My mind wandered. I looked into the windows of houses, some dark, others illuminated by the light of television sets. I thought about the Manson Family. On nights like this they would go out and do what they called a *creepy crawly'. A group of four or five Family members would target a house entirely at random, break in and proceed to *creep' around the place. The idea was to move around the house unnoticed, making sure they didn't wake the occupants. Occasionally they would take something, like cash if it was left lying around, or food to feed the Family back at the ranch. But it was more about moving around undetected, the excitement and power that came with infiltrating someone's house as they slept.

Richard Ramirez-the *Night Stalker'-was one of Los Angeles's most infamous serial killers, and also favoured neighbourhoods like this. The neatly trimmed hedges and manicured front lawns were a far cry from the bleakness and despair of downtown Los Angeles, where he regularly scored drugs at the bus terminus and slept in whatever car he had stolen at the time. The suburbs made the Night Stalker angry, just like they did the Manson Family. The warm little houses in tidy rows were a reminder of every comfort he didn't have. The order of suburbia affronted his need for chaos.

Aunt Lynette's house was a California bungalow with a large front yard and an old-fashioned porch. The light was on in the living room and I could see Lynette bent over her books, a glass of red wine in her hand. From a distance she looked just like my mother, with her hair hanging loose and those thick-rimmed glasses. It wasn't until you got closer that her features became her own. Green eyes instead of brown. A mole on her chin where my mother had none. From a distance I could imagine it was my mother, and for a brief moment everything was as it used to be. But the closer I got the more reality came crashing back.

Aunt Lynette and I were always being mistaken for mother and daughter, something that made us both equally uncomfortable. It was easier not to correct people as that would involve going into details, which neither of us wanted to do. But there was no denying the family resemblance. The same round face, the same large, Kewpie-doll eyes. I didn't get much from my dad's side of the family, except a healthy suspicion of authority that my teachers liked to call an *attitude problem'.

Aunt Lynette was an assistant District Attorney. She prosecuted people on behalf of the county, regardless of whether she thought they were guilty or not. This didn't seem to bother her. She'd worked hard all her life to make it this far, and whether clients were guilty or not was largely irrelevant to her career. She had prosecuted battered wives and mothers, and sent innocent men to jail. But still she slept well at night. All that seemed to matter to her was that she was doing her job effectively.

Lynette also had the alarming habit of flashing her DA badge. Once when I was nine she took me to Disneyland, and two guys got into an argument in the line at Splash Mountain. She pushed through the crowd, walked straight up to them, flipped open her little leather wallet and watched the blood drain from their faces. No one even looked closely enough at her badge to see that an assistant DA wasn't actually a real cop. The two men held up their hands and stepped back as if she was going to taser them, or perhaps cuff them to the fence where they'd have to listen to *Zipadeedodah' all day long. I remember being mortified and hiding behind a corn dog stand as everybody stared at us. Lynette wasn't fazed by the attention. She was proud of working for the county.

As I walked in the front door she looked up from her casebooks. Next to her on the dining table were two plates, one stacked high with some kind of casserole, the other scraped empty.

*I've already eaten,' I said as I kicked off my shoes. Lynette looked at the casserole, brown and congealing on her fine china. I watched her swallow her anger.

*Maybe we should get you a cell phone,' she suggested, *so I can call and check whether you actually want dinner or if I'm going to all this trouble for no good reason.'

*Cell phones give you cancer,' I said, *and the government use them to track your movements.'

*That sounds like something your father would say,' she said, a comment I chose to ignore.

*So what exactly did you and Benji get up to today?'

*Just stuff.'

*Oh really?' She put her pen down. *What kind of stuff?'

I opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk. *Went to Universal Studios, took the tram tour. Can I take this?'

She didn't say anything, just nodded then looked down at her books. *I saw the most horrible thing on Oprah today.'

*Hmmm?'

*They had a story about a woman whose car was stolen and her baby was still in the backseat. She tried to grab the baby but the car sped off, her child still hanging out, attached to the car seat. She watched her child being dragged along the side of the road.'

*That's a repeat.'

Lynette pursed her lips. *Stories like that make you put your life in perspective,' she continued. *Makes you realise how lucky you really are.'

*Just another day for you and me in paradise.'

She examined me through her thick black lenses. *Have you done something to your hair?'

*It's pink.'

*So it is. Do you like it?'

*I just love it.'

*Good. As long as you're happy.'

I leant over her casebooks. *What are you working on?'

*It's a murder case,' she said as she scribbled something on her notepad. *It's gang-related.'

*Cool. Got any crime scene photos?'

She put her pen down and adjusted her glasses. *Hilda, I find your fascination with murder a little disconcerting. This is a very sad and horrific crime.'

*But you said it was gang-related.'

*So?'

*So then he probably had it coming.'

*Life isn't as black-and-white as that, Hilda. It's not fair for you to judge other people when you have no idea what they've been through, the social and economic circumstances they were born into-'

*All right, you don't have to give me a sermon. I'm not the jury.'

*Thank God for that.'

*Anyway, you're the one obsessed with murder, not me. You made a career out of it.'

*I'm not obsessed with murder, Hilda. I'm helping people.'

*Come on, just one look-'

I tried to slide one of the case folders away with my finger but Lynette snatched it back.

*No, Hilda. Trust me when I say you are better off not seeing this.'

I had never viewed any of Lynette's case files. She kept them under lock and key, never once made the mistake of accidentally leaving one out. Did she have any idea what I had access to on the internet?

*You're probably right,' I said. *Wouldn't want to warp me now, would we?'

I was halfway out of the room when Lynette spoke again. *You know, we could feed a third-world country with the amount of dinners I've made for you and you've never eaten. It's very wasteful.'

*I'm not hungry.'

*And I suppose you got everything you needed at the Connors' house?'

*No, I'm just not hungry,' I lied, my stomach still full of chocolate chip cookies.

*Well, I hope you're more grateful to Mrs Connor than you are to me. I'd be very embarrassed if you weren't.'

I went back over to where Lynette was sitting and gave her a kiss on the forehead. *Sorry.'

*Next time call.'

*Okay!' I yelled over my shoulder as I left the room, taking the milk carton with me.

SIX.

John Belushi once said that happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time. I knew what he meant. He was talking about the uncontrollable urge to fuck it all up, the desire to put a knife in the toaster of existence just to see what would happen. To put a bomb under your blessings and watch them blow sky-high, swan-dive off the precipice and give in to the free fall.

Belushi had it all: money, fame, a wife, a home. But he didn't want to live in the safety of these creature comforts. He wanted to exist on the knife's edge, the sharpest point of the blade where you could fall either way, the only guarantee that you will inevitably get cut. He rolled the dice, tossed the coin, shook his tail-feather in the face of death until the reaper lost his sense of humour. The punch line was a big fat speedball to the heart; a massive dose of heroin and coke that left him dead in an expensive hotel room in Los Angeles, bloated and bleeding on freshly laundered linen and thousands of miles from his home.

I sat down at my desk and watched footage on the internet: the old CBS newsreel from the day Belushi died-all grainy and washed-out- posted on a fan's website. A swarm of photographers milled outside Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont; the coroner, grim-faced, wheeled his body out on a gurney. That famous toga was now a death shroud: a thin, white sheet pulled up over his head in an attempt to give dignity to the unmistakeable girth beneath. For some people this unpleasant image would have been enough, but I wanted more. I wanted to see autopsy photos: the incisions made by the coroner's blade, the thick, careless stitches that left the deceased looking like Frankenstein's monster. But what I wanted to see most was an image from the inner sanctum: the photographs of Belushi lying dead in his hotel bed, his naked body seeping gas and fluid onto the sheets. This was the money shot, the point of impact where life abruptly ended. To see how a celebrity looked at the very moment of passing, that mysterious instant where life just stopped. This was what I lived for.

I checked in at The Celebrity Autopsy Room. The website was run by an anonymous webmaster who called himself The Coroner. He had set up a Frequently Asked Questions section to try and impede the flow of disgust levelled his way. Yes, he posted, I can live with myself. No, I don't know what it's like to lose a loved one, but I'm sure it's terrible. No, I am not being disrespectful to the dead, if anything I am preserving their legacy by showing the truth of their final days. No, I will not post a photograph of myself on the website, as it will only assist those of you with vigilante justice in mind to track me down and beat me with a baseball bat, as you have threatened to do so many times before. Yes, if you have any photos of dead celebrities please send them to me. No fakes please-after so long in the business, I can tell the difference.

I logged onto the chat room and posted a question asking whether anyone had seen a photograph of John Belushi dead. There were some high profile celebrities who were fortunate enough never to have photographs of their bloated, distended corpses find their way onto the internet. Phil Hartman was one, which I attributed to the fact he was so well liked and no one had the stomach to publish photos of such a likeable guy with his head blown off. Another was Kurt Cobain. Sure, there was that famous shot taken through the window of the greenhouse where Kurt's dead, lifeless leg can clearly be seen, a Converse sneaker on his foot. But actual photographs of his full dead body had never surfaced. I'd read that the impact of the shotgun blew half his head off. I guess it would be difficult to prove that the exploded head was actually Kurt's and not some other unfortunate individual's.

I checked the message board. A couple of people claimed they had seen photographs of Belushi's autopsy on the internet, but when I clicked the links to take me to the photos I was redirected to porn sites. Most people pointed me in the direction of photos of Chris Farley's death, which had been readily available on the internet for years. Chris Farley was a Saturday Night Live comedian who wanted to emulate his idol Belushi in any way possible, even if it meant dying like him. Farley died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three, exactly the same age Belushi was when he took the speedball that ended his life.

The photos of Chris Farley showed him lying on the floor of his Chicago apartment, his face purple and bloated, a large white bubble coming out of his mouth. The bubble was so solid it looked like a mouth gag, so people often mistook his death for an S & M ritual gone horribly wrong. In reality the white stuff was his stomach coming out of his mouth, pushed up by the toxicity of the drugs. The Coroner's office referred to this as a *foam cone'. The photos were good and graphic, but still a distant second to the footage of Belushi's body being wheeled from the Chateau. Belushi was an original that Farley had failed to measure up to, no matter how hard he had tried. Both of their deaths had been sad and pointless.

My room depressed me. Lynette wouldn't let me stick posters up because she didn't want the wallpaper ruined. As a compromise she bought me a corkboard which hung like a lonely blank canvas in the middle of the room. To show I wouldn't be placated I'd never stuck anything on it. Occasionally I'd find a note from Lynette pinned to it, about remembering to do my homework, or wishing me a good day at school, but I always took them down. The only thing she pinned up there that I hadn't thrown away was a recent article about the Manson Family parole hearings she'd cut from a newspaper. I kept that in my drawer, another slice of LA's morbid history.

My own little collection of artefacts wasn't as carefully laid out as Benji's, or as well presented, and I didn't have down lights or even a cabinet, just a single shelf on my wall that once housed Lynette's case files. I picked up my treasures one by one. A jar of dirt from underneath the Hollywood sign, a T-shirt that a guy at a flea-market told me belonged to Karen Carpenter. I carefully handled a single long-stemmed rose that was now all dried and flaky. I'd taken it from Marilyn Monroe's grave. There were hundreds of them there, and it wasn't as if she could enjoy them anyway. I'd grabbed it and run, while the other tourists tutted behind me, some angry lady telling me to stop. But I kept running. It wasn't like they really cared about Marilyn, not the way I did. I figured Marilyn would understand why I did it, and that was all that mattered to me. Everyone else was just a hypocrite.

I picked up a bracelet of tacky plastic beads, all different colours, and put it on. Once it was way too large, and would have hung off my wrist like a hula-hoop, but now it nearly fitted. Mom didn't care that they were cheap and gaudy beads, she just loved the colours: the blues and reds and oranges that danced on her wrist. She didn't care what anyone else thought about her. As long as she was enjoying herself and could live with herself, everything was fine. I wanted to be just the same way. I was never going to let anyone tell me how to live, what I could and couldn't do, what was acceptable. I took the bracelet off, placed it gently back on the shelf, and went to bed.

SEVEN.

The next morning we once again made our way towards Hollywood. The heat was stifling, the sun blazing like the apocalypse. I wound down the window and breathed in the city air, a familiar mix of smoke and gasoline. Brushfires in the north left a brown haze across the horizon and smoke drifted dreamily over the surrounding hills. We didn't give it a second's thought. Something was always burning in Los Angeles.

I leafed through Benji's copy of Hollywood Hell, the pages yellow and well thumbed. It was a pocketbook guide to LA's seedier attractions, offering tourists an alternative to the corporate tourist traps like Disneyland and Universal Studios. Listed in its pages was information on Hollywood's sordid, secret past, with detailed maps to guide the way. There was no listing for Graumann's Chinese Theatre, no directions to Knott's Berry Farm. Instead you could find the location of the Beverly Hills house where Lana Turner's daughter allegedly killed her mother's boyfriend, the infamous standover man Johnny Stompanato. The apartment where the actor from Seaquest hung himself. The street where Robert Blake's wife was shot.

We drove to Leimert Park where The Black Dahlia's body was found in 1947. The Black Dahlia was a young actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. She was a transient floating from one lonely part of Los Angeles to the next, hanging out with sailors and letting strange men buy her meals. Her naked body was found in a vacant lot close to the side of the road, severed at the waist and drained of blood. Cigarette burns scarred her breasts, a piece of flesh was carved from her side, and a grin had been slashed into her mouth with a sharp object, most probably a straight razor.

Benji and I got out of the car and stood next to the spot where her body was found. The vacant lot had been replaced by a neat row of family homes; the exact spot where her body had lain was now a driveway. A kid's bike lay on its side on the front lawn, its back wheel spinning slowly in the air. Benji and I stood side by side, entranced. Benji was infatuated with The Black Dahlia. Many were. With her ravishing black hair and full pouting lips, she was the epitome of the untouched innocent destroyed by the evils of Hollywood. Her mysterious death was an obsession Los Angeles couldn't quite shake off.

Benji stared at the spot where her body had been discarded. An old man walked his dog across the road, watching us with suspicion, and the tiny dog started yapping in our direction. He was old enough to know what had happened here, and why two teenagers dressed in black were standing at the side of the road staring at the sidewalk. He could see right through us. The little dog kept yapping and I felt the urge to flee, ashamed that we had roused awful memories on this glorious sunny day. I didn't blame him for being angry. Wherever we went we stirred up memories people had been trying to forget, brought darkness back to what were now nice neighbourhoods. Benji pulled out his camera and took a picture of the sidewalk.

*Time to go,' I said, the old man and his dog still watching us. Benji took one more photo then reluctantly got back in the car.

*Did you hear about that new book?' Benji asked as we drove away. *Apparently John Huston was involved in The Black Dahlia's murder.'

*John Huston?'

*Yeah.'

*The director of The Maltese Falcon?'

*Yeah.'

*Father of Angelica and the perpetually underrated Danny?'

*What's your point?'

*My point is, every day there is a new book about who killed The Black Dahlia. One day it's an evil abortionist, the next it's some vagrant who burned to death in a hotel room.'

*But Huston could have done it. You could see it in his eyes. When he was in Chinatown he totally freaked me out. That guy is one evil dude.'

*Benji, he was playing a role in a movie! Do you think Anthony Hopkins really bites people's faces off?'

Benji found a spot of dirt on the dashboard and wiped it off with a wetted finger. *All I'm saying is, to play a role like that in Chinatown, a guy so evil, and to do it so well, you've gotta have something going on inside. He had it in him. He could have done it.'

*Yeah, and Christopher Reeve was faster than a speeding bullet in that wheelchair.'

Many of the sites listed in the guidebook were gone, or had been altered forever. Hotels were now car parks. Schwab's Drug Store, where a young composer scribbled *Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on a napkin while Lana Turner sipped malts in the back booth, was now a strip mall. The last place that James Dean ever lived, a large house in Sherman Oaks, had been renovated until it was unrecognisable.

We stopped at a food stand on Ventura Boulevard and bought French Dip Sandwiches for lunch. The stand was next to a florist that was used in our favorite TV show, *Six Feet Under'. We sat under an umbrella and watched the cars come and go, loading up with bouquets and posies. Benji dripped mustard on his Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and swore.

Our next stop was the highlight of the day, the one we had been waiting for. We drove through Laurel Canyon and passed the Canyon Country store, an iconic grocery shop frequented by boho musicians like Jim Morrison, who would drink orange juice on the porch before scoring drugs from the neighbourhood dealer in the parking lot. We only caught a glimpse of the ruins of Houdini's mansion, set high up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard above the racing traffic, obscured by trees. The staircase that led to the mansion fell haphazardly down the cliff face, the servant quarters the only part of the house still remaining. I had read on the internet that many believed Houdini still haunted the ruins of his mansion, that the walls of his Hollywood Hills home would forever be the only ones he would never escape.

The Hollywood Hills were beautiful, wild and deadly. This was where coyotes attacked the pets of movie stars, where George Reeves, the original Superman, went upstairs during a party at his house on Benedict Canyon and shot himself. Errol Flynn held orgies at his infamous House of Pleasure, and speeding cars regularly ran off the road along Mulholland Drive, plunging down the cliff face. As we drove up Laurel Canyon, cars hurtled back down the hill at terrifying speeds, and a passing truck nearly took off one of our side mirrors. On the radio Courtney Love sang about flying away to Malibu. There were always songs about our town on the radio. Even with the murders and the rapes and the car jackings and earthquakes, the radio played songs like *LA Woman' and *California Dreaming', convincing us this was the only place we would ever want to be.

We drove past quaint chateaux and larger, more extravagant homes. Cielo Drive was easy to find. A brand new street sign had been erected higher than the others, to discourage theft. Another sign, *Not A Through Street', was erected next to it. The houses were inconspicuous in their plainness; lawns were trimmed and walls whitewashed. Two neighbours stood on the corner, coffees and papers in hands, oblivious to the scrutiny of the world and the prying eyes of curiosity seekers. One of them tipped his cap to the other and set off in a jog, sneakers hitting the pavement hard. Above them the sky suddenly turned grey and threatened rain.

*Here,' Benji said, pointing to a concealed driveway. *This looks like it.'

We made a tight turn onto a dirt road with a sharp and steady incline. After a few houses we came across a wooden sign that read *Private Driveway' and listed five house numbers, each one carved on a quaint piece of oak and hung one above the other. The house number we were looking for changed every six months, moving up or down a digit, and Benji had been careful to check the latest incarnation on the internet. We came to the end of the road and stopped at a set of gates higher than the others, the walls flanked by security cameras. Benji shut off the engine and picked up his camera. I leant back in my seat, overwhelmed.

*Are you coming?' Benji asked impatiently. I opened my door, heaved myself out into the grey day and shivered.

On a hot August evening in 1969, actress Sharon Tate and four other people were murdered in her home by the Manson Family. Sharon was pregnant, and her baby did not survive. All that remained of the house where she lived and died was the original telephone pole; everything else had been levelled. I touched the stone of the gate with an outstretched hand. It was still warm from the morning's sunlight, had not yet cooled under the rain clouds that had started to gather. I placed my face against it, felt the thick texture, and ran my hand along its surface. Sharon Tate was only twenty-six when she died. A millionaire had bought the property a few years ago and destroyed it, erecting a modern structure in its place. I had seen photographs of Sharon Tate and her friends dead in the front yard and the living room. Now, the places where their bodies lay had been smoothed over, purged of demons.

I listened. The canyons loomed around us, silent and patient. I was sad that so little remained in the spot where it actually happened. I believed that life was made up of energy. When someone committed a violent act, that energy would become even stronger, fuelled by anger and hatred, fear and desperation. That energy wouldn't dissipate. It could hang in the air, even years later. The canyons were the perfect place for that kind of energy. The hills trapped the impulses inside, where they fermented, growing stronger every day. I could feel it in the ground. It ran through my hands like bolts of electricity. It reminded me of the day my parents died, the static that hung in the air that night, and for one brief moment I felt closer to them. I was back there.

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. I heard the whirr of a surveillance camera as it zeroed in on me.