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

1, a former Indian coastal trail. There are no east-west access roads from inland civilization over the coastal mountains to the sea. North of Sonoma is the so-called Lost Coast, where the mountains come right down to the water and there are no roads and no people.

The Sea Ranch hearings were tumultuous. Hundreds of protestors descended on Gualala, marching its narrow streets. These same people had been coming to the seashore for years, pitching tents, casting lines, some even brave enough to test the frigid waters. They would not be evicted from the coast without a fight. Neither would the Indians. So many protesters came out that the supervisors moved the hearings to Santa Rosa, the county seat. The hearings were front-page news across the state. Castle and Cooke won the battle, but lost the war. Sea Ranch launched the grass-roots movement that led to passage of the California Coastal Act, creating a public commission to take the coast out of the hands of developers and return it to the people.

It took some time for Lizzie to get the truth about the rupture. She sensed something was wrong when Robby didn’t come home after the hearings. Cal dropped him off at Stanford though it was still mid-summer. When neither Cal nor Robby would tell her what happened, she called Hal Kornheiser, the Times’s San Francisco bureau chief, who’d covered the Santa Rosa hearings. Hal checked the transcripts: Yes, a Robinson Morton of Los Angeles had taken the microphone to speak in favor of Sea Ranch, accusing the Sierra Club and its allies of interfering with private land rights in violation of the Fifth Amendment, quoting author Ayn Rand.

The incident poisoned relations between Robby and his godfather. Nor did it improve matters between Robby and his mother, stunned that under the auspices of the Sierra Club he would have spoken out in favor of the project, an act of blatant family treachery. It didn’t help that the Mull Foundation was one of the Sierra Club’s and Coast Alliance’s principal benefactors. If Sea Ranch was a watershed in California environmental history, it was also an aberration, for it took place along the desolate Northern California coast, where few people lived. The bloodiest battles to preserve the coastline were about to take place in Southern California, where the people lived. The primary focus of the war would be the property of Howard Hughes.

Chapter 42

“What the hell is the Summa Corporation?”

“If you don’t know, Mr. Hughes,” said Melvin Cobb into the phone, which was on loudspeaker, “you’d better find out. Summa is acting in your name and doing things you aren’t going to like. I’ll send you everything I have if you give me your address.”

“No, goddam it! Got to keep my address private. People on my trail.”

Maggie looked across to Cobb for a reaction, but he wore his usual encrypted look. Beyond him she glimpsed the Hughes runway and beyond that the cranes of the great dredging operation where the Mull oil wells had once stood, oily sand one day to become Marina del Rey, the world’s largest man-made small craft harbor. Howard had done all right on that deal. So had the Mulls. Then came Summa.

She’d been sitting in Cobb’s office speculating with him where Howard could possibly be when the call came. Where was he? Why was he calling? They hadn’t heard from him in months. She whispered not to let him hang up, that she’d like a word with him.

No one at Hughes Aircraft or Hughes Tool or Hughes Medical Institute or TWA had any idea where to find the increasingly elusive, increasingly paranoid billionaire. He had disappeared. His wife—Jean Peters had finally married him—lived in Bel Air and thought he was at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, which he owned along with just about every other resort hotel in the city. But calls to the Desert Inn, including hers, were not returned. Others said he was in Florida or Nicaragua or had permanently gone underground, like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, because he couldn’t stand dealing with the government and banks anymore, both of which he blamed for taking TWA. According to the press, both were on his trail with subpoenas.

“Maggie Heyward is here with me, Mr. Hughes. She’d like a word with you.”

“Maggie—my little Maggie.” Silence, then: “Heyward? Hell, that’s not her name.” More silence. “Hey, Cobb, do you remember that show with Gale Storm?”

“It was My Little Margie, Howard, Margie,” said Maggie. “And where the hell are you? Do you know what’s happening back here?”

“I’ll tell you where I am but don’t tell anyone, not even Cobb.” (Too deaf to hear the speaker, she thought). “I’m on Paradise Island. But not for long.”

She stared across at Cobb, who shook his head. “I’m sorry, Howard, I don’t know where Paradise Island is.”

“The Bahamas, and a hell of a lot better than Nassau. But don’t tell anyone.”

There was a laugh and a crack on the line. “Remind me who this is again.”

“It’s Maggie Heyward, Howard, damn it, Mull to you and you’ve got to get off your meds and get back here.” She waited for a response, but none came. “Summa is selling everything out from under you. I can’t stay here any longer. I’m gone unless you do something.”

“Don’t leave me now, Margie. You’re one of the few people I trust back there, you and Cobb—Cobb, you still there?”

“I’m here, Mr. Hughes.”

“And what about this so-called Howard Hughes memoir the newspapers are talking about,” she said. “It’s lying trash. Are you going to let that pass?”

“You tell them, Margie. That’s why I called. You call a press conference and tell them it is fraud, beginning to end, bogus, fake, garbage. I don’t know this guy Irving and never talked to him and we’ll sue the shit out of him and the publisher. McGraw-Hill, isn’t it? Do they think I’m so far gone I can’t defend myself?”

“Cary Grant already did the press conference and told