There were two other homes on this twisting bit of road, one on either side of Lowenbruck’s place, all three of them clinging to the side of the mountain. Across Alta Brea was a rocky cliff covered in foliage. A crew of two workmen in buff jumpsuits were busy hacking away at the brush with chain saws. On top of the cliff was another of what Californians called a “house.” The only part you could see from street level was a turret, standing tall, looking like it was part of a full-fledged castle. That was the thing about these hills. No matter where you built your castle, there was always somebody with a bigger castle, higher up than yours.
From street level, Lowenbruck’s place looked like nothing more than a wide, flat bungalow. Spanish-tile roof, freshly painted stucco exterior. On the left was a single-car garage. In the middle was a sturdy front door cut from solid oak, and on the right, windows that would offer you a wide-screen view if tall shrubs weren’t in the way.
But Hardie knew this was just the top level. Virgil told him the place had three floors; the other two were built down along the side of the mountain. In his instructions, Lowenbruck called it his “upside-down house.”
The house was famous in a minor way. In 1949 a film noir called Surrounded had been set here, as well as parts of a 1972 neonoir called The Glass Jungle. This was no accident. The director of Glass Jungle was a big fan of Surrounded and had spent a lot of time on permissions for the location. Later still, in 2005, they remade Surrounded—this time calling it Dead by Dawn—but left out the house altogether. Hardie hadn’t seen any of the films, but Lowenbruck told Virgil there were copies at the house—the sitter should check them out, just for fun. Hardie would check out the first one, but not the others. He had a rule these days: he didn’t watch any movies made after he was born.
Seems the movies were another reason Lowenbruck wanted a house-sitter. Every few days some noir geek would just show up and start snapping photos of the house. Some would even try to sweet-talk their way in, as if the place were just a vacant movie prop and not a real place where actual people lived.
Late last night, when he had to catch his sudden plane to Moscow, Lowenbruck e-mailed Virgil to say he’d leave keys in his mailbox.
Hardie looked.
Yep.
No keys in the mailbox.
3
Nobody came, nobody cares. It’s still not about anything.
—Bill Cosby, Hickey & Boggs
LEAVING THE keys to your $3.7-million-dollar home in your mailbox is never a good idea. But Lowenbruck had insisted—there was no time to FedEx them to Hardie, and he didn’t know any neighbors to leave them with. Couldn’t Hardie just let himself in? They’d be in the mailbox, what, a matter of eight hours?
Or never.
Hardie pulled his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed the auto-dial number of Virgil’s office. He waited. Nothing happened. Upon closer examination, Hardie realized that there were no bars on the screen. Probably the damned hills, blocking everything.
Hardie decided he wanted a beer. Like, yeah, right now. It was super-early in the morning, but maybe that’s what he should do. Get back in the Honda Whatever, drive back down to level ground, and buy some beer. Perhaps by the time he got back, the keys would have magically reappeared in the mailbox. If not, drink another beer. Repeat until reality conformed.
Yeah. Sure.
Hardie realized that unless he wanted to guard this damned place from outside, he’d have to figure out some way of breaking in.
He examined the front, looking for entry points, hoping for an obvious weakness. The oak door was solid, locked. The wide-screen windows were locked as well—and wired. Hardie spied the security transmitters mounted in the corners of the frames. Lowenbruck had given Virgil the keypad code, but that was useless with Hardie locked outside now, wasn’t it?
Moving toward the right side of the property, past some eucalyptus bushes, Hardie craned his neck until he saw a wooden sundeck hanging off the back of the house. It was supported by narrow metal poles and fitted with a wrought-iron railing. If he could make it onto the deck, he could probably jimmy open the back doors. The only problem: there was no easy way up to the deck. From the edge, there was a fifty-foot drop to the ground. Not unless Hardie wanted to climb onto the roof, and then jump down onto the deck.
The latter, of course, seemed to be the only option.
Hardie sighed. Was he really going to do this? Who knows what kind of trouble he might get into up there. One slip and he could end up with a broken leg down in the ravine, bobcats circling him.
Hardie slid the phone into his pocket, climbed behind the wheel, pulled the Honda Whatever up closer to the garage door, then parked. He stepped onto the hood of the car and scrambled up the slanted tile roof. The tiles were warm from the sun. Hardie had a vision of the damned things breaking loose, sliding down the roof, and shattering on the pavement, one after the other after the other. Hardie was a large man; he didn’t know if the makers of Spanish tile took his size and weight into consideration.
But he made it to the peak of the roof without incident. There he paused. The lush bowl of the hills was laid out beneath him, and off in the distance were the hazy glass-and-metal skyscrapers of downtown L.A. Hardie instantly understood the appeal of living here. Even though the sides of the mountain were littered with homes, there was the illusion that yours was the only one that mattered, that the rest of these properties had been assembled here for your benefit. No one else had a view like yours, not the homes above nor the ones below. You had a front-row seat to the big show. You could enjoy it anytime you liked … when you weren’t slaving away on a sound track, that is. Hardie wondered how much Lowenbruck enjoyed his view. He doubted the man ever climbed up onto his own roof to catch this particular vista.
Okay, enough. Sooner or later somebody was going to look up and see Hardie standing here, looking like an idiot.
Hardie spied the deck and began to make his way over to it, arms out for balance. Still, he couldn’t help but glance down at the houses below. The different-colored roofs, the pools, the terracotta patios.
And through a clearing in the trees, on the back deck of the house closest to Lowenbruck’s, a nude woman sunbathing.
It almost looked like a mirage. The branches and trees made a perfect frame around her body, blocking out everything but her astounding and abundant nakedness. She was full-chested, with pink nipples that looked too delicate to be out in the bright California sun. Her body was muscled, perfectly shaved, and oiled—as far as Hardie could tell—from her nose down. Her skin practically glistened. Hardie wondered why Lowenbruck hadn’t left the keys with her.
The woman’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She held a cell phone to her ear. And while her mouth moved, the words didn’t travel the distance uphill.
Hardie froze in place, pitched precariously on the downward slope of the roof. He stared for a few moments before he realized that, fuck, she could probably see him, too.
Probably telling a friend on the phone: You’re never going to believe this, but some idiot is standing up on the roof of my neighbor’s place, staring at my tits.
Hardie continued his descent, placed a hand on the hot tile for balance, then jumped down onto the back deck. Something squished underfoot. Hardie was almost afraid to look … then did. Some kind of animal had been up here recently and had left a large deposit on Lowenbruck’s sundeck. Not a bird; this beast appeared to enjoy a heartier diet than seeds and grass.
Shit.
Fortunately, Hardie had packed another pair of shoes.
Unfortunately, they were in his missing suitcase.
Hardie tiptoed over and tried the sliding glass doors. Miraculously, they were unlocked. Either Lowenbruck forgot or he wasn’t in the habit of locking it.
The moment the contacts separated, however, the alarm was triggered—a shrill repeating bee-BEEP bee-BEEP. Thirty seconds and counting. Hardie knew there was a keypad by the front door. He needed to reach it fast or he’d h
ave company soon, and that would no doubt push back his drinking by a few hours more.
bee-BEEP
bee-BEEP
bee-BEEP
Just as he was about to step inside he remembered the unidentified animal crap on his shoes. Hardie worked off one shoe hurriedly with the back of the other, reached down, yanked off its companion, then darted through the open doors looking for anything, anything at all, resembling a security keypad.
bee-BEEP
bee-BEEP
bee-BEEP
There were too many things hanging on the walls near the front door, too much clutter. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck …
Hardie found it and jabbed the code in with two seconds to spare.
The key situation would have to be figured out sooner rather than later—Hardie didn’t want to leave the premises unlocked for any period of time, nor did he want to climb the tiled roof again to make a grocery run. Maybe he could have some booze delivered? No. Because that would require a working cell phone, and Virgil had told him that Lowenbruck didn’t have a landline.
Anyway, first things first: house check.
The sliding doors from the back deck opened up into a media room—and immediately Hardie knew he’d lucked out. Wall-mounted plasma TV, stereo components whose brand name Hardie only recognized from other houses he’d watched. Overstuffed black leather couch, which Hardie immediately decided would be his home base for most of the next month. The wall shelves contained row upon row of DVDs, many of them classics—which was fantastic. Old movies gave him something to fill the long days. He remembered the special Hell of a Myrtle Beach condo that lacked not just cable or satellite TV but a TV as well. Longest two weeks of his life.
The rest of the top floor seemed to be little more than a life-support system for the media room. The locked front door led to the vestibule and beyond that a winding staircase with wrought-iron rail, leading down to the lower floors.
The stairwell was lined with cardboard standees of 1980s white tough-guy actors, arranged Sgt. Pepper–style. Clint. McQueen. Bruce. Sly. Arnie. Van Damme. Segal. And, strangely, Gene Hackman. This was seventies Hackman. Crazy-man Hackman. Night Moves and Conversation and French Connection Hackman. The collage of 2-D tough guys looked like it had been stuck up there for a while. The edges of the cardboard were frayed, cracked, and torn in places, and the material itself was yellowing. The surfaces featured a film of dust, and various body parts—an elbow, a foot—had come unstuck from the wall. Either Lowenbruck really loved his action heroes, or some previous owner had, and Lowenbruck thought it easier to leave the whole thing up.
The next room was a smallish dining area, though clearly nobody ever ate in here. The table was covered in scripts, DVDs, CDs, old newspapers, staff paper, pencils. A peek inside a cupboard door revealed more battered scripts, yellowing newspapers, and about forty copies of a sound track called Two-Way Split on CD.
The galley kitchen was clean but spare. Seemed like not much cooking happened in here. No booze in the cabinets, no food in the fridge, except for a box of baking soda and a glass jar of martini olives shoved in the back.
Half bathroom off to one side. Handy. Probably thirty paces between the leather couches and the porcelain throne here. That would make life easy.
On the other side of the kitchen, a door led to a tiny two-person deck with a hard-plastic Adirondack chair and a Weber Baby grill, overlooking another part of the hills. Hardie looked through the window and thought he could make out part of the Griffith Observatory. No other nude sunbathers in sight, however. Which was a little disappointing. Would have been nice to have the ladies in stereo.
Okay.
So, three entrances so far:
Front door;
Back patio doors (if you felt like walking on the roof);
Side patio door (if you were to somehow climb up the side of the house and vault over the railing).
All locks in working order as far as Hardie could tell.
Hardie retraced his steps, passed the gang of action heroes, gave Hackman a respectful nod—
Gene
—then continued down the wide stairs as they spun him around to face … a closed set of double doors. Which seemed weird, until Hardie opened them up and walked into a large music studio, soundproofing everywhere.
Ah, so this was the padded treasure in the heart of the Lowenbruck castle: the recording studio. The space was tricked out with enough gear to make the upstairs media room look like a kids’ Fisher-Price set. Huge, wide-screen plasma TV, a mixing console the size of a back porch, multiple keyboards, amplifiers, heaps of spaghetti cable.
Virgil had told him:
“Lowenbruck’s insanely anal about his studio. Don’t even go in there if you can avoid it. Just make sure nothing happens to it.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ve got explicit instructions here. Like, don’t even turn a knob.”
“What am I, in high school?”
“Just telling you what’s here on the form.”
“Okay, Virge. It won’t be easy, but somehow I’ll resist the urge to record my Pet Sounds tribute.”
Nothing else down here—was there room for anything else?—except two other padded doors. One was open a few inches, and obviously led to a bathroom. Hardie could see a white-tile floor and the edge of a silver mirror. He supposed that when Lowenbruck was in full-on work mode, this was all he needed. His keyboards and a place to take a leak or splash water on his face from time to time. The other door probably led downstairs to the third-floor bedroom.
Hardie was about to head down when the bathroom door flew open all the way and someone screamed and rushed at him and hit him on the head with something really, really hard.
You’ve turned the last page.
But it doesn’t have to end there …
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Point and Shoot Page 23
