9

Kurt, our accountant, shook his head with something akin to dismay when I suggested he find a bank that would pony up a few hundred thousand dollars for us. Though the banks couldn’t give money away fast enough at the time, Boulder House was a most peculiar property, and Bill a most peculiar man. The combination was about to get volatile. The initial problem was Bill. In his unfettered confidence, he had extended the house into his neighbour’s land, and we soon discovered that a portion of Boulder House, including part of the kitchen, was actually on land owned by one Floyd Salazar. Right slap-bang in the middle of this parcel of land stood the ‘murderer’s cottage’, usually inhabited by Floyd’s son Danny when he wasn’t serving time in prison. Normally, the matter could have been resolved for a small sum, the land itself being worth a few hundred dollars at the most. But nothing was normal here in the desert, and things tended to get less so as the months passed.

The differences between the violent Wild West and the carpeted canyons on Wilshire Boulevard were getting wider. And so began the longest escrow in the history of Yucca Valley and environs.

I might have anticipated the banker’s problems. They were of the sort that city bankers have when dealing with highly unusual buildings in the middle of the High Desert.

At first, the suits were unhappy with the well, as I would grow to be. The paperwork on the property showed it pumping thirty litres an hour, which is a pitiful amount of water, but better than none, which was what it actually pumped. The banker called from his office in Beverly Hills and informed me that we would need to pump more water.

‘The amount of water that can be pumped,’ I told him, ‘is determined by forces even more powerful than banks — God.’

I pointed out that the water, which seeped from the mountain into the cracks and fissures in the granite over a period of many years, was all that could be pumped. There was little that I, or even the world’s largest bank, could do to speed it up. But such problems were cropping up with every aspect of the house, and the sale was moving at the same pace as the water. And with the question of water came the question of fire. We were miles from the nearest hydrant, and county regulations stipulated that we had to have sufficient water to put out a fire — a difficult thing to calculate indeed. Thirty litres an hour would scarcely put out a barbecue. In endless tedious conversations, days of telephone tag, I argued that the property consisted almost entirely of rock, and that rock didn’t burn. The threat of brush fires was minimal, as there was very little brush. And, if the house caught fire, there was little hope that 80,000 litres of water would put it out. It had burnt once before, and it had burnt fast.

Bill, in the meantime, was getting toey. He had found the exact place he wanted to move to, and he wanted the money. A year had passed since escrow had commenced. It was again Christmas, Boo was again in Australia, and I decided to head for the high plains and personally assure Bill that we were doing all we could.

Naturally, I stopped off at The Palace, and even more naturally ran straight into Adam Edwards.

‘I thought you’d have moved in by now.’ Adam had fronted up in the otherwise deserted Palace, and roused me from my musing.

‘So did I,’ I said forlornly.

Adam’s aunt Saundra — a Playmate calendar girl of 1958 — had owned Boulder House when it was a small cottage. Adam had played in the rocks as a child, and slept in the house many times. I understood his desire to return, and felt he had had every right to be interested in the house’s destiny.

‘Tell me about Saundra,’ I said.

Bill had remarked that she was ‘a damn fine-looking female’, and any time her name was mentioned other men shook their heads ruefully.

‘My dad tells it best,’ replied Adam, beckoning for the older Edwards to join us. ‘He’s the one who built the house.’

I told John I was intrigued by why such a beauty as his sister had left a Hollywood career that included biggish parts in biggish movies to settle on Coyote Road.

‘She had some kids to this big, burly guy,’ John began, as I settled into hearing how Boulder House came into being.

‘He was a friend of lots of movie stars — his best friend was Steve McQueen. She was living on Laurel Canyon and I was living in Hollywood, and the guy was violent. She called me one afternoon, and said that he was going to kill her and the two children, and she wanted me to come and look after things. I said I couldn’t because I was bowling that night, but I took her a 12-gauge and told her, “When he comes, give him some of this.” Then I went bowling.

‘Well, he came. He couldn’t get through the front door, but he smashed his way through the back — screaming how he was going to kill her and the kids. She emptied the 12-gauge into his chest, blowing his heart right out of his chest. A 12-gauge can make a mess, especially from a few feet.’

It appears the authorities were aware of the deceased’s propensities, and as it was clearly self-defence, Saundra was examined, counselled and, after a few weeks, given her freedom.

She fled to the desert.

‘And you joined her, and built her a home,’ I said, thinking this a fitting, all-in-the-family end to a tragedy.

‘No,’ John replied. ‘There already was a house. One of her boyfriends blew it up.’

An ex-marine, a munitions expert, had been living with Saundra and the kids until he began behaving weirdly. She asked him to leave, and he told her he’d fight her with hate. That hate was stronger than love.

‘Hate can never win over love,’ she replied, and he said, ‘We’ll see.’

Saundra, fortunately, was away on a trip when the angry boyfriend laced the place with explosives. He lined the fuse to the telephone line and, late at night, assuming she was home, made a phone call that set off the charges.

‘The fire brigade arrived in time to hose off the concrete slab,’ said John.

Lying on the ground amongst the ashes was the old painted peyote wheel that had marked the entrance to Coyote Road.

It still had the rope tied around it that Comanche, an old Indian who wandered the desert, had found and given to Saundra. She chewed on the rope to stop the pain, and only then was she able to look at the destruction. All that was left was an old iron fireplace. Someone had even stolen the crystals that hung from the Ten Years Ago Tree.

Then, visiting one day, she spotted a sprout of green — a Joshua tree — coming up through the ashes. She told her kids, ‘As long as we can stand in that yard feeling love and goodness for one another, it will never be gone.’

She decided to rebuild. John, a fine builder, agreed to do the job. It took him six months and cost $712. Saundra worked right alongside him, and at the end of the day she washed off the grime, put on a long dress, and drove into town to work as a cocktail waitress. The kids slept in a big tent, and Saundra dragged a double mattress up onto a huge flat boulder for her own bed. When we moved in, we christened it Playmate Rock. But that was still a long way off.

‘It seems,’ I said miserably, recounting just one of our escrow nightmares, ‘that Bill Lavender somehow managed to build his kitchen into the property of his neighbour — a guy called Salazar. That’s the house where someone got shot.’

‘I know,’ Adam replied with laudable nonchalance. ‘It was me.’

He proceeded to draw back his blond beard, and even in the thin light of the bar I could see where a hole had healed.

‘What happened?’ I inquired.

‘The asshole had been fighting in the bar, over there,’ said Adam, pointing to where the pool tables lay. ‘He got thrown out and went to his truck to get his gun. I followed him. I was trying to stop him.’ Adam sounded aggrieved.

‘I had some beer, and the bar was closing, so I talked him into going home, and went with him.

‘We were just sitting in the cabin shooting at stuff and I said, “You couldn’t hit the fucking wall,” and he said, “I can hit you,” and put the gun up to my face and shot me point blank.’

‘Shit,’ said I.

It is next to impossible to ascertain the exact truth about events minor or major in the high country, but it appears the bullet proceeded to bounce around Adam’s mouth and then exited to lodge against his spine. Adam was somewhat sobered by this development, and staggered out of the shack, blood streaming from his lips and from the hole in his lower left jaw.

The bullet seemed to have done its damage. The question was where it now resided. Adam was spitting blood, but seemed to have stabilised by the time he reached Ernie and Carole’s, insisting he didn’t want a doctor, and would just lie there and die. Danny was, by all accounts, a small but troubled Latino with strong Hopi Indian roots, and had informed Adam that if he went to the cops he would finish him off.

Adam was reluctant to go to the cops for reasons of his own. So he did what any half-sane lunatic would do under such circumstances — he woke up Ernie and Carole at the motel. It was Carole, not Ernie, he was seeking. She had once worked for the AAA, and although that wonderful organisation exists to help repair cars, there was a widespread local belief that anyone with such a background (be it clerical) could be trusted with things like a bullet that had gone missing somewhere in Adam’s head.

Carole could not find the bullet, and considered the task of removing it slightly beyond her skills. At 4.00 a.m., Adam took some beers to bed, and Ernie contacted his father. John Edwards was no stranger to bullets or wounds or cops, and found his way to the motel, where Adam was adamant he would not go to hospital.

Thereupon, Jerry Edwards, John’s brother and Adam’s uncle, an extremely competent ironworker and former LAPD officer, was summoned. He brought his tools, and, as Jerry does fine and delicate ironwork, it was hoped that he could remove the offending slug. But even Jerry could not track down the bullet that seemed to have disappeared without leaving an exit wound.

So John went to the police, and negotiated on his son’s behalf. When the cops heard the story, they assured John they were more interested in Danny.

Adam was finally taken to hospital, where a lot of surgeons passed on removing the bullet. It was right on the spine, and no one wanted to make the handsome young man a paraplegic. Finally, a young female doctor opened him up and took out the slug. Danny hadn’t had the sense to leave the shack, and when the cops arrived three days later, he was found in the possession of chemicals that the police and the courts found to be used in the production of methamphetamine.

‘When,’ I asked Adam, ‘is he likely to be released?’

Adam stared at his beer. It was a subject that had obviously occupied him.

‘Next October.’

‘With any luck, we should have moved in by then,’ I said in a carefree tone, while thinking that we had signed an agreement to buy a house at the end of a very lonely road with a psychopathic neighbour who was completing his fifth year in prison. All this to get away from a psychotic neighbour.

From the frying pan of Venice into the fire. Vicky, The Palace barmaid, made a rare appearance, and I ordered a rare whiskey.