Below the Line

by Howard Michael Gould

  “What do you mean?”

  “No Terrence Rose enrolled, grad or undergrad. Last time UCLA had any Terrence Rose was in 1968 at the School of Dentistry, and that one died in Wisconsin eleven years ago.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  “What the fuck, Waldo? Why’d a fifteen-year-old girl give us five hundred dollars to look for a brother who doesn’t exist?”

  “Guess we should ask her. Meet you at her house?”

  “Her house, fine. I sure ain’t buying her another salad.”

  FOUR

  It was five miles from Ouelette’s apartment to the home address the girl had given them the night before, off Longridge on the Valley-side hills above Sherman Oaks. Stevie’s street—if indeed it was her street—was steep and Waldo had worked up a sweat by the time he found Lorena waiting outside the gate. “You try it yet?” he said.

  “Waited for you.”

  “Think she even lives here?”

  “We’ll find out.” Lorena pressed the intercom button.

  The girl’s voice squawked through the box. “Hello?”

  “It’s Lorena and Waldo. Let us in.” The twin gates opened outward with a mechanical hum and they trudged up the sharply inclined driveway. Waldo walked his bike and leaned it against an oleander hedge. Stevie opened the door for them, in a top that showed a lot of skin again, bare shoulders and belly, tight cutoff denims, nothing on her legs or feet.

  Waldo said, “Can we talk to you?”

  Lorena added, “Inside.”

  The girl led them down the steps into the living room. The back of her blouse consisted of two thin cross-strings to hold the measly front in place.

  The house was California tasteful-ostentatious. A glass wall offered a lordly view of the Valley to the northeast, and large glass sliding doors opposite led to a gardened pool area and a guesthouse beyond. The modern paintings on the walls made Waldo feel ignorant.

  Stevie plopped onto a white sectional and drew her legs up under her. Waldo and Lorena sat more formally on a matching sofa opposite. The big square onyx coffee table between them was adorned with two stacks of oversize books and an abstract stone sculpture in the middle, plus two Atkins Bar wrappers and a can of Diet Mountain Dew.

  Waldo said, “Mr. Ouelette doesn’t remember your brother.”

  Stevie snorted. “Of course he’s going to say that. He doesn’t want to get busted for selling him drugs.”

  Lorena said, “UCLA doesn’t have any record of your brother, either.”

  Stevie said, “Really?” She took a sip of soda. “What name did you use?”

  “Terrence Rose.”

  “Terrence is his middle name. It’s Michael Terrence. That’s why.”

  “I can go back and check again—”

  “You’ll find him.”

  “—but it’ll cost you. You’ve already used up almost all of your retainer.”

  “I gave you five hundred dollars!”

  “Hundred an hour, two of us—it goes fast.”

  That made Stevie hesitate. Waldo said, “We’re going to have to call Children and Family Services.”

  “No! That’s why I need you to find my brother!” The desperation seemed real enough.

  Lorena asked if she could use a bathroom. Stevie pointed around a corner and Lorena left the two of them alone.

  Stevie looked Waldo square in the eye. “Would you really call child services on me, Waldo?” Discomfited by the knowledge of what that would actually mean for the girl, he looked away. “Seriously,” she said, nudging the soda can with her toe, “do I look like a child?” She’d slid back into flirting mode and he hadn’t seen it coming. He felt like he shouldn’t be there. She said, “What would they do, anyway? Like, put me in some foster home or something?”

  “Are you sure there aren’t any relatives? Aunts, uncles . . .”

  “Aren’t those foster parents all, like, pervs? That’s what I heard. They just want the government to bring them kids they can molest.”

  There was nothing to do but shuffle. “Probably not so bad. There’s a screening process—”

  But she’d moved on anyway. “What did you think of Mr. Ouelette?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Did you think he was cute?” The question threw him. “Guys never say they think other guys are cute, because it makes them sound gay? But you can be honest with me. I won’t think you’re gay. I can tell you’re not.” It felt like half an invitation. Waldo tried to will Lorena back from the bathroom.

  He said, “How do you know Mr. Ouelette sells your brother drugs? Assuming you do have this brother—”

  “Are you and Lorena, like, a couple? You at least hook up sometimes, I can tell. What are you, like, private eyes with benefits?” She giggled at her own joke.

  “Do you know other people who buy drugs from Mr. Ouelette?”

  “I think Lorena’s cute. I don’t care if it makes me sound gay. I’m not. I mean, I made out with girls a couple of times, trying it? But I’m, like, so not gay.”

  “I’d rather talk about Mr. Ouelette.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  “He’s not very tall, but he has a great body. Did you notice that?”

  Waldo sighed. “No.”

  “He’s really freaky too. In a good way. Mostly a good way.”

  “What do you mean, freaky?”

  “What do you think I mean, Waldo? So, like, what did he say to you? Did he get all nervous because there was a detective there?”

  Lorena returned. She said to Waldo, “Can I talk to you? Privately?”

  Waldo said, “Please,” and all but leapt off the sofa. He told Stevie to stay where she was.

  Lorena led him down a hallway and started to open a door. Waldo leaned close and said, “I think she may have had sex with that teacher. She was starting to talk about it.”

  Lorena was more interested in her own discovery. “Check this out,” she said, opening a door and leading him into a three-bay garage, filled by a silver two-seat Jaguar XF, a white Lincoln Navigator, and a deep blue BMW 5 Series that clung stubbornly to an I’M WITH HER bumper sticker. Lorena said, “Why would two kids—one who can’t drive—have three cars? And which one is the Hillary fan?”

  They went back into the house proper, detouring through the kitchen on their way to Stevie. Lorena went straight for the refrigerator. Waldo noted that it was fully stocked; Lorena noted a Mount Eden Vineyards chardonnay. “That’s a sixty-dollar bottle,” she whispered. “Little fucker.” Waldo followed Lorena as she stomped back toward the living room, her heels clicking on the Roses’ marble flooring.

  Lorena said, “Where are your parents?”

  “How can you ask me that?! I told you, they’re dead! You’re so mean!”

  “How did they die again?”

  “In a car crash! On the way to Montecito!”

  Waldo said, “The mail come yet today?” Stevie didn’t answer. “It should be in the mailbox; I’ll go get it for you.”

  Lorena said to Stevie, “And I’m going to check out your parents’ bedroom. I bet all their clothes are still there, right? Two years later?” She headed back toward the hallway, Waldo toward the front door.

  Stevie stood up and shouted, “Okay, okay! You guys are such assholes!”

  Lorena said, “Sit down,” and Stevie did. Waldo and Lorena took their previous places on the opposite sofa. “Where are your parents?”

  “Hawaii. They have a house there?”

  “And this ‘brother’? Do you even have one?”

  “Yes,” Stevie said, with all the obnoxiousness she could muster.

  They both glared at her. They’d had enough of Stevie Rose.

  Finally the girl sighed and confessed. “I do have a brother, but not like I said. He’s a half brother, and he’s o
ld. He lives in Chicago.”

  Lorena said, “How old?”

  Stevie said to her, “Old—you know, old. Like your age.”

  Waldo looked at his feet.

  Stevie started crying. Waldo didn’t trust the tears but treated the girl like they were real. “Okay,” he said gently, “what’s this all about? Mr. Ouelette?”

  Stevie cried a little harder and nodded. “I wanted him to know I could make trouble for him.”

  Lorena said, “Tell us about it.”

  “I used to have sex with him.”

  “Start from the beginning.”

  “I had him last year for ninth-grade history, and he was way cooler than the other teachers. He knew good TV shows and all, and he was into anime? And then over the summer we started texting? He treated me like a grown-up and stuff, and nobody else did that, definitely not Paula and Joel.”

  Waldo said, “Who are Paula and Joel?”

  “My so-called parents?”

  Lorena said, “Tell us about how it got physical with Mr. Ouelette.”

  “My parents went on vacation? I didn’t want to go because the school year was starting soon, and I talked them into letting me stay by myself? I mean, I obviously can.”

  Waldo said, “Obviously.”

  “I know, right?” said Stevie, the sarcasm going over her head.

  Lorena shot Waldo a quick look and prompted the girl: “So your parents went to Hawaii . . .”

  “And Mr. Ouelette came over here to go swimming? And he kissed me in the pool and we ended up doing it in the guesthouse.”

  Lorena said, “Had you ever had sex before that?”

  Stevie shook her head.

  “You said you ‘used to have sex.’ So there were other times with him?”

  “Like, four more.”

  “Here?”

  “No, at his apartment. On Whitsett? Then, like, I hooked up a couple of times with other guys, like, closer to my age—and I wanted to cool it with Mr. Ouelette?”

  Waldo said, “You call him Mr. Ouelette?”

  “When I was actually with him, like doing stuff, I was allowed to call him Vic? But like other times he still wanted me to say Mr. Ouelette.”

  Coaxing, Lorena said, “So you ended it with him . . .”

  “Well, I told him I wanted to, but he kept texting me and stuff. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “Did you tell anyone about it?”

  “Yes! And no one would do shit! Mr. Ouelette denied, like, everything.” Waldo assumed the primary “nobody” she was referring to would be the headmaster of her school, with whom he had a history. “Everyone thinks I’m lying. Including Paula and Joel.”

  “But you had the texts, right? You could show them.”

  This was clearly, to Stevie, crazy talk. “I don’t want people looking at my phone.” They both frowned, not understanding. “I have stuff on there! Personal stuff.” She got impatient with how dense they were. “Like stuff you send to boys? Pictures. You know, pictures?” She pushed back on the sofa and crossed her arms. “If everybody just believed me, there wouldn’t be any problem.”

  Lorena said, “Okay, so why did you call me? Why this whole act about your ‘brother’?”

  “I don’t know. I thought if I got detectives to go over there and ask him questions about something else, it might scare him or whatever and get him to back off.” She picked at a fingernail. “Hopefully it worked.”

  Waldo studied Stevie, then Lorena. Five hundred spent, five hundred earned. Fucked-up situation, fucked-up world, but maybe this was exactly the kind of transaction private eyes were useful for, every day. Better than peeping in windows, but still not his calling.

  Stevie looked up at him. “You don’t have to tell my parents about this, right?”

  * * *

  • • •

  “That’s the first time I wished I was still a cop.” They were in Lorena’s car, heading up Coldwater, back to the Hollywood side.

  “Why?”

  “Guy should be in jail.”

  “If it even happened. There hasn’t been a straight line out of that girl’s mouth since we met her.”

  “The guy’s a creep. I knew something was off.” Lorena hiked a shoulder, not buying it. Waldo said, “Why would Stevie lie?”

  “Why would she lie? Jesus! To get your attention!”

  “My attention? Not yours?”

  “Oh, please!” She was taking the sinuous canyon road too fast. Waldo gripped his door handle and hoped she wouldn’t notice. Lorena said, “Bouncing around for you with her perfect little titties and her belly ring.” Just then she came up on the back of a Honda taking the hairpin curves at about ten and had to slam on the brakes. Waldo hadn’t seen this coming at all, though given their history, maybe he should have. He stayed quiet, not even wanting to ask Lorena where she was taking them.

  She drove back to her house. Willem wasn’t home. Lorena banged cookware around the kitchen toward a stir-fry made of vegetables they’d bought together but also some tofu she or Willem must have bought at a chain supermarket. The passive-aggressiveness of the soy was impossible to miss; she knew Waldo never ate anything from its kind of plastic container and was daring him to object. He took a strategic bite to let her have a small victory, then said, “Whatever you think about that girl . . . I didn’t do anything.”

  She dipped her head a fraction of an inch, an acknowledgment.

  “This isn’t going to work if we start getting jealous again. That was the point of this ‘understanding’ you suggested, right? So we wouldn’t go through that shit anymore. In either direction.”

  “What’s an understanding?” she said. “It’s something that lasts, until it doesn’t.”

  That was the entirety of the dinner conversation. He ate around the rest of the transgressive tofu.

  Later, he read more of the Churchill book while she took an unusually long time in the bathroom. When she came to bed he wondered if he should reach for her, but she preemptively said, “My period’s starting.” He knew it was a lie: it was only two weeks since she’d told him, on the phone to Idyllwild, how convenient it was that it had come while he was away. He wondered if she remembered that and was goading him again. Probably.

  She turned on her side, away from him. In the old days, they’d rarely spent a night together without any kind of sex. He gently ran his fingers through her luxuriant tresses. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t stop him or shift away, either. That gave him a minute or two to study carefully, and by the time she reached over to switch off her night lamp, he was pretty sure that the white hair had been discovered and expunged.

  FIVE

  She fell asleep quickly, or pretended to, but Waldo lay awake for hours. He logged onto the chess website on his phone, something he’d never done with Lorena beside him. He played the usual set of four losing games, then tried again to sleep; no luck. He didn’t drift off until well past three, and when he woke up, she was already gone.

  Willem was in the kitchen—covered, barely but mercifully, and about to go for a run. He pointed out a note Lorena had left for Waldo on the island.

  Went back to O.C.—L

  She’d known he was planning to return to his woods today, and she hadn’t even left him a good-bye.

  * * *

  • • •

  Waldo had one bit of business before going back. He took the Metro to the Valley, then biked Chandler all the way to the Stoddard School. Stoddard had been more or less the epicenter of the Monica Pinch murder case, and the coincidence of Stevie being a student there nagged at him. He didn’t believe in accidents.

  He couldn’t imagine, though, how this new situation could relate to the knotty transactions he’d had in the past with the man he was going to visit, the headmaster, Sebastian Hexter. Waldo had kept a secret of Hexter’s b
ut had then demanded a highly problematic favor in return. The headmaster was no doubt certain he’d seen the last of Waldo, and glad of it.

  A superannuated security man on a stool waved ineffectually as Waldo glided past and through the gates. Waldo left his bike in the familiar rack and continued to the main office. The receptionist’s face fell when she saw him, and Hexter’s assistant let out a tiny but audible gasp.

  Waldo said, “Tell him I’m here.” The assistant went in to see Hexter, then returned and tipped her head toward the inner office.

  Waldo closed the door behind him. Hexter looked like a man about to have his prostate checked. Waldo skipped the greeting and said, “Let’s talk about Victor Ouelette.”

  Hexter shut his eyes briefly. “What about Victor Ouelette?”

  “Victor Ouelette, and Stevie Rose.”

  “How are you involved in this?”

  “So you’re aware. And you’re not doing anything.”

  “The school can’t take action based on unsubstantiated claims.”

  “She’s fifteen. Someone needs to do something about this guy. He can’t be left in place to prey on more girls.”

  “We don’t know that he’s done anything. A man’s career is at stake, and his reputation. He’s entitled to due process. Without it, the school’s exposed to all kinds of lawsuits.”

  “So give him due process.”

  Hexter just looked at him.

  “You don’t believe her.”

  “I don’t know whether I believe her. What I do know is that I’ve had a lot of experience with teenagers. How much do you know about their brain chemistry?” Waldo shook his head. “The adolescent brain develops as rapidly and violently as the adolescent body. While it’s in flux, it pretty well resembles, physiologically, the brain of an insane adult. That’s why so many teens pass through a troubled phase at some point. Some girls become fabulists; some develop an agenda. And some discover their sexual power, perhaps before developing the maturity to wield it responsibly. Do you understand what I’m saying?”