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

he’d quit his job on the Los Angeles Utilities Board and gone to ground. It took her two weeks to locate him at Lake Arrowhead, where he’d built a cabin. “Sick of the whole thing,” he told colleagues before he disappeared. People knew he lived in Venice, but he was gone when Lizzie found the house. “Up in the mountains” was all he’d ever said about his cabin. After knocking on a few Venice doors Lizzie found a neighbor who knew it was Lake Arrowhead. Some mountain sleuthing led her to his cabin on a snowy winter day.

“I had to get out of that place before it ruined my health,” he said, staring back into the fire. “I couldn’t stand to see what they were doing. People are going to go to jail. They damn well better. Trouble is it’ll be too late.” She’d taken out pad and pencil, but after listening for a few minutes put them back in her purse and flipped on the tape recorder. Fred Barrett liked to talk. At his office, they’d told her he knew every mile of every line in the city and could tell a story about all of them. She’d come to listen.

The Times had taken its time getting into it because few people grasped what was happening. Reports came in of tracks being pulled up here and there around the city, but other tracks were being laid. It didn’t seem different from what had been going on for years as Los Angeles grew and spread and redistributed itself. The Pacific Electric Company of Henry Huntington was a business, and it was natural that unprofitable lines would be replaced by profitable ones. All this was overseen by the utilities commission because trolleys were public transportation, monopolies to be regulated in the public interest. Some of the construction had been spectacular, like the grading through the Cahuenga Pass that took trains over the Hollywood Hills to Studio City and Sherman Oaks.

“They do it in the dark of night,” said Barrett. “People wake up and where there’d been a train that took them to work they find a hole in the road.”

Cal’s tip put her onto the story, but it took time because she’d been wrapped up in the second Pitts trial and because beyond the sale of Pacific Electric to National City Lines it wasn’t clear what the story was. It wasn’t until more tracks started to disappear that she knew she had something. And when she went looking for National City Lines, she couldn’t find it. How could that be? Pacific Electric was the largest employer in the city, running lines into every corner of the county, carrying over a hundred million passengers annually. The Sawtelle trolley downtown to the Times was an easy ten-minute walk from their Barrington house.

How could the new owner of such a leviathan be invisible? And if they were pulling up old tracks why weren’t new ones being laid?

When Fred Barrett unwound his gangly frame from the redwood chair to head into the kitchen, she had a chance to look around. He’d built the house himself, he said, over countless weekends, countless years. It was his therapy. The house was built in the shape of a tower, or maybe pagoda, at the end of a dirt road winding up from the lake, which was frozen solid as she drove by. It seemed all one room, though the kitchen had its own round corner behind a partition, and a spiral wooden stairway led to a loft bedroom under the exposed beams of the roof. Like the man, the house was sparse and neat. The fireplace kept it warm though it couldn’t be much above twenty-five degrees outside. Through skylights on either side of the loft she saw falling snow. She’d had to wait at the Times while they put chains on the company car, “just in case.” It was snowing by the time she hit San Bernardino, and Highway 18 up to Crestline was impassible without chains. The Times stringer at Lake Arrowhead found Barrett’s address at the post office and told her how to find the house. It was mid-afternoon by the time she arrived. Despite his surprise, Barrett welcomed her warmly.

“It’s accumulating, darling,” he shouted from the kitchen. “You better drink your coffee down and get out of here or you’ll be snowed in.”

“I didn’t come all this way just to go back. I don’t suppose you have a phone.”

“No phones up here. That’s why we come. Tell you something else. People come up here because they’re afraid of the ‘Big One’—you know, the earthquake that’s supposed to level the city one day.” She heard a guffaw. “What they don’t know is that the San Andreas Fault runs right under Lake Arrowhead. When the Big One comes we’ll be at ground zero.”

He had a good fire going, and when he returned with a coffee tray and biscuits she was not sure she wanted to leave. He put a new log on the fire.

“Any place to stay in Arrowhead?”

“You don’t want to stay up here. Never know when you’ll get back down.”

She took a sip of the strongest coffee she’d ever tasted.

“Better pour some milk in that,” he said, settling into his chair. “Tell me, how did you get onto this?”

“I have a friend who worked at Pacific Electric.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“Just that the P.E. was being sold and nobody knew the buyer.”

“Best kept secret since the Manhattan Project.”

“But how can that be? The city council was involved. The public utilities commission was involved. The state railroad commission had to know something.”

“I’ll tell you how it happened,” he said, putting his feet up on a wooden stool. “If you’re not going back then you’ve got some time and might as well get comfortable. We can drive into town in a bit and check out the Village Inn. They’ll have something for you. Now, turn that machine of yours on and we’ll get going.”

He drank