He handed me one of Rusty’s freshly rolled cigarettes and we lit up. Rusty dropped the Packard into gear and pulled away. The window slid quietly up as if someone in the house had prompted it.
About twenty yards ahead of us, a road curved off to our right and then dipped sharply down and curved around the cliff and out of sight. The ocean was in front of and below it. Another spectacular view. A bright red sawhorse with lanterns on both ends of it blocked the road.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s Cliffside Road. We closed it several years ago; too dangerous.” He tapped Rusty on the shoulder. “Let’s take Cliffside down,” he said. If that made the driver nervous he didn’t show it. He stopped, got out, swung the sawhorse out of the way, got back in the car, drove a dozen feet beyond it, then got out and moved the sawhorse back in place. We started down a narrow, steep, curvy, precipitous road in first gear. There was no guardrail. Four feet from the road, the cliff made a dead drop two hundred feet straight down to the rocks and the ocean. Three feet on the other side, it went straight up. The Packard hugged the safe side of the road, rocks and pebbles spitting under the wheels. About a hundred feet along, we rounded a sharp curve and came on a wide shoulder in the road, big enough to handle six or seven cars. There was a waist-high stone wall around its entire perimeter and an old, crumbling stone bench on one side.
Without being told, Rusty pulled off on the shoulder and parked. He pulled on the hand brake and turned off the ignition with the car in gear.
“Better leave your hat in the car,” Culhane said, tossing his black fedora on the seat. I did the same and followed him out on the shoulder, trying to conceal my terror. A hard wind rose swiftly up the side of the mountain from the ocean, whipping Culhane’s hair around his ears. I don’t like heights. I don’t like narrow roads and steep cliffs. I also don’t like drop-off shoulders on those narrow roads.
“It’s perfectly safe,” he said, walking to the edge and standing with one foot on the stone wall.
“You’re giving me the creeps,” I managed to tell him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “This is the safest spot on the road. Don’t look down, you’ll be fine.”
I walked slowly to the stone wall. When I got to it, I reached down and grabbed it with both hands. I looked straight out at the Pacific. Black storm clouds broiled far out to sea and I could see the rain line sweeping across the ocean. A white pontoon plane with a blue stripe down the side banked into the mouth of the bay a mile away and circled toward us, flying parallel to the cliff. It circled all the way around the basin and swept in over the sailboats, then settled down slowly. The two pontoons smacked into the bay and churned twin wakes behind them. It turned and taxied slowly toward the pier.
“That big house on top of the hill is the O’Dell estate,” Culhane said. “He and Eli Gorman started all this. They were partners in the railroad. One was a gruff old Irishman who mostly gambled for a living, the other was an orthodox Jew and all business. They were always at each other’s throats. O’Dell wanted to sell the bottomland by the ocean for a paper mill. Gorman said he wasn’t going to live with a stinking paper mill in his backyard. They put the deeds for all this property on the table, each of them put up ten grand, they played poker for the whole thing. Winner take all. O’Dell lost, and left and never came back. He and his wife died when the Lusitania was sunk. A caretaker kept the house up until Delilah, their daughter, inherited the house and his bankroll.”
“Pretty fancy for a whorehouse,” I said.
“That’s a misnomer,” he said. “It’s a private club, and way too rich for your blood-or mine. Five hundred to join on a one-night basis, plus the cost of the entertainment. A lifetime membership is ten thousand.”
I whistled through my teeth.
“You’d be surprised if I told you the names of some of the full-timers.”
“Why did Delilah O’Dell do that?”
“People here despised her because she was an O’Dell, rich as Croesus and a smart businesswoman to boot. They snubbed her, so she got even, and turned Grand View into the classiest whorehouse on the West Coast, probably in the whole country.”
“Prostitution is against the law,” I reminded him.
“Not in this county. Neither is gambling. And neither was drinking during Prohibition.”
“How do you justify that?”
“I don’t have to. Buck Tallman said it best. ‘You can’t stop folks from drinkin’, gamblin’, and whorin’ around. The best you can do is make it safe and pleasant for them. They pay the bills.’ Does that offend your sensibilities?”
“Not a bit,” I said. “I happen to work under a different set of laws.”
“Hell, you know you can find a game or get laid in L.A. any time of the day or night. As long as the right palms are greased, everybody looks the other way.”
I couldn’t argue with that so I changed the subject. “You know, maybe I prefer old man O’Dell’s vision for this place. He was out in the open about it. Put it right on the table. Soak ’em for the land, let them build a mill. Let ’em stink up the air, poison the ground, ruin the water, cut down all the trees, and sit back and count their money. Gorman made a playpen for people with big bank accounts, charged them three or four times what they’d pay anyplace else, and made loans to all the peons who work for a living. Now he probably acts like a humanitarian.”
Culhane looked surprised. “Jesus, who stepped on your jewels?” he said.
“If I have to make a choice, maybe I prefer greed over hypocrisy. I’m giving it some thought.”
I could see him staring at me from the corner of his eye, a somewhat bemused expression on his face. He was trying to figure out if I was for real or just being contrary. He looked back at the bay.
“That’s Rudy Shaeffer,” Culhane said, pointing at the pontoon plane. “He works three days a week and then flies up on Wednesday and spends four days at the Grand View.”
“How does he make his money?”
“I never asked.”
When my stomach calmed down, I cautiously looked over the side, and immediately got that queasy feeling again. Below us, halfway down the precipice, was a small shelf covered with half a dozen pine trees. Something glittered in the rubble that surrounded the trees. I looked closer and made out what looked like a large, rusted bedframe. Near it, a semicircle of steel seemed to grow out of a pile of dead branches.
“There’s something down there,” I said.
“It’s a 192 °Chevrolet coupe,” he said, without looking down. “It gets so foggy up here at night you can’t see your feet. Some nervy kid was going downtown. He lost control of the car, didn’t make the curve, went straight over the side, and caught fire. We didn’t find him until the next morning. The road was twice as wide in those days and it had a guardrail. It’s eroded away through the years.”
“Did you know him?”
“I knew everybody in town then, and I still do.”
“You didn’t know Verna Hicks.”
“Then she never lived here.”
I reached into my inside pocket and took out the five-by-seven shot of Verna from the newspaper. I pointed to Verna Wilensky. The wind rattled the photograph and he held it with two hands. He stared at it and looked at me with one eyebrow cocked.
“And which one would she be?”
I pointed to the blowup and he laughed.
“I’m supposed to recognize this lady? All I can see is the top of her head and her nose. And the picture looks like it was shot at the bottom of a canal.”
I showed him the original and he just shook his head. Then I gave him a look at the morgue shot.
“Jesus!” he snapped. “I hope to hell you don’t show that to anybody. They’ll puke on your shoes.” He shoved the shot back at me.
“Why did you come down this way?” I asked. “Just to give me the willies?”
“I didn’t know you had a problem with high places. My life changed forever one night, on that stone bench right over there.”
“How?”
He didn’t answer, just looked off at the horizon and tilted his head up at the sky. “Storm’ll be here soon,” he said.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. As we neared the Howlands’ house, the first big drops of rain splattered
