“Were you faithful to your wife?”
“I don’t see where that’s relevant.”
“Everything’s relevant.” It was clear that Alastair didn’t intend to answer, or else felt that he already had, so Waldo moved on. “When did you shift the furniture around?”
“I told you, Monica was a constant tinkerer—”
“The night table in my room doesn’t fucking fit, okay? It hangs way over the side of the bed. Nobody who gets pictures of her house in Architectural Digest would ever put that table there. I’m thinking it was moved from your bedroom and the one in your bedroom came from the living room. Probably on the night of the murder. Unless you’ve moved them since.”
Alastair bit off his response. “I have not. Moved them. Since.”
“Could you have rearranged furniture that night and dressed it with tablecloths and flowers—and not remembered the next day?”
“I’ve gotten married, fathered children and taken out mortgages and not remembered the next day.”
They renewed their silence, Waldo wishing he could bellow his frustration. The transposed furniture, Jamshidi—the reeds were slim, but they were reeds, and any sane man invested in his own exoneration would grasp at them with all he had. Why not this man? It was as if he were hell-bent on his own undoing. Could self-loathing possibly run this deep?
They’d reached Gaby’s school. Alastair pointed wordlessly to a procession of cars waiting their turns to collect elementary schoolers laden with colorful backpacks and art projects, and Waldo steered the Hummer to the end of the line. Alastair scanned the crowd for his daughter and said, “What shall you do, Detective, when your vaunted skills lead you to the conclusion that I did, in fact, murder my wife? Will you share your findings with the police? Will you stand for your client, or for Truth and Justice, like the incorruptible Charlie Waldo of yore?”
Or, Waldo thought, there was that. Maybe Alastair wasn’t invested in exoneration because he knew on some level, even if it was buried deep, that he killed his wife and saw punishment as not only ineluctable but deserved. Which begged the question: why had Waldo been so resistant to accepting the obvious answer as the true one, almost since the moment he’d met the man? Again, was this the unavoidable nature of PI work, approaching the investigation as advocate rather than disinterested analyst? Or was it simply Alastair’s movie star panache working its magic from the start despite Waldo’s best efforts to resist it?
Alastair’s bone-weary sigh pulled him back. “I used to rather like waking up somewhere I didn’t know, with someone I didn’t know, and no idea what damage I might have caused the night before. It kept life interesting. Gave me character.” Waldo, edging the Hummer forward, spied Gaby just before she spotted them and came running full tilt. Alastair, opening his door, turned back to him and said, “Stick with Truth and Justice, Waldo. I’ve gotten away with far more than most men. If I killed my little girl’s mother, this time I’ll take what’s coming to me, and we’ll call the whole lot even.”
Maybe he was just a chump for Alastair’s acting—it wouldn’t be the first time—but Waldo believed he meant it. And coupled with the little girl leaping into his arms, it was heartbreaking.
Alastair shed the heaviness and became the joyful daddy once again. “Princess Ozma!” he shouted, twirling her.
Waldo got out of the car too, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jayne among her kindergarteners. And there she was, a few cars ahead, chatting with a parent; she saw him immediately and flashed him a quick smile with her eyes while politely keeping focus on her conversation.
Waldo turned back to the car, and what he saw beyond it chilled him: a black Escalade sitting at the curb outside the campus entrance, Don Q in the passenger seat, staring in their direction, dead eyed, unblinking.
“Daddy,” Gaby was saying, “I know all my lines for my play!”
“I can’t wait to see your Rumpelstiltskin,” said Alastair, oblivious to the danger. “One of the most coveted roles in all of theater!”
Gaby climbed into her car seat; Alastair leaned in to buckle her. Waldo rounded the car and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “you sober enough to drive?”
“If I must.”
“You must. I’ll see you at your house.”
“What’s wrong?”
Waldo opened the back of the Hummer and pulled out his bike. “Just keep your doors locked and don’t stop for anything. Anything. Understand?” Alastair nodded.
Waldo shut the rear door and marched his bike toward the entrance, blood pounding in his ears. This motherfucker killed her, killed her, and set her on fire. He barely broke stride to drop the bike and backpack against a wall just inside the school gate. He picked up his stride and stormed at the Escalade. Don Q stepped out, and Nini, too, from the driver’s side.
“Tell me about Lorena,” Waldo said, inches from Don Q. “Tell it to my face.”
“You tell me ’bout my Mem.”
“I don’t even know what a fucking Mem is!”
“I think you’re prevaricatin’, Waldo. That means lyin’.” Was this fucker smiling? He was! “Bitch said she gave it to you. Last words she ever said, too, so I’m inclined to take it for true.” Waldo could feel malice coursing through his body like a chemical. “You know, she was still alive when I poured the gas on her, and once that shit started, you couldn’t get the bitch to shut up—”
Waldo lunged for Q’s throat, driving him into the car door. He barely started squeezing off the bastard’s larynx when he felt Nini’s fist batter his kidney and the strength drain from his thumbs and everywhere else. Nini flung him against the Escalade and pounded his rib cage. The air went out of Waldo and he doubled over, first retching, then gasping frantically for oxygen like he’d been released into a different atmosphere.
There was no winning this. Lorena was dead and these guys were going to kill him, too, quickly or slowly, if he didn’t find this Mem, whatever the fuck that was. “Okay,” he wheezed, “tell me . . . exactly . . .”
But Don Q was massaging his throat and shaking his head, uninterested in negotiation at the moment. Nini stood Waldo up against the Escalade and put him to sleep a second time.
TWENTY-TWO
He was facedown at the bottom of the ocean, or it could have been a deep well, because there was a pin of light somewhere ahead in the distance, though if he saw it he couldn’t be facedown, could he, maybe he was on his back, he couldn’t even be sure about that, maybe he was faceup now that he thought about it, and maybe it wasn’t a well but the bottom of a tank at the aquarium, a tank that’s shaped like a well, with tropical fish, because it didn’t look like sky when he cracked his eyes, there were colors, bright colors swimming past, but it hurt even to squint, so he closed them again, and how did he get to the aquarium, where would that be, Long Beach or was there a little one in Santa Monica, and who brought him here anyway . . . ?
Q.
Now he remembered. Q and the Eskimo, what were they going to do with him . . . ? He needed to pull it together, climb out of this tank, get away . . . but how was he even breathing at the bottom of a tank? It was excruciating, each inhale, but it was possible. So all right, he wasn’t underwater. Also he was freezing at the bottom of his face, but no place else—what was that about? He decided to force his eyes open and start from there.
The colors. An assault. Not moving, not fish, but yellows and oranges and reds and greens. It was a drawing. Of what? A girl and a boy and a sink. Why? And there were words. It took some doing to decipher them, but at last he did, and they read:
GOOD HEALTH STARTS WITH CLEAN HANDS!
What the fuck.
He let his eyes drift to the overhead fluorescents while he explored his rib cage with his fingers: swollen but no protrusion, so good news, only bruised, but he’d been through that once before and knew it would be a month till he felt anything like goo
d health again, and by the way, washing his hands wasn’t going to help a damn bit. He put a hand to his frozen jaw and found an ice pack. He scanned the room without moving his head. It wasn’t a hospital, more like a doctor’s office, a pediatrician’s, maybe, from the posters.
And now something touched his hair and he flinched at the assault, but it was a kind touch, and he contorted his neck to look.
Jayne, smiling at him. “Morning, sleepyhead.”
“Is it . . .”
“No, it’s about four thirty. Sorry, I shouldn’t confuse you. You’re in the school nurse’s office.” That pulled it together. “A couple of football players saw it happen and carried you in. The nurse had to go home, so I said I’d stay and take care of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Should I take you to a hospital?”
“No. But I could use another ice pack for my ribs.”
“They got your ribs, too? Nice friends you have.” Waldo grunted.
A little later he turned down a second offer of a ride to the hospital but agreed to let her drive him to Alastair’s. She helped him off the nurse’s table and out to a bench near the student pickup area, where he waited, still holding an ice pack to his side, until she swung her Civic around and helped him ease into the cramped passenger seat. Steadying himself on the roof of the car, Waldo happened to glance up and spot Dr. Hexter in a corner window of the top floor of the main building, watching them. Their eyes met but neither man offered any sort of greeting. Waldo got the sense that his chaos had outlasted the headmaster’s patience, and that the man wasn’t happy about whatever might be brewing between Waldo and Jayne, either.
It felt strange to be alone in a car with a woman, more so with her driving. They turned onto Laurel Canyon and found it stopped dead; the few miles to Alastair’s could take half an hour or more. “Sorry to put you out,” he said, stifling a wince.
She said, “Does it hurt to talk?” and he nodded. When on the next green they didn’t even make it to the intersection, she said, “I might have a better idea. Do you trust me?”
Waldo said, “Why should I trust you?” and gave her a crooked grin that made his jaw ache.
But there was no smile in return; in fact she was almost solemn when she said, “Because you’ll like it.” Her unexpected seriousness dizzied him. It was the last either of them spoke for hours.
* * *
—
She lived in a standard midcentury two-story deeper in the Valley, the big looping cursive out front that read SHERMAN WAY ROYALE promising more than it delivered, eight boxy units around a pool that had seen better days. Jayne’s own apartment was sparse and shabby—Waldo guessed she’d rented it furnished—but clean. There was a Paul Detlefsen lithograph of a horse and buggy crossing a covered bridge with a boy in a straw hat fishing in the foreground, bucolic and nostalgic, a token of her kindergarten choirgirl side, or maybe it just came with the place.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and caught a glimpse of a long strip of dark fabric, which she brought to his eyes and tied into a blindfold. “Shhh,” she whispered.
She took his hand and steered him into what, from the sound of their footfalls, he took to be another room, and then she maneuvered him to sit on a low, uncomfortable chair, which he eventually recognized as a closed toilet seat. She tied something else loosely around his neck. He heard the scraping of metal against metal—scissors?—then felt a soft tug at his lower left cheek and he realized she was trimming his beard. He started to object, but she quieted him with a soft finger on his lips. He was stunned by her boldness, even more surprised by how unhurriedly she worked, taking each pinch of hair between her fingers, twirling and caressing it before bracketing it with the blades and slowly closing them, the room so still that he could hear individual whiskers severing. Then she’d move on to the next patch, working her way bit by bit down his neck and back up to his jawline, then across his chin and over to the other side, idling as she gently pulled on the patch below his lip to glide a finger slowly across the lip itself, then tarrying for the same on the return trip as she clipped his mustache. When she’d finished the entire beard—or when he’d thought she’d finished—she began the whole process again, cropping closer this time, the backs of her fingers never losing contact with his skin now, skin that even his own fingers hadn’t encountered in years.
He felt the coolness of a gel and then her fingers spreading it across the bristly remains, and after that the blade, in long, thoughtful strokes. She kept close to her work; he could hear her inhale and feel her exhale. And when the gel and the whiskers were all gone, she caressed his new naked face, every millimeter of it, less than a caress, really, the contact so slight that it was barely a touch at all, and his breathing became so quick and shallow that he forgot about his ribs.
Then she took off the blindfold and led him into the bedroom.
* * *
—
He hadn’t realized she was awake, but as the first stirrings of dawn turned the room from black to iron gray, she propped herself on an elbow and said, “What are you thinking?”
He’d been thinking about all of it—the night, the strangeness of it, and the moment he realized it had stopped being strange. About how he never would have guessed she’d be so at ease in bed, so sexually fluent, and how grateful he was for the way her effortlessness so quickly melted his own initial awkwardness and rust. About how careful she’d been of his ribs, how she’d balanced her weight on his shoulders or his hands, how every time she shifted she’d check to make sure he was all right, and how she stopped checking once she’d lost herself completely, and how powerful that was to experience, how potent for him her ferocity had been. And he’d been thinking about how connected he felt to her now, more connected than he could recall feeling the first time with anyone, except maybe Lorena, of course, and he’d been wondering whether it was only because it had been so long or whether there was something stronger stirring here, something that would force a whole bunch of questions more consequential than whether this meant he was going to start shaving regularly.
Of course, he didn’t say any of that. What he said was “I was thinking of a woman who looked like she was about seventy, with false teeth that didn’t fit right, and a big, ugly wart on the side of her nose.”
She laughed. “And why were you thinking that?”
“Because she was my kindergarten teacher.”
Jayne laughed again, then rested a hand lightly over Waldo’s heart. “Does that hurt?”
He shook his head. He could make out her face a bit, in this early light almost like a black-and-white photograph. It worked for her. But then again, everything did. Waldo said, “That was . . . intense.”
“Too intense?” She put a hand over her face. “I’m embarrassed. I’m not usually like that.”
“Who is who they are?”
“Stop!” But he could tell she liked the reprise.
On her bed stand he noticed a tall stack of DVDs. He reached over to pick up a disk and squinted to read the box in the half-light. It was a workout video. “Savannah Moon, huh?” He picked up another DVD and looked at it, then a third. “What do you have, twenty DVDs of her?”
“Something like that. And all five books.”
“Twenty and five. That would be a quarter of my stuff,” he said, marveling. “Why her?”
“Empowerment.”
“Really?”
“Oh, definitely. Self-confidence begins with physical confidence.”
“Well, you’ve got that.”
“Stop!” she said again and slapped him on the shoulder, lightly, ever conscious of his injuries.
Waldo perused one of the discs. “I’m kind of fascinated by her, actually. She’s sort of the essence of consumerism—she preys on people’s insecurities, then gets rich pumping tons of nonbiodegradable crap into the ecosystem.” He realized she
was grinning at him. “What?”
“Was it really three years? Or was that a line?”
“It wasn’t a line.”
“Huh. Wouldn’t know it.”
“Truth,” he said. “I thought I was retired.”
“Maybe that’s what did it for me—the idea of you going without for so long. Or maybe it’s that you’re so damaged.”
“Damaged? Is that how you see me? Damaged?”
“Jesus, Waldo.”
“Everybody keeps saying that.”
“You live alone on a mountain. You’ve got all these insane rules . . .”
“I’m just trying to live more responsibly. Leave a smaller footprint.” Seeing the way she looked at him, something else moved inside him, and he thought that this had to be deeper than a first-time-in-years postcoital flush, because something about this girl made him want to make himself . . . known. “The thing is,” he said, “having some rules . . . some lines to color inside of . . . a plan for being a better person . . . and not hurting anything anymore, not another human being, not the planet . . . it’s how life started making sense again. That’s all.”
Saying it out loud for the first time, he was certain that it did make sense, and that she’d see him as he saw himself, that she’d understand that he wasn’t merely eccentric, let alone unhinged, that he was entirely rational.
She said, “Uh-huh. Really damaged.”
Her words unnerved him, but just as quickly her smile steadied him. Sincere or ironic, she was telling him that she got it, and more important, that she was all right with it. This was what he’d never have living alone on a mountain, this was connection, and even with his jaw throbbing, his elbow aching, and the bruised ribs now making every full breath a white-hot rapier piercing his side, for the first time in what felt like forever, it didn’t hurt to be alive.
TWENTY-THREE
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