Waldo pedaled away from the entrance along the canyon road, edged on the Beverly Park side by ivy-covered walls. He pulled to the shoulder when he reached an area far from any streetlamps and thick enough with foliage to blacken out even the moonlight. He found a thick branch growing from a tree on the other side of the wall and leaned his bike beneath it, hoping like hell it would be safe here unlocked. He stepped onto the seat, pushed up on his toes, and managed just enough purchase on the branch to take a couple of ivy-aided steps up the wall and swing one leg over the top. He shimmied down the other side and found himself in a grove at the edge of one of the estates. He cut across the lawn on a diagonal, looking to pick up the internal road far enough from the walls to avoid the security guards.
The properties were so large that he spent the better part of an hour looking for Jamshidi’s address, trying to steer clear of a particular mansion that seemed to be hosting some kind of event until he realized it was the very one he was looking for. He’d rather have caught his target on a quiet night alone with his family; Jamshidi would have too many people around to run interference, possibly even an event security team. But at least Waldo could be sure the guy was home. Maybe he could turn the audience into a vulnerability.
He took cover behind a neighbor’s thick oak to watch the action in the driveway. Dressy guests spilling from luxury cars stopped to marvel at the grandeur of the home’s facade before regaining their L.A. cool, trying to look like they belonged here, like they were invited to soirees in palaces all the time. The cars themselves were swept off to an unseen lot by a squadron of red-vested valets. The very tableau, its heedless prodigality, rekindled the fury, swerving Waldo’s thoughts back to Lorena and the grisly photograph. But tonight couldn’t be about her; one job at a time.
He came out of the darkness and crossed the street. When one of the valets stepped into his path, Waldo muttered, “Don’t even think about it.”
The valet said, “I park the cars, man,” and cleared out of the way.
Ascending the front steps and entering the colossal foyer, Waldo couldn’t keep from marveling at the grandeur himself. There was marble everywhere and a five-foot circular mahogany table in the center with a perfectly centered crystal vase holding three dozen white tulips, and gilt-edged mirrors the size of picture windows on both walls. It reminded him of his junior-high trip to the White House. Waldo caught his reflection and realized the eyeful he presented, his wild mane now peppered with leaves and twigs from his clamber over the wall. He still smelled like urine, too. Fuck it, he thought. Use it.
A lively cocktail party was under way in a living room big enough for an NBA game. Long-limbed dazzlers in tall heels and short dresses passed out drinks and hors d’oeuvres to scores of guests in Zegna and Armani. There was a bar working at either end of the room; in between, a giant ice sculpture of a majestic eagle presided over a luxuriant dessert table.
The guests near the entrance were the first to notice him and stopped talking; within a minute their silence rippled through the hall as everyone turned and stared at the interloper. Loud enough to be sure everyone heard, he said, “Is this Darius Jamshidi’s house?”
Nobody answered.
He’d pick an individual to work, make a show of it. He turned to the first woman on his left. But she was dark, Lorena’s complexion, with a comparable build, now that he noticed, and he was back to that photograph, and the fury rose but not in a useful way. He spun to his right and locked on a dissimilar woman, auburn hair, porcelain skin, much better for the purpose, and asked her, “Do you know Darius Jamshidi?” The woman recoiled. “You the wife?” She gave her head a tiny shake. “Mistress?” Trembling, she stepped behind a nearby man, who didn’t look like he wanted her.
Waldo crossed toward one of the bars, studying the partygoers one by one as he passed, each of them so comfortable, so complacent, so untroubled. His gaze landed on a man with tortoiseshell glasses and a silk pocket-handkerchief. Up here on your hill, behind your walls . . . He wasn’t sure whether or not he’d said it out loud, but the man flinched as though he had.
At the bar, Waldo turned and asked the room, aloud for sure, “Which one of you is Jamshidi?” Nobody answered. This fucking day, and now these fucking people. He picked up a wine bottle from the bar and studied the label. “Château Gruaud Larose.” He looked at the bartender. “Did I say that right? Château Gruaud Larose.” He turned to a man in a cream silk jacket, holding a glass of red wine. “This what you’re drinking?” The man averted his eyes. “California makes some of the best wines anywhere—and people still haul a bottle like this from clear over on the other side of the planet.” He strolled toward the ice sculpture in the center of the room. “Put it on an extra ship, so what. Extra truck, who gives a shit.” He tipped the bottle to his lips, took a deep swig and felt the effect, his body still unused to alcohol. He regarded the bottle again. “I mean, sure, this vino’s tasty . . . but seriously, after two glasses, you might as well be drinking Ripple, right?”
With his free hand he plucked some kind of berry tart from the buffet. For damn sure none of these confections had ever been packaged. “All those extra ships and trucks?” He polished off the tart in two chomps and continued with his mouth full. “You know how many premature deaths we have from diesel pollution? Two thousand a year in California alone. Two thousand.” This was the best thing he’d tasted in longer than he could remember, and swallowing it reminded him how little he’d eaten today—no wonder the wine hit him hard—so he reached for another treat. “What do they call these? Macarons? Macaroons?”
“Macarons,” said a man with close-cropped silver hair, impatient and condescending.
Waldo squinted into the man’s wineglass. He said, “You like that Château Gruaud Larose?” this time warping the name with a snotty pseudo-French inflection. He stuffed the macaron into his mouth. “All these people dying in California from diesel pollution and still we bring wine all the way from France, Italy, Australia, because ours is too, what . . . local?” He swallowed the macaron. “Shit, that’s good. Like macadamia or something. What’s this pink one?” He wolfed down another and kept talking while he chewed and browsed the rest of the table. “You know where the pollution’s the worst? The hubs. The port in Long Beach, the truck routes in West Oakland, the rail yards in Commerce. The death rates there . . . fuck.” He turned to the silver-haired man, whose blue sport jacket somehow reminded Waldo of the navy. “But you don’t live in Commerce or West Oakland, do you, Admiral?”
A statuesque blonde spoke up from across the buffet table. “Whoever you are, I’ll have you know that the people in this room are very concerned about the environment. This happens to be a fund-raiser for global warming.”
“Really.” He took in the grand salon. “In this house.”
“This house is quite green. All the furniture replaced in the last two years is bamboo.”
Bamboo. He almost choked on his third macaron. These self-satisfied ass clowns, flying in private planes from one gargantuan house they don’t need to another, mansions with room after supersize room, each of these stupid fucking mansions pouring millions and millions of pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, for nothing—nothing—but to show off to the other ass clowns coming over for a drink—but those mansions are okay, see, not just okay but righteous, even, because the furniture in those earth-choking rooms in those earth-choking mansions, furniture nobody but their Guatemalan housekeepers will even touch, is made of bamboo. Next she’d start gibbering about carbon fucking offsets.
Waldo shook his head and looked at the buffet again. “You folks may have your heads up your asses, but I’ve got to give it to you: you do have some fine grub.” He leaned over the table and shook the leaves and twigs out of his hair and all over the desserts, ruining half the spread.
“Okay, mister, that’s enough.” Waldo turned and saw a brawny preppie type stepping forward to take him on, no doubt rememb
ering glory days playing rugby at some candy-ass college.
Waldo said, “I’m sorry—am I hogging the macaroons?”
The young man made his move, an Ivy League cross that Waldo slipped easily, hooking a leg and tripping him into the table and bringing it down on top of the preppie, the frozen eagle landing across the bridge of his nose and leaving him stunned and preposterous under a heap of overpriced pastries. Waldo turned to the room and said again, in a weary voice, “Which one of you is Jamshidi?”
The crowd parted, making way for a matched set of immense security guards, everything about the pair designed for intimidation, from the bovine builds and shaved heads to the neck tattoos and gauges that stretched all four of their ears ostentatiously. One of them said, “That’s enough, friend.”
Waldo smiled at the blue-jacketed man from before and said, “Look, Admiral, I made a friend.” The second baldie had circled so that one could charge Waldo from each side. Waldo said to that second one, “You my friend, too?” Then he squatted and smashed the bottle of Château Gruaud Larose on the marble floor, turning it into a jagged two-hundred-dollar weapon.
He looked from one behemoth to the other—left, right, left, right—and on the second turn to the right, the left baldie lunged. Waldo ducked his massive arm and came up with a grip on the back of the man’s collar and the broken bottle at his throat, freezing the other attacker in his tracks. Waldo said into the nearest gauged ear, “Okay, Thing One, tell Thing Two to take those handcuffs from his belt and cuff one of his own wrists.” When he didn’t speak, Waldo nudged the broken glass harder against his neck. “Tell him.”
Quickly the big man said, “Do it.”
The second baldie obeyed, slapping a cuff onto his own thick left wrist. “Now,” Waldo said to the man with the cuff directly, “I want you to turn around and put your hands straight out behind you. And step back toward us, slowly.” Again the big man did as he was told. “Okay, Thing One, I want you to cuff Thing Two’s hands together behind him. Come on, come on.” When he’d snapped the second handcuff into place, Waldo said, “Now kneel.” Neither moved and Waldo realized they didn’t know which one he was talking to. He said, “Thing One, you. Thing Two, you keep standing.” Waldo kept the bottle pressed to the man’s throat as he knelt.
With his free hand, Waldo reached into his backpack and found his bicycle cable lock, then pushed one end through the kneeling man’s ear gauge. “What the fuck!” the man said.
When the other baldie started to turn around to see what was happening, Waldo snapped, “Don’t move!” He looped the cable around the fastened handcuffs and, tossing aside the bottle to free his other hand, quickly clicked shut the lock, pinning one man’s ear to the other’s wrists. Then he kicked the bottle out of the kneeling man’s reach.
Waldo stood in front of the standing man, hooked a pinky through one of his gauges and said, “Now let’s all find a comfortable sofa”—his eyes searched the room for the tall blond woman—“a comfortable bamboo sofa, and discuss how I might get to meet Mr. Darius Jamshidi.” Tugging the ear of that baldie, who bent at the waist, Waldo started across the floor, the man on his knees whimpering as he struggled to keep up.
“I am Darius Jamshidi.”
Waldo stopped short and looked for the voice. The baldies tripped over each other and toppled, one crying out in pain.
Waldo scanned the room. “Who said that?”
“I am Darius Jamshidi,” the man repeated, and this time Waldo found him. He looked to be about four foot eleven, with piercing blue eyes. Persian-born, Waldo guessed from the man’s name and gentle accent. The blond bamboo woman, apparently Mrs. Jamshidi, stood beside him, towering over him by an easy foot.
Jamshidi said, “The real police will be here momentarily. But I’ll speak with you in private until they arrive.”
Waldo knew he’d have to clear out of the house before then but left the baldies moaning on the floor and followed Jamshidi down seemingly endless hallways to a distant wing. They walked so far, in fact, that the din of the resumed party had faded to a hush even before Jamshidi closed the door to his stately study—leather and dark cherry, no bamboo in here. Jamshidi sat behind his desk and said, “How can I help you, Mr. . . . ?”
“You know my name. You sent Gomes to strong-arm me. I assume you sent those punks from the Palisades, too. Why do you want me off Pinch so badly?”
“I don’t know anyone named Gomes.”
“Didn’t know,” he corrected. Jamshidi’s eyes narrowed. “Cops haven’t come to see you yet? Your boy Gomes had a busy day. First he tried to put a scare in me, and right after that he called you, and right after that someone put a bullet through his ear.”
The color drained from Jamshidi’s face. Recovering, he rose and opened a set of French doors that led to a garden and said, “The wall past the next house backs onto Mulholland. Save us the embarrassment of more drama at my wife’s event.”
“Cops probably haven’t tied you to Gomes yet. Lot more drama if I help them out. Tell me who he was—then I’ll leave.”
“Warren Gomes had a talent for special research, which helped my company make what it makes.”
“Which is?”
“Money,” he answered, as if it were a stupid question, as if there were nothing else a company might be interested in making.
“Say more.”
Jamshidi spoke slowly and deliberately, like one would to a small child. “There’s a group of shopping malls we acquired several years ago. They were an attractive target for us because their price was depressed due to chronic labor problems. Mr. Gomes’s research enabled us to exercise certain . . . leverage and make those problems go away. We were then able to sell for a profit.”
“So, okay, you’re trying to buy the network. But who were you hoping to blackmail on this one?”
“I don’t believe I said anything about blackmail.”
“And what good would it do you to keep me away from Pinch? Why would you want the network’s biggest star to go to jail? Is that going to drive the price down?”
Sirens wailed outside, at least three units, from the sound of it. LAPD was perennially undermanned and there were parts of town where a homicide call could take twenty minutes. Flatten a dessert table in Beverly Park, though, BH police were all over it.
Waldo, charged with murder only this afternoon, knew he had to disappear. He took a last, urgent shot. “But even if you drive the price down—if you’ve lost your star, the network you bought’s still worth less, right?”
Jamshidi offered an enigmatic shrug and spread his hands with the flawless self-possession of a man who’d once managed to score four billion dollars without inventing or manufacturing a goddamn thing. “If everyone could understand business,” he said now to Waldo, “everyone could live here.”
TWENTY
Could an entire picnic set count as one Thing? Two plates, two forks, knives, spoons, plus glasses and a cutting board? If they’d belonged to him, he’d consider those alone to be eleven Things, and the basket built to hold them all a twelfth. And wait—were those candles? Candleholders? The whole concept seemed profligate, and that was before taking into account paper napkins—paper! Of course, the kit belonged to Jayne, and minimalism wasn’t a part of her life, so was it fair to measure her by his standards? He should let go and enjoy every morsel of this spring afternoon—the cerulean sky, the trilliums in early bloom, the wine not only light and crisp but reassuringly local (Santa Barbara—hell, Waldo could’ve biked this bottle here). And, of course, there was Jayne herself, with her raven hair and heart-shaped face and azure eyes that never seemed to stray from his, Jayne as fresh as those trilliums in a corn-colored summer dress that played well on her slim silhouette. So different from Lorena’s curves. Noting that brought home why he was uneasy, and he was uneasy, and not, if he were being honest, over the excesses of a picnic basket, or even the hours he w
as spending away from the job and the client who was relying on him. The unease—the guilt—was over being here at all, in this park, under this tree, where he’d lain with Lorena on a different sublime afternoon that had also felt like it could last forever. What was he thinking, picking the very spot, with thousands of acres to choose from in Griffith Park alone?
As if Jayne could feel his thoughts straying from her, she finished the wine in her glass, stood, kicked off her sandals and trotted away barefoot across the fresh-cut grass, confounding him all over again. But when she tossed a look over her shoulder before disappearing around a bend and behind some shrubs, this time at least he was able to recognize the flirtation. So he balanced his own glass on the picnic basket and followed her, the grass pleasantly prickly on the soles of his feet—when had he taken off his shoes? he couldn’t remember—until the ground felt a little too soft on one step and softer still on the next and suddenly it wasn’t ground under him at all but black muck, swallowing one foot all the way to the knee, and when he tried to put his weight on the other to pull himself out, that one got swallowed, too, and he was mired completely. What was this? He heard Jayne in the distance and looked up to see her by a eucalyptus grove, laughing like it was all a game she’d designed, another flirty and confusing trick to entice him, but when he looked down again and realized he was pinned by black tar, like the viscous asphalt that trapped the mammoths twenty thousand years ago, he knew it wasn’t a joke, and then he heard the explosion and looked for Jayne again but the oil-rich eucalpytuses were consumed by fire and he screamed and then he could see Jayne in the flames only it wasn’t Jayne but Lorena and he wanted to race over and save her from the fire but he couldn’t extricate himself from the tar and Lorena said, “You should have called me, Waldo,” and then she vanished, again.
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