Below the Line

by Howard Michael Gould

  He said, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “I can’t even imagine what that might be.”

  “Take a look at a picture, tell me if you know her?” He showed Jana the hotel photo on his phone, blowing it up with his fingers to give her a better look at the blonde.

  “That’s Leila Massey, isn’t it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s who that is. Leila Massey.”

  “Why would I know her?”

  “She was kind of hot for a while on Days of Our Lives.”

  That would click with him thinking soap but wouldn’t explain it. “Never watched it.”

  “She left because she booked one of those Adam Sandler movies and thought she was going to have a different career.”

  He shook his head; he wouldn’t know her from a Sandler movie, either. Maybe he’d come across her in real life, maybe on a case? He couldn’t place her. “She still working?”

  Jana called up IMDb on her laptop. “Not recently, looks like. She might have left the business.” Waldo came around behind Jana and looked over her shoulder, breathing her familiar perfume. He willed himself to focus on Leila Massey’s short list of credits, presented in reverse chronology: at the top a handful of pilots and one-shots on cop shows, preceded by the Sandler comedy, the six years on Days, and before that a few starter gigs early in the 2000s. The vaguely familiar title at the very bottom, her first job, bumped him. “Sea Legs—what’s that?”

  “Piece of crap, is what it was. Don’t quote me. Cop on a cruise ship, for some reason, I think she recurred as the guy’s daughter—”

  “Wait—Joel Rose.”

  Jana looked surprised. “Yeah. Pre–Malibu Malice.”

  Waldo closed his eyes, hoping the tumblers would click. There are no coincidences. Then again, actresses, producers, Hollywood, the constant shuffling of careers—everybody had to be just a degree of separation from everyone else, right?

  Jana said, apologetic, “I do have a session starting.”

  “I’m sorry. Couple more quick things.” He pointed to a line on Leila Massey’s page that read, Self. “What’s that?” Jana clicked on it. There were only a few credits, just some behind-the-scenes hype for the soap and the one movie . . . plus one season of Celebrity Apprentice.

  Of course: that’s how he knew her. She was one of those annual B-minus “celebrities” he’d never heard of, the one he’d pigeonholed at the time as looking like a perfectly generic soap star. He felt now like he’d seen a lot of her—it might even have been one of those deliciously grotesque Gary Busey seasons—but his only specific memory was her excruciating dismissal, in which, after some middle schoolish backstabbing by Christie Brinkley and the guy who used to be Pee-wee Herman, this Days of Our Lives blonde was reduced to tears in the faux boardroom by the now leader of the free world.

  Waldo said, “I know you have the faculty of Princeton out in the waiting room”—Jana tittered and gave him those Sheraton eyes again—“but any chance you can help me find her?” The actress, a few more clicks revealed, didn’t have a current agent. But Jana did know a guy at the Screen Actors Guild who had a thing for her, which, with one phone call, she was able to play into the address where SAG forwarded Leila Massey’s residual checks.

  Jana had been so accommodating, had taken so much time out of the work she was supposed to be doing, that it was no surprise to Waldo when she asked him, “Are you free tonight? I’d like to buy you dinner.”

  Lorena had no claim on him anymore, but it still didn’t feel right. He said, “Maybe next time I’m in town,” and tried to smile with some kind of indefinite promise.

  She said, “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea: I’m with somebody now. I’m actually engaged. Trying the death-do-us-part thing again, believe it or not.”

  “Really.” He could have sworn she’d been flirting with him since he walked into the office. One more reminder of how long he’d been out of circulation.

  “But there’s something else I thought we could talk about. You know how I said I’m producing now? I was wondering: does anybody have your rights?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Leila Massey’s five-story building sat north of Hollywood in that no-man’s-land that never gets better, west of the tourist scrub, east of the funky cool. The button for 3B read McKenzie, not Massey, but Waldo tried it anyway.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for Leila Massey.”

  The woman said, “She doesn’t live here anymore.” Waldo pressed all the apartment buttons in both rows and a moment later some other tenant’s hostile buzz told him he could push open the security door.

  The hallways were overdue for a paint job and the B next to Leila’s brass 3 was just a shadow. Waldo knocked. He heard the scrape of the peephole disk. “Leila Massey?”

  She said again, “She doesn’t live here anymore.”

  He said, “I’m a friend of Paula Rose. My name’s Charlie Waldo.” The woman cracked open the door and looked at him through her security chain. He wasn’t sure which of the names did the trick.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m a private investigator. I was working for Paula at the time of her murder.” He added, “I also know Roy Wax. Right now I think I’m the only one who knows how you’re connected to both of them. If you help me, maybe I can keep it that way.”

  The door closed. Then it opened, without the chain.

  It was like stepping into an East Coast autumn, drapery in deep reds and a half dozen candles breathing out a robust, woodsy scent. Leila had aged around her eyes in the way of early alcoholics or pretty girls L.A. had used hard.

  Waldo said, “You knew Paula a long time,” and that was all it took to get her to spill her whole story. She’d probably been telling it in her head since she read the news.

  Back when Leila was a fresh ingenue in town, eighteen but usefully able to play fifteen, she got her first TV role, as a semiregular on Sea Legs. There she quickly hit it off with one of the youngest women on the crew, a production assistant named Paula Steinfeldt, who was beginning a glamorous, clandestine romance with Joel Rose, Sea Legs’ handsome (and married) auteur. Unlike most production friendships, theirs survived beyond the show’s cancellation.

  Leila’s subsequent run as a soap star was a blessing that proved to be an unexpected curse, leaving her less than famous enough to launch a full-on movie career, but—when the roles dried up and she couldn’t meet her bills—a little too famous for a real-world job. Even when she tried a relatively anonymous gig like telemarketing, she’d be recognized by coworkers, who assumed she was only slumming toward research for an upcoming role; Leila would quit rather than have to explain her humiliating decline. She went home to Texas, where it was more of the same but worse. Abashed and helpless, she slid into depression and made her way back to Hollywood, where at least she could get through, say, a night at the laundromat, unapproached, mercifully unspecial alongside all the other has-beens and almost-was’s.

  How much better, Waldo thought, to be born just a bit less beautiful, like Jana Stiltner, and thus to have your dreams crushed in time to do something about it.

  He asked Leila what happened to her friendship with Paula Rose during those years.

  “We stayed in touch. It was harder for me when things weren’t going well.” She crossed to the kitchenette and started fussing with a pot of tea.

  Waldo waited until her back was turned to him, giving her a touch of privacy before saying, “How much did she pay you to sleep with her brother-in-law?”

  Leila stopped what she was doing. “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “And you had to give Paula the where and when?”

  She turned and looked at him. “She made it really clear that it wasn’t for blackmail. Paula said her brother-in-law was a terrible guy, that he knocked her s
ister around; she was afraid he’d end up killing her someday. But the woman was so cowed, she refused to see that her husband was running around on her, even though everyone around them knew. Paula said the only way she could save her sister was with hard proof.

  “She knew I needed money.” Leila put something together. “Wait—were you the private eye who was taking pictures of us?”

  “No. I was helping Paula with another family matter, and then this all happened.”

  “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. Would you mind if I . . . ?” She took the lid off her cookie jar and took out a rolled joint. Waldo gestured go ahead and she lit up. He realized that the candles were to cover the smell.

  Leila leaned against the counter. “That man killed her, didn’t he? Roy Wax.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t seem that bad. Goddamn.” She took a deep drag and held it. “Goddamn. He killed her because of me.” She held out the joint to Waldo.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I should’ve just done porn.” She took another hit. “I could’ve, you know.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “I had no idea,” Joel said. “Paula didn’t tell me about any of that.” Waldo gave him a moment to chew on all his murdered wife had been up to. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Why not?”

  Joel lifted and lowered a shoulder.

  “Why wouldn’t she tell you?”

  “Because she knew I’d have stopped her.”

  They were in the Roses’ living room, where he and Lorena had first sat with Paula and Joel. Waldo felt the shadows of both absent women. He said, “The sisters weren’t close, though—that was true?”

  “Not close at all.”

  “Would she have gone to those lengths to protect Brenda from Roy?”

  “No,” said Joel. “No fucking way.”

  “Then why’d she do it?”

  “Because she hated Roy. That’s all. I mean, she hated Brenda, too—but she loathed Roy.”

  “But why now? What changed?”

  The answer was simple for Joel, obvious: “Trump.”

  Waldo didn’t get it.

  “She was wound up about Roy before, but the election put her over the top. She could barely sleep anymore. Paula—neither of us, but Paula especially—couldn’t see how someone as competent as Hillary—proven, tested, secretary of state—I mean, even aside from the fact that she was a woman, and all that would mean for the country, and girls—here was the most qualified person ever to run for—”

  “Okay,” Waldo interrupted, “but how did this land on Roy?”

  This, too, was obvious to Joel. “Brenda and Roy were the only people we knew who voted for him.”

  The Waxes were Them. That’s what this was all about for Joel, the way it all cohered—Thanksgiving, and Stevie and Daron, and now Roy shooting Paula. He said, “You could see that’s where this was all going to go.”

  Joel sat back on the sofa. A tic found his eye, his new reality hitting him again, his political rage crumbling back into personal grief.

  Waldo said, “There was a call from this house to the Waxes’, landline to landline, the day Paula was murdered.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “It wasn’t you.”

  “No. Must’ve been Paula.”

  “Or Stevie?”

  Joel shook his head. “She never touches the landline.”

  “And you guys really had nothing to do with Roy and Brenda, except on Thanksgiving. Never even talked to them during the year.”

  Joel sighed and bobbed his head this way and that.

  Waldo said, “What? Something you’ve been leaving out?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “It’s all important. Something with the kids?” Joel shifted in his seat. “The drugs? Something more?” Waldo said again, “It’s all important.”

  Joel surrendered, but covered the pain of the story with a half-bored air, like he was repeating some tired gossip about the neighbors. “The last couple years, Stevie and Paula have been fighting a lot. This one time it got really bad, and Stevie said something horrible, I don’t even remember what. Paula confiscated her phone. And Paula—against my advice—decided she was going to look at everything on it, to find out what Stevie was saying about her to her friends. Stupid. Anyway, what she found . . . was that Stevie . . . and Daron . . . were sending each other pictures of themselves.”

  “Nude?”

  “Daron. Stevie in a swimsuit.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right after New Year’s, I think. Stevie hadn’t turned fifteen yet, I remember that. And Daron was twenty-one. Her cousin. Paula lost her shit. I mean, both of us did, but Paula was out of control. She talked to Brenda then, that’s for sure.”

  “And Roy? Did you guys confront him, too? And Daron?”

  “No, it was just Paula and Brenda—who blamed Stevie, which made it worse. And I remember Paula getting off the phone, and that’s when she went at Stevie—remember, the two of them had been hammer and tongs already, Paula still had Stevie’s phone—at which point Stevie announced to Paula that she was pregnant. And that Daron was the father.”

  Waldo pushed down the uncharitable thought that it sounded like the kind of thing that could have at least given Joel a season opener.

  Joel said, “For a few days I was seriously worried about Paula. I thought she was going to have a stroke. I mean it: there wasn’t enough Xanax in the world.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sat Stevie down and said that we had to start by taking her to the doctor. Which got Stevie to cop to the whole story being bullshit. She said Daron was into her but she wasn’t going to actually do anything with her cousin; that was ‘creepy.’ But, shit, I’m sure she was leading him on. I mean, the swimsuit pictures? Probably so that he’d get her drugs. Swear to God, I don’t know what that girl’s thinking half the time. Anyway, she wasn’t having sex with Daron; she wasn’t pregnant; she just said all of it to pull Paula’s chain.”

  Maybe even a two-parter, thought Waldo.

  “Then there was a whole different incident a couple months ago, when Stevie disappeared for almost a week, and came back saying that she had been at Brenda and Roy’s the whole time. That was another nasty phone call—Brenda completely denied it, and Paula never knew who to believe. But Paula just got more and more unhinged when it came to Brenda and Roy, because of all of that.” He looked out at the pool, then added, “And Trump.”

  Joel had some questions about how his wife had managed to trick a pro like Lorena. Waldo had already sorted that all out on his bike ride over the hill from Leila Massey’s and was able to walk Joel through it.

  Paula, calling from a blocked line that Lorena couldn’t identify, claimed she was calling from overseas, likely adding protection via voice-altering software, which had gotten fairly effective in the last few years. Lorena put “Brenda” through some vetting questions, but Paula knew plenty of her sister’s real-life details and was convincing enough in her fear of Roy and his temper to engage Lorena’s sympathy—no accident that Paula had picked a woman PI—and keep her from grilling too hard. An advance from PayPal closed the deal.

  Waldo had even unraveled the original coincidence: Paula naturally learned of Lorena, a female PI specializing in marital work, from the Monica Pinch mess, every detail of which had been dominating all conversation around the Stoddard School. Pretending not to have heard of Waldo when he and Lorena first arrived at the Roses’ was an oversell of her innocence, but slight enough not to give herself away at the time. Anyhow, Stevie, looking to spook Ouelette, would have heard about Lorena the same way.

  Joel said, “So you think Roy figured out that Paula set him up? You think that’s why he came up here and killed her?”<
br />
  Waldo didn’t know what to say. It was demoralizing to realize, but there were still some answers he didn’t have, answers that would require one more trip south.

  Anyway, Joel looked like he’d already lost interest in his own questions. His eye tic started up again. He looked so worn, a man with everything and nothing, and all the worst still ahead: a wife to bury, a home to rebuild, a wild daughter to raise alone. Waldo tried to read the pain on the man’s rapidly aging face, wondering which of those grim prospects was at this moment torturing him to distraction.

  Joel said, “He sent him money, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Roy. He sent that pussy-grabbing bigot money.” Joel shook his head. “I can’t understand it. So much hate.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  During the last leg of the trip to the Waxes’ house, the burn between Waldo’s middle and index fingers grew so much worse so quickly that he wondered whether the stitches had opened. He needed a painkiller but didn’t want to dull himself, not until he finished up his business down here.

  He was hoping he wouldn’t get blocked at the gate again; the danger in the O.C. was gone with Tesoro and Roy Wax off the board, but there was no guarantee Brenda would talk to him. The gate guard greeted him with a knowing look. “Mr. Wax did it, didn’t he?” Waldo turned his palms to the sky. The guard continued, embroidering the old nutty theory with an irresistible new thread: “I mean Pinch. I bet Mr. Wax killed the actor’s wife, too. He was one of the investors in the network, and all this new business has something to do with that stuff. Am I right?”

  Waldo saw an opportunity. “What’s your name?”

  The guard puffed up at the attention. “Schmitty.”

  “How’d you figure it out, Schmitty? How’d you crack it?”