Drive west along the Sunset Strip, out of the twenty-dollar-boutique-martini zone they call West Hollywood, and you know it without even seeing the signs: You’re in Beverly Hills.
Suddenly, the road under your wheels isn’t asphalt anymore. It’s butter. Beverly Hills must have a law: Pavement shall at all times be as smooth and creamy as the faces of the makeup-counter girls at Saks. Not so much as a dimple allowed in the roadbed to shiver the undercarriage of a Bentley.
Even in a geriatric ride like mine, with tires as bald and thin-skinned as Jesse Ventura, you can feel the difference. Besides, for me, rolling onto Butter Boulevard means I’m home. I live here.
I don’t live in Beverly Hills the way the Sultan of Brunei lived here, or even the way the Beverly Hillbillies did. I sure don’t drive anything like whatever His Sultanity kept in his garage—though my grungy old AMC Gremlin would give the Clampetts’ jalopy a run for the ugly trophy.
But I’m still a local.
For as long as Beverly Hills has been here, the Quires have been here, which is more than I can say for a lot of the fast new crowd. During the glory days of the big studios, my father, Harold Quire, headed up security for one of the biggest. He never got anything like rich, but he made good money and he kept his mouth shut, which got him connections and friends money couldn’t buy.
My father also bought a little hunk of land in a wild, scrubby canyon and built a Craftsman house on it, long before the neighbors started putting up Mediterranean villas. Anywhere else it’d be a classic, but in Beverly Hills it makes me a one-woman slum.
That’s what my father left me, that and the legacy of his reputation. It has helped me carve out a nice little niche for myself tutoring actors. I choose my own clients, make my own hours, and am generally free to tool around town indulging my hobby, dabbling in what my father did best—intelligence gathering.
It turns out that the best intelligence network in town is the cleaning ladies. Most mornings, I pick them up from the bus stops on Sunset and give them a lift up the hill to the mansions where they work. That’s how I found out about the jewelry heists—from the cleaning ladies. Lots of small-m mafias operate in Beverly Hills (and a couple of big-M ones), and my favorite is the Cleaning Lady Mafia. It is very tight and usually right about everything.
On their long bus rides from Boyle Heights or Van Nuys, they have plenty of time to compare notes on their employers. What arcane plastic surgery Señora Tiffany treated herself to as a reward for hosting that godawful celebrity charity golf tournament. What little tattletale item Señor Roberto forgot to take out of the pocket of his Sea Island cotton shirt before dumping it in the hamper.
Why they haven’t written their own nanny diaries, I don’t know, except that their idea of celebrity runs to the blondined spitfires on the Mexican telenovela soap operas, not some knotty-calved, tennis-playing billionaire studio mogul whose face they’ve never even seen on Telemundo.
Their patrones live in the hills and canyons above Sunset. The roads there are too twisting to accommodate buses, and the chatelaines too busy to go get the help from the bottom of the hill. So the cleaning ladies have to make like mountain goats. That’s why, before I head to my office, I give them rides to work. They accept, even though they’re embarrassed to be seen in my car. In Beverly, snobbery goes all the way up and down the social ladder.
I don’t mind. Beverly Hills has two kinds of rich: bankaccount rich and information rich. I’m the latter. My father got buried with more ugly secrets than a prison priest. The word “karma” wasn’t in his vocabulary, but if someone got what they deserved—good or bad—my father was the first to know … and the last to tell.
Take the murder of a certain Golden Age producer that regularly shows up on late-night TV shows about unsolved Hollywood mysteries. What only a handful of people ever knew is that he was bludgeoned to death by a dildo from his own collection of ornate sex toys fashioned from semi-precious stones—agate, topaz, tiger’s eye. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy: He used his toys to sodomize starlets he’d slipped a Mickey, and one of them finally fought back. That young actress went on to luminous stardom. My dad knew all about it; he just got out of karma’s way.
Our family rule was, if it’s in the papers—or nowadays, the blogs—it’s just gossip. Before it gets there—or if it never gets there at all—it’s information. And information, good information, isn’t easy to come by. This isn’t a chat-over-theback-fence place. Not when the fence is ten feet high and topped by Slinky loops of razor-wire. Parts of BH don’t even have sidewalks. You want exercise? That’s what home gyms are for. There are more unlisted phone numbers in L.A. than anyplace but Vegas, and the Beverly Hills residential phone book is thinner than Nicole Kidman’s ankles. Restaurants have unlisted numbers, on the principle that if you don’t know, you shouldn’t go.
Anyway, the Cleaning Lady Mafia topped my “reliable sources.” And on a hot July morning, I found out that my home town was getting whacked by high-end thieves. It started when Sonia announced that her patrona’s best friend, the heiress to a cosmetics fortune, had been cleaned out by robbers. “There was nothing left,” Sonia said. Except the foundation, I joked. Yessica, the youngest and hippest and best English speaker, rolled her eyes to remind me what a dumb huera I could be.
Then Yessica remembered that her friend’s patrones in Bel-Air, not far from the Reagans’ house, were cleaned out while they were at dinner at Ortolan. And Sonia shot back, wasn’t there also un robo up off Hillcrest two days ago? Between them, the cleaning ladies assembled a regular police log of rich people getting cleaned out. These slick operators made the smash-and-grab looters at the museum in Baghdad look like morons who shoplift Corn Nuts at 7-Eleven.
Anywhere else, this would be big news. Not here. Here, the cops don’t talk, the victims don’t talk. It’s like Disneyland—no crime, no litter, no frowns. The Happiest Zip Code on Earth. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the murder rate isn’t really ten times higher than the BHPD admits, but the city long ago cut a deal with one of the big-M Mafias to smuggle its stiffs over the municipal line and dump them in Century City.
I dropped the ladies off and drove to my office—the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I do my best thinking on the second-to-last pink stool at the counter, cocooned in banana-leaf wallpaper.
Most days, that thinking is about how to help rich and famous clients whose thread count in their linens is higher than their SAT scores. After spending more years in grad school than Nixon spent in the White House, I’m a natural for the job.
Remember the actress starring in a World War II picture who marveled to reporters that, gee, she’d never known about all those people killed in concentration camps? Oh yeah, she said it. That’s when the idea came to me. It took one call to an old friend of Dad’s at the studio and I had my first assignment.
Pretty soon the word got out. Other studio execs remembered my father’s reputation for discretion and then recalled mine for college knowledge. It’s our local nepotism, but it’s really no different from inheriting a job on a Ford assembly line. In Beverly, once you’re in, you’re in.
Now I discreetly tutor, shall we say, “struggling” actors. I put together an entertaining, easily digestible CliffsNotes backstory about their project of the moment: an archaeological thriller set in Greece, a movie about Madame Curie. Language, politics, science, art—I don’t overstuff their brains, just pad them a little. I should have been spending this morning crafting one-syllable Civil War nuggets for an actor just cast as General Grant. But the news I’d heard was too rich to pass up.
With my fork in one hand and my cell phone in the other, I started calling: my book club, my clients, my ex-Pilates classmates. (As a lapsed Pilatesian, the choice between a German exercise regimen and the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Dutch apple pancakes was no contest.)
The Cleaning Lady Mafia was right again.
All over town, the story was the same. Plasma TVs, laptops, cameras, cash in several countries’ currencies—poof, gone. But any decent second-story man would take those. It was the rest of the hauls that made this gang special. These thieves were discerning. If they didn’t actually subscribe to the glossy living-and-spending magazines, they must steal them from doctors’ offices on Roxbury. Forbes, Vogue, Wine Spectator—they’d be regular crime primers to these guys.
They knew to take the Manolos and leave the Bandolinos. Take the real pearls, leave the fakes. Patek Philippes, but not Omegas. They carted off wine, but only top-rack stuff: Château d’Yquem, Petrus, DuMol pinots from the first Clinton Administration.
And the jewels. Drag queens don’t have the nerve to wear rhinestones as big as the sparklers that were vanishing. I calculated the take just from the cleaning ladies’ count: besides all the brand-X bling, the thieves had stolen baubles that little King Davey bought to adorn the scrawny Duchess of Windsor, Fabergé desk trinkets the Romanovs used as stocking stuffers, Persian turquoises brought here by genuine Persians—Beverly Hills is full of them, starting with the Shah’s relatives.
Inside those fabulous houses on cliffsides and canyons, people were freaked with fear. Terrified to go out. Terrified to come home. The places they’d built to get away from it all weren’t far enough away, after all.
I saved the last call for the Davises. They were old family friends, and I’d picked up a rumor that they had been hit too. My father and Mr. Davis had been a sometimes-team—a studio security chief and an attorney. Carlton Claridge Davis wasn’t one of those attorneys you see on Court TV. He was good because he kept himself and his clients out of court—and out of the papers. He and my father had come to trust each other, and over the years they’d exchanged information and favors and friendship. I learned to swim in their pool. Their actor son, Winston, became one of my clients.
When the Davises heard I needed a place to stay while my house got earthquake-proofed last year, they’d offered me their daughter’s old room. I had a swell time, like living in a Father Knows Best episode—if the Anderson family had had a private screening room and a couple of Cézannes hanging in the dining room.
The Davis house had been hit while they were away visiting their first grandchild. The usual high-end gadgets went missing, but so did some of Eloise Davis’s jewelry. Her fondness for wearing her jewelry instead of stashing it in the vault was notable even in Beverly Hills. My first memory of her is on the tennis court, the thwack of ball on racket in counterpoint to the tinkle of bangle on bangle. Just about every piece came with a lively story about the giver, or the occasion, or both. Many were engraved with memories. Her history, in carats and karats—not bad, she’d say, for a small-town girl.
Theirs was old Beverly Hills money. Old money here meant BCTV—before color TV. Old money had more class than new money, but fewer zeroes. New money BH didn’t much care whether you were Charles Lindbergh or Charles Manson, just so long as you were famous—ideally paired with rich. Old money BH, on the other hand, set great store by Bostonian virtues like discretion and civic dignity.
This was understandable. When actors first swarmed into Hollywood, they encountered signs in boardinghouse windows reading, No Dogs or Actors. They couldn’t even get top billing in a rejection.
Once they’d prospered and swarmed into this new town and made it theirs, little wonder they began to practice their own kind of snobbery and exclusion. My father had often recounted the cautionary tale of a man who complained to the papers about getting fleeced in a Beverly Hills gambling scandal in the 1930s. In retaliation, the victim was cut from every guest list, every club, snubbed and ignored, his children passed over for good schools, his wife unable to book a good stylist at a salon. Oh, the cheater himself was briefly punished as the Old BH crowd saw fit: lousy tee times, bad tables at restaurants, little slights that mattered so much. But that was nothing compared to their fury at the man who let the world in on a Beverly Hills secret.
Old BH hated the fact that the place’s original name was Morocco Junction; they thought it sounded like some cheesy hotel on the Vegas Strip, as indeed it did. In the early 1960s, a Barbary Coast stripper—one of the new silicone types whose body wasn’t so much a temple as a major topographical feature—began billing herself as Beverly Hills. Old BH passed the homburg at a Chamber of Commerce smoker and presented Ms. Hills—along with a few legal documents drawn up by Mr. Davis—a nice little retirement fund, and a one-way ticket to Zurich so she could deposit it in person. New Beverly Hills would have elected her mayor.
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 gray, 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.
Eloise hadn’t been going to a girlfriends’ get-together every year—but she had needed everyone to think that. She had been checking on her illegitimate son. It’s not a word that Madonna’s generation uses, but it was a common one, and an unkind one, to Eloise’s generation. She’d given this boy up for adoption, as unwed mothers did then, and had gone to college nearby to be close to him.
Now her boy was dead, yes, but would she have killed herself over that? She still had two children and a loving husband, and her secret was safe in her poor son’s grave.
As I assembled the bits of newspaper, Eloise’s bracelet gleamed on my arm. The one she never took off. So much of Eloise’s jewelry were mementos or gifts, so many of them inscribed—I wondered, had she engraved this one with some secret reminder of her son, like his birthdate, meaningful only to her?
I slipped it off and tipped it into the light, turned it. Nothing.
Not even a hallmark? A karat marking? I switched on the lighted makeup mirror, that lab-quality magnifier found in the bathroom of every woman in Beverly Hills, the forensic facial tool in the ruthless hunt for any hint of imperfection.
In the merciless light I could see that the bracelet was missing something else. Something less definable than a hallmark, more elusive. Something a Beverly Hills brat would know from the time she was old enough to try shoplifting at Fred Segal: the unmistakable inner glow of deep, true gold. I looked closer. Here and there, under unforgiving magnification, the tiniest pinpoints of cool metal gleamed through.
Silver. Not gold.
A fake. No, a copy.
I spread a thick towel on the marble countertop and laid out what I’d brought back from the BHPD. One after another, in the unrelenting light, I began to notice almost microscopic clues—a jewel cut slightly too deeply, a patina a little too dull, another a little too bright. Line for line, the copies were exceptionally accomplished, but copies nonetheless.
Why? Why on earth would a rich woman have fake jewelry?
I tried to use my father’s practical brain instead of my academic one. Eloise Davis had killed herself. She had gone back to her “annual reunion” and learned that her boy was dead. He probably didn’t know about her, didn’t know that his upbringing, his education, med school—all had been paid for covertly by Eloise.
Eloise, who could have asked her husband for anything but this, had sold her jewelry piece by piece, and concealed her losses by commissioning superb copies that could pass muster almost anywhere. Except, maybe, in BH.
My mind hurried down the stairs to the Cézannes that still hung in the dining room—not because thieves didn’t want Cézannes, but because perhaps they too were copies and the thieves knew it.
For thirty years, the Davises, their friends, their guests, their help, had all been so used to seeing the paintings that they never noticed the switch. But the savvy thieves recognized them for what they were.
Once they’d had the leisure to scrutinize Eloise’s stolen jewelry, they would have twigged to the fact that it was all fake too, and dumped it fast on that Koreatown pawnbroker, where it turned up along with some of their lesser jewelry haul.
I imagined those looky-loos at the police department coming back, looking once, twice. Somebody would eventually figure it out. In this town? You bet they would. Two girls in my sixth-grade class did their science fair project on how to test for genuine gold.
Soon it’d be whispered from salon chair to salon chair, from restaurant booth to restaurant booth. Eloise Davis’s fabulous jewelry is fake.
Her suicide made a sad kind of sense: She’d rather be dead than humiliated—or humiliate her family. New BH would laugh at her pretensions; Old BH would expel the Davises for having embarrassed them in front of New BH.
Once, Eloise had owned the real things, the satin and velvet jewelers’ boxes from Harry Winston and Van Cleef’s, and the insurance appraisals to prove it. But once le tout BH knew the jewelry wasn’t real, Mr. Davis, good lawyer that he is, would set out to turn up the truth about why his wife wore fake jewels. And then he’d find out about the illegitimate son and the gold and diamonds gone to pay for his upbringing, his education, maybe even the very car he was driving the day he was killed.
And good lawyer’s wife that she was, Eloise had planned—so she thought—for every contingency. Her will specified that her jewelry be buried with her. Sentiment, everyone would agree. The jewels had disappeared, and the insurance company would have paid up. But instead they resurfaced, very publicly. That, on top of her boy’s death, knocked her plan awry, and she must have seen only one solution—in the pill bottles beside her bed.
Oh, Eloise, you desperate, foolish, loving woman. By the time the tox results came back from the lab, she and her jewelry would be long buried.
No one would connect a Beverly Hills matron’s death with a GP killed in a car crash in the rural Midwest.
I switched off the glaring makeup light and the room subsided into shadows. I pocketed the bit of newspaper and carried the jewelry out to the dressing table. Now it hardly mattered whether anyone stole it before the funeral. Maybe one of these days, another pack of thieves, less discriminating, would steal the fake Cézannes and tie up that loose end.
The family didn’t know. And they never would, not from me. As I said, in Beverly Hills, the police don’t talk. The victims don’t talk. And I am my father’s daughter. Why should I?