Last Looks_A Novel Read online

  But he was facedown on a floor and his first job was to figure out what floor. It was his own, it turned out, in what was passing for good news this week. His ruined Kindle was right in front of him. He would order a new one, so there would be a net-zero impact on his Things, but one also had to consider environmental costs incurred in producing each Kindle. The breakeven on those costs, relative to traditional paper books, came with the download of 22.5 e-books, but Waldo had been hoping to get several more years’ use out of this one and read easily a hundred books a year, and if you called it three hundred books that meant about a thousand pounds of CO2 he’d still been hoping to save. Looking at it in a more forgiving way, the manufacture of a new device would be adding “only” about seventy-five pounds’ worth. But of course that didn’t account for the abhorrent practices behind the gathering of the columbite-tantalite required to manufacture the Kindle’s capacitors, two-thirds of the world’s reserves of which resided in war-torn Congo, rendering virtually every electronic device on the planet complicit from birth in financing African military conflict at least and, at worst, human rights abuses up to and including slave labor.

  It was paralyzing to contemplate.

  But he needed to focus on imperatives closer to home. The priorities today were Lorena, a gun, and Alastair. Then he remembered one bit of priority housekeeping that couldn’t wait: he’d have to do something about the dead man in his driveway.

  He sat up and phoned the Riverside County Sheriff’s, then spent an hour freshening his chickens’ provisions and putting his cabin back in order while he waited for a cruiser to make its way up the mountain from Hemet. They sent two men, Oquendo and Foy, a fortyish buzz-cut sergeant and a young African American with the skittery eyes of a trainee. The dispatcher apparently hadn’t passed on the word that Waldo was former law enforcement, and they were far enough from L.A. and the old scandals that his name must not have triggered anything for them.

  In fact, Oquendo, who did all of the talking, seemed pretty sure that this long-haired freak living alone in the woods had shot a man on his property and was trying to cover with some babble about LAPD and drug dealers and Eskimo prizefighters and a body being left to intimidate him. Waldo didn’t have a lot to back up his story: his three-year beard covered the evidentiary bruises and swelling on his jaw. When Oquendo asked him again if he was certain he didn’t recognize the dead man, Waldo suggested he take a picture of the corpse and shoot it to a detective named Jim Cuppy at North Hollywood Division, because he’d been up here days ago asking about the drug dealer who was here last night and maybe he could provide an ID. The specificity of an LAPD contact gave Oquendo pause, so he told his partner to stand with Waldo by the body while he got back in the car and made the call. In the awkward silence Waldo asked Foy if he was a rookie and the kid decided it was safe to say yes. Then they both watched Oquendo through the windshield. He hung up and got out of the car and told them that Cuppy wasn’t reachable but that dispatch would get a message to him.

  The sergeant stared dumbly at the corpse, frozen, overmatched by the situation. In the vacuum, Waldo declared that he needed to leave soon to catch a bus back to L.A. That roused Oquendo. “I don’t think you should leave town.”

  “You arresting me?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Get sure, or I’m going.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “I’ve got business.” He moved for his bike, which was still near the body.

  “What kind of business?” said Oquendo, easing his hand toward his belt.

  Waldo couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Are you going for your piece?”

  “Sir, I need you to keep calm.”

  “Tell you what, put your right hand on your gun, put your left hand down your pants and while you’re being an actual jerk-off, have your trainee here Google ‘Charlie Waldo, Alastair Pinch.’” He had worked in L.A. long enough to know when to drop a name.

  Foy looked to Oquendo. Oquendo took his hand from his gun. “Judge Johnny?” Waldo nodded. “What do you got to do with Alastair Pinch?”

  “I’m working for him, as a PI. Go ahead, look it up.”

  Doubtful: “You are.” But he nodded to Foy, who quickly found the Variety story. He showed his phone to Oquendo. “I’ll be damned,” said Oquendo.

  Foy said to Waldo, “So what are you, like, famous?” Waldo picked up his bike and inspected it for damage from last night’s collision with the dead man. Foy, reading his phone over Oquendo’s shoulder, said, “He really was LAPD.”

  Covering, Oquendo said, “I could tell,” as if he had been in Waldo’s corner all along. Waldo let it slide. Oquendo said to no one in particular, “Fucking Idyllwild, man. Every time I have to come up here it’s something screwy. But this wins the goddamn prize.” Then added to Waldo, “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  While Waldo finished checking out the bike, Oquendo got up his nerve. “Ask you something? How much they pay you on a case like that?”

  Waldo was enjoying the upper hand too much not to share. “Two thousand a day.”

  Foy blurted, “No shit?”

  “But I’m making them give it all to the Sierra Club.”

  Oquendo headed toward the cruiser shaking his head. “Fucking Idyllwild.”

  * * *

  —

  It was another harrowing ride down the mountain. A motorcycle club passed and one biker buzzed so close Waldo could smell the weed on the guy, then saluted him with a middle finger as the crew roared off around a bend. But he made it to the Banning station, sweat-soaked more from nerves than from exertion. The Greyhound was over-air-conditioned and chilled him in his wet clothes, but it had Wi-Fi and as it merged onto the 10 he searched Lorena and found her agency, which was called Very Private Eyes. Shit, he wanted to tell her, with a name like that, of course you get too much marital.

  The website had a phone number—not familiar, not Lorena’s cell—and a PO box for an address. She had claimed to have some full-time ops—was that just a fiction to impress him? Was the agency really doing business? That Porsche she was driving wasn’t cheap. Then again, Cuppy said she was in the drug trade now, or at least drug-trade adjacent, working for Don Q. Waldo hadn’t wanted to believe it . . . but so far Cuppy was proving right about the rest. He sighed. Lorena Nascimento. Three years could do a lot to someone. Look in a mirror.

  He tried the number on the website, got a machine with Lorena’s voice. No receptionist. He said, “Waldo. Call me,” and hung up. He buzzed around the net some more, found Very Private Eyes on all the social media platforms, but it was studiously anonymous, no pictures of Lorena, no names of other staff. Yelp seemed to swear by her, at least the few semi-anonymous but possibly actual people who shared their stories. Giving up on finding a toehold online, he turned off his phone to save the battery. He shifted his thoughts to the challenge of securing a gun without a license, not something he’d ever had to worry about before, and let the Greyhound rock him to sleep.

  A sudden slowdown for freeway traffic jolted him awake with the answer handy. He restarted his phone, searched “gun shop sunset blvd,” but didn’t find what he was looking for until he remembered that the store might be just beyond the line where Sunset turns into Cesar Chavez and tried again. There it was: Alberto Suarez was still in business.

  Alberto was a two-decade fixture at the police academy armory, everybody’s favorite, an equal-opportunity ballbuster who remembered every cop who came through and left you laughing whenever you did. Then his only daughter, Marisol, went to her first high school party in Panorama City and never came home, found two days later raped and strangled and left in a Dumpster just over the Tujunga Wash, the boundary between North Hollywood and Mission Division. For the first and only time in his career Waldo forced himself onto another division’s case, spent a week pulling every string he had downtown until they initi
ated a loan-out. Mission had been working one suspect: the football player who’d gotten Marisol Suarez drinking Southern Comfort and Dr Pepper and brought her home to an empty house, his parents off at his mother’s college reunion in North Carolina. They didn’t believe the kid’s story about falling asleep together on the sofa and waking up to find her gone, but the case jammed when the kid’s DNA didn’t match the swabs.

  A month later the investigation was running dry and Waldo was starting to get pressure to go back to his division when he played a hunch and ran a check on the kid’s relatives, even the out-of-town ones, and found an uncle in New Mexico with a rape jacket, then found the same uncle had rented a car in Las Cruces the day before the murder and reported it stolen the day after. Turned out a surprise visit to his sister’s family had gone in a different direction, and now, thanks to Waldo, Marisol’s killer was at Mule Creek, on a cellblock with one of the Menendez brothers. But Alberto Suarez was never the same, stopped busting balls, finally pensioned out and spent a couple of years watching the Dodgers before he decided Kershaw every fifth day wasn’t enough of a distraction from the hell and opened a gun shop of his own.

  When Waldo entered the empty store, Alberto recognized him even through the beard and almost smiled but not quite. Business was good, Alberto told him, plenty of cops coming his way, the years of goodwill paying off. Most of his stock, in fact, was LAPD-approved weaponry, familiar stuff. Waldo searched the glass case for an eight-round semiautomatic Beretta 8045F, the weapon he’d carried on duty and off for most of his career, and found one. Alberto unlocked the case and handed it to Waldo. He couldn’t say it felt good in his hand, but it felt like his.

  Waldo tested the safety, then tested Alberto. “One thing. I don’t have a license.”

  “Anybody asks, I thought you were still a cop.”

  Waldo raised an eyebrow, doubting the play. “You don’t watch TV?”

  Alberto was confident. “Don’t even have one no more.”

  Waldo nodded gratitude, laid the Beretta on top of the case and said, “This’ll work.” He took out his wallet and gave Alberto his one credit card, which reminded him of the other issue, that the gun would be the Hundred and First Thing.

  “Problem?” Alberto said.

  Waldo didn’t want to explain it all again. He reconsidered the wallet, which he would rather not give up, then emptied his pockets onto the counter in hope of finding an alternative. A Swiss Army knife—eight Things in one and thus indispensable—plus the keys to his cabin and bike lock; that was it. The wallet had to go. He plucked from it his cash and credit card and showed the ratty wallet to Alberto. “You know anything about Goodwill? Think they’d want this?”

  Alberto’s brow furrowed at the odd question but gave the wallet a once-over. “Probably not.”

  “Throw it away for me?”

  “Why’n’t you get a new one first?” Waldo waved off the question. Alberto tossed it in the garbage can behind the counter. Then he said, “Let’s get you some bullets.”

  Waldo froze. “Bullets. Shit.” He thought for a moment, then kicked off his shoes and started pulling off his socks. One had a hole in the toe anyway.

  THIRTEEN

  The PO address on Lorena’s website was a dingy little mailbox store on Hollywood Boulevard. Waldo wheeled his bike inside and leaned it against a wall. The place was empty save the young woman behind the counter, and she didn’t glance up from her phone when he came in. Waldo found 173 on the wall of rental boxes and peered in the tiny glass window: empty. Lorena had been missing for the better part of a week; not even junk in there, which meant somebody was picking up her mail.

  He took another look at the girl on duty: sleeve tattoos, a dozen piercings, pigtails ironically high on her crown, thumbing her phone a little too fast. “Hey,” he said, and she still didn’t look up. A little louder—“Hey”—and she did. “You got a name?”

  She frowned for a good five seconds, less like she wasn’t sure what to answer than like she didn’t remember what a question was. Finally she said, “Theola.” One eye twitched a little.

  “Tell me about 173, Theola,” Waldo said, coming over to her. “Who owns it?”

  Her hands trembled too. After another odd hesitation she said, “My boss doesn’t want me to, like—” Before she could finish, Waldo stormed around the counter and snagged the studded leather handbag from the chair next to her.

  “Hey!” She lunged but he turned away, blocked her with his body and dumped the contents onto the counter. Along with the usual wallet and keys, sunglasses and lighter, loose change and mints, he found what he expected, an amber prescription bottle from Rite Aid. “Your boss doesn’t want you to, like, take dexies on the job, is that what you were going to say?”

  “Gimme that!” She grabbed at the bottle but he held it out of reach.

  “Not your day, Theola. I’m a cop.” It wasn’t just a lie, it was a felony, but in his experience, tweakers didn’t tend to file formal complaints.

  She stopped trying to wrestle for the bottle and went with a shaky indignation instead. “I’m ADHD,” she said. “I have a prescription.”

  “I’m sure you got several.” Then he repeated, “Box 173.”

  She scowled, cornered and resentful, then went to the desk computer and struggled to work the mouse with a jittery hand. “You don’t look like a cop,” she grumbled as she brought up the info.

  Waldo looked over her shoulder and read out loud, “Willem Vander Janssen, 511 North St. Andrews Place.” He looked down at her. “You know him?” She shook her head. When she held his eye he decided she was probably telling the truth. “Thank you, Theola,” he said, friendly, and went for his bike.

  “Hey, do I get my pills back?”

  “Nah. I’m keeping ’em.”

  “If you’re a cop, I wanna see some ID.”

  Half out the door, he turned back. “Feel free to call my captain and tell him what a prick I am. North Hollywood Division. My name’s Cuppy.”

  “Come on. Please?” She looked frightened.

  What would he do with them anyway? Dump the bottle in a sewer, feed Dexedrine into the ecosystem? Save it until he went to division and toss it in the drop box there? That visit was going to be complicated enough. He could hold on to it without a short-term plan . . . but, well, then it’s a Thing. He tossed her the bottle and was surprised when she caught it clean.

  She looked up at him, grateful like a child, and said, “Thanks, Cuppy.”

  * * *

  —

  A stakeout without an automobile was another first, exposed and conspicuous on a street of one-story houses and little traffic. To cover, he leaned the bike against a mailbox and dropped down to fuss with the gears and pretend a repair. In case anyone was watching from inside one of these houses, every hour or so he moved the bike to a different spot on the block, keeping 511 North St. Andrews in sight.

  As the afternoon of squatting and kneeling ground away and he wondered whether it was time to move to yet another vantage, his fourth, his conscience began to trouble him almost as much as his knees. It had been well over twenty-four hours since he’d done anything on the case he’d been hired to handle, given that the trip to and from Idyllwild ended up having nothing to do with Alastair Pinch. Waldo rationalized that more of Alastair’s neighbors would be around to talk to him in the evening anyway, his intended next step. Of course, by the same token it was likely that he was right now staking out an empty house, that Waldo would waste the rest of the day here waiting for Willem Vander Janssen, whoever that was, to get home from work, and even after that it would take him a good couple of hours to get over the hill to Studio City. Being honest with himself, he knew that if he stayed here until, say, eight o’clock, he’d end up giving his clients nothing for today’s two thousand dollars.

  He’d just decided to give St. Andrews Place one more hour, when a shirtless
blond man emerged, locked the front door behind him and trotted into the street in Waldo’s direction. He was more fashion-ad handsome than TV-star handsome, tall and muscled like a swimmer, his perfect three days’ beard nothing like Waldo’s raggedy three years’. Even the skimpiness of his running shorts suggested a life of being looked at. And why not? Waldo thought. He was the flavor of beautiful you find in maybe a dozen American zip codes. The two men nodded strangers’ acknowledgment as the jogger passed; then Waldo stood and called to his back, “Willem Vander Janssen?” The man stopped running and turned, corporeal confidence giving way to corporeal fear.

  Waldo said, “I’m looking for Lorena.”

  The man took a couple of steps backward, like he was thinking about making a run for it. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Charlie Waldo.”

  “Oh,” Vander Janssen said, visibly deflating with relief. “Oh. Waldo. Thank God. Hi.” He came to Waldo and pumped his hand gratefully.

  Waldo said, “You know who I am.”

  “Lorena’s talked about you. Plenty.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “I haven’t seen her since last Thursday. She borrowed my car. She said she was scared to drive her own.”

  Waldo said, “Lorena used that word? ‘Scared’?” It was hard to imagine this woman, who had once left a pro athlete three times her weight in critical condition, being afraid of anything.

  Vander Janssen said, “You’re probably wondering why I’m going for a run, with her missing and all. But, you know.” He gestured vaguely to his body, as if its perfection were explanation enough. He bounced nervously on the balls of his feet, took a glance in each direction down the street. “Truth is, I’m pretty freaked out. Are you helping her? She said you’d help her.”

  “When did she say that? Before or after she came to see me?”

  Vander Janssen said, “I didn’t even know she saw you. She only told me she was going to reach out.”