While a nurse finished the bandaging, his phone dinged with a text from Lorena. At Roses—meet me here.
A minute later it dinged again: If you take a fucking bus I’ll kill you.
Steadying the phone on his leg, he downloaded the Uber app one-handed. He declined the nurse’s offer of a sling: the compromise he’d made toward peace with Lorena still nettled him; his first sling was sitting on the floor beside her bed, and there was no way he was going to pretend two slings weren’t Things. Then he had a lengthy debate with the ER desk nurse in charge of billing, more contentious than the analogous one two nights before, about why he needed to keep all his insurance information in his head instead of carrying a card. After that they let him go, so he ordered a car and waited in front of the hospital.
The driver talked at him all the way to Sherman Oaks, half the time about the “Netflix-type pilot” he was writing about a vampire hit man who drove for Uber, half the time about how this Infiniti station wagon burned so much gas that the gig was barely worth it. Everything about the ride gave Waldo’s stomach a fresh turn.
He texted Lorena when they got off the 101 and she was waiting for him when the Uber let him off at the foot of the Roses’ driveway. She made eyes at his mummified left hand but he waved the question off with his right. “You first.”
“Gang’s all here,” she told him as they scaled the drive past the parked black-and-whites. “Joel, Stevie, Cuppy, your favorite lawyer. FIU’s still in there with the body.”
“What do we know?”
“Joel says he was working late on the show, came home, found Paula on the kitchen floor. Two shots at close range, no struggle, looks like they’re pulling a third slug out of the wall.”
“Where was Stevie?”
“In the kitchen, shooting her mother.” He lowered his chin, raised his brows and waited for a better answer. “She says, out in the pool house. Earbuds, Florence and the Machine. Didn’t hear a peep.”
“Where is she now?”
“Back in the pool house. Cop stationed outside, making sure she doesn’t run.”
“Where’s Joel?”
“In his study with Davis. Cuppy wanted to do residue tests on both him and Stevie but Davis jammed him—she said not without an arrest, and Cuppy can’t decide yet which Rose he likes better.”
“What about Fido?”
“Double homicide.”
“Shot?”
“Poisoned. Antifreeze in the doggy dish out back.”
He started inside but she stepped in front of him.
“What’s with the hand?”
He recounted his whole O.C. trip, from Wax’s brush-off through the Wonderland bathtub. As soon as he said the name Tesoro he could feel the heat rise; for her this was picking up where the Mariana story left off.
“I’m going to cut his fucking hands off.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You think I’m kidding.” She was edging back in the red zone again.
“Well, you may not even have to fight traffic.” He told her about Tesoro’s translated threat to come looking for her. She rolled her eyes. He told her to take it seriously. Whether or not the pimp was bluffing about having her plate, the cops knew who Waldo was, so Tesoro could probably find out, too, through Amador through Wax, and the step from Waldo to Lorena wasn’t a big one. In any event, Don Q had been right: Tesoro was an adult dose, and she needed to be careful.
Lorena said, “Bring it. I’ll cut his balls off, too,” and headed inside.
A cocktail party’s worth of uniforms and plainclothes filled the big house. Waldo recognized half of them. The guest of honor herself was slumped against one of the twin Sub-Zero refrigerators, her blood seeping into grout between the mosaic of gray and white tiles. The Field Investigation guys were still at work, photographing, measuring, taking samples. Most everyone ignored Waldo and Lorena, but a couple made a point of stopping their work to eye-fuck him. Around LAPD, he’d get that forever.
“Hey, hey, hey!” barked Cuppy when he saw them. “Out! You can sit in the office with the lawyer, but out of the kitchen!”
He pointed in one direction but Fontella Davis appeared from the other. “I’m right here.” Off Cuppy’s confusion, she said, “I was in the pool house with Stevie. She’ll only talk to you,” she said to Waldo. “Alone.”
He went out through the glass doors, feeling Lorena’s eyes drill holes in his neck.
Stevie was on the daybed, wrapped in an afghan, makeup running, a box of Kleenex at hand and a dozen crumpled tissues at her feet. She looked up at Waldo and said through sniffles, “I didn’t know if you’d even talk to me.”
He turned one of the club chairs to face her and sat, keeping the length of the room between them. “Because you told Lorena I put a move on you?” Stevie nodded. “Why’d you do that?”
“Is she here?”
“Uh-huh. In the house.”
“She thinks I killed my mother, doesn’t she. She hates me. Plus you can tell she thinks she’s really hot. I bet she’s already dying her hair.”
“What can you tell me about tonight?”
“I didn’t do it. I have an alibi.”
“You might not want to phrase it that way. You told them you were out here all night?”
“I was out here all night. But I wasn’t alone. I have this friend, Dionne?”
“Dionne was here with you?”
Stevie shook her head. “Her boyfriend, Conor.” Naturally. Stevie stopped crying, anyway, distracted by her own story. “He came in and out through the side gate, by the garbage cans, so no one would see him? He left, like, two minutes before the police got here. Promise you won’t tell anyone. It would be, like, nuclear for the whole school. I’m only telling you because it’s important you believe me.”
“Other people need to believe you, too.”
“If you believe me, I know you can fix it with them.” He got her to tell him that the boy’s last name was Jacoby and that he was a junior at their school. “But,” she said, “we kind of had a fight?”
“What about?”
“He said he should get at least a blow job—you know, if he was, like, cheating on Dionne and everything? I didn’t like his attitude—I mean, she’s my best friend. So I said if that’s how he felt, he could leave, and he did.” Somewhere in there was an ethical stance in which Stevie seemed to take pride, but Waldo decided not to try to tease it out. “You have to promise not to tell anyone. Especially Lorena.”
“Why not Lorena?”
“She’ll burn me with Dionne. You know she will.”
He promised to keep her secret, knowing it wouldn’t last the drive home.
A remark of Alastair Pinch’s on the last case flitted across his mind: that it tells everything about how people really feel about marriage that the first suspect is always the husband. It made him wonder what Paula and Joel’s carefully rehearsed story might have been built to hide. He said to Stevie, “Tell me about your dad. Does he have a temper?”
“Joel?”
“Yeah. Ever see him get angry at your mom?”
Stevie snorted. “Not hardly. Joel’s a wuss. Like, totally pussy whipped. I swear, it’s painful to watch.”
“I heard he got pretty crazy at Thanksgiving. Something about the election and a knife?”
“Uh, no? That was Uncle Roy.”
“Roy was waving the knife around?”
“Yup. Uncle Roy was so obnoxious, because he was, like, Mr. Total Trump Fan? And Paula and Joel were already flipped out about Hillary—so they started getting on Uncle Roy’s ass about how his factories are all full of illegals and how they were going to go to what’s her name, that annoying lady they’re always watching on MSNBC? And Uncle Roy was holding the knife for the turkey, you know? And he started yelling at them to go ahead and see how that works out for them.”
“You’re sure that’s how it went. Because I heard it a different way.”
“Uh, I was, like, there? Uncle Roy is always way aggressive. One Thanksgiving? Aunt Brenda had on these big sunglasses and she kept them on, like, the whole day. She told us she had pinkeye but my mom said . . .” Stevie stopped and let out a moan of suddenly recalled grief, then broke down completely and wept. Whatever was underneath, it didn’t seem like an act.
Stevie lay on her side and pulled the blanket over her head, disconsolate and probably embarrassed. She seemed her age for a change, or even younger. Eventually her sobs tapered to sniffles. Waldo said, “You going to be okay?” He wasn’t going to leave her alone out here until he was sure she could handle it.
“I could use a hug.” She was still buried under the covers.
“Maybe you could get a good one from your dad.”
It was a while before she said, softly, “He thinks I did it.” The weight of that hung over them both for another while before she sat up, looked at him and said, “Please, Waldo?”
He went over to the bed and sat beside her. She shed the blanket and threw her arms around his neck. He was struck by how little there was of her under her T-shirt, all bones and angles. He recalled that first dinner, her barely touched salad. This girl’s problems had no beginning and no end, and now she was down to one clueless, hapless parent to help her find her way through.
In his arms, her breathing settled and quieted. Waldo wondered if she was falling asleep. He knew he needed to hold on to objectivity, but man did he hope this wouldn’t all end with him figuring out that this girl had murdered her teacher, let alone her mother.
Stevie said to him, softly, “I don’t . . .” and trailed off.
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t like boys my age.”
Waldo let go of her and stood. He stepped back from the bed. “You know, until things settle down, you might want to take a break from any boys.” Or better, he thought, give them a break from you.
She looked up at him with the glittering eyes that once upon a time must have sirened Victor Ouelette to her door in his swim trunks. “Be honest, Waldo: if you could be sure nobody would ever find out . . . isn’t there anything you’d like to do with me?”
Waldo thought about it, seriously thought about it, and had to nod. “Yeah.” Before she could say, I knew it, he said, “Buy you a cheeseburger.”
“What a bucket of crap.” Lorena was taking the canyon way too fast again.
“Which part? That this Conor kid came over?”
“No. That she was messing with her BFF’s boyfriend? That, I believe. That she didn’t blow him? Bullshit.”
He was reminded again that this game—kicking the case around with Lorena, detective to detective—wasn’t going to get him anywhere closer to solving it. She had always been a more than competent PI, but her Stevie derangement syndrome wouldn’t let her see anything clearly. He told her about the rest of the pool house conversation, up to but not including the hug. He also told her that he believed Stevie’s grief was genuine, but even that was another trigger.
“Who do you think killed Paula?” she snapped. “Joel? Because I don’t see that.”
“I’d like to know what Roy Wax was doing tonight.” He knew he was swinging wildly but felt he had to throw out a name.
“Roy Wax? Why? Because he got really, really mad when Paula accused him of hiring illegals—last Thanksgiving? You’re doing it again, trying to protect Stevie.” Was he? His ability to resist the girl sexually didn’t mean she wasn’t putting some kind of voodoo on him. Lorena said, “At least check out her fucking alibi before you swallow it.”
She was right. He said, “Okay. Tomorrow.”
But it wasn’t enough. “Every step of this, you’ve been protecting this girl. Why don’t you protect Mariana?”
“Mariana? What does—? We protected Mariana. How could we have done any more to—? Why even bring her up?”
But Lorena shut down. Like she had already taken something too far.
“What?” said Waldo. “What aren’t you saying?”
She didn’t answer, all the way down the canyon, all the rest of the way to her house.
When she put the car in park, though, and killed the engine, she didn’t dash into the house the way he expected her to. She sat behind the wheel for a long while. He waited her out.
Finally: “I told you about after my father, right?”
“Not a lot.”
“But my aunt . . .”
“Who raised you? His sister?”
“Yeah.” She studied a cuticle in the weak glow of the garage opener. “There were two of us.”
Waldo kept very still, hanging on the rest.
“I had a sister. Sofia. She was born; she didn’t die with my mother.” It flew in the face of everything she’d ever told him and for a minute he had trouble accepting it as true. “Around when I finished high school my aunt got married again. I was eighteen, and with the husband—the house felt small, you know? So I moved out. A year or two later . . .” She had trouble saying it. “I was into myself . . . I had school, and a room in a house with some people, and there were boys . . . and Sofia was twelve, thirteen . . . I wasn’t paying her a lot of attention . . . and all of a sudden . . . she was gone.”
Waldo watched her carefully, waiting to see if that meant what it sounded like.
“Looking back, I don’t know, maybe this new ‘uncle’ was doing stuff to her. Whatever it was . . . she disappeared, and nobody ever heard from her again.
“So the thing is, whenever I see a girl like Mariana . . .” She stopped a tear with a fingertip before it had a chance to happen. “Every time.”
“Jesus.”
She looked at him. “You understand what I’m telling you?”
He took a deep breath and said, “Yeah. That there’s a difference between Stevie Rose and girls with real problems.”
He reached for her hand but she pulled it away and looked him in the eye without warmth or communion.
“No, Waldo. I’m telling you, a lot of people have real bad things to get past.” The garage opener light clicked off, leaving them in the dark. Slow and hard, she said, “But not everyone lets it turn them batshit.”