Nichols veered to the right. The straightaway turned into Jalmia Drive and compressed to a single lane, darkened even further under a canopy of trees. The road lurched, dipped, finally dead-ended without warning at a bamboo-walled cul-de-sac slotted with several steep driveways. The one I was looking for was marked by a white mailbox on a stake and a white lattice gate that sagged on its posts.
I pulled to the side, parked, cut the engine, and got out. Cool air. Night sounds. The gate was unlocked and flimsy, no more of a barrier than it had been years ago. Lifting it to avoid scraping the cement, I looked around, saw no one. Swung the gate open and passed through. Closing it behind me, I began climbing.
On both sides of the driveway were plantings of fan palm, bird of paradise, yucca, and giant banana. Classic fifties California landscaping. Nothing had changed.
I climbed on, unmolested, surprised at the absence of any kind of police presence. Officially, the L.A.P.D. treated suicides as if they were homicides, and the departmental bureaucracy moved slothfully. This soon after the death, the file would certainly be open, the paperwork barely begun.
There should have been warning posters, a crime-scene cordon, some kind of marker.
Nothing.
Then I heard a burst of ignition and the rumble of a high-performance car engine. Louder. I ducked behind one of the palms and pressed myself into the vegetation.
A white Porsche Carrera appeared from around the top of the drive and rolled slowly down in low gear with its headlights off. The car passed within inches, and I made out the face of the driver: hatchet- shaped, fortyish, with slit eyes and oddly mottled skin. A wide black mustache spread above thin lips, forming a stark contrast with blow-dried snow-white hair and thick white eyebrows.
Not a face easily forgotten.
Cyril Trapp.
For the past year Trapp had done his best to wear down Milo- a gay cop was as irregular as they come. Closed-minded but not stupid, he went about his persecution with subtlety, avoiding deliberate gay- bashing. Choosing instead to designate Milo a “sex crimes specialist” and assign him to every homosexual murder that came up in West L.A. Exclusively.
It isolated my friend, narrowed his life, and plunged him into a roiling bath of blood and gore: boy hookers, destroyed and destroying. Corpses moldering because the morgue drivers didn’t show to pick them up, for fear of catching AIDS.
When Milo complained, Trapp insisted he was simply making use of Milo’s specialized knowledge of “the deviant subculture.” The second complaint brought him an insubordination report in his file.
Pushing the issue would have meant going up before hearing boards and hiring a lawyer- the Police Benevolent Association wouldn’t go to bat on this one. And unremitting media attention that would turn Milo into The Crusading Gay Cop. That was something he wasn’t- probably never would be- ready for. So he pushed his oars through the muck, working compulsively and starting to drink again.
The Porsche disappeared down the drive but I could still hear its engine pulsate in a chugging idle. Then the creak of the car door opening, padded footsteps, the scrape of the gate. Finally Trapp drove away- so quietly I knew he was coasting.
I waited a few minutes and stepped out of the foliage, thought about what I’d seen.
A captain checking out a routine suicide? A West L.A. captain, checking out a Hollywood Division suicide? It made no sense at all.
Or was the visit something personal? The use of the Porsche instead of an unmarked suggested just that.
Trapp and Sharon involved? Too grotesque to contemplate.
Too logical to dismiss.
I resumed my walk, climbed up to the house, and tried not to think about it.
Nothing had changed. The same high banks of ivy, so tall they seemed to engulf the structure. The same circular slab of concrete in lieu of a lawn. At the center of the slab, a raised circular bed rimmed with lava rock housed a pair of towering cocoa palms.
Beyond the palms a low-slung one-story house- gray stucco, the front windowless and flat- faced, shielded by a facade of vertically slatted wood and marked with over-sized address numerals. The roof was pitched almost flat and coated with white pebbles. Off to one side was a detached carport. No car, no signs of habitation.
At first glance, an ugly piece of work. One of those “moderne” structures that spread over postwar L.A., aging poorly. But I knew there was beauty within. A free-form cliff-top pool that wrapped itself around the north side of the house and gave the illusion of bleeding off into space. Walls of glass that afforded a breathtakingly uninterrupted canyon view.
The house had made a big impression on me, though I didn’t realize it until years later, when the time came to buy a home of my own and I found myself gravitating toward a similar ecology: hilltop remoteness, wood and glass, the indoor-outdoor blend and geologic impermanence that characterize canyon living in L.A.
The front door was unobtrusive- just another section of the slatted facade. I tried it. Locked. Looked around some more and noticed something different- a sign attached to the trunk of one of the palms.
I went over for a closer look and squinted. Just enough starlight to make out the letters:
FOR SALE.
A real estate company with an office on North Vermont, in the Los Feliz district. Below it another sign, smaller. The name and number of the salesperson.
On the market before the body was cold.
Routine suicide notwithstanding, it had to be the fastest probate in California history.
Unless the house hadn’t belonged to her. But she’d told me it did.
She’d told me lots of things.
I memorized Mickey Mehrabian’s number. When I got back to the Seville, I wrote it down.
8
The following morning, I called the real estate office. Mickey Mehrabian was a woman with a Lauren Bacall voice, slightly accented. I made an appointment to see the house at eleven, spent the next hour thinking about the first time I’d seen it.
Surprise, surprise. She’d been full of them.
I expected her to be flooded with suitors. But she was always available when I asked her out, even on the shortest notice. And when a patient crisis caused me to break a date, she never complained. Never pushed or pressured me for commitment of any sort- the least demanding human being I’d ever known.
We made love nearly every time we were together, though we never spent the night together.
At first she begged off going to my place, wanted to do it in the backseat of the car. After we’d known each other for several months she relented, but even when she did share my bed, she treated it as if it were a backseat- never completely disrobing, never falling asleep. After waking up several times from my own postcoital torpor to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed, tugging her ear, I asked her what was bothering her.
