Twenty years later Mr. Walsh returns, the ever reluctant visitor, driving alone up out of the flats, past Our Lady of the Good Cadillacs and the Polo Lounge, martinis forever in mid-air. The patrons in those days, old friends of his father, the likes of Katleman and Bautzer, were $1,000-a-point backgammon players and idea tycoons, much bigger than Mad Men. They wore diamonds in their cufflinks and oversized dark glasses, and carried alligator skin address books filled with the unpublished numbers of studio heads, Vegas casino owners, and starlets held in private-reserve.

The reluctant visitor —the ‘late Mr. Walsh‘ is how he thinks of himself — continues up Coldwater Canyon, turning left at the fire station and the park where he once ran down fly balls by the bucket full, past the orange grove, underneath hanging tennis courts, and up beyond the house where one of Errol Flynn‘s ex-wives once lived. Everything once and once upon a time.

Eventually, he comes to the fork. To the right, the road runs up and over a ridge to Franklin Canyon and then up a long fire break through this part of the Santa Monica mountains to a ridgeline and Mullholland Dr., where forty-one years ago, in a ravine off the Drive, a Great Dane found...