Chore Whore Read online

  Chapter Three

  “Mom, you there?” I shout into her answering machine.

  “I was outside,” Mom says, breathlessly. “You have to give me a minute to get to the phone.”

  “Is Blaise behaving himself or driving you nuts?”

  “Cornelia, I have no idea what the problem is. He’s been a delight. Today we went to the Quaker Christmas Tree Farm and he picked out the tree. He even helped cut it down. He mowed the lawn earlier. . . .”

  “Mom, you let him near a gas mower? He could have blown your house to bits!” I say, thinking I’d better go get my boy.

  “Cornelia, I wasn’t born yesterday. I let him use the old push mower. Remember, I raised you? I think I know how to do it. Anyway, he’s out raking the yard now.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really don’t know what all the hullabaloo is about. He’s been an absolute gem. Very willing to work and help out. Wants to please. Maybe he’s not the problem, Cornelia! Maybe it’s you.”

  I gulp.

  “I’m not the one lighting feces on fire, Mom. I have to go now. I just wanted to make sure he was all right.”

  After I hang up, the phone rings immediately. I know my mom. She’s calling back to have the last word.

  “Hello, Mom,” I say, annoyed that I’m about to receive a lecture.

  “It’s Veronique!”

  “Oh! I thought you were my mom calling back. Welcome home from Italy! We’ve been trading messages—”

  “Listen, Corki, I’m sorry for interrupting, but I’m walking into my hair appointment at the John Frieda Salon. I know this is a bit of a last-minute request on a Saturday morning, but I’m going to New York tomorrow for Christmas and I need a few gifts.”

  “Okay. Give me the list,” I say confidently.

  “Bob and Harvey Weinstein over at Miramax in New York. And Julia Roberts, Woody Harrelson and Demi Moore. I’ll need you to deliver the last three; they’re in town for the holidays. The others I’ll take with me or we can FedEx them—it’s up to you.”

  “Price limit?” I ask as I jot ideas on a notepad.

  “Well, a lot for the Weinstein brothers; the other three, say up to five each?” she asks.

  “No problem,” I say. “I think I’d rather FedEx the gifts—I’ll have them wrapped appropriately and insured. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. Do whatever you think best.”

  I hang up, go take a shower and put on my Beverly Hills shopping clothes.

  Not only are the streets of Beverly Hills crowded with local shoppers, but the tourist buses have let off throngs of Midwesterners with bulging pocketbooks and cameras bouncing against their generous bellies. They cross Rodeo Drive illegally, stomping on the freshly planted poinsettias in the median strip, anxious to see if that was really Jennifer Lopez going into Giorgio Armani.

  Parking at the post office, I pay the valet parking attendant and dash across Little Santa Monica Boulevard as I straighten out my skirt. Applying one last swipe of lipstick before entering a brick courtyard full of small shops that have sister shops in Nice and Cannes, I pass through the outside dining area of a small restaurant frequented by an odd assortment of actors, mini-mafiosos and the Secret Service.

  I push open the glass door to a small, dimly lit shop and approach the man behind the counter. He has never given me his name, although I have given him mine as well as all my pertinent information. We have a dance we regularly participate in when I come here. He acts surly and suspicious and I, appreciative and thankful.

  “Good morning. I’d like to—”

  “I know what you want,” he interrupts. “You’re the one who lives on welfare, right?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He checks his computer and I look at myself in the mirror. Can he tell I’ve just lost two clients and am heading toward poverty? I feel my shoulders tensing.

  “Yes, I have it right here, Corki Brown on Wilshire Boulevard!”

  “Oh, yes, my mailing address is on Wilshire.” God, I’m becoming paranoid. Welfare, Wilshire, whatever. I clear my throat. “I need a full box today.”

  “All right, wait right here.”

  He surreptitiously leaves the shop through the front door, looking both ways before he exits and locks it behind him. I wait at the counter looking at the security cameras watching me. He has a smart system here—we’re both committing crimes and we can implicate each other—me by buying, him by selling.

  He returns with a box wrapped in brown paper. I hand him $1,250 in cash, he counts it, and I leave with a small nod. Always nice doing business in the underworld, where I can’t ask for a receipt and don’t expect one. Thank God Veronique doesn’t ask questions, but trusts me implicitly.

  Walking down Rodeo Drive to Tiffany’s with over a thousand dollars’ worth of Cuban contraband bouncing against my hip, I laugh at the thought. Welfare. I’d scrub toilets again before going on government assistance.

  I scurry up a cobblestone walkway that resembles the streets of Paris and pop into Tiffany’s, excited by my idea for Demi and Woody. My mood immediately deflates when I see Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver walk into the same room. I can’t compete with them and it will take me forever to get a salesperson’s attention if I have to wait lurking in the governor’s shadow. I hate to act like this, but I have a schedule to keep and other celebrities can’t get in my way.

  “Arnold!” I say with so much enthusiasm that I even surprise myself.

  He spins around and looks at me, his brain working overtime to figure out who I am.

  “Fröhliche Weihnachten!” I say.

  “Merry Christmas to you!” Arnold replies.

  “You don’t remember me? I’m Jock Straupman’s assistant!”

  “Of course!” he says.

  I cozy in next to them, make small talk about Jock’s well-being and wave to the saleswoman. I put in my order for twelve crystal champagne flutes, pay for them and leave, once more wishing Arnold and Maria a merry Christmas in German.

  Mission accomplished.

  Julia Roberts has the same fondness for angels that I have for antique saint figurines. I drive to West Hollywood, where my favorite antique mall is filled with both, sweep in past the guard, and within five minutes have located a sweet, small, eighteenth-century Italian angel, bare-bummed and blowing a horn. I pay the $675 and take note to tell Veronique that I had to go over the $500 limit.

  One last stop at Almor Liquor for two bottles of champagne and a bottle of cognac for Bob Weinstein and it will complete the shopping portion of my Veronique “project.”

  “Mary! Merry, merry!” I say, rushing in the front door of Almor.

  “Hi, Corki,” I hear from behind a pile of wrapping paper, boxes and ribbon. She peeks her blond head out. “You look nice today, what’s the occasion?”

  “Every once in a while I like to shock people. Keep them off balance. Mary, I need two Cristal Rosés—they’re $350 each, right? And a bottle of cognac . . . the Rémy Martin in the Baccarat decanter.”

  “Okay,” Mary says as she gets up, takes her keys and unlocks a glass-enclosed case. “The Cristal is $350 but you know this Rémy Martin is from Louis the Thirteenth’s private reserve. It’s hundreds of years old.”

  I think guiltily of the Rémy Martin I threw down Lucy’s kitchen sink when I got too tipsy to drive.

  “How much is it?” I ask, mentally apologizing to Kevin Kline . . . such a nice gift he gave Lucy.

  “Most places sell it for fifteen hundred. I sell it for thirteen and change.”

  “I’ll take it! You have a regular bargain basement here!”

  She rings up my $2,164 purchase.

  · · ·

  At home, I wrap the Rémy Martin in blue and white Hanukkah gift paper for Bob. My illegal Cuban cigars, though, I open and carefully dump out on my kitchen table. Removing the rice paper and then the layer of cedar with the word “Havana” burned into it, I take each cigar and cautiously remove its band
. After wrapping the cigars in one carefully chosen gift box and the cigar box, cedar and bands in another, I make out separate FedEx labels and put them in their respective mailing boxes. To reduce the chance of jail time, I have to separate the cigars from their origin—Cuba.

  I know why I go to the trouble for Veronique, but don’t know why she goes to the trouble for Harvey Weinstein. My one and only lasting impression of him was in a client’s brand spanking new home theater, where he refused to use an ashtray and let his cigar ashes build up in a pile on the carpet.

  I send the Weinstein gifts to New York and wrap and deliver Woody’s Cristal champagne and six Tiffany champagne flutes to his office. I wrap the same gift for Demi, drop it off to her holiday beach house in Malibu and deposit Julia’s gift at the front door of her beach house a few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway. I have driven 155 miles and am finally done for the day at nine P.M.

  At ten P.M. I’m eating a reheated dinner of shrimp pesto pasta when my phone rings. I let the answering machine pick it up.

  “Corki, it’s Jock Straupman.”

  After all the years I’ve worked for him, he still uses his full name when he calls to leave a message. His voice drips syrup and I wonder if he’s going to tell me about Paris.

  “How are you tonight? I need you to come over first thing tomorrow morning and gather up some things to return to Britt. Just some clothes and personal effects. Oh, and return the things you picked up at the cleaners to her, too. She should pay for the cleaning. Also take her Georgia O’Keeffe coffee table book. You know, Georgia’s the artist who made everything look like a vagina.”

  His voice tightens around the word “vagina.” Britt must have mentioned the word “commitment” or something, because obviously she’s getting dumped, and I’ll be the one doing the dumping.

  “Also, if I’m not here, there’s a letter I’d like you to deliver along with her things.”

  The “Dear Jane” letter, I’m sure.

  “And I’ll leave her address on a note for you. Thanks.”

  He hangs up. This is the second goodbye letter and return of personal effects I’ve handled in the past six months. God, I hate being the deliverer of bad news.

  My phone rings again.

  “Corki, it’s Jock Straupman. I also need you to clean my collection. It’s time, right? Hasn’t it been two months? I’ve been going to the range a lot lately. I think it’s time. Please. Sometime after the holidays would be good. Thank you.”

  Break up with conquest of the week and clean my guns. Fantastic.

  Fifteen years ago, when I first started working for Jock, Concepcion came across firearms stashed under his bed, in certain drawers, in his car and in the gym. After she found the guns, Jock’s lawyers cooked up a paper for her to sign in which she was sworn to keep her mouth shut about every aspect of his personal life. Jock didn’t know she’d already told me about her findings.

  Right after that, I saw Jock go into his meditation room, but when I entered the room he was gone. His meditation room is a pristine alcove off his bedroom. There are no pictures, awards, books, windows, doors or artwork. The room is wallpapered in an unusual pumpkin orange stripe pattern. It features a pillow on the floor and a huge statue of a Buddha in a recessed niche on one wall. That’s it. Jock is what they call a Jew-Bu, genetically Jewish but practicing Buddhism.

  I stood in the doorway, dumbfounded, searching for an explanation as to where he had gone. I called out to him. No answer. Stupidly, I picked up the pillow, as if to find him there. I leaned into the niche and looked behind the figure . . . only a renegade dust bunny and the earthquake strap securing the carved figure to the wall in case of a temblor.

  The following week, Lucy and Jock left for a two-week trip to St. Tropez with Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston. Concepcion had the two weeks off, and I was left to my own devices. Jock asked me to get the air-conditioning filters changed for the summer season and the pool’s bottom paint changed from light blue to black. Before they came home, he also wanted me to drain, clean and rearrange the scenery in his wall-length fish aquarium that was home to a two-foot shark and other fishies that kept getting eaten when “Jaws” wasn’t fed enough. Not willing to lose my right arm in this endeavor, I called the pros. While they cleaned the tank, I had plenty of time to snoop in the meditation room.

  I went in, sat on the pillow and stared at the walls, ceiling, and floor, then examined the motion detector sensors whose invisible beams cross the middle of the room. I touched Buddha in every place I could, even some unmentionable ones. Standing in front of the statue, I looked out across the room.

  I found what I was looking for when I ran my fingers over the molding that surrounded the recess. One piece of molding was looser than the rest and slightly separated from the wall. I pulled it gently. As if it were on hydraulic hinges, the entire wall opened to reveal a steep staircase going down to complete blackness.

  Silently scolding Buddha for keeping secrets from me, I went to get a flashlight from Jock’s earthquake kit and returned to the meditation room. As I descended the tightly twisting spiral staircase, I entered another world. Images of hell, Italian catacombs, Parisian sewers and Cold War bomb shelters flew rapidly through my mind. I hit the last stair and it dawned on me where I was. This had to be his safe room, and here, all this time, I had thought the basement was the only room below the house.

  It was explained to me by an FBI agent I once dated that criminals who break into celebrities’ homes don’t typically want to kill them. Thrilled by the proximity to their idols, they want to steal their stuff or perhaps even kidnap them. Celebs respond by finding a way to barricade themselves from such a threat. Safe rooms are lined in steel so no gunshot can penetrate. They have telephone lines that are buried underground so no one can cut them, or they are equipped with cellular. They usually have television monitors split into four or more screens so occupants can watch everything going on outside their home. Some have safes in the ground or wall. Some also have a wine cave, storage room, closet, bathroom and dressing room. All have a button that when pushed forces the alarm system into panic mode. And most have a loaded gun for the worst-case scenario.

  I turned on the lights. Bright, fluorescent bulbs flickered on throughout a room as big as a winery’s cellar.

  Before me was a full-scale gun range. There were four lanes, each with a station divided by walls. At the ends hung paper figures of people riddled with bullet holes.

  Lying on tables next to chairs were magazines with flashy headlines that read “Glocks Rock!” and “Make your .38 great!” I found night-scoping equipment and camouflage clothing and became very confused. Jock was on the mailing list of several Democratic organizations trying to raise funds to abolish private gun ownership. He always sent them a donation.

  Paranoid, I turned off the light switch and rubbed away my fingerprints with my shirt. If he had to have his little hideaway, I sure wasn’t going to rain on his parade. I ascended the staircase, closed the wall and went about the job I was paid to do.

  Two weeks later, Jock and Lucy returned home. Tanned, relaxed and looking more in love than ever, they left the unpacking to me. I made piles of dry cleaning, laundry and things to return to the bathroom, kitchen and library. I figured out what to refill, restock and repack for the next time they decided to take off on a last-minute whirlwind vacation. Not many stars can plan a vacation too far ahead. After all, they may get the offer of a lifetime, that perfect part in a wonderful movie destined for box office success. They live waiting for that moment.

  As I carted their dirty clothes into the huge, walk-in closet for Concepcion to launder later, Jock came into the room. He smiled dreamily and I wished a vacation like that for me. A holiday that didn’t leave me worrying for six months about how I was going to pay off the credit cards for my indulgences. Oh, to come home and walk around looking dreamy, jet-lagged and ecstatic.

  Jock stood there a little too long without saying a word.

&nb
sp; “Did you have a good time in St. Tropez?” I asked.

  Jock’s smile widened even more, if that was possible. He resembled the Cheshire Cat. “Oh yes, we had a very good time. How ’bout you, did you have a good time?”

  Doing what? Working?

  “Yeah, sure. Jaws didn’t bite anyone. The pool came out nice. Good time had by all.”

  He shifted in the doorway. “I mean down there.”

  Was he getting nasty? Too much sun, French wine and sex.

  “Down where, Jock?”

  He pointed to the ground. “There.”

  Oh shit, he knew.

  Jock repeated himself. “Did you have fun down there?”

  “It wasn’t exactly fun,” I stammered, “but definitely eye-opening.”

  He moved into the room. “You had your eyes open for seven minutes and thirty-three seconds. Did you see everything you needed to see?”

  Something timed my stay at the range? For a man who can’t program his VCR, and who has me go in the basement to change the tapes in his security cameras because he can’t figure it out, he sure had some sophisticated monitoring equipment.

  I tried to keep it light, as if I frequently snooped in private hideaways. “More than I ever imagined.”

  “I do imagine then that you can keep your eyes open, but your mouth . . .” He mimicked securing a lock and tossing out the key. “Understand?”

  I nodded. “I have no idea ‘down there’ even exists.”

  Jock obviously liked my immediate placatory stance.

  “You ever shoot a gun?”

  Time to surprise him back. “Yep! I have a Brazilian Rossi .38 at home . . . for protection. I was stalked once. In fact, I even have a CCW.”

  I sensed Jock, at that moment, liked me or perhaps respected me more than he did two weeks ago. Permits to carry a concealed weapon are virtually impossible to get in Los Angeles and damn hard to get anywhere else in California.

  “You know how to clean a weapon?”

  “Of course. That’s taught in Responsible Gun Ownership 101.”