On the Trail

My neighbor Anna Kamrath is a big fan of mystery writer Sue Grafton’s "alphabet series" of novels featuring female P.I. Kinsey Millhone, which is enough to give anyone a suspicious mind.

Resting after a walk up to "the Overlook," a point high on Mulholland Highway that affords an expansive view, Anna and her husband Mike noticed a truck on the road below them, awkwardly navigating the road’s hairpin curves. Anna spied a large wrapped object in the truck bed.

"Wonder if he’s thinking of dumping something," she said, aggrieved at the thought that someone would litter along the scenic roadway.

"Yeah, a body maybe, ha-ha," said Mike. But then the Grafton influence weighed in, and Anna considered this in earnest. The object’s shape suggested a discarded Christmas tree—or a corpse.

The Kamraths peered down at the truck as the driver pulled over, got out and fussed with the wrapped object. Then after taking a long look in their direction, he got back inside, made a U-turn and drove back from where he’d come.

I told Anna how once I’d happened by roughly the same spot on Mulholland to find police crime scene tape fastened in the branches of chaparral shrubs that line the road.

"What was it? What was down there? How much did you see? What did the cops tell you?" she asked with that breathless blend of dread and glee that sets us detective novel addicts (Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is my favorite shamus) apart from normal people, who are often reluctant to acknowledge Mulholland’s reputation as a "body-dump road," as some members of local law enforcement agencies have dubbed it.

With regret I informed Anna that I’d been a day late. Another hiker had found a decapitated corpse police reckoned as an out-of-area drug hit.

"Some grisly-gruesome scene, huh?" I said, and we both fell into a dreamy contemplative silence, imagining where the likes of Chandler or Grafton could have taken the material. But Anna’s bold curiosity got me to looking "over the side" a lot more intently.

A few months after a bulldozer had graded a long-neglected (unpaved) service road I enjoy walking along, I noticed a gap in the scrub oak that otherwise creates a wall of impenetrable foliage on the roadside.

Years ago, the gate that now restricts access to the service road to all but authorized vehicles was broken and all manner of rowdies drove into the wild canyon the road bisects.

People towed in old cars, swilled beer and with shotguns reduced the vehicles to Swiss cheese.

Entrepreneurs set up mini-marijuana plantations, though it appeared the deer may have eaten their profits. So from people stewed to the gills and armed to the teeth, to stoned Bambis, this was one truly unruly place.

A new locked gate made all the difference. Since the party era ended, it’s about as bland and docile a place as you’ll find. In fact it is so monotonously unchanging a landscape that that small gap in the scrub oak stood out like a major and significant deviation bearing further investigation.

Uncharacteristically, the dog didn’t plunge headlong to see what was up—or rather down. The road grading had shoved mounds of loose earth onto the road’s shoulder. She preferred to frantically dig tunnels in these mounds for fun.

I glanced through the gap and gasped. Below was what appeared to be freshly dumped items—furniture upholstered in bright pink and electronics equipment in fairly spruce condition. There were scattered kids’ toys and a heap of electrical cords lurking in the shadows like a host of writhing eels.

I slid down the slope for a closer look.

Immediately I got a bad feeling. Who would go to such trouble to bring stuff way back in here and how’d they get past the locked gate? I was up to my waist in somebody’s discarded living room furnishings, none of it outdated or unfashionable stuff.

Then I saw the fingers stiffly poking out of the heavily mounded soil.

I leaped as if struck with a cattle prod and fell backwards, landing on a toy school bus that had been rigged as a kiddie play-piano. It bleated some butchered notes as my derriere impacted the keyboard.

Above me on the road, the dog was tunneling furiously, loosening the wall of earth where the stiff pointing fingers were imprisoned. Sweat poured from my scalp into my eyes, mingling with sunscreen that stung intensely.

The dirt mound heaved toward me. I looked up. The dog’s white muzzle was black from digging and she had a triumphant gleam in her eye as her conjoined tunnels collapsed. I righted myself only to stumble backwards into a director’s chair whose rotted cloth seat ripped and plunged me bottom-first into a morass of pink-hued junk. Fingers—then a hand—then a rigid arm—shot towards me as if blasted out of the dirt heap, its earthen tomb.

Pinioned by the crisscrossing legs of the director’s chair, I did what all brave detectives do in a moment like that: closed my eyes and screamed bloody murder as a headless torso came hurtling through the dirt. Something skidded across my legs then jabbed me in the chest. There followed a heavy, hollow thud. I opened my eyes. The dog had landed on the torso’s sculpted back and was chewing at a strip of flesh-colored paint on its plaster shoulder, which had cracked and imploded like an eggshell.

A mannequin’s slender fingers were poking me in the ribs.

"Also called ‘a dummy,’" the dog said with excruciating emphasis.

"I get your drift!" I said, flinging her and the mannequin off me. From that moment on, I vowed to leave mystery-solving to the Marlowes and Millhones of the world.