Tesoro shook a definitive no.
Waldo typed in Look at the photo again.
Tesoro did, leered, then typed and showed the English to Waldo: Pretty mouth.
Then: She will become a rich man.
Then: I have not seen her. Tesoro shook his head. Waldo was pretty sure there were no typos in that last one.
He reached to take the photo back. Tesoro sneered and put it in his pocket. He typed again into Translate: I will keep this.
And: Put it under my lunch.
Having gotten the last word, Tesoro pimp-rolled into the night.
Waldo made off in the other direction, through the parking lot, keeping his ears pricked for an ambush there by Tesoro or his men.
It didn’t come. He walked undisturbed to Harbor and started down the deserted boulevard. He’d cross at the corner by the strip club and the break in the tree-lined center median, to the side where Lorena was supposed to be waiting.
He heard two pairs of footsteps and glanced over his shoulder: the pimp’s bangers from the Burger King had fallen in behind him, a quarter block away.
Waldo picked up his pace. They did too.
He looked back at them again. Beyond, down the boulevard, two pairs of headlights were approaching, probably pushing fifty on the empty boulevard. Waldo darted into the street and, using the speeding cars for interference, made a run for the median, praying that Lorena would be where she was supposed to.
He sprinted down the grass strip, staying left of the line of trees. There were a number of parked cars ahead, but the glare of the headlights in this direction made it impossible to know whether Lorena’s Mercedes was one of them. He dashed into the street and toward the far sidewalk, well ahead of the oncoming car. He looked back to see how much distance he’d put between himself and the bangers with his first maneuver.
They were running straight across the median, out onto Waldo’s side. They veered and ran down the left traffic lane, waiting to let the car whiz by in the center before cutting over to the far sidewalk to chase Waldo down.
Waldo recognized Lorena’s Mercedes just as she threw open her door and slammed it into the lead banger, who went down hard. His partner stumbled over him. As the latter regained his balance, the Mercedes screeched to a stop beyond and went into reverse, Lorena gunning it right toward them again. The banger on his feet dove for the median. The one she’d already hit had gotten up on all fours; Lorena swerved to bounce him off her taillight and stayed in reverse until she reached Waldo.
“Nice timing,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat.
“I was waiting down the block. You were late.” She threw the car back into drive and floored it, aiming straight at the man still on the ground.
Waldo said, “If you’re going to hit him again, let me get my seat belt.”
The banger rolled out of the Mercedes’s path just in time.
“He looks okay,” said Waldo as they passed.
“Seriously?” said Lorena, “He’s what you’re worrying about? Fucking car is two months old.”
SIXTEEN
What the . . . ?” Lorena turned the pillow over. “There’s a lipstick stain! They didn’t change the sheets! I put the—” She looked at Waldo. “Did you take the card off the pillow?” He didn’t deny it. “Goddammit, Waldo, could you please just chill a little? You want to wear your clothes wet, fine, I won’t blow-dry them for you. But for two-fifty a night I don’t want to sleep on yesterday’s lipstick, okay?”
On the way back to the hotel he’d told her all about Alice and then she’d been quiet for a long time. The explosion didn’t come until now, when she was getting into bed. “You waste all your energy on this OCD-psycho-environmentalism—meanwhile here’s a girl who’s a fucking slave. Why don’t you pull your head out of your fucking ass and spend your energy on that?”
He’d gotten to know this Lorena too well in the old days, the one who’d misdirect legitimate rage at Waldo, the nearest target. He knew she’d be sorry for talking to him like that as soon as the words left her mouth. But he could take it; somehow he was built to ride out her flash storms. It was one of the ways they fit.
He even knew how long to wait before saying, “What now? Back to Amador?”
“Yup.”
“He’s not a talker.”
“He hasn’t met me yet.”
* * *
• • •
In the morning, while Lorena went to the front desk to check out, Waldo walked out to the street and thought about the night, which had never fully gotten back on track. Echoes of the unpleasantness were still hanging around the hotel room when Lorena had turned out the light—expecting him to reach for her and fix things that way, Waldo guessed. But he couldn’t: he’d found himself pinned to his side of the bed by flashbacks to the lonely, crushing nights long ago, nights when they’d turned to their reliable physical consonance to save them, only to find afterward that it hadn’t been enough. Lorena stayed on her side, too, possibly frozen by the same memories.
They’d set the alarm for quarter after five so that Lorena could make it to the Dollar Tree parking lot where Alice had told him women lined up hoping for Marwin Amador’s favor. Lorena would first have to overcome a wardrobe challenge: she’d never pass for a factory day worker in her usual couture, so she’d have to engineer a change of clothes, too, no simple task at an hour before anything was open. The plan was for Waldo, meanwhile, to spend the day on the phone taking an exhaustive round of blind shots, widening the net to include the hospitals in both counties, plus the jails and coroners too. He decided he might as well place the scores of calls from the enchanting Laguna boardwalk rather than from some parking lot in Santa Ana.
The valet brought Lorena’s car. Waldo tipped him and waited for her to come out of the hotel. When she did she offered Waldo a ride to the beach, but he said he’d prefer to walk. Her good-bye peck felt obligatory.
The phone work proved as fruitless as expected. Waldo broke up the tedious day by rewarding himself with three long walks, one through the heart of the quaint beachside town, the second barefoot along the mile or so of unbroken beach to the south, and the last, after he’d struck out with his last cold call, a random climb through the steep, winding inland streets to the multimillion-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.
Lorena sat heavily on his mind. Her marital surveillance was mostly stuff for rich white people, nothing like the diverse world of victims and perps Waldo naturally encountered as an L.A. homicide cop. He wondered if Amador and Tesoro being Latino embarrassed her, if it had anything to do with her misplaced anger.
She’d never introduced him to any relative, not even the aunt who raised her, and had offered Waldo only a sketch of her upbringing. He did know that Lorena’s mother, in the country from Zacatecas without documentation, had tried to tough out a second pregnancy without health insurance or prenatal treatment and died of toxemia diagnosed too late. Her dad, also here illegally, had been working two full-time jobs; not long after losing his childhood sweetheart and their unborn second child, he collapsed of a heart attack and died. He was thirty-eight. Lorena was seven. Lorena once told Waldo that she couldn’t hear the term “anchor baby” without wanting to tase someone.
After that, Lorena was raised by her father’s divorced younger sister. About those years she said particularly little. Waldo knew she’d considered the academy but enrolled instead at East Los Angeles College with an eye toward a career in accounting. The turn came when a neighbor’s pickup got stolen and Lorena managed to track it down, found it sitting with fresh paint and new plates in the driveway of the owner’s niece’s boyfriend. That led to her first paying gig: another neighbor’s husband had run off with the jackpot from the woman’s winning Fantasy 5 ticket; the jilted wife, a hotel maid who couldn’t afford a traditional investigator, offered Lorena a quarter of whatever she could recover. Lorena found the prick at a b
lackjack table in Reno—ahead, miraculously. With a sudden thirty-four thousand dollars in her first-ever savings account, Lorena dropped out of school and found a third-rate PI in Los Feliz willing to take a flyer on a kid coming off a big win. The real flyer the guy was hoping for, of course, was that this hot twenty-one-year-old wannabe would be up for a spin with the boss. Lorena managed to keep him out of her pants for the six thousand working hours she needed before the state of California would let her hang her own shingle.
Waldo’s phone buzzed in his pocket: Lorena was on her way back from Santa Ana and wanted to know where to meet him. He suggested the easiest landmark in town, the same lifeguard tower where he’d met Don Q.
He got there before she did, found an empty bench, stretched his arms across the back and enjoyed the clouds as they started to turn pink over Catalina. He closed his eyes, breathed the ocean air, slow and deep, and dipped into a happy drowse.
Something landed on his lap, startling him awake. “Rough day?” Lorena settled in next to him, holding a take-out soda. Waldo reached into the white bag and found a wrapped sandwich, a Jumbo Jack. Lorena plucked it out of his hand and tore into it.
Waldo looked in the bag and saw another burger and a cardboard box full of fries. “I’m not eating this.”
“It’s not for you. I haven’t eaten in twelve hours. Wait till you hear this shit.” She was still in a ferocious mood. For the moment, though, he didn’t seem to be its target and he was thankful for that small mercy.
He said, “Start with the outfit.” Her attire couldn’t be more non-Lorena: fraying jeans, a nondescript gray sweatshirt with a torn seam at the wrist, blue Keds. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band.
She told him that she’d looked for a woman her size behind the Dollar Tree and offered a trade: her entire couture ensemble plus a hundred dollars for the woman’s work clothes. The woman took the deal and also spelled out the drill. The raitero, Amador, would show up around seven and look over the women hoping for work. If he picked you, you had to give him eight dollars for the ride, cash. When he was almost full he’d start asking for an extra five for the last spots and would always find desperate takers. At the end of the shift the temp agency would give your pay to Amador, not to you; he’d drive you to a check-cashing store, which, like it or not, would take out another four dollars and give you what was left.
Amador had arrived in an old school bus repainted blue. From the hundred or so hard-up women, he picked sixty-four, by Lorena’s count. She was one of the first and, best as she could tell, the only one who wasn’t an immigrant. Amador was pocketing money every which way on each of them: eight-plus for the ride, some kick from the check-cash store, probably a couple of bucks per working hour from the temp agency—say twenty-five dollars a woman in all, times sixty-four, that would be sixteen hundred bucks a day, most of it in cash. Each woman, meanwhile, was taking home, for her eight hours (eleven, really, counting three of unpaid travel and waiting at the factory before the time clock started), seventy-two dollars, minus withholding. That is, the lucky women who got picked at all.
“And here comes the good part. Where do you think he took us to work?”
Waldo didn’t have a guess.
“Independence Infants.”
“Wax’s . . . ?”
“I spent all day sewing Born in America Babies. Baby Barack. At least it was a president I liked.” Waldo wanted to sort through what the coincidence meant, but Lorena kept railing, exercised by the politics. “Wax wants his pro-business Republicans in there, so he bankrolls two anti-immigrant hard-asses, while the very people they want to build a wall to keep out—they’re the ones making his fucking toys! And then he gets all offended by his in-laws’ hypocrisy in Hollywood—”
“Wait,” said Waldo, cutting her off. “What are the chances Amador would take you to Roy Wax’s factory?”
“Not an accident.” The tumblers clicked for Waldo even before she laid it out. “That’s how Daron knows Amador. And why Daron didn’t seem all that afraid about taking us to his house that night: end of the day, Amador works for his daddy.”
Waldo said he had no idea Lorena knew how to work a sewing machine. He certainly couldn’t imagine her sitting behind one all day.
“Fucking miserable,” she said. “Eight hours, no lunch break. My neck’s killing me. Look at my nails.”
“So how’d it work? End of the shift, Amador picks you up, takes you to the check-cashing place . . .”
“Yep.”
“Did he offer to buy you dinner and meet a pimp?”
“I was expecting it.” Waldo was being facetious: no way in hell could this woman make herself look vulnerable enough to be mistaken for that kind of prey. But he could hear in Lorena’s voice a little disappointment, even offense; she was so oversensitive right now that she took even this as a snub, one more sign of her vanishing youth.
From the check-cashing store, she’d followed Amador into a nearby dive bar, where she cornered him coming out of the men’s room and leaned on him, using what she’d picked up during the day and the Wax connection.
Waldo said, “Really? That got him to talk?” Amador’s racket was surely amoral, but if it was actually illegal, it wasn’t by much.
“I didn’t threaten him with the cops. I told him I’d go to the Orange County Register. You know Roy Wax doesn’t want his Newport Beach buddies reading about him and Marwin Amador.” It was the smart squeeze: Amador’s fear of losing this sweet job—eight grand a week in bus fare—would lubricate a conversation for sure.
Still, though, Amador hadn’t been able to give her much. He admitted knowing Daron through his father and also that Stevie had indeed come inside the house the night Daron bought the coke.
“And Stevie’s phone call?”
“He said she sounded kind of wasted, hung up, that was it.”
“He say anything else?”
“Yeah, he said, ‘That girl don’t need me to find trouble.’”
“You believe him?”
“Who knows. The phone call was only two minutes, right? Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe that was long enough to set up a place for him to pick her up . . . and then, whatever.”
They were nowhere. All the Orange County leads were dead ends or stone walls. “What now?” said Waldo.
“Now I eat my other Jumbo Jack. Gimme.”
They reviewed their options while she ate. They could fight traffic back up to the Valley and talk to the Roses and Dionne again, try to pull some more names of Stevie’s friends they could interview. Or they could stay in Orange County and lean into the worst possible scenario, try to find Tesoro’s other tracks in Santa Ana and talk to more of his girls. On top of the Stevie problem, they faced the usual nuisances of deciding where to sleep and an acceptable dinner for Waldo.
Lorena’s phone rang and she checked the caller. “Wax.”
Waldo was sure it wouldn’t be good news. “You think Amador told him you went undercover in his factory?”
She said, “Why would he?” But it gave her pause. She watched the phone ring, and Waldo could see her picturing her career in flames. They didn’t come any tougher than Lorena Nascimento, but this guy had her petrified.
Waldo said, “Put it on speaker.”
She did, connecting the call. “Hello?”
Roy Wax said, “I know where she is.”
SEVENTEEN
Wax was brief and to the point. Stevie had texted his son, Daron, and then they had spoken on the phone. Daron was able to get an address from his cousin and Wax had insisted Daron give it to him. The girl had been in L.A. since she’d left his son. That was all Wax knew. He was passing on the address to Lorena and Waldo, on some street called Cheltenham Drive, and trusting that they would find Stevie safe and sound. Assuming they did, he’d consider their business concluded and then he expected them to leave him and his family alone
.
Waldo and Lorena walked from Main Beach to her car, which was parked at a meter near the gallery where Waldo had met with Don Q. The two of them were on the same page at last. They shared a take on the timing of Wax’s call: Amador had indeed reached out to Wax after Lorena shook him up; Wax in turn leaned on his son, who either found out or knew all along where Stevie had been hiding. The ticktock didn’t matter, though. As long as Stevie really was where the Waxes said she was, they’d take it. They’d deliver her to her parents and smooth the meet with Cuppy, and once the family Rose was hooked up with a lawyer they’d extricate themselves as quickly and cleanly as they could.
Lorena started the engine and plugged the address into her GPS. “That little cooz.”
“What now?”
Lorena showed him on the dashboard map. “Look. She’s half a mile from her parents’ house.”
* * *
• • •
A white-haired woman opened the door, a senior flummoxed by unexpected visitors after sundown. Lorena said, “We’re looking for Stevie Rose. We were told she was staying here.”
“Yes, while her parents are out of town. Who are you?”
“My name’s Lorena Nascimento. This is Charlie Waldo.” The woman, who hadn’t recognized Waldo without the prompt, now couldn’t keep from gawking. Lorena told her that the Roses were, in fact, at home and had hired them to find Stevie. The woman said her name was Marilyn Lambert and that she was Clara’s grandmother, assuming they’d have an idea who Clara was. She said she’d go get Stevie and disappeared into the house without inviting them inside.
Stevie glowered at Waldo and Lorena as she strode past them and out to the street, leaving without a good-bye or thank-you to her friend Clara, who lingered in the doorway, or to Clara’s grandma. Waldo did thank Marilyn Lambert and they followed Stevie.
Waldo and Lorena hadn’t made a plan for getting the girl home in the two-seat Mercedes. Waldo said, “We could walk.”
Below the Line Page 14
