“She came up to where I live, in Idyllwild.” The guy shrugged: news to him. Waldo said, “Your car she borrowed—was it the Porsche?”
“The 911? Uh-huh.”
“Why’s she doing business out of your PO box? Who are you?”
“Oh. I’m her husband.”
It was a gut punch.
Then again, what should he have expected? He was the one who disappeared, and stayed that way—of course there would be somebody, probably a whole series of somebodies; still, with the reality standing in front of him, this pretty boy with his shorty-shorts body off a Sunset Boulevard billboard, the world tilted off its axis. His own erotic memories, his thoughts in the night, everything he had so tenaciously chased away, were all of her, still, but here was a living demonstration that her erotic life had moved on. And yet—and how did this square with the fact of a husband—Lorena wanted Waldo back, didn’t she? The visit to the mountain, the way she held him, looked at him—wasn’t that what she’d been telling him? Evidently not. How had he misread that so badly?
The time away had made him wholly incompetent to live in the world.
“You want to go inside and talk?” the man said. Lorena’s husband said. Waldo nodded dumbly and followed him back inside the house.
Her house. With these oversize arty photographs of birds on the wall (was this her taste now? since when?) and framed photos of older people (the darker-complected ones familiar, the blond ones not) on the end table of the living room set, this living room set they probably shopped for together, Mr. and Mrs. Willem Vander Janssen, out on a Saturday afternoon with a joint Mastercard, looking to fill up their home together with shared Things. Because none of this would have been Lorena Nascimento’s alone. Her downtown apartment had been cluttered with secondhand gems discovered at swap meets and yard sales, eclectic but all comfortable and interesting and hers, not these anodyne prefabs straight out of some anodyne chain at some anodyne mall, clean and well matched but aggressively not interesting. Had she subordinated her taste to this guy’s, to everything she wasn’t? Did she love him that much?
And then he found himself furious for wondering about any of that, for letting his mind, his weakness, distract him from the only question about Lorena that mattered: Was she even alive?
Vander Janssen himself was asking him a different question, though: “Would you like a kombucha?” Waldo didn’t know what that was but knew he didn’t need one and shook his head. “Is it okay if I get one?”
“Your house.”
Vander Janssen went into the kitchen. Waldo followed to see what that was like. More Lorena, the new-model disinfected Lorena: white marble countertops, even the small appliances well coordinated, everything placed perfectly as if staged for a real estate showing. The notion that she lived like this was as foreign to Waldo as his cabin must have been to her.
Vander Janssen took a bottled tea-looking drink from the fridge and leaned against the counter. Waldo asked, “Did she tell you who she was scared of?”
“No. She never talked about her work.” That, too, was strange: she’d always been candid with Waldo, their respective investigations part of the daily fabric of their lives together. Early on they’d established a sort of inviolate confidentiality agreement with regard to their business-related conversations, and each trusted that the other would never misuse anything shared. It was part of their intimacy, and it held even when they were in one of their off-again stretches. A Lorena who walled off her work from her life partner would be a different Lorena. Then again, he was a different Waldo. Three years.
More important, it meant that her husband might not be much help. “Can you tell me anything about her business? Like, does she have an office? The website only has the PO box.”
“No office. She goes to the client, and if they want to meet her somewhere else, she uses this thing LiquidSpace.” That plus kombucha, two words in less than a minute that Waldo didn’t know, and when Vander Janssen explained by saying, “It’s like Airbnb, for offices,” that made three. Waldo decided he’d be better off nodding false comprehension, but when Vander Janssen added, “Saves her on overhead,” he interpolated some sort of short-term rental service.
“What about the ops? She said she had full-time employees.”
“She does. Three. It’s all online or phone.”
“Know their names?”
“Sure.”
“It’d be good if you could write them down for me.” Lorena’s husband opened a drawer and took out a pad, then stopped, overcome by some thought. “What?” Waldo said.
Vander Janssen said, “Do you think anything happened to her?”
The things they had in common made Waldo queasy. He got back to it. “If Lorena was hiding, where would she go?”
Lorena’s husband didn’t have any idea. It was stunning how little the man seemed to know about his wife. The realization that the relationship must have been primarily physical made him queasier. Vander Janssen said, “You can look at her room if you want. She might have some files up there.”
“Her home office?”
Vander Janssen shifted his weight. “It’s really like her, you know, room. Like where she lives.” Waldo didn’t get it. “We’re kinda, like, separated. Even though we’re both living here.” He added, apologetically, “That’s why I don’t know very much.” The ground kept shifting under Waldo. He couldn’t even tell what he was feeling—relieved or angry or jealous or just pissed off at the guy’s uselessness.
They passed the husband’s bedroom, as flawless and flavorless as the front rooms, but when they reached Lorena’s he recognized the woman again. “Sorry about the mess,” said Vander Janssen. But it wasn’t a mess; it was a revolt: there was a queen bed with discrepant sheets and pillowcases and a heavy afghan Waldo recalled her bringing home from the Rose Bowl Flea Market. He’d slept under it many times.
There was an overstuffed closet and shoes that overflowed across the carpet, but no desk and no file boxes. She had a laptop but, unsurprisingly, Vander Janssen didn’t know the password. He did know the names of her three employees—all men, Willie Williams and Lucian Reddix and Dave Goldberg—and even had a phone number for one of them, but Waldo doubted they’d be very useful either.
The two men who’d shared Lorena’s bed, probably the bed they were standing next to, talked for a while about how she and Vander Janssen met, and how quickly they got married and bought the house, and why it made financial sense to keep sharing it platonically while they figured out how to untangle their lives. The talk satisfied some of Waldo’s curiosity but shed no light on whether Don Q had harmed her or where she might be hiding if he hadn’t.
His phone rang. “Waldo.”
“It’s Fontella. Got anything yet?”
He felt guilty again for ignoring the case for a day and a half. Half turning from Vander Janssen, he said, “I’ve got the coroner’s report.”
“Jeez, I can get that.”
He’d almost forgotten how much he hated having a boss. He flashed on his pond and his Kindle. He said, “I’m going to hit Alastair’s neighbors this evening, when people are home from work,” feeling the need to justify himself, then immediately hating himself for doing it. Davis didn’t respond. He could feel her disdain through the static. He said, “I could use access to phone records from that night.”
Davis sighed annoyance. “Nothing there. Monica had two calls on her cell: one outgoing early in the evening to order Indian food—delivery man saw Monica, didn’t see Alastair; one incoming later, a friend confirming a tennis date the next day. Nothing on Alastair’s cell. One call to Sikorsky from the landline.”
“What was Sikorsky about?”
“Chocolate.”
“Chocolate?”
“Alastair called to tell him American Milky Ways aren’t as good as they make in England and he needed his trailer stocked with
the British kind. Mars bars.”
“Alastair called the president of the network for that?”
“Doesn’t remember doing it, either. Sikorsky says he was completely tanked already. Let me know if I can do anything else for you.” She didn’t need tone to sell the sarcasm.
Waldo said, “I could use the times of all those calls,” but she’d already hung up.
FOURTEEN
He was back in Studio City by five, leaving him plenty of time to talk to Alastair’s neighbors. Or, as it happened, plenty of time to realize how few neighbors Alastair had. The house sat on an acre-and-a-half lot, big for L.A., and backed onto a hillside that abutted public land, separated from Fryman Canyon Park by cyclone fencing topped with razor wire, ugly but practical and tucked deep enough into a hillside eucalyptus grove to be unnoticeable from the Pinch yard. The only neighbors with a chance of seeing or hearing anything the night of the murder would have been those in the houses on either side, or possibly the one across the street on what looked like an even larger property, though that home was hidden by forbidding ivy walls and a solid gate. Waldo tried it first.
The entrance, directly across from Alastair’s driveway, had a doorbell and keypad for gate entry. While he waited for a response to his ring he noticed a security camera pointed at him. “Yes?” a woman said through an intercom. He looked straight into the camera and said he was an investigator and that he’d like to talk to her about Monica Pinch. She told him she’d already said everything to the police. When he started to ask how well she knew the Pinches, she said, “Please go away,” and he heard a click.
The house to the Pinches’ left looked more promising. No wall, just a friendly red picket fence behind which a fresh-faced young woman with copper hair watched two little kids on training-wheeled bikes pedaling loops around a driveway the size of a small playground. She wouldn’t come outside the fence or let Waldo inside, but she chatted over it for a few minutes while she kept an eye on her charges. Her name was Shelagh and she was spending two years in America as an au pair for this family, the Goodwins. She was homesick for Edinburgh and said she loved the kids but she didn’t seem to care for their parents, who’d gone out for the evening, as they did almost every night. She’d never personally seen Alastair but knew from the Sparkletts man that he lived in the house next door. She said she’d heard shouting from over there once but couldn’t make it out, and also that their nanny, Rosario, seemed nice though her English wasn’t good enough for them to really be friends. Waldo thought she gave him this much time mostly because she was lonely.
The only actual homeowners he got to meet were the ones on the other side. Waldo had seen Chase and Martha Shinn before, on a local news segment on the murder that he’d found on YouTube that first morning he’d researched the case, after he’d been linked to it in Variety. They were both executives at what they called content providers, neither of which Waldo had heard of but whose names they seemed to think would impress him. The couple was happy, even eager, to talk some more about the Pinches, whom they clearly couldn’t stand. Waldo got the sense that they both disliked Monica even more than Alastair, especially the wife, but he could see them trying to focus their scorn tactfully on the spouse who hadn’t just been murdered.
They took Waldo out to the street to show him the torn-up lawn in front of their house and the stump of an orange tree, which they claimed Alastair had cracked so badly with his Hummer one drunken night that they’d had to cut the whole thing down. Then they showed him a toolshed that the Pinches had built a foot and a half over their property line, and also described at length the ugliest point of contention, a birthday party invitation that the Shinns’ daughter had extended to Gaby but which went unreciprocated, a slight that escalated to tears on the day of Gaby’s birthday when little Alexa Shinn saw that the Pinches had brought in a pony and a moon bounce for the day. As for the murder, Alastair’s guilt was self-evident to them, though they hadn’t actually seen or heard anything the night Monica died.
The third time the conversation circled around to the contretemps over the moon bounce, Waldo found a way to extricate himself and walked back to Alastair’s house. Rosario let him in and told him that Gaby was upstairs in her room and that Alastair wasn’t home from work yet. Waldo decided to take advantage of the unsupervised time to give the house a closer inspection and see if he might glean something the cops had missed.
He checked out the security system, which supposedly had been armed through the night, until right after the police saw Alastair turn it off. It was from a well-known alarm company and pretty standard issue for this kind of house, everything in order and working right and all the accessible windows fitted with alarm screens.
He studied the front door, which had two locks: a typical single cylinder, opened by key from the outside and a twist knob from the inside, plus a one-sided dead bolt with a twist knob on the inside but no access at all from the outside. With that one locked, nobody could enter through the door, and nobody could secure it from the outside, either. This was the lock Freddie had mentioned and the immutable fact that most incriminated Alastair.
Waldo retrieved the Architectural Digest from his guest room and surveyed the living room from the camera’s vantage in each of the two large photos in the magazine. The issue was a year old, but little in the space had changed: there were different flowers, naturally, some art and a new Oriental rug. A side table had been swapped for another, and a small sculpture and a floor vase were gone. Other than that, the magazine shoot could have been this afternoon.
“What say you, Detective? Ought I hire a decorator and refurnish completely?” Alastair had entered behind him and he hadn’t noticed.
Waldo tapped one of the magazine photos. “Where’s this vase?”
“Ah, the amphora she was killed with. Gone, gone. Smashed to bits.”
“What was it, ceramic?”
“Earthenware. We bought it in Istanbul.” He sighed. “Beautiful piece. I miss it.”
Waldo wondered how a jury would take to him. Could be a catastrophe, but then again, with all that star power and that disarming twinkle even when tossing out a casually outrageous remark like that, twelve star-struck citizens might eat this guy right up. Waldo indicated the magazine again. “How about this table?”
Alastair considered it a bit but didn’t have an answer. “That photo’s a year and a half old, you realize. Monica was a tinkerer; no room was ever finished. That painting’s changed, too.”
“I saw. And the rug.”
“Well, that’s because of the blood,” he said softly. Waldo nodded gravely. Alastair added, “With the stains, it didn’t match the sofa.” Waldo doubled back: catastrophe for sure.
He said, “And this sculpture?”
“That’s not a sculpture—it’s an Olivier Award, for my Richard the Third.”
“Where is it now?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never been much for Acting Trophies,” Alastair said, making plain what he thought of them. As always, Waldo couldn’t tell where the genuine insouciance ended and the posing began. “Monica liked to keep that one on display for sentimental reasons—that was the production on which we met. Truly, I haven’t thought about it in years; I’ve no idea where she moved it. For all I know, the police may have stolen it.” Waldo frowned, his patience thinning, but Alastair kept the act going. “There were a number of things missing when they were through. Some photographs, petty cash from the cookie jar.”
“Really.”
“They haven’t exactly been gentle with the process.” He flopped onto a sofa. “Or perhaps it went into the trash with my other Oliviers and my People’s Choice Award.” He pronounced the last with extra-big capital letters. “For that one I had to beat out two crusty doctors and a vampire.”
“What do they give Oliviers for? Plays?”
“British theater. The equivalent of your Tonys.”
“Honestly, I don’t know where any of them are. Anyhow, it’s not the number; it’s the notion. They’re fakery. Fakery to celebrate fakery.”
“You don’t seem to think much of your work.”
Alastair gazed out the window at his California-style English garden, jasmine and succulents instead of tulips and lavender. “The perfect performance would be King Lear, done in a sealed black box with no audience. Every deviation from that is compromise. The more you’re willing to compromise, the more the forces of commerce stand ready to palliate the damage to your soul with statuettes and luxury, until the palliative becomes the thing itself, and then, my dear friend, you are lost.” He thought about that for a moment, and added, “Of course, as your presence attests, lost I may already be.”
“Or maybe,” Waldo said, “somebody just wanted to say they like your acting.”
Alastair exploded with a guffaw. “Yes! Yes, Detective! It could be that!”
Gaby bounded into the room with a picture book she wanted her dad to help her read, and Alastair excused himself for the night. Waldo had plans anyway: he was going to hear Jayne White sing.
He considered taking a shower, though he’d just had one the morning before. Living in Idyllwild, he did that only every third day to conserve his well water. Even then his careful bucket shower used but a small fraction of what a few minutes under the spray in a normally plumbed house would use, so two traditional running-water showers a mere thirty-six hours apart felt dissolute, considering the water crisis threatening the globe. But since yesterday morning he’d had the grueling, sweat-soaked bike up the mountain, the scuffle with Don Q and Nini, and then today’s long wait in the sun outside Lorena’s house, and the level of hygiene adequate for solitary life in the woods probably wouldn’t do in Los Angeles, especially not at whatever kind of club in West Hollywood Jayne had invited him to. So shower he did, mitigating the extravagance by running the water only briefly to wet himself, then turning it off to soap, shampoo and lather, then on again to rinse as quickly as he could.
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