Last Looks

by Howard Michael Gould

  “Gaby Pinch is one of your students. I’d say the chaos already found her.”

  Hexter’s smugness dissipated. He said, “Her name’s Jayne White. Room 2. I’ll walk you over.” They crossed the campus in a disagreeable silence. Hexter indicated the door without a good-bye and headed back toward the playground.

  Waldo stepped into the classroom and saw a life-size plastic skeleton holding its own skull in an upraised palm. Alastair was standing behind the skeleton, his head atop the spine where the skull should be. Gaby and her bucktooth friend, sitting on the floor in front of the show, were already squealing with delight.

  Alastair quieted them and began: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy . . .” He worked the bones like a skilled puppeteer, the arms expressive and elegant, the legs punctuating with an occasional twitch or kick. The girls were riveted; they didn’t need to understand the words, only that they hadn’t seen anything like it. Neither had Waldo.

  “. . . he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed—” Alastair bussed the skull square on the mouth and turned to the little girls with an icked-out face. They screamed and giggled; the man knew his audience.

  Alastair played the speech all the way to the end and the tiny crowd hung on every word. When he finished, all three applauded, and so did a fourth. Waldo looked over his shoulder and saw the teacher Jayne White, twenty-six maybe, simply and practically adorned for a day among five-year-olds, yet still so striking, hair so dark and eyes so pale, that Waldo took a second glance despite himself.

  “Ms. White?”

  “That’s me.”

  Alastair affixed the skull to its rightful spot and said, “Come, girls—I’ll push you on the swings until the bell rings. Mr. Waldo wants to ask your teacher whether Daddy plays nicely with the other children.” They each grabbed a hand and he led them out, winking at Waldo and saying, “I’ll meet you at the car so you can gather your bicycle.”

  When they were alone he said, “My name’s Waldo. I’m a detective working for Alastair.”

  “Really.” She gave him a once-over. “I’d have guessed you were his stylist.”

  The crack knocked him off-balance. But he recovered: “Give me some credit—not a lot of people could pull this off without looking scruffy.”

  She smiled, then sobered. “I’m sorry; we shouldn’t be joking. My heart breaks for Gaby. This has to be all kinds of unreal for her. I can’t even imagine how she’s processing it. Mr. Pinch does a lot to keep her spirits up.”

  “What was Mrs. Pinch like as a parent?”

  Jayne thought before answering. “We have the children memorize these poems? I like to ask the kids whose mom and dad can recite them, too. Half the time the parents can’t, but the nanny can, in two languages.”

  “And the Pinches?”

  “Mrs. Pinch never knew the poems. Mr. Pinch, always.”

  “Her death must have shocked the hell out of this place.”

  “Not me.” That got his attention, but before he could follow up, a cluster of little boys broke the moment, tumbling into the room, screaming and knocking the carefully ordered desks askew. Jayne was gentle with them but firm. “No running in the classroom, you guys know that. And we use our inside voices, remember?” The boys settled down as Jayne took a marker and began writing on a sheet of construction paper.

  Waldo said to her, “I want to hear more.”

  “Come tomorrow night and hear me sing,” she said.

  “You don’t look like a singer.”

  She handed him the construction paper. It had an address on La Cienega, the other side of the hill, and below that she’d written, 8:30.

  “This is Hollywood, Waldo. Who is who they are?”

  NINE

  Like many Angelenos, he had never actually ridden the subway, but his thighs cried for mercy after yesterday’s hours on the bike, so he looked up the Metro on his phone. He calculated that the Red Line, which ran all the way to Union Station, could clip fifteen blessed miles off the ride downtown.

  Rush hour hadn’t thinned yet at the North Hollywood station, so he had to jostle his bike through the crush and onto the long escalator down from the plaza. At the bottom he took a spot behind two other passengers waiting to pay for the ride. When his turn came, it took him a moment to decode the vending machine’s payment system, and when he finally did his heart sank: the Metro apparently required him to load the dollar seventy-five fare, or multiple fares if he preferred, onto a reusable card, which itself had to be purchased separately for a dollar. No way around it, the reusability made the card itself a Thing, which would have to live alongside his cash and single credit card (two Things) in his threadbare wallet (a third Thing). “Shit,” he muttered.

  He looked at the wallet, which he’d owned for a decade and rarely used, and considered shedding that in favor of the Metro card. But aside from the mild undesirability of keeping his cash and credit card loose, he wasn’t expecting to spend much time in Los Angeles or come back often; a rarely used fare card was precisely the kind of Thing he’d learned to strip from his life.

  Someone behind him cleared her throat and shuffled impatiently, and he realized that there were already three people waiting for him to finish, the first in line—probably the throat clearer—a young Latina in what looked like a nurse’s uniform.

  If he used the card just once and disposed of it immediately, he could consider it currency—and part of that Thing—as he would, say, if the subway ran on old-fashioned tokens. Of course, if he rode the Metro more than once, as was likely, that would raise each fare by more than fifty percent, to two seventy-five, steep for a subway ride, but maybe the best available choice. That is, if it didn’t mean throwing away a piece of plastic every time he rode a subway, a nonstarter. “Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered.

  “Need some help?” said the nurse, not gently.

  Waldo didn’t answer, put his credit card in the machine and figured out how to purchase a card with one fare loaded.

  At the turnstile he watched other passengers tap their cards on the sensor to continue to the trains and he imitated them with one hand while lifting his bike with the other. There was still another short escalator to ride down to the platform, and he was relieved to see a security guard standing beside it, eyeballing him. Waldo approached him, holding out his Metro card. “Can I give you this?”

  “What for?”

  “I can’t keep it. Can you take it, give it back to the . . . whoever?”

  “You keep it. For next time you ride.”

  “I don’t want to keep it.”

  “Keep it.”

  “Please.”

  “Look, man,” said the guard, “you wanna chuck it, chuck it. I can’t do nothin’ with that.” He held up his hands, not wanting to touch something that Waldo had been holding, and Waldo realized that, given his appearance, it was understandable. He decided he’d look for the vending machines at Union Station and see if he could give the card away to a passenger about to buy one, and if not, leave it on the ground nearby in hope that someone would pick it up.

  Waldo descended the short escalator with his bike just as a train was pulling into the station. The car was empty, North Hollywood being the first stop on the line, and Waldo took a seat that allowed him to rest his bike against the wall of the car beside him. In the quiet of the ride his mind drifted not to Alastair and Monica Pinch, but to Lorena and to Cuppy’s ominous claims. It was possible, even likely, that Cuppy was just trying to push his buttons. But Lorena must have seen the media attention that Waldo was getting in the past twenty-four hours; you’d think she’d know he was working on Pinch and reach out. Then again, when she came to see him, he’d rejected a lot more than a case. Maybe she was humiliated, maybe even ang
ry at him all over again.

  Besides, mystery had always been her default. In fact, she counted on his acceptance of that; it had been an essential element of their equilibrium. Even in their early days, when he was still with the department and had means legal or otherwise to check the dirt behind anybody’s ears, he had never asked around about her, never even ran a simple online search. He’d allowed her to be as much or as little a cryptogram as she wanted to be, a choice that sometimes served as a love drug and at other times magnified his torment, but which, he could tell from the beginning, was the only way to be with a woman like Lorena Nascimento and keep himself sane.

  The reverse had never been true, he was sure.

  They’d originally met at a double-homicide scene in Echo Park. Hours before, Lorena—an op in those days for an eastside schmo named Tejano—had played her client recordings of the woman’s husband and au pair cavorting in the couple’s own bed while she was out at her book group talking about The Help. The wife, a devotee of cooking shows, decided to consult the Food Network website rather than a divorce attorney, then put her own twist on one of Rachael Ray’s favorites and served both husband and au pair a zucchini linguine with curried arsenic pesto.

  As Detective Charlie Waldo, called to the scene, guided the murderous wife into the back of his car, he thought he noticed the woman’s alluring PI looking him over with a curiosity dissonant to the occasion. The second time he met Lorena, at her boss’s office to take her statement, the look she gave him while she lingeringly palmed him her business card told him she’d moved well beyond curiosity—in fact, it made him feel like he’d already been fully vetted. And during their first date, dinner in a reconstructed speakeasy she suggested downtown, it was like she was three steps ahead, like she’d somehow combed through his bank accounts and quizzed a handful of former lovers. She was almost smirking while she let him tell stories she already knew, even finishing one or two for him. Whom she’d talked to, what she’d actually seen—that was part of the enigma that Waldo intuitively knew to let stand.

  So by the time the train pulled into the next stop, Universal City, and the car started to fill, he had convinced himself not to worry about Lorena. There were all sorts of reasons he might not hear from her.

  But then he started to think about the darker ones and reached for his phone, only to learn there was no connectivity this far belowground. He felt suddenly helpless, penned into a close space as he hadn’t been for ages, with no idea how long the rest of the ride downtown would take or even how many stops before they got there, and fifty people, easy, between him and the map that could tell him. He closed his eyes, drew as deep a breath as he could, and promised himself he’d be back in Idyllwild before long.

  At Vermont/Sunset a disfigured woman limped aboard, four and a half feet tall and no more than eighty pounds, skin a mottle of angry blotches, a disconcertingly long tongue hanging straight down to her chin, possibly without bottom teeth to hold it in, a ratty wool cap covering whatever the top of her head might look like. Waldo couldn’t begin to guess her age. The kinder teenagers by the door shied away; the cruel ones giggled. Whatever her afflictions, it had to be an unimaginable existence. Dragging a green plastic bag full of something, she hobbled over to Waldo and squeezed past him into the vacant window seat.

  She settled in and from her rancid cloth coat pulled out a smartphone with a shattered screen and half a pair of earbuds and began tapping it with maculated hands. Soon she was laughing, full guffaws ringing through the otherwise quiet car. Waldo couldn’t resist peeking down. Through the cracks in her screen he made out a fat man in what looked like a Nazi helmet and recognized it as an episode of the old prison camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. The commandant with the monocle smacked his bald head in chagrin and the misshapen creature chortled, stomped her foot and drooled a little. Why, of all the things she could have downloaded for subterranean playback, had she chosen this? The anomaly so vexed Waldo that he almost tapped her leg and asked, but the last thing he wanted to do was disrupt her delight and jar her back into wretchedness. Then again, maybe it wasn’t that complicated, and no different from his connection to MTV Cribs—these goofy Nazis played the right chords, the ones that somehow worked for her, distracted her and gave her respite. Same reason anyone watched anything, maybe. Same reason so many people watched Johnny’s Bench.

  Which brought him back to the case. Why hadn’t Alastair been arrested yet? Did the police have doubts? Or was it just particular caution because of the high-profile suspect, wanting to have the case fully locked down before they pulled the trigger? One of his first pieces of business would be to find out whether they were looking at anybody else. He also needed to learn whether those buffoons from the Palisades were even on their radar. Why were they so intent on scaring Waldo off the case? They weren’t just a piece that didn’t fit; they seemed to be completely misboxed, from another puzzle entirely.

  * * *

  —

  Waldo locked his bike to a stand outside the pretty brick building on Mission Road that used to be the old Los Angeles County General Hospital and now housed the coroner’s office. He went up to the second floor and past the sign for Skeletons in the Closet, the eccentric little gift shop, discreetly set off from the rest of the building’s grim business, which sold chalk-outline towels and boxer shorts along with crime scene tape and toe tags. There was a time when its morbid irony tickled him, but now he knew it to be, like all its brethren, an apotheosis of the world’s problem, silently poisoning the planet one playful bit of kitsch at a time.

  He asked the receptionist to see Freddie Dellamora and gave his own name, which didn’t seem to mean anything to her, a good sign, and took a molded plastic seat in the waiting area. Waldo didn’t know how many friendly pockets he’d be able to find after everything that had happened, but this was a safe place to start. Though Freddie was seven years older, they’d hit it off on a drive-by killing during Waldo’s rookie year and quickly became after-work buddies. Beyond their friendship, Freddie owed Waldo more favors than either of them could count: he’d introduced Freddie to his wife, a public defender with a lot of business at North Hollywood; later on, when Freddie grew tired of the marriage, Waldo had reluctantly let him invent a fiction about splitting a pair of Dodgers season tickets, to cover Freddie’s once again robust dating life.

  Now Freddie emerged from behind a heavy door, a little thicker under his scrubs, eyes droopier, gray hair peeking out from under his cap. Time hadn’t been kind to him, but this was the first friend Waldo had seen since he’d gotten to town, and he felt himself smiling.

  Freddie wasn’t smiling back. He gave Waldo a once-over and said, “Jesus, Waldo.” It was something he was hearing a lot. Freddie tipped his head toward the heavy door and Waldo followed him through. Freddie moved fast, making no effort to let Waldo keep up, and once in his cramped office shut the door quickly behind them. Stacks of file folders covered the floor and every inch parallel to it except for Freddie’s desk chair, onto which he dropped, frowning. “Outside this room, you don’t know me anymore. Understand?” Waldo held out his hands for an explanation. “You’re poison.”

  “Even at the coroner’s?”

  “Coroner’s, sheriff’s, LAPD, DMV, PTA. Poison. Fuck were you expecting?”

  Waldo frowned. “Can I sit?”

  Freddie waved permission for Waldo to move the files from the chair. “What kind of welcome they give you at division?”

  “I came to you first.”

  “Thanks for that. Ticker tape, you’ll get over there. Rose petals.”

  “Yeah, I know. Probably twenty guys in that building who’d like to knock my teeth in.”

  “Twenty? A hundred. Twenty who’d like to knock ’em in with a bullet.”

  Waldo got right to it. “I want the autopsy protocol on Monica Pinch. All the slides, all the photos—”

  Freddie scoffed. “Good luck with that.”<
br />
  Waldo said, “The defense has the right to everything—”

  “Defense. He hasn’t been arrested yet.”

  “Is he going to be?”

  “Fuck you think.”

  “So, what—I’m asking you for it a couple days early.” Freddie shook his head. Waldo tried another tack. “Or you can wait and deal with Fontella Davis instead. Who’s every bit the delight she looks like on TV, by the way.” Waldo saw that wasn’t enough. “And who never went in with you on Dodger seats.”

  Freddie looked out his window. “Barb left me. Right before Christmas.”

  “There’s a surprise.”

  “Charlie fucking Waldo.” He plucked a file from one of the stacks on his desk. “Wait here while I make copies. Door closed.” He started out of the room.

  Waldo stopped him with a question. “Straight up: how do you make this?”

  Freddie stopped and exhaled to signal a serious and thoughtful response. “Severe blow to the right temple, cerebral hemorrhage, secondary contusion back of the head, probably where she fell.” Waldo nodded, following. “Subject locked in a house with a drunk who likes to beat people up. Front door’s got a dead bolt locks only from the inside. I’m guessing . . . suicide?” He screwed up his mouth, wiseass. Waldo shifted in his seat. Freddie went on. “And the alarm—you heard about that, right?”

  Waldo shook his head. “I just came on.”

  “Burglar alarm was set when the cops got there; they saw him turn it off. Alarm company says it was armed straight through since the previous night.”

  “Before or after time of death?”

  “Too close to call.” Freddie leaned on the edge of his desk, pushing a stack backward with his butt. “Fucking guy’s got two assault convictions in England, did you know that?” Waldo shook his head. “He’s a drunk and a hitter and a liar and he clobbered his wife with a vase. Nothing complicated about this one: he did her. I hear the DA’s dotting every i twice before they bring him in because he’s going to shoot for life.”