The windows were brightening. Sounds from the kitchen. Had to be way past eleven. Begonia, the Basque maid, would have cleaned up by now, and people would be making their way to the kitchen. Kenny. Down deep she missed him and the good old days, maybe because they went so far back, back to dances at the country club. He was a good dancer and a nice boy and so fucking loyal. But such a nebbish. She liked that word, “nebbish,” a Hollywood word, Archie said, because there were so damn many of them around.
She’d wanted to do it with Kenny that first time and maybe if she had things would be different, but it wasn’t her fault. Other girls were doing it and talking about it and telling her about diaphragms, and with Kenny it would be safe and secret and so she got the diaphragm and one night when she was home for the weekend, and Iris was off and Granny out with her gigolos she invited him over and put Sinatra on the phonograph and got him on the couch. They’d hardly kissed when he exploded and excused himself and when he came back from the bathroom was so embarrassed he left. Comme ça. Imagine having that for a boyfriend!
Lizzie wanted to drive. As the crow flies, Angelo Drive isn’t all that far from Sunset, but crows don’t follow mountain roads. Angelo is technically Beverly Hills, but not the part people know about. You’ve got to find the right canyon and then the right road, only three of which make it all the way over the mountains. The others go in circles or lead to dead ends. Lizzie knew the way because she’d been part of the Times team that covered the Manson murders on Cielo Drive, which is even harder to find than Angelo. Manson knew the house. You don’t find Cielo Drive by accident.
Lizzie insisted on taking her Ford rather than Maggie’s Porsche. Angelo is winding and endless and dangerous with steep drops, and Lizzie knew how Maggie drove. So did Billy Todd. They came to the black mailbox with the name Zug and turned off onto a pocked asphalt road leading up a steep hill. The road was cut through jagged stone that sprouted scrub grass and some chaparral stalks through the cracks. Above the cut for the road, scrawny brown pines lusting for sunlight leaned south.
“Not the most inviting driveway I’ve ever seen,” Lizzie said.
“Discourages drop-ins.”
“Imagine going back down that canyon at night after a few drinks.”
“Drinks or something worse.”
The Zug house was a sprawling, two-story, Spanish-style hacienda with white stucco walls and towers on each end and a red tile roof and tiled eve overhang running the length of the facade. Despite its stylistic lavishness, there was something fake about it. In front, five cars, all foreign, all expensive, were parked around a grassy, well-tended roundabout. The scent of jasmine and gardenias rose from bushes, and bright red Bougainvillea climbed along both sides of blue and yellow ceramic steps wending up to the front door, which was open behind a screen. From somewhere they heard cries and splashes. Ascending, they heard voices inside and saw the screen door slowly pushed open. Didi had seen them coming.
“My goodness, a family delegation, mothers, aunts, could a cousin be lurking around somewhere? And a Ford—Mother, how shameful! Where is your Porsche?”
Maggie tried a hug, but it didn’t work.
Didi wore a wrinkled purple muumuu and her feet were bare. Her dark hair was brushed after a fashion, but it was too early for make-up, which wouldn’t have helped much with the circles under her eyes and bruises on her neck. Her skin was tight and sallow and a little bit twitchy and she held the railing by the door for support. Bad hangover. Maggie looked at her once beautiful daughter, and the word “slovenly” passed her mind.
“How did you find me? Granny told you, didn’t she?”
“Granny couldn’t find this place. Are you going to invite us in?”
“Just a minute,” she said, retreating inside and closing the screen. They heard voices, muttering, doors slamming before she returned. “Some of my friends weren’t, shall we say, dressed for the occasion. They’ve gone out to the pool.”
“I would like to meet your friends,” said Maggie.
Didi smiled. “They were—well, never mind. They felt like a swim.”
The furniture was Spanish oak, large and clunky and made semicomfortable with enormous bulky cushions. The living room was long and, in the Spanish style, dark. They sat down, and Maggie caught a fleeting glimpse of the maid she’d seen on her first visit. The house seemed clean enough, but it was surface clean. Under shaggy rugs and thick cushions and heavy furniture was stuff accumulating faster than any maid could get it out. The smell was the kind you only got out with something that smelled worse. It was a luxury house on a handsome estate high in the hills and icy as an igloo. Two giant sofas faced each other across a well-stained oak coffee table. Didi took one of the sofas, leaving her mother and aunt on the other, a more adversarial positioning than Maggie would have preferred. She was happy to have Lizzie there. Her sister’s presence always helped.
“I suspect this delegation has come to take me home,” said Didi with a tight little smile. “Wherever home might be.”
Maggie looked across at this disheveled, dissipated and dispirited presence. She observed the neck bruises. Not a doubt what they were from. The image of the fastidious little girl at the beach club sitting alone eating egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off passed her mind. How could it be? “Your home is in Bel Air, I believe.”
“I’m not going back there. What’s happened to Granny, anyway?”
“Your grandmother has had a stroke,” said Lizzie. “She’d like to see you.”
“Probably wouldn’t even recognize me.”
“Who does?” said Maggie. It slipped out. She tried recuperating. “You could always come live with me.”
The arrow had hit its mark, and the girl reddened. “I don’t even know where you live, Mother. You never bothered to tell me.”
“Because I couldn’t find you. Anyway, I’m back in Westwood.”
“Either of you have a cigarette by any chance?”
Maggie took out her Tareytons and Zippo. She stood and shook one out for Didi, snapped the lighter and held the high flame toward her daughter, whose hand shook so badly she had to grasp her mother’s hand to steady it. Didi’s hand was ice-cold.
Maggie lit her own and switched couches, sitting down beside her daughter.
“I live on Tiverton, one floor down from your godfather.”
Didi inhaled deeply, and they could almost see the smoke hit her bloodstream and begin mixing with the other poisons. She gave a little shudder. “You three really stick together, don’t you?” she said with a massive exhale. “Always have—the Mull musketeers. All for one, and one for all. Ever make room for anyone else in your neat little group?”
“The answer is, yes,” said Lizzie, seeing her sister stiffen and cutting in before she could reply. “You want to join, there’s plenty of room.”
“Sorry, it’s a little late.”
“You could come stay with Joe and me for a while,” said Lizzie.
Didi stared fixedly at her aunt. “Aunt Liz,” she said, taking another huge swallow of smoke and hesitating until her lungs fully injected the nicotine into her bloodstream, “do you happen to know how much your son and I hate each other and always have?”
“Robby’s gone.”
“Why all this venom?” said Maggie suddenly. “Where does it come from?”
Wherever it came from they saw it in her eyes, dark, anxious, lost, distrust mixed with envy and regret. Was there a way out of this, the eyes asked? No, too late, a voice replied. Down deep, maybe, there was a way out, but to get there you had to strip away layers of resentment and remorse and hostility and other stuff, and no one could dig that deep. It couldn’t be erased anyway, etched into hippocampus as into granite. The sisters had come to help, and that made it worse. Pity mixed with solicitude makes a sour brew.
Her face still red, she turned to face her mother. “My shrin
k says everything I do is in reaction to you. My vertigo comes as a reaction to your flying. My fear comes from your fearlessness. He says I have built up antibodies to protect myself against you. That letting you back into my life could kill me.”
Maggie’s cigarette tasted foul, and when Didi put hers out on the tile floor, crushing the butt with the sole of her bare foot, Maggie put hers out as well, grinding down harder than she meant to do. Give the maid some work. She was angry; whatever guilt she’d felt over her daughter’s disappearance exorcised under the deluge of accusations. We become what we choose. We alone are responsible.
“Had we known this was how things would turn out, we’d never have sent you to Granny’s. We thought it was the right thing. Obviously, we were wrong.”
“You said, we, but it was you. You alone.” From behind the house somewhere they heard splashing and shouting.
“Not exactly,” said Maggie. “Anyway, isn’t it what you wanted?”
“What I wanted? How old was I, eight? Why wouldn’t I want to go to Granny’s when I never saw either parent and spent all my time in that awful public school and with that witchlike old woman with her hairnet and cigarettes and she smelled, smelled—did you ever get a whiff of Mrs. Crotch? I hated her. Of course, I went to Granny’s.”
“She asks for you,” said Lizzie.
“Oh, nice, Aunt Lizzie. A little guilt trip? Well maybe I’ll go see her. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just telephone.”
“She can’t talk on the telephone anymore.”
“That’s my fault, too, isn’t it?”
Lizzie was staggered. Was it something about these hills? The thin air, maybe? She could not come up here without thinking of the Manson murderers, of those girls running around stabbing to death people they didn’t even know, butchering poor Sharon Tate who pleaded to let her unborn baby live, zombies stalking the night with their knives, ghoulishly drenching themselves in blood on Manson’s orders. She had covered every major story in this city for three decades, yet nothing came close to Manson. Every other calamity lent itself to some sort of explanation. Manson alone was inexplicable horror, the sort of thing we thrill to in movies because it is so obviously bogus. Looking into the dead eyes of her niece, she understood the Manson girls. Killing ourselves or killing others: programed to a hatred of life, life of hatred.
She had to try. “Why are you trying to be so tough, Didi, tough and mean? Forget what your shrink tells you. Granny wants to see you, and you want to see her. We wouldn’t mind seeing more of you either. Why not drive down? I’ll take you myself if you don’t mind my Ford.”
“What, tear yourself away from the Times?”
“I’ve left the Times.”
“God, all this family news I’m missing! No more work, no more prizes. Just you and Uncle Joe in Brentwood.”
“We have the foundation. Do you know about the foundation? I’d love to show you around sometime.”
Maggie wasn’t going to interfere. If Lizzie thought she could break through impregnable barriers of disgust and self-loathing, let her try.
“Do-gooders, that’s what you are. That’s what Archie calls you: do-gooders. Where would the world be without the Mulls?”
“Archie?” said Lizzie.
“Archie Zug, the man in whose house you are sitting. Archie is my director, among other things. Vern is my counselor, also among other things.” She was holding nothing back.
“Archie is Wonderworld, isn’t he?” said Lizzie.
“That’s Trevor. Archie works with Trevor. They’re going to build their own studio just as soon as they find the land.”
“Tell me, Didi,” said Lizzie, fighting against an instinct that wanted to bolt from this noxious presence and these murderous hills, “what’s wrong with doing good? Isn’t that what life is all about? Isn’t that everyone’s duty.”
“Duty? God, wait until I tell Vern that one! My only duty is to myself. Fortunately, Granny gave me some money to do it with—the only Mull who ever gave me anything. I’m in her will, you know. The only one!”
“And what will you do with all this money?”
“Why,spend it, of course, just like Granny taught me.”
They were quiet most of the way down. Too many curves, too many cliffs, too many thoughts. Maggie finally spoke: “So where did we go wrong?”
Lizzie glanced over. “You don’t believe that, do you?”
“Of course not.”
She fell silent a moment. “My turn next. It took a while to find him. He lives in West Hollywood with his girlfriend. Not far from Uncle Willie’s first church.”
“Second church.”
Lizzie laughed. “That’s what I meant, of course.”
“Of course.”
They were almost down, almost to Sunset. “Here’s what Miss Adelaide told me once. She had this big garden up in these hills someplace. She brings home two identical plants from the nursery, plants them in the same sun, feeds them the same, waters them the same: one grows, one withers. What’s the answer?”
“It’s their nature.”
Chapter 46
They met in a former wholesale bakery on Romaine Street, a dingy neighborhood in West Hollywood that Howard Hughes had once used as headquarters for Hughes Productions. Robby would not come to the Richfield Building and would not agree to meet on any neutral ground. Even to see him on Romaine Street took a series of phone calls over several weeks. It was not normal behavior for lawyers representing adversarial clients, but they carried more baggage than just lawyers’ briefs.
If feud it was, then Romaine Street was a good place for the shootout. The building was two stories of dun-colored stucco with bunker-sized slit windows perfect for Springfields but in fact designed to defeat gawkers and germs in a semi-industrial area you didn’t visit unless you had good reason or were lost. Vacant lots filled with debris and stripped-down car carcasses were flanked by metal grinding shops and car painters. Over time it had evolved into Summa’s corporate command center, uninviting to the curious, which is what Summa liked about it. Howard Hughes hadn’t set foot on Romaine Street in years.
He parked down the street and walked around the block looking for an entrance. It was as welcoming as a castle with the drawbridge up. Various entrances from bakery days had been cemented up so he circled to the rear, finding an alley with a dock area where the bakery trucks once picked up their daily bread. He ascended a ramp and tried a rear door that didn’t open. He rang and the door was opened by a young man in LDS uniform, crewcut, white shirt, dark trousers and skinny black tie. He led him inside to a desk and picked up the phone. “Right, sir,” he said before hanging up.
“Follow me.”
Down a long corridor, Cal heard voices behind closed doors but saw no people. Numbers, not names, on doors, something grim and penitentiary-like about the place. The corridor must have been fifty yards, though hard to judge precisely without windows and in dim light. They took a left turn at the end and came to a glassed-in, heavily lighted switchboard area fitting for a hotel. Manned day and night, the young man said, connected to Summa’s worldwide network. Continuing, they turned into another long corridor heading back the original way. He understood he was being taken on a tour. “All these rooms were once used for filmmaking,” his guide said. “Developing, cutting, editing, splicing, exhibiting. This one,” he opened a door, “was where Mr. Hughes lived for days viewing films and entertaining actors—and actresses, of course,” he added, smiling.
He pointed down the corridor. “Those are vaults used to store Mr. Hughes’s memorabilia—trophies, awards, clothes, films, photographs, relics from every stage of his legendary life. Only Mr. Hughes and Mr. Gay are allowed to enter the vaults. I’ll take you upstairs now for your appointment with Mr. Morton. Perhaps he’ll show you the rest of our complex.”
Already he hated coming. The tour was to impress him wit
h the power of an institution so secret even its founder had never heard of it. If this was Robby’s way of softening him up on the disposition of the Hughes Aircraft properties, he had miscalculated. It was the classic tactic of bullies: flaunt power in expectation you’ll back down before the contest even begins. Tactically, it is both clever and risky—clever if it works, risky if it fails and raises the stakes. Eddie Mull had been the master of it, but how would Robby know?
He remembered talking once—only once—with his father about Uncle Eddie, always a taboo subject. He’d wandered down the second floor at the temple to schmooze with Miss Shields, and Willie asked him to come in. He’d been working on a sermon that wasn’t coming and needed a break. “Like the Buddha,” he said. “You search and search and don’t find so you stop. And the answer comes by itself.” He’d told Cal what Eddie said about Grandma Eva’s death. “Eddie called it a sad event that turned out well for everyone,” Willie said. “I didn’t respond. How could I? It was his confession. I forgave him.”
Cal had steeled himself for this meeting, telling himself it was just one more lawyers’ conference. The problem was he couldn’t think about Robby Morton without visceral pain. Most people he knew, certainly everyone in the family, had a constancy about them. The more you knew them, the more you got into them, the more you understood. Even truly exotic people like Howard Hughes, ones who operated in the alternative universes of Hollywood and government, had characters that could be pegged. Robby Morton was the one person who did not add up. The adult person he’d become bore no resemblance to the boy Cal had known. He’d asked Joe about it once, Joe who knew his son better than anyone. “Robby is as authentic as any of us,” he said. “The problem is that he is authentically duplicitous.”
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