North Rodeo Drive [antikvár]

Chapter One Clint. Belle was sure it was him. But keeping track of Clint Hopper and his cars wasn't easy, he bought and sold them so fast. Belle was positive, though, that it was-had been-him on the other side of Sunset Boulevard. She had stopped for the light at the bottom of Benedict Canyon and Clint sort of streaked past, headed east, in something low-slung, twodoored, and blue, one of the sleek new Japanese sport cars everybody was trying out in Beverly Hills these days. She couldn't fail to recognize the line of his jaw, so like Charley s; it had an aristocratic tilt, she thought, or was it just confidence? Clint looked a lot like his brother Charley, who was Belle's husband; but Clint was more sharply drawn, a little less craggy than Charley. But . . . stupid for her to compare them now; Clint racing past with an adoring blonde beside him at nine in the morning, and Charley, more dead than alive, lying still and silent in a hospitál bed, kept alive by the very newest in high-tech life support systems. That was not Clints fault and, it was true, Belle felt better just seeing him. He had that effect on people-women adored him. More often than not he was seen with a pretty female, blond or otherwise. He was tall, brown-haired, and handsome-and very rich. If his attributes were listed according to preeminence, rich came first. Waiting for the light to change, Belle brooded. Ahead of her, the road split into several directions. She was aimed at Rodeo Drive. Over her leit shoulder, she sensed more than saw the pink mass of the Beverly Hills Hotel; it seemed to shimmer in the hard, gray light of an early morning in November. The hotel always made her remember Sally Markman, who'd been her best friend in California, until she died so tragically, and their best friend in New York, Norman Kaplan, who was still 1