“A lot of very rich people live up here,” he said as we approached the Hill. “They like to own a piece of the institution they bank with.”
“And if there aren’t enough pieces they start their own?”
“That’s the way it plays.”
We slowed down as we approached a steel gate as imposing as the Great Wall of China. The uniformed gateman stooped over and saluted Culhane as we drove through to enter a natural greenhouse. Trees shouldered the road and formed a wall between the street and the residences, all of them shielded by the foliage.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you with that bank thing,” he said. “I called a couple of bank people and they are adamant about not showing those checks without a subpoena.”
“I didn’t have any trouble in L.A.”
“You’re more sophisticated down there. We’re just country folks.”
He said this as we passed mansions and estates, hidden back from the road among pines, live oaks, cypress trees, and eucalyptus. The lawns were manicured and bordered with flowers, all open in all their glory: yellow daffodils, roses, sword lilies, begonias, daisies as big as a spare tire. Occasionally, there was a car parked under a porte cochere or sitting in the driveway. Through the foliage I spotted a four-seat Mercedes convertible, a Rolls, two Lincoln touring cars, and a Stutz. The houses were even more impressive. No two were alike; every kind of architecture imaginable was represented in this discreet but elegant neighborhood.
The road wound its way to the top of the foothill, where it traveled along the ridge with the town spread out below us. A silver Duesenberg roared past. I glimpsed the driver, a dark-haired fellow wearing a navy blue golfer’s tam cocked over one eye. A mile later, as the road turned back into the trees, we passed a gate that led to a Tudor-styled, three-story, brick-and-beamed manor. It dominated the ridge and was about two hundred yards back from the road, sitting on about twenty acres of property. The third floor had steepled and stained-glass windows. The gate was open and a black Pierce-Arrow was sitting beside the house, in front of the matching garage, in a turnaround as big as a baseball diamond. The hired man slowly rubbed wax deep into its already sparkling finish. Behind the house, the crest rolled down and away from the house to a paddock and pasture, and half a mile or so beyond it, at the foot of the cliffs, was the Pacific Ocean, looking as serene and placid as a fish pond.
“Nice little place,” I said.
“That’s the Gorman estate,” he answered.
“He’s the one who wasn’t at the bank when I went calling, then walked out after I left, and drove off in that Pierce-Arrow.”
“He plays golf every afternoon,” Culhane said, and not apologetically. “That was him in the Duesenberg on his way to the club.”
“He’s got lousy manners.”
“Nobody invited you to go in his bank,” Culhane said, snuffing out his cigarette.
“He doesn’t strike me as the sort who would worry too much about the confidentiality of a bunch of checks that were addressed to a woman who is now dead.”
“You have to get to know this community,” Culhane said. “Then maybe you’ll understand.”
“You mean they’re all so goddamned rich they’re innately rude?”
He threw me a sideways glance but made no response to that.
“What are we doing up here, Captain?”
“I just told you; I’m introducing you to San Pietro. The part the tourists never see.”
“You invited me to leave town two hours ago.”
“It was a dumb thing to do. I was a little paranoid. Osterfelt and Bellini are both bottom-feeders. They’ve got their hands in most of the pockets in Sacramento. I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
“Is that why you’re running for governor?”
“I’m running for governor so I can get out of here. Except for my years in the Marines, I’ve been in San Pietro all my life. If I don’t move on now, I never will. I’m almost sixty.”
“I can understand that. It’s a cute little spot but I can see how it could get very boring after an hour or two.”
“I can beat those two bums,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “Sometimes you need leadership that hasn’t been tainted by longevity.”
“You think you can change anything up there?”
“Probably not,” he said, and grinned, “but I can sure drive the bastards crazy.”
I laughed along with him. “Hell, that makes it worthwhile, then. What makes you think you can whip a couple of ward heelers like those two?”
“Numbers,” he said. “Right now, no one’s calling the game; it’s close to fifty-fifty, with Bellini getting the edge. But those voting for Osterfelt are doing so because they think Bellini is a bigger crook. And vice versa for the Bellini voters. All I need to do is get forty percent of the voters who want an honest man, no matter who he is.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“That’s politics: cynicism and hypocrisy. It doesn’t require anything but a quick tongue and a big grin. It certainly doesn’t require intelligence or honesty.”
As we came around a bend in the road, the trees thinned out and I saw a house two hundred feet back on the right. It was a three-story, classic Victorian, at the end of a pebbled drive lined on both sides with sandford hedges. There were a scattering of avocado trees interspersed with tall, slender Roman pines behind the hedgerow. I couldn’t tell what was to the right of the drive behind the hedgerow, but there was a lot of land back there.
The gate was ornate and impressive, ten feet of black iron, with curlicues and spirals to make it seem less imposing. They didn’t work. The gate said “keep out” in no uncertain terms, but just in case the message didn’t come across, the fence adjoining it was an eight-footer with spikes at the top of the stanchions. A guardhouse at one corner of the fence completed the picture. The gates were open.
“Can we slow down a minute?” I asked.
Rusty stopped the car and I lowered the window on my side.
The house was white with pale blue trim and had five towering gables across the front. There was a twelve- foot, arched porte cochere, with beveled supports, over the entrance. The door was leaded glass. Even at two hundred feet, its facade shimmered with prismed light. The drive separated about seventy-five feet from the entrance and circled into it, forming a grass island, in the center of which was a small nude statue of a Greek goddess holding a tilted jar. Water poured from it into the small pond at her feet. There was an adjunct to the road that led straight from the covered entrance into what I assumed was a parking lot south of the mansion.
I had seen the place from the other side of the basin and knew it had a broad lawn in the rear that ended at the edge of cliff that dropped straight into the Pacific.
I was guessing there were at least fifteen bedrooms above the first floor. The main floor probably had a library, billiard room, dining room, living room, and whatever other cubbyholes were necessary to let rich people know the owner was richer. Behind the mansion, far out over the Pacific, the sky was black with storm clouds forming on the horizon. About halfway down the drive a gray rabbit stuck its head out of the hedge, looked around, and started to hop to the other side. It stopped suddenly, turned, its feet kicking up stones, and bolted back to safety moments ahead of a speckled hawk that swept across the road, its claws distended, and then pulled up sharply over the hedgerow.
No other name but Grand View would have fit.
It made the Gorman place look like a dollhouse.
“Now that’s a sight,” I said.
But in my mind I imagined gunshots in the night; Culhane charging through these gates in his 1920 Ford; a thug named McGurk staggering out of the house and blowing out the windshield before Culhane dropped him into the hedgerow with a single shot in the eye. I imagined Culhane rushing the living room. Three more shots. A woman’s scream.
And I wondered who shot whom when those last three gunshots rang out in the night.
I sat back in the car seat.
“I’ll bet the inside of that joint would give John Jacob Astor a start,” I said.
“Cost you five bills to find out.”
“Not likely.”
