The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3) by Philip James

Author:Philip, James [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 36

Sunday 12th January 1964

Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles

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

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