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

vice principal’s office, of which she’d had a few. The men turned to watch. They liked to watch her walk, even in overalls. The summons was what she’d been waiting for.

He was standing with his back to the door, staring out the window to the airfield when she entered. He’d seen her coming, watched every step for a hundred yards, though she could not see him behind the tinted windows. He was dressed in a dark business suit. He didn’t turn around to see who’d come in. Melvin Cobb, his lead flack, was in a chair. They exchanged glances. She liked Mel. He liked her.

She waited for him to turn but was darned if she’d stand like some poor army lieutenant waiting for the colonel to acknowledge his existence. She sat down next to Cobb, who was natty in herringbone. It wouldn’t be the first pair of greasy overalls on Hughes’ snazzy furniture. He had it scrubbed down with saddle soap each night. He was a fiend for cleanliness, a fierce enemy of germs, paranoid on the subject. She wondered how he could make love like that.

“You might have talked to me before you planted this.”

Still he hadn’t turned.

His office looked out on the airfield he’d carved from the fields between Playa del Rey and Culver City. She was not two miles from the horses that had given her as a girl the taste for something faster. Looking northwest, beyond the runway, toward the wetlands and Eddie’s oil derricks, she spied a flock of something (whimbrels, godwits?) sweep through the air in perfect formation, like a squadron of fighters. Her eyes followed the curves of Culver Boulevard over the marshes and came to rest on the spot where Billy Todd was killed in a field of lettuce. Not the worst place to die.

“And you would have laughed me out of the office—as you did last time.”

Finally, he turned, wearing the sardonic smile that wasn’t a smile so much as simply the way his mouth shut because of the scars. She loved the way he looked—tall, ruggedly handsome, with the self-assurance of a man who accepted no limits.

He’d been in crashes and walked away each time, which some said explained his erratic behavior. He spoke loudly, and she was increasingly aware that he was hard of hearing. His outbursts with men who challenged him were legendary. He was known to be ruthless with men and courteous with women—with whom he didn’t have to be ruthless because they surrendered so easily. He was vain about his appearance and kept a large staff of lawyers and publicists to look after his image and interests. His troubles with movie censors, the notorious Hays’ Office, over The Outlaw, the movie he’d just completed, had been in the news for months. Featuring Jane Russell in a special Hughes-designed uplift bra, the film had been banned, and Hughes set his PR department to work on public opinion to win its release.

“This is betrayal, Miss Mull, which in the Hughes bible is a mortal sin. I can’t keep you on after this you must know.”

She came to the edge of her chair.

“Betrayal? I challenge you to a race, fair and square, and you call it betrayal? What kind of a man does that?”

She thought he suppressed a smile but he turned away so she couldn’t be sure.

“You went behind my back. Your sister is on the Times, isn’t she?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing—I’ll find out.”

“And I’m sure the next item in the Times,” she said with calculated anger, “or maybe it will be a full story this time, will be how the brave Howard Hughes dodged a challenge he knew he would lose.”

He turned back, and this time it was not a smile and was not suppressed. It was a horse laugh. “Lose to you?”

“You won’t be the only one to lose—everybody loses.”

She stood to go.

Melvin Cobb was shaking his head. “Mr. Hughes, you can’t do this.”

“Why can’t I do it, Melvin?”

Cobb spoke the words slowly, accenting each one. “Because you will look stupid and weak, Mr. Hughes.”

She was walking toward the door.

“Wait!” he called. “Why Catalina?”

She turned. “I thought it would have more appeal.”

“To . . .?”

“To everyone—to the press, to the public, to you.”

She watched him sizing things up, wondering how much of the look was about the race and how much about how she would look in the Russell bra.

“Sit down, Maggie.”

She came back and sat down, glancing at Cobb, whose look somehow suggested that the whole scene was arranged—Hughes the movie director at work. How else could Cobb, a factotum if ever there was one, have had the temerity to challenge his boss.

Hughes sat down behind his desk. “You think you can fly my H-1 Racer?”

“With a little practice.”

“I set world speed records in that plane, you know.”

“I do know that, Howard.”

“And you?”

“I flew a Dewoitine 520.”

“Not a bad plane. Handles like a Spitfire, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve heard it said. I’ve never flown a Spitfire.”

“You’ll only embarrass yourself, you know.”

Maggie’s smile was so incandescent that both Hughes and Cobb broke out in laughter. “My embarrassment will be nothing like yours when I win.”

Again, the men erupted in laughter. This time Maggie joined in.

♦ ♦ ♦

The race was set for eleven o’clock on a hot, bright Saturday morning with the winds strong off the ocean making the women spectators hold down their skirts and the men onto their hats. It was to start from the Hughes test site adjacent to the bean and beet fields of Santa Ana. Ten thousand gawkers and a few dozen concessionaires came ready for a fair, ready for a summer carnival, ready for an event to lift spirits. The war news was looking brighter with both the German advance in Russia and the Japanese advance in the Pacific stalling, and what better way to celebrate than an air race to Catalina?

Basking in the free publicity, Hughes gave Maggie time to practice in his H-1 racer, the