Below the Line

by Howard Michael Gould

  Waldo was in trouble.

  He jogged across Harbor toward the Wonderland and the relative safety of its lights. A twentyish kid with a pompadour and hoops in his ears manned the desk, young for the night job, a stickup waiting to happen. A terrified look in his eye, he said, “Help you?” Waldo shook his head, trying his best to look reassuring. He took out his phone and, tossing aside every belief that once had saved him, tried to save himself now by finding a cab. He’d concoct some counterpoise later; maybe he’d squeeze to Ninety-Nine Things for a year.

  The scared kid disappeared through a door to the office; a second later, when Tesoro came out the same door, it became clear that it hadn’t been Waldo who was frightening him. Waldo spun for the exit and straight into a left cross from the Burger King thug who’d survived Lorena’s demolition derby. There were two more bangers behind him.

  They tackled Waldo and laid into him with boots and fists. One against four: he couldn’t get off a single lick of his own. One of them noticed the bandaging on his arm and stomped on it. Waldo screamed.

  Another banger stood on his good wrist, pinning him. Tesoro knelt over him and drew back a muscle-bound arm. The last thought Waldo had was almost comforting: if he was still alive, it probably meant that they wanted him that way.

  * * *

  • • •

  Someone was slapping his face awake.

  Waldo was in a bathtub, his sleeves rolled and his hands bound with bungees to the rusty metal knobs overhead. A grungy plastic shower curtain was gathered by his feet, whitish tiles all around him stained by a half century’s worth of hotel guests of slowly descending quality.

  Tesoro perched beside him on the edge of the tub. A girl a few years older than Mariana stood in the doorway. Tesoro spoke in Spanish; then the girl said, “He says, he told you this ain’t the neighborhood for you.”

  Waldo said, “Tell him I took a wrong turn.”

  The girl put it into Spanish. Tesoro nodded at Waldo: you sure did.

  Waldo added, “Tell him I’m looking for Disneyland. ‘It’s a Small World’ fell out of my head and I have to get it back in.”

  The girl hesitated. “That’s stupid. You really want me to say that shit?”

  “I don’t think it matters a lot.”

  Tesoro, displeased at the side conversation, turned on the girl. They had a brief dialogue. Then the girl said in English, “He says, ‘This time we send you home with a souvenir.’”

  Waldo said, “Cool. I’ll take one of those Goofy caps, with the long ears.”

  The girl sighed annoyance and shook her head.

  Tesoro snapped open a small knife and placed it on the edge of the tub. He reached into his pocket and took out a wide-mouth bottle of Parker black ink. He opened it and laid out the bottle, the cap and an eyedropper at the curtain end of the tub.

  He ripped a tatty white towel from a bar and spoke a couple of sentences in Spanish. The girl translated for him: “Some pimps, they mark their bitches with tattoos. This is better—gives you an experience to . . . what’s the word?” She looked for it, found it. “Remember.”

  Tesoro leaned down and held Waldo’s nose closed and, when Waldo opened his mouth to catch a breath, stuffed the towel into it.

  The girl said, “It’ll be less bad if you don’t fight it.” Her own contribution.

  But Waldo balled his fists and squeezed them tight as he could. He could feel the effort straining the stitches on his arm, the one farther from Tesoro. Tesoro called out and one of his bangers pushed his way past the girl and into the bathroom. He stepped into the tub, bracing his foot between Waldo’s sternum and the wall. With both hands the banger pried open Waldo’s left fist, knuckle by knuckle. Tesoro carefully positioned the knife against the webbing between Waldo’s ring finger and pinky, then flicked his wrist. Waldo felt the wicked sting and, looking up, saw the red on his forearm, first drops and then a steady trickle.

  It would do him no good to watch the bleeding. He looked away—and through the banger’s legs saw the ink bottle on the side of the tub. Waldo torqued his body, then whipped his far leg, kicking the glass jar clean across the bathroom; it shattered on the ceramic tank behind the toilet. At least he’d be spared Tesoro’s crude tattoo.

  “Cabrón.” The pimp answered with his knife, adding a second laceration between Waldo’s ring and middle fingers, slicing a little deeper this time. He did the third web, too, and then the coup de grace across the ball. The blood streamed onto Waldo’s face. Waldo grunted into the towel.

  Tesoro stood and rinsed his knife in the sink. He said something to the girl and left the room, his banger behind him.

  The girl came over and unbound Waldo’s hands. Everything was staining red. She took the towel from his mouth. Waldo wrapped it around the bloody hand as tightly as he could, tasting the salt of his blood as it traversed his mustache.

  Tesoro came back and said something from the doorway.

  “He says, come back here again, he cuts a T in your throat.” The girl looked at Waldo with concern and apology. Tesoro kept talking and she translated, in pieces. “And that bitch with the Mercedes? . . . He’s gonna cut all kinds of Ts into her . . . He has her license plate, so tell her he’ll see her soon . . . She don’t even have to come to him.” The pimp turned and left again.

  The girl leaned in and whispered, “Are you the one who took Mariana?” Waldo nodded. “Is she okay?” Waldo had no idea.

  Tesoro called for her. She tossed another towel to Waldo and scurried out of the bathroom. Waldo heard them all leave and the outer door slam.

  His phone was in his back left pocket. He reached around for it with his right arm—pathetically enough, his better one now. Behind the instant smears of blood, he managed to find 9 and 1 and 1.

  * * *

  • • •

  For the second time in three nights Waldo reclined on an emergency room bed, taking stitches. These were more agonizing for the same reason Tesoro picked that spot to cut, the concentration of nerve endings in the fingers. This doc, a young guy named Pfeffer with a mane of orange frizz, wasn’t telling him how lucky he was. He wasn’t buying Waldo’s claim of a can-opener accident, either.

  Waldo distracted himself by chewing over what the night meant to the case. Why did Wax want him out of O.C. so badly? Their knowledge of the raitero business couldn’t be enough to trigger all this, could it? What would that be to Wax, really, beyond bad PR? Then again, would Wax necessarily be told what Tesoro would do to Waldo? Was dropping him on Harbor just Amador’s suggestion, with Tesoro taking it this far on his own, retribution for stealing one of his girls? Did Wax even know Tesoro at all?

  The drug connection to Ouelette was still murky, but the immediacy of the violence made their involvement in his killing feel more plausible. But again—what did “they” even mean? Was Wax connected to Ouelette, in more than a secondhand way through Stevie? Could he be the seventy-nine link? He’d have the kind of friends who could afford big-ticket designer pharmaceuticals. Even if it was hard to see Roy Wax personally waiting for Victor Ouelette in his parking garage with a gun, he could have sent Amador. Tears like rain. But the links were thin, the motives opaque.

  Shit upon shit, and Waldo was still nowhere.

  His cell rang and he managed to work it loose from his pocket midstitch, to the doctor’s consternation. He looked: Joel Rose. Good God, what now? What could Stevie possibly have left for an encore?

  “Joel,” he said, trying to keep the weariness out of his voice. “What’s up?”

  Joel Rose answered through racking sobs. “It’s Paula. She’s dead.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  While a nurse finished the bandaging, his phone dinged with a text from Lorena. At Roses—meet me here.

  A minute later it dinged again: If you take a fucking bus I’ll kill you.

  Steadying the phone on his leg, he
downloaded the Uber app one-handed. He declined the nurse’s offer of a sling: the compromise he’d made toward peace with Lorena still nettled him; his first sling was sitting on the floor beside her bed, and there was no way he was going to pretend two slings weren’t Things. Then he had a lengthy debate with the ER desk nurse in charge of billing, more contentious than the analogous one two nights before, about why he needed to keep all his insurance information in his head instead of carrying a card. After that they let him go, so he ordered a car and waited in front of the hospital.

  The driver talked at him all the way to Sherman Oaks, half the time about the “Netflix-type pilot” he was writing about a vampire hit man who drove for Uber, half the time about how this Infiniti station wagon burned so much gas that the gig was barely worth it. Everything about the ride gave Waldo’s stomach a fresh turn.

  He texted Lorena when they got off the 101 and she was waiting for him when the Uber let him off at the foot of the Roses’ driveway. She made eyes at his mummified left hand but he waved the question off with his right. “You first.”

  “Gang’s all here,” she told him as they scaled the drive past the parked black-and-whites. “Joel, Stevie, Cuppy, your favorite lawyer. FIU’s still in there with the body.”

  “What do we know?”

  “Joel says he was working late on the show, came home, found Paula on the kitchen floor. Two shots at close range, no struggle, looks like they’re pulling a third slug out of the wall.”

  “Where was Stevie?”

  “In the kitchen, shooting her mother.” He lowered his chin, raised his brows and waited for a better answer. “She says, out in the pool house. Earbuds, Florence and the Machine. Didn’t hear a peep.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Back in the pool house. Cop stationed outside, making sure she doesn’t run.”

  “Where’s Joel?”

  “In his study with Davis. Cuppy wanted to do residue tests on both him and Stevie but Davis jammed him—she said not without an arrest, and Cuppy can’t decide yet which Rose he likes better.”

  “What about Fido?”

  “Double homicide.”

  “Shot?”

  “Poisoned. Antifreeze in the doggy dish out back.”

  He started inside but she stepped in front of him.

  “What’s with the hand?”

  He recounted his whole O.C. trip, from Wax’s brush-off through the Wonderland bathtub. As soon as he said the name Tesoro he could feel the heat rise; for her this was picking up where the Mariana story left off.

  “I’m going to cut his fucking hands off.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “You think I’m kidding.” She was edging back in the red zone again.

  “Well, you may not even have to fight traffic.” He told her about Tesoro’s translated threat to come looking for her. She rolled her eyes. He told her to take it seriously. Whether or not the pimp was bluffing about having her plate, the cops knew who Waldo was, so Tesoro could probably find out, too, through Amador through Wax, and the step from Waldo to Lorena wasn’t a big one. In any event, Don Q had been right: Tesoro was an adult dose, and she needed to be careful.

  Lorena said, “Bring it. I’ll cut his balls off, too,” and headed inside.

  A cocktail party’s worth of uniforms and plainclothes filled the big house. Waldo recognized half of them. The guest of honor herself was slumped against one of the twin Sub-Zero refrigerators, her blood seeping into grout between the mosaic of gray and white tiles. The Field Investigation guys were still at work, photographing, measuring, taking samples. Most everyone ignored Waldo and Lorena, but a couple made a point of stopping their work to eye-fuck him. Around LAPD, he’d get that forever.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” barked Cuppy when he saw them. “Out! You can sit in the office with the lawyer, but out of the kitchen!”

  He pointed in one direction but Fontella Davis appeared from the other. “I’m right here.” Off Cuppy’s confusion, she said, “I was in the pool house with Stevie. She’ll only talk to you,” she said to Waldo. “Alone.”

  He went out through the glass doors, feeling Lorena’s eyes drill holes in his neck.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stevie was on the daybed, wrapped in an afghan, makeup running, a box of Kleenex at hand and a dozen crumpled tissues at her feet. She looked up at Waldo and said through sniffles, “I didn’t know if you’d even talk to me.”

  He turned one of the club chairs to face her and sat, keeping the length of the room between them. “Because you told Lorena I put a move on you?” Stevie nodded. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Is she here?”

  “Uh-huh. In the house.”

  “She thinks I killed my mother, doesn’t she. She hates me. Plus you can tell she thinks she’s really hot. I bet she’s already dying her hair.”

  “What can you tell me about tonight?”

  “I didn’t do it. I have an alibi.”

  “You might not want to phrase it that way. You told them you were out here all night?”

  “I was out here all night. But I wasn’t alone. I have this friend, Dionne?”

  “Dionne was here with you?”

  Stevie shook her head. “Her boyfriend, Conor.” Naturally. Stevie stopped crying, anyway, distracted by her own story. “He came in and out through the side gate, by the garbage cans, so no one would see him? He left, like, two minutes before the police got here. Promise you won’t tell anyone. It would be, like, nuclear for the whole school. I’m only telling you because it’s important you believe me.”

  “Other people need to believe you, too.”

  “If you believe me, I know you can fix it with them.” He got her to tell him that the boy’s last name was Jacoby and that he was a junior at their school. “But,” she said, “we kind of had a fight?”

  “What about?”

  “He said he should get at least a blow job—you know, if he was, like, cheating on Dionne and everything? I didn’t like his attitude—I mean, she’s my best friend. So I said if that’s how he felt, he could leave, and he did.” Somewhere in there was an ethical stance in which Stevie seemed to take pride, but Waldo decided not to try to tease it out. “You have to promise not to tell anyone. Especially Lorena.”

  “Why not Lorena?”

  “She’ll burn me with Dionne. You know she will.”

  He promised to keep her secret, knowing it wouldn’t last the drive home.

  A remark of Alastair Pinch’s on the last case flitted across his mind: that it tells everything about how people really feel about marriage that the first suspect is always the husband. It made him wonder what Paula and Joel’s carefully rehearsed story might have been built to hide. He said to Stevie, “Tell me about your dad. Does he have a temper?”

  “Joel?”

  “Yeah. Ever see him get angry at your mom?”

  Stevie snorted. “Not hardly. Joel’s a wuss. Like, totally pussy whipped. I swear, it’s painful to watch.”

  “I heard he got pretty crazy at Thanksgiving. Something about the election and a knife?”

  “Uh, no? That was Uncle Roy.”

  “Roy was waving the knife around?”

  “Yup. Uncle Roy was so obnoxious, because he was, like, Mr. Total Trump Fan? And Paula and Joel were already flipped out about Hillary—so they started getting on Uncle Roy’s ass about how his factories are all full of illegals and how they were going to go to what’s her name, that annoying lady they’re always watching on MSNBC? And Uncle Roy was holding the knife for the turkey, you know? And he started yelling at them to go ahead and see how that works out for them.”

  “You’re sure that’s how it went. Because I heard it a different way.”

  “Uh, I was, like, there? Uncle Roy is always way aggressive. One Thanksgiving? Aunt Brenda
had on these big sunglasses and she kept them on, like, the whole day. She told us she had pinkeye but my mom said . . .” Stevie stopped and let out a moan of suddenly recalled grief, then broke down completely and wept. Whatever was underneath, it didn’t seem like an act.

  Stevie lay on her side and pulled the blanket over her head, disconsolate and probably embarrassed. She seemed her age for a change, or even younger. Eventually her sobs tapered to sniffles. Waldo said, “You going to be okay?” He wasn’t going to leave her alone out here until he was sure she could handle it.

  “I could use a hug.” She was still buried under the covers.

  “Maybe you could get a good one from your dad.”

  It was a while before she said, softly, “He thinks I did it.” The weight of that hung over them both for another while before she sat up, looked at him and said, “Please, Waldo?”

  He went over to the bed and sat beside her. She shed the blanket and threw her arms around his neck. He was struck by how little there was of her under her T-shirt, all bones and angles. He recalled that first dinner, her barely touched salad. This girl’s problems had no beginning and no end, and now she was down to one clueless, hapless parent to help her find her way through.

  In his arms, her breathing settled and quieted. Waldo wondered if she was falling asleep. He knew he needed to hold on to objectivity, but man did he hope this wouldn’t all end with him figuring out that this girl had murdered her teacher, let alone her mother.

  Stevie said to him, softly, “I don’t . . .” and trailed off.

  “Don’t what?”

  “I don’t like boys my age.”

  Waldo let go of her and stood. He stepped back from the bed. “You know, until things settle down, you might want to take a break from any boys.” Or better, he thought, give them a break from you.

  She looked up at him with the glittering eyes that once upon a time must have sirened Victor Ouelette to her door in his swim trunks. “Be honest, Waldo: if you could be sure nobody would ever find out . . . isn’t there anything you’d like to do with me?”