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

she’d never heard from him again, evidence perhaps that the restraining order was working despite what he’d written. Cal gave up his apartment at Echo Lake. Los Feliz was only ten minutes further from his office. The temple and the Richfield Building were on the same bus line and sometimes they rode together. The G.M. buses were a poor excuse for the Glendale-Burbank trolley with its own right-of-way—which his father had taken years before to visit the same woman—but the trolley was gone.

Angie was a phenomenon. Nothing had been certain when she took over from Willie. Her position was provisional for the board and its chairman, Eddie Mull, but not for the Soldiers, who wanted her and no one else. After Eddie was gone, the Los Angeles establishment, which hated notoriety, still opposed her for a while—just as it had opposed Willie until it saw he was good for downtown business. None of it turned out to matter. Sister Angie had become a postwar symbol for women who’d stepped into new roles during the war and had no intention of giving them up. Angie was too good a politician to hold a grudge, and with time the establishment came to accept her. Like Hollywood, the Temple of the Angels was a national institution, good for morale and good for business. Make your peace.

She left her robes at work. At home, she was all woman, barefoot on the carpet, bare legged on the couch, naked in bed. She loved quoting from the Song of Songs, that strange Old Testament book celebrating sexual love. Everything about the Song is a mystery, she told him: when it was written, where, by whom and how it ever got into the Bible. Blasphemous for Christians, it was a product of old Jerusalem, its origins closer to Egyptian love poems or Tantric sex hymns than anything in the Bible. In sermons and shows she never mentioned it, but knew it by heart and would recite it to excite him. Never did the subject of marriage come up between them. They didn’t expect the arrangement to last forever. One day at a time while Gil was at large. People found out if they wanted that Calvin Mull was living with Sister Angie. It made sense if anyone thought about it: Sister Angie needed protection from a murderer who had vowed to kill her. Her protector was the son of the man he had murdered.

Gil l’Amoureux had gone to ground. After Folsom he’d gone to San Francisco for that’s where he’d posted the card. From there he disappeared. Much later, in an interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who visited him in San Quentin, he claimed he’d simply worked his way down the coast on derricks, boats and in the fields, the kind of jobs where no one asked about you or expected you to stay. If he ran out of money or slept with the wrong woman or got drunk or in fights or fired, he simply moved on down the coast a little farther, getting closer to Los Angeles as he went. He never sent another card, but as he got closer, he told the Chronicle man, his nose started twitching and that wasn’t all. He hadn’t used his real name when he got out of Folsom for it was too well known. As he got closer, he began to use it again. Let them wonder.

One evening found them, unusually, alone together in the dining room. Catalina, the Mexican housekeeper who lived in the cottage behind the rear patio, had made mole poblano and sopa de tortillas, and Cal opened a bottle of Spanish Rioja to go with it. Dinner with them was never formal, just something that happened if they both found themselves at home and Catalina had prepared something ahead of time. Cal, who now had a private law practice in addition to running the Sierra Club, often stayed out for dinner with clients, and the temple regularly scheduled evening events requiring Sister Angie’s presence and kept its soup kitchen open until eight. Life on Lambeth Street was casual. The kitchen, which looked out onto the rear patio, was normally a busier place than the dining room, and it was more common to find one or the other in the kitchen munching tacos or enchiladas Catalina had stacked in the refrigerator than to find them together in the dining room with a bottle of wine.

It was a handsome room, with a lower ceiling than the salon because of the bedrooms above it. Dark heavy beams angled up to the vault at 45 degrees from both sides to connect with a longitudinal beam running the length of the room. The table, chairs, and sideboard were heavy California oak, and the floor of dark travertine tile. Leaded, arched windows gave onto the front patio. Evenings, curtains were always drawn. They never entertained together. Angie occasionally had Soldiers or benefactors for dinner, but Cal never joined them. They saw no point in advertising the arrangement.

They’d been talking about a legal case that was to take Cal into the San Bernardino Mountains the next day. Developers were seeking permits to build a ski resort near Palm Springs on Mount San Jacinto, a mountain sacred to the desert tribes, and Cal had been hired to represent the tribes in opposition to the permits. They hadn’t had dinner together in a while but planned this one because it wasn’t certain how long Cal was to be away.

“Three days at the most,” he said. “In any case, I should be back before the weekend. Make our pleas, submit the files, see what the judge has in mind.” He looked to see if she seemed at all bothered, but she was in good spirits. He would be sleeping in her bedroom that night. With time, Gil and his threats were fading. It had been more than a year since he was released. If he was coming, it figured he