The land on which his house stood ran from the sea to the Pacific Coast Highway. It was approximately two acres wide and six acres deep, and when he had paid not quite a million dollars for it five years before, it was generally agreed that he was crazy. There had been a house on the land when Piers bought it, a sprawling fourteen-room California Mission-style affair that had been well built at low cost back in 1932. The house had been considered a showplace, if not quite a historic-cultural monument worthy of preservation, and almost everyone was properly horrified when Piers brought in the bulldozers, leveled it, and had the rubble carted off to a dump.
In its place Piers had build a thirty-two-room house that was usually referred to as a mansion for lack of a better description. It had been designed by a young Japanese architect in Tokyo who had worked on its plans full time for almost two years. The problem had been to comply with Piers’s insistence that every room must have a view of the sea. The architect had cleverly managed this by designing the house around a series of three staggered, open-ended, U-shaped courtyards. The architect had done his job so well that he had been written up in the Los Angeles Times as a genius, which made him happy because he was now getting a lot of work from the Arabs.
The house was built of Burmese teak and Pittsburgh glass and Italian marble and Mexican tile and Philippine mahogany, and exquisite was the word most often used to describe it. It had two swimming pools, one indoor and one outdoor; three Jacuzzis; two saunas; fifteen fireplaces; two kitchens; a six-car garage; nineteen bathrooms; and a dozen living suites, not counting rooms for the servants and kennels for the greyhounds.
The original estimated cost of the house had been $2.6 million, but because of inflation and what the architect and the contractor had come to call Piers’s “mizewells,” its final cost had topped out at $4.9 million. The mizewells were Piers’s unchecked proclivity to suggest, in the form of an order, that “we mizewell use marble here instead of tile, and while we’re at it, we mizewell put in another bathroom over there.”
When word got out about how much the house was costing, most Piers watchers were publicly shocked but secretly delighted. For a time, a lot of people went around calling the place “The Six-Million-Dollar Goof.” That lasted until late 1975, when a Beverly Hills real estate agent, representing what she chose to call “certain interested parties in Kuwait,” offered Piers a firm $10.6 million cash money for the place, which was almost exactly twice what it had cost.
It was a quarter till seven by the time Piers reached the top of the marble steps. He turned the greyhounds over to Fausto Garfias, the bowlegged thirty-nine-year-old Mexican gardener who was also the dogs’ schoolmaster. It was Garfias who had taught them the silent hand signals, which he later had taught Piers to use. Although the dogs pretty much had the run of Piers’s twelve acres, they usually roamed around all bunched up in their tight, disciplined pack. Piers had hired another Mexican, Angel Torres, nineteen, not only to help Garfias out with the gardening but also to pick up the dog shit.
The rest of Piers’s household staff consisted of a butler; a Korean who served as a combination chauffeur-bodyguard; an Austrian housekeeper from Vienna; two young Mexican maids who were in the country illegally; and a cook who claimed to be French, but was actually Swiss. The staff, with the exception of the butler and Fausto Garfias, kept hours that were scheduled around Piers’s wife, Lace Armitage, who seldom got up before eleven unless she was working in a picture, which she hadn’t done in seven months.
The butler, who liked getting up early because he was still enthralled by California sunrises and suffered from insomnia anyhow, was Styles Whitlock, a forty-four-year-old Englishman who had been born in Islington and, on a scholarship, had taken a degree in engineering from the University of Warwick. In 1960 he had emigrated to the States as part of what he still liked to think of as the brain drain. Whitlock had worked in the space program in Los Angeles until the cutbacks began in the early ’70s, when he had been one of the first to be fired because he was, at best, only a mediocre engineer.
After six months, Whitlock’s American wife had got sick of his hanging around the house all day staring at television. So she had hired herself an acerbic lawyer with an intimidating snarl, filed for divorce, and taken Whitlock for his last dime. After that he drove a Yellow Cab for a while and then in desperation placed an ad in the Hollywood Reporter that read: “Experienced English butler available for catered parties.” Because he was tall and dour and spoke with what most Americans thought of as a properly received accent, he soon had more work than he could handle.
When Randall Piers married Lace Armitage in 1973 they had moved into the new house in Malibu, and Styles Whitlock had been one of the bride’s wedding presents. Piers paid Whitlock almost as much as he would pay a halfway brilliant engineer, but after getting into several technical discussions with the Englishman, Piers was always relieved that he had hired him only as a butler.
Whitlock was waiting for Piers just outside the huge room which the architect had designed as a library, but which Piers used as an office, although the butler insisted on calling it “the master’s study.”
“Coffee is on your desk, sir.”
“Thanks,” Piers said. “Mr. Ebsworth here yet?”
“Just arrived, sir.”
Piers nodded, started into the room, but paused. “Get somebody to pick up a coffeepot,” he said. “I want the big old-fashioned kind that’ll hold a gallon and is made out of speckled enamel. Blue and white. They can probably find one at Sears.”
Whitlock gave Piers a grave nod of assent, which he had practiced for hours in front of a mirror after studying the nods of English butlers in old movies. The Public Television series Upstairs, Downstairs had proved to be a treasure trove of information on buttling, and Whitlock had watched each program at least three times and often took notes.
When Piers entered the library-office, he didn’t bother to say good morning to the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer with the streaked blond hair, cautious blue eyes, and thin, skeptical mouth that always looked to Piers as if it were about to issue a dire warning. The lawyer’s name was Hart Ebsworth, and he had been graduated second in his class at the University of Chicago. He had been Randall Piers’s executive assistant for nearly five years now and didn’t at all mind coming to work at seven in the morning because Piers paid him almost $76,000 a year.
Ebsworth had gone to work for Piers instead of joining his uncle’s Chicago law firm, which was the kind usually referred to as stuffy but prestigious, because when Piers offered him the job he had said, “If you come to work for me, you won’t starve, but you won’t make any money, not for the first three years. After that, if you work out, I’ll pay you exactly what the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court gets. If he gets a raise, so will you, because by then you’ll be worth it.”
Piers settled himself behind his carved oak desk, picked up his cup, and took a sip of the coffee. Ebsworth watched him, waiting, not saying anything. Piers decided that the coffee wasn’t nearly as good as that which he and the fat Chinaman had had that morning. He put the cup back down, looked at Ebsworth, and instead of saving good morning, said, “Midwest Minerals.”
“A dog,” Ebsworth said.
“We could have gone short.”
“We could have bought Avon at nineteen.”