The dry heaves finally stopped. He noticed flecks on his shoes, found a leaf on the ground that looked fresh and wiped off what he could. He checked the rest of his clothes for puke; given his limited wardrobe and his daily wear-one, wash-the-other routine, he was grateful not to find any more. Still shaking, he unlocked his bike, but he couldn’t pull it out of the rack: someone else’s U-lock tethered it to a second bicycle beside it. He looked around for the biker who’d carelessly jammed him up, and when he saw no one nearby, Waldo lost it.
He cursed, every foul word he knew or could remember plus some he made up. He kicked the other bike, football-style, then stomped on it over and over until he’d bent its gear mechanism so badly that the chain dropped off. The bike ravaged, he focused his wrath on a metal trash can, hurling it against the side of the building and scattering garbage across the asphalt. Then he picked it up with both hands and smashed it against the brick wall again and again and again and again.
Spent, he propped himself with his backside against the wall and his hands on his knees. He spit a few times to rid the foul taste from his mouth, then wiped his face with his sleeve. He took some deep breaths and began counting slowly, actually whispering the numbers aloud. By fourteen or fifteen he had calmed himself, and at twenty he stood, focused on the ground between his feet, and exhaled.
When he looked up, there was the blue Cadillac.
It was parked on the far side of the small lot, facing away from Waldo, and the man was getting out and heading in Waldo’s direction. He was indeed middle-aged and ordinary-looking and wore a nondescript brown suit. “Excuse me,” he said. “I had my bike on that rack next to yours, and I must have left—”
“Bullshit!” Waldo stormed at him. “You’ve been following me all day! Now, get that lock off my goddamn bike before I—”
The man held up his hands in front of him. “If you’re thinking about doing me bodily harm, you should know that I am an attorney specializing in personal injury, and I will seek damages.” The man walked past Waldo and squatted by the rack, inspecting the busted-up bike. He said, “Speaking of damage.”
Waldo seethed. “Just get the lock off.”
The man took his bike chain in hand but stopped himself before opening the lock and looked up at Waldo. “You’re a private eye?” Waldo waited for the man to open the lock. The man waited for Waldo to answer.
“Yeah,” Waldo said to move things along, “I’m a private eye. Now, get—”
“Big mistake,” the man interrupted. He dropped the chain and stood. “You’ve just committed a felony, presenting yourself as a private investigator in the state of California when in fact you’re unlicensed.”
“I’m acting as an operative under a fully licensed investigator.”
“Who’s the investigator?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions.”
“You’ll have to answer the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services’ questions, and I hope your boss can provide documentation to them. Otherwise you could be looking at a ten-thousand-dollar fine and/or one year in prison.”
“Thanks for your concern, but I’ll be back home long before that becomes an issue.”
“To that house in the woods.”
This guy knew too much about him and Waldo didn’t like it. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Do you have running water up there?”
“I have a well.”
“That must really cut down on waste.”
“It does.”
“Admirable. Did you happen to file a well completion report with the Department of Water Resources?”
Waldo hadn’t even heard of a well completion report. He’d ordered the cabin and everything possible prefabricated, and the rest he had taught himself with online research and laborious trial and error.
The lawyer said, “You’re not going to get a permit without a C-57 Well Drilling Contractor’s License. And I sincerely hope you don’t have a composting toilet.”
“What’s this about?”
“A client of mine is curious why you’d involve yourself with a murderer like Alastair Pinch.”
“One of your personal injury clients.”
“A legal client.”
“Who would that be?”
“Let’s just say a gentleman of resources who wonders why you’d get entangled with this, when you’ve had such a peaceful life in Idyllwild, undisturbed by the government or lawsuits from your neighbors.”
“Listen, asshole, I’ve had a lot scarier than you trying to muscle me off this case—”
“You misunderstand, Mr. Waldo. I’ve made no threats whatsoever, and none are intended.” He knelt again to fiddle with his U-lock and this time opened it, releasing both bicycles. He started back toward his Cadillac with the lock, leaving the busted bike in the rack.
Waldo said, “Aren’t you going to take your bike?”
“Now that I looked closer, that bike might not have been mine after all.” More shit: thanks to this prick, Waldo had just stomped somebody else’s bike to pieces. As the lawyer got to his car he called back, “You know, Mr. Waldo, it’s my hope—and my client’s—that you enjoy your retirement to the fullest and that this pleasant, happenstantial conversation is the last dealing you and I ever have.” He pointed to the bikes, said, “Sorry for the inconvenience,” and got into his car. Waldo heard the electronic snap of the door locks, but the lawyer didn’t start the ignition right away; it looked like he was making a phone call first.
From the bike rack, Waldo watched the back of the man’s head and tried to make sense of the confrontation. This was the second time he had been warned to stay off the Pinch case. Either someone other than Alastair had killed his wife, or the Pinches had been involved in something else that some third party didn’t want uncovered, something they thought the police less likely than Waldo to notice, or at least less likely than Waldo to reveal or exploit. The people who’d tried to intimidate Waldo—the would-be gangbangers and now this nuisance-suit lawyer—were mismatched, too. He wanted to know more about this guy and he wanted to know whom he was talking to.
The lawyer was deep in conversation. Leaving his bike in the rack, Waldo swung wide out of his view and, crouching, approached the rear of the Cadillac from the side. He knelt behind it, keeping low enough so the lawyer couldn’t spot him in the rearview. Then he waited.
A couple of minutes later the engine turned over and red brake lights went on. Waldo braced himself, and as soon as the car moved a few inches he reached up and slapped the top of the trunk hard while letting the car tap him and knock him down.
The car stopped and the driver killed the engine. Waldo stayed on the ground, curled and facing the passenger side. The lawyer got out and rushed over, not asking if Waldo was all right, but launching straight into a self-protective spiel, delivered to the back of Waldo’s head. “There is no liability on my part here. I don’t know what mischief you were up to at the rear of my car, but I checked the mirrors carefully and you were deliberately below the sight line.”
But Waldo didn’t answer. He was sobbing, his body racking.
“Mr. Waldo?” the lawyer said, thrown. “Mr. Waldo?”
“They killed her,” Waldo got out between gasps.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s m-my fault. If—if I had just helped her in the first place . . .”
The lawyer, softening, came around to Waldo’s other side. “Let me help you up.” He reached out to him, offering a hand.
Waldo didn’t take it. “It’s my fault . . .”
“Mr. Waldo, are you injured?”
“No.”
Again the lawyer said, “Let me help you up,” and this time Waldo let the lawyer pull him to his feet.
Tears streaming down his face, he reached into his pocket and took out the gruesome photo of Lorena’s incinerated body. He showed it to the lawyer while he blubbered some more. “I’m sorry . . . this has been . . . three years . . . not even talking to anyone . . . and then . . . Lorena . . .” He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I’m sorry,” he said, “this is embarrassing.”
“Yeah,” the lawyer said, for lack of anything better.
“You’ve got one of those watches,” Waldo said, noticing a Kudoke Skeleton, like Sikorsky’s, the one Alastair coveted, and he felt the anger rising in his blood again. “Why do you need it?”
“What?” the lawyer said, again for lack of anything better.
“You have a phone. You know how many people you could feed with what that watch cost—” He stopped himself. There was just too much else wrong in the world, wrong in his world. He looked the lawyer in the eye. “I’m going back to my mountain. I’m done.”
The lawyer looked surprised, then pleased. “It’s the right decision. You don’t need any more trouble.”
“No. I don’t. Thank you for being so kind.” The tears coming again, Waldo threw his arms around him in an appreciative hug and sobbed some more into his suit, clinging until the lawyer managed to extricate himself and got back in the Cadillac as quickly as he could. The lawyer backed out of his space extra carefully and drove off with Waldo watching.
When the Cadillac cleared the driveway and pulled safely into the street, Waldo dropped the sobbing act and wiped his face again. “Fucking ambulance chaser,” he muttered, looking down at the lawyer’s iPhone, which he’d lifted during his weepy embrace.
Waldo went into settings, changed the autolock to “never,” and stuffed it into his own pocket.
It wasn’t until Waldo settled into a chair in the nearby public library to examine the phone that he started to fret over how it fit into the constellation of Things. In the confusion of the moment, he’d forgotten to discard something to offset it. He agonized over the infraction, finally granting himself absolution by establishing a new codicil: evidence, material gathered specifically for the case, was never really his and thus needn’t count.
The crisis resolved, he got to work. A couple of taps identified the phone’s owner—well, former owner—as Warren Gomes, Esq., and a couple of more taps confirmed that he indeed specialized in personal injury work as a sole practitioner with an office in West L.A. Waldo checked the phone history and learned that the guy’s last call—the one placed right after strong-arming Waldo by the bike rack and right before tapping Waldo with his car—was to someone named Darius Jamshidi.
Waldo switched over to his own phone to research Jamshidi and quickly learned he was the founder and principal owner of something called the Darius Group, a global private equity firm specializing in acquiring and partnering with mature and growing businesses, with concentrations in technology and telecommunications. Waldo had no idea what any of that meant.
But he did know what it meant that Jamshidi resided in Beverly Park. First, it meant that Jamshidi lived in a walled community above the city among the richest of the rich, the very biggest movie stars and moguls and athletes in Southern California; second, it meant that if Waldo wanted to confront Jamshidi at his home—more aggressive and likely more fruitful than doing it at his office, where he was sure to be insulated by layers of assistants and a small army of security men—he had a wicked canyon pedal ahead of him.
Waldo read a little more about the acquisitions Jamshidi’s company had made over the past few years: a chain of shopping centers, a group of seventeen radio stations, a French manufacturer of terrestrial broadcast equipment, the library of a once-powerful independent television studio, and a biotech firm known for its revolutionary artificial knees. But the Darius Group’s most legendary killing came from its purchase of a Belgian company called LGA Avianimmo, which had previously made a fortune in some advanced medical field called pharmacogenomics before losing a patent lawsuit and falling on hard times; after the acquisition the Darius Group secured a bankruptcy judgment in Bruges, shut down two-thirds of the company’s operations, then resold the restructured firm to a Bulgarian holding company that Darius managed to buy in its entirety two years later. Somehow the result of these maneuvers—nothing but contracts and closures—was a four-billion-dollar profit for Jamshidi and his investors.
And Waldo found one more news item online that made the web of relationships all the more curious: the Darius Group was currently awaiting the Federal Communications Commission’s blessing of its biggest acquisition yet, SignaCom Global, whose best-known asset was the television network that happened to be employing Waldo right now, whose production arm was on the verge of making hundreds of millions syndicating Johnny’s Bench.
In other words, it looked like Darius Jamshidi was trying to become the biggest financial beneficiary of Alastair Pinch’s popularity, while also trying to stop Waldo from keeping Alastair Pinch out of prison. Waldo squinted, as if behind the pixels on his phone he’d be able to find the logic. He might as well have been trying to teach himself pharmacogenomics.