Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [44]
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.