Los Angeles Noir

by Denise Hamilton

  My sympathies lay firmly with Old Beverly Hills, I decided, as Meghan finally answered the phone after ten rings. She was Eloise’s assistant, a Renaissance Studies major in her first job out of college.

  “Oh, Minerva, Mrs. Davis isn’t here? The police called and said they found her jewelry and could she come down and ID it?” I liked Meghan well enough—but she spoke in irritating, perpetual interrogatories.

  So they had been hit.

  “What about the Cézannes?” I asked. Marita, their housekeeper, had once told me that she didn’t see what was so special about the pair of still lifes. She called them, dismissively, “las frutas.”

  “Oh, they didn’t touch them, thankfully?”

  Now I knew these thieves were pros—smart enough to recognize a Cézanne, and smarter still to know how risky it is to fence a hot post-Impressionist.

  The thieves had to know that both Davises would be away. Every July, Mr. Davis went to the Bohemian Grove—that private men’s club in the Redwoods where prime ministers and billionaires go to pee on trees and build bonfires. And Eloise went back to the Midwest for her annual get-together with her old college girlfriends. No women were allowed at the Grove gatherings, and no men at Eloise’s “girls’ weekend.”

  “She hurried right home when she heard about the burglars. She was in an absolutely terrible state—I’d never seen her so bad?”

  Well, I’d soon hear all about it from Eloise herself—maybe after she got back from the police station. One thing I knew: Nobody would ever break into my place. My dogs regarded any creature larger than a parakeet as a potential Osama bin Laden. And my tumbledown Craftsman house screamed out, If you find anything worth stealing, we’ll both be surprised! I was immune.

  On my way to breakfast the next morning, I was surprised to find an extra passenger for my cleaning-lady shuttle: Marita, the Davises’ maid, whom Meghan usually picked up. Driving along Schuyler Road is like cruising down the Loire—castles on both sides. The biggest is Greystone Mansion, where Heidi Fleiss used to screw rich men. Greystone’s first owner, an oilman’s son, was murdered by his own assistant. An inside job.

  Hello. Switch on the klieg lights: an inside job. Like all these heists.

  Whoa. Lights off. Yessica was right—I am a dumb huera sometimes. What big crimes in Beverly Hills aren’t inside jobs? Back in 1929, the gang that made off with a twelvecarat diamond ring from a house in Benedict Canyon had dressed like electricians and been ushered right in the servants’ entrance.

  Every one of these houses is watched over by more camera angles than a James Cameron film set. Nobody just strolls in and happens upon a stash of De Beers’ best. They had to know the angles, the layout, the comings and goings of everyone there.

  This was bad news for the cleaning ladies. Their patronas would gather by their rock-bottomed pools and speculate, Who can we trust? Did some maitre d’ tip off the thieves to when the family would be out to dinner? Or the blow-dry guy at the salon? Or maybe—and their eyes would swivel to the stolid brown women swabbing their slate floors … or maybe … the help.

  At the Davis house, Marita hadn’t set both feet out of the car when the front door opened and Meghan ran out sobbing. She yanked Marita to her feet and hugged her like she was giving her the Heimlich maneuver. They communicated in their own peculiar Italo-Spanglish hybrid, and with Meghan crying like the fountain at Spago’s, it was hard to get it straight.

  Eloise Davis was dead.

  “Como?” Marita had asked several times, incredulously. “Muerto?”

  “Yes,” said Meghan. “Sí. Morto. Morta?” (Meghan wasn’t long out of Barnard.)

  Oh no—Eloise. Had the thieves come back for the Cézannes, found Mrs. Davis at home, and upped the ante to murder?

  Meghan said the paramedics were on their way. She didn’t know any more. If she did, I couldn’t understand through the sobbing.

  Meghan put an arm around Marita and they walked inside, heads dipped together in misery, one dark and one Sheer Blond Spun Gold. The immense Spanish door swung shut. I was half-tempted to knock—to do what, I don’t know. Make coffee. Pass Kleenex. Just be there. Instead, I got back in the car.

  The cleaning ladies, who had observed everything, crossed themselves and fell silent. They barely muttered “adiós” when I dropped them off.

  My father’s Rule Number One was: Find out what everyone else knows. Rule Number Two: Don’t let on that you know anything. I’d already planned on going to the BHPD to suss out my pals about the burglaries; now I had another reason—Eloise’s murder.

  They all knew me at the PD. A lot of the brass had learned the trade under my dad. And my grandmother had been BH’s first air cop. She had a pilot’s license and a badge and patrolled on wings back when a lot of towns still sent out cops on horseback. That made me practically a blue brat.

  On the way, I speed-dialed Joel, my secret source in the coroner’s office. Joel loves Hollywood. He came here from one of those fly-over states the way pilgrims go to Canterbury—with reverence and awe.

  I know it makes me sound like a cartoon private eye, “my mole at the morgue.” Truth is, Joel’s chief job is running the coroner’s gift shop, selling souvenir beach towels with chalked body outlines and personalized toe-tag key chains. When the shop isn’t open, he edits and files autopsy reports.

  But his passion is Hollywood. To Joel, anyone who ever possessed a lot pass is touched by stardust. He knows more about the movies than folks who actually make them, every fragment of minutia from Edison’s Kinetoscope The Kiss to next year’s releases. We met because Joel sent me a very sweet sympathy note after my father died, and we became buddies.

  “Skeletons in the closet, death becomes you,” sang out Joel, who changed his telephone answering voice almost every day. Today it was Bogie, or maybe Mae West with a head cold.

  “Not me, Joel,” I said dryly. “Mrs. Eloise Davis, Beverly Hills. And it’s the other way around—Mrs. Davis has become death.”

  He was already writing it down; I could hear the scribbly sound of the gift shop’s best-selling ballpoint pen shaped like a human femur. “Eloise Davis,” I repeated. “Be nice. She was. When, where, how? Call me when you know. Later, Marlowe.”

  I waved my way into the BHPD, chirping to the desk sergeant that I wanted to see whether my stolen emerald tiara had been recovered. “Oh sure, Minerva,” he said cheerily. “In the property room, right next to the Hope Diamond.”

  As soon as he turned away, I zigged down the opposite hall from the property room and poked my head in at the office of the lieutenant, another Quire protégé, who’d be handling the Davis investigation. Not there. Probably at the coroner’s this very minute. I’d pick his brain when he brought it back to his desk.

  As long as I was there, I might as well check out what Eloise had seen yesterday—her recovered jewels. I zagged back to the property room. Somehow I’d thought the process of finding one’s burgled loot would be as discreet and private as identifying a loved one at the morgue.

  The line down the hallway was like the Crown Jewels queue at the Tower of London. These people couldn’t all be victims. The cops had spread the table with midnight-blue cloth. It looked like Christmas at Cartier’s, though Cartier has scarier security.

  From the way the looky-loos were handling the goods, they might have thought this was Cartier’s too. I was surprised to recognize some of Eloise’s jewelry scattered here and there—from what Meghan said, I thought she’d claimed it yesterday. There were the bracelets, a couple of necklaces, and her clip-on earrings, from the era when Tiffany’s believed real ladies didn’t pierce their ears.

  Some woman picked up Eloise’s calibre-set sapphire ring. She slipped it onto her finger and was admiring it when she saw me watching and put it back down. Slags. Vulgar enough, pawing over other people’s jewels. With Eloise murdered, it was downright ghoulish. Once they heard she was dead, they’d be chewing this cud for a week.

  With an insouciance I didn�
�t feel, I gave the desk sergeant my best Queen Mother wave, and walked down Little Santa Monica to Jamba Juice. I was ordering a Strawberry Nirvana Enlightened Smoothie (hey, I don’t make up the names) when my phone twittered at me.

  It was Winston Davis, my client and Eloise’s son. He had landed his first small acting role a year or so before, as Porfirio Rubirosa in a TV bio-pic about Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress. While the Dominican playboy’s chief assets were unquestionably in his polo jodhpurs, I persuaded Winston that he should know more about the Latin lover—his times, his class, his culture—to portray him convincingly and sell the film to a wider Hispanic audience.

  He got just one review, but it was good: “Winston Davis agreeably reminds us that there was something to Rubirosa from the waist up too.” Winston and his parents had thanked me as profusely as if I’d written it myself.

  “Oh, Minerva,” Winston began. “Meghan said you came by. I wish you’d come inside. Mom … you make her laugh.” His tenses were as wobbly as his voice. “Made her laugh.”

  I made the usual condoling noises about not wanting to intrude.

  “No, please come over,” he said. “Katharine’s here.” I knew Winston’s sister from Beverly Hills High, our alma mater with a fifteen-story oil well on the football field. That the well is still pumping away tells you about our local priorities; that it’s been camouflaged in a trapezoidal floral condom tells you about our local pretenses. I’d earned advance placement credits in Political Science for my failed campaign to change our school team name to the Fighting Derricks.

  “Please. Dad’ll be glad to see you too.”

  For the second time that day, I drove up to the Davises’ house and took the parking spot an unmarked police car was just pulling away from.

  The huge Spanish door was opened again, by Winston—tall, dark, and a little less than handsome for the fatigue circling his eyes like the rings of Saturn. I shuffled down a huggy receiving line of grief: Winston, Katharine and her husband, and my father’s old compatriot, the brand new widower Carlton Claridge Davis.

  As I hugged Carlton back, I saw over his shoulder that the Cézannes were still in place. So there hadn’t been a second burglary, or at least not a successful one.

  Winston steered me up the stairs. Heading toward Eloise’s suite, he must have felt me stiffen. “It’s okay—she’s … not here,” Winston said delicately. “Dad found her this morning. He thought she’d had some kind of stroke. He called 911. But she was already …” I waited. “You know.”

  So maybe it wasn’t murder then? At least not violent, bloody murder.

  Winston started to sit down on his mother’s bed, then swiveled his rear end onto the bench at the foot of it. I sat at the dressing table. He didn’t want a conversation. He just wanted to think out loud. I’d done the same thing after my father died.

  “She wasn’t sick or anything. We asked the doctor about that right away—was she not telling something, so we wouldn’t worry? Nothing. The last time the doctor saw her was yesterday, after she left the police station. He gave her something to help her sleep. She was so incredibly upset by the robbery—even though we had insurance, she hated the idea of strangers rooting through the house.”

  He ran his thumb along the welting on the bench cushion, a cloudlike pouf upholstered in Clarence House blue velvet. Eloise had once pointed it out to me with pride—not for the $400-a-yard fabric, but for the stiff patch where Katharine, age five, had smeared Elmer’s glue pasting illustrations into her first book report.

  “We thought she’d be so happy when the police found most of her jewelry.” Winston sighed and looked up again. “It was in some pawnshop in Koreatown. The cops said we were lucky it hadn’t been broken up yet.”

  The night before, Eloise had given the family a dinnertable account of going down to the police station, groups of women wandering among the tables, just as I’d seem them doing, picking up bangles and brooches like it was a pasha’s yard sale. A couple of acquaintances had spotted her and waved a bit guiltily—“Oh, Eloise, I think I saw your David Webb pin over there … Eloise, isn’t this your Cartier panther bracelet?”

  But the cops hadn’t let her take her jewelry home. There were two more days of showings, in case there was some dispute, and anyway, it was evidence.

  Mr. Davis’s voice rolled up the stairs, the words indistinct but the tone unmistakably summoning. Winston excused himself and hustled downstairs as my phone rang. It was Joel, my coroner mole.

  “Two options, Minerva,” he said, cutting to the chase, this time in William Powell’s Nick Charles voice. “Neither of them murder. Toxicology results will take a few weeks, but the white coats favor accidental overdose or suicide. Paramedics found empty sleeping pill bottles. And your Homicide guys just left. Keep it mum, okay? Over and out.”

  I felt myself go flushed and teary, and a shameful thought crossed my mind. Murder would almost have been preferable—horrible, but cleaner in its way.

  Winston labored back up the stairs. If he noticed any difference in me, he didn’t say so.

  “Dad wondered if you’d be willing to go get Mom’s jewelry from the station. The cops called and said that under the circumstances, it’s okay, they have plenty to make their case. Those guys know you, and Dad’s written a note authorizing it. Here. He’s in no shape to do it. And the, ah, funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

  I said sure.

  Winston braced a hand against my shoulder. “Minerva, before you go, we all agreed that we want you to have something to remember her by.” From his pocket, he fished something out and dangled it from his fingertips. A delicate rose-gold bangle as finely braided as hair. Like a Victorian mourning bracelet, fashioned from the locks of the dear departed. I had never seen it off Eloise’s arm, until Winston slid it onto mine.

  “You know, she always insisted she be buried with all her jewelry. She made such a big deal out of it. We always kidded her about trying to take it with her. But the lawyer told Dad it was in the will. So we wanted to make sure you got this now …” Winston’s voice trailed away. “See you later? Marita’s fixing some food, if you’re hungry.”

  I couldn’t remember ever being less hungry. For the second time that day, I headed toward the BHPD, wondering why a rich woman, a healthy woman, a happy wife, a woman who’d just had the one-in-a-million luck of getting her stolen treasures back—why would she kill herself? It had to be an accident.

  The same desk sergeant who’d joked about the Hope Diamond was as solemn as a pallbearer when I handed over the note and signed for Eloise’s jewelry. The white plastic property bag was unmarked, probably the only bag in Beverly Hills that didn’t brag about where it came from.

  Small but heavy, containing the best moments of her entire life. A woman who was well over twenty-five when she moved to Beverly Hills from some nonentity Midwestern town, and nearly thirty-five when she married the handsome kind attorney in the law office where she worked. A life like that was, as Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, too happy to make much of a story.

  Except, now, for the way it had ended.

  By the time I got back to the Davises’, people were beginning to gather.

  I slipped into the hall, past the family, and went on into the kitchen. I thought I’d get out of the earshot of the sobbing, lest I start in myself.

  But Marita and Meghan were doing their own bawling, a subdued duet over a tray of de-crusted sandwiches. They mopped their eyes on Sferra Bros. linen napkins, twenty bucks each, a fact I knew because I’d priced them in a friend’s bridal registry. (I ended up giving her a gift certificate to PETCO.)

  “Thanks, Minerva, thanks so much?” Meghan said. “Would you mind putting it on Mrs. D.’s dressing table? I’ve got to lay out her clothes for the … service?”

  Some chatelaines change their décor with every Architectural Digest annual “Designers’ Own Homes” issue. For her rooms, Eloise had stuck to the blue, lilac, and silver palette she favored. When she began going gr
ay, she had laughed that finally her hair went with the color scheme.

  Leaving the jewels on the dressing table sounded like a lousy idea, considering the burglaries. I carried the bag into the bathroom. I’d tell Katharine I’d stuffed it in the back of a drawer full of makeup and skin goop until the funeral. My grandmother used to hide her dough in a box of Kotex. She figured even burglars and junkies would be too squeamish to look there.

  I yanked too hard. The drawer came out completely and tipped in my hands, spilling mascara and lipstick and cotton balls all over the floor. I kneeled down to gather it up. Its owner would never touch any of it again, but it wasn’t my place to throw it away—though I did ditch the cotton balls, scooping them up as they scuttled like Nerf balls along the floor.

  When I opened my fist above the wastebasket to let them cascade, I saw something at the bottom that hadn’t shaken loose when Marita emptied it. A newspaper clipping, torn raggedly into several pieces, each crumped smaller than a cotton ball itself.

  I smoothed them out and assembled them on the marble floor. It was the kind of story big-city newspapers don’t bother to write anymore. A young man, a doctor, a figure of some standing in whatever town it was, had been killed by a drunk driver two weeks before.

  The victim’s name meant nothing. But the face—it had the Davis family stamp to it: a little bit of Winston, a lot of Eloise.

  And the town. I’d heard of the place. It wasn’t far from where Eloise had gone to college, where she and her friends met every year for their girls-only reunion.

  I read on. Friends mourned the man who had been adopted into a poor but loving family, then become a high-school standout and a fine medical school student. His parents evidently scrimping to send him there. After his internship, he hadn’t run off to a fancy city practice, but returned to his hometown. He was on his way to the hospital, to take a friend’s shift, when he was killed.

  As I stared at the dead face on the mangled scraps of newsprint, things began to make a sad kind of sense.