My mind hurried down the stairs to the Cezannes that still hung in the dining room-not because thieves didn’t want Cezannes, 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
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, foolish, loving woman. By the time the tox results came back from the lab, she and her jewelry would be long buried.
No one would connect a Beverly Hills matron’s death with a GP killed in a car crash in the rural Midwest.
I switched off the glaring makeup light and the room subsided into shadows. I pocketed the bit of newspaper and carried the jewelry out to the dressing table. Now it hardly mattered whether anyone stole it before the funeral. Maybe one of these days, another pack of thieves, less discriminating, would steal the fake Cezannes and tie up that loose end.
The family didn’t know. And they never would, not from me. As I said, in Beverly Hills, the police don’t talk. The victims don’t talk. And I am my father’s daughter. Why should I?
OVER THIRTYBY CHRISTOPHER RICE
The bus bench at the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega was empty, which meant that Jawbone was probably holed up in a shelter somewhere, possibly drying out from the combo of malt liquor and meth that kept him shouting at passing traffic for days on end. It was Ben’s lover Ron who had given Jawbone his nickname, a nod to the fact that the guy’s face was so wasted from drug use that the only solid thing left in it was his mandible. The intersection had been Jawbone’s turf for years now, and the fact that he had chosen this night to go on hiatus made Ben feel all the more shameful as he walked home from a sleazy gay bar at a little after 2 in the morning.
For most of the night he had guzzled weak vodka tonics. Then he had made the mistake of buying a tab of ecstasy off a nineteen-year-old tranny that had turned out to be spit and aspirin. Because he was slightly numb and seriously nauseous, it took Ben a few seconds to realize that he recognized the giant face staring down at him from the billboard for some new cop show that had just gone up over the intersection that afternoon. Ben had slept with the handsome actor right after moving to L.A. They had shared the same agent and the same cosmetic dentist and, to Ben’s disappointment, the same taste for throwing their ankles skyward in the bedroom. Now that he was being prepped for prime-time glory, it was a safe bet that the star-to-be, who had apparently changed his name from Peter Lefkin to Peter Lowe, no longer sped around West Hollywood in his Porsche convertible with Leontyne Pryce blasting from the stereo and a vial of coke tucked inside the pocket of his white jeans.
For a while, Ben just stood there, staring up at his former lover. Peter Lefkin Lowe had been given all of the same opportunities as Ben, and had adopted a few vices that Ben had never been forced to reckon with, and there he was, towering over the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega, while Ben, thirty-five and a year from his last acting job, stumbled home from a night spent watching adolescent go-go boys dance on top of a dirty bar.
He was supposed to be in Palm Springs getting wined and dined by his agent. But earlier that evening, an hour before he was supposed to brave rush hour traffic, Ben had taken a good hard look at the evidence and realized that his agent’s idea for a weekend getaway was probably a separation hearing. He hadn’t worked in over a year, not since being booted from the cast of
The bungalow he shared with his lover was the kind of tiny, absurdly expensive property that real estate agents referred to as charming and upwardly mobile gay couples referred to as transitional. Still, Ben felt a surge of pride as he approached it; this was the only real accomplishment he had left. Six years ago, he had convinced his lover Ron to take on the mortgage at almost ten percent interest, a testament to the fact that Ben’s powers of persuasion were dependent upon the firmness of his ass.
Ron would be furious when he found out Ben had cancelled on his agent, so Ben decided to delay the inevitable as long as possible by entering through the side gate instead of the front door. Ben had spent the last 365 potential working days turning the backyard into a Zen meditation retreat, but he hadn’t done much of anything in it besides sneak the occasional cigarette. Squares of white gravel held rows of faux-bonsai trees and a stone Buddha sat cross-legged in the middle of the yard, a thin stream of water gurgling from a hole in the center of its bald head. Ron’s only contribution to the landscaping had been to repeatedly batter it with his gas-powered leaf blower, before one of the neighbors called to angrily remind him that gas-powered leaf blowers were illegal in the city of West Hollywood. That was Ron-ever successful in all of his business endeavors, he was convinced that this gave him license to remain ever defiant in the face of small rules designed to make other people comfortable.
When he closed his hand around the knob, Ben realized that the back door was slightly open. Like most of their friends, they had come to a specific agreement about sex outside of the relationship. Unlike most of their friends, however, they had both agreed not to have any. Suddenly, Ben realized that he had executed the kind of detective work a suspicious wife usually took weeks to plan-he had convinced his lover he would be out of town and had not given any indication that he was returning home early.
A fluid-filled groan came from the direction of the master bedroom, too low to be heard by anyone besides a startled lover hovering on the back steps. Ben was confident that Ron had made the sound, and in his mind’s eye, he saw the nubile young porn star from Rudy’s straddling Ron’s hairy chest, the kid’s hands gripping the headboard
