A loud blat came from a passing car. Deirdre realized she’d nearly sideswiped it. She jerked her car back in its lane. Get a grip, she told herself. Her father had asked for her help. He’d mellowed a lot in his old age, and even took the occasional break from his monologue to ask what she was up to. And it was just a weekend, not a lifetime.
She’d intended to drive up last night, but at the last minute her business partner, Stefan Markovic, got a call from an arts reporter for the Wall Street Journal who wanted to meet with him to talk about the new arts district that was taking shape in San Diego. She and Stefan had agreed it was potentially great publicity. But that meant he wasn’t there to help install their new show, so she’d been at the gallery with the artist’s assistant until after midnight. By then it was too late to start driving to L.A., so Deirdre had gone home. Before she went to sleep she’d turned off her phone’s ringer. Her father had a nasty habit of calling at all hours of the night, using her silence as permission to rattle on about his latest brilliant idea or vent his spleen, depending on how much he’d had to drink. When he was done, he rarely said good-bye. He’d just hang up, and she’d end up lying in bed for an hour, trying to fall back asleep.
Deirdre crossed into the left lane and accelerated. Power surged and her Mercedes SL automatically downshifted and shot forward, hugging the road as she pushed it around a bend. She braked into the curves and accelerated coming out, weaving between cars on the winding four-lane road. Forty, forty-five, fifty. The end of her crutch slid across the passenger seat, the cuff banging against the door.
The car drifted into the right lane coming around a tight curve and she had to slam on the brakes behind a red bus that straddled both lanes and poked along at twenty miles an hour, idling just outside walled estates. STARLINE TOURS was painted in slanting white script across the back.
Deirdre tapped the horn and crept along behind the bus, past pink stucco walls that surrounded the estate where Jayne Mansfield had supposedly once lived. It had been a big deal when the actress died, had to have been almost twenty years ago. And still tourists lined up to gawp at her wall. Breasts the size of watermelons and death in a grisly car accident (early news reports spawned the myth that she’d been decapitated)—those were achievements that merited lasting celebrity in Hollywood. That, or kill someone. It was the same old, same old, real talent ripening into stardom and then festering into notoriety. Deirdre sympathized with Jayne Mansfield’s children, though, who must have gone through their lives enduring the ghoulish curiosity of strangers.
Buses like the one belching exhaust in front of her now used to pull up in front of her own parents’ house, passengers glued to the windows. Most writers, unless they married Jayne Mansfield, did not merit stars on celebrity road maps. And in the flats between Sunset and Santa Monica where her father lived, notables were TV (not movie) actors, writers (not producers), and agents, all tucked in like plump raisins among the nouveau riche noncelebrity types who’d moved to Beverly Hills, so they’d say, because of the public schools. You had to live north of Sunset to score neighbors like Katharine Hepburn or Gregory Peck. Move up even farther, into the canyons to an ultramodern, super-expensive home to find neighbors like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.
Arthur Unger had earned his spot on the celebrity bus tour through an act of bravery that had lasted all of thirty seconds. It had been at a poolside party to celebrate the end of filming of Dark Waters, an action-packed saga with a plot recycled from an early Errol Flynn movie. Fox Pearson, the up-and-coming actor featured in the film, either jumped, fell, or was pushed into the pool. Sadly for him, no one noticed as the cast on the broken leg he’d suffered a week earlier doing his own stunts in the movie’s finale dragged him to the bottom of the deep end. Might as well have gone in with his foot stuck in a bucket of concrete.
A paparazzo had been on hand to immortalize Arthur shucking his shoes and jacket and diving in. Fox Pearson’s final stunt, along with its fortuitous synchronicity with the movie’s title, earned more headlines for the dead actor than any of his roles. Suddenly he was the second coming (and going) of James Dean, a talent that blazed bright and then . . . cue slow drumroll against a setting sun . . . sank below a watery horizon.
When talking about it in private, Arthur liked to quote a line from Sunset Boulevard. “The poor dope—he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.”
Deirdre used to dress up in her mother’s silver fox stole and wave at the bus from the window seat of their dining room. She perfected an open handed, tilt-to-tilt wave like one of those gowned-up girls in the Rose Parade. Back then she could dream of being in the royal court. Queen, even. But beauty queens didn’t have withered legs.
Finally the bus pulled over so that Deirdre and all the cars backed up behind her could pass. A few minutes later she cruised past the familiar brown shield, its message printed out in gold letters: WELCOME TO BEVERLY HILLS. After that, the twisty road straightened into a divided parkway and the speed limit dropped to thirty, as if chastened by the wealth surrounding it. There was not a single pedestrian on the sidewalks. Not a soul in the crosswalks or waiting at bus shelters.
A half-dozen blocks farther along Deirdre turned south. Two blocks down, she pulled over and parked in front of the house where she’d grown up: stucco façade, front courtyard, and arched living room window screened by an elaborate wrought-iron grille. That was Henry’s black Firebird parked in the driveway. Arthur kept his red TR8 in the garage. To the casual observer the house seemed the same as it had for years. Decades, even. She could imagine the ad: Charming one-story Spanish colonial, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, in-ground pool.
Deirdre sat there for a few moments, listening to the car’s engine tick in the silence and wishing she wasn’t such a compliant daughter. Then she reached for her messenger bag, looped the strap over her head and across her chest, and grabbed her crutch. She climbed out of the car and leaned against the door. Heat seemed to pulse off the macadam. She put on her sunglasses and took a harder look at the house. Terra-cotta roof tiles were missing, and the once white exterior was more the color of weak tea. Deirdre doubted it had been painted since her mother left, the last time for good, nearly twenty years ago. Maybe that real estate ad should include the chipper warning: Fixer-upper.
Not that everyone fixed up Beverly Hills houses these days. Parcels of land had become so much more valuable than the houses on them, why bother? Buyers tore down and started over, erecting new houses that looked like they were worth the million or more you had to shell out to get an address with a 90210 zip.
Case in point: Across the street from her father’s house, where there had once been a gracious, one-story Spanish colonial, there now sprawled a house worthy of a southern plantation. Two-story columns and Palladian windows flanked a magnificent pair of coffered front doors: Tara with vertical blinds, and badly out of scale for its third-of-an-acre lot.
Several more properties on either side of the street had been similarly perverted, and another was in process. Her father’s house, once typical for the neighborhood, had turned into an anomaly.
Deirdre popped the trunk and slammed the car door. She eased her arm through the crutch’s cuff and grasped the grip to which she’d duct-taped an extra layer of foam padding. She stumped to the back of the car and pulled a small duffel bag from the trunk. She’d packed light.
As she crossed the lawn she felt the rubber tip of her crutch sink into the grass. It made a little popping sound as she pulled it out. The courtyard was a tad cooler, shaded by a leaning olive tree. The ground under it was awash in rotting olives, some of them squashed and bleeding red slime on the gray stepping-stones. Deirdre knew from experience they could be treacherous to her crutch, so she picked her way carefully around them.