Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (top 50 books to read .TXT) 📕

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