Los Angeles Noir

washed my wineglass but left his.

“Nobody’s going to think twice about this, Richard. Only Mariah. I’ll show her the headline, would you like that? Actor Dies in Los Feliz Apartment. Despondent over stalled career, bit player Anthony Karras…” I looked to see how he was liking my performance, but he had stopped breathing altogether. His eyes stared glassily at the leg of the coffee table, his right shoe. He was dead as the rat in the catch-and-release cage. I kneeled by him on the floor. “Am I good enough now, Richard?” I said softly to the body, his inert, splayed mouth open on the rug. I finished cleaning up, locked the door on the inside, wiped the knob, and then closed it with my shirttail.

MOROCCO JUNCTION 90210BY PATT MORRISON

Beverly Hills

Drive west along the Sunset Strip, out of the twenty-dollar-boutique-martini zone they call West Hollywood, and you know it without even seeing the signs: You’re in Beverly Hills.

Suddenly, the road under your wheels isn’t asphalt anymore. It’s butter. Beverly Hills must have a law: Pavement shall at all times be as smooth and creamy as the faces of the makeup-counter girls at Saks. Not so much as a dimple allowed in the roadbed to shiver the undercarriage of a Bentley.

Even in a geriatric ride like mine, with tires as bald and thin-skinned as Jesse Ventura, you can feel the difference. Besides, for me, rolling onto Butter Boulevard means I’m home. I live here.

I don’t live in Beverly Hills the way the Sultan of Brunei lived here, or even the way the Beverly Hillbillies did. I sure don’t drive anything like whatever His Sultanity kept in his garage-though my grungy old AMC Gremlin would give the Clampetts’ jalopy a run for the ugly trophy.

But I’m still a local.

For as long as Beverly Hills has been here, the Quires have been here, which is more than I can say for a lot of the fast new crowd. During the glory days of the big studios, my father, Harold Quire, headed up security for one of the biggest. He never got anything like rich, but he made good money and he kept his mouth shut, which got him connections and friends money couldn’t buy.

My father also bought a little hunk of land in a wild, scrubby canyon and built a Craftsman house on it, long before the neighbors started putting up Mediterranean villas. Anywhere else it’d be a classic, but in Beverly Hills it makes me a one-woman slum.

That’s what my father left me, that and the legacy of his reputation. It has helped me carve out a nice little niche for myself tutoring actors. I choose my own clients, make my own hours, and am generally free to tool around town indulging my hobby, dabbling in what my father did best-intelligence gathering.

It turns out that the best intelligence network in town is the cleaning ladies. Most mornings, I pick them up from the bus stops on Sunset and give them a lift up the hill to the mansions where they work. That’s how I found out about the jewelry heists-from the cleaning ladies. Lots of small-m mafias operate in Beverly Hills (and a couple of big-M ones), and my favorite is the Cleaning Lady Mafia. It is very tight and usually right about everything.

On their long bus rides from Boyle Heights or Van Nuys, they have plenty of time to compare notes on their employers. What arcane plastic surgery Senora Tiffany treated herself to as a reward for hosting that godawful celebrity charity golf tournament. What little tattletale item Senor Roberto forgot to take out of the pocket of his Sea Island cotton shirt before dumping it in the hamper.

Why they haven’t written their own nanny diaries, I don’t know, except that their idea of celebrity runs to the blondined spitfires on the Mexican telenovela soap operas, not some knotty-calved, tennis-playing billionaire studio mogul whose face they’ve never even seen on Telemundo.

Their patrones live in the hills and canyons above Sunset. The roads there are too twisting to accommodate buses, and the chatelaines too busy to go get the help from the bottom of the hill. So the cleaning ladies have to make like mountain goats. That’s why, before I head to my office, I give them rides to work. They accept, even though they’re embarrassed to be seen in my car. In Beverly, snobbery goes all the way up and down the social ladder.

I don’t mind. Beverly Hills has two kinds of rich: bankaccount rich and information rich. I’m the latter. My father got buried with more ugly secrets than a prison priest. The word “karma” wasn’t in his vocabulary, but if someone got what they deserved-good or bad-my father was the first to know… and the last to tell.

Take the murder of a certain Golden Age producer that regularly shows up on late-night TV shows about unsolved Hollywood mysteries. What only a handful of people ever knew is that he was bludgeoned to death by a dildo from his own collection of ornate sex toys fashioned from semi-precious stones-agate, topaz, tiger’s eye. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy: He used his toys to sodomize starlets he’d slipped a Mickey, and one of them finally fought back. That young actress went on to luminous stardom. My dad knew all about it; he just got out of karma’s way.

Our family rule was, if it’s in the papers-or nowadays, the blogs-it’s just gossip. Before it gets there-or if it never gets there at all-it’s information. And information, good information, isn’t easy to come by. This isn’t a chat- over-theback-fence place. Not when the fence is ten feet high and topped by Slinky loops of razor-wire. Parts of BH don’t even have sidewalks. You want exercise? That’s what home gyms are for. There are more unlisted phone numbers in L.A. than anyplace but Vegas, and the Beverly Hills residential phone book is thinner than Nicole Kidman’s ankles. Restaurants have unlisted numbers, on the principle that if you don’t know, you shouldn’t go.

Anyway, the Cleaning Lady Mafia topped my “reliable sources.” And on a hot July morning, I found out that my home town was getting whacked by high-end thieves. It started when Sonia announced that her patrona’s best friend, the heiress to a cosmetics fortune, had been cleaned out by robbers. “There was nothing left,” Sonia said. Except the foundation, I joked. Yessica, the youngest and hippest and best English speaker, rolled her eyes to remind me what a dumb huera I could be.

Then Yessica remembered that her friend’s patrones in Bel-Air, not far from the Reagans’ house, were cleaned out while they were at dinner at Ortolan. And Sonia shot back, wasn’t there also un robo up off Hillcrest two days ago? Between them, the cleaning ladies assembled a regular police log of rich people getting cleaned out. These slick operators made the smash-and-grab looters at the museum in Baghdad look like morons who shoplift Corn Nuts at 7-Eleven.

Anywhere else, this would be big news. Not here. Here, the cops don’t talk, the victims don’t talk. It’s like Disneyland-no crime, no litter, no frowns. The Happiest Zip Code on Earth. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the murder rate isn’t really ten times higher than the BHPD admits, but the city long ago cut a deal with one of the big-M Mafias to smuggle its stiffs over the municipal line and dump them in Century City.

I dropped the ladies off and drove to my office-the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I do my best thinking on the second-to-last pink stool at the counter, cocooned in banana-leaf wallpaper.

Most days, that thinking is about how to help rich and famous clients whose thread count in their linens is higher than their SAT scores. After spending more years in grad school than Nixon spent in the White House, I’m a natural for the job.

Remember the actress starring in a World War II picture who marveled to reporters that, gee, she’d never known about all those people killed in concentration camps? Oh yeah, she said it. That’s when the idea came to me. It took one call to an old friend of Dad’s at the studio and I had my first assignment.

Pretty soon the word got out. Other studio execs remembered my father’s reputation for discretion and then recalled mine for college knowledge. It’s our local nepotism, but it’s really no different from inheriting a job on a Ford assembly line. In Beverly, once you’re in, you’re in.

Now I discreetly tutor, shall we say, “struggling” actors. I put together an entertaining, easily digestible CliffsNotes backstory about their project of the moment: an archaeological thriller set in Greece, a movie about Madame Curie. Language, politics, science, art-I don’t overstuff their brains, just pad them a little. I should have been spending this morning crafting one-syllable Civil War nuggets for an actor just cast as General Grant. But the news I’d heard was too rich to pass up.

With my fork in one hand and my cell phone in the other, I started calling: my book club, my clients, my ex-