Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  “An hour earlier and we could have attended the vigil for us,” she said.

  He looked straight ahead, straight into the eyes of the boarding passengers, defying them to recognize him. Filing in, pushing and chattering, most didn’t notice the shabby pair at the rear. One or two who caught his eye looked quickly away, embarrassed.

  The car started up again, trundling on, over Sunset, along Silver Lake. They both stared hard at Tony’s ice cream shop, where it all started. They clanged across the dry riverbed and over the little cross streets, stopping to let passengers out, mostly Soldiers picked up at the temple. How well they both knew this route, how many times each had taken it—though, oddly, never before together. It was midweek and except for the temple vigil no reason for people to be out. Day workers were already home, night and swing shifters already at work.

  The building would be watched, but there was a back alley. They spotted the stakeout, a dark sedan with a man inside. Getting off past the building, they circled the block to approach from the rear, checking for a rear lookout, seeing no one, slipping separately down the alley, past the car stalls, past the garbage cans, a cat darting out, into the rear entrance. Angie went first, waiting inside until Willie was safely in. They had five flights to climb up the service stairs, and Willie, with the suitcases, took them slowly.

  Breathing heavily, he set the bags down outside the door and leaned against the wall. Angie had the keys out but hesitated, waiting for him to catch his breath, understanding the effort he’d made. They listened to the quiet building, people already retired, the clang of another trolley somewhere far off. Neither had given any thought to the apartment. Why would they after a month? The important thing was to get in without being seen.

  She turned the key, opened the door, switched on the light and screamed. Willie came in quickly behind her and shut the door, afraid the scream would bring people into the hallway. They stood against the door, looking out over a living room littered with newspapers and trash. They instantly understood that he had been there, living there. The curtains were closed, and she had not drawn them. To their left, the kitchen alcove and table looked a mess as well, and the shades to the street were down, something she never did. To their right, the door to the bedroom was open.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” said Willie.

  “It’s been a month,” said Angie. “He’s cleared out.”

  “He has a key.”

  “Put the chain on, Willie.”

  “We could go to my place.”

  “Walk by your front desk and it will be on the front page tomorrow. No, I’ll change the sheets and we’ll deal with the mess tomorrow. I want sleep.”

  In the bedroom, Gil lay quiet as a mouse, barely breathing, listening. He capped the bottle and came up on his elbows. Good thing he’d turned out the lights. He got up silently in the dark, catching the bottle before it thumped to the carpet. Moving quietly in his boots, he slipped behind the bedroom door. Through the crack he saw a bearded old man put the chain on the door. He saw her start toward the kitchen and stop, turning instead toward the bedroom. They’d thought he was gone but now weren’t sure. She turned toward the bedroom but couldn’t see because of the darkness. Couldn’t make up her mind, took a step back toward the chained door, then spun around and started toward the bedroom. He held his breath and didn’t twitch a muscle.

  She flipped the switch.

  “Gotcha,” he cried, jumping out and grabbing her wrist.

  Her scream was deafening. “Wil-l-i-eee!”

  He punched her hard in the gut to shut her up. She collapsed.

  “This is the guy,” Gil shouted, pointing at Willie. “This . . . !”

  Staggering to her feet, Angie moved toward the closed window that gave onto Glendale Boulevard, but Gil grabbed her and knocked her back.

  Willie hesitated, turned and ran for the living room windows, tripping on a rug and nearly falling. The detective was just across the street. Surely, he would be listening and looking up. That’s why he was there. Open the curtains, he told himself.

  Grabbing Angie’s wrists in a gnarly hand and slapping her hard with his free hand when she tried to kick him, he dragged her screaming into the living room. He had to silence her quick and smashed her mouth. With a heel she got him in the shin. “Whore,” he shouted, smashing her again, throwing her to the floor, standing over his prey, kicking her in the ribs and stomach, hurting her really bad, turning screams into soft sick moans.

  Willie ran at him, knocking him from the back, putting him to his knees. Willie was a big man, but not a strong one and his only chance was to delay him long enough to get to the window and signal the cop. He dashed back to the windows, tangling in falling curtains when he couldn’t find the draw cord. The venetian blinds were drawn. Angie tried to get up and Gil kicked her in the face, the side of his big hard roughneck’s boot catching her in the mouth, teeth against soft lips, explosion of blood.

  Wrapped in curtains like a statue before unveiling, Willie tried to scream, but had no voice. An arm pulled tight around his throat, closing it so he couldn’t breathe. He heard banging from the next apartment or maybe the floor below. Why didn’t they come? He kicked out, trying to loosen the arm that grew tighter until he blacked out. His trachea was crushed, his blood was stopped, his voyage was over.

  Sobbing, delirious, her dress up around her waist, Angie lay still on the carpet.

  “And now you,” he said, picking her up, wiping blood from her bleeding face with his sleeve and carrying her into the bedroom. “You be good to me now, just like in the old days.”

  Hours later, with Gil drunk and spent on stained, bloody foul-smelling sheets, she finally reached the window and screamed to the cop outside, who had awakened. She could hardly open her mouth and when she tried, the wounds that had sought to close while she was being raped reopened and blood gushed again. The cop came quickly but not quickly enough to catch Gil, who gave her a final belt and was out the door and down the back stairway.

  A large man, unkept, unshaven, physically depleted, hungover, covered in blood and well known to the police, he was caught the next day at a trolley stop.

  Chapter 19

  They gave her blood, stitched her shattered face, which had turned black; set her broken jaw and right arm, bandaged her broken nose, covered her eyes swollen shut from the stitching, taped her fractured ribs, swabbed and bandaged cuts and contusions everywhere on her body, tended scratches on her thighs and around the vagina. They treated for concussion and probed for organ damage and internal bleeding. They stitched and bandaged the gashes on her legs. Capping her broken front teeth would have to wait until they unwired her jaw. She lay semiconscious for days, unable to see, held immobile by cords, drugged on antibiotics and analgesics, fed intravenously and denied all visitors. A police guard stood round-the-clock outside her room, and reporters from newspapers across the nation were kept away, though an enterprising one made it as far as the guard outside her room.

  Her mind awakened at some point, telling her she was dead. She could not see or feel, had no sense of time, space or body. What is that, if not death? Her mind alone told her she was not dead, or that if she was dead that her soul had survived in some strange invisible dead place. “If a man keep my saying he shall never see death,” and she had kept His saying. She had the feeling of being lost in deep, black space, some kind of heaven without light. At some point—hours, days, weeks, she didn’t know—dim light seeped in, she was aware of it though she could not see. She heard distant voices. Her mind told her she was alive. The Lord’s design, His trial by fire, a voice said, and she had answered. Jesus was not done with her.

  Gradually she became aware of the coming and going of doctors and nurses, of people talking, changing her bandages, manipulating her body, which she had begun to feel again, at least parts of it. At some point one eye partially opened and she saw shadows in the l
ight that with time turned into people. The people were all in white, but one day she saw dark suits, and they tried to talk to her. She began to think more lucidly and to move. Her eyes opened, both of them, and she could hear, but her lips were sewn shut.

  The dark suits came again and again. She understood them, but had no desire to answer because she could not speak and could not write because she could not move. She was plastered and wired and tubed, immobilized like a ship in dry dock. Cal came to tell her about Willie’s quiet burial at Forest Lawn Cemetery, but she could not cry. He told her of plans for a memorial service, plans that the Soldiers, led by Henry Callender, insisted must await her recovery. He was sitting in a chair by the window and then came over to the side of the bed and told her not to worry, that they would wait. The Soldiers wanted her, no one else. She wondered how she looked. Others had flinched at the sight. Cal did not.

  She had not seen her face, had no desire to see it until the final surgery was done and time had passed and the scars healed. How many months or years would it take? Martyrdom is never pretty. Cal told her that DA Barton Pitts had abandoned his plan to prosecute her and Willie for “outrage to public morals and illegal flight.” Only Gil was to be prosecuted. Cal was not sure she understood anything. There had always been two Angies for him, and he wondered if both would survive this ordeal.

  Had she lain there for a week, a month, a year? Time had no meaning. One day, someone was waiting when her eyes opened. Pitts had considered sending young Asa Aldridge, who he knew was friendly with Lizzie Mull, but changed his mind. Pitts was always careful with the Mulls, culling advantages from overlooking Eddie’s operations and ignoring complaints, including from the archdiocese and the Rev. Bob Shoemaker, about Willie and Sister Angie’s “healing.” The murder and coming trial would test his indulgence, already stretched by the continued presence of the Providence in Santa Monica Bay, which he knew belonged to Eddie.

  It was the morning of the twenty-fourth day (though she had no way of knowing), and the person waiting was a large man sitting sloppily with his legs spread, glancing at her from time to time while writing or doodling on a legal pad propped on his stomach. She closed her eyes, hoping he would be gone when she opened them. Who was he? How long had he been watching her? Why had they let him in? The visitor noticed the eye movement.

  “Peter Federmeister,” he announced, standing and approaching the bed. “Assistant district attorney.” He held his business card for her to see and placed it on the bedside table. “I know you’re not well. I’ll be brief and to the point.”

  He pulled the chair closer and sat down. He was heavy-set, middle-aged, with a square chin beginning to accumulate several satellites. His head was mostly bald with a few crisscrossing strands and he wore a rumpled brown suit and vest. His hat lay on the windowsill. He had nervous hands that wrote or doodled constantly, sign of a man who needed a smoke but knew he could not in a hospital room.

  “Your husband has pleaded not guilty to murder charges,” he said. “He is plea-bargaining with us. We’d like a first-degree conviction, intent to kill, but he is holding out for second degree, maybe even manslaughter.” He looked to see if she understood, but she made no sign. “My point is this: I see your pain and suffering plainly before me. But without your help, the man who did this to you could get manslaughter or even go free.”

  With her face stitched, she could make sounds, but not words. She did not like to make sounds because they were inhuman. She was ugly and pitiful and hated it. For the last two days she had been able to scrawl words left-handed, and they had brought her pad and pencil.

  “We are looking for a way to show that your husband’s attack on you and Reverend Mull was premeditated. Can you help us with that? Letters, phone-calls, threats, things like that?”

  “WAITING BEHIND DOOR!!!” she scribbled slowly in barely legible script.

  He read and looked up at her. “Yes, but apparently he was getting ready to leave. If you’d returned later, maybe only minutes, you know what I mean. Fate. That’s bad luck, crime of passion, not premeditation. Now if there was a threat of some kind . . .”

  “urder!” she grunted, the “m” impossible.

  “Unfortunately, we can’t be sure the jury will agree.”

  Badly wanting to fly back to the silent comfort of her blackness, she shook her head. “Rafe,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  She wrote again: “RAPE!!!”

  Uncomprehending, he stared blankly. “Rape? But the man is your husband.”

  And the tears finally came. Her poor swollen eyes overflowed with all the built-up grief and pain and fear and frustration and anger from being dead and coming back to life and lying in bed for so long and being such a mess and now being subjected to interrogation by a man who was clearly a fool. How, when nothing else on her face worked, could tears fall? Would no one ever know the truth? No, clearly not, for she could never repeat what happened to her that night. How it felt to be pinned on the cross. Her Calvary. The doctors could tell from her battered body. No one else would ever know.

  Disoriented by the tears, Federmeister fell silent.

  “TRIED TO KILL ME!” she scrawled in capitals, which were easier to form.

  “The man is your husband. He caught you with another man. He was aggrieved.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Barton Pitts had no doubt that it would be the biggest trial of his career, the biggest in the city since the McNamara brothers were tried for bombing the Times building, with Clarence Darrow for the defense. Never had city newspapers, mainly Hearst and Chandler, sold more papers or made more money than since Willie and Angie went missing, and they went on milking the story for everything it was worth. Sex, religion, and murder—it didn’t get any better than that. As much as Pitts longed to bring Angie to court for the showdown with her husband, the newspapers privately urged him to take his time.

  If Pitts had followed his instincts things might have gone better. Gil l’Amoureux was as perfect a villain as Hollywood could produce, and Pitts wanted to get on with it. But Angie was still in and out of surgery. She was to be the star witness against her husband, waiving her right of spousal privilege. Without her testimony, Gil had a good chance of getting away with murder. The newspapers were on her side for she helped them sell papers, but the airwaves were hostile. For the Rev. Bob Shoemaker, the most influential pastor in town with Willie gone, Angie was a Jezebel and, worse, had made Los Angeles a national laughingstock.

  “Here in Los Angeles we take our religion seriously,” he broadcast. “Remember the Ten Commandments, which come directly from God: Adultery is as great a sin as murder.”

  Pitts first learned of Angie’s plans to leave the hospital in a Times story about the coming memorial service for Willie Mull. With thousands of Soldiers arriving, they’d moved the service from the temple to the baseball park at Wrigley Field on Avalon Boulevard, a few blocks from Exposition Park where the Soldiers would set up their campground. Pitts met with Superior Court Judge Herman Anzug, and they agreed that with Sister Angie leaving the hospital they could now proceed. The trial of Gil l’Amoureux was docketed for Nov. 14.

  By then, spring had come and gone, and it had not been a good one. Willie Mull was murdered on May 3, 1940, one week before Hitler invaded France and two weeks before Capt. Arnaud Ricot de Scitivaux was shot down over Sedan. Maggie’s letter informing them of Arnaud’s death arrived two weeks later, and the family penned a joint letter of sympathy urging her to come home before it was too late. Willie’s death also changed things for his son, who had been planning to leave the temple to begin study for law school. Cal decided to stay on to prepare the memorial service and make sure the temple passed into the right hands.

  The Soldiers arrived from across the country, thousands of them, from as far as the KWEM antennas could reach. They came to honor the man who for years had been a part of their lives, a fixt
ure on their radio dial, a voice in their homes as familiar as that of Henry Aldrich or the Great Gildersleeve. When the day arrived, twenty thousand of them marched down Santa Barbara Avenue and filed into the ballpark as the choir sang the familiar funeral hymns—“Oh Day of Rest and Gladness” and “Cast Thy Burden Upon the Lord.” They’d known death and had sung those songs before. Seated, they watched as the young woman dressed in black and wearing a black veil was helped across the grass and up to her place on the dais.

  Reporting the story the next day, the Times wrote:

  Not even a cough could be heard as the battered young woman whose lifted veil revealed her terrible scars came to the words of the eulogy that everyone was waiting for. This was the service for the Rev. Willie Mull, and surely she must say something about his adultery. What would scripture answer to a man of the cloth murdered by a husband who caught him with his wife? Scripture must deal with it today, the mourners knew; tomorrow the law would have its turn.

  Speaking slowly, as though each word was excruciating, she did not flinch: “To those who say Willie Mull committed adultery, I say this: He did not know! I am the sinner.”

  With this, many in the crowd leapt to their feet shouting, “no, no!”

  “Yes,” she continued. “Willie Mull did not violate the Lord’s commandment. I did! I loved him so. I loved him so much that I hid the truth, fearful he could not love me as I loved him. Cast your stones at me, not at Willie. The man’s heart burst with love . . . with love for you . . . with love for me . . . with love for Jesus. He did not know! He did not know!

  “And when I told him—yes, as the end approached, I told him the truth, that I was married to a monster. What was he to do? Cast me over? Send me back? No. He comforted me. And he knew; yes, he knew what was coming, and still he loved me and he comforted me. Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned? He knew, and we wept together.”