Waldo was a different flavor of carsick, nauseated by the awareness of the hydrocarbons this colossal Kia Sedona kept coughing into the atmosphere, not only during their first swing through the hills—a trip that could have been perfectly walkable, by the way, at least in normal shoes—but also before and after their ride, while the Sedona’s driver trawled aimless miles up and down Ventura Boulevard waiting for a fare. Still, if the Shapiros weren’t home, discharging the Uber too soon and having to call for another to climb the hill to fetch them would be even worse, so Waldo stayed behind in the back seat, pinning down the beast, while Lorena rang the Shapiros’ doorbell. When no one answered, she got back in and they started the eleven miles to Woodland Hills, where Koy Lem lived, far for a Stoddard student.
The westbound 101 was already strangled with rush-hour traffic, further agitating him. He bought the pilot episode of Malibu Malice on iTunes, waited through the slow download without Wi-Fi, and popped in his earbuds. Having spent time with the artists, he was eager to assay their famous canvas.
The show opened with a nighttime beach party, teens around a bonfire—dancing, beer, weed, sex, coke, sex, pills, sex, and, just before the opening credits, the body of the new girl at school found naked and dead in the surf, triggering the vertiginous plot: the Malibu Police Department calls it an accidental overdose, but Sandy Walker, nerdy freshman reporter on the Malibu High Daily Eagle, won’t let it rest, as the dead girl, whose name was Laura Roberts, in a moment of kindness to less-than-popular Sandy, had mentioned that she didn’t drink or do drugs either, but suddenly inquisitive Sandy, who, by the way, just had her braces removed, gets her first-ever boy attention from, of all people, Jesse Butler, football star and campus man-whore, or maybe campus date-rapist, who, Sandy learns, went out one time with the dead girl, Laura, and perhaps something happened that night that drove Laura to suicide and perhaps that’s also why Jesse is paying attention to Sandy in the first place, to cover it up, but then again Jesse does seem really interested and he’s sooo cute, though his attention to Sandy also draws some decidedly less desirable attention from Jesse’s putative, much-cheated-on girlfriend, Eden Conner, head cheerleader, blond and bitchier than the bitchy brunette girl who in turn is bitchier than the bitchy black girl but even that girl is pretty bitchy, and the three of them invite Sandy to Eden’s house, where they roofie Sandy and take pictures of her with her shirt off and then post them on Sandy’s Instagram with Sandy’s own phone, and next thing you know, Sandy’s in trouble with the principal, Mr. Story, who would come down harder on Sandy except that Mr. Story is having an affair with Sandy’s mother, Kelly, herself once upon a time—quite unlike her daughter—the blondest and bitchiest cheerleader at this very school and now, by evidence, the bitchiest mom in the PTA and a closet alcoholic. The hour was garish, depraved and unapologetic. It was no mystery how this had become the Roses’ golden goose.
All of them are doing everything. The trick is to get them to be responsible about it.
The Lem house was off De Soto, a distant and less tony portion of the Valley. Waldo wondered if the boyfriend would be walled off from them by the protective parents Paula had mentioned, but when they rang the bell they got lucky: a high schooler opened the door, a big-shouldered kid with a floppy undercut, in cargo shorts and a tank top that showed off ropy arms. Lorena asked if he was Koy and when he said yes, they signaled that the driver could leave. Waldo watched the Sedona accelerate into its next stopgap voyage to nowhere and held down a fresh wave of nausea.
Lorena explained to the boy that they were detectives working for Stevie Rose’s parents. Koy said, “Why?” and looked nervous. Lorena asked if they could come inside and talk and he said, “No,” very quickly.
They heard voices from in the house. The teen turned and called, “It’s for me, Ma,” then stepped outside and shut the door behind him. He confirmed that he went to Stoddard with Stevie and told them he was a senior, headed to Santa Clara in the fall.
The door opened. Koy’s mother took a quick glance at Lorena, then inspected Waldo head to toe. Koy said, “It’s okay—they’re in my class,” and almost winced at the clumsiness of his own lie. The mother did a second pass on Waldo, toe to head, harrumphed and went back inside.
Waldo asked Koy if he’d seen Stevie around the last couple of days. The kid shrugged. Waldo said, “You’re her boyfriend, aren’t you?”
“No! Damn! Who told you that?”
“Her parents.”
“Damn,” he said again. “We hooked up, like, one time.” The kid felt their disbelief. “Two times,” he conceded. “But one was just a blow job.”
It still didn’t compute. Curtains in the window parted: Koy’s mother making her presence felt.
Lorena said, “Why do Stevie’s parents think you guys are more?”
The kid, overwhelmed and annoyed, led them away from the house. He spoke in a loud whisper. “The first time was at a party, okay? The second time was, like, three months later in this, like, extra, like . . . building.”
“What kind of building?”
“Like, at her parents’. By the pool.”
“You mean the guesthouse?”
“I guess, yeah. And after, we went in the regular house and her mom was all, like, suggestative. I think she was shit-faced.”
“What do you mean, ‘suggestative’?”
“Like, coming on, practically.”
“In front of Stevie?”
Koy shook his head. “Stevie was getting me a Red Bull. Her mom kept talking about my gams. I looked at my shorts, to see if they were hanging out, but they weren’t.”
Lorena said, “Do you know what ‘gams’ are?”
Koy giggled. “Yeah—they’re your boys. Your frankenberries.”
Waldo said, “They’re your legs. Gams are legs.”
Koy knew better. “You’re thinking of nads.”
“Like gonads?”
“Exactly.”
Waldo said, “Gonads are frankenberries. Gams are legs.”
Koy looked to Lorena to break the tie. She nodded.
Koy said, “Oh. She said I had water polo nads.”
Waldo puzzled, then offered a correction: “Water polo gams?”
“Yeah, maybe. Probably. I guess she knows I play.” That filled in a gap: this kid wasn’t riding to Santa Clara on his SATs. “And then her husband came in—like, Stevie’s dad? He was, like, all in the next room and shit! And Stevie’s mom goes, ‘This is Stevie’s boyfriend,’ and suddenly he’s all, like, ‘Why don’t you stay here with Stevie when we go to Hawaii?’ Like my parents would ever let me do that—stay all week at some girl’s house when her parents are away.”
Lorena said, “And that was it? You never hooked up with her again?”
“Nah. That shit with her parents weirded me out. And she’s, you know, Stevie.” He seesawed his head back and forth, a gesture that he must have thought communicated something. “We haven’t even talked at school since then.”
“How long ago was that?”
Koy thought. “Two weeks?”
Lorena said to Waldo, “You got anything else?” and Waldo said no. He knew she was prompting to see if he wanted to tell the kid Stevie was missing, but Waldo didn’t see where that would help. Instead he suggested that Lorena give Koy her card and asked the boy to please let them know right away if Stevie happened to contact him. They turned and headed toward the street.
“Hey,” said Koy, after them, keeping his voice down so his mother wouldn’t hear. “Stevie’s bananas—but I like her, you know? Somebody should tell her to slow down.”
This next Uber was an SUV too, a Hyundai Santa Fe. They decided to try Stevie’s friend Dionne again in Sherman Oaks before continuing on to the other girl’s house in Studio City. This time Naomi Shapiro, the mom who’d been driving Stevie to school, answered the door. She embraced her age more than Paula Rose and it was working for her, with thick, smartly cut hair gone fully gray. She was trepidatious at first but unwound on hearing that they were working for Paula and Joel, and when they told her that Stevie was missing she invited them inside.
Naomi apologized, saying that she’d been on edge since hearing about her daughter’s former teacher getting murdered, and asked if they knew anything more about that. Waldo and Lorena played dumb. They asked her when she last saw Stevie. Naomi said she drove Stevie home two afternoons ago—in other words, just before Waldo and Lorena had last seen her themselves.
Naomi described her friendship with Paula Rose as long and convenient, Dionne and Stevie having gravitated toward each other in nursery school and the families living so close. They’d been carpooling to one school or activity or another for a decade. She said she hadn’t picked Stevie up the previous morning because Dionne told her that Stevie had texted that she had a bad cold and wasn’t up to going to school.
That gave them the opening to ask to talk to Dionne. Naomi at first insisted on being in the room with them, but Lorena, referencing her own teenage girlfriends and asking Naomi to think back to hers, said that if Stevie was in trouble, Dionne would be more likely than anyone to have some bit of information that could make the difference, and that it might be something she didn’t want her mother to hear. Lorena was gentle but determined and Naomi finally agreed to stay a couple of rooms away watching Dancing with the Stars, on standby should Dionne want her to intervene. Waldo was grateful Lorena was there; he never could have negotiated that himself.
Dionne Shapiro, who’d herself been lounging in front of the TV, wore heels and complicated eye makeup, no doubt new to her at fifteen and essential at all hours. Lorena began by saying they knew Stevie hadn’t been at school the last few days. “Any idea where she is?”
“Uh, yeah. She’s my best friend.”
“Can you tell us?
Dionne hesitated. “Only if she says it’s okay.”
“Can you ask her?” While Dionne tapped a text message into her phone, Lorena said, “Stevie’s parents don’t know where she is. They’re really worried. Has she been posting anything? Instagram, Facebook?”
“I could look.” Dionne stayed focused on her phone.
Lorena asked if Dionne knew about what happened to Mr. Ouelette and whether the kids at school were talking about it. Dionne nodded small affirmations but gave only a half shrug when Lorena asked if kids were speculating about who murdered him. Waldo couldn’t tell whether she was using her phone to search for Stevie or to hide from them.
Lorena said, “Stevie told us she was hooking up with Mr. Ouelette.”
That got Dionne’s attention. “Stevie told you that? God.” She snorted and said, “Actually, I’m totally not surprised. She thought it made her, like, so cool to be doing it with a teacher. I mean, he’s not even a hot teacher. And, like, I totally could have had sex with Ouelette. Seriously. Whenever he used to make me get up and throw away my gum, I knew he was watching my butt the whole time. The boys made jokes about it at lunch. Ouelette is, like, a total perv.”
Then Dionne’s face fell, her disgust at the teacher giving way to the recollection of what had happened to him.
Waldo asked, “Did Mr. Ouelette ever make a move on you?”
Dionne drew back like she’d forgotten Waldo was even in the room. Lorena scolded him with her eyes, then said to Dionne, “Did he?”
Dionne looked like she was thinking about lying, but finally said, “No.” Then she added, “But I’ve hooked up with way hotter regular guys than Stevie. And she totally knows it.”
“Did you say that to her? Like, when she was bragging about getting it on with a teacher?” Waldo could see that the question landed. Lorena stayed with it. “Did you say all that other stuff, too—the stuff you just said to us?” Dionne looked away. “Did you guys have kind of a fight?” Dionne nodded. “When was that?”
“Couple days ago, at lunch.”
“Has Stevie talked to you since then?”
“Not really.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
Dionne said that they had driven Stevie home but barely talked in the car; then Dionne fell asleep early that night and awoke to find a late-night text from Stevie saying she was sick and couldn’t go to school. Lorena had Dionne read them the text.
They asked if she really knew where Stevie was, and Dionne admitted she didn’t. They asked about Koy Lem; Dionne said that Stevie wasn’t into him anymore. They asked if there was anyone else from school who might know more than she did; Dionne said, “You mean, besides Mr. Ouelette?” and began to tear up. Waldo saw a box of tissues across the room and brought it to her. She blew her nose. Dionne said, “Do you know where he got shot?”
Lorena said, “His apartment building.”
“I mean, where on his body?”
A Chevy Tahoe made it a hat trick: after the Sedona and the Santa Fe, three straight air-befouling SUVs named for unspoiled locales of the West. What were these car companies up to—a hoodwink, or a taunt? The thought of some future Chevy Idyllwild with an extra-long wheelbase was almost too much to bear. Not that any of these monstrosities troubled Lorena; indeed, he thought he caught a smirk when she was climbing in.
At least the address of Stevie’s other friend wasn’t far, just a few miles away on the other side of Ventura Boulevard, where the homes were smaller and closer together. Parents in this neighborhood who sent a kid to Stoddard weren’t merely adding another tractable expense; they were making sacrifices that might squeeze them forever.
Waldo rang the doorbell. A thin-haired man in baggy chinos and a UCLA sweatshirt opened the door, drooping, drained by the day or maybe by life.
Waldo said, “Are you Mr. Whiting?”
“Yeah. What’s up? It’s past nine.”
“My name’s Charlie Waldo; this is Lorena Nascimento. We’re private investigators, working for fellow parents of yours from the Stoddard School—Joel and Paula Rose?” Whiting’s eyes hardened; Waldo could tell he’d dropped the wrong names, but there was no turning. “Your daughter Kristal is a friend of Stevie’s?”
“So?”
“So, Stevie’s missing. If Kristal’s around, we’d like to talk to her.”
Lorena added, “We know it’s late. Just for a minute or two.”
The man looked at a flower bed and Waldo could almost hear him count ten in his head before speaking. “Kristal’s not here,” he said, slowly, evenly. Another parent with a girl on the loose.
“Do you have any idea when she—”
The man cut him off but kept the same even cadence. “Kristal’s in rehab.” Waldo didn’t even get to say, Oh. “Leave my family alone. Stevie Rose has done enough damage.” Kristal Whiting’s father closed the door.
Three leads and nothing to show. Lorena sighed and said to Waldo, “I guess that’s a night,” while she started to order their next car, their fifth of the day. They waited quietly, a few driveways down, so as not to linger in front of the Whitings’. When their ride pulled up, his heart sank again: a Dodge Grand Caravan. “What the hell is it with Uber?” he said. “It’s all SUVs.”
“Yeah, XL,” said the driver. “That’s what you ordered.”
Aghast, Waldo turned on Lorena, who was already giggling. “Lighten up, Waldo. I just wanted you to give my poor Mercedes a little love.”
Willem wasn’t home, so Lorena microwaved a bag of popcorn and watched the Malibu Malice pilot in the living room. Waldo sat nearby, cruising the internet and diving deeper into the Roses.
Their moment in the sun, he learned, had been a masterly marketing scheme of their own devising, one that made Malibu Malice a succès de scandale right out of the box some four years ago. Their network, a struggling cable stepchild of one of the big conglomerates, acquired in a package with a more coveted sports network and known mostly for tired reruns of second-tier sitcoms from the nineties, had decided to “go edgy,” i.e., to break the same new salacious ground that thirty other networks were already breaking.
With Malibu Malice, its first venture into scripted programming, the network had, at the Roses’ urging, eschewed traditional advertising and targeted teens only through social media. Their provocative message of Watch it online and clear your browser . . . your parents will never know! suckered watchdog groups into a predictable uproar, and the creators did everything they could to build the attention into a bonfire: Joel and Paula Rose had been everywhere, from the look of it, talking about the right-wing forces of censorship and how kids were too smart to fall for it. When the initial conflagration died down they stoked it again with a second-season opener in which super-vixen Eden Conner persuades an innocent freshman to hold on to her boyfriend and still keep her virginity by having anal sex instead. Waldo found four different YouTube interviews from that autumn in which Joel Rose defended the story line with the same rationale, offered each time in the same earnest timbre: “Believe me,” Joel would say, “this is happening all over. This is a real issue.” Indeed, thought Waldo, just like deforestation, or the scarcity of clean water.
Lorena got to the end of the pilot and snapped off the TV. “And now these people have Stevie Rose,” she said.
“What do you think?” said Waldo.
“What do I think? I think some people get everything they want, and everything they deserve.”