Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [4]
“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”
“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”
Clewiston had to think about that to remember.
“Last time I used Arty, it was a crosswalk hit-and-run case. The vic was a marine up from El Toro. He was in his fatigues and there was a question about whether the hitter saw him.” Clewiston slung the strap of his laptop bag over his shoulder. “He did. Thanks to Arty we made a case.”
He took his clipboard out of the trunk and then a digital camera, his trusty measuring wheel, and an eight-battery Maglite. He closed the trunk and made sure it was locked.
“I’m going to head down and get this over with,” he said. “I got called in from home.”
“Yeah, I guess the faster you’re done, the faster I can get back out on the road myself. Pretty boring just standing here.”
“I know what you mean.”
Clewiston headed down the westbound lane, which had been closed to traffic. There was a mist clinging in the dark to the tall brush that crowded the sides of the street. But he could still see the lights and glow of the city down to the south. The accident had occurred in one of the few spots along Mulholland where there were no homes. He knew that on the south side of the road the embankment dropped down to a public dog park. On the north side was Fryman Canyon and the embankment rose up to a point where one of the city’s communication stations was located. There was a tower up there on the point that helped bounce communication signals over the mountains that cut the city in half.
Mulholland was literally the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the west side and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look.
Mulholland had that top-of-the-world feel to it. It could make you feel like the prince of a city where the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.
As he came around the bend, Clewiston saw another firetruck and a tow truck from the Van Nuys police garage. The tow truck was positioned sideways across the road. Its cable was down the embankment and stretched taut as it pulled the car up. For the moment, Mulholland was completely closed. Clewiston could hear the tow motor straining and the cracking and scraping as the unseen car was being pulled up through the brush. The tow truck shuddered as it labored.
Clewiston saw the man with sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and moved next to him as he watched.
“Is he still in it?” he asked Fairbanks.
“No, he was transported to St. Joe’s. But he was DOA. You’re Clewiston, right? The reconstructionist.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got to handle this thing right. Once the ID gets out, we’ll have the media all over this.”
“The captain told me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you too. In this department, the captains don’t get blamed when things go sideways and off the road. It’s always the sergeants and it ain’t going to be me this time.”
“I get it.”
“You have any idea what this guy was worth? We’re talking tens of millions, and on top of that he’s supposedly in the middle of a divorce. So we go five by five by five on this thing. Comprende, reconstructionist?”
“It’s Clewiston and I said I get it.”
“Good. This is what we’ve got. Single car fatality. No witnesses. It appears the victim was heading eastbound when his vehicle, a two-month-old Porsche Carrera, came around that last curve there and for whatever reason didn’t straighten out. We’ve got treads on the road you can take a look at. Anyway, he went straight off the side and then down, baby. Major head