Judith Krantz (56 page)

“Now, shall you and I get down to business?”

“Business?”

“Liddy, we don’t know each other as well as we should. That’s a loss we’ll have to recoup. But meanwhile, time is of the essence.”

“Is it?” Liddy asked, as blankly as possible. She had underestimated this man.

“The Kilkullen Ranch will be sold, as we both know. The only question is to whom. I represent a group that is prepared to pay the highest price Valerie and Fernanda can get anywhere. Other groups will be interested in the property. The more people who get involved in bidding for it, the longer it will take to sell. The process could take a long time. I want to make a preemptive bid to ensure that my people get the ranch.”

“You don’t waste words,” she said dryly.

“With someone less intelligent, I might have to.”

“I didn’t inherit the ranch, Jimmy, my daughters did. More precisely, two-thirds of it.”

“I know that, Liddy. Fernanda phoned Georgina yesterday.”

“I see,” she said, frowning.

“I also know how much influence you have on your daughters. They know that if it hadn’t been for you, they might well not be heiresses today.”

“That’s quite true,” Liddy said, mollified.

“May I be direct?”

“Isn’t this a little late to ask?” Liddy began to smile. She had
gravely
underestimated this man.

“Extremely direct?”

“By all means.”

“If you use your influence with your daughters to assist my partners in securing the ranch, they will insist on showing you their gratitude.”

“Can’t you be more direct than that?” She laughed, and he laughed with her.

“There would be a finder’s fee, as soon as the deal is closed.”

“How much of a finder’s fee?”

“One-half of one percent of the selling price.”

“And roughly what would that come to?” Liddy asked.

“Roughly, somewhere around fifteen million dollars. Possibly more.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Tell me, Jimmy, how much do you know about Orange County?”

“Enough, Liddy.”

“Forgive me, but I doubt it. I’ve been following the rise in land values in Orange County week by week for the past thirty years. Nothing has happened there in real estate that I don’t know about. I can foresee every problem your group of would-be buyers will face. First they have to satisfy the permanent administrator, who will be appointed by the court, that they are the proper buyers. Then they face problems from various state and local agencies.”

“My people are aware that it won’t be easy to develop the land. They expect to have to be patient.”

“It can be made easier. But not for one-half of one percent.”

“Oh?”

“I have one great friend in this world. A faithful friend for over thirty-five years. A friend who will do anything that I ask.”

“Oh?”

“The Governor of the State of California. Deems White. He has the power to force through the permanent
administrator of his choice. He has the power to make problems from state and local agencies … disappear.”

“I had no idea.” Jimmy Rosemont spoke respectfully. “Of course, that changes things. Shall we say that it doubles them?”

“I rather think it triples them,” Liddy said.

“That seems fair.”

“Then we understand each other. The details can wait until the time comes.”

“It can’t come soon enough, Liddy.”

“I quite agree.”

Jimmy Rosemont raised his glass to her. He had indeed underestimated this woman. But on the other hand, she had underestimated the value of her influence. If she had demanded a hundred million dollars to ensure that this deal happened, he would have agreed happily to her price. It was going to be the ultimate deal of his life. One hundred million would have been a most reasonable price to pay for a hundred square miles of the most valuable land in the United States.

“W
hat kind of cooperation are the Soviets going to give you on the shoot in Kiev?” Jazz asked Sam Butler as they spoke on the phone.

“Why are you so sure we’ll have to go to Kiev?” Sam asked.

“You’re playing a Ukrainian political leader, right? Last I heard, Kiev was the capital of the Ukraine. Definitely Soviet.”

“What the hell, locations are Milos’s problem. One of those places looks just like the other anyway. Grim, that’s the big point, Jazz, the location’s gotta be grim. I’m bloody excited.”

“Of course you are—it’s exactly what you were looking for. I still don’t understand how you got out of the male-model gig.”

“I convinced Guber and Peters that you can’t force an artist to do something against his will. After I shaved my head, they believed me.”

“You didn’t!” Jazz stifled a rising giggle.

“You wanna bet?”

“Have they recast the part yet?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked, but yeah.” Sam Butler’s bubble of ebullience was dented but not punctured.

“Tell me,” Jazz demanded.

“Daniel Day-Lewis,” Sam said in disgust. “Would you have believed that Daniel Day-Lewis would agree to play a male model? After getting an Oscar for
My Left Foot!”

“It’s a change of pace for him, that’s all, Sam, don’t be upset. Think of it as a tribute to you that Milos Forman asked you first.”

“Yeah, cobber, that’s right, I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he said, pleased by her opinion.

“Has your hair started to grow back in?” she asked, trying to sound concerned.

“Like crazy, thicker than ever, wouldn’t you know?”

“When you were completely bald, did people treat you differently? Were they more friendly, less intimidated, at least while it lasted?”

“Nah. It weirded them out. Face it, Jazz, I’m stuck with my instrument. To transcend your instrument, you’ve gotta have a nothing face. Oh well, it may be a dirty job but somebody has to do it. I guess things could be worse.”

“I hope the shoot goes brilliantly, Sam,” Jazz said, thinking fervently that Daniel Day-Lewis most certainly didn’t have a nothing face, and yet he transcended it with each new role.

“I’ll miss you, cobber. A hell of a lot.”

“I’ll miss you too.”

“See you when I get back?”

“Of course, Sam. Have fun.”

As she hung up the phone, Jazz knew that she would never see Sam Butler again except as a friend. Distance had dissipated a never-solid enchantment; absence, far from making the heart grow fonder, had proved a definitive cure of what had not been love. Now that Milos Forman was spiriting him away for
months to Kiev or some suitably grim substitute, she could forget about him in good conscience.

She glanced at the clock on the bed table of her familiar room at the hacienda. It had been a morning of unexpected phone calls, and she’d been interrupted several times as she tried to dress for an unwanted meeting with her sisters.

First there had been the conference call from the Diet Pepsi people. As soon as Jazz had decided that she was far from ready to go back to work, she’d called her new friends to regretfully resign the job.

Today, in the middle of January 1991, they’d phoned and told her that they had decided to wait for her, even if it meant a month or two. Their campaign had been tailored to her work, they told her. They considered her as irreplaceable as a great actress who would always surprise you; they never knew to what new limits she’d be able to take celebrity photography, and her new approach was too innovative to consider having another photographer copy it.

While Jazz was still thinking about the Pepsi call, Red had phoned, sounding a little more like her old self than she had since the night Mike Kilkullen had been killed, and they’d made a dinner date.

Casey had been out of the hospital for days, eating as much, under Susie’s watchful eye, as any man could be expected to. Next week he planned to resume his full duties as Cow Boss, using one of the Jeeps to get around, until he was completely mended. Casey had not been surprised when Jazz gave him a delicately expurgated version of why her sisters had refused to agree to his appointment as special administrator. Joe Winter, of Wells Fargo, a sensible and likable man, had been appointed by the state to serve as special administrator. He had been delighted that Casey had agreed to continue as Cow Boss until the Kilkullen cattle, a famous “Reputation Herd,” were satisfactorily sold.

Valerie and Fernanda had settled in at the Ritz-Carlton in nearby Laguna Niguel, hanging around the
area as if they thought their inheritance would vanish if they weren’t in the neighborhood. What could they want from her today, Jazz wondered, feeling a plunge of uneasiness add itself to the condition of grief in which she existed. Her state of mind was utterly dominated by the loss of her father, to which was added her dread of the inevitable sale of the land and an evergrowing, painful nostalgia for the life of the ranch that was about to end.

She had found herself incapable of making the only sensible move and returning to Los Angeles and her work at Dazzle. She was unwilling and unable, emotionally and physically, to separate herself for even a day from the ranch while it still existed as it had always existed, tranquil, timeless, majestically beautiful, its hundreds of rounded mesas unchanged from the days when the friendly Gabrielino Indians greeted the first Spanish soldiers as they arrived from the Royal Presidio of San Diego in 1769 on their northward exploration of the land that was to become California.

Every morning she saddled up Limonada and rode the lively roan in a different direction, taking her last looks. Here and there, Jazz could not ignore a Jeep track or a windmill or a reservoir that betrayed the presence of modern man, but once her horse mounted the hill behind the hacienda, the vast, glorious, downward sweep of the land was intact, as it curved in its roughly fanlike shape that narrowed bluntly at the top of Portola Peak and widened out to its longest boundary at the Pacific Ocean.

When Jazz urged her horse to pick its way down into an arroyo, the world of 1991 disappeared entirely. Often she would slide down from her saddle and stretch out on a bed of dried leaves, watching the sun travel overhead for hours, feeling each time as if today were the last chance she might ever have to be alone in each sweet-scented, humming pocket of shelter.

She knew she should be praying for more rain, as Casey and Joe Winter were, but the dry days that had followed the heavy rains earlier in the year seemed to
be giving her a reprieve from reality. When Jazz craved company in her sadness, she spent her time out on the open pastures among the vaqueros, who were busy watching over the breed herd.

Winter was always the liveliest time of the year on the range. The bulls, who spent ten idle, lonely months of the year in the purely male company of the “Bull Battery” corral, had been put in among the cows on the first day of December, one bull to every twenty cows. On the first of February they would be “gathered up” and sent back to bull purdah, but for the moment they were roaming frisky and free, as they finished their function of impregnating the entire herd. Every cow still had a nursing calf, born last fall, by her side, and some ninety percent of them had been “bred back” and were due to calve again next fall, a cycle that ended only if the cow failed to breed during these two winter months, became dry, and had to be sent to market.

Casey and Joe Winter had quickly agreed, at their first meeting, that the best time to sell the herd would be at an auction held no sooner than late spring, after the calves were weaned and independent. The fattened cows would all have been tested to make sure that they were bearing calves. If the sale took place before the calves were weaned, the cows would be sold as a “three-in-one package,” the nursing calf and the unborn calf sold with each cow, at a much less desirable price.

She’d never been sharply aware of these particular financial aspects of ranching, Jazz realized, because Mike Kilkullen had never talked about money. But as much as she would miss the sight of the cattle wandering slowly and peacefully over the immemorial curves of the mesas, it was the land that called to her. Each three-hundred-year-old oak, each blooming sprig of each sage bush, each meadowlark she heard in the morning, each owl that hooted at night, imprinted itself on her heart, another beloved reminder of her father.

The enormous Ritz-Carlton at Laguna Niguel, between Emerald Bay and Three Arch Bay, is located on a particularly tall bluff, one hundred and fifty feet above the shore. Although Jazz knew it was described as being in the Mediterranean style, she saw nothing Mediterranean about its vast marble lobbies and gigantic public rooms, decorated in French and English antiques. The whole place was staggering in its ostentation; everything about it was ten times too big, she decided angrily as she strode through one immensely long, expensively carpeted corridor after another in search of the elevator that would take her to the suite Valerie was occupying.

If someone had to build such a bloated blimp of a hotel on the coastline, why couldn’t they have done it in a way that would make it seem as if it bore some relationship to its California location, instead of creating an over-scale imitation of the Crillon in Paris? Even if this hotel, like the Crillon, had been located on the Place de la Concorde, the most impressive square in France, it would still be condemned as trying too hard to be grand. As she rode up in the elevator, Jazz realized that she really didn’t hate the innocent, if pretentious, hotel; she hated having to lay eyes on Valerie and Fernanda.