Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 6

As I neared my house, my service called. Mr. Bunyan letting me know today’s consult was canceled, the parents had reconciled.

I’d be paid for a day’s work.

My karma was shaping up strangely; at this rate, I should go looking for a subsidized crop not to grow.

I got home, drank coffee, walked to the studio and told Robin about Thalia.

She gasped. As a child, she cried a lot, does her best to avoid it now. But now the tears flowed and she tried to distract herself by brushing sawdust from her bench.

She put her whisk away. “That was stupid, I never met the woman. Milo’s sure it was murder?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

She shuddered, took hold of my arm, rested her head on my shoulder. “No life’s worth more than another. But shouldn’t there be extra credit for endurance?”

I returned to my office, opened a drawer, found Thalia’s uncashed check.

Getting paid not to work doesn’t sit right with me. I’d figure something out.

Meanwhile, time to learn about the Aventura.

The Web had plenty to say. Built in 1934 by a consortium of private investors who’d managed to make money during the Great Depression, the hotel had been conceived as a “Spanish Revival masterpiece that would rival the 23-year-old Beverly Hills Hotel, the relative upstart Beverly Wilshire, built in 1928, and the venerable Bel-Air occupying 60 acres two miles east of the former bean farm where the four-story, three-hundred-room structure was erected.”

The finished product featured three swimming pools, one a “therapeutic lagoon” filled with salt water trucked in from Santa Monica, plus half a dozen tennis courts. Llamas, ostriches, and exotic parrots were caged in a private zoo. The Aventura Slim, a since-forgotten cocktail based on absinthe, was served up at the Agua Caliente Bar.

An old black-and-white photo depicted an imposing structure with “El Ori-hi-nal” little more than an appendage leading to “tropical gardens and secluded meditation spots.”

Soon after the Aventura’s construction, the business plan faltered, leading to dissolution of the consortium and sale to a “shadowy group of investors reputed to have ties to organized crime, including former bootlegger and mobster Leroy Hoke. Hoke was also rumored to have been a member of the original group who’d taken control by exerting pressure on his partners.”

Under new management, the hotel acquired a reputation as a place where illicit lovers could expect to enjoy privacy, gamblers could operate one-night casinos, and rich girls could undergo illegal abortions.

The surgeries were reputed to have taken place in a series of bungalows tucked into the western edge of the property. Known as The Numbers, hidden from view by thick vegetation, and reached via a guarded footpath, the outbuildings served as a hotel within a hotel, ideal for clandestine activity.

Origin of the name inspired debate, with some chroniclers guessing a literal reference to the numerals on the doors of the clapboard structures and others claiming it reflected the operation of numbers and other rackets.

Everyone agreed that by the late thirties the Aventura was a favorite of the demimonde, and the absence of police raids suggested cozy connections to those in power.

On December 14, 1941, a week after the U.S. entered World War II, Leroy Hoke was convicted of racketeering and tax evasion and sent to San Quentin. The Aventura was shut down and loaned to the U.S. Army as officer housing, and after the war served as a short-term military psychiatric hospital specializing in “shell shock.”

By 1948, ownership had shifted to a third syndicate, this one announcing intentions to demolish the structure and build low-cost housing for workers servicing the burgeoning upper class of Bel Air and Brentwood.

That plan ran headlong into protests by the intended utilizers of domestic service. Drawn-out legal battles were followed by complaints that the hotel’s abandoned grounds had become a “haven for vagrants.”

On August 9, 1950, William Parker became L.A.’s new police chief, ushering in an era of iron-fist law enforcement. One of Parker’s first directives was to raid the now squalid Aventura acreage and “convince” the transients to vacate.

Parker might have played a part in the city’s demand that the still-litigious owners clean up their mess within days or face criminal prosecution. A December 1950 sale transferred the property to a St. Louis hotelier named Conrad Grammar, who promised speedy rehabilitation and return to “the glory days of luxuriant hospitality.”

Grammar kept his word but his profligate spending saddled the Aventura with crushing debt. Unable to shake its unsavory reputation, the hotel proved unable to compete with its high-end rivals and ended up offering package deals to road-tripping families.

The burgeoning upper class groused about a “trailer park totally at odds with the new face of Brentwood.”

In 1957, Grammar got out of the hotel business, switching to the manufacture of recreational vehicles, and the Aventura began decades of revolving-door foreign ownership.

A British group tried to make a go. Then Italians, Franco-Italians, Franco-Swiss, Franco-British, all-Swiss.

On February 2, 1971, an Icelandic corporation announced plans for the world’s largest “health-oriented spa,” including forty prefab authentic Icelandic saunas scattered around the property for “thermal rejuvenation on impulse.”

The neighbors began grumbling.

On February 9, 1971, the earth shrugged.

Tremors originating in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains blossomed into a 6.5-magnitude disaster. Most of the Sylmar Quake’s damage was concentrated in the Valley, but older structures throughout the L.A. Basin suffered as well, including four dangerously sagging stories of Spanish Revival stucco resting on an unbolted foundation set atop soft earth that had once nourished beans. Strangely, several wooden cabins on the property survived intact.

By the time the aftershocks ceased, the Icelanders had cut bait and a Macao-based concern had taken the property at a poorly attended auction. A grand scheme to build the world’s most luxurious six-star hotel was thwarted by the necessity of demolishing the main building running up against the demands of preservationists that “any structurally sound components of the historic locale be left in place.”

The result was years of additional litigation, yet another forfeiture, and a rushed-through statehouse decision to use taxpayer money to fund demolition of all but “a stable western wing plus loggia plus supplementary outbuildings.”

That took half a decade to accomplish, after which a young Dubai-based sheik with a penchant for totaling seven-figure supercars scored the site at an even lower price. He hired a “cutting edge” architect who designed a “postmodern tower merging with the psycho-structural suggestion of the original wing as an exemplar of stylistic incest.”

Nothing since then.

How much of the parade had Thalia witnessed? Kurt DeGraw claimed she’d scored a bargain and maybe she had. But living through the changes only to end up smothered in bed seemed a steep price to pay.