Mulholland Highway belongs to a larger, winding road system that cuts across Los Angeles from East Hollywood to the Pacific. In the novel, it is more than a way to travel: its traffic, isolation, and broken continuity help define the landscape of Eldon Mate’s murder and the investigation that follows.

Route and Setting

The narrator approaches from Beverly Glen, turning onto Mulholland and driving west past houses strained by seismic risk and vacant lots. The road coils through brush and saplings before climbing sharply; at one point the asphalt continues east under the name Encino Hills Drive. Elsewhere, Mulholland is described as more than thirty miles of blacktop stretching from East Hollywood to the Pacific, but wilderness cuts it off in several places, making a continuous end-to-end journey impossible.

The route can feel urban and exposed, then suddenly remote. On an evening drive, the road leads through Kanan toward the coast; beyond Trancas Canyon, the Coast Highway is nearly empty, and the travelers cross the county line at Mulholland Highway. That shift from congested city roads to a quiet shoreline, and then toward mountain roads, gives the larger route an unsettled character: it connects places without making them easily accessible.

Traffic, Distance, and Isolation

The narrator’s early drive occurs against the southbound commuter crush. Roadworks are under way at the bottom of the glen, where crews are installing storm drains; the narrator views the work with characteristic sarcasm, noting both its timing ahead of a drought and the apparent imbalance between workers and onlookers. The jammed Porsches, Jaguars, older cars, and pickups turn the road into a forced encounter among strangers, while the narrator sails past in the opposite direction.

That congestion contrasts with the emptiness of the coastal stretch. The novel makes distance feel variable: a road may be crowded and close to home, yet its bends, closures, and wilderness breaks can leave a traveler isolated. The same combination matters to the murder inquiry. Investigators consider whether the killer arrived with Mate, parked farther away than they had searched, or left no tracks; no one reported another vehicle, but no one had noticed Mate’s van either, despite its remaining at the scene for hours.

The Murder Site and Its Evidence

Mate’s van was found near the narrator’s home, and the road below the murder site becomes a point of departure for the investigation. The forensic account emphasizes how carefully the killer appears to have worked inside the vehicle. There was no blood outside, despite the bloody work in the confined space. The killer may have used the passenger side to clean up, changed clothes, and swept the ground before leaving; those steps are presented as an investigative reconstruction, not as witnessed events.

The scene’s makeshift details link the murder to the vehicle’s secluded setting. Sheets of thick cardboard, cut to cover the driver’s-seat windows and streaked with arterial blood, could have blocked light from within. The detective suspects that the killer brought them, along with the mattress on which Mate lay. In this reconstruction, Mate had come prepared to help someone die, but the intended roles were reversed. The winding, poorly observed road offers the conditions for such a crime, while the absence of tracks and witnesses leaves the route of arrival and escape uncertain.

An Investigative Corridor

The road remains part of the inquiry after the crime scene is left behind. Milo Sturgis waits below the murder site with the engine running, and he and the narrator drive east on Mulholland before heading north into the Valley. Later, their pursuit of Paul Ulrich takes them back through a wider network of roads: from Kanan to the coast and then inland toward a remote property reached by an unmarked road. The cabin lies well beyond its nearest neighbor, preceded by a long stretch of state land; the approach reinforces how easily the surrounding terrain can conceal a destination.

At the property, the investigators notice old sycamores like the tree beside which Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped. The resemblance prompts the narrator to suspect that Ulrich may have recognized and valued the symmetry. The association turns the landscape into more than a backdrop: roads, trees, and distances become potential parts of a murderer’s design, though the narrator’s inference remains an interpretation rather than confirmed fact. Mulholland’s decisive narrative function lies in that tension between access and concealment: it carries the investigation forward while repeatedly reminding the detectives how much of the terrain—and of the killer’s movements—remains unseen.