Blood and Oranges James Goldsborough (best romantic novels in english txt) 📖

Callender wants to meet me face-to-face. I gathered it has something to do with Pat Murphy and Barton Pitts.”

She sat up so fast she nearly spilt her beer. “What? What does Henry Callender have to do with Pat Murphy and Barton Pitts?”

“I believe Pitts and Callender are residents of the same hotel—the Folsom Arms.”

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “That awful little man who killed Dad is claiming to know something about the Murphy case? That is preposterous! Pitts may be evil. He’s not dumb. Why would he talk to Callender? Pitts sent Callender to Folsom!”

He wasn’t going to argue, wasn’t going say that Callender was as close to a friend as Willie ever had and had been his friend as well. “Things leak in prison,” he said. “I thought you might be interested. You’re working on the Murphy case, aren’t you?

“Going to Folsom on a wild goose chase, you mean?”

“We can drive up together.”

She didn’t answer. He glanced at Maggie, who was smoking and watching the little sister who usually did the watching. Lizzie curled her fingers around the stem of the beer bottle, turning it, squeezing it, signs of conflict. “That man murdered our father,” she said at length. “I thought we were done with him.”

Dead silence. He listened for sounds. Brentwood was quieter than Bel Air because it wasn’t up in the hills where the air is thinner. He wondered about Robby, two years old now, his godson, wondered if he ever cried in the night.

“And you would be done with him, except he says he has information about Pat Murphy. Your call.”

“He won’t mind me there?”

“Why would he?”

She fell silent for a while. Then: “Okay, why not?”

He glanced at Maggie, silent, restless, drawing on her cigarette, wanting to move on. “Are you two done?” she asked.

He knew what was coming, at least thought he did. Nelly had hinted at it over dinner. “Not if it’s to talk about Uncle Eddie’s estate. I want no part of it, and no, I’m not being coy. I have a good job at Pacific Electric. Eddie’s estate goes to you three.”

“And what are we to do with it?” said Lizzie. “None of us needs that kind of money. Mother wants to buy her dance studio when it’s probated. Imagine.”

“As to what you should do with it, that’s another matter,” he said. “I have some ideas on that. No use giving it all to the bankers.”

Maggie nodded at her sister, stood up, walked around behind the chair where Lizzie sat. Lizzie was smiling. Something was afoot. Maggie leaned over the chair toward him, silk blouse falling slightly open, gold chains dangling, cigarette between her long, slender fingers, looking like Lauren Bacall leaning over Hoagy Carmichael’s piano. “Speaking of the estate, dear cousin, is not exactly what I had in mind.”

Lizzie was giggling.

“Oh?”

“How would you like to give me away again?”

“No!”

She laughed. “Is that a ‘no’ of surprise or rejection? Terry and I are getting hitched, and you are the last Mull male left standing.”

He stood to hug her. “This is getting to be a habit.”

“Last time, I promise. Next time is your turn.”

“No comment.”

“We’re thinking soon,” said Maggie, sitting down again.

“Where?”

“Nothing like in Paris. Simple. Maybe the Lutheran Church on Wilshire.”

“Is Terry Lutheran?”

“He thinks he had a grandmother who was Lutheran.”

“Ah.” He took another gulp from his beer when the thought struck him head on, attached itself in his brain and dug in. Willie would love it. And if Terry didn’t care . . .

“I think you should be married at the temple.”

Silence. Then Lizzie: “Surely, you’re joking.”

Maggie simply stared. “I will not be married in that coliseum.”

“No, no, not the amphitheater,” he said. “In the chapel—quiet, intimate, quite beautiful. You’d love it. So would Terry.”

“So would you,” said Lizzie. “What makes you even think . . .”

“Because the temple is—I have to say it—part of the family.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Angie would be thrilled.”

Maggie continued to stare. When had she ever been conventional?

“Do you know,” she said at length, “that I’ve never met Sister Angie, never even seen her. I’d never heard of her until the night—what, ten years ago?—when you two were sitting there on Tiverton talking about Uncle Willie’s new girlfriend—sexier than Lizzie, if I remember.”

Lizzie again: “Can you honestly be thinking of . . .”

“I’d like to meet her, really I would. Women love her, I hear.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Mother will be furious,” said Lizzie.

Maggie laughed. “She can bring her dance instructors.”

Chapter 27

An eight-hour drive on Highway 99 took them through the Central Valley toward Sacramento, where they would spend Saturday night at the Senator Hotel, next to the Capitol. The meeting with Callender was set for the next day, Sunday, visiting day at Folsom. Like other Americans, Cal was stuck with a prewar car until Detroit could switch its assembly lines from tanks back to passenger cars again. He’d bought a ’41 Buick convertible from a Santa Monica woman who’d garaged it during the war waiting for her husband to come back. He didn’t, and she sold the car with only twenty-five hundred miles on it. The trip up and back to Folsom would add another thousand.

They had a good palaver on the way up, their first in years. Cal found Lizzie more engaging than she’d once been, more willing to stop asking questions and taking notes and talk about her own life. She was clearly happy with Joe, happy to be a mother, though she said Joe seemed to get along better with their son than she did. “When I’m through with this Murphy thing I’m going to take leave to write a book about it and get to know my son.”

“Doesn’t writing a book about it depend on finding the killer?”

“Oh, I’ll find him.”

Cal looked over. She meant it.

They’d come up through the Grapevine pass over the Tehachapi Mountains not far from where the aqueduct passed on its way to Los Angeles. North of Bakersfield, the clean, fresh grassy smell