Chapter Text
The house on Muirfield Road did not announce itself.
That was, Thomas Edward Street had always maintained, precisely the point. Lesser men built monuments. Men who understood the nature of real money understood that it required no monument. It simply existed, as quietly and as permanently as the San Gabriel Mountains on a clear day, present whether you looked at it or not.
The Street house had stood as such on its corner of Hancock Park since 1921, when Thomas had purchased it from a railroad attorney who’d overextended himself in ways Thomas had seen coming for the better part of two years. It was a Georgian Colonial of considerable size, set back from the street behind a row of Italian cypresses that had grown, over three decades, into a wall of deep green so dense and so perfectly maintained that the house beyond them might have been imaginary.
The garden was immaculate. The driveway was pale gravel, raked smooth each morning by a groundskeeper named Ortega who had worked for the Streets since Della was seven years old and who greeted her, to this day, with the same quiet nod he’d offered the small serious girl she’d been then.
She was not small now. She was twenty-six, and if the girl remained anywhere in her it was only in the way she still noticed the garden as she came up the drive — the roses her mother had planted along the east wall, the liquid amber tree that turned the color of fire each November, the particular quality of the light on a Los Angeles morning in early spring when the air was still cool enough to mean something.
She noticed these things and kept walking.
Her heels on the front steps were precise and unhurried. She had learned, young, that hurrying communicated urgency and urgency communicated vulnerability, and vulnerability in the Street house was a thing one simply did not do.
Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and yesterday’s roses and the particular stillness of rooms that were maintained rather than lived in. The entry hall was floored in black and white marble. A curved staircase rose to the upper floors with the quiet confidence of architecture that had never needed to impress anyone.
On the half-landing hung a portrait of Cornelius Street, her grandfather, painted in oils sometime around 1910, when he had been at the height of whatever rough and considerable power had established the family fortune in the first place. He had the look of a man who had gotten exactly what he wanted out of life and intended to go on doing so indefinitely. His eyes, dark and direct, had always reminded Della of her father’s.
She did not linger beneath the portrait.
The breakfast room was at the back of the house, where the morning light came through tall windows overlooking the garden. Her mother was already seated, small and impeccably dressed in pale blue wool, her coffee cup at precisely the correct distance from the edge of the table, her hands folded in her lap with the composure of a woman who had spent thirty years perfecting the art of occupying a room without disturbing it.
Anna Marie Street had been pretty once. She was still handsome in the careful, maintained way of women of her generation and class, women who understood that appearance was a form of argument and kept theirs well-reasoned. She looked up when Della entered and offered a smile that reached approximately to the middle distance.
“You’re later than I expected.”
“I had a telephone call.” Della took her usual chair and reached for the coffee. “Good morning, Mother.”
“Your father’s already in his study.”
This was not news. Thomas Street was always already in his study. Della sometimes thought he slept there, upright in his chair, reading contracts in his dreams.
“I’ll speak with him after breakfast.”
Her mother’s gaze moved briefly to Della’s hands — ringless, both of them, a fact that Anna Marie Street registered each morning with the particular silence of a woman who had learned which battles were worth the energy and which were simply weather. Della had turned down three proposals in the last four years. The first had been the son of a banking family her father approved of. The second had been a city councilman with excellent prospects. The third she declined to think about at all.
She drank her coffee with cream and sugar, just the way any self-respecting future hostess should.
Outside the windows, Ortega moved along the rose wall with his clippers, unhurried and methodical, and the morning light lay across the garden in long pale strips. Della Cornelia Street, named after her maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather respectively, sat in the house she had grown up in and felt, as she sometimes felt here, the familiar but unsettling sensation of a room that both fit her perfectly and not at all.
Her father’s study occupied the entire southwestern corner of the ground floor. It smelled of pipe tobacco and old paper and the faint mineral sharpness of ink. Floor to ceiling bookshelves lined two walls, filled not with the decorative leather-bound sets that populated the libraries of men who wished to appear well-read, but with working volumes. His collection included everything from legal references and financial texts, to geological surveys and industry reports going back to the previous century. A large desk of dark walnut dominated the center of the room with the authority of a judicial bench. Behind it sat Thomas Edward Street.
He was sixty-one years old and looked, depending on the angle, either like a supreme court justice or a hanging judge. His hair had gone fully silver in his fifties, and he had kept it precisely cut ever since, as though even his aging were subject to his approval. He was reading when Della entered and he finished the paragraph before he looked up, which was a habit he’d had since she was a child and which she had long since stopped interpreting as anything other than what it was: the natural behavior of a man for whom the ordered completion of a task was simply non-negotiable.
“Sit down,” he said, voice measured and even as always.
Della sat. She folded her hands in her lap, which was her mother’s gesture and which she was always mildly annoyed to catch herself making in this room.
“You wanted to speak with me,” her father continued. It was not quite a question.
“I’ve been looking at the Consolidated accounts.” She kept her voice even. Informational. She had learned, also young, that her father responded to data and not to emotion, and that the fastest way to lose an argument with Thomas Street was to let him hear anything in your voice that sounded like feeling. “There are irregularities.”
A pause. Brief, but she had spent a lifetime reading her father’s pauses the way sailors read weather.
“Irregularities,” he repeated.
“The quarterly disbursements don’t reconcile with the asset reports. There’s a discrepancy going back at least eighteen months, possibly further. I haven’t been able to trace it internally because I don’t have access to the original land documentation from grandfather’s time.” She watched his face. “I’d like that access.”
What happened then was subtle enough that anyone else in the room would have missed it entirely. Thomas Street’s right hand, resting on the desk beside his papers, moved approximately one inch to the left and stopped.
That was all.
But Della had been watching her father’s hands since she was old enough to understand that his face told you nothing and his hands, occasionally, told you everything.
“I’ll have Simmons pull the relevant files,” he said. “Leave it with me.”
“Of course,” Della acknowledged with a demure nod.
She stood. She smoothed her sensible dark blue pencil skirt and ensured with a glance that the ruffles adorning the front of her pristine white silk blouse were just-so, and walked to the study door with the same unhurried precision with which she’d entered. Della did not look back at the portrait of her grandfather on the way through the hall, and she did not let herself think, not yet, about what that one-inch movement of her father’s hand had just told her.
Her own office was at the opposite end of the ground floor from her father’s study. This had been Thomas’s arrangement, practical and deliberate, because a workspace was not a bedroom and Della Street was not to conduct business from her private suite like some society woman playing at industry.
And her office was a handsome room filled with good light from the east windows in the mornings, a desk that matched the seriousness of its occupant, and bookshelves she had filled herself over the course of years with volumes her father had not selected for her. It was the one room in the house that felt most like hers, which was perhaps why she went there now.
She closed the door, leaned her back against it and closed her eyes. A deep inhale, a hold, and then an exhale before moving to sit at her desk where she allowed herself, for the span of perhaps thirty seconds, to think about what that one-inch movement of her father’s hand had just told her.
He already knew.
Whatever had produced those irregularities in the Consolidated accounts, Thomas Street knew about it. He had known before she’d walked through his door, known before she’d opened her mouth, and his response — so reasonable, so courteous, so perfectly constructed — had been designed to move the relevant files beyond her reach before she could put her hands on them.
Bill Simmons would have his instructions within the hour. By tomorrow the documentation would be unavailable for reasons that would be explained to her with perfect courtesy and no explanation at all.
Thirty seconds. She allowed herself exactly that and no more. Then she opened the top right drawer of her desk, removed her address book, and turned to the D’s. The name had been given to her six months ago by a family friend, offered with the sort of offhandedness of information imparted by someone who trusted it might someday be useful: “if you ever need someone discreet, Miss Street, Drake is your man.”
She had written the number down because Della Street wrote everything down.
Now, she reached for the telephone.