Los Angeles Noir (10 page)
“Poor Sharon,” Mariah said, watching the screen, Sharon Tate doing her breast exercises. “Did you know the La Bianca house is right around the corner, across from the nuns?”
The first Manson killing. Right here in Los Feliz.
Better look out for Charlie’s girls …
It was a cold afternoon and I shivered, thinking of that freaky guy with his flock of bizarre little girls, exactly the kind of thing people in Kearney worried about when they thought of L.A. I wrapped my fingers around the packet of white powder Richard had given me. I was supposed to put it into Mariah’s drink. Some ground-up barbs to knock her out for a few hours. So far I’d taken a few things—a letter here, a signed picture there—but it was time to get into her Deco bedroom for a little scout around.
Yes, Grandma, there was lots to worry about in L.A., and they didn’t always look like Charlie and his girls. There were people like Richard. People like me.
And yet, I couldn’t help wondering how he knew her. If they’d really been lovers. She might have known him when he had hair, and she was a movie star. I was jealous of her, having had him, this fuzzy-headed has-been in the goat-hair sweater. I could imagine them together, how it was. I thought of it all the time, knowing what it was to have Richard; I’d never known sex could be like that. He was a drug. He hardly even came, just got you off about twenty times. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“I met this guy at Orzo’s,” I said, sipping my Corona. “He said he knew you.” I was taking a chance, but couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know one fucking thing about Richard. Who his friends were, what he liked to do besides fuck. “His name was Richard something.”
She shrugged, sipped at her Scotch, watching Sharon Tate and Lee Grant on the flickering screen.
“Kind of intense, brown eyes?” I added.
The speed at which she turned to me, I knew. And it was either big or recent. But it hadn’t been good. She looked downright scared. “Was he tall, lanky? Attractive in a sort of reptilian way?”
I backpedaled fast. I didn’t want to tip her off. “No, this guy was stocky. Sort of like a wrestler. He said he interviewed you in the ’80s. You snorted coke together.”
She relaxed, went back to watching the TV. “Oh, a journalist. Yeah, I seem to remember someone like that. Richard somebody. Stevens. Sheehan.”
Onscreen, Sharon Tate was launching a porn career to care for her declining husband.
“So,” I said, natural as all get-out. “Who was this other guy?”
“Someone I had a thing with,” she said, not turning away from the TV. “Years ago. But what a psycho. I had to get a restraining order.”
I thought of Richard. Had he threatened her, had he hurt her? Was he capable of that? I had imagined him as dark, but was he dangerous?
You’ve got to layer. Hold something in reserve. Easy. Casual.
“What was his name?”
“Anthony. Karras. I had him fired off a set. People don’t take too kindly to that.”
“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?” I searched for my inner Laura. “Makes you kind of feel sorry for him.”
She patted my leg. “You’re a nice kid. Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was one of those guys who’s exciting in a kind of bad boy way … and then you get involved, and they’re just freaks. I got wise and told him it was over, to move the fuck out, but he wouldn’t. Had to call some people to get rid of him. He said he’d kill me. Showed up at my house. Called my friends. I took him off the picture and got a restraining order. Told the casting agents to watch out for him, he was a definite freak.” She got the remote, turned up the sound. “Learned my lesson, baby. No more smart men. Only nice and dumb and hung.”
I thought of the white powder concealed in my hand. Gilbert shoved his nose under my arm to be petted. I could feed him this shit, but he was a nice dog. I excused myself and went back to the kitchen, found Mariah’s stupid catch-and-release rat trap in the pantry. I opened the odiferous refrigerator—I’d scrubbed it out once, but it had lain rank too long, the smell was now part of the enamel—cut a little chunk of her $20-a-pound Whole Foods cheese, and blended it with a pinkie-nail’s worth of white powder. “Bon appetit,” I whispered as I pushed it through the door of the rat trap with a pencil. “My name’s Holly and I’ll be your rat-waitress tonight, we’re serving Humboldt Fog with a reduction of Nembutal.” Stuck the trap back into the pantry.
By dinnertime, there was a nice big guy in there. Stone cold dead. Teeth bared and claws curled to a chest solid as a pit bull’s.
* * *
I thought of it all through dinner. Richard sitting in his red room above the market, pouring himself a glass of wine, thinking he’d gotten away with murder. With me to take the rap. How satisfied he was with himself.
You’re such a special girl, Holly. You’re going to go far.
Yeah, I was going to go far. Right to fucking prison. Was he jerking off, imagining her dying? He sure as hell wasn’t thinking of me, walking away in handcuffs, trying to explain that my boyfriend put me up to it.
I didn’t know, I just thought I was going to knock her out and rob her.
To think I’d imagined he really was hot for me, wanted me. He hadn’t even
seen
me. He’d been fucking me and thinking of her. How he was going to screw her. Thinking of her not as she was now, but as she had been back then, beautiful and famous and spoiled, when she’d had him thrown out and the locks changed. Just because I’d gotten the best screwing of my life, I was assuming it meant something.
Oh, Midwest. Oh, Pioneers.
Well, I’d always known he was a wrong guy, fake as tendollar Prada. That every word out of his mouth was a lie. But not about us. Not how beautiful he thought I was, how exciting.
Such a special girl. You’re going to make it. You just have to hide the barbed wire.
I’d hide it all right. Now he’d see how special I was.
At about 11:00 the phone rang. I picked up. Mariah didn’t like to answer her phone if there was someone else to do it. Hard not to have help when you’re a former film goddess. “Hello?”
It was Richard. I imagined how shocked he must be, hearing my voice, that son of a bitch. I listened for the tell, the little gasp, the hesitation, but he was good, he was always so fucking good. He didn’t waver for a second. “Holly. I thought you were going to call me. Did you do it?” He was calling to see if Mariah was dead.
Quickly, I scraped my own part together. Naïve cockstruck dupe wasn’t much of a stretch. “Yeah, but it sort of didn’t work out,” I said. “I put it in her Scotch like you said, but the dog knocked it over.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, carefully. “Did you use it all?”
“Yeah.” I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. “I didn’t want her waking up as I’m taking an earring out of her ear, right? Hey, I miss you.”
“What are you doing right now?” he asked.
“Working on my scene. Laura. It’s coming pretty well,” I said. “You’ll be surprised.”
“Come over here and surprise me.”
It was late, but he never went to bed before 2 a.m. He answered the door, wearing his tattered red brocade smoking jacket and a pair of jeans. The jacket would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. On him it hit just the right decadent note.
I let him kiss me. It surprised me. It felt just the same. Goddamnit if I didn’t still want him like a house on fire. It was insane. I felt like I was losing my mind. He poured us some wine. I tried mine and frowned, said it tasted weird, but he drank his and said it tasted fine. We made out on his bed and I took off my shirt, concealing our glasses of wine from him. I handed him his glass. “To Laura,” I said.
We toasted, then drank. He frowned and worked his mouth, his tongue, tasting, grimacing. “That
is
off.”
And then we made it. We did everything: me on top, him on top, sideways, scissoring. I was getting the best lay of my life. I came up with ideas I didn’t even know I had. I was sad I wasn’t going to have this anymore. But nobody fucks around with me. Nobody takes me for a ride.
Finally, he lay on his back, rubbing his arms, his chest. His breathing had grown audibly labored, though his cock was still working fine.
“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned.
“What time …” He was having trouble breathing. He turned over and squinted at the clock, his vision must not have been working so well. It was only 12:45.
“Feeling cold?”
His back arching, jerking. I rubbed his back, his arms. I could feel the rigidity, the tremor, the poison spreading. I hadn’t seen the rat die, I didn’t know quite what to expect. It was very instructive.
After a while, he pushed me away. “That’s … not … helping.” He lay on his back, his jaws clenching, his eyes luminous and big with fear. “Holly …”
“Can I get you something? Water? Aspirin?”
He nodded.
I fucked around in the kitchen, killing time, running the water, filling the glass a couple of times. As I held his water with one hand, I stretched out the other before me. Perfectly steady. I raised a palm up, inspected. The hand of someone I hadn’t known until tonight. We really could have had something, Richard and I. We were perfect for each other, like Bonnie and Clyde. But he didn’t see it. He just threw me away like a gumball prize.
When I came back with the water, he was rigid, his hand up by his throat, he could barely breathe. I held the water for him, let him drink. He choked a little, I backed off. He croaked, “Hosp … 911.”
“Should I call 911?” I said.
His face was pale with a greenish cast. Reptilian, yes, definitely. His eyes pleaded. Oh yeah. Now you notice me.
I called 611 and waited. Let it ring. I braced the receiver to my breast. “It’s busy, they say to hold. Oh God, Richard, what should I do?”
“Christ—” he gasped.
“Wait …” I said, as if someone was coming onto the phone. His back arched like he was in some yoga pose. “Oh fuck, it’s still busy, oh shit, Richard, what should I do?!” Crying a little. Was I overplaying it? Maybe just a bit. “Are you going to die?? Richard, don’t die!”
He tried to sit up on one elbow. “Help—”
“And … end of scene.” I announced. I hung up the phone, dropped the panicked-girlfriend routine. Now his eyes were bugging out of his head.
“You know, Anthony,” I said, pulling on my underwear, “I never did use that shit on Mariah.”
I was sure he would have taken a deep breath if he could, but he wasn’t breathing much at all. And yet, even like that, from somewhere, he found the strength to lunge at me. But he was rigid and in pain and all that happened was that he fell off the bed with a thud onto the Cost Plus rug.
“You know, I was crazy about you. I would have done anything for you. But you didn’t care what happened to me. All you cared about was getting back at her. For dumping you. You stupid fuck. She called you a psycho, you know? And I could be in jail right now, making my one call. Now, should it be to a lawyer? Or my darling boyfriend.”
His eyes looking up at me from the carpet, upside down, his back was so contorted, the whites were red and the irises full of horror and surprise. White frothy shit coming out of his nose, his mouth. I didn’t know how it would go down, how I would feel watching the man I adored die. It was like watching a part of myself die. The part that was good and decent. Well, good riddance.
“You know, I might have even offed her for you, if you’d sold it right. Then you could have had it all. Revenge, the swag, the whole deal. But you got sloppy. I won’t make that mistake.”
As he wheezed and convulsed, I busied myself cleaning up, wiping down the bottle and the water glass. I 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.
D
rive 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 Señora Tiffany treated herself to as a reward for hosting that godawful celebrity charity golf tournament. What little tattletale item Señor 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-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—
poof
, gone. But any decent second-story man would take those. It was the rest of the hauls that made this gang special. These thieves were discerning. If they didn’t actually subscribe to the glossy living-and-spending magazines, they must steal them from doctors’ offices on Roxbury.
Forbes, Vogue, Wine Spectator
—they’d be regular crime primers to these guys.
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: Château 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, Fabergé 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
Father Knows Best
episode—if the Anderson family had had a private screening room and a couple of Cézannes hanging in the dining room.
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
thwack
of ball on racket in counterpoint to the tinkle of bangle on bangle. Just about every piece came with a lively story about the giver, or the occasion, or both. Many were engraved with memories. Her history, in carats and karats—not bad, she’d say, for a small-town girl.
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,
No Dogs or Actors
. They couldn’t even get top billing in a rejection.
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 Cézannes?” 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, “
las frutas.
”
“Oh, they didn’t touch them, thankfully?”
Now I knew these thieves were pros—smart enough to recognize a Cézanne, 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.”