Golden Orange

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The rest of the bar conversation centered on the 4.6 earthquake that had struck Newport Beach at 1:07 P.M. that afternoon. Not a big quake, but the two jolts felt powerful; the epicenter was right on the Newport-1nglewood fault. The outrigger hanging from Spoon’s ceiling had to be rewired to the termite-infested ceiling timbers, and Spoon had lost a dozen glasses and a picture frame that held one of the last-known photos of Al Jolson, the family’s favorite singer when Spoon was growing up. Spoon always said that he hoped Jolson’s ex-wife, Ruby Keeler—who often came to The Golden Orange during the summer—wouldn’t write an exposé of Al Jolson just because there was a natural title in it: Mammy Dearest.

  Of course, Buster hadn’t felt the earthquake, in that he was too busy out on the street being attacked by canaries and lovebirds. He wondered now if maybe the earthquake had made him less surefooted while he was chasing the Asian thief. Maybe he’d actually gotten dumped by Mother Nature, not by Cockatoo Clyde.

  Buster explained his battered condition by telling the denizens of Spoon’s Landing all about his day’s misery, but leaving out the part about Betsy, refusing even to think about that cassette. The big cop was so despondent he ordered one of Spoon’s “pizzas,” prepared and frozen every Thursday by the saloonkeeper himself when he got his delivery of cheese and pepperoni from a guy in Costa Mesa, and a load of anchovies from one of the crew who manned the fishing boats that do the full and half-day runs out of Newport Harbor.

  Bilge O’Toole, who’d closed his live-bait shop early that day, heard Buster place the order. And when Spoon was out of earshot, he said to the cop, “When was the last time you ate one a Spoon’s pizzas, Buster?”

  “I don’t remember,” Buster said. “I musta been drunk if I did it.”

  “They’re tougher’n fiberglass, but they don’t smell as good,” Bilge informed him.

  Tripoli Jones, sitting on the other side of Buster, concurred. “The anchovies must come from Alaska. Nothin that didn’t die in an oil spill could taste like that. Put a dozen of ’em in a juicer, you could pour it in your crankcase.”

  “I don’t care what it tastes like,” Buster mumbled. “I ain’t that hungry anyways after the day I put in.”

  “So save it for the beach,” Bilge suggested. “Use it for a boogie board. Where were you when the earthquake hit?”

  Tripoli Jones said, “I was up on a pole by city hall gettin ready to check a line when the pole started to cha-cha. I did a lumberjack slide. My hands got so shaky I coulda threaded a sewin machine if it was movin. I had to come straight here for a drink!”

  Spoon logged that as the most novel drinking excuse of the year so far: An earthquake made me do it.

  “I started praying,” Carlos Tuna said. “Regis got tossed off the kitchen table and pinballed out onto the porch. I started saying Hail Marys. I thought it was the big one!”

  Spoon moved his slimy cigar stub from one side of his mouth to the other, and said: “A day to go down in Newport Beach history. A town where every thirty feet there’s a bar or a bank, with more masseuses than the Ottoman empire. Fifteen square miles a greed and white-collar crime. And people finally pray because of a little four-point-sixer!”

  “Well, in Lubbock, Texas, two hundred forty-seven people saw the Virgin Mary this month!” Carlos said. “Weird stuff’s going on. I think the end is near.”

  “If the end is near, I wanna live a little before I go,” Buster said to his beer glass. “Gimme a double shot a Wild Turkey, Spoon.”

  “Careful, Buster,” Bilge warned. “You’ll be gettin those three A.M. visitors like your pal Winnie. Like the ones Carlos gets, and Guppy. Me, I only get ’em on Tuesdays, Thursdays and sometimes on Monday. They don’t come on weekends.”

  “Nobody gets in my place at three A.M.,” Buster said, “’less they can do it with a gut full a hollow-points.”

  “The ones Bilge’s talkin about ain’t scared a guns,” Carlos informed Buster. “He’s talking about life! The old lady you still love? The one you still hate? The kids that never call you even on Christmas? The boss that spends his Sunday multiplying loaves and fishes but comes to work on Monday like The Nightmare on Elm Street?”

  “That’s what my three o’clock dreadlies look like, come to think of it,” Tripoli Jones said. “But they’re wimps and pussies compared to the real monster you face at three o’clock in the morning. Your youth. The youth that was me. The me I lost!”

  Buster Wiles was having a major epiphany. He said, “I’m almost forty-five already. Forty-five! I can’t believe it. Where’s my youth?”

  “You got some good years left, Buster,” Carlos said. “But not as many as you think. It’s gonna all start to go soon. Them big muscles a yours? They’re gonna fall like ethics in Washington. Better take charge a your life now, if you can.”

  “You get our age,” Guppy said, “your life’ll be more outta control than Central Park.”

  “And then your blood pressure starts to take off,” said Tripoli Jones. “And it’s harder to bring down than Fidel Castro.”

  “One day you look at yourself,” said Carlos. “You say to yourself, people know me for miles around. But that’s all I got!”

  “Shit, they don’t know you for blocks around, even,” Bilge O’Toole said, getting predictably surly, turning on his nemesis, Carlos Tuna.

  Becoming more surly yet—and that was as predictable as beach litter—was Tripoli Jones, who said, “The fuckin guy two stools away don’t know you and you been drinkin here for fifteen years!”

  Buster Wiles left the fiberglass pizza on the bar, finished his drink, and decided to get out now that the geezers might be drunk enough to start a fight.

  For the rest of the evening he was determined to enjoy what was left of his youth. He was going to take better care of himself and pump iron two hours every other day and cut the booze down to almost nothing. In effect, Buster Wiles was making that career decision to take on a job that would change his life.

  14

  Zeros

  By the weekend, the heat wave was breaking, at least in The Golden Orange. Los Angeles was still uncomfortable and the desert was a furnace, but the coastal communities had begun to settle down to more normal temperatures. Winnie had made only two brief trips to his apartment during that entire weekend. Sometimes it would seem as though Tess had forgotten about the man who’d been watching her house, but when Winnie would suggest that he go home so she could tend to ordinary business, she’d look frightened and beg him to stay.

  “I need to be baby-sat,” she said, and yet when he’d look for fear in her eyes he’d see only gray pebbles.

  When she’d wrap those strong arms around his neck and work him over with her muscular tongue, Winnie didn’t look for anything.

  On Monday morning they got up early to keep a hastily arranged appointment with Martin Scroggins, attorney-at-law. By mutual agreement they had a breakfast meeting at the yacht club, the one formerly commodored by Conrad P. Binder, Senior, where Scroggins himself had been a member for more than forty-five years.

  “Seems strange to come in the front door,” Tess said to Winnie as they walked through the corridor. “I used to always arrive by boat when I was a kid. They put up with a lot of nonsense from me and my chums in those days.”

  The club was done in blue and white fifties nautical, like most of the older yacht clubs, with racing trophies and a sailboat model on display, and the corridors lined with pictures, dating back several generations, of commodores in blazers and brass buttons and yachtsman caps.

  Tess paused before a portrait of a handsome sunburnt commodore with a long straight nose and round glasses and a stern expression.

  “My grandfather,” she said. “I think Daddy was disappointed that he never became a commodore too. That’s probably why he seldom came here during the last ten years of his life.” Then she added, “Of course, he couldn’t see that he never had a chance of being commodore after he … after Mother died and he took on Warner as his com
panion.”

  “Did he have a blind spot about Warner?”

  “In most ways,” Tess said. “Like many men of his generation with a … confused sexual identity, Daddy thought other people wouldn’t guess. He could be very naïve, my father.”

  The patio offered a panoramic view of the turning basin, where there was decent wind but little boat activity on a Monday morning. They sat at a table under a blue umbrella, and Tess switched to sunglasses with white frames. She wore a white linen dress with a double row of black vertical buttons and black scalloped trim across the shoulders. To Winnie she seemed overdressed compared to the other more casually attired breakfasters at the yacht club.

  Winnie saw an older man emerge from inside and look toward the tables, blinking in the bright sunlight. He said, “That must be Scroggins. He’s all gray, just like I imagined.”

  It was true. Martin Scroggins wore a gray suit, a gray silk tie with the tiniest of patterns, and his thinning hair, absent the rinse popular with men his age at Tess’s club, was the color of a tarnished butter knife.

  “Good eye, Officer,” Tess said. “That’s Martin, all right.”

  “He’s so invisible he stands out,” said Winnie.

  Scroggins saw Tess, waved and quickly came to their table, giving her a peck on the cheek. He was so tall he had to duck under the blue umbrella to shake hands with Winnie.

  When they were seated Martin Scroggins immediately signaled to a waitress for coffee and menus. He was not a man to lollygag.

  “Have you been well, Tess?” he asked.

  “Well enough.”

  “Yes, I was sorry to hear about your divorce.”

  “Be sorry for the last two,” Tess said. “Not this one. Ralph Cunningham was a real bastard.”

  Scroggins gave Tess a patient understanding nod. He looked to be a man with an understanding of all the Binder problems, Winnie thought.

  “I had hopes he’d be the one for you, Tessie,” Scroggins said. “I know your father hoped so too.”

  “Daddy hated Ralph’s guts.”

  That embarrassed the elderly lawyer. He cleared his throat and took a sip of water.

  Tess said, “Winnie’s a retired Newport Beach policeman, Martin. I wonder if you two ever saw each other in a courtroom?”

  “Can’t say that I ever tried a criminal case around here,” Scroggins said, smiling at Winnie. “Oh, occasionally when a client would have a problem with one of his kids, I might attempt to get a drunk driving reduced to a reckless. Something like that.”

  “Don’t think we ever met,” Winnie said.

  When the menus came Martin Scroggins ordered a very hearty breakfast. Tess asked for a slice of toast, no butter.

  Winnie said to Tess, “I’m gonna have an omelet. Even though I know it won’t beat your omelets.” He saw that Martin Scroggins didn’t miss the implication of Tess having made breakfast for him.

  When the waitress was gone Scroggins said, “How can I help you, Tessie?”

  “It’s about Daddy’s will, Martin. I have a few questions about the trust giving El Refugio to Warner for the remainder of his life.”

  Martin Scroggins glanced at Winnie again, very uncomfortably.

  “Winnie’s aware of everything,” Tess said. “It’s all right, Martin.”

  “Yes, well, a trust by its nature is a device whereby some taxes can be saved and the property can be controlled. The decedent’s wishes will be honored, and, believe me, your father was adamant about his wishes.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Tess said. “I guess what I’m trying to find out is, how is it that there was so little in the estate?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I only got two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “Yes, but your father believed Ralph Cunningham would do right by you during the term of your marriage. He didn’t think you’d need much money. After all, Cunningham’s worth quite a lot.”

  “Are you saying Daddy didn’t anticipate that my third marriage mightn’t outlast our champagne bubbles?”

  “Exactly. He thought you were … well, as he put it, mellowing.”

  “He wouldn’t put it that way. Maturing, you mean.”

  Scroggins didn’t say anything.

  Tess said, “All right, so he thought that a quarter of a million should keep a well-married lady in necessities through Warner’s lifetime?”

  “I think so,” Martin Scroggins said. “In any case, your father and I both knew Warner well enough to agree that if something did happen, some emergency or need, Warner would do whatever he could for your well-being. Your father even told me that if you ever found yourself divorced again or in dire financial straits, Warner’d welcome you to live with him. Warner loves you like his own, Tessie.”

  “Dear God!” Tess Binder said, taking her cigarettes from her purse. “Living at the ranch? Me? Dear God!”

  Scroggins was very uneasy. He signaled to a waitress for more coffee. While the young woman poured, he said to Tess, “Your father’s thinking was sound, in my opinion. It’s quite common for a trustor to leave his estate to his wife as a life tenant to use for her lifetime, and then to his child in fee after his wife passes away.”

  “And Warner was his wife,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Martin Scroggins cleared his throat and said, “Surely, you can’t be having money troubles?” He glanced at Winnie again, but Winnie looked away and drank his coffee in silence.

  “Surely, I am,” Tess said. “Ralph was a swine. His prenuptial agreement is unbreakable. He gave me nothing but household things.”

  “Well, perhaps until you’re on your feet, you might consider talking to Warner. Really, he could use you out there now. He’s lonely with your father gone. It’s only him and the servants.”

  “Have you been to El Refugio lately?”

  “No, not since your dad died.”

  For the first time, Winnie spoke. He said, “Do you know Hack Starkey?”

  Martin Scroggins looked wary. He said, “Yes, I know him. I should say I know of him. I can’t remember ever actually meeting him.” The old man looked back at Tess and said, “He did odd jobs for your father and Warner, I believe.”

  “Mostly for Warner,” Tess said. “He was Warner’s man Friday.”

  Scroggins dropped his eyes while sipping his coffee, and said, “I wouldn’t know about what services he may have performed. There was certainly no provision for anyone else in the trust. Just you and Warner. And even if Warner, as life tenant, and you as remainderman, were to agree to change or terminate the trust, in my opinion, it can’t be done. The trustor, your father, specifically addressed that possibility. He knew what he wanted.”

  Martin Scroggins brightened when breakfast came. He had a hearty appetite for an older man, and after waiting just long enough to be polite, he wolfed his breakfast while Tess made small talk with Winnie.

  Winnie ate quietly, only saying to Tess, “This can’t touch your omelet. Your killer omelet.”

  Tess winked at Winnie when Scroggins was occupied with dipping a slab of ham into egg yolk. Then she said, “Things’re always better when they’re made on an old-fashioned kitchen table.”

  After the lawyer obsessively mopped up the last drop of yolk, he said, “Tessie, so far, I don’t know if I’ve been very helpful to you.”

  Tess said, “You see, Martin, I can understand how Daddy would think I was being provided for by my husband, and that a pittance would suffice.”

  “A quarter of a million,” Martin reminded her.

  “Is a pittance these days and you know it.” She added, “Around here.”

  “Once again, I could suggest the ranch,” Martin Scroggins said. “Why it’s …”

  “A living hell in the summer!” she said. “And limbo the rest of the time.”

  Martin Scroggins was clearly disappointed. “Your father and Warner wouldn’t agree with that. Neither would I.”

  Tess reached over and patted his hand
. His fingers were extremely long, and pencil veins crisscrossed the hands, petering out at the jutting wristbones. “I didn’t mean to sound like a brat,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve been abandoned. I don’t have anything, Martin, except for the equity in my house.”

  When Scroggins glanced at Winnie again, Winnie said apologetically, “This is the only shirt I got without a fuzzy collar or a hole in it. Usually, I dress like a shipwreck. I couldn’t feed a pet gerbil.”

  Tess smiled at Winnie and said to the lawyer, “For once, I haven’t latched on to a man who can help me. Not in that way. He helps me in every other way.”

  Martin Scroggins got very serious. “I’m trying to understand what I can do, Tess.”

  “Martin, is there anything … anything else that could be converted into cash? I mean, aside from El Refugio, which I realize can’t be sold during Warner’s lifetime.”

  “What are you saying? Do you think I’d withhold information from you?”

  “No no no,” Tess said quickly. “But, I don’t know how … I just can’t believe they could have devastated Daddy’s money in only six or eight years! It’s incredible that there wouldn’t be anything left except the cash I got and enough for Warner to live on.”

  “Tessie, they didn’t devastate his fortune!” the lawyer said. “Sure, they traveled a lot and lived very well, but your father was entitled to that. He earned that money. And Warner certainly wasn’t left with some vast secret bank account after your dad died. I believe there’s enough to cover bills and enough to run the ranch for several years.” Then he showed his first bit of exasperation. He said, “Tess, that ranch isn’t Warner’s. It’s yours. Or it will be when Warner’s gone. Your father didn’t abandon you!”

  “But Martin, where did all the cash go?” Now Tess was showing exasperation. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “The ranch!” he said. “El Refugio, of course.”

  “What’re you talking about? A three-acre spot of green in the middle of the desert?”