Waldo spent two hours diving deep into Freddie Dellamora’s files, sitting undisturbed in the spare modernist courtyard of the Los Angeles Cathedral, an old favorite retreat where he used to grab a quiet moment on either side of a downtown court appearance. He scrutinized every page, then stuffed the files into his backpack and rode the Metro back to the Valley, nettled by a couple of dissonant points but mostly discouraged for his client and wondering how he’d gotten sucked into giving a shit about what a likely killer was facing.
That was, after all, exactly the aspect of PI work that had made him sneer at Lorena’s original offer, the inherent corruption of the investigation, which ran counter to his constitution. He was built and trained to attack a case without prejudice, to rely on his intuition to inform but never to guide, let alone determine; the very notion of a “client” was anathema to all that. Still, there was no quitting before he was sure Alastair was guilty: if there was one thing he’d learned hard, it was to play it to the end and make sure the answers weren’t just quick but righteous.
Back in the Valley after wasting a dollar on a second Metro card, he got on his bike and, for lack of a plan, started west on Chandler while he moved on from private eye work’s moral compromises to its practical ones. As a police detective, he’d start by examining the murder scene in its raw state; needless to say, the uncorrupted location wasn’t available to him anymore, nor was whatever the police might have gleaned before turning it back over to Alastair. As a police detective, he’d comb the neighborhood for potential witnesses; he could still do his own canvass, though it wasn’t likely to be very fruitful in a neighborhood built for privacy, gates and hedges dividing one big lot from the next. As a police detective, he could work from forensic reports much wider ranging than the coroner’s; he’d never see any of that, though, as nobody else would be as helpful as Freddie, at least not until it moved toward trial and the DA was obliged to share with Alastair’s lawyers during discovery, long past the point Waldo hoped to be gone from the case. In all, working as a PI would mean working without any of the normal investigative assets he was used to.
Coming at it from another direction: what would he be doing next, if he were still LAPD, and if those investigative assets had already been properly mined by the police and if they had indeed pointed to Alastair’s certain guilt, as they seemed to? He’d focus on Alastair, on breaking him down and looking for the hole in his story, to prove not only that he’d killed his wife but that he remembered full well doing it, toward helping the DA prove intent and secure a tougher sentence.
Of course, that objective would be contrary to his actual intuition; Waldo’s read, admittedly without factual backup, was that even if Alastair had killed his wife, he truly had no memory of it. So in that sense his current obligation to his client squared—more than his old job would have—with his instinct for what would actually constitute justice. The recognition gave him his first glimmer of peace since the encounter with Freddie. Could he find an approach to the case, a way in, that could build on that comfortable moral ground?
No doubt the first impressions on the PD—the locked house; the truculent alcoholic; that the husband is, as Alastair said, always the first suspect—were powerful. Also powerful would be the temptation to arrest and convict a killer as shiny as Alastair Pinch, all the more given the perverse irony of his representing justice itself to America every Wednesday night. Might those powerful forces have influenced the police investigators, even subconsciously?
Maybe that was the way he could serve both his client and the truth and be square with the work: he could question whether the police had gone about their business with the requisite level of dispassion. How did the investigation begin? What were the first minutes like? Who was on the scene? How much information had they gathered before they made up their minds that Alastair was the doer?
Basically, did anybody fuck up?
Of course, there was only one place to begin asking those questions, and it was the last place he thought he’d ever visit again: North Hollywood Division. Not only would he have to return to that river he’d burned, but they’d see him coming with a can of gasoline and a book of matches, ready for another go.
Tires screeched and a black Toyota SUV bore down on him. He swerved into a hedge, then popped to his feet, bracing for an attack—the Posse in a new ride?—only to see a mom behind the wheel, holding a cell phone and mouthing apology. Waldo gave her a baleful glare, though he knew he himself hadn’t been paying full attention either and might have drifted too far toward the middle of the road.
In fact, he realized as the woman drove on, in his distraction he’d absently cruised along old routes into his former Valley Village neighborhood, where he’d lived for his last five years in L.A. Trying to convince himself he wasn’t just forestalling the trip to division, he rode the two blocks to his old house on Cantaloupe to take a look.
It was a two-bedroom stucco bungalow on a dead end, with purple trim that had been white when Waldo sold it. He got off his bike and leaned it against an overflowing blue recycling bin on the street awaiting pickup. There was a basketball hoop attached to the garage now, a tricycle in the driveway and a couple of yellow Adirondack chairs. Like the Camaro, this house had meant so much to him once: first an emblem to himself of early accomplishment and great future, and later of pride and corrosive ambition. It was the place where he and Lorena had spent so many indelible nights together, including that mendacious final one, when he knew what he was about to do but couldn’t bring himself to tell her. In the end, it was the agent of liberation, the canny investment that gave him the freedom to quit the world cold. Now it was just a structure, essentially interchangeable with hundreds of others near it, a structure where a family of strangers kept their many, many Things. Waldo, who’d once spread his solitary life over two whole bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and a full kitchen and one and a half bathrooms and a garage, was almost physically ill, mortified and disgusted by his decades of consumption and waste.
“Get out of here or I’ll call the cops!” someone shouted from across the street, and Waldo turned to see his retired neighbor, Marty Schraub, standing outside his front door. “And stay out of my recycling!”
Before Waldo could identify himself, Marty’s wife, Gerta, called from inside the house, “Who’s out there?”
Marty turned toward their screen door and said, “Some bum, stealing the Faustos’ recycling.”
Waldo took a step in his direction, into the street. “Marty . . .”
“Get away from me! I’m calling the police!” He turned and fumbled open the screen door, but Gerta had appeared in the doorway, blocking him, and was peering around him toward Waldo, wearing her bathrobe even though it was almost lunchtime. “Get inside!” Marty barked at her.
Gerta said, “That’s Waldo, you dummy. Charlie Waldo, from across the street.” She waved. “Hi, Waldo!”
“Hey, Gerta.”
“Waldo?” Marty said, as if it couldn’t be true. He turned and looked at him.
Waldo nodded.
Marty walked out into the middle of Cantaloupe Street, squinting, studying him and finally screwing up his face. “Jesus, Waldo.”
Across the street from the North Hollywood Division driveway, Waldo straddled his bike and took inventory of the relationships he’d enjoyed over his LAPD career, trying to decide which of his closest friends was most likely not to despise him. Freddie Dellamora’s wariness troubled him even more than Big Jim Cuppy pissing in his pond. The truth was, if Waldo’s mission was to focus on the police work itself, to investigate the investigation, even the guys who were totally his guys back in the day—Conady, Dinkley, Segura—wouldn’t be his guys anymore.
A cruiser pulled out and passed him. Neither of the uniforms looked in his direction, nor did either look familiar. He tried to recall how fast the division turned over and wondered how many people in the building would even know him.
He stared at the entrance. He was here, he needed to go inside, but he didn’t have the play yet.
His phone dinged with a text from a number he didn’t recognize. It read:
I know who killed Monica Pinch.
It had been years since he’d even received a text. He wrote back, Who is this?
The answer came back quickly. Meet @ yr cabin.
In LA—let’s meet here.
This time the person at the other end made Waldo wait for a long, long minute. Finally:
Cabin. And then, Tonite.
There was the possibility that this was some kind of ambush, of course, but he didn’t see any option other than the long trek back to Idyllwild. There’d be time for North Hollywood later.