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going, red and white, the occasional siren, racing to an eventuality, all so distant from this spot it almost seemed benign. She and Rachel used to come up here just to hold hands. From a swanky house down below, the sound of a radio playing faintly out an open window rose into the air. That Bob Seger song, Hollywood Nights ; curiously, the music was right but the words sounded all wrong, the radio blatting out twisted lyrics from the famous oldie.…
    Oh, how Hollywood Bites
    Those cute Hollywood Jills
    She was looking so dead
    With her needles and pills
    That wasn’t how Cheryl remembered the song at all. The signal wavered in and out until the song finally ended. Then the announcer came on—nobody Cheryl had heard before, no gruff Wolfman Jack, but a silky voice, the kind that enchants the ear if only reciting the phone book.
    The voice crept up the canyon walls.
    â€œThis is the Piper on Night to Night—” the announcer said. “Your favorite Oldies as Newbies, in ways you’ve never heard.…”
    Down below someone killed the radio and the seductive voice died. The silence felt even creepier.
    Her and Rachel.
    How had it all gone so wrong? When it started so right? I know your face better than my own , Rachel once told her. Going from lust to romance to building a life. Eyes and mind and heart for no one else. African-American lady cop and Hollywood Jewish lady lawyer; married on Nantucket not a year ago. Somebody even found a miniature California Highway Patrol chopper to put on the cake, a mini-Cheryl in uniform standing next to a mini-Rachel in a dark black suit. Blue and black. Good fit, good yin and yang. But then it somehow turned black and blue. The first time Cheryl slapped Rachel’s face she wasn’t even that drunk.
    And what was so important about the argument that somebody needed a bitch-slapping? What color to make the window treatments? Spoiled milk in the fridge? An unpaid parking ticket? Did Rachel work herself into high Hollywood lawyer dudgeon, about Cheryl never paying attention and not caring? Bringing the job home at the end of her shift? What then was so provoking?
    Well, actually a life-and-death thing. A creep died while Chippy Gibson lived.
    And all Rachel had to ask was a simple question, an innocuous question—with the wrong choice of words. Nothing to get angry about. Nothing at all.
    But all Cheryl could think about was what came before, life and death. A bad day on the job.
    The Felix Kidz. It all came back to that.
    For some time now a strange bit of graffiti had been popping up in all the hoods. Sometimes spray-painted in bubble-letter style, sometimes in chalk—Felix the Cat, grinning for all he was worth from alley wall or pavement.
    And sometimes this bit of scribble wasn’t simply limited to South Central or the weirder parts of West Hollywood. At first, like most things that suddenly appear out of nowhere, nobody really noticed it. Not like the President as the Joker that got noticed real quick. This one, just another bit of urban effluence, of questionable significance, easily overlooked in the general chaos of LA’s freewheeling freeway culture.
    Felix’s goofy face appearing on walls in alleys strewn with empty crack vials, wine cooler bottles, and condom wrappers. Then his wild grin showed up on the crack vials themselves, and meth bags.
    Surfacing again as a tattoo on a Jane Doe—some nameless young woman, her body dumped in a concrete spillway of the LA River. Like so many of the hopefuls coming to the City of Angels for a modeling job, for a bit part, to get away from Daddy who called her “the best kisser in the trailer park,” to finally a waitress, then hostess in some strip dump, to finally get her big break in the movies—but this time bent over, ass up, and really acting like she meant it.
    But not moaning up to snuff and tripping down to Hollywood Boulevard for a real spell of Stanislavski method