Night Moves

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Nice house. If you put aside reality.

Sunset Boulevard, Sunday at ten thirty p.m., was an easy ride, cool April air sweetening the Seville’s interior. To get here from my place in Beverly Glen, I’d driven through Bel Air and Brentwood, turned south a quarter mile into Pacific Palisades, continued through tree-lined stretches of architectural revivals: Colonial, Spanish, Mediterranean, Greek, Unidentifiable.

Not a Through Street warnings at most corners; a planned community discouraging casual visitors. GPS-tutored turns led me to a street named Evada Lane, three blocks terminating at a cul-de-sac.

Built-in-the-seventies tract, the Palisades but no palisades in sight. This was flat land, geographically undistinguished, too far from the ocean for someone to smell the brine.

In the Midwest, respectably middle-class real estate. In L.A., not a single structure worth less than a million.

The house garnering all the attention sat at the tip of the dead end like a cherry on a sundae. One of the aspiring Colonials, heralded by white columns, its brick façade strobed red and blue by LAPD cruisers. The same light show played upon a black Range Rover and a gray Lexus sedan in the driveway.

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