The name of the lieutenant overseeing the Hancock Park investigation was R.O. Lowery, a towering black mountain of a man who’d been with the force twenty-two years. By the middle of May people in City Hall, most particularly those who either lived in Hancock Park or had Hancock Park constituencies, were complaining to Lieutenant Lowery about the progress of the case or, more precisely, the lack of it. Lowery regarded the whole matter with contempt. Some one’s assaulted or murdered every five minutes in this city, he thought to himself, and I have to baby-sit these assholes. His contempt intensified when he realized he’d have to involve himself in the case personally. This realization came on the evening the girl in question hurled a rock through the window where she was looking. When Lowery walked out of his office he found his men reading the city map as though it were the writing on pyramid walls. He sighed. “Check this out, gentlemen,” he said, drawing his fingers across the map, “you got her walking right up Fourth from Rossmore. Arden Boulevard, Lucerne Boulevard, Plymouth Boulevard: sweet Lord, she’s sending us satellite reports.” His men looked as disgusted as he did. Lowery lowered his frame on the edge of a desk. He said quietly, “Now I know you’re good cops. I know you all understand we have a duty to protect the citizens of Hancock Park who work very hard so they can stay in the upper brackets and avoid paying the taxes that provide your wages. I’m going to have eight damn units out there tonight. Next report that comes in on this girl I want full response—sirens, lights, screeching tires, everything short of a SWAT team. Wrap this up so we can get down to dealing with the serious criminal element in our society like fifty year-old whores and teenagers who wear their hair in cones.” The room cleared as he lumbered back to his office to get his gear and coat.
With an accompanying detective, Lowery drove down Wilcox to the edges of the Wilshire Country Club, then east on Rosewood to Rossmore and Fourth. Arden Boulevard, Lucerne Boulevard, Plymouth Boulevard: only in Hancock Park, Lowery thought, do shitty-assed little streets like these get called boulevards. They patrolled the park three hours without a single report on the radio. At two-thirty in the morning the lieutenant finally decided to post a unit outside the house that had been vandalized, leave another unit for all-night duty, and go home. The rest of the evening was quiet. The following evening Lowery went on patrol again and it was also quiet.
He’d nearly determined the Hancock Park trouble had run its course when another report came in the next night. Lowery and his detective got in the car and headed for Fifth Street between Windsor and Lorraine (both, of course, boulevards) where someone had seen the girl, not staring in a window but gliding across the grass. “Gliding” had been the caller’s word, and the officer who had taken the report repeated it. Lowery was fed up. “I presume,” he answered dryly over the unit radio, “you mean she’s on roller skates.” Next thing, he said to himself, they’ll be seeing stigmata. Then, when they got to Fifth and Lorraine and the lights of the car swung across an oceanic lawn, against a brick wall that ran through the yard he saw her too.
Rather he thought he saw her, at first. So did the detective at the wheel. “Got her, Lieutenant!” he said, and then stopped the car, the headlight beams staring into space. There was no one at all. What they had taken to be her eyes were simply the large fiery insects that buzzed among the bushes. What they had taken to be her mouth was simply the red wound of a departed animal. What they’d taken to be the form of her face was simply the bend of a bough. What they’d taken to be her hair was simply that part of the night where there was no moon.
“Sorry sir,” said the sergeant sheepishly, “thought we had something.” Lowery didn’t tell him he thought they’d had something too. “Well let’s look around,” he said, and they got out of the car. An hour later, driving back up Rossmore, they got another report of the girl over the box, and Lowery reached down and flicked it off.
In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar, Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever. She left Eileen Rader’s house and started down the hill. In the dark she saw the fog rumbling in from the sea like a herd of white horses. They trampled a path through the middle of the city, separating its roots from the spires that rose from the back of the fog like hooded riders. The black stone rivers of the city stood dry and hopeless, stitching America to the rest of the plains. She got to the bottom of the hill and walked east. She crossed a lone river of lights and walked south. At one point she came to an abandoned fair, where the empty mechanical rides were poised in silhouettes. She went into a tent to sleep and caught the whine of the white herd from far away.
She slept in the tent nearly a week, venturing out each clay to pick fruit off people’s trees. Occasionally the people who owned the trees would run out of their houses, having glimpsed the theft; but they
