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 5
I drive over to West Portal, park the car, and walk up into St. Francis Wood to look at the Santini house. I stick the strap of a camera over my shoulder, and in my right hand I carry a silver clipboard, one of the kind that have a storage compartment under the writing surface. This is part of one of the easiest covers I’ve ever come across, something I picked up from Laura’s world: Appraising. What’s funny is I’ve actually gotten kind of good at it. Years of wandering around looking at properties has taught me to look for the signs of good and bad maintenance, the difference between good and bad paint jobs, the characteristics of failing mortar or plaster work. If worse comes to worst, I can always jump into the field and make steady dough, but what makes appraising such a good cover is that I can wander around pretty much anywhere during daylight hours, look official, gaze at pretty much anything, retrace my steps to inspect something a second time, and while I might get asked who I am and what I am doing, a simple introduction and a business card later and I am mostly ignored.
The Santini house is a big one, up above the Beaux Art fountain on San Anselmo. A lot of plaster, a lot of dark wood, a lot of red clay tile. Maybe Mrs. Santini is the romantic, and fell for the 1920s Spanish schmaltz of the house. Two cars sit in the drive: A big old fifties Buick and, blocking it in, a late model Lincoln Continental in a coppery metallic the maker probably called some goofy name like “light ginger Moon-dust.” Why do hippies prefer Volkswagens? The Lincoln’s paintwork is like a free acid trip.
The house next door has an empty drive, so I walk up it and look over at the Santini House. A lot of the curtains are drawn, but I can see into what must be the living room, and see movement. I wish I brought binoculars, but there’s a fine line between passing as an appraiser, and appearing to be a snoop. I squint, then start a little as I hear a door open. Standing perfectly still, I watch a man exit the house and go down the lengthy steps to the driveway. Keys jingle. A jacket ruffles as it comes off. The door to the Continental flashes, and then Santini is behind the wheel, the motor starting, the car backing out into the street. At first, I cringe, cursing softly to myself, since I’ve parked the Volvo a ten minute walk down at West Portal, then I look at my watch and realize that he’s heading out to his appointment in San Leandro.
Back at the Volvo, I consider going home, then think again. I pick up the Xeroxed planner and re-examine my assumptions. If Santini is having an affair with Carpenter’s wife, sure, maybe it is in the gaps between the appointments on the calendar. Or it could be happening on the calendar. Who checks to make sure that every appointment in his book is one that really exists, and that he kept? A few fake appointments would be easy enough to shove in. Is Santini really going to San Leandro, during rush hour, for an early evening meeting about tilt-up-concrete? Or is he headed out to cocktail hour? Resigned to my fate, I start the car and head back to the east side of the bay. It takes more than an hour before I am in San Leandro, just south of the Oakland city border, a town of warehouses and twenty-year-old suburban homes. The schedule gives me the name of the real estate firm handling the project, so I drop off the Nimitz and use a phone book at an ARCO to look it up. It lists a job office in the industrial districts to the west of the town, near the estuaries and the Oakland Airport. I go drive by slowly and see a wide flat patch of several acres, and a cheap construction trailer, and a gravel lot with several sedans, including the copper Moonflake tan metallic spectacle of a Continental. While the project site is still just dirt, there’s fully built and operating warehouses all around me, and some have a few cars out in the lots, swing shift workers perhaps. I park the Volvo across the street between a couple other cars, pull out a paperback novel, and settle in. I get through about a hundred pages before I hear car doors, and look up to see Santini in the lot, talking with a couple other men in shirtsleeves and a couple men in work clothes. There’s yammering, some back slapping, some hand shaking, some smiles. Santini then gets into his rootbeer metallic nightmare and the brake lights flash on.
I start the Volvo. I leave the headlights off. Santini backs the Lincoln out into the street and then begins to glide away. I back out of my spot, exit the parking lot, flip my lights on and turn after him. This time I am determined to do exactly what Carpenter paid me to do. I’m careful. I try to keep my distance, and once we are on the Nimitz, I try to let a few cars sit between us now and then, but sometimes he pulls ahead and I have to get impatient and do a little aggressive driving to keep up. He nearly loses me when he pulls off the freeway for Broadway in downtown Oakland, but I get over in time to make exit. I figure he is going back to the office in the Kaiser Building, but we pass it. I hang back further, worried I will get spotted in the traffic, but keep an eye on him. Eventually we pass the arts college, wind around the hills, and end up above Tunnel Road. He pulls into a side road to the right, somewhere above the Caldecott Tunnel, and I pass him, turn around at the next opportunity, and then follow up the road slowly. It’s a short dead-end, so I pop my headlights off and set the car down on the shoulder.
I get out. It smells heavily of Eucalyptus. I walk slowly up the road, and as soon as I see the rear clip of the Lincoln, I pause. I cross the road, hugging the shadows of the now dark landscape and keeping my ears open. From somewhere is the sound of a television. From somewhere else, running water, as in a shower or a bathtub. A dog starts barking over at the house where Santini’s Lincoln is parked, making me reluctant to get closer. I can hear, over the distance: “Chill, chill. Chill!” It’s a man’s voice, but it sounds nothing like what I expect Santini to sound like. The dog quiets a bit. Then there’s the sound of footfalls, then a car door. I duck into the front yard of one of the houses, it’s all rhododendrons and sword ferns and California lilac. The tail lights flare up on the Lincoln. Santini backs out past me in the bushes, then pulls away. I watch as his tail lights flare at the edge of Broadway Terrace, as he dutifully puts on his left turn signal, as he drives away.
The air is otherwise still. I can hear, again, the television in one of the nearby houses. The rushing water has stopped. I step out of the bushes and back onto the road, and cross it. There’s a mailbox at the edge of the road, near the driveway Santini had just been parked in. On it are foil-backed self-adhesive numbers, but no name. I memorize the address, and then hear barking from the dog again, this time much louder and much closer. I risk it, stick my head around a hedge, and look deeper into the drive. The house is low, modern, and mostly dark. I can just make out in the driveway another car, a shiny pale blue blob, an Opel GT. The barking begins to grow louder, and I am concerned that it might be me setting them off now. I step back away from the yard and walk towards the Volvo. As I get in and push the ignition key into its slot, I get a hair-brained notion. Searching through the car, I find the metal clipboard from my earlier foray in Saint Francis Wood. In the rear-view mirror, I straighten my hair out a bit, crisp up my shirt a little, then get back out and walk back towards the house. Passing it, I cross over to the hilly side, where I had taken a dive in the rhododendrons, but this time I climb up the slope up to the house there, march to the door, and ring the bell.
The door opens: A woman in a terrycloth bathrobe, her gray hair in curlers. The look on her face reminds me of a cross librarian, or a highly disappointed owner of a dachshund. “May I… help you?”
“Miss—” a little flattery never hurts—”I am with Alameda County.” I wave my clipboard slightly. “Pardon my interruption, but it’s about your neighbors across the way.” I lift the clipboard up, riffle through some notes. “Six-eight-six-zero Balsam. The low house down below.”
“Oh. Yes?”
“Well, we’ve been receiving complaints from several neighbors on this street, miss. Noise complaints, that sort of thing. Can you tell me if you’ve witnessed or heard anything unusual about the house?”
“Well.” Her arm, once stiffly holding the door, now slackens. “Actually, yes. But not noise. It’s actually a rather quiet house, noise-wise.”
“But…?”
“The are a lot of cars that go there. Nice cars, fancy cars.”
“Well there’s nothing wrong with making a fine living, is there, miss, miss—”
“Missus. Missus Fletcher.”
“I apologize, Missus Fletcher.”
“Don’t mention it. As for a nice living, I agree, except…”
“Except?”
“Except, how was that living made? You see, there are just too many cars.”
“There’s one over there now, a small blue sports car. How many more are there?”
“More than I can count. They come and go, all the time, especially in the evenings. They never stay long. It makes you wonder, well, I don’t know. The young man who is usually there is such a nice looking boy, but what does he do for a living, being there all day and all night, never going to work, and driving that fast car, and having all those visitors?”
I scribble some notes down on my pad. Unexpectedly, she reaches out to grasp my wrist.
“Oh, but I don’t want to get him into trouble, or anything! He seems such a nice boy.”
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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Harbour Fordyce 