Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

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 with 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.”

The office was halfway down the drab second-floor corridor. His escort buzzed and the door opened electronically. Inside was a different world from the prisonlike corridors, elegant, obtrusively expensive. It was like the sultans who disguised the entrances to the harems: the pleasures inside are for only the initiated. The reception room was furnished in leafy plants and designer furniture. Oils in the