Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [42]
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