“What were you smoking?”
She answered by not answering.
His phone rang in his pocket and he took a look. Burner. It took a second to realize that had nothing to do with the blaze, that it was only the blind appellation Waldo had attached to the number that Q had called him from the other day. He pressed a button to forward it to voicemail.
Waldo stepped back to take in the damage. The house was so huge that they might even be able to live there during the reconstruction. An older fireman, probably the chief, was talking to Joel and Paula now, pointing to various sections of the roof. Paula was crying too much to pay attention, no doubt mourning irreplaceable mementos lost. She’d get past that more easily than she could imagine, Waldo knew from experience; people always think they need more Things than they really do. Joel seemed fixed on what the fire chief was saying, though he threw one or two glances Stevie’s way. Waldo wondered at the insurance implications of your fifteen-year-old burning down the family mansion with a careless doobie.
“I am so fucked,” Stevie said. “Paula was already talking about sending me away. After you left last night? That’s like all she did, look online at boarding schools for ‘problem girls.’ They probably think I did this on purpose, because I hate them or something.”
“Do you?”
Stevie studied her toenails. “Sometimes.”
Waldo wanted to get away from this quagmire, to get back to handling something easy, like a homicide with no clues.
“It’s perfect that I destroyed my own room, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I fucked everything else up. I wouldn’t know how to find my way back anymore if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Of course. But to what? My parents are so done with me.” It was the first time she hadn’t referred to them by their first names. “Look at them.” The fire chief was walking away from the Roses. Paula was running her hands down her face, Joel putting a hand on her shoulder, the pair a picture of utter defeat.
Stevie looked up at Waldo. “Can you talk to them for me?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell them I didn’t kill Mr. Ouelette. If it comes from you, maybe they’ll believe it. Could you do that for me, Waldo? Please?” There was no attitude, no posturing. She was just a girl, earnest and urgent and frightened. “Tell them I fucked him,” she said, “but I didn’t kill him.”
TWENTY
He glided down to the boulevard. Maybe the best move was to try Ouelette’s apartment building, talk to that nosy neighbor and anybody else who was home. He should also go back to Stoddard and see what Hexter was able to line up for him. If Ouelette had a darker side—bearing in mind that, at this point, they were going only on Stevie Rose’s word for that—had he really managed to hide it fully from his coworkers? Were they all like that clueless hippie art teacher? He should concentrate on the males on the faculty. And he should find out if there were any other teachers who’d been accused of improper relationships with students; Hexter would hate like poison to share those names, but it might be Waldo’s best shot at finding somebody Ouelette opened up to.
He stopped at Coldwater and decided to work his way left after the light and turn north on Whitsett. Hit the school while everyone was still there and save the apartment for later, at the time of day people were more likely to have seen the teacher around anyway.
All at once the world went dark, some kind of hood pulled over his face. Something knocked him off balance; his legs tangled in the bike and he toppled to the curb on his right, his shoulder taking the brunt. Breathing came hard through the hood. Then someone was pulling his arms behind him; that shoulder was screaming and his bitten forearm was crying. Plastic handcuffs cut into his wrists.
An iron grip yanked Waldo to his knees, then to his feet. He let himself be pushed sideways into what felt like the height of an SUV or minivan and onto its floor. Doors slammed. How many were there? It wasn’t his biggest problem right now, but bye-bye to that expensive new bike.
At least inhaling was starting to come easier. It was musty under the dark hood, but they’d left it loose and it felt like some kind of porous cloth. The car made a series of turns. If this had something to do with Roy Wax or Amador or Tesoro, then he was probably on his way back to Orange County. He waited to feel the afternoon sun hit him on the back of the head as they drove south, but that heat never came.
They drove for what felt like half an hour, mostly freeway. There were slow stretches but no full-on start and stop; that probably meant they were heading away from town, deeper into the Valley, the 101 or maybe the 170. Then there were surface streets, and then the driver killed the motor. That same rugged grip pulled Waldo out of the car. He only heard a single set of footsteps plus his own. Could all that muscle come from one man?
They stepped onto deep carpeting. His captor wrenched him to a stop. The plastic cuffs were sliced off. Waldo was shoved backward onto a cushy sofa. The hood was jerked from his head.
Waldo’s eyes teared as they adjusted to the light. He was in a wealthy man’s study, mahogany and leather. But it seemed like a free-standing structure, not attached to a house: windows on two sides looked out on well-tended gardens in the reds and purples of a late-spring bloom, the third side onto a cedar woods, and sound and sunlight poured in from the door behind him. The desk looked to be an elaborate antique, the chairs plush, with good lamps beside them. Bookcases on every wall overflowed with worn paperbacks, not matched sets of classics or antique books bought by the yard by a decorator trying to make some arriviste look learned. This was the library of a real reader who happened to be rich.
“I warned your ass, Waldo, do not trifle with my daughter’s education.” Don Q entered the room through that door behind him and crossed in front of Waldo, then sat opposite him in a leather wingback.
“I didn’t trifle with—what the fuck is this?”
Don Q looked beyond Waldo’s shoulder and said, “Go get Dulci.” Waldo half turned and saw Nini leaving the room. Q said to Waldo, “What you think’s gonna happen, you let my shit go to voicemail?”
“I couldn’t talk to you right then. My client’s house was on fire—”
“Bitch, I don’t care if your client was on fire. I fulfilled my obligations; I got you the four-one-one. And I know all about you goin’ down to O.C. and followin’ up on it. Now you owe me. My little girl needs you to prepare for her presentation—that’s my fire.”
“Okay, chill. I’m here.” Waldo looked around. “This your house?”
“Yeah, it’s my house. And don’t be askin’ what part of town it is, because I don’t need you knowin’ that shit. That’s why I shrouded your trip in mystery. Get it, Waldo—shroud? That’s what you call a ‘bon mot.’”
“Hidden Hills?”
Don Q darkened. “Muthafucker! How you figure that out?”
“Direction we were driving. And it smells a little like horse.”
“It do, don’t it? My wife say she don’t smell it, but I swear I got that shit in my nostrils since the day we moved in.” There were a lot of horse properties at the west end of the Valley. This study was probably a converted barn.
A girl in pigtails raced into the room and jumped right into the trafficker’s lap. “Daddy, can we watch Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn?”
Don Q looked like he was hit with an instant sinus headache. “You don’t got kids, do you, Waldo.” Waldo shook his head. Don Q sighed. “Yeah, we can watch tonight, baby, after your homework is all done. This my friend, Mr. Waldo.”
Don Q told his daughter that Waldo was going to be her very own public sector employee, which seemed a big relief to her. The three of them went to work. Dulci read flawlessly a list of ten carefully curated questions, including why Waldo wanted to be a policeman, what his favorite part of the job was, why he decided to stop,
and whether he missed getting to play with the siren. Waldo answered everything honestly except the question about stopping; to that he only said that he wanted to live in a different town, where they didn’t need so many policemen. He gave his answers slowly, at her winsome admonishment, so that she could meticulously transcribe them into a hardback notebook, her father looking over her shoulder and gently correcting her spelling. Dulci was bright-eyed and clever and adored her daddy. Waldo was transfixed.
Don Q explained that Dulci would turn this into a written report and then would ask Waldo all the same questions in front of her class on Monday. He asked if he could count on Waldo to be at her Stoddard School classroom at eight thirty, or whether he needed to have another limo arranged like this time. Waldo said he’d get there on his own. Don Q made sure Dulci said thank you and then asked Waldo if he had any questions before Nini gave him a ride home.
Waldo said, “Yeah, one. You know anything about seventy-nine?”
Don Q said, “Dulci, go in the house. Tell your mom I’ll be in in a bit.”
The little girl took her notebook and started out. “Bye-bye, Mr. Waldo!”
“And close the door behind you.” When she was gone, Q exploded. “Fuck is wrong with you? Talkin’ ’bout shit like that, in front of my little girl? She don’t know what I do!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t even know what seventy-nine is—is it a drug? It came up in this case I’m working.”
The trafficker started to cool down. “Just watch it in front of my girl, understand?”
Waldo apologized again.
“I don’t know that much myself,” said Don Q. “I just started hearin’ ’bout it. It’s a synthetic—I think from, like, Iceland or shit.”
“Is it the same as fentanyl?”
“Nah, it’s its own thing. Letters and a number, like A-H-seventy-nine-somethin’. Ain’t no business for me, man.”
“Why not?”
“First, you got a marketin’ problem right out the box. Shit don’t even have a good name. A-H-seventy-nine-whatever? Sound like you tryin’ to get your high from the fuckin’ IRS.
“Second, price point. I like a porterhouse at Cut much as the next muthafucker, but Cut ain’t in the Dow Jones like Mickey D, know what I’m sayin’?”
“So where’s it moving? BH? Westside?”
Don Q shook his head. “All I heard is it landed in your neighborhood.”
“Idyllwild?” That made no sense and would be one coincidence too many.
“Your new neighborhood, Waldo. Gold Coast. O. muthafuckin’ C.”
* * *
• • •
Don Q instructed Nini to drive Waldo back to the east Valley, anywhere he wanted to go, and told them both that the hood could come off once they hit the 101.
In the dark again, Waldo considered what he knew, or more accurately, what he didn’t. Why was Cuppy asking Hexter about seventy-nine? Did they find some in Ouelette’s system? In his apartment? What was a San Fernando Valley private school teacher’s connection to a new designer drug that was only moving in Orange County?
That last one was less mysterious than he’d like it to be.
Stevie was the common denominator. One way or another it was looking like the girl was hooked into a drug killing. Maybe she was getting this seventy-nine from her cousin and moving it to her old teacher? Or maybe she was working directly with Amador. Either way . . . shit.
Nini pulled the hood off, mute as always, and Waldo found himself sitting in the back seat of an Escalade. He took out his phone and started tapping the letters and numbers into Google. Don Q’s breakdown was right, as far as it went: AH-7921 was a synthetic opioid, gaining traction in England and Northern Europe. It was developed as an analgesic for medical purposes but never got as far as testing in humans. Hard to come by, usually a powder, usually sniffed, particularly dangerous because of the difficulty of regulating dosages, and the known cause of a couple dozen deaths scattered about the world. Little mention of use in the United States.
Waldo texted Lorena to let her know about the fire, then dialed Cuppy’s number and told him they needed to talk. Cuppy said he was at the Harvard Room. Waldo knew it as a dive bar on Oxnard whose sense of humor extended only as far as its name. He’d been there a couple of nights in the old days, back when Cuppy used to hold court with his partner Dub Gerhardt, two cocks of the walk with the world by the balls.
Nini let Waldo off in front of the bar and popped the hatch. Waldo was only half-surprised to find his Brompton intact. He chained it to a street rack and went inside.
The place was running on inertia: there were more wall signs for defunct beers than there were patrons. Cuppy hunched over a draft—probably not his first, or even second or third, from the look of him. “You know how fucked I am, Waldo? I’m so fucked, you’re lookin’ like good news.”
Waldo waved to the bartender and asked for a Bud. He still wasn’t much of a drinker, but with an Anheuser-Busch plant right in the Valley, a Budweiser on tap might be, oddly enough, one of the least environmentally pernicious items he’d consume today. He said, “Tanaka?”
“Ouelette didn’t land on my desk, bitch’d have my gun already. I gotta close this one.” Waldo’s old colleague Pam Tanaka had become division commander at North Hollywood. Ambitious and starting to catch fire, she no doubt saw Cuppy as a career stain waiting to happen; she had to be as astounded as Waldo that Cuppy hadn’t tumbled with Gerhardt in the investigations that followed Waldo’s noisy exit from the force. But it wouldn’t be hard for her to find a new charge or suspicion she could use to take Cuppy off the board, bury him somewhere monitoring surveillance cameras or checking vehicles in and out while the department slow-walked an investigation and the union pounded sand.
It would kill him. It was killing him already. “I gotta close this one.”
Of course, Waldo didn’t give a shit. “So close it.”
“I know it’s the girl,” said Cuppy. “Teacher was doing her, right?”
“Can’t say.”
“Yeah, can’t or won’t. Jesus, Waldo, give me something.”
“For old times’ sake?” Cuppy blew a grunt through his nose and shifted his weight onto an elbow, which just missed the edge of the bar.
Waldo said, “I got his next one,” to the bartender, who was delivering Waldo’s Bud.
Cuppy drained the glass in front of him and grumbled about Tanaka. “Bitch is made for downtown. And just what they’re looking for now: not white, not male, check all the fucking boxes.”
Waldo said, “How much seventy-nine did they find?”
“Half a gram! You know what that costs?” Cuppy blurted before he had a chance to process the question. Then his wits started creeping back in his direction and he studied Waldo through narrowed eyes. “How’d you hear about that?”
“How much does it cost?”
“I’m not telling you.”
Waldo chuckled. “That’s where you’re going to draw the line? I can Google that.” He pulled out his iPhone and asked the bartender, “You got Wi-Fi?”
Cuppy gave in, waving off the phone. “Fuck it, I found that online, too. Sixty-five G a gram.” A porterhouse at Cut, indeed. “That’s ordering through the Caymans. But even then you need a note from your doctor. Who better be the surgeon general.”
“So, what—private school teacher had thirty grand of this shit in his apartment? And the tox report?”
Cuppy shook his head. “My turn to ask a question. Where’d Little Miss Muffin go for five days?”
“Best I can tell, her friend’s house.”
“The friend with the grandma.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She leave the gun there?”
Waldo conjured the most enigmatic smile he could, baiting the hook. “Tox report,” he said, letting Cuppy know he’d only get the info he wanted in
trade.
Cuppy said, “Clean.”
“Anything else in the house? Coke? Crank?”
“Nope and nope.”
“Adderall?”
Cuppy scoffed. “Adderall? No, Waldo. No fucking Adderall. Jesus. No Midol, either. No Anbesol, no Tylenol.” He shook his head. “Fucking Adderall.”
So no drugs in Ouelette’s apartment except the better part of a year’s salary in an obscure designer synthetic.
The bartender brought Cuppy his draft. The cop said, “So, the gun—what, she left it at the old lady’s house?”
“No idea.”
Cuppy, pissed at being suckered, leaned in to Waldo. The same elbow slid off the bar again. “What about the parents? They keep a gun? They don’t have a permit.”
Waldo shook his head. “They’re allergic.”
“So where’d the girl get it, you think?”
Waldo said, “Give me some more about seventy-nine; then I’ll tell you what I think. There a lot on the street?”
“Yeah, if the street is Piccadilly Circus. Champs-Élysées. Whatever fucking street runs through fucking Stockholm. Even DEA hasn’t heard shit about seventy-nine on the West Coast.”
Which put Don Q a couple of steps ahead of the feds. Surely not for the first time.
Cuppy said, “Now: where you think she got the gun?”
“What I think?” said Waldo. “I think . . . the girl didn’t kill him.”
“Really. You think that.”
“Really I think that.”
“What the fuck, Waldo, you her publicist now?” Waldo shrugged. Cuppy said, “But you know whether she was doing him, don’t you.”
“I do.”
“Well?”
Waldo said, “I need one more answer before I give you that.”
Cuppy finished his beer and said, “Go ahead: ask.”
Waldo shrugged helplessness. “Unfortunately, Cuppy, I’m all out of questions.” He slid off his stool.
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