Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [48]
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,