There were no police cruisers at the Roses’ house now, no fire engines, no pricey attack dogs, no pricey attack lawyers, just a man looking more like the senior citizen he was. Waldo said, “Anyone else here?”
“Only me,” said Joel. “Stevie’s in the guesthouse.”
“Nobody watching her anymore?” Joel shook his head. “I need to talk to her again.”
“The kitchen is still . . .” Joel choked on the rest of the thought. “There are special cleaning people coming.” He led Waldo out to the pool and asked him to swing by his study when he was finished with Stevie.
Waldo saw her through the locked glass door, huddled under a blanket on the daybed with her computer and earbuds. He rapped on the door, had to bang harder to get her attention. Under the blanket, she was wearing jeans, a hooded sweatshirt and a woolen beanie, explained by the Siberian Freon blast when she slid open the glass.
Waldo said, “I talked to Conor Jacoby.”
“I told you that was a secret!”
“He said he wasn’t here last night.”
She went back to her bed and her computer. “Not my problem.”
He pushed her laptop closed.
“What the—?”
“Every time I stand up for you, you make me look like a sucker.”
“Yeah, Waldo. Make this all about you.” The stream of venom he’d seen her turn on others was starting to gurgle in his direction. “Was it your mother who got killed? I don’t think so, Wal-do.” She said his name with an ugly, mocking English.
“Tell me what really happened last night.”
“What—you think I killed my own mother?”
“The police do. They were ready to arrest you until I stopped them by telling them about Conor.”
“You told the police about Conor? Oh. My. God!”
“If I didn’t, you’d be in lockup right now.”
“And of course you believe Conor, not me.”
“I completely believe Conor, not you.”
She huffed through her nose and stared lightning at him. Then she said, “I had to lie,” with a choler that gave Waldo a Paula Rose tingle.
“Why did you have to lie?”
“Because I was out here by myself. I had no proof of anything. And everybody already thinks I killed Mr. Ouelette.”
“Look, if you didn’t do anything, you . . . cannot . . . tell . . . lies.”
“You’re such a piece of shit, you know that? You act like you’re my friend—”
“I’m not your friend. I’m a hired detective—”
“What you are is a total fucker. A fucker and a freak. Why don’t you go take a shower for a change? Jesus Christ. How does your girlfriend even stand it, touching you? And when’s the last time you got a haircut? God! You’re like this nasty-ass cross between a werewolf and a . . . I don’t know, like a warthog—”
“Okay,” he said, trying to steer it back to the productive. “The point is, you can’t lie anymore—”
She went volcanic. “Everybody lies! You lie! All you do is lie!”
“When did I lie?”
“When you said you’d keep my secret!”
“About Conor? That secret wasn’t even true!”
“It was a test! And you failed! And it’s exactly why I can’t tell the truth! Everybody lies to me, they say they’re not going to repeat things, but they do! And then they end up getting killed! You know what, Waldo? I hope somebody shoots you in the head, too. I hope you get killed, on your own kitchen floor, and then you can feel all good about repeating everything I said to you in confidence!”
With another poison stare, she put in her earbuds, reopened her computer, and left the room without going anywhere.
Waldo retreated to the main house and found Joel in his study. There was some kind of teen bacchanal playing on an oversize screen, Joel watching but not really watching. His sofa had a pillow and mussed bedding on it. Waldo said, “Are you sleeping in here now?”
The question dragged Joel slowly out of his catatonia. At length he shut off the television and said, “There’s hardly any house left we can use.”
Waldo said, “The police are probably going to charge Stevie.”
“With both?”
Waldo nodded.
Joel said, “Will you stay with us? On the case?”
“If that’s what you want.” Waldo was speaking for himself. He and Lorena could relitigate her involvement later.
“I do. I want you to find out the truth, even if it is Stevie. And I want to hear it from you personally, because I don’t trust the police in this country to handle it honestly. Jesus, watch the news.” Waldo didn’t need to, of course; he’d been on it enough himself.
He put Joel through all the obvious new queries about his daughter: where she might have gotten the gun, whether she had any bad-element acquaintances. Each question he couldn’t answer made the producer seem smaller in his chair, adrift, inadequate. Finally he held up a hand to stop Waldo from asking anything else. He blew his nose again. “This is what happens when you have a midlife-crisis baby. I’m twenty years too old for this.”
“No one’s the right age for this.”
“It’s what I get, right? For leaving my first family. Sixty-five years old, living in a half-gutted house with a teenage daughter I’m afraid to be alone with.”
Waldo biked over to the Shapiros’ to ask Dionne whether she knew anyone who had access to a gun. She didn’t.
Dionne had a question for Waldo too: “Did Stevie kill her mom and Mr. Ouelette?”
“I don’t know yet. What do you think?”
Stevie’s best friend forever said she didn’t care; she was done with her. From where Dionne Shapiro sat, the lies Stevie told about Dionne’s boyfriend were also a capital offense.
Waldo rolled down to the boulevard and found an empty bus stop kiosk with a bench where he could at least get some late-afternoon shade while he made two unpleasant phone calls. First he gave Fontella Davis the heads-up on Stevie’s imminent arrest so that she could try to orchestrate it in the least damaging and humiliating way. She thanked him before hanging up, an uncharacteristically gracious fillip.
Next Waldo had to swallow his teaspoon of shit and call Cuppy. It was well over six hours, plus he hadn’t been checking in the way Cuppy had instructed. Now he’d have to tell him he’d whiffed on the alibi, too.
“About time,” said Cuppy.
“Yeah, see—”
“Man of the hour. Your lead checked out.”
Waldo was nonplussed.
“Amador. Guess what we found at his house.”
Waldo said, “Seventy-nine?”
“Winner winner chicken dinner. Ever meet this beanie baby? With the ink? We’re pulling that shit out of his house, and guns, and coke—Teardrop keeps going, I’m only a bus driver. Conductor de autobús. Says he drives ‘guest workers.’ Love that. And who do you think owns the factory where he chauffeurs all those undocumented citizenitas?”
“Stevie Rose’s uncle?”
“That a guess, or did you know?” Before Waldo could answer, Cuppy said, “So I ran this Uncle Roy Wax through the California gun registry, and guess who owns a cute little Walther forty-caliber? Keeps it in his walk-in, behind the cummerbunds.” He sounded wired, on an adrenaline rush at least.
“So what—you like Wax for both of them now?”
“More than like him. I just put Richie Rich in the car.”
“Where are you?”
“Newport Beach. Ten minutes I’ll have him on the freeway.”
“You couldn’t have run the gun yet.”
“Bringing it up with me. Lab’s working late tonight.”
Waldo was astonished that Cuppy would make an arrest, especially on a heavyweight like Wax, before getting an affirmative match tying his Walther to the two killings. “You got balls.”
“Didn’t have a choice. You should’ve seen Tanaka this morning, after she saw me with you. I’m fucked, Waldo—my only play left was shoot the moon. But if the gun matches? I clear the deuce and I’m golden. Bitch can’t touch me; I’ll be there longer than her.” It was insane, but not: Wax, through Amador, was the only tie between Ouelette and Paula Rose other than Stevie, and Wax’s forty—a slightly unusual caliber, too—could close the deal.
Waldo said, “Still. You’re going to catch hell, holding this guy.”
“Like I’m not catching it every day already? Anyway, if I didn’t take him now, the fucker’d be halfway to Fiji. You should see the bucket he’s got tied to his dock.” Waldo had, of course. “And you know Tanaka would nail that to my ass, too.”
“How about motive?”
“TBD on Ouelette. But Santa Ana PD brought in Amador; we’ll flip him and figure it out. The sister-in-law I think I know. There was a phone call—that’s the other thing I got.”
“What phone call?”
“Rose house to Wax house, landline to landline, afternoon she got shot. Here’s how I like it: your baby girl heard there was seventy-nine at Ouelette’s and told Mama Bear how deep Uncle Wax was; Mama Bear picked up the phone, called him on it; Uncle Wax came up and killed Mama Bear to cover up the first murder.” It was all a little loose, but of course that was Cuppy the cop; that plus shakedowns. Well, he’d live or die on the ballistics match.
Waldo never would have played it that way. Cuppy probably wouldn’t have, either, if Pam Tanaka hadn’t driven him desperate. Now it would land on her, too, either way: she and Cuppy would both look brilliant, or they’d both pay for it.
Waldo didn’t want the girl dragged in any deeper, so he held back from Cuppy one more thing he knew. Everybody lies to me, Stevie had said to Waldo. They say they’re not going to repeat things, but they do! And then they end up getting killed!
Jim Cuppy wasn’t the only one who thought Paula Rose had gotten killed for challenging Roy Wax. Stevie Rose thought so, too.
He rode toward the setting sun without a plan, under the 405 and out to Encino. The pain was mounting again but he didn’t want to stop moving. When he got to Hayvenhurst he thought of the park to the north: Lake Balboa, concrete rim, reclaimed water reeking of chemicals. The place used to repel him but now it was calling to him; in its unnaturalness, its innate, ineffable wrongness, it felt somehow like this resolution, like this whole stinking case.
He wheeled into the park and took easy counterclockwise turns around the lake while he took inventory of his discontent.
If Cuppy was right about Roy Wax, Waldo should be glad, sort of, for Joel Rose. Paula’s murder was horrible, but the alternative explanation and aftermath would be so much worse.
Ditto for Stevie, in spades.
And Waldo himself should be more pleased than he was feeling. Case closed, troubled teen exonerated, venal businessman implicated.
On the other hand . . . he hadn’t solved it himself. Cuppy, of all people, had beaten him to it. Big Jim Cuppy—talk about venal, for God’s sake.
Far worse, if Waldo had been able to crack it, and just a couple of days faster, Paula Rose would still be alive. Joel Rose wouldn’t be a widower. And Stevie Rose wouldn’t have lost her mother, just at the point in her life—much as Stevie would loathe hearing it—that she needed her most.
And then there was Lorena. The case had broken them.
There was nothing left for Waldo but to go home. He’d find a hotel for the night, set out in the morning for his cabin on the mountain. All the Things he’d brought down from Idyllwild were already in his backpack; he’d packed them before he left Lorena’s house this morning. On some level he’d already known.
The sun was starting to drop and Waldo was getting tired. The pain in his hand was growing unbearable. He saw a copse that reminded him, in a very small way, of his woods, and decided it would be a good place to pop a Percocet and recharge before they closed the park. He lowered his bike to the grass and shrugged off his backpack. He texted Lorena, saying that he wouldn’t be home tonight.
He rested his head on the backpack, closed his eyes and tried to let the evening breeze console him. Lorena wasn’t answering his text. It occurred to him that she should know Cuppy had arrested Wax on both murders, so he sent her another message.
She didn’t answer that one, either.