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 13
I go over to Piedmont Avenue to the old Savoy Realty offices, where Laura’s dad used to operate out of. They sit on the west side of the street, above a small shop, with a side door that goes directly into some stairs and up to the second floor. At the top is another door, this one stained wood with a frosted glass panel, on it hand-painted gold lettering reading “Paul A. Savoy, Real Estate Agent.” There’s not much dust on the knob, and my key works the lock perfectly. Inside, the first thing that strikes me is the smell of old paper and Murphy’s Oil, and it is all old wood paneling, California oak by the look of things. To the right is a small black metal desk with a wood top, mostly naked, but still with a black Bakelite phone, a pale green blotter, and a brass cup filled with pens.
I go around the desk and sit in the old wood chair behind it, poke around, and find an old Bell System phone book, but not much else. The rest of the room has big filing cabinets on the south side, but they’re empty. On top of them sits several reference works and some older plat maps laid flat and flopping over the cabinets. To the left is a divider wall of more frosted glass, which seems to be glowing. I go over and open the companion door and go into what used to be Paul Savoy’s office, and compared to the emptiness of the reception room this seems crowded. The desk, a big old oaken thing, sits in the middle of the room with papers and books strewn all over it, along with an amber shaded banker’s lamp, another phone, a few old paperweights, a stapler in a coppery metallic color, and a big black typewriter that had cut-glass side windows and looked heavy enough to use as an anchor on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Behind all this sat a big padded desk chair and behind that a wall of windows looking out into the street. Outside these, the wall of buildings opposite burned a peachy-orange, reflections of the setting sun, making the office glow in sympathetic colors.
To my left along the north wall are a number of framed pictures and papers, and then below this a bookshelf. To my surprise, most of the titles here are old American literature—Fitzgerald, Twain, James—along with some poetry and, of all things, a few small, old, worn books in Hebrew script. The second level had dustier books with more prosaic titles, legal books about California property law, a dictionary of surveying terms, old ledgers. Rummaging about I find what my instincts told me Paul would have: A California social register. It’s out of date by about ten years, but I take it out anyway, carefully wiping off the dust with my right hand and then setting it on the desk, face down. Opening it from the back, I flip through to the W section, then Wo, then into the Woods. Randall. Richards, many Richards. Even a Roark. Then Robert. Too far? I flip back a page and, using a ruler, work my way up the thin onion-skin, and there he is: Woods, Mr. & Mrs. Robards I. (Eustace Bennington), followed by the address of the house in the Claremont, and then by a listing of country clubs, athletic clubs, charity boards, and the like. No Pacific Union. No Bohemian. None of the other, more fanciful social clubs. I pop on the desk lamp and then pull out a small notebook from my pocket and begin to jot some of it down.
From beyond the room I hear some noise. I set my pencil down and freeze, listening; it sounds like the door at the bottom of the steps. Turning to look out the window, I see that across the street there’s now a big yellow Mercury convertible, about ten years old, and recognize it instantly. The word “shit” escapes my lips, directed at nobody in particular, and I go over to the companion door, prop it open, then turn on a light in the main room so as not to seem too clandestine. Just then, I see a shadow on the other side of the main door, and then the knob turns, and an old man in a fine gray suit walks in, a good fedora sitting jauntily on the back of his head.
“Oh, Ken, I didn’t know you were here.” There’s a jingle of keys and he shuts the door behind him. A folded London Fog hangs over one arm, and under the other is a polished chestnut valise.
“Hello, Paul.”
“Does Laura need something from the office?”
Paul is now standing in front of me, his arms still hunkered around his belongings like a refugee at a dock.
“Do you need me to get that?” I motion towards the valise, which looks about ready to slip to the floor.
“Oh, I, sure. If you can take it and set it on my desk in the other room, that would be much appreciated.”
I do as bid, and then turn to go back into the other room, but Paul has already made it to the companion door. He shuffles past me and then sits in the chair behind the desk.
“I didn’t know you still used the office,” I replied. “I needed someplace to do some work and didn’t want to go all the way back out to Rancho Santa Rita.”
Paul, sitting in the chair, looks small, his hands as they reach towards the desktop seem dry, bony, light. They reach the notebook sitting in the crook of the opened social register, and he tips it forward slightly. “Robards Woods. You aren’t working for him, are you?”
“I think I’m working for his son-in-law.”
“Carpenter?”
I nod.
“What sort of work is this?”
“It’s… complicated. It’s personal work, I think.”
“Does Laura know?”
“No. Well, she knows I am working for Carpenter, but she doesn’t know what the case is.”
Paul lets the notebook flop back on the social register. “It’s a name I wish not to remember.”
“Do you know him?”
“I did.” Paul begins to shuffle some papers about on the desktop. “Why don’t you take the register over on the chair over there, so I can clear some space? Yes, I knew Woods. A long time ago. The 1920s.”
I move the book, and ask idly, “Was he in the social register then, too?”
Paul snorts. “Not in the slightest. That came later, after he’d married well and established himself as a land baron. Back then, he was just another eager, sharply dressed swindler peddling cheap houses in East Oakland.”
“What happened?”
“Go out into the other room. In the bottom drawer of the third file cabinet there should be a bottle of something good. There should be some glasses out in the bathroom medicine cabinet.”
I went out to run my errand and in my absence I can hear lots of paper shuffling. By the time I return, the desk has several neat stacks of paper and a great deal of the black leather blotter is showing at last. I set down the two glasses and pour some of what appears to be a decent bottle of Coganc into them. I take one of them and sit in the chair on the client side of the desk, then finish transcribing the register entry on Robards Woods. Paul seems lost in his valise, rummaging through it, then setting several file folders on the desktop, he begins to work through them with a red pencil, and if correcting a school paper. I close the register, get up, and put it back where I found it.
“What are these Jewish books?” I point to the two of them, but do not touch them. Paul’s face, glowing from the desk lamp and light reflected off the papers, seems perplexed for a moment. I hesitate, and begin to feel a strange sense of guilt. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry.”
“They are holy books,” he replies. “They belonged to Ruth, my wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
Paul sets the file folders on the desk and pushes them away from himself, placing the red pencil gently atop them. “Robards Woods and I were in the same business. We both came up through real estate after the War to End All Wars. We still called it that then. We didn’t know yet that we were wrong. I’d fought in the war, Soissons, 1918. Two U.S. divisions alongside some British, all under the French. Hitler was there, did you know that? I wish I’d met him and put a bullet in him that day. After I got back, I got a job with a cousin’s real estate office. Woods was the same age as me, but he already had his own practice. He’d stayed home during the war—some reason, I don’t remember. Made a bunch of money selling Spruce holdings to the Army for aircraft manufacturing, then moved into housing right after the armistice.”
“That’s a long time ago, now.”
“Yes, a long time ago now, but he’s not a man I’ll ever forgive.”
“For not serving?”
“For what he did to Ruth.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Benjamin Berenstein was Woods’s first partner. Back then Jews couldn’t buy just anywhere, so there was a small and profitable market selling houses to them. Berenstein specialized in that business, and Woods went in with him as partner in nineteen or twenty. I used to play poker with Berenstein most weeks, just a friendly game. He wasn’t a great man, but he wasn’t a bad one either, but under Woods’s influence he got too ambitious. Hell we all did in the twenties. Money was easy to get, if you knew the right guy at the right bank you had a loan and off you went, turning bean fields into houses out beyond Seminary Avenue or up in the flats west of Berkeley.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t last?”
Paul shook his head slowly. “And when the bills came due, it turned out that Woods had made a lot of withdrawals from the company accounts, and couldn’t be found. Berenstein ran out of options. One day he took a ferry to the city and quietly slipped overboard. His body washed up weeks later out by Crissy Field.”
“Does this have something to do with those books?”
“Those belonged to Ruth, his widow. We married two years later, in 1926.”
“So how did Woods go from shady real estate agent to social register material?”
“The usual ways. Politics. He ran for Alameda County Commission and won. When the Depression set in, he used his nest egg to begin buying foreclosed properties at auction. If the property was near something else he wanted he’d make a nuisance out of his holdings, like moving in pigs, or a trash heap, or some other noxious use of the land that drove neighbors to want to sell, and sell cheap. And since he was on the county commission there was usually nobody you could turn to and complain. With the money he made he bought his way into the right social circles, and married well. His wife Eustace was heiress to a carbon black fortune, and second cousin to one of the Spreckels heirs. Little Jack was born about a year later, and Iris a year after that.”
“Little Jack?”
“Yes. He died not yet two years old, a car accident.” Paul lifted his glass and drew off what was left of the whiskey. “I have a question. Do you think that Laura really wants this desk?”
“She wants it?”
“She says she does. For the office.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me.”
“It’s a very old desk. And big. I’m not sure where it will fit in that modern office of hers. And it seems a bit old fashioned by comparison, and appearances matter a great deal in real estate.”
“I have no idea. Are you using it?”
“I am now.” He waves his hand at the folders. “But if she really wants it, I can always move the reception desk in here and work from that.”
“I had no idea you still did any work.”
Paul shrugs. “Mostly I read. Sometimes I do the crossword.”
I nod at the folders. “That’s not the crossword.”
“No, that’s legal papers, to tie everything up while I can.”
“While you can?”
Paul looks at me, then finishes his drink and sets the glass gently onto the desk. “Have you told Laura about this case you are working on? I asked before but you did not answer.”
“It’s not my usual sort of case. It might involve divorce work, depending how it turns out. So I haven’t told her the details.”
“And she hasn’t told you about my condition?”
“Your condition?”
“I don’t like this. I don’t like the two of you keeping secrets from each other.” Paul sighs, then picks up a folder and hands it over to me. I glance at the top, and read: I, Paul Savoy, born Paolo Amando di Saviao, declare this document to be my Last Will and Testament….
I set the folder back down on the desk. “What’s wrong?”
“Does it matter? I’m old. I was born in the 19th century. That’s reason enough. There’s nothing more the doctors can do.”
“How long?”
“I’ll see Christmas. If I am lucky, a second one.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell her about your case?”
I sit back in the chair and put my hands over my face.
“Kenneth. Kenneth.”
I let my hands fall and sit back upright.
“You have to be brave to be married. To be strong. Trust her, tell her. And whatever you do, don’t trust the Woods. Any of them, even their son-in-law.”
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, October 14th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.
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