Follow the Money

26


I didn’t want to go alone. Fortunately, I caught Liz on her cell and convinced her to go with me. I picked her up in front of a coffee shop in Westwood. She was still lugging her backpack, in addition to a large iced latte.

“Nice ride.” She smiled, as she threw the backpack in the back seat and climbed in the front. “Did you get rid of the Beemer? Did you finally come to your senses and reclaim your soul?”

“Don’t start.” I smiled. “It’s been a rough day. I can’t believe we’re even doing this.”

I told her all the details of my meeting with Ed. We drove out on Sunset, through the Pacific Palisades and continued past Temescal Canyon and on toward the ocean. The road descended away from the shops and restaurants in the village, down the final tight curves to where Sunset suddenly burst around a corner to reveal the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Sunset Boulevard finally butted up against the Pacific Coast Highway at an intersection perpetually clogged with traffic. On the ocean side of PCH sat a parking lot for a seaside restaurant and little else but sand, surf, and the jagged rocks of the breakwater. We turned right and headed up PCH toward Malibu.

The Topanga Canyon road winds its way through the part of the Santa Monica mountains that sit between the Palisades and Malibu. Though only twenty minutes from the city, it is one of the final vestiges of rustic country living to be found in the area around Los Angeles. Countless smaller roads barely wider than a single lane angle off the main road and up the steep mountainside, ultimately disappearing into the wilderness of low trees, sage brush, and rocks that line the canyon walls.

We went through the small collection of buildings that functions as the town of Topanga, with its odd shops and quaint restaurants, and then turned left up a small drive with a cluster of rusty mailboxes gathered along the main road.

What had for many years been a hideout for artists and other rustics who fancied a rugged, pastoral life, was rapidly gentrifying into a neighborhood of wealthy businessmen, lawyers, surgeons, and the ubiquitous movie people who seemed to run like lemmings into every place considered hip or cool. This left the canyon with a strange mix of lone holdouts, still living the country life but finding it more and more difficult to pay their property taxes, and the wealthy interlopers only interested in the appearance of country living without the attendant hassles.

“Do you really think it will be there?” Liz asked, more to herself than to me.

“Who knows. It looks like a real deed, doesn’t it? Murdock said she’d bought a place.” I studied signs at the ends of the driveways as I drove. They were difficult to read. “I just hope the place is still empty.” I added.

The road was steep and only a single lane. We passed old homes with old cars in the driveways that were decorated in the bohemian style one expected in Topanga Canyon — hand painted murals, yards colored brightly with shimmering glass and metal sculptures, dogs everywhere. But interspersed with these were the new homes, built with new money by people who did not care to blend into their surroundings. They were monstrosities piled high and to the edge of their lots with manicured lawns and Mercedes SUVs in the driveways. Homes built by and for obnoxious people who had even less sense than they had taste.

The numbers on the houses climbed as we ascended the hill. I slowed the car as the addresses got close and stopped completely when we reached a number that was too high. For a minute I felt slightly deflated, disappointed at the prospect that the deed was inaccurate, or that the house was no longer there.

“Maybe we missed it,” Liz said, leaning out the window and looking back down the road behind us.

I backed up slowly and we examined the driveways one by one. We came to one that appeared to branch off and split into a high and low road. The driveway leading up disappeared behind its crest.

“Could be up there,” I guessed.

Liz said, “It doesn’t look like the upper road is used at all.” Then she turned to me and grinned. “Maybe it’s tucked back in there and no one knows about it.” She was excited. I liked her that way. Her energy was infectious.

I turned in and drove up the gravel driveway. It looked like the lower portion was occasionally used for parking by the neighbors. But as we went up, the weeds began to grow high in the center of the wheel ruts and the ruts themselves faded to grass covered parallel indentations until, perhaps a half mile onward, we came to a low slung post and beam house protruding out over a small terrace. I shut the car off and we got out, looking around at the trees and grass and listening to the overwhelming silence. There were numbers beside the door and they matched the address on the deed.

“Looks like this is it,” Liz said. The sound of her voice was utterly foreign in the stillness.

The house was a single story and looked like a log cabin Frank Lloyd Wright might have built. It was small and blended into the hillside, the wide decks surrounding it mixing indoor and outdoor space perfectly. I could see east out across the Santa Monica Mountains, with their jagged peaks and soft, mossy green hue, off toward the city and then south down the canyon. The smog hovered at the base of the canyon, blotting out the furthest edge of the view, but I imagined that on a clear day the nebulous gray air would dissipate and the blue of the Pacific would twinkle like a gemstone in the distance.

I stepped up onto the porch and found the front door locked. Liz came up beside me and peered through the window. I did the same. We could see the dusty wood floors of a long empty living room disappear around a wall. The house was empty.

We walked down the side of the house and onto the wide deck that sat out over the hillside, supported by stilts. The view was panoramic, unobstructed, and endless. I imagined Sharon Steele standing in the same spot more than a decade before feeling the warm Santa Ana breeze blowing eucalyptus and jasmine on her face and contemplating the same view and the serene contrast it would offer to her then current life.

I turned to face the wide bay windows, shielded my eyes, and stuck my nose to the glass. I could see a front room with a pile of boxes and other things in the center. There were a few loose articles scattered about the room, but it was otherwise empty.

“There’s her stuff,” I mumbled. Seeing the pile through the window gave me shivers.

“It’s kind of eerie,” Liz said, reading my mind.

We went around to the rear of the house, trying all the doors and windows along the way. Everything was locked. We stood by the back door, staring at each other.

“We’ll have to break in,” Liz suggested.

I knew she was right. I picked up a rock and held it, assessing its weight. Despite the situation, I hesitated, briefly debating the moral consequences of burglary.

Liz rolled her eyes and let out a huff. “You sell yourself to corporate America and now you’ve got a conscience. Gimme that.” Liz snatched the rock from my hand and tossed it through the glass in the back door. She’d thrown it harder than necessary. We could hear the rock rolling across the floor inside.

“Way to finesse it.”

“F*ck you.” She grinned as she reached in through the broken window and tried to turn the knob. I watched her struggle a few times.

“Here, shorty. Let me do it.” She stepped aside and I reached in and unlocked the door.

Once inside, we came into a kitchen that opened into the living room we’d seen from the deck. I tried the faucets. No water. I flipped the light switches. Dead. The air was suffocating, dank, and smelled of mice. I could see their telltale turds, scattered along the counters and floors like handfuls of black rice tossed and left to land like confetti. Liz didn’t know what they were and she grimaced when I told her.

We went into the living room. Several of the cardboard boxes had split at their sides, eaten away by rodents, their contents — mostly clothes — spilling out onto the floor and eaten at as well.

I walked around the pile. There was an antique mission style chair placed in the corner of the room, facing the windows, a lamp beside it. I imagined Sharon Steele placing it there. Selecting the location after surveying the room, making a futile effort to make the house feel more like a home — more like her home — on the day her stuff was delivered. I kicked at an unraveled sweater, half of which had been drug off somewhere, likely as material for a nest, but no mice scurried from the open boxes. I moved a tall wardrobe box to one side, hesitating, waiting for something hideous to leap out at me. Nothing. I took a deep breath and laughed at myself; the laughter echoed through the empty house.

Liz asked, “What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know.” And I really didn’t. “We’re just kind of looking, I guess.”

I unfolded the cardboard flaps of the boxes on the top of the pile. One was full of books, another filled with papers and files, and the third contained the photo albums I assumed Becky had been talking about. I opened one and its plastic pages, stuck together with heat and time, turned in clumps of two or three. Liz opened another.

Peeling several pages apart, I examined the pictures with an odd, detached interest. Scenes of people I did not know, taken in a living room during what might have been Thanksgiving. It looked like the late 70s, or maybe early 80s. There was a small girl in one of the pictures and I wondered if it was Becky.

I tried to identify Steele in some of the pictures, but could not. As I stood there, catching a glimpse of the those private things Sharon Steele had run off with in the days before her death, I realized I couldn’t identify her in any of the pictures because I did not know what she looked like. I had seen a few pictures of her in the news reports about the murder, but I had lost those few images and now had nothing to identify her by. I put the album back and grabbed another. The problem persisted.

Liz looked up at me with a sadness coloring her eyes. “I think these are all of her family. These were the things that she wanted to preserve.” She set the photo album on the pile like it was made of thin, delicate glass. “It’s just so sad. These are the things she chose to take with her when she finally had the courage to leave her failed marriage.”

I picked up the box of pictures to set them aside and the bottom fell out, sending the books tumbling to the floor. I tossed the remains of the box back behind me and piled the photo albums off to the side. As I pushed the stacks of boxes further apart to get at one that had fallen between them, I noticed that, at the bottom and in the middle of the pile was a wooden box.

“Hey, check this out,” I said.

Liz helped me pull the rest of the boxes away from it. “What is it?”

I slid it out from the pile with my foot. “I’m not sure, but I think it’s Becky Steele’s long lost hope chest.”

The chest was about three feet long, a foot deep and a foot and a half wide. It was old and solid, well made and heavy. I picked it up by the ornate brass handles at each end and gave it a shake. The thick brass lock dangling from the hasp rattled, but nothing shifted inside when I shook it. I set it back down, placed the photo albums on top and lifted it again. I carried the pile out to the car and placed it in the trunk.

“At least Becky can get these things back,” I said, as Liz closed the trunk.

She stood beside me, close, nearly leaning against me. “I hope that’s not the only good thing to come from this whole mess.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to turn and take hold of her, but resisted. It didn’t seem right. Whether because of the haunting quality of the house or because I was too scared to upset the fragile balance Liz and I had attained, I couldn’t say.

Instead, I lingered for another minute and said, as I walked back to the house, “Best of all, K&C can pay for the shipping.”

Liz followed me back inside. We poked through the rest of the boxes, none of which seemed particularly interesting. Then we stood for a minute, watching dust particles drift through the shafts of light streaming in through the windows.

I went to the kitchen with a sudden urge to clean up the mess we’d made. Liz stood and watched me scrape the broken glass into a pile near the back door and toss the rock back outside.

“I don’t suppose it matters much,” I said. “I suppose Becky or someone will have to come out and get the rest of the stuff at some point. Then I guess they’ll sell it.”

Liz looked around the kitchen and then at me. After a few seconds she said, “They’ll have to do something about that bad deed first.”