“You’re such a piece of shit, you know that? You act like you’re my friend—”
“I’m not your friend. I’m a hired detective—”
“What you are is a total fucker. A fucker and a freak. Why don’t you go take a shower for a change? Jesus Christ. How does your girlfriend even stand it, touching you? And when’s the last time you got a haircut? God! You’re like this nasty-ass cross between a werewolf and a . . . I don’t know, like a warthog—”
“Okay,” he said, trying to steer it back to the productive. “The point is, you can’t lie anymore—”
She went volcanic. “Everybody lies! You lie! All you do is lie!”
“When did I lie?”
“When you said you’d keep my secret!”
“About Conor? That secret wasn’t even true!”
“It was a test! And you failed! And it’s exactly why I can’t tell the truth! Everybody lies to me, they say they’re not going to repeat things, but they do! And then they end up getting killed! You know what, Waldo? I hope somebody shoots you in the head, too. I hope you get killed, on your own kitchen floor, and then you can feel all good about repeating everything I said to you in confidence!”
With another poison stare, she put in her earbuds, reopened her computer, and left the room without going anywhere.
Waldo retreated to the main house and found Joel in his study. There was some kind of teen bacchanal playing on an oversize screen, Joel watching but not really watching. His sofa had a pillow and mussed bedding on it. Waldo said, “Are you sleeping in here now?”
The question dragged Joel slowly out of his catatonia. At length he shut off the television and said, “There’s hardly any house left we can use.”
Waldo said, “The police are probably going to charge Stevie.”
“With both?”
Waldo nodded.
Joel said, “Will you stay with us? On the case?”
“If that’s what you want.” Waldo was speaking for himself. He and Lorena could relitigate her involvement later.
“I do. I want you to find out the truth, even if it is Stevie. And I want to hear it from you personally, because I don’t trust the police in this country to handle it honestly. Jesus, watch the news.” Waldo didn’t need to, of course; he’d been on it enough himself.
He put Joel through all the obvious new queries about his daughter: where she might have gotten the gun, whether she had any bad-element acquaintances. Each question he couldn’t answer made the producer seem smaller in his chair, adrift, inadequate. Finally he held up a hand to stop Waldo from asking anything else. He blew his nose again. “This is what happens when you have a midlife-crisis baby. I’m twenty years too old for this.”
“No one’s the right age for this.”
“It’s what I get, right? For leaving my first family. Sixty-five years old, living in a half-gutted house with a teenage daughter I’m afraid to be alone with.”
* * *
• • •
Waldo biked over to the Shapiros’ to ask Dionne whether she knew anyone who had access to a gun. She didn’t.
Dionne had a question for Waldo too: “Did Stevie kill her mom and Mr. Ouelette?”
“I don’t know yet. What do you think?”
Stevie’s best friend forever said she didn’t care; she was done with her. From where Dionne Shapiro sat, the lies Stevie told about Dionne’s boyfriend were also a capital offense.
Waldo rolled down to the boulevard and found an empty bus stop kiosk with a bench where he could at least get some late-afternoon shade while he made two unpleasant phone calls. First he gave Fontella Davis the heads-up on Stevie’s imminent arrest so that she could try to orchestrate it in the least damaging and humiliating way. She thanked him before hanging up, an uncharacteristically gracious fillip.
Next Waldo had to swallow his teaspoon of shit and call Cuppy. It was well over six hours, plus he hadn’t been checking in the way Cuppy had instructed. Now he’d have to tell him he’d whiffed on the alibi, too.
“About time,” said Cuppy.
“Yeah, see—”
“Man of the hour. Your lead checked out.”
Waldo was nonplussed.
“Amador. Guess what we found at his house.”
Waldo said, “Seventy-nine?”
“Winner winner chicken dinner. Ever meet this beanie baby? With the ink? We’re pulling that shit out of his house, and guns, and coke—Teardrop keeps going, I’m only a bus driver. Conductor de autobús. Says he drives ‘guest workers.’ Love that. And who do you think owns the factory where he chauffeurs all those undocumented citizenitas?”
“Stevie Rose’s uncle?”
“That a guess, or did you know?” Before Waldo could answer, Cuppy said, “So I ran this Uncle Roy Wax through the California gun registry, and guess who owns a cute little Walther forty-caliber? Keeps it in his walk-in, behind the cummerbunds.” He sounded wired, on an adrenaline rush at least.
“So what—you like Wax for both of them now?”
“More than like him. I just put Richie Rich in the car.”
“Where are you?”
“Newport Beach. Ten minutes I’ll have him on the freeway.”
“You couldn’t have run the gun yet.”
“Bringing it up with me. Lab’s working late tonight.”
Waldo was astonished that Cuppy would make an arrest, especially on a heavyweight like Wax, before getting an affirmative match tying his Walther to the two killings. “You got balls.”
“Didn’t have a choice. You should’ve seen Tanaka this morning, after she saw me with you. I’m fucked, Waldo—my only play left was shoot the moon. But if the gun matches? I clear the deuce and I’m golden. Bitch can’t touch me; I’ll be there longer than her.” It was insane, but not: Wax, through Amador, was the only tie between Ouelette and Paula Rose other than Stevie, and Wax’s forty—a slightly unusual caliber, too—could close the deal.
Waldo said, “Still. You’re going to catch hell, holding this guy.”
“Like I’m not catching it every day already? Anyway, if I didn’t take him now, the fucker’d be halfway to Fiji. You should see the bucket he’s got tied to his dock.” Waldo had, of course. “And you know Tanaka would nail that to my ass, too.”
“How about motive?”
“TBD on Ouelette. But Santa Ana PD brought in Amador; we’ll flip him and figure it out. The sister-in-law I think I know. There was a phone call—that’s the other thing I got.”
“What phone call?”
“Rose house to Wax house, landline to landline, afternoon she got shot. Here’s how I like it: your baby girl heard there was seventy-nine at Ouelette’s and told Mama Bear how deep Uncle Wax was; Mama Bear picked up the phone, called him on it; Uncle Wax came up and killed Mama Bear to cover up the first murder.” It was all a little loose, but of course that was Cuppy the cop; that plus shakedowns. Well, he’d live or die on the ballistics match.
Waldo never would have played it that way. Cuppy probably wouldn’t have, either, if Pam Tanaka hadn’t driven him desperate. Now it would land on her, too, either way: she and Cuppy would both look brilliant, or they’d both pay for it.
Waldo didn’t want the girl dragged in any deeper, so he held back from Cuppy one more thing he knew. Everybody lies to me, Stevie had said to Waldo. They say they’re not going to repeat things, but they do! And then they end up getting killed!
Jim Cuppy wasn’t the only one who thought Paula Rose had gotten killed for challenging Roy Wax. Stevie Rose thought so, too.
* * *
• • •
He rode toward the setting sun without a plan, under the 405 and out to Encino. The pain was mounting again but he didn’t want to stop moving. When he got to Hayvenhurst he thought of the park to the north: Lake Balboa, concrete rim, reclaimed water re
eking of chemicals. The place used to repel him but now it was calling to him; in its unnaturalness, its innate, ineffable wrongness, it felt somehow like this resolution, like this whole stinking case.
He wheeled into the park and took easy counterclockwise turns around the lake while he took inventory of his discontent.
If Cuppy was right about Roy Wax, Waldo should be glad, sort of, for Joel Rose. Paula’s murder was horrible, but the alternative explanation and aftermath would be so much worse.
Ditto for Stevie, in spades.
And Waldo himself should be more pleased than he was feeling. Case closed, troubled teen exonerated, venal businessman implicated.
On the other hand . . . he hadn’t solved it himself. Cuppy, of all people, had beaten him to it. Big Jim Cuppy—talk about venal, for God’s sake.
Far worse, if Waldo had been able to crack it, and just a couple of days faster, Paula Rose would still be alive. Joel Rose wouldn’t be a widower. And Stevie Rose wouldn’t have lost her mother, just at the point in her life—much as Stevie would loathe hearing it—that she needed her most.
And then there was Lorena. The case had broken them.
There was nothing left for Waldo but to go home. He’d find a hotel for the night, set out in the morning for his cabin on the mountain. All the Things he’d brought down from Idyllwild were already in his backpack; he’d packed them before he left Lorena’s house this morning. On some level he’d already known.
The sun was starting to drop and Waldo was getting tired. The pain in his hand was growing unbearable. He saw a copse that reminded him, in a very small way, of his woods, and decided it would be a good place to pop a Percocet and recharge before they closed the park. He lowered his bike to the grass and shrugged off his backpack. He texted Lorena, saying that he wouldn’t be home tonight.
He rested his head on the backpack, closed his eyes and tried to let the evening breeze console him. Lorena wasn’t answering his text. It occurred to him that she should know Cuppy had arrested Wax on both murders, so he sent her another message.
She didn’t answer that one, either.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The buzzing in his pocket jerked him awake and into pitch-blackness. He squinted against the piercing brightness of the phone and began to piece things together through the Percocet fog.
Lorena was calling.
It was two nineteen. He must have slept through the park closing.
She’d been doing something somewhere that kept her from responding to him for half the night.
He swirled that all together and it came out as “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said. “So, Wax.”
He staggered through a muddled recap of his conversation with Cuppy.
She said, “You think he’s right?”
“He’ll need the lab to come through, but that would seal it, I guess.”
“You said Wax the other day.”
“I was talking out of my ass. I didn’t have it.”
They were quiet together. It was a freighted moment for them—likely, they both realized, a conclusive one. He knew he should be processing all the valedictory emotions and finding something worthy to say, but mostly he was afraid of insulting her by falling asleep midconversation. He rapped his lacerated hand a few times with his good one, hoping the fresh throbbing would keep him from drifting off.
She said, “You’re going back.”
“In the morning, yeah.”
“I guess Santa Ana’s a good place to leave it. We’re square now.”
Waldo said, “Yeah,” and wished he were lucid enough to know what that meant.
“Well.” A deep sigh. “Bye, Waldo.”
He sighed himself. “Bye.”
She clicked off first.
What was that about Santa Ana? He typed it into Google with one woozy, fumbling thumb, then scrolled down the results to the news. A link to a piece from the Orange County Register website teased—
SANTA ANA POLICE SAY MAN FOUND BEHIND BUR . . .
—and Waldo tapped that.
SANTA ANA POLICE SAY MAN FOUND BEHIND BURGER KING HAD CONVICTIONS FOR PIMPING, PANDERING
SANTA ANA—The man whose body was found behind a Burger King on North Harbor Boulevard previously served two and a half years at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility for pimping and pandering, according to Santa Ana Police Department Cmdr. Reuben Singleton.
Police were called Tuesday night at 10:20 when Aron Naranjo, whom police said went by the name of “Tesoro,” was found by a group of juveniles behind a dumpster on the 800 block of North Harbor Boulevard with apparent slash wounds to the neck . . .
Good God, that’s where she’d been tonight. We’re square now.
Suddenly he wasn’t groggy anymore.
Was it even possible? Could she have done this? Sure, she’d once mutilated a corpse, she’d once tased a man into a heart attack, and he had no doubt she could kill in self-defense if she needed to.
But this was something different—this was, Waldo had saved her life when she was deep in it with Don Q, and now, to punctuate their long affair, she was reciprocating, cutting the throat of the man who’d mutilated him. A man who was also, by the way, threatening her and destroying the lives of scores of girls.
Of course she could have done it. That’s why she called: not about Wax, but to make sure Waldo knew. We’re square now.
Fucking Lorena.
It was almost three. At this point he might as well spend the rest of the night in the park. He remolded the backpack under his head until it was comfortable.
Still, there was a wrong note somewhere. Something about Cuppy and Wax, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something just . . . off. Maybe it felt that way because someone else had cracked the case instead of him, maybe because the someone else was Cuppy, maybe because the case wasn’t really quite solved, not really, with no clear motives, just a bad cop getting lucky on a ballistics match.
Or maybe there wasn’t even a wrong note.
Maybe it was just the Percocet, and Lorena.
Fucking Lorena.
* * *
• • •
Five hours later he awoke in the sunshine, clearheaded. There was no activity yet in the park, which probably didn’t open until eight or nine.
His phone showed three texts from Cuppy that somehow hadn’t roused him. The first read: Got a match. The second read: Golden. The third read: Up Tanaka’s ass.
The Tesoro murder came rushing back; for a moment he wondered if it had been just a druggie dream. No, it was real. He and Lorena had been dragged over the line into Orange County, it had wreaked havoc on them, and in the end they’d returned the favor.
Wait: dragged down to Orange County—
That was it, the wrong note from last night, even more dissonant this morning, out of tune with the triumphant chord Cuppy was playing.
It was the way O.C. had begun for them in the first place, the setup that had Lorena burning Roy Wax. Wax’s explanation about the Korean factory and the business rival had always sounded like bullshit. Somebody had it in for him, and it had to have something to do with the rest of it. It was all too fluky otherwise.
Could that same enemy who sicced Lorena on Wax have also set him up for a double homicide?
Before Waldo could go back to his woods, he had to spend a morning trying to scratch that itch. But how?
Had Wax not intimidated Lorena and Waldo out of decoding the original peep-show scam, they’d have started by looking for Wax’s Disneyland blonde. Waldo opened Lorena’s surveillance photo collection and took another look. He still had a faint feeling he knew her. Generic soap opera looks rang again in his head but he didn’t know why. For all the junk TV he watched, soaps had never tempted him.
If she was an actress, though, there had to be a way to f
ind her. Maybe it was the déjà vu of another breakup with Lorena, but it came to him right away whom he could ask.
* * *
• • •
Jana Stiltner’s casting office was still on Cahuenga, convenient to five studios and a little too convenient to the Sheraton Universal, where she and Waldo used to hook up during the quasi-managed mayhem of his early relationship with Lorena.
Three actors were waiting in her outer office, all tweedy, bespectacled professor types, and they eyed Waldo, fresh but perplexing competition. The boyish male assistant behind a desk pushed a sign-in sheet toward him. Waldo said he wasn’t here to audition but was hoping to talk to Jana. The assistant, well trained, offered a shutdown smile and told him to leave his picture and résumé and he’d make sure that Ms. Stiltner got them.
“Tell her it’s Charlie Waldo.”
The assistant did a tiny double take at the name, said, “Of course, sorry,” and scurried to a rear office. He came out half a minute later and said, “Come on back. Can I get you a water?”
Jana had been an actress; she once told Waldo she’d moved out from Illinois after getting every lead in high school and college only to learn that in Hollywood her wholesome midwestern looks played merely, as she put it, “best-friend cute.” Back in their Sheraton days those looks played better than that for Waldo. At the time, Jana shared enough about her failing marriage for him to see a symmetry, that she and Waldo were each trying to find in afternoon debauchery a way to anesthetize the wounds of their snarled primary relationships. It was telling that Jana ended the affair with Waldo when she and her husband finally separated, not because she’d found somebody else.
Still, some of those afternoons had been indelible and there had never been a moment of unkindness. She greeted him now with a smile full of warmth and secret memory. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again.”
Waldo grinned. “I guess nobody did.”
“So I’ve read. Alastair’s a piece of work, huh.” She seemed to know the key points of Waldo’s recent history, so she caught him up on hers. She told him she’d cast an HBO limited series that won some awards and after that her business had taken off; she was even starting to cross over into producing. She was talking shop, but her eyes were all hotel room.
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