Blood and Oranges

by James O. Goldsborough

  The game room at Folsom is arranged in rows. The most popular games are dominoes and checkers, followed by chess and backgammon, and finally the Chinese game, Go. The prison provides lockers so the games can be put away at night if not finished. The game tables and card tables occupy half the long, rectangular room, with ping-pong tables at the opposite end. Inmates can check out games or bring their own, and most evenings all the tables are filled.

  Bob Jones was Pitts’s chess partner that day, and they were playing two tables down from Callender and his partner. Most of the chess players knew each other, or at least knew of each other, which is to say knew why they found themselves at Folsom. The beauty of chess is that it doesn’t matter what you do, or did, away from the table. To have a murderer and a corrupt prosecutor playing is no stranger than to find a bank embezzler squaring off with a penny-ante grifter. Pitts and Callender would never choose to play each other, but could not avoid occasionally finding themselves at the tables at the same time. Chess players don’t talk much, but the evening in question Pitts was muttering in a low voice and Jones was listening and Callender caught those two names, Murphy and Chili, and knew they weren’t talking about food. Callender knew about Jones, an ex-LAPD cop hired by the L.A. city council and sent to jail for taking money from people he was supposed to be investigating. Callender kept up with the news and wondered why Pitts would be talking to a crooked ex-L.A. cop about Pat Murphy.

  Pitts had the perfect alibi for the murder: he was in Folsom. But if he didn’t have opportunity, he had motive, and no one else did. Murphy had worked the Hall of Justice forever, but was more of a police crony than an investigative reporter. The only person Murphy ever really went after was Pitts, most likely because after all those years he’d had a bellyful. Or maybe his daughter the nun pushed him. The archdiocese had never agreed with Pitts’s high threshold of tolerance for corruption. It had the makings of the perfect crime. Pitts could not be accused unless a tie between him and the killer could be shown. Lizzie understood from the beginning that her job was to find the link, the means by which Pitts could execute the crime, which is why she kept badgering people with the question: “Who owed Pitts?”

  Lots of people owed Pitts. The question was, who owed him enough to kill Pat Murphy?

  While at Folsom to see Callender, she’d checked the records on Pitts’s prison visitors. Nothing stood out. Records of phone calls were not kept. Her assumption was that he’d not had time to set up the hit before arriving at Folsom. She came back from Folsom with the possibility that a man named Chili might be the link, but who was he—the mob, a hired gun, a cop, an ex-cop? Why was Pitts talking to ex-cop Jones about him?

  Days, even weeks, of combing through back editions of the Times and directories of L.A. police officers would be fruitless if Chili was a nickname, as she supposed it was. The faster way was to check with the Times police reporters, though that came with risk of leaks if the person assigned to the Murphy case, namely herself, did it. After hashing it over with Joe, who hated everything about the assignment, she came up with the idea of having Teddy Lubrano, her replacement on the metro desk, have discreet inquiries made at the Hall of Justice about someone called Chili.

  It didn’t take long. One of Teddy’s metro reporters knew of a downtown beat cop named Carlos Chaidez, aka Chili. Locating the name in the police directory, Lizzie started through old Times files to see if Officer Chaidez had ever made the newspapers, discovering his name in more stories than a good police officer would want. He’d killed three people in fifteen years and been cleared each time by police boards of using unnecessary force. The first was during a holdup in the jewelry district. The issue was that the robber’s rod was rubber, but how was Office Chaidez to know that? The second time came during a confrontation in New Chinatown. The board faulted Officer Chaidez again for being too quick on the trigger, but surprisingly recommended no penalty for a second citizen killed.

  The third death was the most intriguing. A building maintenance contractor named Jerry Korngold fell from his eighth-floor apartment on South Grand when Chili and his partner arrived to question him about a complaint Korngold had filed at the police department. The officers testified that Korngold had not answered their knock, and that they broke the door down after hearing him scream, the scream he made as he jumped, they said.

  The Times treated the story as routine filler, the miscellaneous stuff reporters copy from the daily police docket that ends up at the bottom of an inside local page. The story said nothing about the nature of Korngold’s complaint or why the police considered it important enough to call at his residence. Did building maintenance contracting have something to do with it, have something to do with Pitts, who had his fingers in many pockets around the city? No reporter had gone beyond the perfunctory docket report. But what if the scream had come after the police broke down his door? Why had no neighbors been interviewed? When Lizzie attempted to find out more, she found that the police had no record of Korngold’s complaint. She showed them the Times clipping. They shook their heads. The only thing of value in the brief Times account was that Officer Chaidez’s partner was Officer Bob Jones.

  Pitts to Jones to Chili to Murphy—is that how it was done? She needed more before going to McManus. The evidence was circumstantial, but because there’d been a witness to the murder it was a start. Pat Murphy was blown up leaving his South Pasadena residence to drive to work. The witness, an elderly neighbor, had pored over dozens of police mug shots in hopes of making an identity, but the photos were of known criminals, not members of the LAPD. She wasn’t sleeping well that night and got up to rock in the chair by the window, finding that a few minutes of gentle rocking helped her get back to sleep. Staring out the window she’d noticed a shaft of light moving under the car parked across the street. It didn’t make sense so she put her glasses on and saw a man crawl out from under the car, Murphy’s car. For a moment the flashlight illuminated his face. The car blew up when Murphy started it up that morning, sending parts of the reporter and his car flying into her yard.

  “Hard on herself for not understanding what the guy was doing,” Lizzie told McManus.

  “And you say the guy is Chili.”

  “Pitts was apparently Chili’s good fairy. Saw they kept him on the force despite his horrible record. Chili owed Pitts. Honor among thieves sort of thing.”

  “What about Jones? How did he end up at Folsom if Chili didn’t?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe he got sent up after Pitts was gone.”

  “We can’t ask for a lineup with Chili in it. They’d laugh in our faces.”

  “How about we get his photo and show it to her?”

  “Would she recognize him from a photo? Would she testify? She’d be testifying against the LAPD. So would we.”

  She knew what he meant. The Times and the LAPD were not exactly friends, but it is one thing to be uncooperative and another to be public enemies. Mutual enmity had gotten Pat Murphy killed, and Lizzie knew how much time McManus had spent downstairs with the publisher after the murder. He didn’t want her to be next. Readers and advertisers like to think that newspapers and law enforcement are on the same side.

  “She would testify. She’s that sort of woman. Reminds me of my sister. Doesn’t flinch.”

  He leaned back, shaking his head, exhaling a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “What you’re telling me is that the former L.A. district attorney, a man elected twice—no three times—to enforce the laws of the county, a man whose election this newspaper supported, is responsible for two murders, Murphy and Korngold.”

  “At least two.”

  “There are more?”

  “With a guy like Pitts, who knows?”

  He 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 collea
gue 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 pilot daughter, brought her down to earth, so to speak. She’d been happily surprised when Maggie showed up at the bank in a skirt instead of her usual pants.

  “Farther down, almost to Hancock Park. And it was his second church. The first was a little place just off Wilshire. Eddie used to call it a grocery store with a steeple.”

  Chasen’s was a comfortable, red-leather booth and wood-panel place that became boisterous at night with the movie crowd and gossip columnists and sometimes a brawl or two. At night, the bar was three or four thick with heavy drinkers and you never got your table on time, which was the point. Maggie had been there once before with Howard, who lived nearby and always got his tables on time. Lizzie had never been there.

  “I wish Cal would change his mind,” said Lizzie.

  “Why?” said Nelly, quickly. “No one adores Cal Mull more than I do, but he has less need of money than you do. Just be thankful to your father.”

  “And to you too, Mother dear,” said Maggie, patting Nelly’s hand.

  She was a handsome woman, as vain about her appearance as the day Eddie first spotted her on the boardwalk at Lick Pier. She’d kept her Iowa body, which is to say it was more farm solid than city slender, but still well maintained as she advanced through middle age. She’d never had surgery, though lately had begun to wonder. She’d had enough money to purchase the dance studio and with probate was ready to bring it up to the standards of her Beverly Hills clientele. Widowhood, in her daughters’ view, was engendering extravagance. She wore too much make-up, dyed her hair too light and wore clothes with too much red. She seldom appeared with a man who was less than thirty years her junior. But if she had no great virtues, neither were her vices worse than those of any other Bel Air matron. The girls admired how quickly she’d rebounded from tragedy, but worried about her running around so much. She wouldn’t talk to them about any of it.

  Maggie smiled at her sister. It was the signal.

  “Mother,” she said. “First chance to tell you. I’m five months pregnant.”

  Nelly smiled and reached for her hand. “I thought I saw a little tummy but wanted to let you tell me.” She looked to Lizzie. “You knew, of course, you who know everything. It’s your turn next, you know, one child’s not enough, at least two in each family, that’s what Granny Sinclair used to say. Of course your father wanted to have more, but
it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Why at least two?” asked Lizzie.

  “On the farm you want as many as possible, but at least two, because that way the family doesn’t shrink, generation to generation.” She looked back to Maggie. “By the way, I hope you don’t do any flying while you’re pregnant.”

  “Why not?”

  “You might crash and kill the baby.”

  Maggie laughed, couldn’t help herself.

  “I’m certainly not going to have another,” said Lizzie.

  “I think I might like it,” said Maggie.

  “You like everything,” said Nelly. “Maybe too much.” She sipped her wine and looked for something else to say. It was never easy with the girls, always easier with Cal. “I trust you’re not involved with this monster plane I keep reading about.”

  Maggie laughed. “The Spruce Goose? Howard hates the name. Plane’s not even spruce, it’s birch. To him it’s the H-4 Hercules, and he keeps it surrounded in the hangar like it was radioactive. I’m testing the F-11, different program.”

  “Why don’t you want to be pregnant again, Lizzie?” Nelly asked, switching back. “Robby needs a sibling. He’s an aggressive little thing, don’t you think?”

  The problem was that Nelly didn’t like Joe. Or maybe it was that she’d liked Asa better even though it was Joe who provided her first grandchild. She rarely had them over because Joe didn’t fit in with her friends. At her last Christmas party, an annual thing she’d had for twenty-five years, there’d been a bad moment when a tipsy Freddie Gibson from the Bel Air Club staggered over and asked Joe why he wasn’t in jail. Along with some other Hollywood types he’d been called back to Washington by the House Un-American Activities Committee and convicted for holding views unpopular with Congress. Joe, who was appealing the conviction, turned his back and walked away. Nelly thought he should have defended himself.