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

his coffee half down. “I assume you know that National City Lines is a front. If you didn’t know that you wouldn’t be here. Guy named Roy E. Fitzgerald runs it, or maybe that’s E. Roy, never was sure about that. Signs his name both ways. He’s as much of a ghost as his company. Got started in a town called Galesburg, near Chicago, with money from General Motors to buy the town’s railway system and junk it. GM promised Galesburg buses to replace it—you know, those yellow things they make. Worked so well that GM kept on giving and E. Roy kept on pulling up tracks in little towns all around Illinois. Nobody complained—too much money being sloshed around. Pretty soon GM had partners named Standard Oil, Mack, Firestone, Greyhound, and they started eyeing bigger fish. Took their act to Tulsa, Montgomery, St. Louis. Tracks come out, buses go in. By the time the public knows what’s going on it’s too late. But none of these towns is anything compared to Los Angeles. They were fishing for minnows and then went for the whale. Best transit system in the world, I tell you.”

“And that’s what you told the city council?”

“That’s what the public utilities board told the council. And we told the council what these guys were doing back east. I went back myself to see and wrote it all up for the council.”

“So it’s all part of the record.”

“It’s all in there.” He paused. “But try and find it.”

He crunched on a biscuit. “Where you from?”

“Born right here in Los Angeles,” she said.

He smiled. “One of the few. I got my start in New York, little town called Syosset. I worked on the Long Island Railroad. Went right through Syosset. After the war—the First World War, that is—I came out here. Docs said I needed a dryer climate. Went to work for the P.E. and watched our train system grow up and surpass the Long Island. We laid half again as much track as the Long Island. Now can you imagine New York without the Long Island Railroad? You cannot. New York would not function without the Long Island Railroad. Where would the people live? Now don’t you imagine that General Motors and Standard Oil and the rest of them would love to pull up seven hundred miles of Long Island track and replace it with cars and buses? You bet they would. And any New York city councilman or Long Island town supervisor who let that happen would be up at Sing Sing the next day.”

He finished his coffee and glanced up at the skylights, now dark with snow. “I tell you, darling, the day will come in Los Angeles—don’t know when it will be, maybe twenty-five, fifty years out, who knows?—when the city is so inundated with cars and smog and bumper-to-bumper traffic and general misery and frustration that it will look back at what it had in the thirties and forties and wonder how in hell people could have been so stupid. Mark my words, there will be a highway from downtown to the beach that will follow the exact path of the Venice Short Line, only instead of a half-hour ride while you read your newspaper you’ll be shut in your car barely moving and breathing the exhausts of the cars all around you. It will take four times as long and you’ll arrive four times as frazzled—and then try to find a place to park.

He stood up. “And you know what they’ll do? One day, after wringing their hands and pulling their hair for years, they will start to rebuild what they destroyed. They will pull up the roads and scrap the buses and lay down track—maybe subways, maybe elevated, who knows what they’ll have by then—and those tracks will go exactly where Pacific Electric had laid them. I’m telling you, they will follow the exact same routes. How much will the new system cost? It will cost a thousand times what it cost to build the system we have today. Hah! And they say that the human species is getting smarter.”

He stopped talking and walked to the front door for a peek outside. A gust whooshed in that made her shiver. “Getting pretty heavy. The 18 will be closed by now. Tell you what. I’ll drive to the Village Inn. You follow me in. They’ll have a room. Better for you than stuck out here. We’ll get some dinner and talk. Time this story gets the attention it deserves.”

She’d brought only a purse, but the village shops would get her through the night—or maybe a few nights. Her main problem was shoes, so after checking in at the hotel and leaving Fred Barrett at the bar she went searching for boots and heavy socks. In another shop she found pajamas and a woolen cap and then it was back into the snow to the local drugstore for toiletries. At least she’d had the foresight to bring her good woolen coat. Back at the inn, she had her things sent up, went into the ladies’ room to freshen and then off to find Barrett. As a rule, she didn’t drink in the daytime, but it didn’t seem like daytime anymore and she was cold enough that she would have broken her rule anyway. Barrett was seated at a table in the bar reading the Times, and they ordered hot rum grogs.

“First time at Arrowhead?”

There was a fire going. She’d kept her boots on and with new socks could finally feel her toes again. “First time,” she said, keeping her hands wrapped around the warm mug. “Beautiful place, though I’m not used to the snow. We live in Brentwood.”

“Brentwood? Santa-Monica-Sawtelle Line—runs from downtown right out to the Veterans Hospital. Say, your name’s Mull. You by any chance related to the late Willie Mull?”

“Willie Mull was my uncle.”

“Well, darling, you have my deepest sympathies. That was one sad story. I’ve never been