Mallory's Former House in Benedict Canyon

Mallory's Former House in Benedict Canyon is the canyon residence Bret enters while investigating Robert Mallory. Its clean, almost anonymous exterior gives little warning of what lies within: Robert’s makeshift room holds personal effects and clippings about Katherine Latchford, while a locked inner basement door, rows of empty fishbowls, animal cages, and a confined iguana make the house’s hidden spaces newly disturbing. The search turns an apparently ordinary home into a repository of clues, projections, and unanswered questions.

Setting and Exterior

On a Monday morning in November, Bret drives to the house after speaking with Dr. Croft at Buckley. He approaches along empty roads, passes a pool-cleaning van and a gardener’s truck, and enters through a wrought-iron gate bearing a crooked, mud-streaked no-trespassing sign. The gravel approach gives way to a stone driveway in front of a house that appears clean and carefully maintained.

The exterior is plain rather than imposing: fresh-looking white paint, decorative pine-green shutters, and gray shingles make it seem almost interchangeable with a house elsewhere. Its location in the Los Angeles canyons lends it an exotic air, and Bret believes it is probably valuable. That ordinary, orderly appearance matters because the discoveries inside do not announce themselves through a visibly ruined or abandoned building. The house’s secrecy is spatial, not immediately legible from the road.

Robert’s Room and the Clippings

The upper floor is larger than the sloping roof suggests. Bret passes dark, empty rooms and finds a bathroom that still contains shaving cream, soap, towels, shampoo, Noxzema, and a razor. At the end of the long hallway is Robert’s room: a futon and gray bedding on a bare wooden floor, a Tensor lamp, and an empty 7Up bottle on the windowsill overlooking the driveway.

The room’s scattered possessions suggest someone living there informally. Bret sees a small bag of marijuana, rolling papers, a glass pipe, an ashtray, and white candles set on paper plates around the futon. A makeshift desk holds an electric typewriter and a boom box, with tapes by the English Beat, Was (Not Was), and Tom Verlaine nearby; a small stack of paperbacks includes The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, and The Grapes of Wrath. In the closet are mostly black T-shirts, tennis shorts, sandals, and black jeans. Bret also finds issues of Penthouse and Hustler and a jar of Vaseline, details that prompt an erotic response rather than simply advancing the investigation.

The desk’s spiral notebooks are blank, but the material Bret finds alongside them is not. Newspaper clippings document Katherine Latchford’s disappearance, her life, the weeks she was missing, mysterious phone calls, rearrangements in her bedroom, discovery of her body, and subsequent coverage of her murder. The clippings give the room a second function: it is not only a place where Robert stays, but also a space containing an assembled record of a case Bret has already connected to him. Their presence intensifies suspicion without, by itself, proving who collected them or why.

The Basement and Its Contents

Bret reaches a door he initially believes leads to the garage. He calmly slips a paper clip into the lock and opens it onto a dark stairwell leading to a basement, an unusual feature for a Los Angeles house. A lightbulb at the bottom reveals a damp, faintly rotten-smelling, apparently unused room. Farther in, a second door has two keyholes and appears bolted from within; the paper clip cannot open it.

The basement’s storage corner is more revealing than the empty room. Beside deflated rafts, blue pool kickboards, a broom, and a mop, floor-to-ceiling cupboards contain a partly filled bag of dry dog food, about twenty tins of Purina Cat Chow, birdseed, and a row of empty glass fishbowls. An adjoining cupboard holds small steel cages used to transport pets and other small animals. The supplies evoke the disappearance of animals and fish associated with Robert, but the house’s contents alone do not settle what happened to them.

One glass enclosure holds an iguana on sand scattered with rocks, with a small water bottle fixed to the side. The animal’s still stare arrests Bret; he closes the cupboards, hurries upstairs, and leaves through the laundry room, forgetting to close and relock the door he has forced. The scene moves from investigation to bodily revulsion and flight, while the locked inner door remains unopened and its contents unknown.

Narrative Significance

The house gathers together several kinds of evidence without resolving them into a complete account. The Katherine Latchford clippings point toward an obsessive attention to a murder; the animal food, empty bowls, cages, and living iguana connect the space to animal keeping and to the story’s pattern of missing animals. Yet neither set of objects provides a simple explanation. The unopenable basement door preserves a literal blank at the center of the search.

The building also externalizes Bret’s changing state. He arrives carrying anger and, inside, proceeds calmly through rooms and locks; by the time he finds the iguana, fear and dread have given way to numbness, followed by sickness and hurried escape. The house’s progression from clean façade to lived-in room to sealed basement makes its architecture part of the investigation: each threshold offers a more intimate glimpse, but the deepest space remains inaccessible. Its force lies in that mixture of concrete clues and unresolved inference.