He was back in Studio City by five, leaving him plenty of time to talk to Alastair’s neighbors. Or, as it happened, plenty of time to realize how few neighbors Alastair had. The house sat on an acre-and-a-half lot, big for L.A., and backed onto a hillside that abutted public land, separated from Fryman Canyon Park by cyclone fencing topped with razor wire, ugly but practical and tucked deep enough into a hillside eucalyptus grove to be unnoticeable from the Pinch yard. The only neighbors with a chance of seeing or hearing anything the night of the murder would have been those in the houses on either side, or possibly the one across the street on what looked like an even larger property, though that home was hidden by forbidding ivy walls and a solid gate. Waldo tried it first.
The entrance, directly across from Alastair’s driveway, had a doorbell and keypad for gate entry. While he waited for a response to his ring he noticed a security camera pointed at him. “Yes?” a woman said through an intercom. He looked straight into the camera and said he was an investigator and that he’d like to talk to her about Monica Pinch. She told him she’d already said everything to the police. When he started to ask how well she knew the Pinches, she said, “Please go away,” and he heard a click.
The house to the Pinches’ left looked more promising. No wall, just a friendly red picket fence behind which a fresh-faced young woman with copper hair watched two little kids on training-wheeled bikes pedaling loops around a driveway the size of a small playground. She wouldn’t come outside the fence or let Waldo inside, but she chatted over it for a few minutes while she kept an eye on her charges. Her name was Shelagh and she was spending two years in America as an au pair for this family, the Goodwins. She was homesick for Edinburgh and said she loved the kids but she didn’t seem to care for their parents, who’d gone out for the evening, as they did almost every night. She’d never personally seen Alastair but knew from the Sparkletts man that he lived in the house next door. She said she’d heard shouting from over there once but couldn’t make it out, and also that their nanny, Rosario, seemed nice though her English wasn’t good enough for them to really be friends. Waldo thought she gave him this much time mostly because she was lonely.
The only actual homeowners he got to meet were the ones on the other side. Waldo had seen Chase and Martha Shinn before, on a local news segment on the murder that he’d found on YouTube that first morning he’d researched the case, after he’d been linked to it in Variety. They were both executives at what they called content providers, neither of which Waldo had heard of but whose names they seemed to think would impress him. The couple was happy, even eager, to talk some more about the Pinches, whom they clearly couldn’t stand. Waldo got the sense that they both disliked Monica even more than Alastair, especially the wife, but he could see them trying to focus their scorn tactfully on the spouse who hadn’t just been murdered.
They took Waldo out to the street to show him the torn-up lawn in front of their house and the stump of an orange tree, which they claimed Alastair had cracked so badly with his Hummer one drunken night that they’d had to cut the whole thing down. Then they showed him a toolshed that the Pinches had built a foot and a half over their property line, and also described at length the ugliest point of contention, a birthday party invitation that the Shinns’ daughter had extended to Gaby but which went unreciprocated, a slight that escalated to tears on the day of Gaby’s birthday when little Alexa Shinn saw that the Pinches had brought in a pony and a moon bounce for the day. As for the murder, Alastair’s guilt was self-evident to them, though they hadn’t actually seen or heard anything the night Monica died.
The third time the conversation circled around to the contretemps over the moon bounce, Waldo found a way to extricate himself and walked back to Alastair’s house. Rosario let him in and told him that Gaby was upstairs in her room and that Alastair wasn’t home from work yet. Waldo decided to take advantage of the unsupervised time to give the house a closer inspection and see if he might glean something the cops had missed.
He checked out the security system, which supposedly had been armed through the night, until right after the police saw Alastair turn it off. It was from a well-known alarm company and pretty standard issue for this kind of house, everything in order and working right and all the accessible windows fitted with alarm screens.
He studied the front door, which had two locks: a typical single cylinder, opened by key from the outside and a twist knob from the inside, plus a one-sided dead bolt with a twist knob on the inside but no access at all from the outside. With that one locked, nobody could enter through the door, and nobody could secure it from the outside, either. This was the lock Freddie had mentioned and the immutable fact that most incriminated Alastair.
Waldo retrieved the Architectural Digest from his guest room and surveyed the living room from the camera’s vantage in each of the two large photos in the magazine. The issue was a year old, but little in the space had changed: there were different flowers, naturally, some art and a new Oriental rug. A side table had been swapped for another, and a small sculpture and a floor vase were gone. Other than that, the magazine shoot could have been this afternoon.
“What say you, Detective? Ought I hire a decorator and refurnish completely?” Alastair had entered behind him and he hadn’t noticed.
Waldo tapped one of the magazine photos. “Where’s this vase?”
“Ah, the amphora she was killed with. Gone, gone. Smashed to bits.”
“What was it, ceramic?”
“Earthenware. We bought it in Istanbul.” He sighed. “Beautiful piece. I miss it.”
Waldo wondered how a jury would take to him. Could be a catastrophe, but then again, with all that star power and that disarming twinkle even when tossing out a casually outrageous remark like that, twelve star-struck citizens might eat this guy right up. Waldo indicated the magazine again. “How about this table?”
Alastair considered it a bit but didn’t have an answer. “That photo’s a year and a half old, you realize. Monica was a tinkerer; no room was ever finished. That painting’s changed, too.”
“I saw. And the rug.”
“Well, that’s because of the blood,” he said softly. Waldo nodded gravely. Alastair added, “With the stains, it didn’t match the sofa.” Waldo doubled back: catastrophe for sure.
He said, “And this sculpture?”
“That’s not a sculpture—it’s an Olivier Award, for my Richard the Third.”
“Where is it now?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never been much for Acting Trophies,” Alastair said, making plain what he thought of them. As always, Waldo couldn’t tell where the genuine insouciance ended and the posing began. “Monica liked to keep that one on display for sentimental reasons—that was the production on which we met. Truly, I haven’t thought about it in years; I’ve no idea where she moved it. For all I know, the police may have stolen it.” Waldo frowned, his patience thinning, but Alastair kept the act going. “There were a number of things missing when they were through. Some photographs, petty cash from the cookie jar.”
“Really.”
“They haven’t exactly been gentle with the process.” He flopped onto a sofa. “Or perhaps it went into the trash with my other Oliviers and my People’s Choice Award.” He pronounced the last with extra-big capital letters. “For that one I had to beat out two crusty doctors and a vampire.”
“What do they give Oliviers for? Plays?”
“British theater. The equivalent of your Tonys.”
“And you’ve got so many you throw them away?”
“Honestly, I don’t know where any of them are. Anyhow, it’s not the number; it’s the notion. They’re fakery. Fakery to celebrate fakery.”
“You don’t seem to think much of your work.”
Alastair gazed out the window at his California-style English garden, jasmine and succulents instead of tulips and lavender. “The perfect performance would be King Lear, done in a sealed black box with no audience. Every deviation from that is compromise. The more you’re willing to compromise, the more the forces of commerce stand ready to palliate the damage to your soul with statuettes and luxury, until the palliative becomes the thing itself, and then, my dear friend, you are lost.” He thought about that for a moment, and added, “Of course, as your presence attests, lost I may already be.”
“Or maybe,” Waldo said, “somebody just wanted to say they like your acting.”
Alastair exploded with a guffaw. “Yes! Yes, Detective! It could be that!”
Gaby bounded into the room with a picture book she wanted her dad to help her read, and Alastair excused himself for the night. Waldo had plans anyway: he was going to hear Jayne White sing.
He considered taking a shower, though he’d just had one the morning before. Living in Idyllwild, he did that only every third day to conserve his well water. Even then his careful bucket shower used but a small fraction of what a few minutes under the spray in a normally plumbed house would use, so two traditional running-water showers a mere thirty-six hours apart felt dissolute, considering the water crisis threatening the globe. But since yesterday morning he’d had the grueling, sweat-soaked bike up the mountain, the scuffle with Don Q and Nini, and then today’s long wait in the sun outside Lorena’s house, and the level of hygiene adequate for solitary life in the woods probably wouldn’t do in Los Angeles, especially not at whatever kind of club in West Hollywood Jayne had invited him to. So shower he did, mitigating the extravagance by running the water only briefly to wet himself, then turning it off to soap, shampoo and lather, then on again to rinse as quickly as he could.
After he dried himself he flipped the channels until he found something promising, two morbidly obese women on the ground clawing at each other in front of Maury Povich, apparently over the results of a paternity test. Waldo put on his clean underwear and, when the security guys began to pry the women apart, moved to the bathroom to listen to the Maury denouement while he hand washed his other set of clothes in the sink. The job was quicker today without socks. In fact, he thought, if the skin on his feet could get accustomed—no sure thing, as nasty irritations were already in bloom behind both heels—he might eventually go sockless full-time, opening two permanent slots to spend however he wanted. The thought made him feel like a rich man. For now, though, he was glad to still have one pair and that this would be a socked night.
Maury went to break and another truculent Savannah Moon commercial. “Have you taken off all your clothes and looked in the mirror?” Waldo, in his boxers, appraised his own body, something he hadn’t done in a long time. Lorena was right: he was skinny.
“Seriously, how fat are you going to get before you do something?”
How skinny?
“Well, guess what, Shamu—I’m your something.”
Waldo finished dressing while he pondered his options for the trip to West Hollywood. His legs were shot, so riding over the hill and back was an intimidating proposition. The 218 bus went north-south over Laurel but would stop running before he’d need it to come home. Then there was the danger of the curvy canyon roads in the dark. He decided to coast downhill to Ventura, catch the bus and double back up and over to the other side, and choose later whether to brave the tough ride back or figure out something involving multiple transfers.
Waldo got off the 218 at Sunset and biked to La Cienega, then carefully down its first steep blocks. Beyond Santa Monica most of the stores were dark, shut down for the night, but in the distant blocks ahead he could see pockets of light and people in the street. The first club he approached had a crowd milling out front and he figured that was Jayne’s until he got closer and realized that there were no women among them and the music inside was pulsing EDM. He checked Jayne’s construction paper and saw he was probably still a block away.
The address she’d written had to be a mistake, because it matched a Lutheran church called Saint Luke’s. There were a couple of places open on the other side a block down and he tried those. One was a sports bar and the other a hipster joint with a jukebox loaded with sixties songs; neither was set up for live music.
Waldo went back to the church and this time as he neared he heard a choir from within: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives.” Waldo locked his bike to a rack near the heavy wooden door and took a look inside.
It was a rehearsal, not a service, the choir in its stalls but in street clothes. Sure enough, there was Jayne among the altos, in a simple white blouse, hair pulled back in a blue ribbon. Come hear me sing. The setting was even more unsexual than the kindergarten, but still she had something ineludible. Waldo slipped into the rear pew to watch and listen. Near the end of the hymn Jayne noticed him and smiled; she might have winked, too, but he wasn’t sure. Between the classroom and the church, he’d been around her less than five minutes, but she’d already knocked him off his pins a dozen times. He listened to “Lift High the Cross” and “Go, My Children, with My Blessing” before the rehearsal broke and Jayne said her good-byes and walked down the aisle to Waldo’s pew. “You came,” she said.
“I like music.”
She told him she knew a place they could get a soda or something and he followed her out. They made small talk on La Cienega, Waldo asking how long she’d been in the choir, Jayne answering that she’d just joined, Jayne asking if he went to church and Waldo saying not lately. She led him into the hipster bar, where the jukebox was playing Jan and Dean. They slid into a wooden booth with high backs.
When a waitress came over, Waldo waited for Jayne to order, but she said to him, “You first.” He looked at her demure ribbon and thought about her singing about Jesus and his cross and asked the waitress for a cranberry juice. Jayne said to the waitress, “Double Maker’s, rocks.”
The waitress said, “Right up,” and started away.
Waldo said, “Check that,” and changed his order to match Jayne’s, then said to her, “Who is who they are?”
Jayne smiled at the playback and said, “Could be I’m exactly who I am—a kindergarten teacher choirgirl who happens to like whiskey.”
Waldo shifted in his seat. This was feeling more social than he’d expected and he wanted to get back to work. “So why weren’t you shocked that Monica Pinch was murdered?”
Her smile didn’t fade, but she said, “Let’s hold that till our drinks come.” She made him feel ham-fisted, like he wasn’t up to the job, like he didn’t know how to do any of this anymore, not how to chip away at a case, not how to order in a bar, not how to have a simple conversation with a woman he was attracted to. Jayne was watching him and waiting for his next line and all he could think of was that he didn’t have one.
Finally she said, “So—you dressed up for me.”
He looked around the bar at the rest of the clientele. There were hipsters wearing jeans and work shirts that seemed similar to his, but if she was saying this now he must be conspicuously untrendy, the stuff he bought for its durability wrong in some way obvious to everybody but him. “Sorry,” he said. “Where I live . . . I don’t have to think much about fashion.”
She untied the ribbon and shook her hair loose, holding his gaze as she did it.
Without thinking about it he said, “There goes the kindergarten teacher choirgirl,” but wondered right away if he’d gotten it wrong again.
She said, “Just wait till I have a couple whiskeys in me,” and he thought maybe he was okay. Then she said, “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m totally a kindergarten teacher choirgirl. Who happens to like whiskey and has good hair.”
The waitress came back with the drinks and they both thanked her. Jayne raised her Maker’s to Waldo in a silent toast and they both sipped. He hadn’t had a drink in his years on the mountain, not out of principle but because he didn’t see its place among the new habits he was creating.
He asked again, “Why weren’t you shocked?”
But Jayne was distracted by something over his shoulder. Waldo turned: the TV behind the bar, running silently while the oldies played—Buffalo Springfield now—was showing an update on the Monica Pinch murder, footage of Fontella Davis, footage of Alastair, helicopter shots of his house. Jayne said, “I have a confession to make: I’ve been watching CNN ever since the arrest. I knew who you were the minute you walked into my classroom, even with the new look.” Waldo wanted to ask again what she had to say about the Pinches, but before he could she said, “Who was Lydell Lipps? They keep talking about Lydell Lipps.”
It was inconceivable that she didn’t know, that any Angeleno who even thought to turn on any cable news talk show, anyone who recognized Waldo at first sight even with all his hair, wouldn’t know all about him and Lydell Lipps. And given the way she’d been misleading him, teasing, taunting, flirting, toying, she had to be messing with him some more. Or at least trying in a playfully obvious way to get him to tell the story in his own words. But there was no guile in her look as she awaited the answer, no hint at double meaning. He said, “You really don’t know?”
She shook her head.
“Were you living in L.A. three years ago?”
She nodded and said with apology, “I was busy, I guess.”
“Usually I can tell when someone’s screwing with me. But you . . . something jams my radar.”
“Maybe your radar’s just rusty.”
He weighed it, wasn’t convinced.
“Honest,” she said, “I never, ever heard of Lydell Lipps until I heard about you getting hired to help Mr. Pinch.”
Waldo took a drink and a good long look at her before he decided to tell her the story, the central story of his life, the story he’d never told aloud. He started haltingly, but something about the fully present way she listened—in sympathy, concern, horror, hanging on every word and never looking like she was waiting for her turn to talk—made him keep going. The alcohol, which hit quickly, made it easier. He told her about all of it, even the aftermath. About how, when he was still living in town after he’d quit the PD, he couldn’t look at the yellow Camaro without remembering that if it weren’t for what he’d done to Lydell Lipps, he wouldn’t have that car. Or his house, for that matter. Or even that girlfriend he’d been with off and on since the high-flying days. “I didn’t know how to be with anybody anymore,” he told Jayne now. “If somebody said something funny and I laughed . . . I’d start thinking, Lydell Lipps can’t laugh at jokes any more, what right do I have—” He stopped midsentence.
Why was he doing this? He’d come here tonight to ask her things, to find out what she had to say about Monica and Alastair Pinch, but the evening had gone completely off course. “Sorry,” he said, “I never really talked about it.”
“It’s okay. I’m glad you’re talking to me.” She reached across the table with both her hands and took his, comforting him. “Did you get any help? Therapy?”
“Someone made me an appointment, but when I got to the guy’s door, it was, Lydell Lipps can’t go to therapy . . . and I turned around and went home. I got to where I couldn’t get through the day, you know? Couldn’t live in the world.”
“So what did you do?”
“I stopped.”
He finished his drink. She said, “What do you mean, you stopped?”
So he told her about how he sold the Camaro and renounced materialism, about Idyllwild and the Hundred Things and the three years alone. He didn’t tell her about Lorena’s visit or any of what followed, only that somebody approached him about helping out with Alastair Pinch’s case and that he decided to come down the mountain and do it.
After that they sat together quietly for a long time. When the waitress came over, Waldo motioned for the check. Jayne reached for her purse but he said, “I’ve got it,” and paid in cash.
Talked out, he walked her back to the church, still unspeaking. She was silent too. He didn’t feel awkward with her anymore, just drained.
“This is my car,” she said, stopping at a white Civic hybrid, a sensible kindergarten teacher ride.
He remembered that he still hadn’t taken care of the business he’d intended and felt incompetent again. “Why weren’t you shocked about Monica Pinch?”
“God, of course I was shocked! How could I not be shocked?” He was completely baffled now, about the entire night. She looked at him like he was a fool and said, “Don’t you know when a girl just wants to have a drink with you?” and when he still didn’t know what to do she kissed him. Not a flirty kiss, either, an all-in kiss, her tongue darting between his teeth, then her own teeth tugging at his bottom lip, the fingers of one hand on the back of his neck and the other tangled in his mane, and soon his own hands were moving all over her. Like everything else, more than everything else, it had been so long. He slipped a hand under her blouse and she drew a breath.
“Kindergarten teacher choirgirl,” he muttered into her mouth.
“When I like it, I like it,” she said and sucked on his tongue, leaning against him and pressing his back against her passenger door.
He eased his fingers under her bra and found hard pebbles and squeezed and she gasped. “Jesus,” she breathed, kissing him harder . . . then suddenly broke from him and pulled away. “I said, a drink.” She spun out of his arms and continued around to the driver’s side. She staggered a little; Waldo himself was reeling. She opened her car door, looked back at him and said, “Three years in the woods—you haven’t been with anybody all that time?”
He shook his head.
Her mussed hair hung in front of her face, wanton, and she said, thickly, “That’s kinda hot, Waldo,” then slipped into her car and closed the door. Waldo stepped back from the curb and watched her pull away and disappear down La Cienega and into the night.
He was bewildered and alone again and he still had to get back to the Valley. He decided to risk the traffic in the dark, straight over the canyon. Do it the hard way.