families watch uneasily as yuppies build three-story glass-and-steel lofts.
This anthology also conjures up fictional landmarks straight out of our collective unconsciousness. When Emory Holmes II describes the Chateau Rouge, a ten-story black marble curvilinear structure on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard built by L.A. architect Paul Williams that “looked like a fat stack of bop records ready to be played,” we think,
But then, Los Angeles has never been defined by physical geography-it’s a grab bag of ethnic clusters, neighborhoods, communities, subcultures. A state of mind. Lienna Silver’s world of Russian immigrants who carry memories of their homeland like a snail’s shell and Christopher Rice’s tale of two young gay men nearing the end of a relationship might take place on different planets instead of four miles apart. And Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, San Marino, Commerce, and Belmont Shores aren’t even in L.A. proper, but they’re part of the recombinant DNA that is helping Los Angeles evolve into something so new we can’t even imagine what it will look like five years from now.
What we can be sure of is that it will remain a funhouse mirror reflecting back into infinity, and that we’ll glimpse bits that look frighteningly familiar. Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes wouldn’t recognize the Chinatown of Jim Pascoe’s story-whose tiny crooked alleys now house hipster bars and art galleries-but he’d sense the same edgy despair. Diana Wagman captures the eerie dislocation of Westchester, a 1950s model suburb under the shadow of LAX airport where body parts might rain from the sky. The detective in Hector Tobar’s story is obsessed with the damage done by kids with guns. Soon after Tobar turned in his story, a fourteen-year-old boy in L.A. shot and killed an eleven-year-old over a bike.
Tobar’s story is set in working-class East Hollywood and his Armenianand Mexican-American detective duo reminisce about the moldering movie star photos of famous alums at their alma mater, Hollywood High. When the authors in this collection write about The Industry, they refract it through an oblique angle-Janet Fitch’s ’70s actress hiding away in a decaying Los Feliz mansion; Scott Phillips’s sexy Valley cocktail waitress whose claim to fame lies in the title, “The Girl Who Kissed Barnaby Jones”; Morrison’s security chief for the studios who quashed the story about the producer bludgeoned by his own jewel-encrusted dildo.
These are stories that begin after the tourists go home and the klieg lights turn off. It’s the city examining itself through a gritty, glamorous, tawdry, and desperate lens and finding grifters, gamblers, newly arrived immigrants, thirdgeneration bluebloods, confused kids, millionaires, has-been actors, murderers, meth addicts, and traitors of the heart.
It’s impossible to distill L.A. into one noir story. That’s why we’ve brought you seventeen.
PART I.
MULHOLLAND DIVEBY MICHAEL CONNELLY
Burning flares and flashing red and blue lights ripped the night apart. Clewiston counted four black-and-whites pulled halfway off the roadway and as close to the upper embankment as was possible. In front of them was a firetruck and in front of that was a forensics van. There was a P-one standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that they had open. With a fatality involved, they should have closed down both lanes of the road, but that would have meant closing Mulholland from Laurel Canyon on one side all the way to Coldwater Canyon on the other. That was too long a stretch. There would be consequences for that. The huge inconvenience of it would have brought complaints from the rich hillside homeowners trying to get home after another night of the good life. And nobody stuck on midnight shift wanted more complaints to deal with.
Clewiston had worked Mulholland fatals several times. He was the expert. He was the one they called in from home. He knew that whether the identity of the victim in this case demanded it or not, he’d have gotten the call. It was Mulholland, and the Mulholland calls all went to him.
But this one was special anyway. The victim was a name and the case was going five-by-five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right. He had been thoroughly briefed over the phone by the watch commander about that.
He pulled in behind the last patrol car, put his flashers on, and got out of his unmarked car. On the way back to the trunk, he grabbed his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civies, having been called in from offduty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced he was a detective.
He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-one left his post in the road and walked over.
“Where’s the sergeant?” Clewiston asked.
“Up there. I think they’re about to pull the car up. That’s a hundred thousand dollars he went over the side with. Who are you?”
“Detective Clewiston. The reconstructionist. Sergeant Fairbanks is expecting me.”
“Go on down and you’ll find him by the-Whoa, what is that?”
Clewiston saw him looking at the face peering up from the trunk. The crash test dummy was partially hidden by all the equipment cluttering the trunk, but the face was clear and staring blankly up at them. His legs had been detached and were resting beneath the torso. It was the only way to fit the whole thing in the trunk.
“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”
“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”
Clewiston had to think about that to remember.
“Last time I used Arty, it was a crosswalk hit-and-run case. The vic was a marine up from El Toro. He was in his fatigues and there was a question about whether the hitter saw him.” Clewiston slung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder. “He did. Thanks to Arty we made a case.”
He took his clipboard out of the trunk and then a digital camera, his trusty measuring wheel, and an eight- battery Maglite. He closed the trunk and made sure it was locked.
“I’m going to head down and get this over with,” he said. “I got called in from home.”
“Yeah, I guess the faster you’re done, the faster I can get back out on the road myself. Pretty boring just standing here.”
“I know what you mean.”
Clewiston headed down the westbound lane, which had been closed to traffic. There was a mist clinging in the dark to the tall brush that crowded the sides of the street. But he could still see the lights and glow of the city down to the south. The accident had occurred in one of the few spots along Mulholland where there were no homes. He knew that on the south side of the road the embankment dropped down to a public dog park. On the north side was Fryman Canyon and the embankment rose up to a point where one of the city’s communication stations was located. There was a tower up there on the point that helped bounce communication signals over the mountains that cut the city in half.
Mulholland was literally the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the west side and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look.
