Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  The Mortons owned a bougainvillea-covered Spanish stucco on South Barrington, halfway between Sunset and San Vicente. He saw Maggie’s red Ford coupé in the driveway as he pulled in, the first time he’d been back to Brentwood since soon after the wedding. Lizzie hadn’t told anyone, just slipped off to a chapel in Westwood so Miss Adelaide wouldn’t find out. Ten years older than his wife, Joe Morton had spent the thirties covering Europe for UPI, mostly in Germany, coming home after Pearl Harbor and missing the draft by a year—though his eyes would have kept him out if his age hadn’t. He’d worked for the Times until selling his first movie script, a B thriller filmed in the sewers of Los Angeles. He was pudgy and balding and couldn’t see his feet without his glasses but was as passionate about writing as was Lizzie and just as passionate about her. He liked to cook and didn’t mind babysitting while Lizzie was at work. The baby, Robby, was Cal’s godson.

  Lizzie wore glasses now, had the perfect face for them, Cal thought, the dark hornrims accenting her light skin and inquisitive bright eyes. A good marriage had helped her, so had success, so had motherhood. His girls had become successful women. They looked on him as a brother, but he’d been more like a father, six years older than one, seven more than the other. He’d had been there when Eddie was not, which was most of the time. Maggie had needed him more, the rotor of her gyroscope. Lizzie had her own rotor.

  “Callender?” she asked, handing him a beer.

  “Milstein asked if I remembered the trial. Of course, I did, I said. I was in the Pacific, but you’re talking about my uncle. I read the trial transcript. He said his client might have some information for the Reverend Willie Mull’s son. That’s exactly how he put it—‘for the Reverend Willie Mull’s son.’ Odd, no?”

  “I remember Milstein,” she said. “I didn’t cover the trial, but I was there every day. Callender was acting crazy, talking about Willie and chess and cats and the law of the trail, things no one understood. Milstein didn’t want him declared incompetent, said he was just a little ‘teched’ from a long, hard life. The jury was not impressed.”

  “He wouldn’t be angling for a new trial, would he?” said Maggie, lighting a cigarette.

  She looked smart, he thought. Back to the days at the stables she’d worn Levi’s and now wore beige slacks, though there was nothing slack about how they fit her. She had on a long-sleeved white silk blouse with gold chains. She wore her dark hair shorter than before, better to fit into flight helmets, he supposed. Since helping to found the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) during the war she’d become famous. There’d been talk of a fling with Howard Hughes, but her steady was a Hughes pilot named Terry Heyward, an air ace who’d somehow survived the war in the Pacific. Cal met him at Robby’s christening. He liked him.

  “No chance,” said Lizzie. “He’s up there for good.”

  “Might want to get his sentence cut,” he said.

  “How?”

  “That’s for us to find out.”

  “Come on, Cal, give! You’re holding something back.”

  “Milstein wouldn’t say exactly—not on the telephone. Just hints. Callender wants to meet me face-to-face. I gathered it has something to do with Pat Murphy and Barton Pitts.”

  She sat up so fast she nearly spilt her beer. “What? What does Henry Callender have to do with Pat Murphy and Barton Pitts?”

  “I believe Pitts and Callender are residents of the same hotel—the Folsom Arms.”

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. “That awful little man who killed Dad is claiming to know something about the Murphy case? That is preposterous! Pitts may be evil. He’s not dumb. Why would he talk to Callender? Pitts sent Callender to Folsom!”

  He wasn’t going to argue, wasn’t going say that Callender was as close to a friend as Willie ever had and had been his friend as well. “Things leak in prison,” he said. “I thought you might be interested. You’re working on the Murphy case, aren’t you?

  “Going to Folsom on a wild goose chase, you mean?”

  “We can drive up together.”

  She didn’t answer. He glanced at Maggie, who was smoking and watching the little sister who usually did the watching. Lizzie curled her fingers around the stem of the beer bottle, turning it, squeezing it, signs of conflict. “That man murdered our father,” she said at length. “I thought we were done with him.”

  Dead silence. He listened for sounds. Brentwood was quieter than Bel Air because it wasn’t up in the hills where the air is thinner. He wondered about Robby, two years old now, his godson, wondered if he ever cried in the night.

  “And you would be done with him, except he says he has information about Pat Murphy. Your call.”

  “He won’t mind me there?”

  “Why would he?”

  She fell silent for a while. Then: “Okay, why not?”

  He glanced at Maggie, silent, restless, drawing on her cigarette, wanting to move on. “Are you two done?” she asked.

  He knew what was coming, at least thought he did. Nelly had hinted at it over dinner. “Not if it’s to talk about Uncle Eddie’s estate. I want no part of it, and no, I’m not being coy. I have a good job at Pacific Electric. Eddie’s estate goes to you three.”

  “And what are we to do with it?” said Lizzie. “None of us needs that kind of money. Mother wants to buy her dance studio when it’s probated. Imagine.”

  “As to what you should do with it, that’s another matter,” he said. “I have some ideas on that. No use giving it all to the bankers.”

  Maggie nodded at her sister, stood up, walked around behind the chair where Lizzie sat. Lizzie was smiling. Something was afoot. Maggie leaned over the chair toward him, silk blouse falling slightly open, gold chains dangling, cigarette between her long, slender fingers, looking like Lauren Bacall leaning over Hoagy Carmichael’s piano. “Speaking of the estate, dear cousin, is not exactly what I had in mind.”

  Lizzie was giggling.

  “Oh?”

  “How would you like to give me away again?”

  “No!”

  She laughed. “Is that a ‘no’ of surprise or rejection? Terry and I are getting hitched, and you are the last Mull male left standing.”

  He stood to hug her. “This is getting to be a habit.”

  “Last time, I promise. Next time is your turn.”

  “No comment.”

  “We’re thinking soon,” said Maggie, sitting down again.

  “Where?”

  “Nothing like in Paris. Simple. Maybe the Lutheran Church on Wilshire.”

  “Is Terry Lutheran?”

  “He thinks he had a grandmother who was Lutheran.”

  “Ah.” He took another gulp from his beer when the thought struck him head on, attached itself in his brain and dug in. Willie would love it. And if Terry didn’t care . . .

  “I think you should be married at the temple.”

  Silence. Then Lizzie: “Surely, you’re joking.”

  Maggie simply stared. “I will not be married in that coliseum.”

  “No, no, not the amphitheater,” he said. “In the chapel—quiet, intimate, quite beautiful. You’d love it. So would Terry.”

  “So would you,” said Lizzie. “What makes you even think . . .”

  “Because the temple is—I have to say it—part of the family.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Angie would be thrilled.”

  Maggie continued to stare. When had she ever been conventional?

  “Do you know,” she said at length, “that I’ve never met Sister Angie, never even seen her. I’d never heard of her until the night—what, ten years ago?—when you two were sitting there on Tiverton talking about Uncle Willie’s new girlfriend—sexier than Lizzie, if I remember.”

  Lizzie again: “Can you honestly be thinking of . . .”


  “I’d like to meet her, really I would. Women love her, I hear.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Mother will be furious,” said Lizzie.

  Maggie laughed. “She can bring her dance instructors.”

  Chapter 27

  An eight-hour drive on Highway 99 took them through the Central Valley toward Sacramento, where they would spend Saturday night at the Senator Hotel, next to the Capitol. The meeting with Callender was set for the next day, Sunday, visiting day at Folsom. Like other Americans, Cal was stuck with a prewar car until Detroit could switch its assembly lines from tanks back to passenger cars again. He’d bought a ’41 Buick convertible from a Santa Monica woman who’d garaged it during the war waiting for her husband to come back. He didn’t, and she sold the car with only twenty-five hundred miles on it. The trip up and back to Folsom would add another thousand.

  They had a good palaver on the way up, their first in years. Cal found Lizzie more engaging than she’d once been, more willing to stop asking questions and taking notes and talk about her own life. She was clearly happy with Joe, happy to be a mother, though she said Joe seemed to get along better with their son than she did. “When I’m through with this Murphy thing I’m going to take leave to write a book about it and get to know my son.”

  “Doesn’t writing a book about it depend on finding the killer?”

  “Oh, I’ll find him.”

  Cal looked over. She meant it.

  They’d come up through the Grapevine pass over the Tehachapi Mountains not far from where the aqueduct passed on its way to Los Angeles. North of Bakersfield, the clean, fresh grassy smell of the alfalfa fields filled the air and Lizzie asked him to put the top down, He pulled to the side of the road and opened the car to the sun. The convertible roof mechanism still worked like new, sign of a car kept unexposed to Santa Monica salt air.

  “Now tell me about you,” the old Lizzie said when they were going again. “Why are you working for Pacific Electric?”

  He laughed. “They needed a lawyer.”

  “Lots of companies need lawyers.”

  “Public transportation has interested me, back to the days when I used to take you to the stables on the trolley. I had a professor, one Wesley Pegrum by name, who knew everything about it. Told me to check out the European cities, which I did, with your sister.”

  “I thought it was more fun when you got your own car.”

  “We won’t talk about when Maggie got her own car.”

  “Seriously. You could have gone to work for anyone. Why a trolley company?”

  “Biggest employer in the county, running ten thousand trains daily, which happens to be a world record. P.E. is definitely more than a trolley company.”

  “Doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  “Pegrum liked to say Los Angeles had a chance that most cities never get: to do its planning before the people arrived. Here was this dry empty plain that overnight gets enough water to become a metropolis—the exact opposite of most cities, always trying to catch up with growth. And the secret of it all was transportation. You lay out your grids before the people come so you don’t have to destroy neighborhoods and dig up roads to lay lines and all that. You put down your tracks where you want the people to live. Pacific Electric did it the right way. You can call Harriman and Huntington and the whole crowd of them robber barons, but they gave the city the best transportation system in the world.”

  She didn’t respond, and he fell quiet, too, keeping the car at a steady 65 miles an hour on a highway with few other cars. The time had come to tell her what was bothering him, but he hesitated. He still wasn’t sure. He trusted her, but she was a reporter and could hardly be expected to keep quiet about it. But did he want her to keep quiet about it? Wasn’t it time for people to know? He had to set conditions.

  They stopped for lunch at a Basque restaurant in Fresno where he listened to Lizzie talk about Joe’s new collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright he’d met in Berlin in the thirties. Brecht had escaped Hitler to find refuge, along with a few dozen other German literati, in Santa Monica. “They’re collaborating on a play, or maybe I should say Joe’s helping Brecht put his play into English. We’ve had him over a few times, a nervous, chain-smoking little man even more near-sighted than Joe. His English isn’t bad, but he writes only in German. Joe’s German is apparently flawless.”

  “Isn’t Brecht a Communist?”

  She laughed. “Isn’t Joe a Communist?”

  They drove in silence through the long fertile plain bordered on the west by the coastal ranges and on the east by the Sierra. Grasslands that once stretched from Sacramento to Bakersfield were slowly being replaced by crops that one day would feed the nation.

  “You have something on your mind, don’t you?”

  “Perceptive as always.”

  “We go back a long way, Cal.”

  “To the beginning.”

  “So?”

  “Story’s not ready yet. I’m still working on it. What I tell you is off-the-record. If you agree, then when it’s ready it’s all yours.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Pacific Electric is being sold. We’re not sure why.”

  She turned to face him, putting on the bland reporter’s face he knew without looking. “Why is that news? Companies are sold all the time.”

  “First of all, companies sold all the time are usually not this big. Second, it so happens that the outfit buying us—something called National City Lines—doesn’t have any lines and doesn’t have any money. It is a front.”

  “For . . . ?”

  “General Motors mainly. And a few others.”

  “General Motors is going into the trolley business?”

  “General Motors wants to destroy the trolley business.”

  Without turning he could feel her eyes boring into him. He stayed silent. Let her ask the questions. Gauge her interest.

  “So why would the city do something like that?”

  “Not sure.”

  “A few others?”

  “Standard Oil, Mack Trucks, Greyhound, Firestone Tires.”

  “In other words . . .”

  You can imagine how much money a consortium like that has to offer councilmen to junk electric trains and buy their gas engines.”

  Still she stared. “That sounds like a hell of a story, Cal.”

  “That’s all I can tell you for now.”

  She smiled. “Fortunately, I have this other story for the moment.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Folsom is not the world’s ugliest prison, though some inmates might not agree. Built on the banks of the American River rushing down from the Sierra and still carrying flecks left over from gold rush days, Folsom had its share of hangings until the “invention” of the gas chamber moved executions to San Quentin, allowing Folsom to acquire a gentler reputation. Photos taken at certain angles, with the river in the foreground and the walls and buildings nestled in the shrubbery and fields behind, hardly show it as a prison at all. On a picture postcard, with its turreted cupola rising over granite walls, it has the aspect of a medieval castle, perhaps in the Rhine Valley or along the Loire, ramparts gazing down on the sweet-flowing river below. Other angles, those with guard towers and electrified fences, show it for what it is.

  They were identified at the main gate, searched and admitted. Lawyer Milstein was waiting at the gate, and they were escorted across the yard to the visitors’ waiting room. It was hotter inside than out, and a guard suggested they wait outside in the visitors’ patio area.

  Several broad canopies had been set up, each covering a table and two benches. A handful of prisoners in blue strolled the yard with visitors. People sat under the canopies or in the shade of the main building, talking, holding hands, nervous, saying what they could in the time they had, afr
aid they would forget something. Visitors were dressed casually, though here and there men in lawyers’ uniforms—dark suits, ties and fedoras—were spotted. Lizzie found herself looking for Barton Pitts but knew Milstein would have arranged to have him kept far away. Gil l’Amoureux was at Folsom, too, a popular place. She hadn’t thought of Gil since his trial. Twelve to fifteen, she recalled. She wondered when he’d be getting out and what Angie thought about that, made a mental note to ask her at the wedding.

  “Not bad as prisons go,” said the lawyer as they waited, “and I’ve seen ’em all—at least in California.” Lizzie remembered Milstein’s baggy eyes and lisp from the trial. She’d said nothing about the coming meeting to Cal on the drive up—uncomfortable about seeing Callender again and convinced they were on a wild goose chase. She’d come because curiosity got the better of her, as it usually did.

  They sat at a table under a canopy that stopped the sun but not the heat, their eyes fixed on the door leading to the visitor’s room inside the main building. Time crawled as the sun rose higher, beating down ever stronger on the canopy. At length, Callender emerged from the building and stood a moment outside shielding his eyes, accustoming them in the bright sun. He nodded to a guard posted by the door and started across the grounds alone.

  She watched him coming: the man who’d been cheated by her father and killed him in revenge. Cal knew him; she didn’t. She’d seen him at the trial. McManus wouldn’t let her cover it, but she’d been there. What she remembered, what she would never forget, was what he did after the shooting. Pitts, still the lead prosecutor in those days, kept emphasizing it, making sure the scene was indelible in the jurors’ minds. “You shot Eddie Mull, Mr. Callender, but why did you kick his body into the ocean, why did you have to do that?” Watching Callender coming toward the tent, she didn’t want to look at his face. She made herself do it.

  Milstein went out to shake his client’s hand. “Why don’t we all sit down,” he said. No other hands were offered, though Lizzie saw Callender start to offer Cal his hand, then stop. The man’s blue eyes had lost none of their intensity, she noted, and he stared hard at her as introductions were made. The mustache was gone. He and Milstein sat down on one side of the table, leaving Lizzie and Cal to slide in on the bench across from them. Everyone but Callender, who looked serene and cool, was dripping in the heat. She felt her blouse soaked through.