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

looked her straight in the eyes. “You don’t think I’m thinking about that?”

McManus was surprised by what she’d found out, but not too much. He’d arrived in L.A. when Charlie Crawford, a colleague of Eddie Mull’s, ran the Prohibition mob, and no policeman ever touched Crawford. The mayor at the time, George Cryer, went through six chiefs of police during his tenure, each worse than the other. They couldn’t get Charlie because Charlie paid everyone off. Everyone but assistant DA Dave Clark, who went to Charlie’s office one day and shot him dead, along with a reporter who’d picked the wrong time to visit Charlie.

McManus covered the trial. Clark claimed he’d done his civic duty to rid the city of a scoundrel when no one else would. The reporter was just a case of bad luck. He was acquitted. “Would Clark have done his civic duty if he’d been in on the payoffs?” reporter McManus wrote. They cut it out of the story.

“You expect the police to do a line-up with Chili in it?” he asked Lizzie.

“If Fritz Singer orders it.”

“Why would the DA turn against his mentor?”

“Because I’m going to write the story and make him.

The day she wrote the story that brought Pitts down from Folsom to stand trial for the murder of Pat Murphy was the day Lizzie had her first row with her husband. Certain she was putting her life in danger and maybe their son’s as well, Joe Morton hated everything about the Pitts assignment. He’d told her that at the beginning, easing off only when she told him she’d take six months off after the story ran. They’d go traveling and let things blow over.

The row came when she told him she couldn’t keep her promise.

They were in the living room after dinner. Joe had had his usual two drinks before dinner and glass of cabernet at the table. He was almost ready to go into his study and start working when she told him.

“No,” he said, quickly. “You can’t renege. Too dangerous. Plus, you promised.”

“Something has come up.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Don’t they have other reporters at that newspaper?”

“Not for something like this.”

Annoyed, angry even, he went to the sideboard for a snifter of Courvoisier to calm down. He didn’t care what had come up. Another murder? Something worse? She’d do it anyway. He was intensely proud of his wife, but he just didn’t always respect her judgment. That was the trouble with being the best. They want you, only you, no one else will do. He’d been there, covering the rise of the Nazis in the thirties. He knew that the best stories involve the best reporters and the biggest risks because the stakes are highest. Every reporter knows it and lusts for it. No one declines the assignment.

“So tell me,” he said, sitting down again, calmer.

“It’s Cal’s story, and he won’t give it to anyone else. The head of the L.A. public utilities board, a guy named Fred Barrett, resigned. It wasn’t much of a story because who’s ever heard of Fred Barrett or the public utilities board? He resigned because the city council overruled his board to approve the sale of Pacific Electric and Los Angeles Railway to something called National City Lines.”

“That is a story?”

“It gets better. National City doesn’t have any lines and doesn’t have any money. It is a front for a consortium led by General Motors, which wants to junk the city’s railways and replace them with buses. Barrett calls it an illegal conspiracy and says he informed the council in closed session and had assurances the sale would be disapproved. He also informed the US Department of Justice. Nobody wants more gasoline engines in this city with the smog we already have. Barrett says he has proof that at least three council members were paid off by the consortium to change their votes. We’re about to lose the world’s best transportation system.”

Chapter 30

When Eddie Mull’s estate was probated, the bankers at Security Trust invited the widow and her daughters to bank headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard for discussions. Joe Sartori, Security’s founder and Eddie’s friend, had passed on by then, but the founder’s successors were determined to hold on to the widow’s jointure, valued at some $90 million. If Eddie was not quite in the league with Ed Doheny, whose oil fortune had had a few years more to grow, it was still a handsome sum, nicely up from the $107,650 he’d started with. Lending banks like Security Trust needed all the deposits they could get to keep up with demand from young war veterans settling in Los Angeles and seeking loans for new homes and cars.

The bankers were businesslike and the meeting was expeditious. After deducting taxes, the probate court had passed the Mull estate entirely to the widow, who informed the bankers that she wished to share it equally with her daughters. Cal Mull had already declined to share in any part of the assets. The daughters considered liquidating, but Cal urged them to hang on. In the postwar housing boom and with Detroit starting to produce passenger cars again, prices of land and oil would only rise. He had some ideas.

After meeting the bankers, Nelly took her daughters to lunch at Chasen’s, a Beverly Hills restaurant not convenient for either working daughter but their mother’s favorite because of its proximity to her dance studio, which she now owned. Her dance instructors, all young, athletic, attractive and hoping to be discovered, preferred Romanoff’s to Chasen’s because it was brighter inside and easier to be seen, but Nelly liked Chasen’s for lunch. It was closer and quieter. She rarely saw her daughters together and she wanted to talk. She ordered chardonnay. The girls chose iced tea.

“Wasn’t Uncle Willie’s first church around here somewhere?” asked Maggie after the drinks arrived. Marriage to an easy-going flyer seemed to her mother to have been quite the right medicine for her test