Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [45]
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