Below the Line

by Howard Michael Gould

  “Mr. Waldo and Ms. Nascimento came over here to talk to you earlier that day. Is that correct?” Davis was actually asking Waldo and Lorena, who nodded confirmation. She turned back to Stevie. “And is it true that you hired them?”

  “Yes.”

  “To do what?”

  “I told them I needed them to find my brother. But what I really wanted was for them to go talk to Mr. Ouelette.”

  “Why did you want that?”

  “Because he’s a total creep and something, like, really, really shitty had to happen to him, and I knew nobody else was going to do it if I didn’t.”

  Fontella looked to Joel, who was returning with two low-backed leather chairs, probably from the Roses’ dining room. “We need to do some work before we let Stevie talk to the police.” Waldo and Lorena sat on the chairs. The Roses sat on the sofas, Joel beside his daughter and Paula next to the lawyer, who said to Stevie, “When the detective’s here, you’re not to answer any questions unless I specifically tell you to. After he leaves, I’ll teach you how to answer in a way that won’t get you into trouble. Okay?”

  Stevie said, “Whatever.”

  Joel said, “Maybe Paula and I should have a conversation with the officer first, without Stevie.”

  Davis shook her head and said, “He’s going to want to talk to her.”

  Stevie said, “Yeah, Joel. It’s not all about you for once.”

  Her father said, “Don’t call me Joel.”

  “Okay, Joel.”

  Joel strained to keep his anger in check. “Young lady, we’re paying a top lawyer thousands of dollars to come out here in the middle of the night to keep you out of prison. Now, straighten up. Be respectful. And go change your clothes before the police get here, like your mother said.”

  Stevie said, “Have another Xanax, Joel.”

  Waldo got off the chair and came over to Stevie on the sofa. He crouched to talk to her eye to eye; Stevie sighed annoyance and looked at her fingernails. He said, in a softer tone than the others had been using, “I know the cop who’s coming over here today. I know him really well. You think we’re all assholes? This asshole is really an asshole. And he wants bad things to happen to you. So listen to Ms. Davis. Don’t talk unless she tells you to. And after he leaves, let her coach you. Trust me, okay?”

  She finally met his eye.

  Everyone else held a careful silence.

  A bell rang. Joel went to the intercom, buzzed open the gates and left the room to answer the door. The others stayed quiet and listened to Cuppy introduce himself to Joel, who led him into the living room. He said, “This is Detective Cuppy.”

  “I’m Fontella Davis, attorney for the Rose family.” Cuppy took a deep breath at that news and blew it out. She told him, “Stevie’s not going to be answering any questions tonight. She’s a minor, it’s late, and I’ve just met her myself. I suggest we meet you at North Hollywood Division tomorrow morning at eleven and pick this up then.”

  Cuppy said, “Sure, we could do it that way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Second option, she could answer a few questions here now, informally. Third option, we do this with handcuffs and a sleepover. Come to think of it, we’re not going with the first option.”

  Davis, stuck, looked at Stevie and weighed how to play it. She said to Cuppy, “Only questions about Stevie’s activities on the day of the murder. You ask; I tell Stevie whether or not she should answer. If I say stop, the interview’s over and you can do what you will.” Cuppy nodded agreement. Davis added, “And I want everyone out of the room. Just the three of us.”

  Joel and Paula conferred wordlessly; then Joel said to Waldo and Lorena, “We can all wait in my office.”

  The Roses started to lead them out, but Stevie said, “Hang on. I want him here.” She tipped her chin toward Waldo.

  Cuppy said, “Not a chance.”

  Davis said quickly, “Agreed.”

  Stevie said, “Fine. Arrest me.” She held out her wrists for handcuffs.

  Davis and Cuppy met eyes, gave in together. The others left the room.

  The questioning played out the way Fontella directed: Cuppy posed a series of simple queries about Stevie’s day, and, with step-by-step permission from her lawyer, the girl walked through the timeline, from school hours through Waldo and Lorena’s visit, then through her phone call to her cousin Daron and his bringing her down to Costa Mesa. When Cuppy asked what they did down there, she said they watched some movie; she couldn’t remember the name but some guy had sex with a cake.

  She told them how Clara Lambert had picked her up and about how she’d stayed at Clara’s house without telling anyone until today. Waldo chimed in at that point, corroborating that that was where he and Lorena had collected her earlier in the evening. Cuppy asked him how they knew Stevie would be there; Waldo said that he received a phone call from Stevie’s uncle, Daron’s father, who’d known that he and Lorena had been looking for her in Orange County.

  Cuppy said he was going to need all of Daron’s information and Clara Lambert’s too. Stevie said she’d have to get it from her phone and Cuppy let her go to her room for it.

  Waldo could see Fontella Davis starting to breathe easier. It could have gone a lot worse.

  Stevie returned with her phone and the contact information. Then Cuppy asked her the same question Waldo had earlier. “When you were at Clara’s for so long, why didn’t you contact your parents?”

  “Because we’re, like, always fighting.”

  “What do you fight about?”

  Stevie said, “They’re just, like, horrible. They’re, like, constantly . . . abusing me.”

  Davis jumped to her feet. “Okay, we’re done.”

  Cuppy said, “Wait a minute, abusing you how?”

  “No. We’re done.” Davis said to Waldo, “Go get Joel and Paula.”

  Waldo left the room to find the Roses. Behind him he could hear Davis telling Stevie to go to her room and Stevie snapping back, “I don’t have to listen to you.”

  Waldo followed adult voices to Joel’s office and told the Roses that they could come back now. Lorena asked with her eyes how it went, and Waldo, the same way, answered that it had been a disaster.

  Back in the living room, Cuppy was saying to Davis, “You’ll explain to them how child services works?”

  Paula said, “Child services?”

  Cuppy said to the Roses, “Yeah, they’ll be dropping in for coffee and cake. In the meantime, make sure your daughter doesn’t go running off again.”

  Stevie said, “Yeah, because they were so good at that the last time,” and stomped off to her room.

  Cuppy gave business cards to Fontella and Joel, said he’d be in touch and left.

  The moment the door closed, Lorena turned to Paula. “So, mission accomplished: Stevie’s home, safe and sound. I’ll send you a bill. Good luck.”

  Joel said, “Wait—you’re not leaving us now. We still need you. Until she’s cleared.”

  Waldo cut Lorena off before she could demur. He said to Joel, “We’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Lorena shot him a look but he touched her elbow. She took the cue and went with him to the door.

  As they left, Joel said to Waldo, “I still want to talk to you about that other thing.” Waldo thought he must mean the dog. But Joel said, “You know: the rights to your story. I’m telling you . . .” he said, with a meaningful look, the meaning being, presumably, money.

  * * *

  • • •

  Out on Ventura, Lorena said, “First I thought that girl was a train wreck. She’s not—she’s a carrier. Bad shit’s going to keep happening if we stay with this one. Plus she shot the guy. I know it in my bones.”

  He thought of Stevie sitting on that sofa, in her nightclothes, her bare legs folded under her, vulnerable, surrounded
by Cuppy’s animus, Fontella Davis’s thirst for publicity, her own parents’ uselessness. “We can’t walk away,” he said. “She’s fifteen. Who in that room do you think’s going to look out for her?”

  “Nobody, Waldo. Nobody but you. Her hero.”

  “Don’t start this . . .”

  “Looking up at you with those big eyes. ‘I want him here.’” She gave the quote a breathy Marilyn Monroe reading. Waldo didn’t respond.

  She pulled onto the 101 to head back to her house. Waldo silently nursed his own doubts about whether he was doing the right thing. What he really wanted, but knew he couldn’t say, was to spend the night in his tiny loft, where there wasn’t room for two.

  NINETEEN

  Waldo woke from a restless Percocet sleep with his forearm throbbing, and once more alone. He heard laughter, struggled one-armed into his dry set of clothes and went out to the kitchen. Willem was juicing again, in workout gear this time. Lorena was drinking coffee and leaning on the counter in an aquamarine cowl-neck blouse and a black pencil skirt. She stopped giggling when Waldo entered. He got the feeling he was interrupting something.

  Waldo said, “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you. I’ve got a meeting, prospective client.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t mentioned it.

  “It came in last night, while you were in the MRI. Marital—which is starting to look better. You going to be all right on your own?”

  He didn’t know if she was telling the truth about the new case or if it was just a way to slide out of Stevie Rose’s without another argument. He felt Willem’s eyes on him and wondered how much he knew. Probably none of it, based on the sketch Lorena had given Waldo of their marriage, but still her ex-husband had to sense the strain. Waldo said, “Sure.”

  Lorena rinsed her cup, said, “Good. Check in later?” and made a quick exit. Waldo had an apple and some dry granola, then went back to Lorena’s room, where he showered carefully and treated and re-dressed his wounds lefty.

  Feeling strong enough to try the day without the sling, he biked to the Red Line and rode it back up into the Valley, a solo act again.

  Their romantic morass would take time to figure out, but the professional side was becoming clear. This case would be another one-shot à la carte like Pinch was. The Roses had agreed to three thousand a day, which meant Waldo’s chosen charity would be entitled to at least fifteen hundred. Actually, he’d have an argument to make for two thousand, the amount he’d negotiated for Pinch and which he’d deserve again if he was going to start working Stevie’s case himself. It reminded Waldo that he’d received no confirmation that the network had actually made the contribution of the Pinch money—sixteen thousand dollars by his reckoning—to the Sierra Club. He ought to ask Fontella Davis about it next time he saw her.

  Maybe he’d steer the Rose fee to Greenpeace, or Ecotrust. Or maybe, Lorena’s censure from the other night reverberating, he should stretch beyond environmentalist groups and give it to people trying to help girls like Alice.

  Meanwhile, Stevie. Following Hexter’s disquisition on teenage brain development, he had done some reading on his own. One doctor’s article, seconding the thesis about teen brains resembling those of insane adults, advised any parent with a problem teen to hang on and wait for these hellish years to pass, and in the meantime just keep the kid alive. Maybe he should forward that article to the Roses.

  Of course, it’d be nice if they could keep everyone around Stevie alive, too.

  * * *

  • • •

  “He was one of our most beloved teachers, you know. You can’t imagine the effect it’s having on the campus—the fragility, the utter grief.” Hexter closed his office door behind them. “I tried to explain that to the detective, but he’s been a bull in a china shop.”

  “Jim Cuppy?”

  “You know him?”

  “What has he asked you about?”

  “Victor’s background, how he fit in at the school. His classes, the clubs he supervised. How he got along with the faculty, with the students.”

  “Did you get into the relationship between Ouelette and Stevie?”

  “Her accusations?” It was a subtle but pointed correction.

  “Yes.”

  “I did.”

  “What was Cuppy’s reaction?”

  “Detestable.”

  “What did he say?”

  It was like a turd in Hexter’s mouth. “He said, ‘Bet you wish you did something about that, huh.’”

  “You still don’t believe anything happened.”

  “I didn’t believe it before Victor was killed, no. And now you want me to believe it was the motive for the murder you want me to believe she didn’t commit.”

  “I’m not saying who committed the murder.”

  “She’s your client, isn’t she? You’re trying to prove she didn’t do it.”

  It was a truth he’d yet to fully acknowledge to himself. During the Pinch case he had wrestled with precisely this issue, the inherently corrupt nature of the PI’s role, so different from the objectivity of police work. Somehow with Pinch he’d walked that line to his own satisfaction: he kept thinking of himself as a legitimate investigator who happened to be hired by someone with an interest in Pinch’s exoneration, but he never thought himself a champion for that exoneration. He followed leads as cleanly and thoroughly and honestly as he could, and his solution had borne out the legitimacy of his process.

  But this was different. Somewhere along the line and without realizing it, he’d indeed become invested in protecting Stevie Rose. He said to Hexter, “Did Cuppy ask you about anything else? Any subject you weren’t expecting?”

  The headmaster pumped a knee a few times. Waldo could tell they were veering toward another tough subject. “Drugs. Drugs on campus. He dug in on that.”

  Waldo asked whether that was a particular problem at Stoddard. Hexter said it was an issue at every private school and talked about Stoddard’s zero-tolerance policy, which had led to seven expulsions during the current school year.

  “What drugs were they expelled for?”

  “Six for marijuana, one for cocaine.”

  “How about Adderall?”

  “Prescription drugs are a different issue, with their own challenges. Some parents are complicit, and some doctors.”

  “Ever hear anything about Victor Ouelette selling Adderall to students?”

  “What? No. Is Stevie Rose claiming that, too?”

  “Cuppy didn’t ask about that?”

  “Not about Adderall.”

  It was too careful an answer. “But he asked if Ouelette was selling drugs?”

  Hexter stood, discomfited. “I wish people would remember that Victor was the victim here.”

  “Look, a case like this, there’s usually something going on in the victim’s life that people around him didn’t know about. I understand it’s a delicate time, but could you arrange for me to talk to more of the faculty? And I’d like Ouelette’s emergency contacts from your records, or any other family members you might know about.” Hexter nodded sadly, resigned to the continuing intrusion. Waldo said, “Anything else about Cuppy? Anything that surprised you?”

  “He asked me about a number.”

  “A number?”

  “Seventy-nine. He asked if seventy-nine meant anything to me.”

  “Did it?”

  Hexter shook his head. They heard a hubbub coming from the outer office. Hexter said, “May I?” and they both went outside.

  The staff was clustered around one assistant’s desk, staring at her computer, which Waldo saw was open to the neighborhood website Nextdoor. “Look,” one of them was saying, “there’s a link to KABC. Maybe they’re showing it.”

  “What’s going on?” said Hexter.

  “There’s
a fire. I live near there. I got an alert.”

  The link took them to aerial footage of what looked like a very large hillside house, one end of which was in flames. LIVE and SHERMAN OAKS filled the bottom of the screen next to the Channel 7 bug. There were at least three trucks in the shot and a couple dozen firemen trying to knock down the blaze.

  Waldo said, “Is that close to here?”

  “Not that close. But it’s a Stoddard family.”

  Hexter said, “Dear God. Who?”

  Waldo didn’t need to hear the answer.

  * * *

  • • •

  He could smell it all the way up from Ventura Boulevard, acrid and metallic. He started coughing, dismounted his Brompton halfway up and walked the rest. The trucks were still there but the firemen on the street seemed unhurried. He said to one of them, “How’s it looking?”

  “We think we got it all, but we’re still going through the house.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “Looks like we’re good. Family got out quick.”

  Waldo left his bike at the bottom of the driveway. One truck was parked at the top. The near side of the house looked intact, but the roof damage started only ten yards past the front door. Paula, in tears, came around from the back, Joel a step behind, both looking up, surveying the damage. Waldo said to them, “What happened?” Paula couldn’t speak. Joel answered with a lethal glance toward the glider where Waldo and Lorena had sat waiting for the ambulance the night before. Stevie rocked on it now, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the grass.

  Joel put his arm around his wife and guided her away. Waldo went over to Stevie.

  She was defiant, provocative. “It was an accident.”

  “You didn’t go to school?”

  “Paula and Joel said I could stay home today. After everything.”

  “And . . . ?”

  She recited it in a bratty singsong, oh so put upon at having to tell it again. “And I was smoking in bed, and I fell asleep for a minute. I thought I put it out, but I guess I didn’t.”