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

Joe gone, Lizzie hired a UCLA co-ed as nanny in exchange for room and board. Terry questioned if Didi really needed a godfather, but the Mulls, on both sides, Catholic and Presbyterian, had always had them. Godparents are there when the birth parents aren’t. So once again, for the hundredth time in her life, she turned to Cal, deprived of a godfather himself for having been born in China and still without wife or children of his own.

Maggie and Terry lived in a brown, two-story wood shingle house on Montreal Street in Playa del Rey, up the hill from the stables and looking out across Santa Monica Bay. Hughes Airfield was ten minutes away, and either of them taking off flew directly over the house just before reaching the ocean. Nelly was right: Terry was good for Maggie. Love, no. Arnaud was for love. Five years older, Terry was a good guy and lucky or skilled enough to have survived a war of island-hopping in P-38s. He was a bachelor and intended to remain one until he met Maggie. He’d paid $15,500 for his house and spent most of his spare time just down the hill at the Westport Beach Club. Maggie had been the boss’s girl, but when she wasn’t seeing the boss anymore Terry invited her to Westport for dinner and before long she was sleeping over. Maggie regarded herself as equal to any male pilot, but Terry had thirty-two known kills in the war and been shot down and fished out only once, and no one could match that. He was slow and easy and loved her madly, the opposite of Hughes, who was a dervish of motion and constant agitated calculation and didn’t offer love as much as he took it.

With no churches in Playa del Rey, the christening on a hot summer Sunday afternoon was at St. Michael’s in El Segundo. Afterward, they returned to the bar at Westport, a potted-palm, beachy room with the usual netting, cork, and seashells. An upright piano with stains telling many tales stood on one side ready for the piano player if he showed up or anyone else if he didn’t. The dozen bamboo tables between piano and bar would be full by then. They ordered rum drinks and whiskey for Joe, who was just back from prison, and the children stayed until they got noisy and were driven up the hill by their grandmother. A sitter had been arranged, and Nelly would come back for dinner and dancing. Claude, her latest dance beau, would join them.

Playa del Rey was a special place for the Heywards, a sleepy little village surrounded by Ballona marshlands, beach, and ocean. The village consisted of grocery store, drugstore, a couple of burger joints and a gas station. The trolley tracks from downtown to Redondo Beach were still there behind the paddle tennis courts, though the trains weren’t running anymore. The Westport was the center of activity, but was a monastery compared with the snazzy beach clubs up the way in Santa Monica and Malibu. The village was Maggie’s favorite place back to her stable days. The crash with Billy Todd might have rubbed some of the magic away but hadn’t. She joked with Terry that it was as much the village as the man that had seduced her.

Aside from the christening, the occasion was to welcome Joe back. His appeal denied, he’d served nine months in a Tennessee prison with some of his friends and returned to a Hollywood that wanted no part of him. Prison had not changed him. The nanny was gone, and Joe was babysitting again, writing and giving Lizzie more time downtown, which she needed. The second Pitts trial had resettled the former district attorney at San Quentin, and she had moved on to investigating why the Los Angeles City Council had allowed the world’s greatest transportation system to be sold to a shell company serving as front for General Motors.

Cal passed a letter from Howard Hughes around as their drinks arrived. “This came last week. He wants to meet to discuss the land. It’s up to you all, of course. I’m just your lawyer. Just tell me how to answer him.”

“How about lawyer and adviser,” said Maggie.

“And negotiator,” said Lizzie.

“I heard you hung up your shingle,” said Joe.

“In Echo Park,” said Maggie, smiling. “He just can’t break away.”

“From . . .?”

“From the past—what else?”

“It’s where the memories, reside, my dear,” said Joe. “We are all prisoners.”

“Howard wants to speculate on the land,” said Cal, trying to get back on subject. “I can’t see any other reason he’d be interested. He’s certainly not going to expand his airfield with L.A. International so close. He knows he’ll have to shut it down one of these days.”

“One of these days will be when jet planes arrive,” said Terry. “No way the FAA allows two airfields so close with jets buzzing around.”

“So why sell?” said Maggie. “We can speculate as well as Howard can.”

“Keep those awful wells?” said Lizzie. “Howard promised to pull them out.”

“And keep the stables,” said Maggie, sipping her Daiquiri.

“I’m glad Nelly’s not here,” said Cal. “She loves the wells and hates the stables.”

“For Howard, it’s always money,” said Maggie.

“The wells are coming out sooner or later for the marina,” said Cal. “My guess is that Howard thinks he can make money by holding the land for a few years and selling to the county, and that you’ll sell now because you want out of the oil business.”

“So do we meet with him?”

“Of course,” said Cal. “Find out what he’s up to.”

“You just told us,” said Maggie.

“There could be more to it. He might have his eye on the land between the wells and the airfield, the wetlands of Ballona. But why? We won’t know until we sit down with him.”

“Include me out,” said Joe. “Howard and I don’t mix now that I’m a criminal.”

“I think you should come,” said Lizzie. “Howard Hughes is a feast for writers.”

Joe smiled