Waldo woke from a restless Percocet sleep with his forearm throbbing, and once more alone. He heard laughter, struggled one-armed into his dry set of clothes and went out to the kitchen. Willem was juicing again, in workout gear this time. Lorena was drinking coffee and leaning on the counter in an aquamarine cowl-neck blouse and a black pencil skirt. She stopped giggling when Waldo entered. He got the feeling he was interrupting something.
Waldo said, “I didn’t hear you.”
“I didn’t want to wake you. I’ve got a meeting, prospective client.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t mentioned it.
“It came in last night, while you were in the MRI. Marital—which is starting to look better. You going to be all right on your own?”
He didn’t know if she was telling the truth about the new case or if it was just a way to slide out of Stevie Rose’s without another argument. He felt Willem’s eyes on him and wondered how much he knew. Probably none of it, based on the sketch Lorena had given Waldo of their marriage, but still her ex-husband had to sense the strain. Waldo said, “Sure.”
Lorena rinsed her cup, said, “Good. Check in later?” and made a quick exit. Waldo had an apple and some dry granola, then went back to Lorena’s room, where he showered carefully and treated and re-dressed his wounds lefty.
Feeling strong enough to try the day without the sling, he biked to the Red Line and rode it back up into the Valley, a solo act again.
Their romantic morass would take time to figure out, but the professional side was becoming clear. This case would be another one-shot à la carte like Pinch was. The Roses had agreed to three thousand a day, which meant Waldo’s chosen charity would be entitled to at least fifteen hundred. Actually, he’d have an argument to make for two thousand, the amount he’d negotiated for Pinch and which he’d deserve again if he was going to start working Stevie’s case himself. It reminded Waldo that he’d received no confirmation that the network had actually made the contribution of the Pinch money—sixteen thousand dollars by his reckoning—to the Sierra Club. He ought to ask Fontella Davis about it next time he saw her.
Maybe he’d steer the Rose fee to Greenpeace, or Ecotrust. Or maybe, Lorena’s censure from the other night reverberating, he should stretch beyond environmentalist groups and give it to people trying to help girls like Alice.
Meanwhile, Stevie. Following Hexter’s disquisition on teenage brain development, he had done some reading on his own. One doctor’s article, seconding the thesis about teen brains resembling those of insane adults, advised any parent with a problem teen to hang on and wait for these hellish years to pass, and in the meantime just keep the kid alive. Maybe he should forward that article to the Roses.
Of course, it’d be nice if they could keep everyone around Stevie alive, too.
“He was one of our most beloved teachers, you know. You can’t imagine the effect it’s having on the campus—the fragility, the utter grief.” Hexter closed his office door behind them. “I tried to explain that to the detective, but he’s been a bull in a china shop.”
“Jim Cuppy?”
“You know him?”
“What has he asked you about?”
“Victor’s background, how he fit in at the school. His classes, the clubs he supervised. How he got along with the faculty, with the students.”
“Did you get into the relationship between Ouelette and Stevie?”
“Her accusations?” It was a subtle but pointed correction.
“Yes.”
“I did.”
“What was Cuppy’s reaction?”
“Detestable.”
“What did he say?”
It was like a turd in Hexter’s mouth. “He said, ‘Bet you wish you did something about that, huh.’”
“You still don’t believe anything happened.”
“I didn’t believe it before Victor was killed, no. And now you want me to believe it was the motive for the murder you want me to believe she didn’t commit.”
“I’m not saying who committed the murder.”
“She’s your client, isn’t she? You’re trying to prove she didn’t do it.”
It was a truth he’d yet to fully acknowledge to himself. During the Pinch case he had wrestled with precisely this issue, the inherently corrupt nature of the PI’s role, so different from the objectivity of police work. Somehow with Pinch he’d walked that line to his own satisfaction: he kept thinking of himself as a legitimate investigator who happened to be hired by someone with an interest in Pinch’s exoneration, but he never thought himself a champion for that exoneration. He followed leads as cleanly and thoroughly and honestly as he could, and his solution had borne out the legitimacy of his process.
But this was different. Somewhere along the line and without realizing it, he’d indeed become invested in protecting Stevie Rose. He said to Hexter, “Did Cuppy ask you about anything else? Any subject you weren’t expecting?”
The headmaster pumped a knee a few times. Waldo could tell they were veering toward another tough subject. “Drugs. Drugs on campus. He dug in on that.”
Waldo asked whether that was a particular problem at Stoddard. Hexter said it was an issue at every private school and talked about Stoddard’s zero-tolerance policy, which had led to seven expulsions during the current school year.
“What drugs were they expelled for?”
“Six for marijuana, one for cocaine.”
“How about Adderall?”
“Prescription drugs are a different issue, with their own challenges. Some parents are complicit, and some doctors.”
“Ever hear anything about Victor Ouelette selling Adderall to students?”
“What? No. Is Stevie Rose claiming that, too?”
“Cuppy didn’t ask about that?”
“Not about Adderall.”
It was too careful an answer. “But he asked if Ouelette was selling drugs?”
Hexter stood, discomfited. “I wish people would remember that Victor was the victim here.”
“Look, a case like this, there’s usually something going on in the victim’s life that people around him didn’t know about. I understand it’s a delicate time, but could you arrange for me to talk to more of the faculty? And I’d like Ouelette’s emergency contacts from your records, or any other family members you might know about.” Hexter nodded sadly, resigned to the continuing intrusion. Waldo said, “Anything else about Cuppy? Anything that surprised you?”
“He asked me about a number.”
“A number?”
“Seventy-nine. He asked if seventy-nine meant anything to me.”
“Did it?”
Hexter shook his head. They heard a hubbub coming from the outer office. Hexter said, “May I?” and they both went outside.
The staff was clustered around one assistant’s desk, staring at her computer, which Waldo saw was open to the neighborhood website Nextdoor. “Look,” one of them was saying, “there’s a link to KABC. Maybe they’re showing it.”
“What’s going on?” said Hexter.
“There’s a fire. I live near there. I got an alert.”
The link took them to aerial footage of what looked like a very large hillside house, one end of which was in flames. LIVE and SHERMAN OAKS filled the bottom of the screen next to the Channel 7 bug. There were at least three trucks in the shot and a couple dozen firemen trying to knock down the blaze.
Waldo said, “Is that close to here?”
“Not that close. But it’s a Stoddard family.”
Hexter said, “Dear God. Who?”
Waldo didn’t need to hear the answer.
He could smell it all the way up from Ventura Boulevard, acrid and metallic. He started coughing, dismounted his Brompton halfway up and walked the rest. The trucks were still there but the firemen on the street seemed unhurried. He said to one of them, “How’s it looking?”
“We think we got it all, but we’re still going through the house.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Looks like we’re good. Family got out quick.”
Waldo left his bike at the bottom of the driveway. One truck was parked at the top. The near side of the house looked intact, but the roof damage started only ten yards past the front door. Paula, in tears, came around from the back, Joel a step behind, both looking up, surveying the damage. Waldo said to them, “What happened?” Paula couldn’t speak. Joel answered with a lethal glance toward the glider where Waldo and Lorena had sat waiting for the ambulance the night before. Stevie rocked on it now, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the grass.
Joel put his arm around his wife and guided her away. Waldo went over to Stevie.
She was defiant, provocative. “It was an accident.”
“You didn’t go to school?”
“Paula and Joel said I could stay home today. After everything.”
“And . . . ?”
She recited it in a bratty singsong, oh so put upon at having to tell it again. “And I was smoking in bed, and I fell asleep for a minute. I thought I put it out, but I guess I didn’t.”
“What were you smoking?”
She answered by not answering.
His phone rang in his pocket and he took a look. Burner. It took a second to realize that had nothing to do with the blaze, that it was only the blind appellation Waldo had attached to the number that Q had called him from the other day. He pressed a button to forward it to voicemail.
Waldo stepped back to take in the damage. The house was so huge that they might even be able to live there during the reconstruction. An older fireman, probably the chief, was talking to Joel and Paula now, pointing to various sections of the roof. Paula was crying too much to pay attention, no doubt mourning irreplaceable mementos lost. She’d get past that more easily than she could imagine, Waldo knew from experience; people always think they need more Things than they really do. Joel seemed fixed on what the fire chief was saying, though he threw one or two glances Stevie’s way. Waldo wondered at the insurance implications of your fifteen-year-old burning down the family mansion with a careless doobie.
“I am so fucked,” Stevie said. “Paula was already talking about sending me away. After you left last night? That’s like all she did, look online at boarding schools for ‘problem girls.’ They probably think I did this on purpose, because I hate them or something.”
“Do you?”
Stevie studied her toenails. “Sometimes.”
Waldo wanted to get away from this quagmire, to get back to handling something easy, like a homicide with no clues.
“It’s perfect that I destroyed my own room, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I fucked everything else up. I wouldn’t know how to find my way back anymore if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Of course. But to what? My parents are so done with me.” It was the first time she hadn’t referred to them by their first names. “Look at them.” The fire chief was walking away from the Roses. Paula was running her hands down her face, Joel putting a hand on her shoulder, the pair a picture of utter defeat.
Stevie looked up at Waldo. “Can you talk to them for me?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell them I didn’t kill Mr. Ouelette. If it comes from you, maybe they’ll believe it. Could you do that for me, Waldo? Please?” There was no attitude, no posturing. She was just a girl, earnest and urgent and frightened. “Tell them I fucked him,” she said, “but I didn’t kill him.”