Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [43]
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