Judith Krantz (42 page)

Liddy’s mind was speeding far ahead. Deems White was now in his second term as Governor of California. He and Nora still came to Marbella when he was able to get away, even if it was only for a week
at a time. The intense quality of their marvelous affinity had never diminished. The infrequency of their meetings only made them more important, more filled with meaning. Liddy never changed the severe, shingled haircut that Deems loved. Her body, fanatically exercised, remained as firm and muscular as ever, for she never wanted to change from the woman Deems had met one night in San Clemente and adored instantly.

Now, in the publicity that his office attracted, Deems White dared not find an outlet for his homosexuality. Liddy’s room, with its shadowed, mellow afternoon light, its heavy scent of flowers, was the only place in the world where, in fantasy, he could become again the carefree young man he had been when he first entered her bed. When he came to her room every afternoon, he never left until both of them were satisfied. Although Liddy never guessed it, she had become his sailor.

Nora White, Liddy thought, had taken advantage of her position as First Lady of California, to give herself airs and graces that Liddy had been careful never to discourage, for Nora was a loyal friend. The Whites maintained a home in San Clemente, where they spent almost as much time as they did in Sacramento, and Nora, who had bloomed in sophistication as a politician’s wife, knew all the gossip of California society. She would have every access to people who knew all about Red Appleton. Perhaps she had some information about Red, information that could be used against her. Liddy resolved to telephone Nora as soon as she returned from lunch. How could she have failed to do it sooner?

The waiter briefly considered asking if any of the three ladies were ready to order coffee—obviously they would never order dessert—and thought better of it. Perhaps in a minute or so, but not now, not while they were sitting there without speaking, as if they were angry with each other. They were very different, he thought idly, the beautiful young one with the long blond hair, the other one with her hair pulled back,
the big nose and not enough chin, and the older one with a kind of unsmiling hardness in her face that you didn’t often see when ladies lunched, yet there was also something alike about them. Something in their expressions, perhaps?

“D
on’t fly too low,” Jimmy Rosemont instructed the pilot of the small helicopter he had rented at John Wayne Airport. “This thing makes too much damn noise as it is.” In his hand he held a fold-out Thomas Guide map of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties that he’d carefully marked the night before, in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel feeing the ocean in Laguna Niguel. It was a fairly small map that covered a great deal of territory, so that only the crude outlines of the country below were indicated, but it served his purposes. He had already flown over the partly developed areas where the Irvines had once ranched, land now owned by Donald Bren.

Now there was a man he admired, Jimmy Rosemont mused, there was his kind of guy, worth zip thirty-two years ago, many billions now. The color photo of Bren in the
Forbes
annual issue of the richest people in America, in the small section devoted to multibillionaires, showed him wearing a rancher’s cotton shirt, faded jeans and a conqueror’s thin smile,
standing in the sunlight amid orange trees, looking every inch the former champion skier and marine he had been before he borrowed $100,000 to build his first home way back in 1958. By 1977, when he had become an extremely successful builder, Bren and four partners bought the Irvine ranch for a laughable $337 million. When the partners hadn’t been able to get along, Bren had bought them out for $518 million in 1983.

Only seven years ago, Jimmy Rosemont thought, his rascal’s eyes dreamy, Bren had been able to buy one-sixth of Orange County for that incredibly low sum. How could his partners so have lacked vision? Hadn’t any of the other four hardheaded rich men with whom Bren had co-financed the purchase been able to see that they were making the sucker deal of a lifetime when they sold the land back to him? So what if they didn’t get along? For the kind of money they each lost by selling out to Bren, they could afford a little ego conflict, for Christ’s sake. But Bren had been the only Westerner in the bunch, probably the only one who realized the potential of the land he was acquiring. Al Taubman of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, one of Bren’s former partners, made $150 million on selling his share of the Irvine ranch back to Bren, a lousy $150 million for losing control of land that must be worth ten times that now, and would be worth twenty times that in a few years.

Jimmy Rosemont snorted in disdain and then forgot his fellow billionaire, Al Taubman, as he leaned forward to look at the Kilkullen Ranch, which lay just ahead, below the tiny helicopter that had wraparound windows and a floor that was largely transparent, so that anyone flying in it had an exceptionally wide view.

“Head out over the water first,” he told the pilot, and the helicopter swooped out to sea, turned and followed the coastline of the ranch. Jimmy Rosemont held his breath as the vision of the virgin coastline unfolded under his eyes. He knew he was looking at twenty miles of empty beach on a typically California winter day, brilliant with sun and blue sky, but if he
had been introduced into Ali Baba’s cave, and all the barrels of the riches of the Orient had been spread open before him, he would not have been nearly as excited.

The inhabitants of the South of France would long ago have seen their tourists depart and now would be settling in for a rainy, increasingly uncertain winter; Provence would be empty except for farmers for the next months of mistral and cold; Florida would be in the grip of possible hurricanes and certain humidity, but here, during the winter, would rule the best weather of the entire western world. And there, just below, was the perfect natural harbor he had heard about, the wide, horseshoe-shaped curve which the Pacific waves had scooped out over the millennia. It must be at least a mile and a half across.

Like the rest of the beach, the harbor was deserted except for a tiny structure that he knew must be the Kilkullen boathouse, located in an inlet at the most protected part of the harbor. On both sides of the harbor, the wide strand of the gray-brown sandy beach spread in a long, undulating line, the waves beating against the shore. Here and there, well out to sea, were outcroppings of great rocks against which the ocean, now at high tide, flung up wild horses of white spray. And there was Valencia Point, just as it had been described to him, reaching out into the waves like a finger pointing westward.

“Make another pass and then go in and fly right over the beach,” he ordered. “But stay high.” In the next ten minutes he saw that the beachfront property of the Kilkullen land was broad and unblemished, backed by high bluffs behind which some two miles of flat, treeless land was planted in a crop he couldn’t identify.

Rosemont instructed the pilot to fly inland, over the rich green lowland acres that were planted in many different crops, dotted at wide intervals by the farmhouses of the men who worked the land. Then they flew yet farther inland, over the heart of the ranch, the miles and miles of rolling, rising pastures and deep,
shaded arroyos, where only herds of cattle and the occasional man on horseback could be spotted, where the trees were fewer and most of the thousands of acres were given over to pasture. Narrow dirt roads, windmills, fences and five reservoirs were the only marks to be seen on the majesty of the uplands.

“Do you want me to circle all the way around Portola Peak?” the pilot asked.

“Don’t bother, I can see it easily from here,” Rosemont replied. The peak itself was the least interesting part of the fan-shaped ranch from his point of view. Above the treeline it was rocky and steep, the most difficult part of the land to develop. On the other hand, Rosemont realized as the helicopter rose and gave him a better view, if the peak was carved out properly, the views from the lower and even the middle parts of the mountain would be so magnificent that they would more than repay the huge expense of the infrastructure. The peak could be as valuable as the beachfront. In some ways more valuable.

“Go back to the airport,” he told the pilot.
Infrastructure
, Rosemont thought, who the hell had invented that awful word? It was so unnecessarily intimidating. The infrastructure of any piece of land was much simpler to understand than the complexity of any human hand.

Roads, water supply, sewers, telephone lines, gas lines, electricity, and there you had it. Every homeowner presided over a piece of infrastructure, although he never thought of it that way. If you had vision and weren’t afraid of the word
infrastructure
, if you were a Jimmy Rosemont or a Donald Bren, you were as much at home with infrastructure as you were with yourself—maybe more so—because without it you couldn’t put up anything more complicated than a tree house.

Jimmy Rosemont stepped down from the helicopter and walked across the circle of the heliport into the waiting limousine that would take him to his meeting with Mike Kilkullen. He was early, he thought as he looked at his watch. Time for a cup of coffee before
he met with the man over whose property he had just flown. It was more valuable than he had ever expected, he thought with certainty, far more valuable than even his partners had suspected. And these partners, a consortium of the richest bankers of the Hong Kong Chinese community, were the smartest men, in his opinion, with whom he’d ever done business.

Mike Kilkullen walked out of the front door of the hacienda when the limousine drove up. He always received guests, no matter how unwanted, at the entrance to the Hacienda Valencia, but his daughters Fernanda and Valerie had made such a point of their friendship for the Rosemonts, when they telephoned him last week, that he wanted to be particularly gracious for their sake. Normally he would never have agreed to a business meeting in the middle of a working day on the ranch.

The two men shook hands, taking each other’s measure. Neither liked what he saw. Kilkullen looked too much the lord of the manor for a man who had never done anything with his life but raise steak on the hoof, Rosemont thought, too imposing, too damn tall, in his gray flannels, his open-necked blue oxford shirt and his gray tweed jacket, for someone who never traveled, whose farmer’s life was limited to a daily round that didn’t include the only excitement worth having, the power to make things happen in the great world. And he hadn’t expected the absolute grandeur of the approach to the hacienda, the giant avenue of trees, the perception that the hacienda was surrounded by acres of old, well-tended gardens, the size of the hacienda itself.

Mike didn’t like men who couldn’t drive their own cars, no matter how rich. He didn’t like men who wore dark gray, pinstriped, three-piece suits during the day. He didn’t like men with darting eyes and smiles that they must practice before the mirror every morning to make sure that none of the charm had worn off overnight. He didn’t mind fat men or thin men, but he didn’t like plumpish men who thought they could
conceal a slight paunch under the excellence of their tailoring. He particularly didn’t like men who came to him on “business” through members of his family and made appointments at an hour that guaranteed that he’d have to invite them to lunch or seem inhospitable.

“I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Kilkullen. It’s most kind of you to make the time for me.”

“Not at all, Mr. Rosemont. Come on in. I think it’s about time for a drink before lunch.”

Mike led Jimmy Rosemont quickly through the long living room of the hacienda and out to the broad veranda supported by beams that were covered with winter-blooming jasmine. They settled down in comfortable old chairs in front of a table on which an array of bottles, glasses and an ice bucket had been set.

“What can I give you?” Mike asked.

Rosemont never drank at lunch, but he decided that even though there were bottles of Perrier on the table, he didn’t want to ask for it with a man who must be a two-fisted drinker. “Scotch, please, no ice.”

Mike poured from a bottle of Glenfiddich, gave himself a Perrier on the rocks, with a half a lime, and the two men raised their glasses in a silent toast.

Rosemont’s eyes darted around the patio. He hadn’t dared to fly over the hacienda itself for fear of being spotted, but he was fascinated by the view from the veranda: the wide fountain surrounded by pots overflowing with purple vinca, pink geraniums and huge blue and white pansies, the paths of formal cypress that led in many directions, indicating the existence of a number of separate gardens, each one hidden from the others.

“What a marvelous place you have here, Mr. Kilkullen.”

“It’s my pride and joy, Mr. Rosemont.”

“There’s nothing like a garden, is there? My wife’s English, and she lives for her days digging in the dirt at our country house. Georgina told me that you have a famous rose garden.”

“Thank you. It’s trouble, but worth it. Now what
was it that you wanted to talk to me about, Mr. Rosemont?” Mike asked, trying to cut through the horticultural bullshit as quickly as possible.

“Your future, Mr. Kilkullen.”

“Selling life insurance, Mr. Rosemont?”

“Not exactly. Mr. Kilkullen, you’ve been a very astute man all of your life, you don’t need any insurance.”

“How so?”

“All around you, up and down the coast, people whose families settled here in the late 1800s, and even in the 1900s, have been selling their land and getting rich, while you’ve been sitting tight on your land, living in comfort and not parting with an acre.”

“ ‘Living in comfort.’ Is that the way you see cattle ranching?”

“As I understand it, in the cattle business, if you own your land free and clear, and if you haven’t borrowed against your stock, you’re doing fine. Let’s say you run four thousand head of cattle—that’s about right, isn’t it, Mr. Kilkullen?—and ninety percent of them calve every year. That’s thirty-six hundred calves. In a good year, by the time they’re ready to go to market, they’ll weigh four hundred and fifty pounds a head and you’ll sell them for five hundred dollars a head. It costs you four hundred and fifty dollars to raise each one, so you make a net profit of fifty dollars per calf, or two hundred thousand dollars a year.”