Five-Eighty is a novel about a private detective working in the suburbs of the Bay Area of California in the early 1970s. Each Saturday morning a new installment appears. As the events of this novel take place during the election season of 1974, the story will be released during this, the election season of 2024. May it prove an entertaining distraction from the news of the day. Please enjoy, and as always, comments are welcome!
—HF
Chapter 2
7 o’clock the next day. Main Street in Rancho Santa Rita sits angled slightly against the sun, so that the little storefronts all along the west side glow brightly, none more so than the one on the corner of Interurban Road. It is one story only, but the corner of the building is all shades of yellow. The windows are framed in yellowish fake bronze, the glass is wavy and amber, the flat solid parts that aren’t glass are tall, narrow little tiles in gloss bright yellow, like a yellowjacket. Above, in backlit Plexiglass, a sign reads SAVOY REALTY. The letters are big, bold capitals, bank gothic but sloping in italics, as if they were poised to blast off into the future.
Standing on the bronze-painted concrete corner stoop, I fish around in my coat pockets, hear jingling, and my fingers find the jagged edge of my keys. I insert them into the door, turn, and swing it slowly open.
“Ken?”
I cringe slightly, then hope the door is still hiding my face. “Hi, sweetheart.”
“Where were you last night?” The emphasis is on the word last, as in, this is not the first time she has asked.
“You’ll see.”
Leaving the door open, I go back out to Main Street where the Volvo is parked, pop open the back hatch, and grab the small crate there. It’s heavy, but I manage to swing it out and set it on the curb without getting a hernia. Closing the hatch, I pick it back up, grimace, juggle it a bit with my knee, get it up against my gut, and then waddle in to the office with the box. Just inside the door, I set it down beside the walnut coat rack. It settles slowly into the oatmeal shag carpet like a boat sinking in an estuary. “You don’t mind if I leave these here? They’re heavy, and Ekberg will probably come get them in an hour or two anyway.”
As I speak the sentence, I move through the room, putting distance between myself and the box and the prospect of moving it again. I pass the two bitter-orange tufted chenille armchairs and the low surfboard coffee table covered in copies of Newsweek, Vogue, and Sunset. I pass the bronze grillwork that divides the space from Laura’s office, with the grey Steelcase desk that she still insists is temporary, and the dusky pink metal filing cabinets, and the globular orange floor lamp her father bought in Italy.
“What are those, anyway?” She asks, her nose down, one hand holding a thin gold fountain pen, her other steadying a minty green sheet of accounting paper. She makes careful entries on the paper.
“Nail guns. Pneumatic. The latest thing.”
“Ekberg’s?”
“Until last week, yeah.”
“Do I want to know how you got them back?”
I pass the end of the row of rosy cabinets and enter the narrow hallway that even in the morning needs to be lit by the recessed brass can lights above. To the right, the wall is all pebble glass, the same amber as up front. The door is walnut veneer, and on it in little gilt plastic Swiss letters serve as my only shingle:
Kenneth Chisholm
Licensed Investigator
I slip the door open. Inside is a walnut veneer desk with a dingy white swing-arm desk lamp, a crummy calendar blotter, many stacks of partially used legal paper pads, several Bic pens in various stages of life and death, one high mileage white rotary phone, and one chunky Dictaphone answering machine. Two fiberglass Herman Miller chairs with ratty beige upholstery sit on one side of the desk, and one orange Steelcase executive chair sits on the other. To the right, the plastered partition wall goes up to a line of amber pebble glass transoms against the asbestos ceiling tiles, and these glow faintly, with twice-filtered daylight from the street out front. Below the transoms is a large corkboard pocked all over by thumbtacks in more colors than a Coca-Cola commercial, pinning down everything from old receipts to business cards to invoices to scraps of paper with tangential notes scrawled in my crabbed hand. The opposite, back wall held my own row of cabinets, grey surplus U.S. Navy from Mare Island, waist high, and topped with a slab of redwood donated by a money poor, but building materials rich former client. This was now the office bar. On top is an electric percolator, a bunch of thick ocher cappuccino cups and saucers; a can of Sanka and a can of Maxwell House; a broken International Harvester mug holding spoons and an errant pencil; a stack of square napkins stolen from a bar; and a few mismatch old-fashioned glasses. Rounding it out are three bottles: one of Old Overholt, one of Stoli, and one of Kahlúa that my brother Nick got in Tijuana. It will make a useful hair-of-the-dog someday.
The morning dies slowly. I listen to my three messages—one from Ekberg saying he will be by at eleven, one from the shooting range wanting to know if I want to renew my membership, and the third from a David Carpenter wanting to know if he can come see me at three. I ring him back, and get a snippy sounding secretary who confirms the appointment. A man with a secretary who takes his calls is not usually a nobody. I pull out the Yellow Pages, an old copy of Who’s Who in California, and on a hunch a directory from the Associated General Contractors of California. I start in the latter. David Campbell Carpenter, Carpenter and Santini Construction. It rings bells. Something about the towers going up in the old produce district in the city, and maybe something to do with some stations on the Concord BART line. I never get to the Who’s Who.
I go to the little shoebox restroom at the back of the building and freshen up—some water on my face, a comb through my hair, a little cologne as impromptu deodorant. Ekberg drops by, picks up his repatriated tools, promises a check by the end of the week, slaps me on the back and leaves a big dusty handprint on my tweed sport coat. I clean it off carefully with a lint roller after he leaves, and Laura secretly watches me out of one corner of her eye as she pretends to read the Chronicle.
“It’s not nice to laugh at your husband.”
“Uh-HUH.” She turns a page, loudly, rattling it like a cookie-sheet thunderclap in a grade-school play. At noon she calls the coffee shop down the street and gets them to send one of their girls over—she really can talk anyone into anything—and we get some egg salad sandwiches and 7-Up, and I brush my teeth after, feeling foolish but smart about it. Later, she gets a couple customers—young married buyers, shopping around casually, checking out the town. By three the office is once again pretty empty. I’m just finishing the puzzle from yesterday’s paper when the front door opens and shuts.
“Excuse me,” I hear through the partition wall, “I’m not sure…”
“You are,” Laura interjects.
“Excuse me?”
Laura: “You’re confused about being in the right place. So you are in the right place….”
This again.
I stand up and stick my head and torso out the door. “It’s alright,” I say. “Mr. Carpenter? Come on back, I’m Ken Chisholm.”
David Carpenter is well over six feet tall and I suppose you might say handsome, if you like a greyhound sort of look. Some women do. It makes the dark blue chalk-stripe suit look a bit too big on him, as if there’s nothing under his shoulder pads but air. His tie is a restrained Yale stripe, a bit too billowy, too silky, echoing his hair which is just a bit too pale brown to make up for its rapidly decreasing volume. As he comes into my office, he glances around briefly, looks at the chairs on his side of the desk, sniffs slightly, then settles into one of them, his legs set wide.
“I believe you know a Mr. John Yorba.”
“Yes….”
“How do you know him?”
I settle back in the chair, leaning into its sprung base. “We went to law school together.”
“You didn’t finish?”
I sit forward. “I found another line of work first. What can I help you with, Mr. Carpenter?”
“Yes.” Carpenter’s eyes look around the room again, light briefly on the bar, come back on me. “Yes, I suppose so. John Yorba is a friend of a friend. He recommended you.”
“I gathered as much.” I get up and grab two cleanish glasses off the bar. Carpenter looks like he’s about to object, but then instead of the three bottles on the bar I return to the desk and from out of one of its drawers place a bottle of middling-good Scotch, and pour us both a finger.
Carpenter takes a tentative sip, looks down at the glass, looks at me, and says “not bad.”
“Gift of a client,” I say, then wonder silently to myself why.
I take one of the legal notepads from the desktop, rip a few used pages off the top of it and toss them aside. With a ball-point pen I put down the date, time, and Carpenter’s name. Below this I write “Initial Interview Notes,” and then below that start a new line with the number one in a small circle. “So how can I help you, Mr. Carpenter?”
“I’m worried about my wife.”
W-i-f-e, I write next to the number one. “In what way?”
“Lately, she’s been very quiet. Her name is Iris, by-the-way.”
I-r-i-s C-a-r-p-e-n-t-e-r. “…and what does Iris do?”
“My wife? Do? She’s my wife. That’s what she does.”
“She has no job? No hobbies, no causes, no social circle?”
“Oh. That. Well. Yes. She has some charities, some hospital thing in Oakland I believe. And she knows several women at the club. We live in Belvedere, normally. Though we do have some land out here too, an old rancho. Small house. Some horses. That sort of thing.”
I write that sort of thing on the pad. “So she isn’t involved in your business, then?”
“No, why would she be?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you said John Yorba recommended me.”
“Yessssss….”
“Well, John knows I specialize in construction and development work. Security consulting. Equipment recovery. Forensic finance sometimes. That sort of thing. This sounds… domestic.”
“Yes. It is. But it’s also not. You see, I’m worried that Iris might be having an affair.”
I put down my pen. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carpenter. I should stop you there. I don’t take divorce work.”
“I think she is having an affair with my partner, Richard Santini.”
Throughout this entire interview, the door to my office had been ever so slightly ajar. From the few years we’ve been in the building, and from several more of marriage, I know that Laura’s hearing is not insubstantial. I also know that my not taking domestic cases is part of the grand bargain by which our two enterprises coexist. I also know just how empty my bank register is looking these days, and how long it would be before Ekberg made good on his promised check. I tear off a blank sheet of legal paper from the bottom of the pad, and on it write “4 PM” and the name of a roadhouse several miles north. I fold this and pass it to Carpenter. “I’m sorry,” I say carefully, clearly, “I don’t think I can help you, Mr. Carpenter.”
He takes the paper from me, scans it quickly, then sticks it in one pocket of his suit. “I understand,” he says, standing and sticking out his hand. I see him out to the front door, shake his hand once more, and close it behind him.
“You’d think John would know you didn’t do divorce work,” Laura says.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’d think.”
More each Saturday!
Enjoy this installment of Five-Eighty? Watch for future installments every Saturday morning during Fall, 2024. The next intallment will post on Saturday, September 16th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.
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