But out in the San Fernando Valley mobs of little cheap stuccos and redwood fronts were beginning to elbow the pained hills, paint-fresh signal lights at intersections were stopping cars which had previously known only the carefree California conscience, and a great concrete ditch labeled “Flood Control Project” was making its way across the sandy valley like an opening zipper.
On the ocean side of the Santa Monica Mountains, from Beverly Glen to Topanga Canyon, lordlier mansions were going up which called themselves “estates” ― disdaining the outmoded “ranch” or “rancho,” which more and more out-of-state ex-innocents were learning was a four-or-five-and-den on a 50X100 lot containing three callow apricot trees. Beverly Hills might be biting its perfect fingernails, but Glendale and Encino were booming, and Ellery could detect no moans from-he direction of Brentwood, Flintridge, Sunland, or Eagle Rock. v* schools were assembling; more oldsters were chugging in from Iowa and Michigan, flexing their arthritic fingers and practicing old age pension-check-taking; and to drive a car in downtown Los Angeles at noontime the four blocks from 3rd to 7th along Broadway, Spring, Hill, or Main now took thirty minutes instead of fifteen. Ellery heard tell of huge factories moving in; of thousands of migrants swarming into Southern California through Blythe and Indio on 60 and Needles and Barstow on 66 ― latter-day pioneers to whom the movies still represented Life and Love and “television” remained a highfalutin word, like “antibiotic.” The carhops were more beautiful and numerous than ever; more twenty-foot ice cream cones punctuated the skyline; Tchaikovsky under the stars continued to fill Hollywood Bowl with brave-bottomed music lovers; Grand Openings of hardware stores now used two giant searchlights instead of one; the Farmers’ Market on Fairfax and 3rd chittered and heaved like an Egyptian bazaar in the tourist season; Madman Muntz had apparently taken permanent possession of the skies, his name in mile-high letters drifting expensively away daily; and the newspapers offered an even more tempting line of cheesecake than in the old days ― Ellery actually saw one photograph of the routine well-stacked cutie in a Bikini bathing suit perched zippily on a long flower-decked box inscribed Miss National Casket Week. And in three days or so, according to the reports, the Imperial Potentate would lead a six-hour safari of thirteen thousand red-fezzed, capering, elderly Penrods, accompanied by fifty-one bands, assorted camels, clowns, and floats, along Figueroa Street to the Memorial Coliseum to convene the seventy-umpth Imperial Session of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine ― a civic event guaranteed to rouse even the dead.
It became plain in his first few days in Hollywood and environs that what the crape-hangers back East were erroneously bewailing was not the death of the angelic city but its exuberant rebirth in another shape. The old order changeth. The new organism was exciting, but it was a little out of his line; and Ellery almost packed up and flew back East. But then he thought, It’s all hassle and hurly-burly, everybody snarling or making hay; and there’s still the twitching nucleus of the old Hollywood bunch ― stick around, old boy, the atmosphere is murderous and it may well inspire a collector’s item or two for the circulating library shelves.
Also, there had been the press and its agents. Ellery had thought to slip into town by dropping off at the Lockheed field in Burbank rather than the International Airport in Inglewood. But he touched Southern California soil to a bazooka fire of questions and lenses, and the next day his picture was on the front page of all the papers. They had even got his address in the hills straight, although his pal the real estate man later swore by the beard of Nature Boy that he’d had nothing to do with the leak. It had been that way for Ellery ever since the publicity explosion over the Cat case. The newspaper boys were convinced that, having saved Manhattan from a fate equivalent to death, Ellery was in Los Angeles on a mission at least equally large and torrid. When he plaintively explained that he had come to write a book they all laughed, and their printed explanations ascribed his visit to everything from a top-secret appointment by the Mayor as Special Investigator to Clean Up Greater L.A. to the turning of his peculiar talents upon the perennial problem of the Black Dahlia.
How could he run out?
At this point Ellery noticed that his glass was as empty as his typewriter.
He got up from the pony-skin chair and found himself face to face with a pretty girl.
As he jumped nudely for the bedroom doorway Ellery thought, The huarachos must look ridiculous. Then he thought, Why didn’t I put on those ten pounds Barney prescribed? Then he got angry and poked his head around the door to whine, “I told Mrs. Williams I wasn’t seeing anybody today, not even her. How did you get in?”
“Through the garden,” said the girl. “Climbed up from the road below. I tried not to trample your marigolds. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I do mind. Go away.”