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 was released during this, the election season of 2024. NOTE: Next week’s two-chapter installment will be the finale! May it prove an entertaining distraction from the news of the day. Please enjoy, and as always, comments are welcome!
—HF
Chapter 18
The red lights of the big Oakland Fire Department engines rotates and bounces over and over across the wet pavement of the street, so that the whole world is red and black. The water on the pavement adds to the coolness of the evening, making me shiver. On the other side of 17th, several people huddle and shiver, too. A woman in a robe clutches two small brown children. A single man in an A shirt and pants and no socks, with unthinking irony, smokes a cigarette. Two young thin men stand closer together than mere friendship allows for, their clothes disheveled and their faces full of frowns. A beat cop stands by them, his hand on one hip, looking bored, talking with a firefighter in full kit as if it is just another Wednesday.
I am a different matter.
“Let’s go over this again. When did you arrive on the scene?”
The question comes from Lieutenant-Detective DuPont, and he is bored with asking it again. I am just as bored with repeating my answer.
“After six, probably about six twenty-five or so.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because after those garage doors blew out into the street and just missed my face, and after I recovered my senses, I looked at my watch and it was six twenty-eight.”
“So, you are saying you only got here a few minutes before the fire blew off the doors?”
“Yes.”
“Did you approach the door before then? Did you go inside the garage?”
“Did I go—? No. I arrived. I walked up the street. I looked towards the building and then the doors started smoking, blew off, and the fire erupted. That’s it. Just like I’ve already told you, at least three times before.”
“And you were here why?”
“To find my brother.”
“Your brother lives here?”
“So I’ve said. More than once.”
DuPont sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. “Look at it my way, Mister Chisholm. The last time I saw you, you claimed you were just doing property ownership research and yet you’d rattled the cage of a known drug dealer and got a good solid mother from my side of the tracks put into a hospital bed. Now you’re over here, supposedly looking for your brother, and an apartment building explodes.”
“Didn’t you say ‘incendiary device?’ That the car caught on fire, and spread? Not that there was an explosion.”
“You get my drift.”
“Well, I’m just trying to find my brother.”
“Why?”
Again, I tell DuPont about the calls earlier in the morning.
“And until today—today!—you didn’t know that your brother had an apartment here?”
“He doesn’t share everything with me.”
“Does that include his being wrapped up with Lenny French?”
“What does that mean?”
“Are you saying you don’t know anything about your brother being involved with Lenny French?”
I shake my head.
“And you’re also going to tell me that you don’t recognize that car in the garage? The one the fire started in?”
I shake my head. It’s easier to lie in gesture. “Who does it belong to? It’s not my brother’s car.”
He shrugs. “You’ve told me nothing useful. Why should I tell you anything?”
“Wait a minute…. what are you even doing here? You’re homicide.”
DuPont says nothing, and looks unlikely to change the situation.
“There’s someone in the car,” I continue. “There’s a body in that car!”
Still DuPont says nothing. He’s like a statue. I feel my hands tense, form into fists, and I imagine grabbing him by the lapels and shoving him against the fire truck and making him tell me what he knows. I don’t, but I want to. Instead, I open my mouth. “If that is my brother over there, I have a right to know. You can’t keep that from me.” DuPont begins to open his mouth, but I cut him off. “And don’t you dare tell me that you can’t tell me. That’d be a whole other kind of cruel.”
DuPont holds up a hand. “Alright, alright.” He pulls a notebook out of his pocket. “There’s a body in the car, yes. And we haven’t identified it yet. Really. But the car doesn’t belong to your brother. It belongs to a man named Albert Perry Soames, twenty-six. He’s listed as living in Hayward with his mother, but I’ll bet she hasn’t seen him in a while.”
Albert Perry Soames. Al. I recall Laura’s comment that morning, the caller who told her his name was Al and how he was sorry how things have gotten and that it was important that he talk to Nick.
DuPont: “Your brother is tall, isn’t he?”
“He’s my height. A bit slimmer.”
“Well then I doubt he’s our man in the car. The guy in the car is shorter. Probably five-six. We don’t have Soames’s height from motor vehicles yet, but we will by morning. And I’ll bet he’s five-six.”
“Has anyone been upstairs? To check Nick’s apartment?”
DuPont shakes his head. “The fire department has been in, to clear the building. They broke any doors that weren’t open and unlocked. None of my guys have been in.”
“Can I?”
“I don’t think the fire chief would allow it. And besides… unless you can prove your brother lives here, it would be breaking and entering. Hell, it would be even if you could prove it.”
“You can’t really expect me—”
“The firemen have cleared the entire building,” DuPont repeats, running his hand through his tight curly hair. “If your brother had been home, he’d be over there right now, standing with all the rest of the suckers who’ve been burned out of their homes tonight. He wasn’t here, if he ever was to begin with.”
I wonder, silently, how long before the authorities will leave for the night, and if I will be able to come back and get in and look around the apartment, and see if I can find any clues to where Nick is, and how he is connected to French’s flambéed henchman.
“Go home,” DuPont says. “But stick near the phone. I may want to talk to you again.”
I give up and follow DuPont’s advice. At the house, I wake Laura and tell her what has happened. With nothing more to do, she advises sleep. What I get instead is another night of tossing and turning. Morning arrives slow, time dripping like a leaky faucet. At six I stop trying, get up, make coffee and breakfast, and bury my head in the newspaper. There’s no mention of the fire—it must not have rated halting the presses. Laura leaves around eight, putting a soft kiss on my cheek and saying no words. I consider going back to the apartment on 17th, but I have little faith in getting into the building undetected. With no real options, I hit the road for the forty-five-minute commute to the office, an hour behind Laura.
Once there, I still can’t work. I can’t bring myself to go back to the pebble-glass alcove of my office, to sit behind my desk and pretend to care. I’m supposed to be working, supposed to be finding evidence of Iris’s collusion with Lenny French and Richard Santini to steal an election and build the Paseo Plaza mall. Yet, somehow, that damned blue Opel has become a grave for Al Soames, Lenny French’s man, and somehow Al Soames tied in to both Iris and Nick. All my grand schemes, all that damned arrogant clarity that I had slammed down in front of David Carpenter on Tuesday is gone. All I really know is that I don’t know shit. So instead of working I sit around the waiting area of Laura’s part of the office, sometimes helping her fetch a file. Between her disappointment with me about taking the Carpenter case and our mutual ignorance of Nick’s whereabouts and safety, we don’t speak about a single thing other than the occasional inanity of routine tasks.
I man the phones, but the day is slow. Two early calls about a property in Dublin, both passed on to Laura right away. One from a bank regarding the pending foreclosure of a property that Laura had sold earlier in the year—does she want to take on listing it for the bank? I ask, hand over the receiver. She does. It nears noon and I consider calling down to the diner to order a couple BLTs, but ringing interrupts me. It takes me a second to realize it is not Laura’s phone, but the receiver in my office. I rise from the couch and nearly topple the coffee table in the process, half sprinting and half falling down the hallway to my door. Inside, I reach across the desk from the client’s side, grab the receiver, and put it to my ear.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s me,” comes from the other side. Nick.
“Where the Hell are you?”
“I’m okay, but I need your help. I need to get away, somewhere. Maybe Mexico. Tijuana. Can you drive me?”
“Forget that, where are you now?”
“I’m at Hayhurst, but I can meet you anywhere, it just has to be discreet, and—”
“Hayhurst!” I hear rustling behind me, and I half turn to see Laura in the hall. “Hayhurst?” I repeat. “What the Hell are you doing at Hayhurst?”
“Jesus! Calm down,” Nick says, and as if in simpatico, I feel Laura’s hand on my right shoulder, from behind, gentle and reassuring, motherly even. I warm to it, then resent my reaction.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”
I hang up.
“Let me just get my coat,” Laura says, but I turn and shake my head, pushing past her.
“Stay here,” I say from the door. “I may need to call someone. Cancel your showings for the day, just in case.”
“Ken, I’m going.”
“No.” I hold the door open, and try to muster as much steel in my voice as I can. “No, you aren’t. I don’t want you to get hurt, and I mean it, I might need someone to call for help. If you are here, I know there’s at least one person I can depend on in a pinch.” I feel the deep frown on my face, and try to soften it a little. “Please,” I ask, one last time, and then walk through and let the door shut behind me.
On the street, I find the Volvo, get in, and head up towards Phoebe Road, and the weird knot of side roads off of it. This time I turn up the drive, and pull up to the big mock-Spanish pile of a house. Out front are two cars, the orange Alfa, and the back end of Nick’s white Coke-bottle Corvette. Between them, Nick and Iris stand, facing each other, gesturing wildly, yelling. They barely notice my approach, my shutting the car off, my getting out of the Volvo.
“I can’t believe you were this stupid!” Iris seethes, crossing her arms, glaring at Nick through narrowed eyes.
“I’m sorry, okay? How many times do I have to say it?”
I’m still standing with the Volvo between myself and the Corvette, still a good twenty feet from the two of them, but I can hear every word just fine. If Iris has any neighbors within a quarter mile, they can probably hear every word just fine, too.
From across the Volvo, I try to jump in. “Can someone tell me what is going on?”
Iris looks across briefly at me, shakes her head, then walks into the house, leaving us alone. I walk around the back of the Volvo and the ‘Vette, and approach Nick. He looks as sleepless as I feel, his hair akimbo, his face haggard, his leather jacket rumpled. This is not the air of the ever-so-immaculate movie-star wannabe that my little brother usually exudes.
“What’s going on?” I ask him, in a more reasonable tone of voice.
“I’m trying to get her to come with me.”
“Come with you? Where? And why?”
“To Mexico. For obvious reasons. You’ve heard, right? About Lenny French torching Al in his car?”
“Yes, but, wait, who is Al anyway? How do you know him, or Lenny French? Or Iris Woods Carpenter, for that matter?”
Nick looks at me and makes a kind of groaning noise, like a stubborn dog being pulled via leash to somewhere he doesn’t want to go. “It’s too long of a story.”
“Meaning you don’t want to admit what you’ve done.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s just like when we were kids, all over again. You’ve done something stupid and you want to pretend it hasn’t happened.”
“Shut up,” he repeats.
“You never denied it, you never lied about it, you never even blamed anyone else, or blamed me. You just shut down, you pretended nothing at all happened, even as mom’s favorite platter sat shattered in a million pieces all over the dining room floor.”
“I said shut up!”
“Nick!” I grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “Tell me what the fuck you did.”
Nick looks at me, wide-eyed, startled. “You just said fuck!”
“What of it?”
“You never swear!”
“Well. Sometimes I do.”
“You never swear,” Nick says again.
“You’re stalling,” I respond. “Why are you asking Iris to go with you anywhere?”
“Because I gotta get out of town for a while.”
“But why are you asking Iris to go with you?”
“Because we’re sleeping together.”
“Wait, you’re… what?”
“We’ve been together for three months now.”
I blink. I say nothing. Then, things in my mind begin to slide together. “Wait a minute,” I say. “That time at the party. At the Mark Hopkins. Iris slipped away… and so did you… did you…?”
A lopsided grin hits Nick’s face. “In an elevator,” he says. I cringe, visibly. “Hey,” he adds, “it wasn’t my idea! She was pissed with David and wanted to feel she was getting back at him for once.”
“How the hell did you two meet? No, wait, skip it. Tell me about Lenny French.”
“Yeah, uh, I kinda didn’t realize I was into Lenny French for anything, at least not when I started….”
“What did you do?”
“Okay, so, there’s these parties I go to,” Nick starts, leaning again the side of the ‘Vette. I now stand where Iris had, my back to the beautiful Alfa Romeo, facing Nick. “There’s always good booze, and some really prime hash, like Thai shit, the best. And anyway, I asked around and found out it’s being dealt by this college dropout up in the hills, a kid named Al—”
“Al Soames.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess. I never got his last name. Anyway, through the grapevine I heard this kid is a total dope, an amateur, doesn’t know shit, was just getting into the business in a serious way, trying to sling to the crowd at Cal. Not the regular students, more like the poor little rich kids, and some of the kinda hippie-dippy lefty professors. The literati set, you know? People who read Dissent but also had a cotillion. So, Al, he’s sitting on the good stuff, and a lot of it, alone in this house up off Tunnel Road. So me and a buddy, we decide we’ll go shake him down. You know, roll him.”
“Steal his Thai weed, or whatever.”
“Well, sort of. I mean, we didn’t steal it. We confiscated it.” Nick grins. “My buddy has this badge. It’s real metal, and has a leather holder, and everything….”
“You pretended to be cops?”
“Well, Feds actually. Drug Enforcement Agency. We busted him.”
“Are you insane?”
“Hey! We didn’t realize that he worked for anyone big, anyone like Lenny French. I mean he’s just some kid, right? And we didn’t know anyone was going to die. We’d never have done it if we knew that….”
“Where’s your partner?”
“I paid him off with some of the product and a little cash. He’s long gone. Probably he’s up camping in the woods in Oregon, naked and high.”
“You know that Al kid came up here to see Iris the other day, right?”
“Yeah, she told me… but wait, how did you know that?”
“It’s a long story. Does Iris know about Al and his car fire yet?” I point towards the house.
Nick shakes his head.
“She needs to know what she is dealing with,” I note.
“Look, can’t we not tell her? I don’t want her to worry. Besides, she might be less likely to agree to go to Mexico with me if she knows.”
I raise one eyebrow. “You’re not going to Mexico, Nick.” Then I turn and go up the short set of stairs to the door. Trying the knob, I find it open, so I push, swing the door inwards, and walk into the house. “Missus Carpenter?” I ask, and my words emptily reverberate off of polished dark wood paneling, and mock-Spanish antiques, and deeply unfashionable landscapes in oils. I walk into the broad hallway, and a great alcove opens to my left, into a front parlor with deep Oriental rugs and a Tudor Gothic hearth and carved wood settees. At a set of glass doors on the far wall, Iris stands, her back to me, her arms clearly folded, looking out at a view of the vast Tri-Valley.
“Iris?”
She half turns. “What do you want?”
I swallow. “Your help. For Nick.”
“Now is not a good time for that.”
“It’s serious. He’s in danger.”
“From that little twerp who came here and demanded money from me? I’m pretty sure he can handle him. He can give him back the drugs and pay off what he’s sold on his own.”
“He can’t do that,” I respond. “Because that ‘little twerp’ is dead.”
She turns fully. She glances around the room for a moment, as if uncertain where she is. Then, “he didn’t tell me.”
“I know.”
“How bad is it?”
“The guy the kid worked for killed him. He put him in a car and set it on fire.”
From behind me I hear the door, and footsteps. Iris looks at me, then at a space beside me, and out of the corner of my right eye I see Nick standing, quiet, his hands in his pockets, looking at the two of us. Looking back at Iris, it’s difficult for me to read anything there. The light from the windows behind her throws her face into shadow, but also there is a calmness to her, a subdued opacity.
“Look,” I hear Nick say. “I know it’s not practical to go to Mexico. But I don’t have a lot of options, and I don’t want to lose you.”
Without a word, Iris walks past us, through the hall, and down the length of it two more doors. Nick turns and follows her, and without any other good ideas, I follow too. The room is a large library, and for a moment I am struck in awe at the two-story space with its fine shelves and hundreds—no, thousands—of books. At the far end is a double-height bay window of leaded glass, and in front of it a great oak pedestal desk. Iris is hunched over the desk, fiddling with a drawer, and then she rudely pulls the drawer open. Her right hand hovers over it for a moment, then from out of it she plucks a set of keys. She looks first at Nick, then at me, then tosses the keys my way. I catch them, barely. A leather fob on them carries a Chrysler badge.
“I’ll take care of this,” Iris says. “Take those keys and go down to the garage—you can get to it from the inside via the kitchen. There’s an Imperial down there, it should have gas and start fine. I want you to take Nick someplace safe—someplace with no connection to my family or yours. Santa Rosa, maybe Sacramento.”
“How will you get in touch with French?” I ask. “And what do you plan to do?”
“I’ll figure out a way to handle him. And my lawyers will know how to reach him. For now, just take Nick away from here. Once that’s settled, call me.” She writes a number down on a pad on top of the desk, pulls it, and holds it out at the edge of her reach. I walk over and take it from her.
Nick walks around the right end of the desk and approaches Iris. He moves to put his hands on her shoulders and lean in for a kiss, but she brushes away his hands.
“Go with him,” she says, her eyes cast downward.
“Iris. I’m so sorry.” He leans in for a kiss again, and she pulls back from him slightly, then relents. Their lips meet, but the kiss is awkward, tender, but not passionate. At first, I think it is because I am there, watching, but there is something more to it that I can’t place. Their lips part, but then Iris puts her hands out and grabs the front of his shirt and pulls him against her hard, pulls his lips to hers one more time and though the kiss is a simple one, there’s no waiver, no hesitation. When their faces part, her grasp of his shirt opens and with the palms of her hands on his chest, she pushes herself one step back, a curiously formal step, like part of a dance. “Go,” she says again, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’ll take care of this.”
We go.
In the garage, I pull the Chrysler out, and have Nick put his Corvette in its place, and close it up behind us. Perhaps overzealous in caution, I have Nick lay in the trunk, and then drive out towards Phoebe Road and down to 580 and head east towards Tracy. Before entering Stockton, I pull off the highway to a quiet spot and let Nick out of the trunk and into the passenger seat. We drive for a while in silence. An hour later we are in Sacramento. Figuring that a cheap motel is the first place someone would look for someone else hiding out, I drive straight into downtown and book a room in the Senator. I splurge and make sure Nick has a window view.
“Don’t go out,” I admonish him, in the room. “Don’t go to any bars, or jazz clubs. If this hick town has any jazz clubs. And for God’s sake, stay away from anyplace that is even remotely connected to drugs or parties or sex.”
“You do realize this is the state capitol, right?”
“Yeah, so stay away from Ronald Reagan, too. He’s still governor for another six weeks.”
“But Nance and I get along swimmingly!”
I growl at him to knock it off, to insist I’m serious, to point out what a situation he’s gotten himself into.
“Hey, just promise me this,” he responds. “Whatever Iris is going to do, make sure she doesn’t get hurt, okay?”
“Have you ever met her father?”
Nick shakes his head.
“Let’s just say that if I were Lenny French I wouldn’t want to mess with Robards Woods. So, I think she’ll be fine.”
“Well I don’t know about any of that. So promise me. Please.”
I promise him, I provide him with some folding money, and instructions to call Laura at the office if he doesn’t hear from me by the morning, and to live off room service for a while. In the lobby, I use a phone booth and call Iris. She picks up after two rings.
“I’ve got him salted away.”
“Can you get back here in an hour?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll set things up for tomorrow.”
“What are you going to do? Pay him off?”
“Bring the Imperial back here. Just park it in the driveway and stick the keys in the mailbox. I’ll be gone when you get back. I’ll call you around six?”
I calculate the time back to the Rancho. “Better make it seven. At the office.”
“I have the number. I’ll call with instructions. Oh, do you have the prospectus for the Paseo Plaza at the office?”
“Yes, I… wait—”
“Good,” she replies. “Get it. I need it back.”
Finale is Next Saturday!
Enjoy this installment of Five-Eighty? Watch for future installments every Saturday morning during Fall, 2024. The next and final intallment will post on Saturday, December 7th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.
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