by Scott Frost
I stared at the map for a moment and repeated the number to myself silently several times.
“Fifty-eight, sixty-three,” I said.
“What does that sound like to you?” Harrison said.
“It sounds like an address.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Without a street name, it’s meaningless,” I said. “It could also be eighty-five, thirty-six. How do you know the order of the numbers?”
“I didn’t, so I tried them in every possible configuration. And then I began matching the different versions to every name or word I found on the map. Some were easy to eliminate, like your name, Manning, Hazzard. By three A.M. I narrowed it down to only the words that didn’t seem to have any other place in this universe he drew.”
I noticed a Thomas Guide sitting open on the table.
“You found it.”
He nodded. “It’s impossible.”
He motioned toward the Thomas Guide. “Look at the open page.”
I walked over and looked at the map it was open to.
“It’s West Hollywood,” Harrison said.
“A lot of actors live in West Hollywood,” I said.
Harrison nodded.
“What am I looking for?”
“D seven.”
I found the coordinates on the map and began to run my finger over the streets until I found what he wanted me to see. I stared at it for a moment in disbelief, then looked back at the map.
“When I first saw it I thought he was making a reference to Homer and the journey he was taking, but I was wrong. It’s a place,” Harrison said.
“Fifty-eight sixty-three . . . Iliad.”
25
Hollywood was just waking up as we pulled onto Sunset in Silver Lake and started west. The human wreckage from the night before was still being cleaned up. In a doorway a homeless man lay under a fire department’s yellow sheet, his shoeless blackened feet twisted on the cement. Near the 101 a group of four runaways emerged from their sleeping place under the bridge in search of loose change and a meal scrounged from Dumpsters.
In another time Mary Pickford had built a studio on these same streets. Where D. W. Griffith had shot his masterpiece Birth of a Nation, four prostitutes sat handcuffed on the curb. One of them, who appeared to be little more than sixteen, had a black eye and a bloody knee under torn red stockings.
The address we had found on Danny’s map was two blocks below Sunset on the edge of Beverly Hills. West Hollywood was an incorporated city a mile and a quarter square. The sheriff’s department had jurisdiction, and not so lovingly referred to it as Boys Town. The annual Halloween parade could make New Orleans blush with envy.
I pulled off Sunset, dropped down the steep hill for two blocks, and made a left. In the middle of the block I pulled to a stop across the street from the address.
“The Iliad Apartments,” Harrison said.
The name was written in elaborate silver script above the glass doors of the entrance. Bird-of-paradise plants that were twenty feet high framed the entry. There looked to be four floors. Through the glass doors I could see into the courtyard, where I assumed there was a pool. The building appeared to have been built in the late seventies.
“I suppose they thought the name would appeal to a gay clientele,” Harrison said.
I nodded. “I don’t imagine that’s part of Danny’s conspiracy theory.”
A man walking a small black dog passed us, his sideways glance in our direction clearly making us as cops—a habit of residents born of less than friendly relations over the years with the sheriff’s department.
“Victoria Fisher lived in the Valley, worked downtown, and died next to the river. Maybe this is something else, maybe it’s nothing at all,” Harrison said.
“Then why is it on the map?”
I looked over the facade of the building, trying to find some physical connection to the world Danny had drawn on his wall, and the one we had been chasing, but it eluded me.
“Are we looking at something from the past or the present? Is there even a difference? Are we going to find my father inside?”
“Danny said ‘he’s alive,’ but he didn’t say who he was.”
I nodded. “But he said it at my house, after painting a plea for help all over my walls. Why would he come to me if it wasn’t about my father?”
“Maybe the doctors will be able to get an answer from him at the hospital.”
I shook my head. “As of this morning when I called his grandmother, Danny hadn’t said a word. He’s been talking to shrinks and taking different med protocols since he was fifteen. Why would he start talking to them now? I don’t imagine he sees doctors as allies.”
I stared at the building for a moment.
“I want to know everything we can about this building—ownership, management company, tenant records for the time of Victoria’s death,” I said.
We got out of the Volvo and walked across the street and entered the lobby. The elevators were to the right through a set of glass doors that we had to be buzzed through. Mailboxes and the intercom to the apartments were on the left. Mounted on the wall of the inner lobby next to the elevators was a plaster replica of a Greek torso. The faint scent of chlorine from the pool in the center courtyard hung in the air.
“I think you better look at this,” Harrison said.
He was standing at the intercom, reading tenants’ names listed next to the apartment numbers.
“Apartment three-oh-six.”
I looked at the name next to the number. “Powell.”
The name Lopez gave me just before he died, and the character my father played in the movie.
“Did Danny write the name Powell anywhere on the map?”
“I don’t remember seeing it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Harrison said.
The doors to the elevator opened in the inner lobby and a tenant stepped out. He was in his late thirties, dressed in a crisp dark suit, and was already working a cell phone. As he stepped through the doors into the outer lobby I asked him to hold the door and he looked at us suspiciously.
I pulled back my jacket and showed him my badge. “Pasadena PD.”
That we weren’t from the sheriff’s department seemed to soften the look he gave us.
“Do you know a tenant named Powell?” I asked.
He shook his head and said a few clipped words into the cell phone, one of which was “script.” I suspected he was an agent. We stepped into the inner lobby and took the elevator up to three. The apartment was at the far end around the corner. Sconces in the shape of Greek columns lit the pale rose-colored hallway. The carpeting was a deep burgundy and smelled freshly cleaned.
We rounded the corner and stopped at the apartment. I started to reach for the buzzer but stopped. The paint around the dead bolt had been scraped off and the wood indented.
“This door’s been jimmied.”
Harrison slipped his 9mm from his waist holster, knelt down, and examined the carpet.
“These carpets were cleaned within the last few days. This happened before that. The paint chips from the door have been removed,” Harrison said.
He took a position next to the door with his weapon at his side. I rang the buzzer and listened for the sound of footsteps from inside, but there was nothing. I rang it again with the same result. I took hold of the door handle and it turned. Whoever had broken in hadn’t locked it when they left.
“You want to bother with getting a warrant?” Harrison said.
I shook my head.
“I wouldn’t know what to tell a judge,” I said.
To enter without a warrant could put at risk any evidence we found inside, unless we entered because of concern for the occupants’ safety.
“The jimmied door is cause enough,” I said.
I slipped my Glock from its holster and turned the handle, then let the door swing open.
“Police officers.”
We held our positions
, waiting for any response, but none came. I stepped in first with Harrison right behind me and swept the apartment with my weapon. Light filtered in through vertical blinds that covered the far wall. The living room appeared clear. A small kitchen and dining area was to the left. A hallway on the right led to what I assumed were the bathroom and bedroom.
I reached around for the light switch and flipped it on. The apartment had been ransacked. Furniture had been overturned, anything that could be gone through or flipped over had been. Harrison moved toward the hallway and I followed. He turned on the light in the hallway and then cleared the bath and bedroom as I waited. He stepped back out and holstered his weapon.
“They’re both the same as this.”
I slipped my Glock away and looked around the room.
“This isn’t just a burglary. Look at the furniture,” I said.
The fabric on the couch had been sliced to shreds. The frames of chairs were smashed. A mirror on the wall was shattered. I walked over to the kitchen. The cabinets were open. Every glass, plate, and bowl— anything that someone could use—had been broken. I took out a pen and used it to pull open a drawer. The silverware had all been bent in half. An aluminum saucepan on the stove had been crushed. The inside of the refrigerator looked as if a baseball bat had been taken to all the contents. Even a roll of paper towels under the sink had been torn to pieces.
“What’s this look like to you?” I said.
Harrison thought for a moment as his eyes went over the mess. “Madness.”
I nodded in agreement. “But whose?”
I walked over to the hallway and stopped at the bathroom door. Two towels hung in shreds on a rack. A can of shaving cream had been crushed on the floor, dried foam clinging to the side of the bathtub. Toothpaste had been sliced open and squeezed out into the sink. Next to it lay a toothbrush with all the bristles cut off and left in a neat pile next to the tap. The mirror on the medicine chest had a spiderweb of cracks spiraling out from a blow to the center.
I opened it, hoping to find some medication that would identify the occupant. A bottle of aspirin had been filled with water, turning it into a white foamy mass that had solidified. A box of antihistamines had been crushed. There was no prescription medicine— nothing remotely personal.
I stepped over to the tub and shower. The shampoo had been spread across the walls, the bottle cut in half. A bar of soap had been sliced into flakes on the bottom of the tub. An ashtray with half a dozen butts mixed with the soap.
“He even destroyed the toilet paper,” said Harrison, who was standing in the doorway.
I reached down and picked up a nail clipper off the floor. The tiny blades had been bent open.
“This reminds me of something,” I said.
I turned to Harrison. “The methodical thoroughness of it. He didn’t miss anything, except the lights.”
“He would have needed them to see so he wouldn’t miss something,” Harrison said.
“It’s like the interior of my house—every inch of it covered in paint or writing. Only here, the violence took over.”
“Or Danny couldn’t control it.”
We looked at each other for a moment.
“So who lives here?” Harrison asked.
We moved to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. The blinds were drawn, as in the rest of the apartment. The sheets and blanket had been sliced into strips. The mattress was cut open, its padding and springs spilling out like a gutted animal.
“He probably did it during the day. There would have been fewer people around to hear anything,” Harrison said.
The floor was littered with pieces of clothes, cigarette butts, and torn newspapers. Harrison knelt down and looked at the newspaper.
“These are all dated over a week before your brother was killed,” he said.
I stepped over to the chest of drawers across from the bed and pulled open a drawer. What used to be socks, T-shirts, and underwear was now just a pile of shredded cloth. The rest of the drawers were the same.
“I think you should see this, “ Harrison said.
He was kneeling on the far side of the bed next to a nightstand, holding two small picture frames.
“Whoever did this must have missed these. They fell behind the bed.”
I stepped around the bed and looked. One was a picture of a small girl with dark hair in a blue print dress and saddle shoes. She was looking at something to the left of whoever was holding the camera, virtually no expression on her face—or at least no sense of connection to the moment the picture was recording. The other was a photograph of a boy holding a baseball mitt with a big smile on his face. I stared at them; the same sense of dread I had felt earlier began to send my breathing out of control.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Danny was right.”
“Your father?” Harrison said.
I tried to catch my breath but couldn’t. Harrison took my arms and sat me down on the bed.
“How do you know?” he asked.
I stared at the photographs for a moment.
“Because I’m the little girl in that picture,” I said.
Until then, I had clung to the possibility that my father was dead—that the nightmare I had been trying to stop had a different ending than this.
“He’s alive,” I said.
“That doesn’t make him guilty,” Harrison said.
I looked at the photograph of me for a moment and then closed my eyes.
“I don’t remember the picture, but I remember the day it was taken,” I said. “I hadn’t until I saw this, but I remember it now.”
I stepped cautiously into the memory as if onto a thin sheet of ice.
“I was four, maybe five years old. There was a neighborhood picnic. I was playing with friends and I ran over to our car. My parents were sitting inside it. I decided to sneak up behind it and surprise them. He had his hand on her wrist, and he was twisting it like he was taking a lid off a jar. She would shake her head, and then he would twist it further until she nodded yes at whatever he was whispering to her.”
I took a breath, trying to slow down the memory but it continued to come. I remembered the smell of barbecuing chicken, the sound of a bat hitting a piñata and the candy spilling out. The yellow sundress my mother was wearing. How she held the arm my father had twisted behind her back for the rest of the party so no one would see the rising bruises.
“Someone other than my parents must have taken this picture,” I said.
“You remember what you were looking at?” Harrison asked.
I glanced down at the picture for a moment and nodded. The room began to close in on me as surely as if I were my mother sitting in the seat of the car with my father’s hand on my wrist. I walked out to the living room and opened the sliding glass door to the small balcony. The dry hot air offered little escape. I felt like I had walked into a crowded elevator with barely enough air left for a breath.
Harrison stepped out next to me. In the courtyard below, a Hispanic man was slowly skimming the black-bottomed pool. Something lying in the deep end glistened in the dark water.
“Whoever manages the apartment will have his records in the rental agreement,” I said.
“I’ll make the calls,” Harrison said.
“We’ll take the pictures with us, see if we can get a print off them.”
Harrison nodded.
I turned and looked back into the apartment.
“If you could kill a physical place as if it were a living thing, and wanted to inflict as much pain as possible before it died, this is what it would look like,” I said.
“You think Danny came here intending to kill your father?”
“He either couldn’t do it or, not finding him, did this,” I said.
Harrison looked over the room for a moment.
“What if there was a third person?” Harrison said.
I had been so focused on my father occupying this space that I hadn’t considered another possibility. I play
ed out the logic for a moment. “The same one who killed my brother?”
I shook my head. “Danny did this. Last night was his way of telling me.”
My eyes ran over the carnage spread across the room, trying to find a connection to my father, and I realized there was nothing there except the mess that he had left behind, just as it had always been.
“I wanted Hazzard to be right,” I said. “If my father was dead, I would know he didn’t murder his own son.”
“You don’t know . . .” Harrison started to say something, then let it go. “What were you looking at in the photograph?” he asked.
I started to tell Harrison that I didn’t know, but there was no stopping the memory that had been let loose. My heart began to beat out of control and I stepped back into the blue dress and saddle shoes. The day had been hot, like today. There were eucalyptus trees in the park where the picnic had been. I remembered finding my mother sitting alone in the car twenty minutes after he had twisted her arm, the scent of his aftershave lingering as she stared blankly out the window, her makeup streaked with tears.
“I was looking for a way to be someone else,” I said.
26
None of the neighbors who were home remembered much about the tenant in 306. A young woman two doors down described him as middle-aged, average height, normal-looking. A tenant in 309 thought a young woman lived there, but wouldn’t bet on it. The rest of the neighbors could add little to the description that made it anything other than useless. And no one had heard or seen anything that could pinpoint a day or time the vandalism had taken place.
It was approaching midafternoon when we pulled to a stop at 7928 Santa Monica Boulevard near the corner of Fairfax. Abraham’s Property Management was on the second floor of an old Spanish building from the 1930s. The white stucco was now gray with age. The once ornate stonework and tile around the entrance was nearly black from the accumulated car exhaust of seventy years. The terra-cotta roof looked like a 3.0 aftershock would send it all sliding into the street.
An antique furniture store occupied the street level. Age being relative in Los Angeles, the front display window was occupied by a red coffee table in the shape of a kidney bean, a fondue pot, martini glasses, and Dean Martin cocktail napkins.
