We made our way up the street on foot. I now understood the reason for the restrictions—the road was only wide enough for one car and there was nowhere to turn around. Even the “driveways” were short strips where one could barely pull a car in with enough room to spare to not have your bumper ripped off by passing vehicles.
The homes were packed tightly together and featured small porches and chalet-like carved trim, vestiges of their former lives as weekend hunting lodges. Wealthy families from Pasadena and Los Angeles would come up here to escape the heat of summer and potentially bag a deer or maybe just catch some trout for dinner.
We passed several homeowners installing long planks at the end of their driveways. I realized that all of the homes had this peculiar addition—a set of pipes at each side of the driveway entrance into which the heavy planks could slide to form a temporary wall. I asked one of the homeowners about it. He gestured warily toward the top of the hill.
“Keeps the mud out,” he said.
The street suddenly felt more menacing, as if around any of the bends could come a flash flood of mud that would sweep us down the hill. The newly formed walls made the whole thing into a sort of channel and blocked off all attempts of escape. I wanted off that road.
The house was a green and brown structure, a little more worse for wear than its neighbors. The driveway was empty and there were no lights on inside. We walked up the short set of stairs to the front porch, whose boards sagged slightly under our feet. There was no doorbell. I pulled open a dusty screen door and knocked on the door behind it.
“Looks abandoned,” Rebecca said behind me.
I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I followed the porch around the length of the house and descended ten steps to a concrete landing in a micro-backyard that was small even by Brooklyn-brownstone standards. A moss-covered oak tree ensured this area never got sun. The run-off channel bordered the back of the house and drowned out all sounds.
The half-basement underneath the house had at some point been converted into a living space. I cupped my hands over the glass door and peered inside. The room couldn’t have been more than twelve by fifteen feet. It was an odd shape as it followed the contours of the bedrock it was built into. The far “wall” was actually a giant boulder, cleaned and sealed and unmoving until the next Ice Age pushed it farther down the hill.
The room wasn’t furnished but it was decorated in a sort of Turkish theme with woven rugs, long cushions on the floor, and a large number of throw pillows. All it needed was a brass hookah and yataghan to complete the Ottoman aesthetic.
As eccentric as all this was, it was the artwork that caught my eye.
I tried the door handle and found it unlocked. I entered the room and studied the drawings on the wall. They were mostly abstract, of what appeared to be butterflies, rendered in familiar charcoal by a familiar hand. Although not signed, they were undoubtedly drawn by the visioning artist, Lois.
There had to be almost twenty versions of the same butterfly drawing, each with a date inscribed in the corner. Some were taped to the wall, but given the limited space, many more were piled on the floor. I picked up a stack and flipped through them. Only when I came upon a graphic portrait of a woman lying on her back, her legs slightly open, her eyes as naked as the rest of her body, did I realize that the other drawings didn’t depict butterflies but something much more salacious.
The subject’s bone-white hair, cast against a shadowy background, clearly identified her.
I let the drawings slip from my hands and suddenly felt queasy as I realized I hadn’t stumbled on an artist’s studio but a well-used lover’s den. Julie may have preferred Eastern spiritualism for her coaching sessions, but when it came to lustful encounters with an employee, she was all Middle East.
I was so distracted by the drawings that I didn’t notice the dark lump nestled in the pillows along the far wall. My eyes strained to see into the part of the room that was so dimly lit from the outside. I slowly approached and pulled back one of the giant pillows and found a man slumped face down on the cushion. There was something sticky on the pillow I was holding, and I realized too late that it was his blood, masked perfectly by the pillow’s burgundy shade. I dropped the pillow and stared at my crimson-stained hand.
“YOU!” a voice shouted behind me, so startling that I lurched upward and cracked my head on the rock overhang. There was that moment when I was fully aware of the pain about to come but for a blissful half-second I felt nothing. I reached up to touch my skull and comfort the impending throbbing.
The voice didn’t like that.
“Don’t you move!” it shouted. “Get down on the ground.”
A second voice repeated the same instruction but with a few expletives thrown in. I surmised from the excessive shouting that they were cops.
“Look, fellas, this area…it’s a little dirty,” I said, and tried to back up without provoking them. “If I could just step out here—”
It seemed they didn’t need much prodding because I was immediately bull-rushed and tackled to the floor. The Turkish throw pillows were soft but the million-year-old boulder wasn’t. For the second time in the span of thirty seconds my head cracked on the stone. I lay face down in the cushions as what felt like a dozen sets of knees tried to prove how flexible a human spine can be. One of those knees found the back of my neck and pressed my face further into the cushions.
I didn’t know what was more unnerving—the fact that my face was buried in pillows from a crime scene or that it was in pillows that Julie St. Jean had used in her elaborate lovemaking sessions.
After being frisked and having my pockets emptied of belongings, I was led out in handcuffs to an idling cruiser in the street. The excitement drew all the neighbors out of their warm houses and into the rain. The inhabitants of Sierra Madre were more of a mackinaw-and-rain-slicker crowd than golf-umbrella types.
I scanned the sea of red and yellow coats but didn’t spot Rebecca. I did, however, see the counterman from the coffee shop. Still wearing his apron, he had the smirk on his face of someone who’d just served a cold slice of justice. I assumed he was the one who’d called the cops.
“Asshole,” I mouthed through the cruiser window.
The bastard winked back at me.
With so many spectators in such a tight space and no room for residents to get by, the police made the decision to move me to the local station. And although I had done almost nothing wrong and didn’t even know the people staring at me, I couldn’t help but feel some level of humiliation. What made it worse was that the officer had to execute a fifty-plus-point turn to get the cruiser pointed back toward the bottom of the hill. Navigating the narrow streets was apparently a local pastime because everyone got in on the act, calling out instructions, giving hand signals, and generally laughing at the officer’s ineptitude behind the wheel.
Everyone had an opinion, except for one person standing away from the crowd, not quite hidden but not wanting to be seen either. It appeared to be a little old man in a baseball cap and a black jacket that was a raincoat in name only as it didn’t look like it could shed much water.
As the officer finally cleared his front bumper, he headed the car down the hill. We passed the old man, who quickly angled his face away from us. I turned to watch the figure disappear between a set of homes like someone very familiar with the area.
Julie St. Jean still knew her old neighborhood.