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 appeared. 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. May it prove an entertaining distraction from the news of the day.
This last installment is a “double feature,” two chapters, chapters 19 and 20, which are the novel’s finale. Please enjoy, and as always, comments are welcome!
—HF
Chapter 19
Friday morning, just before lunch, and Iris stands against the curved railing of the upper plaza at Ghirardelli Square, her back to me, her hands on the railing as if it was the flying bridge of a ship. Beyond her is the fountain, its mermaid swaddling a baby. It strikes me as oddly dark, a commentary on infant death and mourning. Beyond this, more converted brick factory buildings, a series of planes and cubes in reddish brown, and past that a snippet of the Hyde Street Pier and the bay itself in a green so opalescent that it was simultaneously blue and gray and green and yet none of these colors.
I sit on a bench under a small olive tree, behind Iris, watching. Beside me, as instructed last night, I have the bound prospectus. What I wish I had was a flak jacket.
Below, the plaza is relatively quiet. A few families wander around, pausing at times to look at the fountain, or to crane their collective necks and gawk at the buildings. I try to relax. With so many tourists, nobody will be sneaking up on anybody else with a silenced pistol or an icepick in hand. Despite this, the people make me more rather than less nervous. It’s something about the weird carnival atmosphere, a bizarre clash that is reinforced by the dissonant mixture of industrial buildings and the smell of chocolate and caramel corn. It feels, that at any moment, a clown will show up making balloon animals, or maybe a barbershop quartet will spontaneous form, and start singing “Sweet Adeline,” or an acapella cover of a Beatles song. “Yesterday,” perhaps. I look down at my watch, and I wonder, silently, if Lenny French is the type to be on time.
From below, a man ascends the stairs. He is on the far side of the fountain, and wears a chalk-stripe, double-breasted suit, its lapels sharper than a scalpel. On his nose rest a pair of glasses tinted root-beer brown. He strides over to the fountain, turns, walks west, but then he passes the stairs to our level and is gone.
A few minutes pass. At right, from Larkin, a man saunters in. He looks as old as Methuselah, wearing a pale white Homburg and a white suit with a red carnation in the buttonhole, and he holds an ivory-topped cane in his left hand. He approaches, but passes the stairs from his side, pauses at the fountain, then goes down the staircase beyond and down towards the restaurant above Beach Street.
From Larkin, several tourists enter the square, all obvious from their inappropriately light clothing and their Kodak Instamatics. Among them a single figure peels off and mounts the stairs. He wears an old A2 leather jacket over a blue cotton shirt and dark navy work pants. He looks, for all the world, like a mechanic from one of the European car repair shops around the way on Columbus, and his hands are in fact a bit stubby, and the smell of orange-scented hand cleaner strikes my nose. His face is young, smooth, but his hair shows touches of gray at the temples and the slightest shadow of a beard is more like a fine snow than coffee grounds.
He approaches Iris along the rail, he sticks out his hand. “Missus Carpenter,” he says, “or is it Miz Woods?”
She takes his hand and shakes it. “Mr. French, I assume?”
“I apologize for the appearance, I was working on one of my boats when you called earlier, and just jumped in the car after that. I do wish you’d picked a place with easier parking.”
Iris raises an eyebrow. “Shall we get to business?”
He glances at me out of the corner of one eye, then looks back at Iris. “Let’s.”
“I promised to make you whole. Approximately one third of your materials were used up. The rest remains. If the remainder is returned, how much will be adequate to compensate you for the missing portion?”
“Retail, about four grand.”
“Fine.” Iris turns, putting her back against the rail and her hands on it on either side. “Now what else?”
“My reputation has been hurt. I think you can appreciate how important that is to me.”
“And how much does your reputation cost?”
“You can’t put a price on that. You know that. So does your father.”
“My father has nothing to do with this.”
“With respect, Miz Woods, that’s just not true. If it wasn’t for your father I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. He is what makes you a person worth doing business with.”
“And is that what you want? To do business with me?”
French leans forward onto the railing, hard over, rocking over it a little, as if filled with nervous energy, and glancing down at the fountain for a while. “When someone steals from me it makes me look bad. It makes me look like a chump, and it encourages other people to steal from me. Making me whole won’t fix that.”
“Stop blowing smoke, Leonard.”
French stops moving and looks sideways at Iris.
“We both know your reputation is fine,” Iris continues. “It was more than restored yesterday. If anything, that was an overcorrection.”
French turns, reaches into a pocket of his jacket, and pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes. Slowly, like a ritual, he removes a cigarette, puts it in his lips, swaps his pack for an old Zippo with a military insignia on it, and lights up.
“Now you are the one blowing smoke,” French replies. “You know I do most of my business in the East Bay—in roadhouses. You know this is Lanza territory over here—fuck, we’re basically spitting distance from their playground over at Fisherman’s Wharf. I don’t do business here and you know I won’t do anything ungentlemanly here precisely because of that. You’re using them like a chaperone.”
“Your point?”
“Your boyfriend wasn’t such a gentleman. Some of that missing product got missing over here. That hurt some feelings. I need to make things right with my neighbors, and that will take more than a little cash.”
“What do you want?”
“Something that cements peace. Something that requires peace for everyone—and I mean everyone—to make out alright.”
“You want a property.”
French takes a drag off his cigarette. “Robards Woods has sewn up most of the east end of Alameda County. That’s country that will be developing pretty rapidly in the next twenty years. A good place to expand. They’ll need service stations, car washes, bowling alleys, restaurants, cocktail lounges. The real money is always the legit money, and you, sweetheart, are a pipeline into the Robards Woods largesse.”
Iris looks at French for a moment, then out beyond the buildings and out at the bay. A moment more, then, “No. I’m not giving you anything that belongs to my father.”
French shrugs. “Then we’re done,” he replies, and begins to turn away.
“Then you are a bigger fool than I thought you were.”
French freezes on his heel. “Does this mean you’re finally going to tell me what you’re offering?”
Iris turns to me. “Hand me the book.”
From beside me on the bench, I pick up the bound prospectus, stand, and hand it over to Iris. She in turn hands it over to French. He opens it and scans the first few pages.
“Turn to page fifty-two,” Iris instructs. “The page is dog-eared.” French opens it to the appropriate page. It is the balance sheet for Paseo Plaza. “Construction breaks ground next spring, if the financing can be lined up, which given the incorporation approval should be easy enough now. I’ll give you twenty-five percent and representation on the board. And you can cut in anyone you want behind you as a silent partner. The regular, legitimate income should be quite attractive to your neighbors, and give you something to share peacefully.”
French silently pages through the document for a moment, balancing it on the rail.
“Is this golf course a part of the project?”
“It is.”
“Nice. And that’s a Bullock’s?” French holds open one of the gate-folded illustrations.
“Yes. They’re already signed on as an anchor tenant.”
French begins nodding. “It looks good.” He pages through the document a bit more, then hands it back to Iris. “But no, I don’t think so. The split is wrong.”
“You’ll make well more than six figures within five years. Above board. Easy. You don’t even have to do anything.”
“Oh, I’m interested, just not in twenty-five percent.”
“I can’t offer you more.”
“Less,” French says. “Fifteen percent. And as a silent partnership. And you remain representing that fifteen percent for at least five years. That, plus the return of the product, and the compensation for the lost product.”
“Agreed.” Iris puts her hand out, and French takes it.
“Just one more thing,” French says, still holding on to her hand. “Nick can’t stay here. He has to go.”
“I know.” Iris lets go of his hand. “I already knew.”
Iris and French trade their lawyer’s business cards, and then French walks away the way he came. We go back to the garage and get into the Alfa and head up towards Bay Street on the way to the Embarcadero freeway.
“Why did French ask for less percentage of the mall deal? And a silent partnership?”
“He probably guessed that twenty-five percent was most or all of my share of the project,” Iris replies. “He wants me to stay involved as his front, and to make sure that I’m going to keep shepherding the project along. It’s the same reason he wants to have shares to pass over to the Lanzas and whoever else Nick pissed off. Partnership means peace. I can’t screw him if I have skin in the game, too.”
“And what do I tell Nick?”
“That he’s lucky to be alive.” Iris says, her hands gripping the steering wheel hard as we swing south onto Columbus.
Chapter 20
Two weeks go by. Thanksgiving comes nearer, and I am avoiding calls from my father so that I don’t have to try and explain why Nick now lives in Denver, and why he won’t be flying to Los Angeles for the holidays. I am thus avoiding the phone as much as possible, relying on my big hulking plastic answering machine as a foil. One message I can’t ignore, however:
Hello, this is Iris Woods. I believe we have some invoices outstanding with your firm. Could you please come down to the construction offices, so we can close out this account?
Greed gets the better of me, for David Carpenter never paid the bill I had sent him, and I wanted that fat check. I tell Laura that I’m stepping out for an errand—she keeps closer tabs on me now—and then go out, get into the Volvo, and head for Oakland. This time, I park on the third level of the big garage of the Kaiser Center, use one of the sky-bridges, then take an elevator up to the 21st floor one more time. The doors slide open, and I walk into the paneled hallway and down to a set of double glass doors. A man in white coveralls leans close to one of them, his right hand holding a long-handled brush and steadied against a long dowel held in his left. With the tip of his brush, a thin stream of gold paint flows across the glass, spelling out what he has already finished on the other door: Woods, Woods, and Santini in a flowing cursive script, and underneath that, CONSTRUCTION & DEVELOPMENT in small, all-caps letters.
Inside, I tell the secretary I am here to see Iris, and in a few moments, she bids me to follow her down yet another corridor. This opens up into a small courtyard-like space with a goofy, scaled-up mobile of a sculpture in primary colors. Beyond this, through a walnut-paneled door with the name “IRIS WOODS” (and no “Carpenter”), I enter a shallow but wide office with a sweeping curved wall of glass looking out on Lake Merritt. The day outside looks nothing like Thanksgiving week, all sunshine and blue sky and the lake itself shimmering in greens. In front of this panorama is a simple steel desk, and between it and the wall Iris sits in a red-orange upholstered chair, her head tilted down over a set of papers.
“Sit down,” Iris bids me, not even looking up. I find another orange-upholstered chair on the hallway side of the desk and sit.
“So,” she says, looking up across the papers. “I believe my ex-husband left his debt with you unsettled. Would you accept a payment from me in his stead, to clear the account?”
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“And I believe that the invoice has under-reported your work. You put in at least two more days, on my behalf, the day you came up to Hayhurst and the day after, in the city. David was paying you two-hundred a day, correct?”
“Why, yes, but I don’t think you owe anything for that, I mean, given the circumstances….”
Iris slides open a desk drawer and brings out a checkbook, one of the vast, three-ring types used for business checks. Using a small gold fountain pen, she writes out a check, pulls it gently from its perforations, folds it, and holds it out at me. I lean forward and grab it, but put it in my breast pocket without looking at it. It feels too cheap to consider any other gesture.
“May I ask, what’s going on here?”
Iris’s eyebrows shoot up. “Simple enough. My father has replaced my husband. I now represent his interests on a daily basis.”
“I thought your father is retired.”
“To the degree he ever will be, he still is.”
“And what about the mall?”
“It continues. My shares in it now belong to Woods, Woods and Santini. And we’ll be fully divested of it by 1980.”
“There’s no… complications?”
“Mister French keeps his bargains.”
“And—”
“Mister Chisholm,” Iris interrupts. “I’ve paid you. Generously. You don’t owe me any small-talk or kindnesses, and I don’t owe you any explanations.”
I flush. I stand, and go to the door. On my heel, one hand on the knob, I turn. “Look, I just have to know, what were you trying to do, anyway? With all the subterfuge about the mall, I mean.”
Iris sighs, puts the checkbook back in one of the drawers, then slams the drawer shut. From across the desk she seems about to ask a question, but the question never comes, and I leave.
Thank you for reading!
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