Lulu did some cursory googling about Avery after her visit to The Hotel, to see if she could find more information about him and its history, but most of what she turned up was loose threads and weirdness: conspiracy theorists claiming he was illuminati, or that his wife was a vampire, or that if you draw a line between every building with his name on it in the city of Los Angeles you’ll come up with a pentagram or a map to a portal to hell.

Normally she would have left it at that—Lulu isn’t really that into history, even when it’s cult-conspiracy history. But the supernatural bent to people’s theories made her curious. She wants to know how Avery, who seemed basically kind of normal when he was alive, has a legacy that got so warped after he died.

The first book she pulls is called The Men Who Built Los Angeles, which only has one chapter on Riggs. Apparently his dad had a very big trust fund and an even bigger gambling problem; Avery was raised to believe he’d never have to work, and then, when he came of age, discovered that he if he didn’t, he and his mother and sisters might starve. He left the East Coast for Hollywood, hoping to remake the family name out there in the wilderness. But he wasn’t really a very good director, and after a while, no one would hire him.

He got lucky when he begged his way into a screening of a film called Bluebeard, an adaptation of the fairy tale starring a young actress named Constance Wilmott. She was still a teenager, and aside from her studio contract she had nothing. He married her even though it wouldn’t do anything for his “prospects”: a true love story, very touching. Except that it turned out she was a good investment, because it was the money she’d earned on that film—her first and last—that he took and used to buy his first property.

Lulu recognizes the outline of the story, if not the specifics. Her dad was still a junior associate at his firm, not a failed director, and her mom didn’t choose to stop being a serious actress, she stopped getting good roles, but other than that, yeah, she pretty much knows how this one goes. An older man and a younger woman; two people with almost no power, and yet, somehow, one of them has more.

The book says: Wilmott may not be a star that many remember today, but in fact her single role changed Los Angeles irrevocably. The intangible forces of her beauty and talent became the seeds for a real estate empire that would materially reshape the hills and valleys of Los Angeles. It was her image that allowed Avery Riggs to begin to create the city according to his singular vision.