Last Looks

by Howard Michael Gould

  Sikorsky froze, the incriminating arm cocked behind his ear.

  Waldo said, “Let’s go see the cops.”

  “They know all this?”

  Waldo shook his head. “They’re about to hear it now. If I timed it right, they’re already waiting downstairs.”

  * * *

  —

  Waldo had called Conady a couple of hours earlier to ask his erstwhile friend to meet him outside the Admin Building on Alastair Pinch’s lot so he could turn over the real murderer of Monica Pinch and Warren Gomes. It turned into a testy conversation, Waldo not wanting to share his solution until he’d eliminated the final uncertainty of Sikorsky’s handedness, the lieutenant demanding that Waldo tell him up front what he’d learned. Waldo held firm, counting on his own track record to keep Conady from dismissing the possibility of a dramatic reversal and risking months on the front page of the Times if it wasn’t handled right.

  So when Waldo walked out of the building with Sikorsky, he was only mildly surprised to see that Conady had decided to one-up him by arriving late, sending as placeholders a couple of patrolmen who looked vaguely familiar from the week—probably from the day at the station house with Pam Tanaka—thus leaving Waldo and the murderer and the uniforms to wait awkwardly around the cruiser until Conady deigned to show. But Waldo wasn’t too miffed over it; it was a passive-aggressive move he probably deserved for having played it so coy on the phone, and besides, nothing right now could dim his high spirits. He stepped away from the others to unlock his bike with a smile on his face.

  He heard the ignition and turned to see Sikorsky pulling away from the building in the black-and-white. “Stop him!” The cops looked like they didn’t give a damn. “Conady’s going to have your ass!”

  “Who’s Conady?” said one of them.

  Waldo realized where he’d seen them before; the New Orleans police insignias on their shoulders confirmed it. “Shit!” he said. The cruiser turned a corner and disappeared from sight.

  Waldo jumped on his bike and took off after Sikorsky. He rounded the same corner just in time to see the cruiser take another turn, going about twenty, fast for a lot but not so fast as to draw attention. Every time Waldo got him back in sight, he’d take another corner. Waldo started to think Sikorsky was trying not to lose him, was trying to lead Waldo someplace specific.

  Sikorsky turned into the backlot and Waldo followed him in, coasting through the brownstone facades and onto what looked like a deserted New York street—no production under way, no lot workers out for an afternoon stroll—a spooky scene, like from some movie about the dystopian aftermath of a biological disaster.

  Waldo wheeled onto another street and saw the cruiser parked at its far end. He lowered his bike to the sidewalk and pulled the Beretta from the back of his pants. Sikorsky wasn’t likely armed—he would have to have been carrying when Waldo first walked into his office—but then again he had shot Gomes, so Waldo couldn’t be sure. He felt dangerously exposed as he walked down the silent street, the windows of the phony buildings looming on either side.

  Sikorsky wasn’t in the cruiser. Waldo looked to the facades; he could be behind any of those doors. Waldo crept to the nearest and threw it open. He stepped inside, gun at the ready, and found only debris and a metal stand left behind after some production. He went back out, leaving the door open behind him. He tried the next entrance and found more of the same nothing.

  He looked up and down the block. Halfway down the other side of the street he saw a faux police station that said 21ST PRECINCT and decided to try that next, maybe because the thumping in his chest reminded him of his return to North Hollywood and that had worked out all right.

  He yanked open the precinct door and started inside. A wood plank came down on his wrist, knocking the Beretta from his hand, and there was Sikorsky, kicking the gun past Waldo out into the street and winding up to clobber him again with the plank. Before Sikorsky could swing, though, Waldo threw himself headfirst into his midsection, the collision searing Waldo’s ribs, like getting punched from inside. The two men crashed to the ground and grappled. Sikorsky, taking advantage of Waldo’s impairment, flipped him onto his back. He dug one thumb into Waldo’s throat while Waldo desperately grabbed the fingers of Sikorsky’s other hand. Sikorsky pressed their locked hands closer to Waldo’s neck; Waldo wedged a leg between their bodies. Sikorsky let go of Waldo’s hand so he could put him in a full choke, pushing his body weight onto his arms to finish him. Waldo channeled what strength he had left into his legs and kicked Sikorsky off, then rolled away.

  Instead of pouncing again Sikorsky scrambled in the other direction, escaping through a passageway and into the space behind the next facade. The reversal confused Waldo. He pulled himself to his feet and followed, every gasping breath triggering waves of agony.

  He had to step over a pile of scrap lumber to cross through. Sikorsky, hiding, shot out a leg to trip him, then grabbed an arm and pulled Waldo off-balance. Waldo’s bad elbow hit a metal clamp and bore the brunt of the fall. For a few seconds he couldn’t even think.

  He rolled onto his back and tried to gather himself. Sikorsky came into view, standing above him gripping another one of those metal production stands, this one with what looked like a heavy metal lamp on one end, old and rusted. Sikorsky raised it high above Waldo’s skull, poised for the kill.

  Waldo said, “How’ll you get away with this?”

  “Self-defense. You came at me with a gun. LAPD already thinks you’re crazy.”

  Waldo closed his eyes and waited for the deathblow.

  When it came, it didn’t hurt, but it was loud. In fact, it sounded like a gunshot.

  Waldo opened his eyes.

  Sikorsky was looking down at a red stain spreading across his shirt. He crumpled. The movie light fell with him, crunching the cement inches from Waldo’s cranium.

  Waldo, still flat on his back, had to arch to see who’d fired the bullet.

  “Hey there, Waldo.”

  “Hiya, Q.” Things were looking better, but not that much better. “Would it be ungrateful to ask what you’re doing here?”

  “Man, I been followin’ you since Hollywood Boulevard. I even sat through that Rumpelstiltskin bullshit.”

  “How’d you get on the lot?”

  “Snuck in with a studio tour.” He walked over to Waldo. “Hope you don’t mind, I used your gun.” He wiped the Beretta on his guayabera, crouched and offered it to Waldo, who accepted it. “I was never here.”

  “I can work with that,” said Waldo, nonplussed.

  “You do understand why I saved your ass: somebody else kills you first, I can’t get what I want.”

  Waldo rolled onto his side and pushed off the ground with his good arm. Don Q helped him up. “Got to say, Q: not too swift keeping your kind of business records on a flash drive lying around on a desk.”

  “Business records? That what Cuppy told you?”

  “In so many words.”

  “Cuppy’s a fool.”

  “Then what’s on it?”

  Q studied Waldo like he was trying to decide whether he was worthy. “Epic poem,” he said finally. “Long-ass muthafucker, too. Only copy I got.”

  “Epic poem? What, that you wrote?”

  “’Bout the life of a dealer,” Don Q said, “tryin’ to retain his integrity and independence in the era of corporate-style cartels, not to mention all that janky-ass legalization. Be one sick movie after some studio buys the rights.”

  “Why an epic poem?”

  “Shit, man, I coulda written it as a screenplay straight up, but my lawyer says I got a stronger position on merchandisin’ and such if I hold the copyright. He suggested a novel—but I’m drawn personally to the ancient classics, like Beowulf and The Epic of Fuckin’ Gilgamesh.”

  “What’s The Epic of Fuckin’ Gilgamesh?”

  “Y
ou gotta get offa that mountain, Waldo, and learn your white ass somethin’. I’m an autodidact, see? That means I’m self-educated. Had to enrich my own life. Now, my little girl—I wanna make sure she gets a real education. That way she won’t be stuck bein’ no dealer or cop or whatever the fuck it is you’re supposed to be.” Waldo’s head was spinning. “So,” Q said. “My Mem.”

  Waldo pulled it together enough to say, “Can Lorena come back?”

  “Shit, Waldo, you ain’t listenin’. You gotta do for me—then Lorena can come back. You gotta get my little girl into that fancy private school—you know, where that English muthafucker send his kid. You got the juice for that?”

  Waldo grinned.

  THIRTY

  On the back of a real ambulance sitting at a fake curb, Waldo let a real medic tend to his elbow. Real yellow tape sealed off a fake building down the fake block, inside of which the body of the real killer was being poked and measured and photographed by real cops, plus one of the fake ones, as nobody had thought to ask what a New Orleans PD was doing in the middle of a Burbank crime scene.

  Don Q, of course, was long gone. Waldo had a date to meet him at the Banning bus station in two days to return the flash drive. Now Waldo worked his iPhone with one thumb and emailed Lorena:

  Safe

  Conady had taken his sweet time getting to the studio and ended up reaching Sikorsky’s body around the same time as the Burbank police, who’d been summoned after Waldo flagged down a security woman cruising the lot in a golf cart. Waldo laid out for Conady every detail of the solution to the murders of Monica Pinch and Warren Gomes, telling him about the Pinches’ affairs and the kindergarten teacher’s pregnancy and the intrigue around the school, implying that the teacher may have been getting it on with the headmaster as well. Waldo detailed the mistake he’d made leaving Sikorsky unsupervised and how Sikorsky got away from him and lured him onto the backlot. He left Don Q out of the account, of course, and walked through the choreography of his fight with Sikorsky, explaining that he’d saved his own life by shooting him in self-defense.

  Conady told Waldo that even if the rest of it held up, he was going to be in trouble for having a second unlicensed firearm.

  Waldo said, “Actually, it’s the same unlicensed firearm, a second time.”

  It might have been true but it sounded smart-alecky and it didn’t play well with Conady. “Pretty convenient that your story about Sikorsky killing Monica Pinch doesn’t have any hard evidence behind it.”

  “Really? I was thinking it’s not convenient at all.”

  “You might have a problem, Waldo.”

  “Nah. You’ll catch up to it.” He gave Conady Alastair’s burner and told Conady what to look for on Gomes’s phone, then walked him through the people he should interview—Jamshidi, Hexter, Jayne’s unhappy coworkers, the New Orleans faux police—and the bits of the story they could corroborate. He knew Conady was a dedicated enough cop to follow all the leads and would, even without Waldo suggesting it, find confirmation that Sikorsky was left-handed. When enough of Waldo’s details checked out, they’d hang the Pinch murder on Sikorsky and in turn accept Waldo’s account of the executive’s death, too.

  Still, he wondered how much hell Conady would put him through first, and whether he’d face charges for the unlicensed weapon. He wondered whether Alberto Suarez or Patrolman Annis might end up catching some flak. He also wondered whether the network would ever make that donation to the Sierra Club, which at this point, if he was counting correctly, ought to be sixteen thousand dollars. He wondered whether Gaby Pinch and Don Q’s little girl would become friends.

  He wondered where Jayne was now.

  * * *

  —

  They made him sit there for hours, telling the story over and over to a parade of detectives out of L.A. and Burbank. Conady himself made him go through the whole thing twice more. Waldo laid it all out for Fontella over the phone, too, but hadn’t been able to reach Alastair, who was on set. When Waldo was finally allowed to leave, he headed across the lot to see him in person.

  The soundstage was nearly empty; the AD who’d paid off Alastair’s tomato cans said the crew was on lunch break, back in fifteen. Waldo went out to Alastair’s trailer and knocked on the screen door.

  The Alastair he found inside looked lightened by decades. “My hero!” he said when he saw Waldo. “My savior! Sit, sit.”

  Waldo said, “You’ve talked to Fontella?”

  “Indeed. She’s expecting the charges to be dropped presently. And she’s positively giddy about the prospects for a lawsuit for wrongful arrest.”

  “Go for it.”

  Alastair shook his head. “No need. But why not let the lady dream?”

  “One thing I still don’t get. You knew that Jayne was involved with those others?”

  “I suspected. Maybe I knew. She’d drop hints. I think she rather liked having us wonder about each other.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Especially when I asked you about them?”

  “One tries to be a gentleman about these things, to the extent one can. No need to drag other marriages down into my muck. My fidelity was irrelevant. After all, I had no reason to suspect Jayne killed Monica.” He beamed at Waldo. “Is it too much of a cliché to say I don’t know how to thank you?”

  “I might have an idea.”

  “Do tell!”

  “How about after your season finishes, we go off together and get into whatever trouble we get into?” Waldo put up his fists. “A right tasty vodka drunk. Somewhere they’re playing rugby.” The extravagance was out of character but it wasn’t a violation. He’d given it careful thought: experiences weren’t Things.

  “Sounds brilliant,” said Alastair, delighting Waldo. But then he continued: “Unfortunately, starting today, this is my liquor of choice.” He opened his refrigerator and took out a Vitamin Water. He tossed it to Waldo and found a second one for himself. Waldo was stupefied. Alastair opened his bottle. “Never tried before. I used to say, ‘I don’t have a drinking problem, but if I did, I hope I’d have the courage to drink myself to death.’”

  For what felt like the hundredth time, Waldo found himself trying to figure out where the character ended and the actor began.

  “I cocked it all up, Waldo. My Monica is dead; Jayne’s run off carrying a son or daughter I’ll never know. All I have left is Gaby, and the least I owe her is the best I have.”

  “That could take more courage than drinking yourself to death.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Alastair raised his water in a toast. “Courage, Waldo.”

  Waldo toasted back without opening the plastic bottle. “Courage, mate.”

  “You gave me back my life. And my daughter hers. You did for us what you couldn’t do years ago for that poor young man. Could be your little jaunt down the mountain balanced the books.”

  Lydell Lipps had never been less present for Waldo than he’d been these last few days. Now the reference brought it all back in a rush.

  They were quiet together. Waldo thought about what Alastair said and decided he was wrong. There were books that could never be balanced. But maybe this would make them a little easier to live with.

  * * *

  —

  Waldo pedaled off the lot for the last time, waving at the two security dickheads as he coasted past and out the main gate. The one with the mullet pretended to scratch his eyebrow with his middle finger, flipping an artful bird.

  There were no pedestrians so Waldo opted for sidewalk rather than street. He still had the climb up 243 to figure out, but right now he felt renewed and unburdened, and the smooth, flat glide into Burbank was almost rapture.

  A well-timed car door put a sudden and nasty end to that, sending Waldo tumbling across the pavement and his bike skittering into the gutter. He rolled and saw Big Jim Cuppy climbing out of the passenger seat of
his Corvette. “Supposed to ride in the street, asshole.” Waldo groaned. Cuppy perched on his trunk and watched him. “I hear you and Q kissed and made up. I bet you even gave him that flash drive.”

  Waldo pushed up onto a knee, then to his feet. His pants were torn and his leg was bleeding. He limped to his bike and checked it: the front wheel was bent—he tried to spin it but the rim kept brushing the brake pad—and one of the spokes was broken, too. Cuppy grinned at his handiwork.

  Waldo sighed deeply through his nose. “Cuppy,” he said. “I don’t need you busting up my bike and pissing in my pond. Tell you what: if I do you one great, big, corrupt solid, will you call it a truce and stay off my ass?”

  Cuppy frowned, confounded. “What are you selling?”

  “You know TV actors are all cokeheads and tweakers, right?”

  “I never heard that.”

  “Hell yeah. To work the hours they work?”

  “So, what,” Cuppy said, catching on, “you got a supplier on the lot I can jack?”

  Waldo nodded. “The gate guards.”

  Cuppy said, “Really. That gate?” Because of the wall and driveway, they couldn’t actually see the security kiosk from here, but Cuppy kept looking in that direction anyway, starting to dream.

  Waldo said, “Don’t let on at first that you’re a cop.”

  “No?”

  “Here’s the deal: they comb their hair, they’re letting you know they’re holding. Let it play out.”

  “Nice. Okay, pigfucker, this works, you and I are square.” Cuppy heaved himself off the trunk and made for the driver’s side door.

  “No-no-no—dressed like you, in this car? That screams ‘I’m gonna shake you down.’” Cuppy looked at him, lost. “Walk.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Trust me. People come to a drive-on gate without a car? Fucks the guards up from the jump.”

  Waldo could see the confidence flowing into Cuppy, who hitched his belt, said, “Shit, Waldo—you may not be worthless after all,” and sauntered off toward the gate. Waldo watched him go.