Judy had fallen in love with the weird old house hidden away up the top of the canyon at first sight. Admittedly, she and Sam had been the next thing to dead on their feet after three months literally fighting for their lives in the American North West, British Columbia and on the road back to California, but she had — honest to God — fallen in love with Gretsky’s on that spring day last year.
Up until about a month ago her new life in the Canyon had been idyllic; she was in love with a man who adored her, her baby was due any day, what could possibly go wrong?
Apart from pretty much everything!
A cold wind was blowing down from the mountains that morning and now and then Gretsky’s creaked and flexed as if it was alive, bending a little with every sudden squally gust of the oddly wintery weather that had been funnelling down the Canyon for most of the last week.
The house had been built — if one was being pedantic, half-built — by a silent movie star in the late 1920s who had drunk himself to death when, so the story went, people fell about laughing every time he auditioned for a ‘talking’ part. Allegedly, he was one of those over-sized, deep-chested guys who had a high pitched girl’s voice. In any event the house had been left derelict, empty, save for the snakes, the coyotes and the rats for several years before a real estate magnet had acquired it for a song as part of a job lot of falling down buildings and vacant plots of land in 1938. He had used Gretsky’s and its outhouses for his offices and then World War II had kick started a new California land grab and the rest, as they say, ‘is history’. Much of the house’s singular character and all its quirks including its name, ‘Gretsky’s’, resulted from the period of three years when it had been the long-departed shyster real estate tycoon’s bridgehead in the Hollywood Hills.
The original building had never been finished, its eastern end terminating in a slab-sided wooden wall. Fortuitously, this happened to be the side of the house that was invisible from the road otherwise passersby would think that a giant shark had bitten off one end of the structure. Sheltering in the shadow of the abbreviated mansion — even what survived of the original design was very, very big with fifteen rooms and a thirty feet long, dry for many years, oval swimming pool on a terrace hanging precipitously over a twenty feet drop to the bush and scrub below — were the ‘barracks’, big solid timber ‘long houses’ partitioned into smaller ‘living areas’ connected with a crazy tangle of plumbing, and overhead electricity and telephone cables. Weeds and vines almost enveloped these outhouses in the summer but the trees and vegetation kept the sun off the roofs for several hours each day and in the fall and winter sheltered the ramshackle cluster of dwellings from the normally arid wind off the mountains.
Vincent Meredith got to his feet as Judy came into the room, as did a svelte man in an expensive suit whom she guessed was in his fifties or early sixties. Vincent’s companion had about him the air of an expensive big city attorney so she automatically assumed he must work for Ben and Margaret Sullivan.
“This is Frank Lovell, he’s from the State Department,” Vincent Meredith said to introduce the stranger.
While Judy was momentarily unable to speak, too stunned; behind her Sabrina Henschal made an odd choking sound.
“The State Department?” The older woman spat out incredulously. Quickly overcoming her astonishment.
“The Secretary has asked me to do what I can to finesse the situation,” Frank Lovell declared apologetically, smiling sternly. He focused on Judy. “Your father-in-law has been appointed United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Mrs Brenckmann. In my capacity as senior counsel to the Secretary of State I am in California to see what can be done to avoid your husband’s present situation embarrassing the department…”
“Embarrassing the department!” Judy retorted angrily. She hardly ever raised her voice; this time she very nearly shouted.
“Forgive me, I didn’t put that very well…”
“Sam was almost burned to death and then the cops framed him!”
“Yes, quite. Unfortunately, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is extremely sensitive about outside interference in its business from within the state of California, let alone Washington. There is a great need for great discretion in this matter.”
Judy was proud of the way she had held herself together the winter after the war; that she had refused to give in, refused to die like so many others but she had had Sam beside her then and the last month had been like some nightmarish Kafkaesque tragedy. The last two times Vincent Meredith had driven her to the California Institute for men at Chino, San Bernardino, she never got to see Sam; he was in the prison hospital and nobody would tell her why. Last week Columbia Records had ‘voided’ Sam’s contract and presented her with a bill of over $5,000 for their inconvenience, LAPD cruisers routinely pulled up outside Gretsky’s and watched the old house; she had got to the point where she was afraid to go anywhere, say anything to anybody she did not know, and when she was left alone she usually ended up crying, or afraid or just staring into space like an idiot until Tabatha cried for attention.
And now some bastard from DC was worried about Sam embarrassing his new boss!
However, Judy in her angst had missed the main thing.
Sabrina had not.
She protectively wrapped her arms around her friend’s ever slimmer waist — Judy had practically stopped eating, she was so uptight most of the time that the thought of solid food made her feel sick — turned her friend around and hugged her tight.
“It’s not what you know it’s who you know,” she whispered in Judy’s ear. “And this guy’s boss knows the President.”
“Quite,” Frank Lovell smiled, catching the gist of this. “It would be entirely inappropriate for anybody from out of state to attempt to meddle in the Californian judicial system but where there is a will, there is usually a way. About now Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be serving a warrant on Captain Reginald O’Connell of the Los Angeles Police citing involvement in racketeering. The warrant will require that officer to make available his accounts, to make a full disclosure of his financial affairs, and enable FBI men to search his office at Van Nuys Police Station and begin to interview other police witnesses.” The State Department attorney smiled a rueful smile. “This is by way of something of a shot across Captain O’Connell’s bows. Hopefully, it may make him reflect on some of the bad decisions he has made recently. If not, well,” the State Department man shrugged, “in the wake of recent events Mister Hoover, the Director of the FBI, has been extremely keen to support, and to be seen to be supporting, the Administration…”
Judy stared at the man; she just stared.
Did he just say what I think I heard him say?
“Regrettably, we are not in a position to arrest Captain O’Donnell at this time. As I say, that may not be necessary. The thing is that about now he will begin to be aware that the net is closing around him. As will his partners in crime. The best possible solution would be for the Los Angeles Police Department to start doing things to take its head out of the noose. For example, to consider dropping the prospective charges against Mr Brenckmann and Mr Weston.”
Sabrina’s lips were moving but no sound was emerging. The idea that she lived in a country in which J. Edgar Hoover was — today at least — on their side was simply irreconcilable with her life experience up until then. She had sort of understood what was going on when her President triggered Armageddon on account of a few rockets on an island in the Caribbean; in comparison this was utterly incomprehensible. In the world in which she had lived her forty-eight years the FBI and its legendary Director did not lift a finger in defense of the rights and liberties of Americans like her and her friends; and the President was full of shit like ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ which was exactly what a girl would expect from a spoilt rich kid from Massachusetts!