I hung up, not sure it made much of a difference. Even if I located her, what explanation would I use to ask her about Chad’s file?
I decided to concentrate on the job I’d been trained to do. Dressing and clipping my hospital badge to my lapel, I left the house, turned east on Sunset, and headed for Hollywood.
I reached Beverly Hills within minutes and passed Whittier Drive without slowing. Something on the opposite side of the boulevard caught my eye:
White Cutlass, coming from the east. It turned onto Whittier and headed up the 900 block.
At the first break in the median, I hung a U. By the time I reached the big Georgian house, the Olds was parked in the same place I’d seen it yesterday and a black woman was stepping out on the driver’s side.
She was young — late twenties or early thirties — short and slim. She had on a gray cotton turtleneck, black ankle-length skirt, and black flats. In one hand was a Bullock’s bag; in the other, a brown leather purse.
Probably the housekeeper. Out doing a department store errand for Ashmore’s grieving widow.
As she turned toward the house she saw me. I smiled. She gave me a quizzical look and began walking over slowly, with a short, light step. As she got closer I saw she was very pretty, her skin so dark it was almost blue. Her face was round, bottomed by a square chin; her features clean and broad like those of a Nubian mask. Large, searching eyes focused straight at me.
“Hello. Are you from the hospital?” British accent, public-school refined.
“Yes,” I said, surprised, then realized she was looking at the badge on my lapel.
Her eyes blinked, then opened. Irises in two shades of brown — mahogany in the center, walnut rims.
Pink at the periphery. She’d been crying. Her mouth quivered a bit.
“It’s very kind of you to come,” she said.
“Alex Delaware,” I said, extending my hand out the driver’s window. She put the shopping bag on the grass and took it. Her hand was narrow and dry and very cold.
“Anna Ashmore. I didn’t expect anyone so soon.”
Feeling stupid about my assumptions, I said, “I didn’t know Dr. Ashmore personally, but I did want to pay my respects.”
She let her hand drop. Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower belched. “There’s no formal service. My husband wasn’t religious.” She turned toward the big house. “Would you like to come in?”
The entry hall was two stories of cream plaster floored with black marble. A beautiful brass banister and marble stairs twisted upward to the second story. To the right, a large yellow dining room gleamed with dark, fluid Art Nouveau furniture that the real housekeeper was polishing. Art filled the wall behind the stairs, too — a mix of contemporary paintings and African batiks. Past the staircase, a short foyer led to glass doors that framed a California postcard: green lawn, blue pool sun-splashed silver, white cabanas behind a trellised colonnade, hedges and flower beds under the fluctuating shade of more specimen trees. Scrambling over the tiles of the cabana roof was a splash of scarlet — the bougainvillea I’d seen from the street.
The maid came out of the dining room and took Mrs. Ashmore’s bag. Anna Ashmore thanked her, then pointed left, to a living room twice the size of the dining room, sunk two steps down.
“Please,” she said, descending, and flipping a switch that ignited several floor lamps.
A black grand piano claimed one corner. The east wall was mostly tall, shuttered windows that let in knife-blades of light. The floors were blond planks under black-and-rust Persian rugs. A coffered white ceiling hovered over apricot plaster walls. More art: the same mix of oils and fabric. I thought I spotted a Hockney over the granite mantel.
The room was chilly and filled with furniture that looked straight out of the Design Center. White Italian suede sofas, a black Breuer chair, big, pockmarked post-Neanderthal stone tables, and a few smaller ones fashioned of convoluted brass rods and topped with blue-tinted glass. One of the stone tables fronted the largest of the sofas. Centered on it was a rosewood bowl filled with apples and oranges.
Mrs. Ashmore said, “Please,” again, and I sat down directly behind the fruit.
“Can I offer you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
She settled directly in front of me, straight and silent.
In the time it had taken to walk from the entry, her eyes had filled with tears.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
She wiped her eyes with a finger and sat even straighter. “Thank you for coming.”
Silence filled the room and made it seem even colder. She wiped her eyes again and laced her fingers.
I said, “You have a beautiful home.”
She lifted her hands and made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what I’ll do with it.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Just one year. Larry owned it long before that, but we never lived in it together. When we came to California, Larry said this should be our place.”
She shrugged, raised her hands again, and let them drop back to her knees.
“Too big, it’s really ridiculous... We talked about selling it...” Shaking her head. “Please — have something.”
I took an apple from the bowl and nibbled. Watching me eat seemed to comfort her.
“Where did you move from?” I said.
“New York.”
“Had Dr. Ashmore ever lived in Los Angeles before?”
“No, but he’d been here on buying trips — he had many houses. All over the country. That was his... thing.”
“Buying real estate?”
“Buying and selling. Investing. He even had a house in France for a short while. Very old — a château. A duke bought it and told everyone it had been in his family for hundreds of years. Larry laughed at that — he hated pretentiousness. But he did love the buying and selling. The freedom it brought him.”
I understood that, having achieved some financial independence myself by riding the land boom of the mid-seventies. But I’d operated on a far less exalted level.
“Upstairs,” she said, “is all empty.”
“Do you live here by yourself?”
“Yes. No children. Please — have an orange. They’re from the tree in back, quite easy to peel.”
I picked up an orange, removed its rind, and ate a segment. The sound of my jaws working seemed deafening.
“Larry and I don’t know many people,” she said, reverting to the present-tense denial of the brand-new mourner.
Remembering her remark about my arriving earlier than expected, I said, “Is someone from the hospital coming out?”
She nodded. “With the gift — the certificate of the donation to UNICEF. They’re having it framed. A man called yesterday, checking to see if that was all right — giving to UNICEF.”
“A man named Plumb?”
“No... I don’t believe so. A long name — something German.”
“Huenengarth?”
“Yes, that’s it. He was very nice, said kind things about Larry.”
Her gaze shifted, distractedly, to the ceiling. “Are you certain I can’t get you something to drink?”
“Water would be fine.”
She nodded and rose. “If we’re lucky, the Sparkletts man has come. Beverly Hills water is disagreeable. The minerals. Larry and I don’t drink it.”
While she was gone, I got up and inspected the paintings. Hockney verified. Watercolor still life in a Plexiglas box frame. Next to that, a small abstract canvas that turned out to be a De Kooning. A Jasper Johns word salad, a Jim Dine bathrobe study, a Picasso satyr-and-nymph gambol in China ink. Lots of others I couldn’t identify, interspersed with the earth-toned batiks. The wax pressings were tribal scenes and geometric designs that could have been talismans.