Inside. An old-fashioned Beverly Hills mansion. Lots of beige and cream. A shiny, pristine piano in one room. A grandfather clock ticking loudly in another. Antiques everywhere. All the rooms we went through were clean and uncluttered and polished. But you got the feeling that no one had spent any actual time in them in years. And not just because there were vacuum tracks in the carpet. There was an eerie emptiness, a palpable stillness.
We got to a back room that most people would probably call the den. Peter went in first, I followed. The room was pretty small if you compared it to the other rooms we’d just walked through. But not small if you compared it to a similar room in a house in a neighborhood with a less desirable zip code. There was a large flat-screen TV in one corner broadcasting a stock-analysis-type show, but with the sound off. Some more antique-type furniture was neatly positioned around the room. There were little tables with pictures in silver frames on them. An olive green couch that perhaps had never been sat on lined one wall. And in the corner farthest from the doorway, a comfortable-looking navy blue chair housed Muriel Dreen.
She wore eyeglasses, a burgundy dress, a white cardigan over her shoulders, and deep blue shoes that matched the chair. I’m pretty sure she got everything from the Talbots catalog, maybe even the chair. She had the TV remote in her left hand and a lit cigarette in her right. On a little table next to her: a mostly empty ashtray, a Bic lighter, and a just-opened pack of Carltons.
“Mrs. Dreen,” Peter said. “This is the detective. This is John Darvelle.”
Muriel Dreen switched off the TV. Then she gave me a big, charming smile and said hello. She knew how to engage someone quickly. She’d probably done it a lot at fabulous parties when she was in her twenties and thirties, two or three hundred years ago.
She told me to have a seat on the couch and charmingly dismissed Peter. Then she just kind of stared at me, her big eyes magnified through the lenses of her thick glasses.
She stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, then grabbed the pack and tapped out a fresh one. She went through a whole ordeal of lighting it. She held the lighter up to the end longer than she needed to, and then she puffed and puffed, creating a big cloud of smoke in front of herself and getting a bright orange cherry going.
I just watched. It was, I’d say, mildly entertaining.
Finally she took a long, full drag, exhaled a roomful of blue smoke, and stared at me some more, with those exaggerated eyes and that charming and, I could now see, manipulative smile.
Seeing that the show was over, I put my hands up and said, “So, what’s up?”
Quickly she said, “One of my workers has stolen from me.”
“Okay,” I responded cleverly. “Stolen what?”
“My engagement ring. It wasn’t even that valuable, not like the tacky rings girls want today. But it was valuable to me. And that Heather stole it. I’m sure of it.”
Man, that big, charming smile she’d shot me was gone. Her magnified eyes had narrowed to magnified slits, and her mouth had twisted into a viperlike sneer.
She continued. “Heather Press is her name. She tended to the plants before I fired her. A common little girl with a common little face. And a common thief too. She took my ring. I know she did. I filed a police report, and some policemen went over and talked to her, but they said Heather denied it and there wasn’t anything else they could do. I don’t think those policemen were very good at their jobs, because I know that common little girl took my ring. I know she did.”
Just like that, Muriel had riled herself up. She was breathing heavily. Shifting a bit in her chair. Maybe even starting to perspire. And showing me through all this involuntary agitation that it wasn’t so much the ring that she was upset about. It was that someone had defied her.
“Okay,” I said. Man, I was really on a roll with the clever responses that day. “How do you know it was her? Don’t you have other staff?” What I wanted to add was: Are you sure you didn’t lose the ring? You know, because you’re a hundred and twelve? I mean, look, Muriel—or Mrs. Dreen, as you prefer—I’m in my late thirties and I found my lost cell phone in the freezer the other day.
But I didn’t add any of that. Instead I just asked the aforementioned, more respectable question.
She answered, “Because the rest of my staff has been with me for years, forever, so it had to be her. And it’s not possible that I lost it, because I don’t wear it. A few years after my husband, Inman, died—and Inman died ten years ago—I started keeping it in a box in a drawer in the dresser next to my bed. Close to my heart, you see. But not on my hand. So it’s not as if the ring ever moved. It just sat in its box. Before it was taken—stolen, that is.”
Hmm. She’d addressed the question I asked and a couple I hadn’t. Those being: Do you wear it? And: Do you keep it somewhere specific when you aren’t wearing it? Sharp as a tack, this nonagenarian appeared to be.
Right then a thought occurred to me, and I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it, but I’m going to anyway. Here’s what I was thinking: What the fuck is this case? I’m getting hired by a little old lady to find her stupid ring that her gardener took? Excuse me, but I’ve solved murder cases that the cops couldn’t figure out. In Los Fucking Angeles, no less. I’m not Encyclopedia Fucking Brown. I’m John Fucking Darvelle. But then I realized that that attitude is terrible. That’s arrogance. And arrogance is what gets you in trouble. Arrogance isn’t just ugly, it’s stupid. Because right when you start strutting around like a peacock, spreading your feathers and claiming you’re too good for things—that’s just the moment when you get burned. And the sting hurts twice as bad because you said you were too good for the thing that burned you in the first place. I’ll be guilty of arrogance again at some point in my life, for sure. Maybe even pretty soon. I hope not, but maybe. But right now? I’m not going to let it get the best of me. Look, I’m not dying to investigate this case. But, bottom line, I’m a detective for hire. I was hired at my rate. I accepted the case. And now I was going to find out what happened to that fucking ring.
I said, “All right, Mrs. Dreen. You seem like you’ve thought this through. Why don’t I go talk to Heather Press. If you’re right, if she took your ring, I bet I can get it back.”
“Oh, she took it, all right. You’ll be able to see it written all over her common little face.”
“Does Peter have a picture? A phone number? An address where I can pay her a visit?”
“Yes, he does, Mr. Darvelle.”
Again with the “mister.” Again, I let it ride.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I got up, and even though her right hand was free—she was no longer using it to handle her smoke; she’d housed it in one of the ashtray slots a few seconds ago—she extended her left hand. You know when people do that? Maybe they’re holding something in their right hand, or even have an injured right hand? Except she wasn’t holding anything, and she didn’t appear to be hurt. Maybe it was her way of exhibiting refinement or charm or something. I didn’t know. Anyway, she held it almost like she wanted me to kiss it. I imagined myself getting down on one knee and giving her extended hand a soft, wet, almost erotic kiss. I have no idea why. Don’t worry, I didn’t do that. I just grabbed it and gave it a little shake. It was soft, fleshy, I could feel the loose skin under my thumb. And it was cold, just like those magnified eyes.
I walked out of the room and found Peter sitting in a chair just off the front foyer. He was looking out a window, trapped in some kind of daydream, I guessed. But then I noticed he wasn’t daydreaming. He was looking at a squirrel nervously scurrying around a tree. The squirrel stopped on a dime—upside down, by the way, his claws stuck to the bark—and, while still sort of shaking all over, looked right at Peter. Did these two creatures see themselves in each other? Was Peter thinking, Man, my nervous disposition would sit better with me if I could just dart around a tree all day, collecting acorns? And was the squirrel thinking, Shit, sure I’m a trembling mess, but I could still get into the field of law with a specialty in estate management?
Peter, I think feeling my presence in the room, turned to look at me. Right then the squirrel, still upside down, craned its head up to look at me too.
I stood there face-to-face with not one but two shivering creatures, shivering like my cell phone earlier.
“Peter, I need a couple of things from you.”
Instinctively he stood up and said, “Absolutely.”
The squirrel took that as its cue to split, zipping down and out of my eyeline.
“Heather Press,” I said. “What does she look like, what’s her phone number, and where does she live?”