The rest of Alastair’s morning, which Waldo tracked via the sighs and grumbling of crew members, was an exercise in dilatory inventiveness, the star finding one excuse after another not to emerge from his trailer: first the replacement bathrobe, which he swore didn’t fit as well; then a headache, which he blamed on the wardrobe people who’d dragged him through so much tailoring; then a set of script revisions, which he claimed not to have received until the last minute and which he deemed inconsistent with backstory from an episode the prior season. At last the producers cried uncle and called the lunch break.
Through all this, Waldo kept his distance, taking advantage of the dead hours to peel off members of the crew for one-on-ones, wild shots at teasing out new threads. He started with the beleaguered director and his script supervisor sidekick, then found the embattled costume designer and also managed a few minutes apiece with three producers of different stripes, these last behind closed doors in their nearby offices. The various interviews were uniformly cautious, nobody wanting to drop a stronger descriptor on Alastair than “intense” or “complicated.” The words Waldo kept hearing, unspoken, were “meal ticket.”
After the producers, Waldo knocked on the screen door of the actress’s trailer, thinking that her relative irreplaceability might make her less reticent. “Is he finally fucking ready?” she called, confirming the instinct. He apologized for not being the production assistant she’d been hoping for and introduced himself. She invited him in.
The trailer, or her half of it—the chunky actor who played Judge Johnny’s sardonic but fiercely loyal bailiff occupied the other half, with a separate entrance—took a similar approach to limited space as Waldo’s own cabin, cleverly loading a surprising array of amenities into its walls, from microwave to gas fireplace. The actress sat on the only chair and gestured toward the built-in daybed. Her name was Naomi Tompkins-Jones and she didn’t need a prompt to start complaining. “I’ve got a director meeting at four in Culver City. They promised me I’d be out by lunch.”
“I just have a couple questions. I won’t slow down your day, I promise. Do you know Alastair well?”
“Nobody knows Alastair ‘well.’”
“Ever meet his wife?”
“Sat next to her at the Golden Globes. That was a trip.”
“How so?”
“English girl got a mouth on her. And she was not happy to be there. You know that’s the only awards where they serve alcohol during the show, right? Plus they do TV right off, so then we’re all done and still got to sit there three hours, so everybody starts getting shit-faced.”
“Is that what Monica wasn’t happy about? Having to sit there?”
“Everything—sitting there, this show, L.A. Kept calling it the City of Angles. Said, with every award she could feel more brain cells dying. Finally I go, ‘Might not be the awards, girl—might be all them champagne cocktails.’”
“What’d she say to that?”
“She goes, ‘You fucking my husband, too?’” Waldo waited her out on that one. Naomi lowered her chin and her voice and said, “Not even close, honey.” She snorted.
Waldo offered a conspiratorial grin to let her know he believed her. He said, “What’s it like, playing love scenes opposite a man accused of killing his wife?”
“What do you think? I’m on the board of the L.A. Coalition Against Domestic Violence. You know what that means? All this shit’s messed up, is what it means.”
A PA knocked and called from outside that they were ready to start up again. Waldo walked to the stage with the PA and the actress and watched her and Alastair get the breakfast scene right and then shoot another quick two-line scene in Judge Johnny’s chambers—the unsatisfactory new pages having been revised twice more—and then Alastair was released for the day.
Waldo approached him while he was signing the end-of-day paperwork. The two men eyed each other; it was the first time they’d been together since the police took Alastair away, incredibly only thirty hours ago, and the energy between them had altered, profoundly and disagreeably. Alastair, unsmiling, looked much older. Waldo said, “Can we talk?”
Alastair said, “If we must.” Softening an iota, he added, “I’ll get changed and you can come with me to pick up Gaby.”
They didn’t speak during the walk to Alastair’s trailer, or while he changed in the bedroom, or as they crossed the lot to his Hummer and he handed Waldo the keys. It wasn’t like the silence of the first day, all unfamiliarity and uncertainty. This silence was soaked in mutual resentment: Alastair’s over the sense that Waldo not only had failed to protect him but had likely made things worse—no doubt Fontella Davis had fed that impression since the arrest—and Waldo’s over the burner phone and the likelihood that Alastair had been hiding at least one card from him.
Waldo steered off the lot. He decided not to start with the burner. “Warren Gomes, Darius Jamshidi—you know either of them?”
“No,” Alastair said, not missing a beat, “but Robert Blake called last night. He asked if I cared to play pinochle with him on Thursdays. He’s been without a partner since O.J. and Phil Spector went on their vacations.”
Waldo had been through too much; there was nothing winning anymore about the mordant palaver. “Stop fucking around. Everyone else is sure you did it, and the only reason I have doubts is somebody keeps busting my horns. Me figuring out why may be the only thing standing between you and life without parole—so when I ask for your help, goddamnit, help.” He stopped for a light. He turned to Alastair and repeated the names: “Warren Gomes, Darius Jamshidi. Who are they?”
Alastair stared forward, shook his head.
Waldo watched him carefully. How much was this maddening bastard holding back, and how much did he truly not remember? Alastair still wouldn’t look at him. Waldo waited for the light to turn before asking, “Is there anything you’re not telling me?”
“Like what?”
“Like, did you invite anyone over to the house that night?”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“Absolutely.”
“How can you be sure, when you don’t remember anything?”
“Because I never just ‘invite anyone over to the house.’ That’s not part of my life.”
He was lying. Yes, it was possible that the text exchange happened during Alastair’s blackout, too. If there was one—for all Waldo really knew, that was bullshit, too. But even assuming the blackout was real, at the very least he had to remember owning a burner phone that he used to talk to another woman, and he had to know that it was missing and that he hadn’t used it since the day of the murder.
“Were you faithful to your wife?”
“I don’t see where that’s relevant.”
“Everything’s relevant.” It was clear that Alastair didn’t intend to answer, or else felt that he already had, so Waldo moved on. “When did you shift the furniture around?”
“I told you, Monica was a constant tinkerer—”
“The night table in my room doesn’t fucking fit, okay? It hangs way over the side of the bed. Nobody who gets pictures of her house in Architectural Digest would ever put that table there. I’m thinking it was moved from your bedroom and the one in your bedroom came from the living room. Probably on the night of the murder. Unless you’ve moved them since.”
Alastair bit off his response. “I have not. Moved them. Since.”
“Could you have rearranged furniture that night and dressed it with tablecloths and flowers—and not remembered the next day?”
“I’ve gotten married, fathered children and taken out mortgages and not remembered the next day.”
They renewed their silence, Waldo wishing he could bellow his frustration. The transposed furniture, Jamshidi—the reeds were slim, but they were reeds, and any sane man invested in his own exoneration would grasp at them with all he had. Why not this man? It was as if he were hell-bent on his own undoing. Could self-loathing possibly run this deep?
They’d reached Gaby’s school. Alastair pointed wordlessly to a procession of cars waiting their turns to collect elementary schoolers laden with colorful backpacks and art projects, and Waldo steered the Hummer to the end of the line. Alastair scanned the crowd for his daughter and said, “What shall you do, Detective, when your vaunted skills lead you to the conclusion that I did, in fact, murder my wife? Will you share your findings with the police? Will you stand for your client, or for Truth and Justice, like the incorruptible Charlie Waldo of yore?”
Or, Waldo thought, there was that. Maybe Alastair wasn’t invested in exoneration because he knew on some level, even if it was buried deep, that he killed his wife and saw punishment as not only ineluctable but deserved. Which begged the question: why had Waldo been so resistant to accepting the obvious answer as the true one, almost since the moment he’d met the man? Again, was this the unavoidable nature of PI work, approaching the investigation as advocate rather than disinterested analyst? Or was it simply Alastair’s movie star panache working its magic from the start despite Waldo’s best efforts to resist it?
Alastair’s bone-weary sigh pulled him back. “I used to rather like waking up somewhere I didn’t know, with someone I didn’t know, and no idea what damage I might have caused the night before. It kept life interesting. Gave me character.” Waldo, edging the Hummer forward, spied Gaby just before she spotted them and came running full tilt. Alastair, opening his door, turned back to him and said, “Stick with Truth and Justice, Waldo. I’ve gotten away with far more than most men. If I killed my little girl’s mother, this time I’ll take what’s coming to me, and we’ll call the whole lot even.”
Maybe he was just a chump for Alastair’s acting—it wouldn’t be the first time—but Waldo believed he meant it. And coupled with the little girl leaping into his arms, it was heartbreaking.
Alastair shed the heaviness and became the joyful daddy once again. “Princess Ozma!” he shouted, twirling her.
Waldo got out of the car too, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jayne among her kindergarteners. And there she was, a few cars ahead, chatting with a parent; she saw him immediately and flashed him a quick smile with her eyes while politely keeping focus on her conversation.
Waldo turned back to the car, and what he saw beyond it chilled him: a black Escalade sitting at the curb outside the campus entrance, Don Q in the passenger seat, staring in their direction, dead eyed, unblinking.
“Daddy,” Gaby was saying, “I know all my lines for my play!”
“I can’t wait to see your Rumpelstiltskin,” said Alastair, oblivious to the danger. “One of the most coveted roles in all of theater!”
Gaby climbed into her car seat; Alastair leaned in to buckle her. Waldo rounded the car and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “you sober enough to drive?”
“If I must.”
“You must. I’ll see you at your house.”
“What’s wrong?”
Waldo opened the back of the Hummer and pulled out his bike. “Just keep your doors locked and don’t stop for anything. Anything. Understand?” Alastair nodded.
Waldo shut the rear door and marched his bike toward the entrance, blood pounding in his ears. This motherfucker killed her, killed her, and set her on fire. He barely broke stride to drop the bike and backpack against a wall just inside the school gate. He picked up his stride and stormed at the Escalade. Don Q stepped out, and Nini, too, from the driver’s side.
“Tell me about Lorena,” Waldo said, inches from Don Q. “Tell it to my face.”
“You tell me ’bout my Mem.”
“I don’t even know what a fucking Mem is!”
“I think you’re prevaricatin’, Waldo. That means lyin’.” Was this fucker smiling? He was! “Bitch said she gave it to you. Last words she ever said, too, so I’m inclined to take it for true.” Waldo could feel malice coursing through his body like a chemical. “You know, she was still alive when I poured the gas on her, and once that shit started, you couldn’t get the bitch to shut up—”
Waldo lunged for Q’s throat, driving him into the car door. He barely started squeezing off the bastard’s larynx when he felt Nini’s fist batter his kidney and the strength drain from his thumbs and everywhere else. Nini flung him against the Escalade and pounded his rib cage. The air went out of Waldo and he doubled over, first retching, then gasping frantically for oxygen like he’d been released into a different atmosphere.
There was no winning this. Lorena was dead and these guys were going to kill him, too, quickly or slowly, if he didn’t find this Mem, whatever the fuck that was. “Okay,” he wheezed, “tell me . . . exactly . . .”
But Don Q was massaging his throat and shaking his head, uninterested in negotiation at the moment. Nini stood Waldo up against the Escalade and put him to sleep a second time.