Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [7]
Hardie was thankful it was daylight. How the hell did people do this in the dark?
These roads weren’t meant for two-way traffic, let alone a row of parked cars along the sides. But that’s what people did up here, apparently—good luck sorting it all out. Still, Hardie made it up the mountain without an accident, and that’s all that mattered.
Hardie had been up in the Hollywood Hills before, watching other houses. But never in this specific area—the original Hollywoodland development known as Beachwood Canyon. The whole setup looked way too fragile to Hardie. Back in Philly, he’d had grown up in a $7,000 two-story row house, which was wedged in with hundreds of other row houses on flat tracts of land that stretched river to river.
Out here was the opposite—all hills and heights and precariously perched multimillion-dollar homes. Every time Hardie looked at the Hollywood Hills, he half-expected to hear a loud wooden snap and then whooosh. All of the houses would slide down from their mountain perches and end up in a giant pit of broken lumber and glass at the bottom of the canyon.
Which was just one of the many reasons Hardie drank a little bit more when he sat one of these houses.
Hardie pulled up in front and turned off his rental—a Honda Whatever that felt and drove like a plastic box. Forget Alta Brea Drive; Hardie wasn’t entirely convinced this car was real. But it was part of the airline–rental-car package he’d found online. He didn’t plan on driving it much, anyway. All he needed was a way to get to a grocery store to buy food and booze, and then eventually a way back to the airport.
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