Los Angeles Noir

Oh no-Eloise. Had the thieves come back for the Cezannes, 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 “adios” 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 protege, who’d be handling the Davis investigation. Not there. Probably at the coroner’s this very minute. I’d pick his brain when he brought it back to his desk.

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 Cezannes 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 table. He didn’t want a conversation. He just wanted to think out loud. I’d done the same thing after my father died.

“She wasn’t sick or anything. We asked the doctor about that right away-was she not telling something, so we wouldn’t worry? Nothing. The last time the doctor saw her was yesterday, after she left the police station. He gave her something to help her sleep. She was so incredibly upset by the robbery-even though we had insurance, she hated the idea of strangers rooting through the house.”

He ran his thumb along the welting on the bench cushion, a cloudlike pouf upholstered in Clarence House blue velvet. Eloise had once pointed it out to me with pride-not for the $400-a-yard fabric, but for the stiff patch where Katharine, age five, had smeared Elmer’s glue pasting illustrations into her first book report.

“We thought she’d be so happy when the police found most of her jewelry.” Winston sighed and looked up again. “It was in some pawnshop in Koreatown. The cops said we were lucky it hadn’t been broken up yet.”

The night before, Eloise had given the family a dinnertable account of going down to the police station, groups of women wandering among the tables, just as I’d seem them doing, picking up bangles and brooches like it was a pasha’s yard sale. A couple of acquaintances had spotted her and waved a bit guiltily-“Oh, Eloise, I think I saw your David Webb pin over there… Eloise, isn’t this your Cartier panther bracelet?”

But the cops hadn’t let her take her jewelry home. There were two more days of showings, in case there was