I stopped at Fairfax with the green light to let a man make a left turn. Horns blew violently behind. When I started again the car that had been right behind swung out and pulled level and a fat guy in a sweatshirt yelled: “Aw go get yourself a hammock!”
He went on, cutting in so hard that I had to brake.
“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”
We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.
“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bawled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.”
“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”
“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood —and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.”
“You are bitter tonight, amigo.”
“I’ve got a few troubles. The only reason I’m driving this car with you beside me is that I’ve got so much trouble a little more will seem like icing.”
“You have done something wrong?” she asked and came close to me along the seat.
“Well, just collecting a few bodies,” I said. “Depends on the point of view. The cops don’t like the work done by us amateurs. They have their own service.”
“What will they do to you?”
“They might run me out of town and I couldn’t care less. Don’t push me so hard. I need this arm to shift gears with.”
She pulled away in a huff. “I think you are very nasty to get along with,” she said. “Turn right at the Lost Canyon Road.”
After a while we passed the University. All the lights of the city were on now, a vast carpet of them stretching down the slope to the south and on into the almost infinite distance. A plane droned overhead losing altitude, its two signal lights winking on and off alternately. At Lost Canyon I swung right skirting the big gates that led into Bel-Air. The road began to twist and climb. There were too many cars; the headlights glared angrily down the twisting white concrete. A little breeze blew down over the pass. There was the odor of wild sage, the acrid tang of eucalyptus, and the quiet smell of dust. Windows glowed on the hillside. We passed a big white two storied Monterey house that must have cost $70,000 and had a cut-out illuminated sign in front: “Cairn Terriers.”
“The next to the right,” Dolores said.
I made the turn. The road got steeper and narrower. There were houses behind walls and masses of shrubbery but you couldn’t see anything. Then we came to the fork and there was a police car with a red spotlight parked at it and across the right side of the fork two cars parked at right angles. A torch waved up and down. I slowed the car and stopped level with the police car. Two cops sat in it smoking. They didn’t move.
“What goes on?”
“Amigo, I have no idea at all.” Her voice had a hushed withdrawn sound. She might have been a little scared. I didn’t know what of.
A tall man, the one with the torch, came around the side of the car and poked the flash at me, then lowered it.
“We’re not using this road tonight,” he said. “Going anywhere in particular?”
I set the brake, reached for a flash which Dolores got out of the glove compartment. I snapped the light on to the tall man. He wore expensive-looking slacks, a sport shirt with initials on the pocket and a polka-dot scarf knotted around his neck. He had horn-rimmed glasses and glossy wavy black hair. He looked as Hollywood as all hell.
I said: “Any explanation—or are you just making law?”
“The law is over there, if you want to talk to them.” His voice held a tone of contempt. “We are merely private citizens. We live around here. This is a residential neighborhood. We mean to keep it that way.”
A man with a sporting gun came out of the shadows and stood beside the tall man. He held the gun in the crook of his left arm, pointed muzzle down. But he didn’t look as if he just had it for ballast.
“That’s jake with me,” I said. “I didn’t have any other plans. We just want to go to a place.”
“What place?” the tall man asked coolly.
I turned to Dolores. “What place?”
“It is a white house on the hill, high up,” she said.
“And what did you plan to do up there?” the tall man asked.
