2
Ocean Heights adheres to the west end of Pacific Palisades, awkward as a pimple on a cover girl’s chin.
Conceived by an aerospace corporation as a housing tract for the hordes of engineers and technicians imported to Southern California during the post-sputnik boom, the district was created by bulldozing lime groves, landfilling canyons, and performing radical surgery on a few mountaintops. What emerged was a slice of Disneyana: a “planned community” of flat, wide, magnolia-lined streets, perfect square sod lawns, single-story ranch houses on quarter-acre lots, and small-print deed covenants prohibiting “architectural and landscaping deviance.”
The corporation is long gone, vanquished by poor management. Had it leased the houses instead of selling them, it might still be in business, because L.A. land-grab mania has pushed Ocean Heights prices into the high six- figure mark and the tract has emerged as an upper-middle-class refuge for those craving salt air seasoned with Norman Rockwell. Ocean Heights disapproves of the untrimmed, septic-tank-and-home-grown-dope ambience of neighboring Topanga, glares down like a dowager aunt upon the beach-blanket licentiousness of Malibu. But the view from the bluffs is often hazy. Fog, like complacency, seems to settle in and stay.
Milo ’s directions were precise, and even in the rain the drive went quickly- a spurt down Sunset, a turn onto a side street I’d never noticed before, three miles along a glassy canyon road that had a reputation for eating joyriders. A year of drought had ended with a week’s worth of unseasonal autumn downpour, and the Santa Monica mountains had greened as quickly as home-grown radishes. The roadside was a tangle of creeper and vine, wildflower and weed- a boastful profusion. Nature making up for lost time.
The entrance to Ocean Heights was marked by the death of that boast: a newly surfaced avenue bisected by a median of grass and shaded by magnolias so precisely matched in contour and size they could have been cloned from the same germ cell. The street sign said ESPERANZA DRIVE. Beneath it was another sign: white, blue- bordered, discreet, proclaiming Ocean Heights a guarded community.
The rain took on power and spattered against my windshield. A half mile later the police command post came into view: sawhorse barriers blocking the street, a domino spread of black-and-white squad cars, a battalion of yellow-slickered policemen projecting the guilty-till-proven-innocent demeanor of Iron Curtain border guards. Something else fed the checkpoint image: a group of about a dozen women, all Hispanic, all soaked and distraught, trying to cross the barriers, meeting stoic resistance from the cops. Other than that, the street was empty, shutters drawn on diamond-paned windows, color-coordinated panel doors dead-bolted, the sole movement the shudder of flowers and shrubs beneath the watery onslaught.
I parked and got out. The downpour hit me like a cold shower as I made my way toward the barricade.
I heard a woman cry out,
“Just a short while longer, ladies,” said a baby-faced cop, struggling to appear unmoved.
One of the women called out something in Spanish. Her tone was abusive. The young cop flinched and looked over at the officer next to him- older, thickset, gray-mustached. Catatonic-still.
The young cop turned back to the women. “Just hold on now,” he said, suddenly angry.
Gray Mustache still hadn’t moved but his eyes had settled on me as I approached. A third cop said, “Man coming up.”
When I was within spitting distance, Gray Mustache gave a straight-arm salute, showing me the lines on his palm. Up close, his face was wet and puffy, laced with veins, and chafed the color of rare steak.
“No further, sir.”
“I’m here to see Detective Sturgis.”
The mention of Milo ’s name narrowed his eyes. He looked me up and down.
“Name.”
“Alex Delaware.”
He cocked his head at one of the other patrolmen, who came over and stood guard at the barrier. Then he went to one of the black-and-whites, got in, and talked into the radio. A few minutes later he came back, asked to see some ID, scrutinized my driver’s license, and stared at me a while longer before saying “Go ahead.”
I got back into the Seville and pulled forward. Two cops had cleared a car-sized space between the sawhorses. The Hispanic women surged toward it, automatically, like water down a drain, but were stopped by a shifting line of blue. Some of the women began to cry.
Gray Mustache was waving me through. I pulled up alongside of him, opened my window, and said, “Any reason they can’t go see their children?”
“Go ahead, sir.”
I drove on, braving a gantlet of accusing eyes.
Nathan Hale Elementary School was eight more blocks up Esperanza- a blacktop and flesh-stucco flashback to the images I’d just seen on the tube. Three empty school buses were parked at the curb, along with paramedics’ vans and a few straggling press vehicles. The main building was sprawling and gray-roofed, skirted by a waist-high hedge of podocarpus. The front door was pumpkin-orange. Two cops guarded it from behind a cordon of yellow crime-scene tape. More palm-salutes, dirty looks, and radio checks before the chain-link gate to the school grounds was unlocked and I was directed around to the back.
As I made my way I noticed another tape cordon, wrapped around a small shedlike structure with wire-mesh windows, about seventy feet from the main building. Over the door was a sign: EQUIPMENT. Crime-scene techs kneeled and stooped, measuring, scraping, snapping pictures, getting drenched for their efforts. Beyond them the rain-blackened schoolyard stretched like scorched desert, vacant except for the distant galvanized geometry of a jungle gym. A single female reporter in a red raincoat shared her umbrella with a tall young officer. What was passing between them seemed more flirtation than information transfer. They paused as I walked by just long enough to decide I was neither newsworthy nor dangerous.
The back doors were tinted double-glass above three concrete steps. They swung open and Milo stepped out, wearing a quilted olive-drab car coat over the plaid sport jacket. All those layers- and the weight he’d put on substituting food for booze- made him look huge, bearish. He didn’t notice me, was staring at the ground, running his hands over his lumpy face as if washing without water. His head was bare, his black hair dripping and limp. His expression said
I said, “Hello,” and he looked up sharply, as if rudely awakened. Then his green eyes switched on like traffic lights and he came down the stairs. The car coat had large wooden barrel-shaped buttons dangling from loops. They bobbed as he moved. His tie was gray rayon, water-spotted-black. It hung askew over his belly.
I offered him my umbrella. It didn’t cover much of him. “Any problems getting through?”
“No,” I said, “but a bunch of mothers are having a problem. You guys could use some sensitivity training. Consider that my initial consultation.”
The anger in my voice surprised both of us. He frowned, his pale face deathly in the shade of the umbrella, the pockmarks on his cheeks standing out like pinholes in paper.
He looked around, spotted the cop chatting up the reporter, and waved. When the cop didn’t respond, he cursed and lumbered away, shoulders hunched, like an offensive tackle moving in for the crush.
A moment later the patrolman was sprinting out of the yard, flushed and chastened.
Milo returned, panting. “Done. The mommies are on their way, police escort and all.”
“The perquisites of power.”
“Yeah. Just call me Generalissimo.”
We began walking back toward the building.
“How many kids are involved?” I said.
“Couple of hundred, kindergarten through sixth grade. We had them all in the gym, paramedics checking for shock or injuries- thank God, nothing. The teachers took them back to their classrooms, trying to do what they can until you give them a plan.”
“I thought the school system had people to deal with crises.”
“According to the principal, this particular school has trouble getting help from the school system. Naturally, I
