Los Angeles Noir

some dispute, and anyway, it was evidence.

Mr. Davis’s voice rolled up the stairs, the words indistinct but the tone unmistakably summoning. Winston excused himself and hustled downstairs as my phone rang. It was Joel, my coroner mole.

“Two options, Minerva,” he said, cutting to the chase, this time in William Powell’s Nick Charles voice. “Neither of them murder. Toxicology results will take a few weeks, but the white coats favor accidental overdose or suicide. Paramedics found empty sleeping pill bottles. And your Homicide guys just left. Keep it mum, okay? Over and out.”

I felt myself go flushed and teary, and a shameful thought crossed my mind. Murder would almost have been preferable-horrible, but cleaner in its way.

Winston labored back up the stairs. If he noticed any difference in me, he didn’t say so.

“Dad wondered if you’d be willing to go get Mom’s jewelry from the station. The cops called and said that under the circumstances, it’s okay, they have plenty to make their case. Those guys know you, and Dad’s written a note authorizing it. Here. He’s in no shape to do it. And the, ah, funeral’s the day after tomorrow.”

I said sure.

Winston braced a hand against my shoulder. “Minerva, before you go, we all agreed that we want you to have something to remember her by.” From his pocket, he fished something out and dangled it from his fingertips. A delicate rose-gold bangle as finely braided as hair. Like a Victorian mourning bracelet, fashioned from the locks of the dear departed. I had never seen it off Eloise’s arm, until Winston slid it onto mine.

“You know, she always insisted she be buried with all her jewelry. She made such a big deal out of it. We always kidded her about trying to take it with her. But the lawyer told Dad it was in the will. So we wanted to make sure you got this now…” Winston’s voice trailed away. “See you later? Marita’s fixing some food, if you’re hungry.”

I couldn’t remember ever being less hungry. For the second time that day, I headed toward the BHPD, wondering why a rich woman, a healthy woman, a happy wife, a woman who’d just had the one-in-a-million luck of getting her stolen treasures back-why would she kill herself? It had to be an accident.

The same desk sergeant who’d joked about the Hope Diamond was as solemn as a pallbearer when I handed over the note and signed for Eloise’s jewelry. The white plastic property bag was unmarked, probably the only bag in Beverly Hills that didn’t brag about where it came from.

Small but heavy, containing the best moments of her entire life. A woman who was well over twenty-five when she moved to Beverly Hills from some nonentity Midwestern town, and nearly thirty-five when she married the handsome kind attorney in the law office where she worked. A life like that was, as Tolstoy observed in Anna Karenina, too happy to make much of a story.

Except, now, for the way it had ended.

By the time I got back to the Davises’, people were beginning to gather.

I slipped into the hall, past the family, and went on into the kitchen. I thought I’d get out of the earshot of the sobbing, lest I start in myself.

But Marita and Meghan were doing their own bawling, a subdued duet over a tray of de-crusted sandwiches. They mopped their eyes on Sferra Bros. linen napkins, twenty bucks each, a fact I knew because I’d priced them in a friend’s bridal registry. (I ended up giving her a gift certificate to PETCO.)

“Thanks, Minerva, thanks so much?” Meghan said. “Would you mind putting it on Mrs. D.’s dressing table? I’ve got to lay out her clothes for the… service?”

Some chatelaines change their decor with every Architectural Digest annual “Designers’ Own Homes” issue. For her rooms, Eloise had stuck to the blue, lilac, and silver palette she favored. When she began going gray, she had laughed that finally her hair went with the color scheme.

Leaving the jewels on the dressing table sounded like a lousy idea, considering the burglaries. I carried the bag into the bathroom. I’d tell Katharine I’d stuffed it in the back of a drawer full of makeup and skin goop until the funeral. My grandmother used to hide her dough in a box of Kotex. She figured even burglars and junkies would be too squeamish to look there.

I yanked too hard. The drawer came out completely and tipped in my hands, spilling mascara and lipstick and cotton balls all over the floor. I kneeled down to gather it up. Its owner would never touch any of it again, but it wasn’t my place to throw it away-though I did ditch the cotton balls, scooping them up as they scuttled like Nerf balls along the floor.

When I opened my fist above the wastebasket to let them cascade, I saw something at the bottom that hadn’t shaken loose when Marita emptied it. A newspaper clipping, torn raggedly into several pieces, each crumped smaller than a cotton ball itself.

I smoothed them out and assembled them on the marble floor. It was the kind of story big-city newspapers don’t bother to write anymore. A young man, a doctor, a figure of some standing in whatever town it was, had been killed by a drunk driver two weeks before.

The victim’s name meant nothing. But the face-it had the Davis family stamp to it: a little bit of Winston, a lot of Eloise.

And the town. I’d heard of the place. It wasn’t far from where Eloise had gone to college, where she and her friends met every year for their girls-only reunion.

I read on. Friends mourned the man who had been adopted into a poor but loving family, then become a high-school standout and a fine medical school student. His parents evidently scrimping to send him there. After his internship, he hadn’t run off to a fancy city practice, but returned to his hometown. He was on his way to the hospital, to take a friend’s shift, when he was killed.

As I stared at the dead face on the mangled scraps of newsprint, things began to make a sad kind of sense.

Eloise hadn’t been going to a girlfriends’ get-together every year-but she had needed everyone to think that. She had been checking on her illegitimate son. It’s not a word that Madonna’s generation uses, but it was a common one, and an unkind one, to Eloise’s generation. She’d given this boy up for adoption, as unwed mothers did then, and had gone to college nearby to be close to him.

Now her boy was dead, yes, but would she have killed herself over that? She still had two children and a loving husband, and her secret was safe in her poor son’s grave.

As I assembled the bits of newspaper, Eloise’s bracelet gleamed on my arm. The one she never took off. So much of Eloise’s jewelry were mementos or gifts, so many of them inscribed-I wondered, had she engraved this one with some secret reminder of her son, like his birthdate, meaningful only to her?

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.