I tell him I don’t know.
Mulholland Dive
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 fire truck and in front of it was a forensics van. There was a P-1 standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that was 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 to the trunk he pulled his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civies, having been called in from off-duty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced that he was a detective.
He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-1 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 staring at the face looking 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 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. In the dark, there was a mist clinging 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 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 Westside 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.
Mulholland had that Top of the World feel to it. It could make you feel like a prince of the city and that the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.
As he came around the bend Clewiston saw another fire truck and a tow truck from the Van Nuys police garage. The tow truck was positioned sideways across the road. For the moment Mulholland was completely closed. The truck’s cable was down the embankment and stretched taut as it pulled the car up. Clewiston could hear the tow motor straining and the cracking and scraping as the unseen car was being pulled up through the brush. The tow truck shuddered as it labored.
Clewiston saw the man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and stood next to him as he watched.
“Is he still in it?” he asked Fairbanks.
“No, he was transported to St. Joe’s. But he was DOA. You’re Clewiston, right? The reconstructionist.”
“Right.”
“We’ve got to handle this thing right. Once the ID gets out, we’ll have the media all over this.”
“The captain told me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you, too. In this department the captains don’t get blamed when things go sideways and off the road. It’s always the sergeants and it ain’t going to be me this time.”
“I get it.”
“You have any idea what this guy was worth? We’re talking tens of millions and on top of that he’s supposedly in the middle of a divorce. So we go five by five by five on this thing.
“It’s Clewiston and I said I get it.”
“Good. This is what we’ve got. Single-car fatality. No witnesses. It appears the victim was heading west when his vehicle, a two-month-old Porsche Carrera, came around that last curve there and for whatever reason didn’t straighten out. We’ve got treads on the road you can take a look at. Anyway, he went straight off the side and then down, baby. Major head and torso injuries. Chest crushed. He pretty much drowned in his own blood before the FD could get down to him. They stretchered him out with a chopper and transported him anyway. Guess they didn’t want any blowback, either.”
“They take blood at St. Joe’s?”
Fairbanks, about forty and a lifer on patrol, nodded.
“I am told it was clean.”
There was a pause in the conversation at that point, meaning that Clewiston could take whatever he wanted from the blood test. He could believe it or believe the celebrity fix was already in.
The moonlight reflected off the dented silver skin of the Porsche as it was pulled up over the edge like a giant, beautiful fish pulled into a boat. Clewiston walked over and Fairbanks followed. The first thing Clewiston saw was that it was a Carrera 4S.
“Hmm,” he mumbled.
“What?” Fairbanks said.
“It’s one of the Porsches with four-wheel drive. Built for these sorts of curves. Built for control.”
“Well, not built good enough, obviously.”
Clewiston put his equipment down on the hood of one of the patrol cars and took only the Maglite over to the
