Free Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) by Diane Patterson Page B

to get to the strip mall, because there was one on every block of the Valley, it seemed, and there were so many names packed onto the signs by the curb that, even if I could have read them, I couldn’t have read them all in the time it took to drive by them. This one had twenty shops crammed into a large L-formation, including a gyros shop, a beauty salon, and a lavandería . The storefront catty-cornered from the gyros shop had a white plastic sign with black plastic letters and a simple, unadorned cross on it. According to Stevie, that sign should read Hitchcock Christian Financial Counseling. I stared at the letters until they rearranged themselves into the word Hitchcock.
      I got a feeling for the neighborhood, and then I headed to Tarzana.
    Most people hear the name “Tarzana” and think the place was named after the character Tarzan. And then there are the people who think the character was named after the place. In fact, both came from the same source: author Edgar Rice Burroughs had a ranch named Tarzana, where he wrote about his famous character. One little-remembered characteristic of the whole suburb was that it was originally designed to be an all-white community, where it would be against the law to sell property to anyone who wasn’t Caucasian.  
    Tarzana was much whiter than Panorama City, that was for certain. It was one of the suburbs on Ventura Boulevard, which served as the main artery through the San Fernando Valley; six to eight lanes wide, full of cars, with every conceivable business (and probably a few no one had conceived of yet) on it.  
    The signs on buildings on Ventura Boulevard were large, as they were everywhere in Los Angeles (have to catch the driver’s eye!), but the signs in Tarzana were more uniform in their size and branding then they were in Panorama City. There was almost no graffiti, which always surprised me driving around a giant city like Los Angeles—London and Paris and New York had more graffiti in central areas than Los Angeles did. The building fronts were white and gray. The groups of people waiting for buses were different. Signs for the L.A. Opera hung from the lampposts.
    Courtney had asked me to meet her at Tarzana First Christian Church. The building itself was large, in the middle of the block. The triangular facade that faced Lindley Avenue was huge, and the facade’s only decoration, a simple, unadorned cross, was probably ten meters high. The church’s walls were white and plain and three stories tall.  
    The parking lot was huge, too. Perhaps a hundred parking spaces, which meant they had lots of parishioners. And best of all, there was only one way in and one way out, both from Lindley. It wasn’t hard to imagine civil, happy parishioners politely flowing toward the exit in their sedans and minivans.  
    One way in and one way out made it very easy for me to watch both the entrance and the exit from where I was parked in the shade of a California Black Walnut tree, at the corner of the parking lot.  
    The only other cars in the parking lot were far away from the church, on the side of the parking lot next to the First Christian Day Care and Preschool. I could see a small playground with swings, a sand pit, and lots of two- and three-year-olds running around yelling their heads off.
    I wondered how many of the little kids on that playground would grow up to appear on shows like Girls Becoming Stars . Or would think there was anything the tiniest bit glamorous about the lives those girls led.
    A light blue hatchback pulled into the parking lot by the large IN arrow. It had Oklahoma plates and one person visible inside: Courtney. She parked in the center of the parking lot, as I’d asked her to. All of the windows on the car were up. Mine were down. She got out and looked around.
    She was wearing a crop top and low-riding shorts. Her hipbones were perfectly outlined in the afternoon sun. When she turned, her top moved and I could see the light shadows