He produced a key from a dark pocket and used it on the man-size gate contained within the larger metal structure. He ushered me through and we came to a nearly vertical granite mountainside that supported a funicular. The right side of the double-car conveyance was made from brass-tinted glass, polished copper, and ebony wood. It was beautifully detailed, which was fitting for its destination.

I looked up at the hillside to our left and said, “I bet Gaetano is in that big oak halfway up.”

“Not even the right hill,” Cosmo said, gleeful at my bad guess.

There were always two Longo guardians at Brighthope Gate. One sat in the bamboo hut waiting for tenants, visitors, workmen, and, of course, unwanted guests. Another of the brothers hid somewhere in the surrounding hills with a high-powered rifle guarding his blood and the entrance.

Cosmo pulled open the sliding door to the funicular and ushered me in. Once I was safely bunged inside, he engaged the mechanism that pulled my car up while the counterweight, the leftward chamber, came down again.

The angle was steep, one hundred degrees, and the view through tobacco-tinted windows was magnificent. To my right sprawled the Pacific Ocean, a sleeping giant at the end of the world. To the left lay the ever-growing landscape of LA, spreading out toward the distant hills so far that the borders faded into a smoggy haze.

At the top of the rise was Brighthope Canyon. Not actually a gorge, Brighthope was a shallow bowl carved out of the top of a coastal mountain, a lush depression that contained six houses connected by cobblestone pathways laid out three-quarters of a century before. You can’t see most of the buildings, as they are hidden behind and under trees and other vital vegetation. Only a stunning blue-and-white Victorian mansion is apparent. This baronial home was the capital of the little village, where sixty-three-year-old Orchestra “Sadie” Solomon lived with her gay soul mate, Reynard Khan, a man of seventy-one years. Though Reynard never touched Sadie, he stayed at her side for decades.

They, or I should say she, owned the entire property. Sadie, and her father before her, gave out free “ninety-nine-year-until-death” leases to all the tenants. The previous occupant of my place had been named Norman. He died at the age of one hundred and two. Norman lived there for so long that no one remembered his surname.