Rainbow Drive

By Roderick Thorp

Decades after his father’s murder, a Los Angeles cop gets a chance to set things right

Michael Gallagher is twelve years old when his father is hit by a speeding truck. While crusading for public housing, his father ran afoul of the city’s most corrupt politicians, and Michael is certain they were responsible for the crash. As his father is lowered into the ground, Michael vows vengeance—no matter how long it takes.
 
Decades later, Michael, now a police officer, is awakened one night by gunfire. Outside his window, he sees helicopters and squad cars arriving at the scene of the crime. It’s a massive operation, but the next day, there is nothing about it in the logbooks. To learn what really happened that night, Michael descends into the black heart of Los Angeles, where he will learn the truth about his father—if he’s lucky enough to stay alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497680951

Roderick Thorp

Roderick Thorp is the author of The Detective, Rainbow Drive, and Nothing Lasts Forever, the basis for the movie Die Hard. He has worked as a private detective and done extensive crime reporting, including a twenty-one-part series on cocaine traffic in Southern California, which was published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Thorp’s other novels include Into the Forest, Dionysus, Slaves, The Circle of Love, Westfield, Jenny and Barnum, Devlin, and River.  

Book preview

1962

The undertaker was worried about getting his money. After twenty-four years in the business in Southern California, he believed he knew when someone was thinking of skipping out on him. The deceased had borrowed heavily against his life insurance policy, and the widow knew there was not going to be much left of the proceeds after she paid the undertaker’s fee. The widow was distraught and panicky, but she was thinking about finances, too.

The undertaker knew that because he had overheard a conversation between the widow and a sister from New York. The dead man’s son, Michael, would be taken back East on the sister’s return trip. At the age of twelve the boy was going to live permanently with the New York sister. The widow had said she was making an economic decision. Maybe there was panic in her choice, but she was trying to be realistic. Realism was a bad, bad sign for an undertaker. Upon the death of any man, guilt carried the day—the undertaking business was built on that principle—with anger setting in later. But in this case the anger was setting in early, and the undertaker had to protect himself. If the widow was beginning to think that in the initial hours of her grief she had spent too much money on the relatively opulent arrangements she had made for her husband’s funeral, the undertaker would be firm indeed in showing her that there was nothing she could do about it now except pay the bill.

Apparently the deceased had been a man who liked to live high. According to what the widow had admitted to the undertaker, there was little in the estate besides the insurance—some equity in the house, no stocks, only a few small government bonds. Nobody in his thirties expects to die. This had been a hit-and-run death, and a real beauty, too: the man had been hit by a truck traveling at a speed of about fifty miles an hour.

Whether or not the widow thought she was going to pay too much, the undertaker did not believe she could complain about what she had gotten, including a clear day. The weather was perfect for a high-on-the-hill Forest Lawn burial. You could see for miles across the San Fernando Valley, across the orchards and bright subdivisions, to the purple mountains beyond. The mourners seemed to be enjoying the view, even the gangly son of the deceased, whose attention wandered from time to time from the business at hand. Maybe he was uncomfortable in his new blue suit, which must have been bought in a hurry. At the funeral parlor the undertaker had noticed that the cuffs were too wide and broke too much on his shoes. The undertaker wanted to like the kid, but he seemed to have nothing to offer, too quiet even under these circumstances, too ordinary, maybe he’d even become one of those men who spend their lives permanently lost.

The fact was, the undertaker did not like any of these people. There wasn’t much to like in a man who left a woman and a child with financial problems. And the toughness in Mrs. Gallagher’s voice was more than just her New York accent. Obviously she was a high roller, too, like her late husband. She was over thirty-five, a tall, full-figured woman who knew she was attractive to men. Gray was beginning to show in her jet-black hair. She was someone beyond the undertaker’s experience, and he knew it. The undertaker was from Indiana, Hoosier born and bred, as he often said himself. A woman like her laughed at a man like him, fifty-five years old, fifty pounds overweight. He was not attractive to women, with pale, puffy eyes and thinning gray hair that was limp, like that of a corpse. The undertaker knew he could never handle a woman like her. That made him feel like a fool, and he could not help finding ways to despise her. At least he knew how to take care of his family, the undertaker thought.

He was more pleased with the perfect weather, if the weather was what had brought out the good crowd. All of the people at the graveside had been at the funeral service, and most had put down their addresses in the space provided when they had signed the guest register. The undertaker was having his secretary copy and verify every name and address in the book, to make it easier to find Mrs. Gallagher in case she decided to skip. That sort of thing happened often in Los Angeles. For that matter, she could be married again in three months. That sort of thing happened often in this city, too.

Standing next to his mother beside the grave, his collar too tight and his suit too warm, Michael Gallagher was not in tears. This morning the tall, thin, fair-haired boy had awakened resolved to show as little emotion as possible. He had thought he would fail, but now, in the last moments of the ceremony for his father, Michael was having difficulty keeping his mind on what was going on around him. It was strange, and he was very ashamed of himself, but questions were crowding into his head—too many questions—and he could not help being distracted by the view across the Valley. In the four years the Gallaghers had been in Los Angeles, Michael had never seen anything like it. He was hoping nobody would notice him turning his head toward the view.

He could not look at any of the adults gathered at the graveside without asking himself what they knew about his father. There were secrets. Maybe his father’s death could have been prevented. A month ago Michael had heard him telling his mother as much. Everyone had his secrets, his father had said. Exactly that. Now he was in his grave.

Prepare yourself, Michael’s father had whispered across the kitchen table to his mother that evening, stopping at the end of every sentence as if he were out of breath. Michael was listening in the hall, sleepy and frightened, in his pajamas, curious about his father’s late-night comings and goings, the car rumbling in and out of the garage. Michael was frozen into alertness, like a startled cat. Something’s going to happen. It was the way they looked at me when the meeting was over. I wasn’t supposed to see what they’re up to. There’ll never be any public housing in Los Angeles like back East. You’ll see. Too much money is involved—hundreds of millions of dollars. You have to understand, for that kind of money, people take no unnecessary chances. I saw the way they looked at me.

That had been a month ago. Now Michael was coming to understand that his parents had been living an unusual life here in California, one that had gone faster and faster. Two nights ago, he had overheard another conversation, in the funeral home, between his mother and his aunt who had flown in from New York, a conversation almost as chilling as the one he had heard a month before.

I wanted you out here to take Michael back to New York with you. I have to get a job. It’s the best thing for me.

I understand that, Michael’s aunt said.

It’s the only way I can help myself, his mother said. If I put the house on the market and sell everything else, I still won’t clear enough to go back East and start over. In New York, I can’t even earn enough to cover ninety dollars a month for a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood in Queens that isn’t full of the niggers or the guineas. So there you are. I can’t think of another way out.

We figured something like this, Michael’s aunt said. She was shorter and plumper than Michael’s mother, and now the tone of the voice was sharp. You bit off more than you could chew out here. You two had everything while Joe and me ran around to doctors trying to find out why I can’t have kids. We can’t send Michael across the country every time you get lonely for him. Do you understand? It’s too much emotional strain on me. If you want to stay out here, you’re making a permanent decision. Everything has its price.

Michael’s mother was silent.

You like it out here, don’t you? his aunt demanded suddenly, her voice rising. "You have to be honest with me. If I know you’re being honest with me now, maybe I can believe you’re not going to give me trouble about this later. I won’t have you tearing up my feelings. You like it here, even now, after what’s happened."

I’m being honest with you, Michael’s mother said. You don’t have to tell me about the price of things. You be fair with me, I’ll be fair with you, okay? I want what’s best for him.

It was as if her words had floated out of the room, she sounded so strange and remote. For a moment Michael wanted to shout to his mother that he had heard his father warn her, but then he shrank back and stayed hidden.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the minister intoned on the sunny hillside and everyone in the sweaty crowd looked down except, as Michael observed, Michael himself. His mother held his hand. Maybe, like everybody else, Michael was supposed to pretend he didn’t know what was happening. His father was dead, probably murdered by somebody, somebody he knew in business, that part of his parents’ life that had really been so different from others’. Nobody was doing anything. Were they all too scared? Why did his mother want him out of town? He was old enough to take care of himself. Michael had made up his mind: he wasn’t going back to New York, not now, not ever. They wouldn’t try to get him on the plane if he was kicking and screaming in front of other people. That’s what he would do if he had to, and he would tell them that this afternoon. Michael was scared, but he would be able to tell them, even though actually throwing a tantrum at the airport would probably be easier.

He knew he was not doing it for himself. He was not doing it for his mother either—she would know, but that didn’t bother him. Michael was going to do it for his father, who wasn’t supposed to be dead. Everybody knew it, but only Michael seemed to care. He wasn’t going to say anything at all about it, not ever, but he was going to stay in Los Angeles and find out why his father had died, no matter what it took, no matter how long.

The undertaker was paid in full for the funeral before he left Forest Lawn. He had to wait until the last of the family moved away from the graveside before he could wave off the chauffeurs of the hearse and flower car, then he trudged down the hill toward the black Cadillac limousine in which the family was waiting. A few cars were still lined up behind, engines churning. The undertaker was perspiring heavily now, and it was going to be hours before he would be able to quit for the day. An old woman had been brought in and needed embalming, but even more unpleasant for the undertaker, he had to meet with his accountant in the evening to discuss taxes.

Twenty yards up from the service road, a sandy-haired man in an expensive gray suit and black tie walked toward him. The undertaker offered a small, tight-lipped professional smile. The man looked about thirty years old, but in Los Angeles he could actually be ten years older. The man stepped in front of the undertaker, blocking him from view.

I want to thank you personally, the sandy-haired man said. The undertaker saw that he had a crooked, overlapping front tooth. He didn’t look like he’d been hit by a truck.

That’s the job, the undertaker said. The late Mr. Gallagher had sustained multiple fractures of the hips, thighs, and lower spine. From the waist down, Mr. Gallagher had been almost as shapeless as a pile of rags. The undertaker had had to wrap the legs with newspaper so they would support a pair of pants, even when the wearer was flat on his back. It had been a tricky job that had consumed almost a full roll of masking tape.

The sandy-haired man drew an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. We took up a collection at the office. It should cover what the widow owes you. If she calls you, tell her what I’m telling you, a collection we took at the office.

While the man watched, the undertaker opened the envelope. Inside was a blue embossed cashier’s check for two thousand dollars, made out to the undertaker, Niles Eberhart.

That should do it, the sandy-haired man said. Any problems, Mr. Eberhart?

Niles Eberhart kept his eyes down. Now he realized he understood the situation all along. Niles Eberhart was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 210 pounds. He was the first undertaker in America to wear muted striped suits to funerals, a real breakthrough. Niles Eberhart knew that the undertaker was an important part of the show he put on. No, none at all.

Well, you know what to tell Mrs. Gallagher. The man motioned toward the envelope. It’d be a good idea to put that away.

Niles Eberhart tucked the envelope into his inside jacket pocket, and the man turned down the hill toward a four-door Oldsmobile 98 hardtop, a five-thousand-dollar car, not cheap. Gallagher had been some kind of an accountant or auditor, high up in the firm, and this sandy-haired man had implied he was a friend. Niles Eberhart had friends in banking who could help him trace a cashier’s check, but he knew he would be making trouble for himself if he tried anything like that—asked so much as a single question.

The sandy-haired man with the crooked tooth had not been at the funeral home or at the graveside ceremony. Some people thought undertakers couldn’t remember faces, but Niles Eberhart remembered everyone. Two thousand dollars, a nice round number. He was supposed to believe it had been collected in an accounting office. Hundreds more than the price of the funeral. The message was clear: forget about this. Niles Eberhart could remember everyone, the living as well as the dead, but he wanted to forget the sandy-haired man and everything about him.

In another minute he was sure he had all but forgotten completely. The two thousand was tax-free. Wife-free, too. Niles Eberhart had just picked up a chunk of money he could spend on his own pleasure. He wasn’t going to tell his accountant either. No, he was going to tell the accountant—not tonight, but later in the year—that Mrs. Gallagher had skipped on him, and that this year’s tax return should show the Gallagher funeral as a bad debt.

Oh, hell, he was thinking a moment later as he approached the limo, if he was going to do that, he might as well rewrite the bill to show a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loss, maybe even three thousand.

Now the power window slid down—the widow wanted to have a word with him. The first eyes Niles Eberhart noticed were the boy’s. The boy was staring at him, in that cold, distant way of grieving children. For just a second the boy’s eyes dropped from Eberhart’s own, dropped no more than eighteen inches or so, to the vicinity of Eberhart’s inside jacket pocket, where the envelope was. The boy had seen what had happened on the hillside—he had been watching all along. Niles Eberhart couldn’t help feeling a moment of fear, as young as the boy was, precisely because the boy’s expression was so deathly—hating.…

But so what if the boy told his mother what he had seen? Niles Eberhart would simply tell her the truth as he understood it, exactly what the sandy-haired man had told him. And that would be the end of it. Mrs. Gallagher would not want more information … no, she would not want to pursue it at all. Niles Eberhart knew this dame: she would be happy if she never heard another word.

1985

BOOK ONE

1

Mike Gallagher rolled over in the strange bed and smiled, his eyes still closed. He reached for Gretchen Heidi, who was from Germany and a movie producer. Her side of the bed was empty.

Where are you?

In the bathroom.

Mike opened his eyes and stared at Gretchen’s ceiling. He had been running around with her for almost six months. She was as bright as they came, but he was not in love with her, nor she with him. They were marking time, and because they knew it, they were friends.

It was four-thirty in the morning, still dark. Gretchen was shooting her first movie in America, a big budget comedy starring Dick Albert and Connie Lyall, about a homosexual and a lesbian who fall in love. Gretchen had told Mike that there were actor problems, but she had not said more because of the names involved. Only once or twice had they really discussed her work. Mike loathed show business and the creeps involved in it. Gretchen agreed with him now—she had seen enough of Hollywood. She was here for the money, she said, and when she had it, she would be gone—another limit to their relationship, one that added to the respect between them.

This was Monday morning, and she had to be on the set very early. Mike liked getting up early anyway. Often he was at his desk at five-thirty. It was the Southern California weather, as close to paradise as the world could devise. The weather made you want to jump out of bed and get going. Construction and factory shifts started at seven, joggers were out with first light, and exercise gyms opened at six or earlier.

Now Gretchen came out of the bathroom and slipped back into bed. She was dark-haired and full-breasted, a little on the heavy side. They had met in Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. Waiting to begin her first Hollywood feature, Gretchen had been exploring the city. She was a beer drinker, and Barney’s carried over a hundred different brands. She had a slight German accent and still spoke English as if she had learned it in school, precisely, although she was almost completely fluent now. She was more surprised to discover that he was a cop than he was to learn she was a movie producer. She liked the idea of his being a homicide detective; what she didn’t like was that he worked for the Los Angeles Police Department. If the newspaper accounts were right, she’d said once, LAPD was just plain vicious. Although she was from southern Germany, near Munich, home of the Nazi party, she considered herself a radical socialist. So they discussed his work as infrequently as they discussed hers.

Mike had done some bits in movies, fully satisfying his curiosity about them—making movies was like flying, hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. He had not seen her first movie, made in Germany—another comedy, about a pregnant girl looking for a husband—but at least he had heard of it. Gretchen was thirty-one and a tough cookie; she liked big, tough guys and wanted to have an affair.

I have my own life, she had said. I won’t change my habits for you.

Mike was always careful, never fooling around with a woman who had less to lose than he did. Don’t do your coke under my nose.

She laughed at him. You sound so rough.

Why don’t you run around with crooks? he asked.

Oh, I do. The only difference between cops and crooks in this country is that the cops are better lays.

He smiled. You have to explain that.

Gretchen had a husky, throaty laugh. She squeezed his bicep. You cops are in better shape.

Mike crossed his eyes and Gretchen laughed again.

Mike understood the game she wanted to play. For as long as the game lasted, she would struggle and Mike would have to subdue her. The idea was to keep it light.

Gretchen was an aggressive, demanding lover who used her strength and nipped him with her teeth. She was curious about his failed marriage and surprised to learn that Judy was older than he was—thirty-six now. With the divorce Judy had quit teaching and gone into advertising. She had wanted to change her life. Mike never said more about Judy than that, and Gretchen professed astonishment that he didn’t complain about his ex-wife, as so many men did. That kind of talk only made Mike’s skin crawl.

In the predawn darkness, those thoughts faded easily. Gretchen liked to make noise in bed, and Mike loved noisy women. It was May, the windows were open, but that was no problem. This was Laurel Canyon, a rustic, aging, hilly neighborhood of hot tubs and cocaine, show business jerkoffs and hippies left over from the sixties. Mike knew it as well as he did because Judy had taught here, in the Canyon’s only public school. Here people thought they could do anything, including fuck on the lawn. Mike knew that Gretchen loved that particular illusion of freedom, so he rode her harder.…

In another minute he heard the scuff of footsteps below the window. They sounded like an infantry squad running double time down the street. Joggers…

The sky was purple when Mike reawakened. Gretchen was out of bed again. From outside, and not far off, a woman cried out.

Mike sat up. Gretchen?

She stepped out of the bathroom, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Relax. They’re having a good time down the street again.

Mike heard the woman moan. She did not sound like she was in the throes of passion. Now furniture crashed.

Which house is that?

Across the street, I think. I don’t know. Gretchen turned away. I’m never home.

Don’t kid me.

They party, Gretchen called when she was in the bathroom again. You’re the cop, you figure it out.

Mike had his feet on the hardwood floor. For the moment there was silence, and Mike listened as he stood up. Gretchen rented this house, leased her furniture from Roberts Rents, dark oak Spanish colonial to complement the fake Spanish-mission exterior. She was a bit of a slob, with film scripts and clothing piled everywhere. He had to step over her high heels and then he put his foot down on a ball-point pen.

The wind had picked up, but through the rustling of the eucalyptus trees, Mike thought he could hear other sounds, so faint he couldn’t be sure he was hearing anything at all. Another woman yelled. This time Mike heard a word, and there was no mistaking it.

"Don’t!"

Did you hear that?

Gretchen stepped into the doorway again. Was I supposed to?

This happens often?

Not so loud. But yes, it does. They yell. What are you going to do about it anyway? You’re not supposed to be here in the first place. It’s against department rules, isn’t it?

Yes, it was, because technically Gretchen was married. The marriage was nonfunctional and her husband was in Germany living as a single man, but the Los Angeles Police Department could tie the can to Mike’s tail nevertheless. Mike had to forget about the noise across the street, much as it went against his instincts. He couldn’t even phone it in to his own division without putting himself at bureaucratic risk. The Los Angeles Police Department’s rules of behavior had nothing to do with the California Penal Code, the Constitution of the United States, or even the twentieth century, and the department had a gang of internal spies and squealers to make sure that the rules were enforced. An officer caught seeing a married woman was up for departmental charges. A captain would be in Chief Tom Cutler’s office within the hour, and Mike, as an acting head of a Homicide Squad, whose job was insecure and still open to political infighting, could consider himself lucky if all he had to leave behind was his badge and pension rights. Mike and Gretchen had discussed all this when her disclosure of her marriage made it necessary. He’d told her about the Wednesday-morning meeting where his fellow supervisors discussed the personal lives of the people under them—no detail was too petty in the struggle to preserve LAPD careers. Gretchen thought it was disgusting and Mike couldn’t argue with her. No matter, because the traditions, like Mount Rushmore, were there, and just about as subject to change.

Still naked, Mike was headed toward the bathroom when he heard footsteps out in the street again, this time going up the hill. What he had wanted to ask Gretchen slipped out of mind as he stopped and listened, holding his breath for silence. Gretchen stepped into the doorway and eyed him, but Mike remained focused on what was happening outside. The sounds beneath the window were not being made by athletes. Mike heard stumbling and hard breathing.

Gretchen threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. Put your shorts on and go down to the kitchen. Bacon and eggs are in the refrigerator. I made coffee. I will be down soon.

Downstairs Mike decided he wasn’t hungry. When he had a cup of coffee, he went to the living-room window. Now the sky was bright enough to let him see into the shadows under the trees. Rainbow Drive was a straight, steep, tree-lined street climbing more than a mile to the rim of the canyon and a dirt road that led over the hill. Diagonally across the street from Gretchen’s place was a row of two-story town houses. The garage door of the nearest house was up, showing a Jaguar sedan and a Datsun pickup truck inside. The gate to the little front garden was ajar, swinging against its wrought-iron frame. Mike was certain of his memory of the condition of the house on previous evenings and mornings: the occupants usually kept the garage door down, the gate locked. But there was nothing Mike could do after the fact of any crime committed in the house, never mind the question of putting himself in jeopardy.

The sunlight sparkled through the tops of the trees. On the other side of the canyon Mike could see the houses set on the top of the ridge, like teeth in a gum. Some of the roads at the top of the canyon were only ten feet wide, with sheer drops on both sides.

Gretchen came down in another few minutes. I thought you would be making your breakfast.

Who lives over there, where the garage door is open?

Are you still interested in that?

Then you know that’s the house the sounds came from.

She stepped back, frowning. What a snoop you are! I told you, the people there carry on—

Who are they?

Mike had barely finished the question when his attention was distracted from an answer by the whup, whup, whup of a helicopter approaching over the jagged hills. He recognized the sound as that made by the helicopter used by several departments of the city of Los Angeles, including police and fire. Mike waved Gretchen back and peered upward through the eucalyptus to catch sight of the source of the approaching noise.

The helicopter swept into a slow circle—Mike could tell by the changing pitch of its sound. The machine swung into view, closer to the ground than he had imagined, below the rim of the canyon, over on its side, its spotlight housing poking from its nose like the mandible of a grasshopper, the familiar blue-and-white surveillance helicopter of the LAPD.

What the hell are they doing here? Gretchen asked.

Mike didn’t answer, as still as an Indian listening to twigs breaking. Laurel Canyon was part of his division, Hollywood, and he thought he knew every major case Hollywood was working on. The helicopter could not have gotten here so quickly, so early in the day—if in fact something had gone wrong across the street—unless a police investigation was already in progress. Mike felt more uneasy than ever, because an investigation in progress meant that the action had originated at police headquarters downtown, Parker Center. It was possible that the reasons at Parker Center for excluding Hollywood were benign, but Mike was too much a politician and knew Los Angeles too well to want to proceed on that assumption.

The helicopter made its fourth pass overhead. There could be no doubt that the object of its attention was the town house with the open garage door and swinging gate.

They’re not here to catch you fucking me, are they?

Mike shook his head. They would have telephoned while I had your legs in the air.

I’m not in the telephone book.

You’re in our telephone book, just like everybody else. I’m going to drive you over to the studio this morning. Take a cab or have somebody give you a lift when it’s time to come home.

Why?

I want us to look like a couple going off to work.

Gretchen looked alarmed. I don’t want trouble with the studio. Will police be at the bottom of the street?

It was a good question—he didn’t know the answer.

Let’s just do it my way, okay? We’ll be all right.

You must think it is very serious if you want to use me for an alibi for getting away from here.

I don’t know, he said. "I’m telling you the truth. Is there anything you know about those people over there?"

He saw her stiffen with anger. I’ve already told you everything, Mike.

At the top of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, where it looped over Mulholland Drive, Gretchen looked back to the helicopter slowly circling almost dead level with them, silent in the distance. She switched on the radio and turned the dial to KFWB, the all-news station. Mike thought it was much too soon for anything on the radio, but he said nothing. Neither of them had spoken since they’d gotten down to the foot of Rainbow Drive, where the only cop to be seen was Mike himself. He knew that the continuing silence between them wasn’t helping, but he was afraid that anything he wanted to say would just trade further on the privileges of their relationship. He wanted to question her more closely about the people across the street. He liked Gretchen enough to want to avoid hurting her, and he disliked himself for the way he was finding it out, fighting his growing curiosity. But she was holding back—maybe only details, but they were something.

They were turning east on Ventura Boulevard when he said, I’ll call you later.

Find out what happened, she said. I want to know.

You’ll know. I’m sure you’ll know.

"Should you have called the police? I know you are the police but should you have called someone?"

He drew a breath. As it turned out I didn’t need to. The helicopter was overhead before I had my underwear on. If I hadn’t been with you, you would have thought nothing about any of it—that maybe someone else called the police. Let’s not explore any other meanings just yet.

You’re saying that it could be serious.

Yes, I think so.

Damn it, Mike, I don’t want to be involved!

In this context, Gretchen, that makes two of us. He glanced at her. Got the idea?

The bottom line, as you people call it, is that I’m supposed to lie for you.

He never said bottom line and he knew that his annoyance with her phrasing was evidence only of his underlying tension. He had thirteen years invested in an ill-chosen career and waiting pension that could be gone in a flash because of her dead marriage, choice of residences, and that she had wanted to go to her place last night instead of his. He was tense, all right. Just play dumb. We’ll be talking.

"We’ll be talking?"

I hadn’t finished. Now he was really controlling himself. I had been going to say, I’ll see that you know what to do and say to keep yourself as far from the situation as possible—okay?

What do you mean, ‘as possible’?

"You live across the street. The only way you can protect yourself during police questioning is to hire a lawyer, and even then he can only keep you from answering their questions, not them asking."

I see. Coldly.

He took a breath. You didn’t see anything. You didn’t hear anything that you hadn’t heard before. The rest of the neighbors will have the same story to tell. That’s all there is to it.

I just hope it doesn’t go any further than that, she said.

It shouldn’t. He turned in at the studio gate. To the guard, he said, I’m going right out again. The guard peered across at Gretchen, recognized her, and nodded. Mike said, We don’t know yet what happened over there, do we?

"We do know that something happened. She opened the door, but did not get out. I know you’re trying to protect yourself, Mike, and that’s all right. Just don’t push me around in the process. It just reminds me of what I don’t like about Americans. You think you own the world."

He kept his hands on the steering wheel. Maybe she wouldn’t see how tightly he was gripping it. You’ve said that before and didn’t get an argument out of me. You won’t get one now.

That’s what I really care for about you. She managed a little smile and leaned over and kissed his cheek.

He wasn’t paying attention. The traffic was still light—he could be through Cahuenga Pass in ten minutes. He wanted to see last night’s reports. He wanted to see what kind of official business Hollywood Division had done in the hours since he had been there.

2

Mike hated the new Hollywood Division building on Wilcox Avenue, a one-story, windowless building that looked like a military bunker and told the neighborhood residents just how little the police trusted them. The new telephone company buildings were in the same Future Siege style, and Mike wondered what the architects knew that hadn’t dawned on the rest of the world. In any event, Mike thought, if you built for civil insurrection, you were going to get it, because people weren’t going to develop the internal mechanisms that prevented that kind of trouble. Mike knew from what he saw going on inside the building that closing civil authorities off like that created a certain paranoia in them. Inside the building, where they couldn’t see who they were talking about, the racists and other haters said whatever they damn pleased. Mike had stopped loving being a cop a long time ago, and he knew exactly why: a lot of other cops, from Tom Cutler on down.

The only human being in the world who knew that Mike felt as he did, as intensely as he did, was his partner and oldest friend, forty-year-old Dan Crawford. Dan himself was a little more than two years from retirement, and his plans were made. Good-bye Los Angeles, hello San Luis Obispo County. The Crawfords had owned a house near Avila Beach for years, and for the past five they had been fixing it up for year-round living. Neither Dan nor Marge cared what work they would do in San Luis, as everybody up there called it. San Luis was still the original California, full of bull ropers—cowboys—and less athletic drunks, as Dan described them. When Mike had expressed some reservation about Dan’s ability to adjust down to that kind of slow pace—after all, if anyone could be called Mr. Hollywood, it was Dan Crawford, who knew all the gossip in town—Dan had said that police work had never been more than a small part of his life, even if he had been the last in his family to realize it. Dan and Marge had been married the day they graduated from high school, almost twenty-two years ago. They had three kids, two of them already out of the nest and sharing houses with people their own age. I’m really a suburban capon, Dan had said. I couldn’t wait to get married, settle down, have kids, and turn my paycheck over to my wife. Now I’m gray and turning to mush. I’m in terrible shape for a cop and I don’t care a nun’s fart.

Dan had trained Mike as a detective, letting him make small mistakes, then gently correcting him, in the process of teaching Mike how to think. Mike had made detective with the reputation for being the strongest white guy in the department; it was Dan who had made him know, as no other person ever had, that he had a brain. One night in Leon’s on Victory Boulevard in the Valley, Mike had called him on that. Dan was more drunk than Mike. Mike had been a skinny kid, but he had filled out in his teenage years when he had played three years of varsity football for North Hollywood High. At six-three and 230 pounds, Mike could absorb as much beer as any of the six detectives who made up Hollywood Homicide, the only people with whom he ever did any real beer drinking. Mike hated whiskey. He had seen enough of it go into his mother to last him the rest of his life. The most important thing I’ve learned since I’ve known you, you old turd, is that I’m probably crazy.

Well, you’re better off, Dan said. Before, you were just as crazy, only you didn’t know it.

I’m not as happy as I used to be, Mike drawled.

That’s your reward for getting older, Dan said. Besides, you were never really happy anyway.

That’s true. I wasn’t even happy when my father was alive. I used to hear them fighting about some goddamned thing or other.

All right, now that you have all the answers, shut up. Dan turned to Leon’s piano player. Do you know ‘I’ll Be Loving You in Hallways’? How about ‘I’m Undressing ’Cause I Love You’? Dan had a marvelous tenor voice he exercised mostly when he was well-oiled. That night, Dan had everybody in the bar in stitches with Tom Lehrer’s Masochism Tango.

Dan didn’t arrive at Hollywood Division until a quarter to eight—not late, but after Juan Lopez and Bill Blair, which meant that Mike could not talk to Dan privately here. The six detectives of Homicide were stationed near the rear of the large anonymous room where all of Hollywood’s detectives and plainclothesmen were supposed to do their paperwork. Homicide desks were pushed together, the large surface covered with papers, telephones, in and out baskets, and general litter. Calls were taken in rotation, and whether the problem was an old guy who had died in his bed without a doctor or a quadruple ax murder, it was your problem until it was cleared. The murder rate in Hollywood was nowhere near as high as people thought, only a fraction of the rate in South-Central L.A., the ghetto, but because Hollywood was the roosting place of transients, thrill seekers, the star-struck, ruthless fortune hunters, and other trash, some Hollywood cases turned out to be very difficult to clear indeed. Police critics loved to point out that the L.A. sheriff cleared a higher percentage of cases than Hollywood Division, but in many suburban areas the sheriff’s deputies often arrived at a murder scene to find a wife standing over her dead husband with a bloody knife in her hand. In Hollywood, sometimes it took the coroner to tell detectives whether the pieces found in a motel room were male or female. Cases like that were solved with information. Every one of the six of Hollywood Homicide had his own collection of grifters, sleazeballs, scumbuckets, moochers, and just plain slime who supplied him with tips, only a few of which ever paid off. Everybody had had a case open for years that had been solved by a lucky break—a cellmate squealing for reduced time, an ex-wife trying to square accounts, a tip coming from another division or an agency outside the department. After all that, you had to go down to the DA’s office and present your evidence to an assistant whose eye was squarely on his own career: if a case wasn’t an easy win, he’d throw it back to you like an undersized fish, and the division was saddled with the lousy statistic.

Politics and careerism decided everything. Mike was acting head of Homicide because people downtown said that they weren’t sure that he could handle the administrative and paperwork sides of the job. That wasn’t it. The people downtown were concerned with their own statistics, which Mike had to deliver—and which he was too honest to fake. If the downtown people saw that he wasn’t going to make them look bad, they would remove the stigma of acting from his title. To the best of his knowledge, there never had been an acting on this level before, but no one above him cared about that. It was Mike’s problem, if he was stupid enough to allow himself to worry about it. He knew better than to do that: it just made him angry enough to tell people to kiss his hairy Irish ass. He wanted to keep the job.

Mike and Dan had a motel room murder, maybe an easy one, probably a rip-off, that had gone down last Friday, and a homosexual killing up in the hills that was already a week old. The victim had been a chicken hawk and one of his young prey had probably turned on him. Dan had the motel room murder autopsy to observe this afternoon, and Mike had caught a dead body call just minutes before the arrival of the others.

I’ve got to have some breakfast before we hit the bricks, Mike said. It meant he had something on his mind.

I can always eat again, Dan said.

Mike’s been waving his big dick again, the mustached Lopez said cheerfully to Blair. Eat, fuck, eat, fuck: it’s all he knows.

Blair looked up from a form he was filling out by hand, laboriously block printing so it could be read ten years from now, if necessary. A lot of cops never learned to type, in spite of all the reports to be filled out. Don’t you ever shit, Mike?

White guys don’t shit, Lopez said. Blair was black. He was thirty-five, balding, one of those skinny blacks who seem to age rapidly.

They shit when they die, Blair said.

Maybe they save it up, Lopez said. Maybe that’s why they’re white, from the strain.

Where’s Novak? Mike asked. Nobody knew where Greg Novak was. The sixth man, Marvin Burgess, who was also black, had the day off. Novak and Burgess were partners, as were Blair and Lopez. Dan Crawford spoke Spanish, which gave Homicide two in that language. What was needed were people who could speak Korean, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Japanese, and Thai. Asian and Pacific peoples were rapidly outnumbering everybody else in Hollywood. Seventy percent of the motels in the division were owned by Asians, and most couldn’t speak English. At least they cooperated with the police. Hold the fort, Mike said. To Dan, he added, We’ll take the db on our way to breakfast.

Walking around to the parking lot, Mike told Dan that after he cleared the db, he wanted to take a quick run up into Laurel Canyon. We’ll take your car. Dan was already on full alert, and by the time they reached the apartment house on Romaine Street where the old woman lay dead, Mike had told him everything he had heard and seen that morning on Rainbow Drive.

But you still don’t know what happened, Dan said.

No, but I’ll have a better idea after a drive-by. The way things are laid out up there, we’ll be able to get a look at what’s going on, if anything, from half a mile away.

Did you check our files this morning?

First thing. Burglary, narcotics. We have nothing active on Rainbow Drive.

That’s on paper, Dan said.

On paper.

Upstairs in the dead woman’s apartment, a young medical examiner was refusing to release the body to her niece’s husband, who had already called the undertaker. The corpse was in the bedroom on the floor next to a dresser, a dental plate, an upper, two feet from the mouth. The woman had been dead at least a day, because the apartment air was thick with the smell of death.

The guy’s wife is working, the medical examiner said. He says that they expected this, that the old lady had a heart condition. If she was taking drugs for her heart, I’ll sign her off, but there are no drugs in the bathroom medicine chest or by her bed. If you guys can find her medicine, it’ll be one less autopsy we’ll have to do.

Don’t give us that, Mike said good-naturedly. You love every one of them. He turned to the niece’s husband, who was one of those fair-haired, pear-shaped guys who looked as if he shaved once a month. What do you know about this medicine?

We weren’t that close to her. He looked terrified of Mike.

She took this stuff every day? Four times a day? She was an old lady. She must have told you.

Wait a minute. Morning, noon, and night. That’s it. I remember.

Go look in the kitchen, Mike said. Around the sink and in the refrigerator.

He left. Dan was smiling. She had a heart attack and fell, Mike said to the medical examiner. She was dead before she hit the floor. It was the force of the fall that knocked her teeth out of her mouth. That’s all that happened. If she’d been alive, she’d have tucked them back in.

I got it! the young man called. I have the medicine!

The medical examiner passed over his form for Mike to sign. Mike wrote the medical examiner’s name in his notebook while the medical examiner glanced around the dingy apartment. How did you know where the medicine was?

She had to take it with meals. When you live alone, you arrange things to suit yourself.

Another case closed, Dan said, not exactly suppressing his mirth. Going down the stairs, he said, I think I’ll pass that on to the others. Sometimes you’re not such a bad little detective.

I should have gone across Rainbow Drive this morning.

It was already going down when you heard it. Were you going to enter that house in your skivvies? You heard a lot of guys, and you don’t know that they weren’t armed. Don’t go looking for ways to die, kid; it’s much too easy.

Mike had been thinking only of himself this morning. He knew it. He still was, hoping that Gretchen would keep him out of anything she might have to tell investigating officers, and, that in fact—as he thought—no one saw him leaving her place this morning. He had timed his steps from her house to his car to coincide with the seconds the helicopter’s view of the street was hidden by the overarching trees.

Dan hated Laurel Canyon, and in that he shared the majority opinion. Outsiders always had a hard time understanding the Canyon, with its near-vertical hillsides, rickety, precarious houses, and incendiary vegetation. In the fire season the chaparral—mesquite, sage, and a hundred other types of low-lying shrub, in soft, muted tones of purple, blue, and olive—swelled with resins more explosive than gasoline. The streets were too steep for walking, the lots too rocky and angled for much gardening. In the winter rainy season came the more lethal danger of mud slides. But the Canyon was a bit of wilderness in the geographic center of Los Angeles, which in itself was desirable to some, and the contours of the land formed natural amphitheaters so that, from many sites, people could see each other from distances of a mile or more. It made for neighborliness on a large scale. People moved here for refuge from the city and for informal living, but the rigors of life in the Canyon as much as its charms led to both cooperation and self-reliance. Neighborliness led to friendships that were healthy or unproductive depending on the people involved, and in extreme cases the privacy led to secretiveness that sometimes concealed criminal activity. As more than one dope dealer had explained, the police could be spotted a long way off. Laurel Canyon wasn’t called Cocaine Alley for nothing. On the other hand, Europeans had told Mike that Laurel Canyon was one of the few places in America where creative people could find a sense of community with which they felt comfortable. For Mike that was the key—after all the analyses and judgments, one thing made Laurel Canyon unique among Los Angeles neighborhoods: it was always intense.

And by ten-thirty on this Monday in May, the Canyon atmosphere was so highly charged that a wise old hand like Dan Crawford warily slowed his car to fifteen miles an hour. The helicopter, or its successor, circled overhead, and people out on their decks or front steps to watch it turned their attention down to the passing car and its two occupants. Mike had hoped for inconspicuousness, but that would have been impossible for any two strangers, much less a pair of sport-coated guys who obviously were the heat. There was still nothing on KFWB, which meant that there had been no public announcement yet.

At the foot of Rainbow Drive, a T intersection, a uniformed officer was directing the driver of a station wagon to pull over to the side. Two hundred feet up Rainbow was a black and white, too far for any special markings on it to be read from the cross street below.

Let’s keep on going, Mike said.

No shit, Sherlock. Dan stepped on the gas, but not too heavily, and kept his eye on the interior mirror. He’s not watching us.

From what I’ve seen from Gretchen’s place, we’ll get a good view of Rainbow Drive from the ridge on the opposite side. Gretchen says that there’s a road at the top that runs all the way around.

I’ve seen those fucking roads, Dan said sourly. "Some of them are about four feet wide. The Indians used to blindfold their

Reviews for Rainbow Drive

[davidlerickson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While making love in the predawn darkness, Hollywood homicide detective Mike Gallagher hears several people running past and shortly, frightened cries from the house across the street. His gut reaction is to investigate, but his lover assures him she hears strange sounds coming from that house all the time. His second reaction is that, with only two years left before he can retire, the last thing he needs is for his bureaucratic bosses to discover he’s been sleeping with a married woman. Mike chooses discretion over duty, but the sudden and curious, arrival of a police helicopter forces him to sneak away. In short order he learns five people had died in that home on Rainbow Drive.At first glance the murders appear to be retribution for a theft by a group of drug dealers/abusers, but the reactions of his higher ups and that the Hollywood homicide division has been pointedly excluded from the investigation, leads Mike to think there may be powerful players involved, perhaps even the Feds.What follows is perhaps the best detective mystery I’ve ever read.The writing is tight and the characterizations detailed. While some of the characters fit stereotype, Mike and other key players display a panorama of raw emotion, a surprising depth of critical thinking and all too human reactions as the depth and breadth of the case unfold.It is a convoluted story that takes off in unexpected directions, where everyone has secrets and Mike has no one he can trust, let alone those closest to him.Thorp provides just enough supporting details to give the reader a strong assurance he knows what he’s writing about without getting buried in the inconsequential. The editing is professional and clean, and the story flows smoothly from one page to the next, making it not only one of the best who-done-its, but a truly enjoyable read.I’m an avid reader and as soon as a finish a book I turn to the next, but that didn’t happen here. It has taken me a few days to digest this novel, allowing me to savor this story as no other. Once the true horrific nature of this tale unfolded I found it impossible to just dive into another.