Pilates classmates. (As a lapsed Pilatesian, the choice between a German exercise regimen and the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Dutch apple pancakes was no contest.)
The Cleaning Lady Mafia was right again.
All over town, the story was the same. Plasma TVs, laptops, cameras, cash in several countries’ currencies-
They knew to take the Manolos and leave the Bandolinos. Take the real pearls, leave the fakes. Patek Philippes, but not Omegas. They carted off wine, but only top-rack stuff: Chateau d’Yquem, Petrus, DuMol pinots from the first Clinton Administration.
And the jewels. Drag queens don’t have the nerve to wear rhinestones as big as the sparklers that were vanishing. I calculated the take just from the cleaning ladies’ count: besides all the brand-X bling, the thieves had stolen baubles that little King Davey bought to adorn the scrawny Duchess of Windsor, Faberge desk trinkets the Romanovs used as stocking stuffers, Persian turquoises brought here by genuine Persians-Beverly Hills is full of them, starting with the Shah’s relatives.
Inside those fabulous houses on cliffsides and canyons, people were freaked with fear. Terrified to go out. Terrified to come home. The places they’d built to get away from it all weren’t far enough away, after all.
I saved the last call for the Davises. They were old family friends, and I’d picked up a rumor that they had been hit too. My father and Mr. Davis had been a sometimes-team-a studio security chief and an attorney. Carlton Claridge Davis wasn’t one of those attorneys you see on Court TV. He was good because he kept himself and his clients out of court-and out of the papers. He and my father had come to trust each other, and over the years they’d exchanged information and favors and friendship. I learned to swim in their pool. Their actor son, Winston, became one of my clients.
When the Davises heard I needed a place to stay while my house got earthquake-proofed last year, they’d offered me their daughter’s old room. I had a swell time, like living in a
The Davis house had been hit while they were away visiting their first grandchild. The usual high-end gadgets went missing, but so did some of Eloise Davis’s jewelry. Her fondness for wearing her jewelry instead of stashing it in the vault was notable even in Beverly Hills. My first memory of her is on the tennis court, the
Theirs was old Beverly Hills money. Old money here meant BCTV-before color TV. Old money had more class than new money, but fewer zeroes. New money BH didn’t much care whether you were Charles Lindbergh or Charles Manson, just so long as you were famous-ideally paired with rich. Old money BH, on the other hand, set great store by Bostonian virtues like discretion and civic dignity.
This was understandable. When actors first swarmed into Hollywood, they encountered signs in boardinghouse windows reading,
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 Cezannes?” 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, “
“Oh, they didn’t touch them, thankfully?”
Now I knew these thieves were pros-smart enough to recognize a Cezanne, 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,
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:
Whoa. Lights off. Yessica was right-I am a dumb
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 of De Beers’ best. They had to know the angles, the layout, the comings and goings of everyone there.
This was bad news for the cleaning ladies. Their
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.
“Yes,” said Meghan.
