Girl’s fucking poison,” said Lorena under her breath. The two of them were alone in the living room, Joel and Paula having gone upstairs to talk privately. “I’ll be lucky to come out of this without losing my ticket.” Waldo didn’t see how any of this would actually jeopardize her PI license, but both Cuppy and Wax had threatened it in the last twenty-four hours and by now everything about Stevie Rose set Lorena’s teeth on edge. “Soon as they come back,” she said, “we’re out of here and we’re calling Cuppy. Tell him everything we know, and then cut this whole fucking family loose.”
Waldo didn’t like the idea of Stevie in the wind. But Lorena was right: the girl was as unstable as a homemade nitrogen bomb, PETN with a belly ring. And in the end, she wasn’t their responsibility. She had these parents, and they had her. Good luck to them all.
Joel and Paula swept back into the living room like the power couple they were, Joel saying, “The truth is, it isn’t that unusual for Stevie to drop off the radar. Sometimes she’ll just go off to a friend’s for a day or two without telling us.” Good luck to them indeed.
Lorena, already starting for the door, said, “Yeah, I’m sure she’s fine—”
Joel wasn’t finished, though. “Still, we’re thinking we should treat this more seriously. Given the situation with the teacher.”
Paula said, “We want to hire you to find her.”
Waldo should have seen it coming, but it wasn’t in him to think like a hustling PI, with an eye for the next gig. And Lorena hadn’t seen it coming because she didn’t want it to come.
Waldo said to the Roses, “Given everything, you should probably talk to the police and report her missing.”
Joel said, “No—dead teacher and Stevie disappears? That’s a bad look. Better to find her before they know she’s gone. I assume you do missing persons.”
Lorena turned to Waldo for help, but he wouldn’t give it; he wanted the job. Lorena said to the Roses, “Could the two of us have a minute now?”
Paula said, “Sure. You can use one of the guest bedrooms.”
She led them to it, smallish for a house this size, dominated by a four-poster queen bed laden with lacy pillows. But one of—how many guests bedrooms did these people have?
Lorena waited for Paula’s footsteps to recede down the hall, then spoke in a harsh whisper. “We are not doing this.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because she killed him.”
“They’re asking us to find their daughter. Not to prove she’s innocent.”
“That’s next. And you know she did it.”
“I don’t know that,” said Waldo. “I don’t lead with conclusions.”
“What happened to all that high-minded cop bullshit from when you were turning me down on Pinch? ‘Catch the bad guy.’”
“Wait, look at you: you don’t want this one because you think she did it, but Pinch was a dead lock for guilty and all you saw was a business opportunity.”
“I’m a businesswoman. And this case doesn’t even have that going for it.”
“No? Keeping a fifteen-year-old from getting pinned with a murder she didn’t commit? L.A. Times’ll like that story.”
“‘A murder she didn’t commit.’ Sure sounds like we’re leading with a conclusion.”
“You said I can pick the cases I want to work on. You want to team up, here’s where we start.”
She chewed on that, giving Waldo enough time to ask himself just what was compelling him to stay involved with this girl, but not enough time to answer.
Lorena said, “Did you really get two thousand a day on Pinch?”
He nodded. “But I gave the money to charity.”
“Yeah, well. We’re not doing that.”
“We’ll see.”
“How’d you get them to give you that much?”
“I told them that’s what it would take.”
“That’s it? And they just said yes?” He nodded.
Lorena turned and left the bedroom. Waldo followed. He assumed this meant he’d won, though it didn’t feel like it.
They followed the Roses’ voices to the kitchen, where Paula was opening a bottle of Cabernet. Lorena cut right to it. “We get three thousand dollars a day, plus expenses. For that you get Waldo full-time, me part-time, plus all other resources my agency provides, as needed. We want one week’s fee as a retainer, the unused balance to be returned if we find her sooner.”
Joel said, “Credit card okay?”
Lorena said, “Sure.” Waldo knew she was kicking herself for not asking for four.
Paula, pouring, said, “Red all right?”
Lorena and Waldo declined, so Paula poured a third of the bottle each for herself and Joel.
Then they all went to the living room and Waldo and Lorena began their work, collecting background on the family. They learned that Joel was sixty-five, Paula forty-three, and that they’d been together for seventeen years.
Joel said of their courtship, “It was your classic Hollywood location affair, with all the usual drama.” It was hard to tell whether the irony in his voice was self-awareness or theater. “I was running this procedural I created called Sea Legs. It was about this disgraced FBI agent, total hard-ass, nobody’ll hire him, so he goes to work as the head of security on the biggest cruise ship in the world—sort of Love Boat meets The Shield.” War stories about a long-dead series weren’t going to help anyone find his daughter, but somehow he couldn’t resist sharing. “The network never got behind it. You know who we had as the guy—?”
Lorena steered him back toward port. “So that’s where you two met? On that show?”
Paula said, “Yes. He was the boss, and I was as far below the line as you can get.” Waldo didn’t know what that meant. Paula explained: “‘Below the line’—it comes from budgeting on shows. The producers, the actors, the director, we’re all ‘above the line.’ ‘Below the line’ is the rest of the crew.”
“So you weren’t a producer then.”
Paula said, “Hardly. I was a PA—I brought Joel his latte every morning.”
Joel said, “But you could tell she was a Ferrari going ten miles an hour.”
“I was totally smitten. But he was totally married.”
“Not totally married. It was all but over.”
“Of course, he didn’t tell me that when we started. He was telling me that they were happy. I think it was his way of keeping himself ‘emotionally unavailable.’” She said it with affectionate indulgence and ruffled his hair. They’d obviously told their origin story together before and seemed to think it was adorable.
Joel said, “Next thing you knew, the show was canceled, but we were living together.”
Paula said, “I was his midlife crisis.”
“You still are.” They both chuckled. Yeah, thought Waldo, many times before.
Lorena said, “And you had Stevie . . .”
“Two years later. You should see our wedding pictures. I was in this white dress, out to here.” She held her hands out in front of her, fingertips together.
Joel explained, “We had to wait for the divorce to finalize.”
“But we wanted Stevie to be ‘legitimate.’” Paula turned to her husband. “How old-fashioned were we?”
Joel said, “That’s us.”
Waldo said, “Has Stevie been going to Stoddard all the way through?”
“Mm-hmm,” said Paula.
“Thirteen tuitions,” said Joel, another practiced witticism.
“She’s loved it. She was a really good student in elementary. Always one of the smartest girls. Straight As.”
Lorena said, “And when did the issues start?”
Her dislike of Stevie had made her a little careless, a little presumptuous; the Roses stiffened. Joel said, “Issues?”
Waldo covered quickly: “Have there been any issues?”
“I wouldn’t call them ‘issues,’” said Paula, giving it some thought. “No, I wouldn’t use that word. But her grades in high school haven’t been what they were in junior high.”
“And . . . no drugs, alcohol . . . ?”
Lorena added, “Promiscuity? Eating disorders?”
Paula said, “Not especially. You know, she diets more than she needs to, but all the girls do that. And compared to . . . well. Let me just say, I hear some of the kids at that school have real problems.”
Joel erupted. “Paula! Christ Almighty! She’s missing, and the police think she might have killed somebody! What the fuck do you think ‘real problems’ look like?” He’d finally gotten out of his own head long enough to recognize the gravity of the situation.
Waldo and Lorena held neutral faces in the residuum of the outburst. Paula finished her wine.
When, at length, Joel spoke again, he sounded penitent, albeit for older transgressions. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been having another baby at fifty. Maybe I was too old, and maybe we were too busy with our career to pay attention to Stevie like we should have.” Waldo was struck by his use of the singular; this model of self-involvement came with room enough for two.
Paula reached for his hand. “There’s always been someone around for her. A nanny . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Joel, “and a fancy school. Spending isn’t parenting.”
His wife withdrew, wounded. “I think you’re being hard on us.”
He reached for her now, but she pulled away and poured herself the rest of the bottle.
Waldo said, “Let’s find your daughter. Okay?”
Neither parent knew Stevie’s password, so they couldn’t use the Find iPhone feature. Lorena asked which social media Stevie used. Paula said she thought Stevie mostly was on Instagram but she hadn’t been looking at what Stevie was doing there or on Facebook because she knew Stevie didn’t like it. Lorena asked her to log on and see if Stevie had posted anything in the last couple of days. It appeared that Stevie had in fact blocked Paula from both sites, probably some time ago. Joel tried also and found the same.
Lorena asked for a photo of Stevie. Paula had some extra wallet-size prints of Stevie’s latest school portrait and cut one off the sheet for each of them.
Together they browsed the Stoddard School directory. The Roses figured out that Paula was right, that the name of their daughter’s boyfriend was indeed Koy, though not Lee or Ling but Lem. Lorena took a picture of the boy’s info with her phone, and also that of Stevie’s two closest friends, Dionne Shapiro and Kristal Whiting.
Lorena said that they were going to start following up these leads and that the Roses could assist in the meantime by going online and printing out a log of all of Stevie’s incoming and outgoing calls and texts for the last month. They’d probably only be listed by phone number, Lorena said, so they should go through and identify any ones they knew. Lorena jotted Waldo’s cell number on two of her own business cards and gave one to each Rose, saying they should call if anything at all occurred to them, and that they’d be in touch soon.
By the time Waldo and Lorena started down the driveway, Paula and Joel were holding hands again.
When the front door closed behind them, Lorena said, “We split fifty-fifty. You want to piss away your half saving the hippopotamus, up to you.”
“The hippos are in trouble, no joke.”
“No? Because it sounds like one.” Then she said, “How about we leave the school for tomorrow and hit the kids tonight? It’s close to dinnertime; they’ll probably be home.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
At the bottom of the driveway the gates opened for them. “Shit,” said Lorena, remembering. “My car’s not here.”
“We’ll get you a bike in the morning. I’m buying.”
“Comedian.” Lorena took out her phone to order another Uber. “Tomorrow, we ain’t doing this shit.”