I inherited his house after being introduced to Orchestra by the minor real estate mogul Jewelle Blue, my friend and Jackson’s wife. Reynard, who kept his sexuality a secret back then, was being blackmailed by a young man with a camera—George Lund. George, in concert with a beautiful young man named Laurent, got Reynard on his knees. It was my job to help him back up again without making my involvement known. It was a complex coordination, but my police contacts, Melvin Suggs and Anatole McCourt, were more than happy to bust, and bust up, the extortionists. As far as Reynard was concerned, the problem merely went away. Orchestra was extremely grateful for my sensitivity. I also think she could imagine turning to a man like me for assistance from time to time.

So she decided to offer me Norman’s house, which had been abandoned for six years.

I accepted Sadie’s offer because I’d been worried about my daughter’s safety in some run-of-the-mill house on the city streets of LA. My job as a detective could be byzantine and even, at times, downright deadly. It often felt that I passed through life like a mad surfer negotiating a monstrous tsunami. Living on the mountaintop, protected by five Sicilian bodyguards, at least Feather could feel like she was living a normal life—smelling the flowers and considering the thoughts of Euclid and Shakespeare from classes at school and W. E. B. DuBois and Sojourner Truth from my library and that of Jackson and Jewelle Blue. And besides, no other neighborhood that I could afford would allow a man to raise a garden in his front yard and on his roof too.

The exit at the top of the vertical railway was a large irregularly shaped concrete platform studded aplenty with semiprecious stones, iron discs stamped with the shapes of dozens of wild creatures, and various religious emblems rendered in every metal from copper to zinc to gold.

A long, curved, and sloping path of blue brick led down from the platform to the cobblestone walkway that meandered between the half-hidden houses. Under the shade of three cypress trees I came upon Oktai Lorenz, a Spaniard with coppery skin and black, mildly Asiatic eyes. Oktai was in his fifties, a professor specializing in the history of war at UCLA, and a collector of butterflies. He stood six foot four and was built to practice the subject he taught.

“Mr. Rawlins.”

“Señor Lorenz.”

“How go the hostilities down below?”

“Simmering, but nowhere near a boil.”

“Very good,” he said as I passed.

The Bowl of Brighthope was in many ways as eccentric as the little black shantytowns I had known in my days wandering around East Texas and southern Louisiana.

7

7

A few minutes after leaving Oktai I came to the house that would be in my name and then my daughter’s name for the next ninety-eight and a quarter years.