Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  She finished brushing her hair. “And what would you tell him: that your girlfriend is jumpy? Is that good enough for a postponement?”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t funny. They were both jumpy, hadn’t slept that well. “Maybe we can get them to put a watch on the house while I’m gone.”

  “Or I’ll bring back one of the security men with me from the temple. For a couple of days, we’ll manage.”

  “If it was Gil, he’s risking a lot. They’ll send him back to Folsom.”

  “Maybe you scared him off with your gun. At least I know where it is now. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Have you ever fired a gun?”

  “What do you think?”

  He went to her and took her in his arms, her small body reaching only to his shoulders. She shuddered, and he pulled her tight, kissing the top of her head. They stood for some time like that. “You won’t need it. We’ll get you all the protection you need. Three days at most and I’ll be back.” He lifted her head and kissed her.

  Chapter 40

  “Larry wants you,” Phil MacPherson called across the newsroom. “He’s agitated. Better get in there.”

  She looked up and saw him waving his arms like a monkey in a glass cage, a sign that meant whomever you’re talking to, hang up and get over here. Fast! As it happened, she was on the phone with someone she’d been trying to reach for days for comments about the federal court verdict in the great transportation conspiracy. This better be good, she thought, hanging up, pulling down her skirt and starting toward McManus, fast but not too fast. She was in a bad mood, no question. The Chicago verdict sickened her.

  He was standing. “Temple of the Angels,” he said, brusquely. “Salazar is already there for photos. Verducci has gone from the hall of justice. Let them handle the details. The obituary is being updated. I want a full background story from you. Full! Get going.”

  “Sorry, Larry. You forgot to tell me what happened.”

  “I thought that’s why you were on the phone. Someone got Sister Angie.”

  She waited for more, but that was it. She ran out, grabbed her purse and a notebook, decided a cab would be faster than a Times car and she wouldn’t have to look for parking. She took the elevator down from the third floor, hailed a cruiser on Spring Street and told him to take the tunnel to Echo Park.

  Someone got Sister Angie—what did he mean exactly?

  “You don’t want me to take Temple, lady, more direct?”

  “Too much construction, take Second Street.”

  “To the park?”

  “The Temple of the Angels.”

  “Ah.”

  He’d swung around and was heading west toward Second.

  “You wouldn’t be a reporter, would you?” He was looking at her in the rearview mirror, staring more at her than at the street. “I heard the news on the radio. Helluva thing. She was good for this town. Place will be mobbed. Might not be able to get you close.”

  He pushed a button, and they heard an excited voice on KHJ. Sister Angie attacked by her ex-husband, who apparently got into the building through the kitchen with vagrants having breakfast. The police had him in custody. Still no report on the condition of the victim.

  Normally it was a ten-minute drive, except that with police action everything was slowed to a crawl. People in the streets. It wasn’t a mob, but was getting close. Traffic barely moving. She tried to shut the KHJ reporter out and think for a minute, but was jolted back by the news flash: “KHJ has just learned that Sister Angie has been pronounced dead; I repeat: Sister Angie l’Amoureux, pastor of the Temple of the Angels, is dead.”

  She sank back into the worn leather seat and sighed. How ghastly. That poor woman. Why did they let him out? They knew he would try again. Suddenly she thought of Cal. Where was he? Richfield Building? Had he heard? How would he take it? No time for that now, had to focus on the task. The Times would run a murder story, an obituary, interviews, probably a sidebar on Gil. She was to do a full background story, which meant pulling everything into a narrative—everything. She’d worked for McManus long enough to know he’d expect twenty-five hundred words. She’d have to talk to Gil. Ugh. They’d have him downtown by now. No manslaughter this time; this time the gas chamber and he wouldn’t even blink. She’d covered brutes like him before, men always ready to trade death for a good orgasm. She wondered how he had killed her. Strangled, like Uncle Willie? Traffic wasn’t moving. At Glendale, people on the sidewalks had moved into the street and still more flowing out from the side streets as word spread around the city. She’d do better to get out and walk but decided to wait to see if traffic started moving again. She started back over events in her mind, back to the beginning:

  Uncle Willie meets Angie in an ice cream parlor in Glendale. Before the war. Gil finds out so they flee to Mexico. Larry sends her and Luis to find them, but too late. Gil is waiting when they come back, kills Willie, rapes Angie. Gil threatens Angie at the trial. Angie steps in for Willie at the temple, becomes a symbol for women. Spousal rape becomes a crime, at least in California. The temple becomes bigger than ever. So does Sister Angie.

  How much of it would be in the obituary? Times obituaries, dry, bloodless things done years in advance for important people. This is for your obituary, the reporter says, voice flat, usually on the phone. Really, am I dead? the subject asks. Ha ha. Always gets a nervous laugh. Reporter never joins in. Filed away and forgotten and pulled out when the big day comes. She’d worked on obits herself, the dead beat, it’s called, though not on Angie’s. She wondered why. She knew more about Angie than anyone else at the paper. Maybe that was it: they didn’t think she’d be objective. Then why put her on this story? Because Larry didn’t handle obituaries.

  Suddenly she felt nauseous, inhaling fumes, wasting time in a taxi that wasn’t moving. Momentary panic. How to do this? Why am I heading for the temple? What can I learn there? Cabbie staring at her in the rear mirror, waiting for traffic to move again, which it wasn’t doing. Cal . . . the Richfield Building. That’s where I should be. She spied a phone booth, paid the driver with a nice tip, jumped out and made the call. He was watching the news, about to leave for the temple, voice shaky. Roads blocked, she said, you’ll never make it. Wait for me.

  “I have to get over there,” were his first words when she walked into his office.

  “Impossible,” she said. “I already tried.”

  He was disheveled, jacket off, tie loosened, shirt wrinkled, pacing, restless, clearly lost. They stood a moment watching the television reporter. Cameras, reporters, police, a huge crowd pressing in on the closed-up building. They’d have to open doors before long. He turned it off and walked to the window from where he could see the antenna on top of the temple. “I failed her,” he said, simply.

  “You didn’t fail her, Cal. You’re not a bodyguard.”

  “Why exactly are you here,” he said suddenly, anger in the voice, turning back from the window. “You’re not planning on putting me in this, are you?”

  “I’ve got until eight o’clock,” she said, avoiding a direct answer, the old writers’ conflict. “You knew Angie better than anyone.”

  “No,” he said, the voice dry, empty, “I can’t talk about any of that.”

  “No secrets, remember?”

  “This is different. You’re talking about publication.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t . . .”

  She headed him off.

  “Because, Cal, people won’t let go of a person like Sister Angie, let go as if she were, well, an ordinary person, like you or me. She left her mark. She changed things for women forever.” She was floundering. “Help me, Cal, that’s all I ask. What was it? What did she have? Where did it come from? Was it authentic?”

  He stood there with his eyes closed. She was losing him.

  “No secrets, you say,” he said, a
t length, opening his eyes. “You’re asking me, an agnostic, to comment on people of religion. Is that fair? Was it authentic? Are you trying to get me to tell you she was a hypocrite?”

  “Cal, please!”

  “Sorry, but this is hard.”

  Anger in the voice, so unusual. She’d never understood the relationship. Now she did.

  She regrouped. “At this very moment there are thousands of people trying to get to the temple, millions watching and listening. Imagine what the funeral will be like! What was it? What was her magic? Why do they refuse to let her die? Help me.”

  Just get started, she thought, her mind turning, let it come out. Yes, Cal, it’s hard, only don’t let me down. She hadn’t taken her notebook out. She didn’t want him distracted. He stood framed in the window for some time, beautiful San Gabriel Mountains rising behind him, handsome face grieving, trying to hold it in. First his father, now his lover. What is he thinking? She didn’t know him, not like she knew Maggie. Is that the way it has to be, women and men? Always protecting themselves. A good man, trying to do so much, maybe too much: advise his cousins, protect the environment, be a lawyer, be a godfather, good friend, always there. And love? Told Maggie he’d never been in love. But that was then. So strange. She thought of the line from Wuthering Heights: “Our souls are the same.”

  He moved away from the window and started pacing.

  Now, Cal, now . . .

  It came tumbling out. “She was so alive, so vibrant, someone you wanted to understand every way possible—spiritually, emotionally, physically. You wanted to draw her power into you. Do you think Dad wanted to ruin his life? He was bewitched. So were the millions who followed her when he was gone, after the trial, the thousands who came down the aisles every week to be healed, to be saved, to get down on their knees with her and pray. She changed things. Isn’t that what we all try to do in our little way? She made lives better. She had the power. Don’t ask me what it is or how it’s done. Yes, it was a kind of magic. She lay near death for months—and then the message of Wrigley Field, and the trial where everyone opposed her—the law, the newspapers, the public, everyone but the Soldiers. And to turn it all around and become a national hero. The courage, the phenomenal courage!”

  And you, she kept thinking. And you?

  Gesturing as he walked, the words came flowing out non-stop, seeking to articulate something he’d never expressed before. It was coming too fast, and she took out her notebook. He didn’t even notice.

  “It worked on me like it worked on Dad, like it worked on everyone.”

  “Aren’t you describing love?”

  He stopped pacing and stared. A cloud passed, and it dawned on him he was talking of her in the past tense. Circuits in his mind were flashing: Angie is dead! Angie is dead! He turned away, back to the window, shook his head to be rid of it.

  “Dad loved her. I saw the way he looked at her—and she at him. Of course it was love. A higher kind of love, physical, yes, but mixed with something most of us don’t have. Mixed with God.” Her eyebrows might have raised, but he was not looking. “People like that are believers. They attract other believers. They attracted each other. That’s when their love began.”

  “Did you love her?”

  She had to ask it. Another reporter might not have, but Cal was her brother.

  He spun back to face her. “Love her! Of course I did.” And then: “But not like Willie. That was impossible.”

  He stopped, trying to gather his thoughts.

  “There was a physicality to her. There has to be, you know. Have you ever looked closely at religious figures, the ones we see in paintings and icons—the Virgin Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist? These are not unattractive people. Who knows if they really looked like that, but the people who make the paintings and icons know what they’re doing. A homely woman could never have accomplished what Angie did. Her appeal was in the idea that God or nature or whatever gave her something special—physically and spiritually special—and that people who believed in her could tap into it. Dad had the same thing.”

  He slumped down into a chair shaking his head. It was over. He’d given as much as he would. The rest she would find elsewhere. She sat quietly wondering how she was to get it into words, the right words, knowing that she would do it for the Times in the next few hours, but that later, on her own time, in the future, she would make it into something more, much more, something between hard covers, something that would endure as long as the temple itself. The words she would use now—his words—were the words she would use then.

  She sat back and closed her notebook. She checked her watch. Already noon, the day slipping away, deadlines closing in. She had to be back at the office by four o’clock to start writing, which gave her four more hours for reporting. Where to start? Where to go? Whom to see? She had no time to lose.

  Suddenly: “I remember that Uncle Willie met Angie in an ice cream shop in Glendale. You wouldn’t happen to know where that shop is?”

  The idea revived him. “Tony’s? Of course I know Tony’s. Let’s go.”

  The funeral was bigger even than Willie’s memorial service at Wrigley Field. Angie’s body lay in state in the temple for three days. The Times reported forty-five thousand people filed past her bier before it was closed, many coming from outside the state. No one recorded how many of them were women, but it would easily have been two-thirds. Flowers valued at fifty-thousand dollars were contributed, and a record eight thousand worshipers attended the three-hour service, which was led by the Rev. Marcus Wynetski—two thousand obliged to listen outside to the KWEM broadcast that went out around the nation.

  Afterward, mourners followed the casket to Forest Lawn Cemetery in a mile-long cortege across Griffith Park while eleven trucks transported the flowers. Twelve pallbearers struggled to transport the 1,200-pound bronze casket to a grassy spot next to Willie high in the hills, rest platforms stationed for the casket along the way. Across the nation, newspapers and magazines devoted special sections to her life and achievements, above all her work to give women equal spousal rights and to bring evangelical pentecostalism into the mainstream of American religion.

  Even the Rev. Bob Shoemaker, Willie’s old tormentor, who’d turned his righteous wrath on Angie after Willie’s death (and after his application to succeed Willie at the temple was turned down), had something nice to say on his radio program, surely biting his teeth as he said it: “I will never understand why God used the Soldiers for God to start such a movement, but I can easily understand why He will use them to carry on. They are effective. They are more like Wesley’s army than we Methodists would like to admit.”

  Part Four

  Chapter 41

  “Didn’t they teach you to at least try to see the other person’s point of view?”

  Robby frowned. “That from you, Dad, the former communist? I am amazed.”

  “Things were different before the war. Everyone but the plutocrats was on the left.” He was on a glass of cabernet after two Jim Beams. “You’d have been there, too. There were no jobs. Today, jobs for everyone!”

  Robinson Adams Morton—Ram, to his friends (only the immediate family was allowed to call him Robby)—was home. Four years at Phillips Exeter, followed by six years at Stanford, where he’d earned an undergraduate engineering degree and graduate law degree, had opened all the doors. There was the little problem of Vietnam, but he was working on it. Exeter was a prep school for the Ivy League, but after four years he’d had enough of the New England ladder: Exeter-Choate=Harvard-Yale=Wall Street. He’d visited enough of his Eastern classmates’ homes to know he didn’t want to end up like their fathers.

  From his grandmother, he knew all about Grandpa Eddie. He knew about the murder, of course, but what mainly interested him was how Eddie had ruled Los Angeles for a while, which one man couldn’t do in New York or Boston, which is why he had come back. On grad day at Stanf
ord Law, Robby had interviewed with every law firm and corporation headquartered in Los Angeles. An Exeter-Stanford connection didn’t mean much in the East, but in Los Angeles it was gold. It was only a matter of which firm to choose, and Robby was taking his time.

  He glanced at his mother sitting back after dinner sipping her coffee and listening as she always did. As much as he enjoyed going toe-to-toe with his father, his mother vexed him. He blamed her, not his father, for sending him away. If she’d wanted him, she would have kept him, but she was too busy. A decade later, the pain was still there, abated only slightly by knowing how few of his Exeter classmates were close to their mothers. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? The weaning that would make them men.

  “Me a communist?” he said with a little smirk. “I don’t think so.”

  “I wouldn’t be one today either,” Joe said. “Don’t you see, that’s my point: things were different in the thirties. It helps to remember that.”

  Nothing his father did shocked the boy, not even his ridiculous nom de plume. Letters arrived at their house addressed to Memory Laine. Some secret! It had, however, been a shock to find out what his mother was doing, she and Aunt Maggie: a shock to learn of the $50 million Mull Foundation. With money like that, why did his mother still work and his father scrounge out a living writing scripts for B movies and translating the works of communists like Bertolt Brecht? At Exeter, the headmaster called him in one day to talk about that. They weren’t going to expel him, he joked; punish the son for the sins of the father was not the Exeter way, ha-ha, au contraire. But for heaven’s sake, Robinson, hasn’t your father heard of the Cold War?

  And that was before Vietnam.

  “No, Dad,” he said, careful not to raise his voice. Emotion defeats reason, defeats judgment, they taught at Exeter. The greater man the greater courtesy, said Tennyson. “To say that something bad is good because of the circumstances is relativism. There are objective criteria for judging things. The communist system was as flawed then as it is today.”