Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  “Hey you, there!” a deckhand shouted, pointing at him. “No boarding until everyone has left the launch!”

  Eddie was halfway up and looked up and saw Henry blocking his way. He was not five feet away, and Henry held the Remington Derringer aimed straight at his heart.

  “Henry, for God’s sake . . .”

  “I wish I had a gun to give you, Eddie; make this fair and square. But when did you ever play fair and square?”

  Two barrels right into the heart. Eddie Mull fell at his feet.

  With a boot that needed polishing, Henry pushed the body under the ropes, kicked it into the sea.

  “Think of the water, Eddie,” the voice outside Security Trust had told him years before. The water brought Eddie to Los Angeles, and the water carried him away.

  Part Three

  Chapter 25

  There was no better place in the world than postwar Los Angeles. Water had brought the first wave of people, and the Depression brought the second. The third wave was made up of hundreds of thousands of troops who’d passed through on their way to the Pacific, liked what they saw and decided that if they made it back, home would be Los Angeles. Maybe life wasn’t all that bad in the Eastern cities where they were brought up, at least not compared to what they had seen overseas, and it had been good enough on the farms of the Midwest, but there was nothing like Los Angeles. Once you saw it you wouldn’t settle for anything else, and the G.I. Bill made everything possible.

  A county of one million people in 1920 would have four million by 1950, totally unanticipated growth for a dusty bowl cut off from civilization by desert, mountains, and ocean, without enough indigenous water to support robust life. During those thirty years, as the Klan advertised, Los Angeles was a “white” city, an “Anglo” city. However, if the Klan had looked deeper it would have noticed that not all immigration was “Anglo.” The Asians, the blacks, the Mexicans, the Jews, came quietly and settled into their enclaves without fuss. Charlie Watts gave his name to a handsome ranchland south of downtown where tens of thousands of blacks escaping Southern segregation settled. At some point, they would outgrow Charlie Watts’s ranchland and want out, though that was still a few years away.

  Postwar Los Angeles had everything: industry, agriculture, water, mountains, beaches, a climate that meant no more freezing in winter and slushing in spring. Postwar Detroit hadn’t yet started to make cars again, but Los Angeles had a transportation system called the best in the world, a modern trolley network spidering the city from San Pedro to San Fernando, from the beaches of Redondo and Santa Monica to the mansions of Pasadena and San Marino. And let’s not forget Hollywood, which cast its glamorous aura over everything. The movie industry settled in Los Angeles for the land and the weather. So did millions of postwar Americans.

  If there was plenty for the citizenry to like, so was it for newspapers, which hit their stride as millions of new readers arrived in town. Like movies, newspapers need action and excitement to thrive. Unlike movies, they don’t make it up, but depend on the city to provide its own, preferably daily. Newspapers come in sections so there is something at breakfast for everyone. Page one is for the important news, stories about wars, catastrophes, murders. violence—things involving death. Over the years, District Attorney Barton Pitts had been a reliable source for page one stories, but Pitts had gone to prison. Elected with financial support from people he’d helped get rich, including people at the Times, Pitts’s corruption was revealed in a series of front-page stories that won Pat Murphy a Pulitzer Prize.

  And got him killed.

  “The police don’t find him because the police don’t want to find him,” McManus croaked in a voice scratchier than his usual baritone because he was smoking more and sleeping less. “They don’t find him because they’re in on it somehow—as you all know.” The city editor paused to look around the table. “How they’re in on it, I don’t know and neither do you, and I pay you to know. Either someone in this room finds Pat Murphy’s murderer or he will go on hoisting cold ones at the Canton Bazaar until another reporter is knocked off.” Another pause. “And it could be any one of you.”

  The conference room fell silent. Outside the Times third-floor windows, the First Street traffic made its usual din, muffled by double windows installed so people could talk to each other without shouting—though not all the shouting could be blamed on the traffic. Listening to the city editor, eight reporters and editors gazed out the windows to the soothing sight of palms and plants and happy people sunning themselves on the grass around city hall, where they could not hear Larry McManus.

  Lizzie was fidgeting because they’d been over all this before and had gotten nowhere. They had no leads. The pressure on McManus was building inside the newspaper and out. She was ready to ask him to take her off the metro desk and have a crack at it, but wanted him to ask first. The public had no confidence in city hall. The Times had already hinted that the police were in on it. If the Times didn’t catch the killer of its own reporter, who would?

  McManus looked around at the faces focused on him, not one of them showing any sign of speaking. “What I’m going to do,” he said, exasperation finally breaking through, “is start a running story, a daily front page notebook on the Murphy case. The notebook’s success will depend on what you bring me each day. Feed me and we will look good. Starve me and we will look stupid—a notebook with no notes.”

  He paused for a last drag on his cigarette before stubbing it out in the overflowing ashtray. Looking up, his eyes came to rest on Lizzie, and she wondered if they were thinking the same thing. “The point is,” he said, “I don’t want anyone in the city to start thinking—particularly in the police department—that we’re going to let this thing die. And God help us all if the Examiner or Daily News scoops us on the murder of our own Pat Murphy!”

  Afterward, she phoned Asa, and they agreed to meet for lunch at the bazaar. She walked over from the newspaper to find him waiting, punctual despite everything. He looked good, she thought, sharp in pinstripes and a natty red silk tie tied in a neat Windsor, better than in the dingy old days at the DA’s office. After the war he’d joined a private law office. She hadn’t seen that much of him since the divorce and her remarriage. Her view was that the divorce had been good for both of them, which wasn’t necessarily his view.

  “I worry about Larry,” she said after they were seated. “He smokes too much and worries too much. His is face redder than that tie you’re wearing. Murphy’s killer will have a second victim at this rate.”

  He was wondering why she’d called and why he’d accepted, though he had nothing else scheduled. Seeing her always hurt. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  It was not the friendliest of openings. “I’m going to ask him to put me on it. I need some names from you.”

  They’d ordered pot stickers and chicken with broccoli and noodles and watched as the waiter poured green tea. The Canton Bazaar on Temple was more like a two-story Chinese cafeteria than a bazaar. It was a hangout for anyone who had anything to do with city hall, the hall of justice, the courts or the Times. If you wanted to be seen, you stayed downstairs. If you wanted privacy, you came early and slipped upstairs. There were things going on in the back that were illegal, but nobody bothered.

  “My advice is to stay away. Anyway, I don’t know anyone up there anymore. The war, a new mayor, new DA, me a new job.”

  “Who owed Pitts, owed him enough to blow up Pat Murphy?”

  The waiter brought lunch and left quickly, as they are trained to do at the bazaar.

  “There has to be a secretary or paralegal or someone who’s been around forever and knows everything,” she said. “Just give me a name or two, somewhere to start.”

  “I’m sure your reporters have been through the staff.”

  She slurped up a noodle trying to escape. “Maybe they have.”

  “I thought you were happy
on the metro desk, thought you liked the hours.”

  Which showed how out of touch they still were. They said war changed you, but how had it changed Asa Aldridge, a USC Law School, JAG Corps guy who’d spent his career handling AWOLs and Article 32s and never made it west of Honolulu? He was the same guy she’d married five years before and was sent away. They weren’t the only couple to marry in the great surge of Pearl Harbor patriotism and later discover they had nothing in common.

  Maggie had warned her about Asa. “Arnaud and I were already sleeping together,” she said. “Are you and Asa sleeping together? No, don’t answer that because it’s obvious you’re not.” The “obvious” had irked Lizzie. “How can sleeping together be obvious?” she wrote in her diary that night. “What will you do until he’s back?” asked Maggie, convinced her sister was under-sexed, whereas the truth was that she was simply more private. Why should she have told her about the affair with Joe Morton? She doubted she knew everything about Maggie’s affairs either, while conceding there was more to know.

  She stopped woolgathering and smiled for Asa. “You liked the metro desk hours more than I did.”

  “I thought more regular hours might help us—well, you know.”

  Her back stiffened. “I don’t think it was my work hours that kept me from getting pregnant.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She wished she hadn’t said it but didn’t like Asa passing the buck. With Joe, who’d left the Times to become a screenwriter for the studios and now was her husband, she’d had no trouble becoming pregnant. Asa knew it and resented it.

  “If you’ll allow me to go back to the previous question—what are you supposed to do about it?” She had trouble concentrating on Asa, always had. “I worked for Pat Murphy, you worked for Pitts. Murph never let me go near Pitts. The Pitts file was his alone. Even McManus didn’t know what Pat had. He would have had to tell management.”

  Asa was still sore. “And you want me to . . .?”

  She looked around, recognizing some Times people and a couple from the hall. She’d been out of the flow too long. At some table would be someone who worked for Fritz Singer, the new DA, maybe someone who had worked for Pitts, maybe even someone who knew who killed Pat Murphy. Everything flowed through the bazaar, the aorta of city hall life. She looked at her ex and tried a smile again. She’d hurt him and hadn’t meant to. He wasn’t going to help. He resented her, particularly resented Maggie who he knew had opposed the marriage.

  “Who owed Pitts?” she repeated. “Who killed Pat Murphy for him?”

  “It’s been years since I’ve been up there, Liz. Before the war.”

  “I’m going to do it, you know, with your help or without.”

  “If Pitts got Murphy he’s going to get any reporter who comes after him.”

  “Pitts is in Folsom.”

  “He still has friends down here.”

  “Oh? How about naming a few.”

  “Why doesn’t McManus put some fearless young go-getter on it?”

  She leveled hard hazel eyes on him. He’d never understood newspapers—or liked them for that matter. He’d been Pitts’s lead guy on the search for Uncle Willie, but never gave her anything. She’d found Uncle Willie on her own, though too late. She and Luis Ortega, killed snapping pictures on Saipan.

  “They’ve been on it.”

  “Pitts remembers you, you know. You covered his trial.”

  “Three to five for corruption. If we can tie him to Murphy, he’ll get the chamber.”

  Asa finished his tea and paid the bill. Old habits. “Say hello to your sister for me. And to Cal. He still seeing that preacher?”

  “I’m not sure I’d call it ‘seeing her.’ They go back, you know.”

  “Unlike your sister, Cal seemed to like me. What’s he doing these days?”

  “Lawyer for Pacific Electric.”

  “You coming?”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “You go on ahead. I see someone I know.”

  “Don’t get involved, Liz, not good for your health.”

  “Thank you for your concern.”

  McManus was downstairs with the publisher when she returned from lunch. She left a message with Rosa, his secretary, that she’d like to see him. She walked to her place at the metro desk and sat down to go through the afternoon schedule. Most of her reporters were already out on assignments, a few already writing at their desks. She went quickly through the day’s line-up so far: warehouse fire on Figueroa, ten-car crash on Sepulveda, body parts dug up in Griffith Park that could be human, hold-up at a jeweler’s in Beverly Hills, naked man running through the streets in Pasadena, chased by a woman. The usual stuff, nothing for the front page except possibly the naked man. It was a hot day and she felt a little sweaty under her flowered silk blouse. Her bra pinched. Lunch with Asa was still annoying her.

  She surveyed the vast room that had been her home for close to ten years. She saw Miss Adelaide Nevin looking her way and waved, though Miss Adelaide, who hated wearing her glasses, didn’t wave back. She had great affection for that woman, as good an editor as she’d ever known, maybe even as good as McManus but destined by her sex to stay on the society pages. It had gotten better for women during the war, but newspapers were back to being a man’s world. McManus had given her a break in hiring her, taken a risk in assigning her to Murphy and a bigger risk in making her metro editor, even during the war when men were scarce. She’d turned him down at first, insisting she was a writer, not an editor, but Miss Adelaide changed her mind. “It’s a step forward, Lizzie, and I don’t mean just for you.”

  She took it and now was going to end it. Rosa was waving across the room.

  He was smoking, collar unbuttoned, tie loosened (though he’d buttoned up to go downstairs), sweating, the creases running from his cheekbones down past the mouth darker than ever, shirt in need of changing though he was not even halfway through his day. He was too thin, probably from drinking more than he ate and smoking more than he drank. He wasn’t sallow, just dark, Indian red dark, though certainly not from the sun. He didn’t say a word when she entered, just watched her closely, as he always did. Nobody knew much about Larry McManus: came out from Detroit sometime in the twenties, married, divorced, had a son who disappeared. He’d been hired by Harry Chandler himself, the prince, which still meant something on the Times, especially to Harry’s son, Norman, who now ran things.

  As far as anyone knew, newspapers in general and the Times in particular were the only things that Larry McManus cared about. He knew the city inside out, had been city editor forever and didn’t aspire to anything higher. He handed out awards to the staff when there were any and joined them at the bazaar to hoist a few when there was something to celebrate. He tried to be convivial, though it didn’t come naturally, laughed at the jokes and sometimes even tried one of his own. Afterward, he went his way. She’d heard he lived near Echo Park somewhere. If anyone ever inquired about his personal life, he never did it again.

  She sat down without being invited, and they stared at each other a moment. Lizzie was never sure why, but there was something about McManus that always made her want to cry, something in the look—caring, trusting, longing, personal—something she’d never seen in the eyes of any other man except Joe, which was why she married him. With Larry it had always been there for her, more pronounced after her uncle’s murder, indelible after her father’s.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said, exhaling as he spoke.

  She crossed her legs and waited.

  “I don’t know, Lizzie, I really don’t. You have a child now.”

  “Robby adores his Daddy, who works at home.”

  He nodded. “Joe’s a good man, hated to lose him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I like you on the metro desk—where I can keep an eye on you.”

  He was f
ighting it out with himself, and she had no intention of interrupting.

  “On the other hand . . .”

  “The front-page notebook.”

  “Right. The notebook. We’re in a spot . . .”

  He swiveled to look out the windows, a habit he had, do his thinking without being observed.

  At length, he turned back. “Can I put someone with you?”

  She shook her head. “Too soon.”

  He fumbled with a pencil and stubbed out his cigarette. Then he actually smiled. Maggie, who’d never met him, called him a faux dur.

  “Okay, so let’s get on it. Send Teddy in here. He can run metro while you’re away.”

  Chapter 26

  Cal phoned Lizzie from his downtown office after taking the call from Sammy Milstein, Henry Callender’s lawyer. Callender was in Folsom Prison for Eddie Mull’s murder, and Milstein’s call came out of the blue. “He has some interesting news,” Cal said, refusing to say anything more on the phone. He was taking Nelly to dinner the following night, and they agreed to meet afterward at Lizzie’s house in Brentwood. Joe was in New York trying to raise money for a movie, but Maggie would be there “with news of her own,” Lizzie informed him. He took Nelly to Jack’s at the Beach on the pier in Ocean Park, her favorite place, a stone’s throw from where she’d met Eddie in her bathing suit in the story they all knew by heart. She wouldn’t let him pay for dinner. “I can’t spend it all on dance lessons,” she said. Though Eddie’s estate was still in probate—he hadn’t counted on dying and left no will—Nelly had already slipped comfortably into the part of the wealthy widow.