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

long. “No one ever regrets working for Miss Adelaide,” he said. She never did.

Society pages are all about names—the more, the better—and the names must be spelled right and their gowns precisely described, and of course the gown’s designer must be identified, and the photos must be taken straight on—no profiles or at least not from the bad side, which is usually the left for some reason. And quotes. You get quotes wrong at the risk of lawsuits from people with more money even than the Chandlers. Society pages are good for training eyes and memories. Unlike newsroom reporters, the one thing a society reporter never has to do is ask for ages. Society pages don’t run ages because they would all be lies.

Miss Adelaide’s department occupied one corner of the Times’s huge third-floor newsroom and tended to be left to itself. Technically, Miss Adelaide reported to McManus, but in reality, she was autonomous. In her time with Miss Adelaide, Lizzy rarely ventured into the main newsroom. She had no business there. The males, though, sensing that she would soon be out of her cage, were curious. Most of the females working society were of a certain age and tended to the homely side. Lizzie was neither.

It started with Max Untermeyer, star reporter, who walked over one day, plumped his ample behind on a corner of her desk and said: “Doing anything tonight, hon?”

“I have to go straight home, Mr. Untermeyer.”

“Call me Max.”

“I have to go straight home, Max.”

“Got a sweetie?”

“I don’t like sweets.”

After three months, McManus kept his promise and transferred her, not to the newsroom but to the hall of justice. He hesitated at first, for Eddie Mull’s name had been popping up here and there lately and Willie was always in the news. But he stuck to his view not to make decisions about Lizzie based on her name. He talked with Miss Adelaide, who confirmed everything he thought. She was a thorough and relentless reporter, just what the hall of justice needed, a place that had become an old boys’ network of reporters and cops bowling together and hoisting together and sitting on more stories than they produced.

It wasn’t a popular decision. The hall of justice is a huge beat that includes everything that touches on law and order in Los Angeles City and County—namely police, sheriff, courts, jails, district attorney, public defender, tax collector and coroner. The Times had had dozens of people at the hall since it was opened in 1925, old and young, cronies and cubs, fast and slow, cynics and optimists, but they had one thing in common: They were all males. Lizzie was the first female. Pat Murphy, the bureau chief, visited McManus and asked him not to do it. The guys, he said, meaning the cops, reporters, and assistant DAs who ran the place, wouldn’t understand. “Are we so hard up that you have to take girls off the society pages?”

“Don’t get your prejudices up, Murph. She’s a good reporter. She’ll do a good job.”

“What about her name?”

“If they ask, just say the Times never asks reporters about their parents.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Say it anyway.”

“There’s something else.”

“What would that be?”

“She’ll be a distraction.”

“She won’t. Lizzie has learned the fine art of being inconspicuous. The boys in the newsroom found that out and now it’s the turn of the boys at the hall. Take her around to all the departments. Don’t delegate. You make the introductions.”

The district attorney, Barton Pitts, was out the day Murphy took Lizzie to his office. He’d already taken her to the offices of the sheriff, police chief, and judges, and was saving the coroner, appropriately, for last. He’d arranged the DA’s visit for when Pitts was out because Murphy regarded Pitts, a Texan twice elected on the basis of not interfering in the city’s business interests, legitimate or otherwise, as his own exclusive property. Nobody on the Times was allowed to see Pitts without Murphy’s express approval, which never was given and therefore never sought. Lizzie would have to be satisfied with the assistant DA.

Pat Murphy had been at the hall of justice from the beginning and knew everyone in the building, some as corrupt as Pitts and some as virtuous as Murphy’s own daughter Mary, who was a nun. His dossier on Pitts was as thick as a Tolstoy novel and went on growing. He kept it hidden at home in a place known only to himself—and to Mary, just in case. Until Murphy was ready, no other Times reporter was allowed close.

“Corrupt as they come,” Murphy wrote in his notebooks, cataloguing such crimes as protecting bootleggers, taking payoffs from gambling ships and protection rackets, kickbacks from contractors and shielding movie studio bosses from various crimes in return for being supplied with starlets. Murder was not included in the notebooks for the simple reason that time would run out for Murphy. Pitts’s style of living far exceeded his district attorney’s salary, and he was not shy about displaying it. His tentacles reached into every corner of the city, including the Times itself, which had endorsed his election—twice. His knowledge and his connections were his protection. He was protected from everyone but Pat Murphy.

Chapter 15

They began meeting at Angie’s place. Sometimes Willie drove his blue Chevy Roadster, parking in different spots around the neighborhood so it would not be recognized. Sometimes he arrived on the Red Cars from the temple, sometimes on the Yellow Cars which came up Sunset to Glendale. They were discreet, Willie always arriving and departing alone, incognito.

Deprived of affection for so long, he hungered for her. “Girls are so far ahead of boys,” she said. “It takes an older man to make us even.” They spent hours awake in bed, fighting off sleep to rest in each other’s arms. She’d never learned to make love before, just did what Gil told her. If Willie awakened first he would place his hand gently on her thigh and move it slowly upward.