it someplace in L.A. May even be you got into this Pinch bullshit as a cover.”

  Waldo shook his head, though he knew it wouldn’t make an impression.

  “Here’s the deal, Waldo: you got twenty-four hours, and then I want my Mem. The alternative, you end up like your friend Lorena.”

  “Where is she? And what’s a Mem?”

  Don Q gestured toward Nini and said, “You telephone my man here when you got it in hand. Easy to remember his number: 818-ME-NANOOK.”

  Waldo looked at Nini and said, “Me Nanook? Really?”

  One more Inuit uppercut and Waldo’s endless day was finally over.

  TWELVE

  Consciousness took a halting approach shortly before daylight, dragging along a trio of regrets. The first was having refused Lorena. The second was—again—not having an ice pack. The third was not making room in the Hundred for a gun. Lorena had seen the danger of living in isolation without one; it had been her first question when he told her about divesting. Well, he’d need one now. He’d figure that out in L.A., where he’d also need to start looking for her. And he still had to figure out how to handle division.