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 7
From a phone booth near the courthouse by Lake Merritt, I make a few calls to Sacramento. The state’s corporate division has details on Paris Holdings, including the name of the registered agent at the law firm in the city, and a few directors: Frank Lions, Charles Maine, Louis Solaris. Each of them has the same address, a place on Union Street, in West Oakland. I drive over, park the Volvo up on Poplar, near the steel mill, and walk back down to Fourteenth. In one hand I have my metal clipboard. I mentally practice my pitch again. I’m from the city, I’m doing a property survey, I’m taking random samples from each block to make a map of how long people have lived in the neighborhood, where they work, how they commute. I work for the planning department. No, it’s not related to urban renewal. We’re looking to improve the street. Yes, Fourteenth street. Make it a smoother, faster street….
I cross Fourteenth, turn east one block and circumnavigate the big old cereal plant, then turn right again onto Union. Opposite the big concrete walls of the plant, a tidy row of old Victorians. None of them match. There’s a big tall pointed one whose roof is so steep you could ski on it if Oakland ever got snow. Another is so petite and perfect it might as well be a dollhouse. Another is more like a giant box—a cereal box, perhaps—and has a few metric tons of millwork glued to it in an effort to seem stylish, or at least what might have passed for stylish about a hundred years ago. All of them badly need paint. Several have ramshackle additions either back or front, sometimes both. In front, it is either make-shift carports and garages or, in at least one case, a small store that had probably opened in about 1922 and closed a decade later, and reopened never, its glass windows now painted over in the same putty-pink-beige that the rest of the house is.
This, I discover, is the address I am looking for. I mount the steps, and wonder if people in the last century had smaller feet and a higher gait. At the top, in the porch, I find a bell push and push it. There’s ringing, but no response. While waiting, I peer back at the street which, now that I am in the shade of the porch, is so bright that it feels like my eyes are being dipped in Chlorox. A few doors down, a black teen is washing a big, coppery, ten-year-old Oldsmobile with a green garden hose and a yellow bucket full of suds. The other way, back north, a group of small black boys walk down the street towards me. One of them spots me, points, turns to his comrades to say something. I ring the bell again, and look back at them, and they are on the other side of the street, the mill side, walking faster, glancing back now and then. They reach the corner, they are gone. In the glass of the door’s small window, I check my tie, smooth out my suit, then press the bell again. I can’t hear the hose anymore, and I look and the Olds sits there abandoned, the bucket still beside it, the car half wet and half dusty.
I give up on the beige house. Going back down the stairs, I go up equally steep ones to the little pink dollhouse next door and ring the bell there. Across the street, a big brownish-red Lincoln is parked now. I ring the bell one more time, and then the big oak door behind the thin screen door pulls back, and from within the darkness of the house I see materialize the figure of an old black woman. She wears a sun dress in blue chintz, and her hairs has grayed, but she is still tall and not bent, and the smooth almost sculpted terrain of her face, despite the wrinkles, still echoes the beauty of her youth.
“Yes?”
“Pardon me, I’m trying to find your neighbors next door, a mister Lions, mister Maine, or a mister Solaris.”
“Who are you?”
I decide to play this straight. From my suit’s breast pocket, I pull out a business card and hold it forward so she can read it through the screen. “It’s nothing bad, it’s a property thing.”
“Property things can be bad. What do you want from me?”
“I was hoping to get in touch with your neighbors. They own a property near Tunnel Road, and a client of mine would like to buy that property. So naturally we want to be in touch.”
“I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Well… may I come in?”
A moment or two passes, then she extends her arm forward and unlatches the screen door and pushes it out. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Mm-hmm.”
With one arm extended I am welcomed into the living room, a dark place with all the shades drawn, a bit too hot, but with a faint breeze wafting through from an electric box fan in the door to the kitchen. There are some overstuffed chairs in a yellow print, an upright piano, a small console television from the late 1950s, a coffee table with a vase of flowers atop a white lace doily. On top of the piano are framed photographs, probably family. One looks to be from before the First World War, a tall and handsome black man in a trim, tailored uniform that was not military, a dark pillbox cap on his head and a Mandarin collar around his neck, the side of a big old Pullman car behind him. A few frames down, a color portrait of a young man who looked much the same as the old one, also in uniform, but this one with a peaked white cap and a dark blue tunic. Marine Corps.
I sit in one of the overstuffed chairs, and the woman sits opposite. “I would offer you some iced tea, but I just started to make a batch and it’s not yet cold. Would you care for some water?”
“No, thank you. Really, thank you.”
The woman brushes something off her knee, a nonverbal dismissal.
“So, when is the last time you saw your neighbors?”
“On which side?”
“The south side, the beige house.”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“You’ve never seen your neighbors?”
“Not that I know of. The house is usually quiet, though a few times a month, a manager comes to check on it.”
“Can you describe this manager?”
“Can’t say as I can. A white man. A bit older than you I’d guess. We haven’t been introduced.”
“So, you said he was a manager. The house next door is a rental?”
“As far as I know. Now who did you say you were working for, again?”
“I’m an investigator, I work for a real estate investor.”
“Well then, why are you carrying that clipboard?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is West Oakland. Practically the Lower Bottoms. A white man walking around here with a clipboard looks like a parole officer, or a health inspector, or a social worker. Not exactly the most welcome man.”
“People usually think I am a property appraiser…”
“Nobody would bother appraising properties around here, not even before tearing them down.”
I smile, and begin to interject. From beyond the box fan in the kitchen door, I hear another screen door creak open and then closed. “Hey ma, home!”
The woman stands slowly and turns. In the door, just behind the box fan, a tall handsome black man stands, attired in a boiler suit half zipped down, dirty, his face covered in fine sweat. “Isaiah, this is mister Chisholm, he works for some real estate folks.”
“Hello,” Isaiah says, slowly. “Mom?”
“Here, let me get your laundry up so you have something to change into. Please, excuse me, Mr. Chisholm.” Isaiah’s mother disappears down a dark hallway to the right. I begin to feel a bit odd, sitting in this living room, no lights on, the metal clipboard in my lap, my hostess gone. There’s some rattling in the kitchen and then Isaiah is in the door again, is stepping over the box fan, is sitting down in his mother’s armchair, facing me. In one hand is a cigarette emitting a thin wisp of acrid smoke, in the other is a can of Ham’s.
“So, what do want with my mother?”
“I was asking her about your neighbors.” I pull out a business card from my pocket again, this time passing it over to Isaiah. “They own a piece of property that my client wants to buy.”
“What, the house next door?”
“No, I understand that is a rental. The tenants there, however, all jointly own some property in the Oakland Hills.”
Isaiah takes a drag off his beer can, grimaces, then a drag off his cigarette. “You mean someone living in that green-painted dump next door owns a place up in the hills? You’re shittin’ me.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not the green place. The beige one to the south, number—”
“Get out.” Isaiah is now standing, almost looming over me, though his voice is low and controlled. “Right now.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Get out, right now. And don’t come back.”
“I—”
“Isaiah, I’ve laid out some clothes for you in your room—” his mother’s voice is echoing, hollow, but grows stronger with each word, as she walks down the hallway towards us. “Why don’t you go take a shower—is everything alright?”
I stand, slowly. “Yes, ma’am, it’s fine. I think I should be going, however. Still….” I walk over to the old woman, and I pull another card out, and hand it to her… “if you ever see mister Lion, mister Maine, or mister Solaris, I’d appreciate a call.”
“Wait, who?” This from Isaiah, who is still standing by his chair.
“Lion, Maine, Solar—”
“Yes, I heard you. But who are they?”
“They are the people who live next door, the people who own the property my client is interested in.”
Isaiah begins to laugh. “Whoever those people are, they sure don’t live next door. That place belongs to Lenny French.”
“And who’s that?”
“And who’s—say, what kind of investigator are you, anyway?”
“I only work with real estate, mister…?” A pause stuck around long enough to be awkward. It became evident Isaiah wasn’t going to volunteer his last name. I pressed on. “I don’t really know this area or anything, and I’ve never run into mister French before.”
“You aren’t pullin’ my leg, are you?”
I shake my head.
“Look, man, I want you gone. If I tell you who Lenny French is, will you leave, and not come back? I don’t want trouble in this house.”
“Sure.”
“Lenny French is a thug, a thug and a thief. And he sells drugs, any kind you like. Now please leave before you attract any more attention to my mother and me.”
“Is Lenny French… well… is he….?”
Isaiah frowns, then his face relaxes. “Why, you mean, is mistuh French there, he be a negro?” The accent is a mock Southern patois, the kind of thing you hear in minstrel shows or from Heckle & Jeckyl. The room suddenly feels too warm. Isaiah just looks at me and laughs. “Why, look at you, you’re blushing like a little girl!” He sets down his can of Hams and raises his free hand to his eye, as if wiping away a tear.
“Isaiah.” This from the mother, standing in the doorway to the hall, her arms folded. Isaiah lets his arm fall, looks over at her, then sighs.
“I’m sorry man. No. No, Lenny French isn’t black. Lenny French is as white as you. Now please, don’t come back.”
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 23rd, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.
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