Free Hollywood Hills by Joseph Wambaugh Page A

She pressed it and the gate swung open. He drove in on a long, curving, faux-cobblestone driveway. He made the circle around a bubbling fountain so that the front of his car was facing the gate and she was on the side in front of the huge tiled arch over the main door.
    He jumped out and ran around to open the door for her but she was already out, holding her $1,300 shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.
    "Come in for a minute, Nathan," she said.
    "Okay, Mrs. Brueger," he said.
    This was a first. He'd been inside many homes in the Hollywood Hills over the years but as a cop, almost never as a guest.
    She unlocked the door and pushed it open, walking to a nearby computer panel on the wall to punch in her code and deactivate the high-pitched alarm warning.
    "Follow me," she said.
    He did that, crossing a foyer of Mexican tile until he was looking down two steps into the great room. It was very large and it seemed that almost every square foot of the white plaster walls contained paintings: oils, watercolors, and numbered lithographs.
    Leona Brueger tossed her shoes on a massive glass coffee table, knocking over some pricey-looking knickknacks.
    She said, "Have a seat. I'll be right back. What're you drinking?"
    The entire interior was done in cream and custard colors: the walls, the drapes, the carpet, the side tables, and even the twin sofas, with accent pillows in subtle pastels. It all spelled comfort to Hollywood Nate. There was none of that minimalist crap he was constantly seeing in magazines and in the L . A . Times home section.
    This all looked stuffed and overstuffed. He had the impression of being enveloped by a giant voluptuous marshmallow.
    And then there was the view. It was Hollywood, but not his Hollywood down there at asphalt level. This was Hollywood as seen by God, if there was one. The smog from this elevation was not ugly, not a dingy gray blanket of dangerous gases settling over the L . A . basin in late summer. No, this was a blaze of vivid primary colors propelled by offshore breezes and later would be lit by a last solar gasp before the sun fell into the Pacific. It was astonishing how beautiful and even delicious the L . A . smog could look from a $15 million home in the Hollywood Hills.
    She paused on the top step and said, "Do you like the view?"
    Nate said, "Up here the smog is the color of a cabernet and overripe plums and purple grapes with a spray of peach juice flowing through it. But somehow I don't think this is what they mean when they say that Hollywood is just a big fruit bowl."
    Leona Brueger said, "Why, Officer Weiss, you do surprise me. Not only do you carry a SAG card but you have a touch of the poet in you. I wonder what other surprises you might be keeping hidden."
    Nate looked at his watch and said, "I have to be at work and in uniform by seventeen fifteen--I mean, five fifteen. I better not have a drink."
    She turned and said, "How about diet soda? You look like the healthy diet soda type."
    "Fine," he said. "Thanks."
    The coffee table between the two sofas was piled with art books that looked as though they'd never been opened, and women's magazines that looked well perused. When she returned with his diet soda in a crystal goblet, she had a goblet of white wine for herself. She held her glass up to his and said, "Chin-chin," which a makeup artist that Nate used to date said was "the cry of the Hills birds," meaning the women of the Hollywood Hills.
    She sat down two feet away from him on the sofa and said, "I gave the butler the afternoon off. He won't be back until seventeen hundred--I mean, five o'clock."
    That made Nate chuckle, and then he said, "Would he be Raleigh, the guy I'm supposed to see when I check on your property after you're gone?"
    "That's him," Leona Brueger said. "Some of my friends say I shouldn't leave all this" -- she waved in the general direction of the paintings -- "with a man who's only worked here such a short time, but he's also worked for a