Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite sighed, took another long drag on his cigarette. His wife had scheduled a round of golf with a girlfriend that morning; she would either be in an ecstatic or distracted mood over lunch. Such was the cross every golfer’s spouse bore.
Petty Officer Third Class Grant’s hair needed a trim, he decided.
However, for the rest of the drive across Oakland he looked forward to a rare lunch with his witty, vivacious wife. Hopefully, a suitable moment would, serendipitously, present itself and he could break the news that he was planning to spend a few days in Washington DC.
How would you feel about fending for yourself in New York for a couple of days, darling? Spending some time in Bloomingdales, perhaps? I’ll be stuck in unbelievably tedious meetings all day every day; you know what the Navy Department and the people at the Pentagon are like…
Chapter 10
Ben and Margaret Sullivan were already at their table in the clubhouse when Harvey and Molly Fleischer arrived at the Sequoyah Country Club. The two couples greeted each other like long lost siblings, for in most of the ways that counted their personal and business relationships were as close, if not much closer than the ties that bound most mere brothers and sisters. Not only were their shared financial, property and political connections of the most intimate type, all four parties to the partnership which dated back to the bad old days of the 1930s, liked — perhaps, ‘loved’ better reflected the depth of their mutual respect, friendship and loyalty — each other and were utterly at ease, one with the others.
Strangers glancing at the two couples as they hugged, shook hands, slapped backs, and exchanged kisses of greeting often made the mistake of noting how superficially unalike the couples were. Ben and Margaret Sullivan were aging movie stars, svelte, tanned and still lean, always on show, perfectly groomed, always ready to play their parts in life’s dramas large and small; Harvey and Molly Fleischer were large and clumsy by comparison with none of the ‘gentrified’ airs and graces of the Sullivans, or for that matter any of their dress sense, or their effortless charm and indefatigable joie de vivre. But that was to miss the main thing; the underlying strength of their partnership had always been that each person brought something unique to the party.
“There was a really bad tailback on Sequoyah Road,” Molly Fleischer explained, although she knew her apology was unnecessary. “That’s why we are so late. There were cops everywhere and the traffic was down to one lane…”
The couples continued to arrange themselves around the big table in the window with an unobstructed view down the eighteenth hole of the rolling woodland golf course which had hosted the Oakland Open between 1938 and 1944, in which stars like Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson had paraded their inestimable talents.
“There was a shooting,” Margaret Sullivan declared. “One wonders what things are coming to when that sort of things spreads to the country.” Margaret was just sixty — but looked fifty from most angles — and retained the poise and deportment inculcated into her at a series of expensive and very exclusive New England finishing schools as a teenage girl in the early 1920s. On screen her beauty had always been of the timeless, fairy tale sort. Her acting career had eventually become a long sequence of roles as statuesque gangster molls, or haughty out of place and time grand ladies in rag tag westerns, or at the head of a cast of tens or scores of women in long period piece frocks. She had once yearned to fill great dramatic roles but by the time silent movies had given way to the talkies she was already into her thirties, and her voice did not quite have the sultry sexuality of a Bacall, or the stridency of a Hepburn and besides, like Ben, her English future husband, she was trussed head to foot in a disastrously bad studio contract. Vermont-born her accent still retained a mid-Atlantic, occasionally Canadian twang.
Her husband cleared his throat.
“I had our car stop so I could ask a cop what was going on. Dreadful business,” he shrugged. “The victims were a Navy man and his wife. Apparently, they were both members here!”
Harvey and Molly Fleischer became wide-eyed with concern.
One unforeseen consequence of the October War was that many wealthy New England families had come out to the West Coast, giving the top end of the real estate market a welcome boost and providing a much needed fillip to the golf and country clubs of the Bay Area. The Sequoyah Country Club, an exclusive privately owned, member-only golf and country club had been an early beneficiary of the influx of new money.
“That’s terrible!” Molly Fleischer bemoaned. She and her husband were infrequent visitors to the club. They usually only visited when they had friends staying over from out of state, or when Ben and Margaret came up from Los Angeles on business.
The Sullivans and the Fleischers had bought into the Sequoyah Country Club at the bottom of the market just after the 1945 war, one of a string of similarly astute investments Harvey Fleischer had recommended in the Bay Area at that time. Ben and Margaret Sullivan practically lived at the club when they were in San Francisco; Ben still played of a six or seven handicap and the idyllic, forested oasis on the fringes of Oakland was an ideal venue for social reunions or to meet and to entertain other potential ‘investors’.
Harvey Fleischer waved to the maître d’.
The man, immaculate in the club livery glided across to the table.
“It is good to see Mrs Fleischer and yourself again, sir,” the head waiter nodded at the Sullivan’s guests. He was a man in his forties with thinning, slicked back hair and a thickening waistline. His eyes were blue grey, intent and his posture made an unequivocal statement that he was listening with immense care and attention to every word that was said to him.
“Thank you, Jose,” Fleischer grimaced. “A naval officer and his wife dined here earlier this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir.”
Harvey Fleischer waited patiently.
“Forgive me,” Jose the maître d' apologised. He leaned closer so nobody beyond the table could hear what he was about to communicate. “Admiral Braithwaite and his good lady wife enjoyed a luncheon together earlier this afternoon.”
Jose backed away.
Around the table the four old friends were thoughtful.
“Bad business,” Ben Sullivan sighed. He and his wife travelled with at least one armed bodyguard lately. One heard such awful stories; everything from being robbed at gunpoint on the street to loved ones being kidnapped for ransom. One never knew how apocryphal most of the worst stories were but it made sense to take precautions. Some of the stories sounded a little implausible; especially the ones about bands of survivalists and brigands in the hills overlooking the Bay Area; or outlaws holed up in the Sierra Madre; marauding motorcycle gangs terrorising country roads and the streets of the suburbs; and neighbourhoods taken over by the Mafia. Notwithstanding, being rich was a big advantage at times like this. It insulated one from the realities of everyday life in the big cities of the West Coast, and enabled one to afford the inflated costs of living in gated and increasingly fortified enclaves.