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

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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.

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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 21^st 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.

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Thank you for reading!

Enjoy this final installment of Five-Eighty? Previous chapters can be viewed here.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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

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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 17^th, 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 17^th, 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.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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 17

I sleep uneasily. More than once in the night I almost end up on the floor, turning and shifting. My dreams are like commercials, brief interludes between wakefulness, offering products I cannot have. In one, I am following Iris Carpenter in her sexy Italian car, but it stops at a stop light and she gets out to confront me, right there in traffic, but instead of Iris it is Laura. In another dream, I am sitting in front of David Carpenter’s desk but in an office in some other city, neither Oakland nor San Francisco, and he is cutting me my paycheck, and I am thrilled at the size of the pay, but then I notice that the check is drawn from Chisholm Construction and my hands are covered in cement dust. In another, I am driving over the Richmond Bridge when it begins to fall apart over my head, raining down chunks of pavement on the car, and then the car begins to ring, ring like the alarm on a bank vault or a bedside clock. Some part of me starts, and my eyes open, and I realize the ringing is there, in the kitchen. I glance at the clock on the wall above the fireplace and make out the hands to read something like six in the morning.

            The phone stops ringing. I swing my legs around and put my bare feet on the carpet, brush some stray lint off my boxers, and use my hands to rub the capillaries in my face. I feel as if I have drank too much, even though I have not. The phone begins to ring again.

            I walk to the kitchen, grab the yellow plastic receiver, and put it to my ear. “Hello?”

            No response.

            “Hellllllo?”

            Nothing. I curse aloud but softly and put the receiver back in its wall cradle. It is still dark enough that the kitchen is hard to make out, so I flip the wall switch on, immediately regret it, flip it back off again. My eyes adjust, and I find the coffee can and the espresso pot and start a batch.

            The phone rings. Same routine. I hang it up, hear the burbling of the Mokka pot, and pour a double into an old cup that had probably been stolen years ago from Enrico’s in the city. Or maybe the Greco. Behind me, a dull shuffling sound, and I turn. Laura stands in the doorway from the living room.

            “Did you make enough for another cup?”

            “Of course,” I reply.

            I set out another cup, and fill it. Behind me, the phone rings again. Laura picks it up as I turn.

            “Hello? Hello, is anyone there?”

            “It’s been like that all morning,” I say.

            Laura, into the phone: “No, he’s not here. He doesn’t live here.” I raise an eyebrow, hoping to elicit some information about the caller from Laura, but she ignores me. “No,” she says again. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.” She hangs up the phone.

            “What was that about?”

            “Someone looking for Nick.”

            “Did they say who they were?”

            “Yeah, someone named ‘Al.’ Something about how he’s sorry how things have gotten but now it really is important that he talk to Nick, and to pass it along.”

            “Weird.”

            “Yeah.”

            “And, well, about the case….” I start. Laura shoots me a dark look and I lose all ability to continue the conversation. “Look, I’m sorry—”

            “No. Too soon.”

            She kisses me gently then goes to shower and get dressed. At eight she leaves for work, and I go about starting my own day.

            What annoys me the most, I decide, is that there’s none of Leonard French’s fingerprints on any of the Paseo Plaza documents. I don’t expect his name right out in the open, but there should be some trace of a shady deal somewhere. A minority non-voting stake in the project, perhaps. I know there is fire. Why isn’t there a sign of smoke? The Xeroxes of the documents don’t help me any, spread over the coffee table and the floor. It is all black-and-white, all printed clean and clear and crisp, all business. Nothing seems missing. The renderings of the buildings are most annoying of all, they look so innocent, their pencil lines precise as if hiding nothing, their monochrome ink washes transparent with nothing beneath. This is a wholesome project. It is a cold glass of milk, a bowl of strawberries, as innocent as the neatly cleaned and polished maple coffee tabletop.

            I don’t really want to go rattling Lenny French’s cage. I don’t feel like it.

            And anyway, why was someone trying to call Nick at six-something in the morning? And here?

            I go to my study in the far corner of the house. In the desk drawer is a small turquoise address book. I flit through the many crossed-out numbers in the book before I find the youngest number for Nick. Picking up the beige receiver off the desktop rotary phone, I dial. I hear only a repeating burr, over and over, constant. I set the receiver down. A quick breakfast, a suit over my skin, the Xeroxes packed into a briefcase, I try again. Nothing. I make lunch. I try again. I still get nothing.

            I go out to the car.

            The drive to Oakland is the same as it ever was, smooth and uneventful except for a little bit of Bay Bridge traffic. I swing down off the double-deck Nimitz into downtown Oakland, down past the limp tourist trap of Jack London Square (which should have just been called Jack London Parking Lot) and then down to the ramshackle warren of old wood warehouses where Nick keeps his little studio. The narrow street has the same smell of sawdust and reefer that it always has, and I worry the Volvo into a parking spot and bound around the corner, through the little courtyard-cum-driveway, up the stairs, into his apartment with my key. Inside it is the same mess it was the last time I was there, trying on tuxedos. The thin layer of dust on the dresser suggests it hasn’t been visited by anyone else since.

            Back outside in the courtyard is a big old prewar Cadillac, its folding hoods bent up like a chicken before a stick-up gang. Under one of these contraptions a man in coveralls crouches, his hands buried deep in the mechanical psyche of the car.  

            “Excuse me.” I approach, and point across my body up at the studio apartment space. “Have you seen Nick?”

            A head above the workman blue shoulders pops upward. It shakes, a negative.

            I introduce myself across a gap of maybe a dozen feet. “Any idea where he’d be?”

            “Well, he sure does get around.” The mechanic unbends a little, his narrow face turned slightly so he can glance at both his task and at me. “Have you tried that girl of his?”

            “What girl?”

            “Hrm.” He reaches under into the engine and pulls at something, hard, but whatever it is, it won’t come out. “Something with an S. Stephanie. Steffie.” He jiggles something on the engine again. “Stefania. That’s it, Stefania.”

            “Where would I find Stefania?”

            “Berkeley, I think. Dunno. Then again maybe he’s at one of the card clubs. He could be anywhere, really.”

            In my head, I immediately picture some Sacramento heiress to a minor planting fortune, twenty-one, a tennis wiz, a senior at Cal. A younger, less ironic Joan Didion, or a Patty Hearst but with only superficial interest in politics and a slightly smaller bank book.

            “Is there anyone who would know?”

            “What am I, a bartender?”

            Back up the stairs, I go over to one of the night stands and rummage around. No sign of Stefania, but there’s a matchbook for the Key Club, in Emeryville.

            Back on the road. Emeryville, sitting at the eastern end of the rat’s nest of roads that serve the Bay Bridge, is a kind of leftover space where normal rules don’t apply. One feature of this status is the high number of quasi-legal card rooms, glorified bars where poker goes a bit beyond the definitions of “a friendly game.” The Key Club is one of the older survivors, a slimy dive with a jaunty sign sitting slammed to the ground on the first floor of a large SRO hotel. I park the Volvo around behind the building, and make use of the discrete back entrance to enter the dim gloom of sticky floors, sour beer, and glowing green lamp shades. It’s a Wednesday, midday. Three old men play cards at a table way up front, and a bartender behind the cheap padded bar wiping the same glass, over and over.

            I sit on a vinyl stool. When the bartender comes over to ask for my choice of drink, I hesitate, then order a beer, chalking it up as rent. He brings me one of the short, gun-shell-shaped bottles of Michelob, pops it open, and sets it down on the bar-top. “I have a question,” I say, as I push over a dollar bill, and then set a five atop it. “Have you seen Nick Chisholm around lately?”

            The bartender eyes me, then puts one finger out to touch the bills. Deftly, he snaps the dollar down to the table top and slowly pulls it back, leaving the five where it was. Halfway to freeing the dollar, he stops. “Who’s asking?”

            I explain the situation, even going as far as showing him my driving license.

            “Yeah, I dunno.”

            “Are you sure?” I put another five down. “Or have you ever heard him talk about a woman named Stefania?”

            Without forethought, the bartender breaks into a grin. “Oh, yeaaaaaaaah. I’ve heard all aboutStefania.”

            “I haven’t heard a thing!”

            “He never told you?” The bartender leans forward, putting both hands on the back edge of the top. “Well, from everything I heard, she’s a hell of a woman. He’s never brought her in here of course, for a while I thought maybe she was just made-up.”

            “What’s so remarkable about her?”

            “Everything, man. She just has… everything.”

            “So they’re together?”

            “You sure you’re his brother?”

            I take a swig of the Michelob and shrug. “He think I’m a little sheltered.”

            “Well if he’s with Stefania, I don’t think he’ll want anyone checking in on him. Interrupting him, you know. And if you’re any kind of brother you wouldn’t want to, either.”

            Light suddenly flares into the room to my left, and I realize it is because the front door has opened and closed, admitting a pair of customers. Two middle aged men in work clothes, carrying lunch-pails, workers from Sherwin Williams or General Electric or maybe Heinz, a bit further up the road. The bartender goes down to take orders. A few minutes pass and he makes his way back up to me.

            “So, Stefania. Where can I find her?” I reach out and push the two fives, still on the top, a little closer to him.

            The bartender hesitates, then leans forward, puts a cocktail napkin down in front of him, and takes a Bic pen from his barber-shop striped waistcoat. He pushes his work across at me, then takes the two fives and slips them in his pocket.

            “Got a phone book?”

            In a few minutes, I get a Bell book for my lap, and I flip through the white pages looking for the name he’s given me, Stefania Stiles. When I find her, she’s surprisingly close, on Sixth in West Berkeley. Borrowing a pen, I scrawl the house number on the cocktail napkin, thank the bartender, and go.

             Outside, back in the sunshine, my eyes hurt, but I can’t tell if it’s the sudden bright light or leftover effects of the card room’s atmosphere of stale beer and old cigarettes. The Volvo, miraculously, is unharmed, no windows broken, nothing missing. The drive up San Pablo is a series of gas stations and factories and old roadside dives from the days before the freeway was built. Nothing looks clean, nothing looks busy, nothing at least except for the factories. Behind the mock Spanish façades there would always be ketchup made.

            At Channing I turn left and tuck into the neighborhoods. So close to industry, they aren’t good, clusters of tiny low-slung bungalows and an occasional Victorian pile, peeling paint all around, much of it either white or a gray that obviously came back in buckets in the trunk of a car on the last drive back from the Richmond Shipyards in 1945. Unmown lawns. Vegetable beds in front yards. Broken fences. Asphalt shingle roofs with shingles starting to peel up. Non-code additions to the sides and backs of houses. The whole place feels wild, forgotten, in between, a lair.

            I prowl the road slowly, moving north closer to University Avenue. Here and there, lawn signs from yesterday’s election, signs mostly for Senator Cranston, the Democrat, but also a few for someone for the Peace and Freedom Party who, appropriately, is named “Justice,” and a few more for Pat Brown’s son for governor. Looking at the cocktail napkin, I compare my scrawled numbers with the addresses, and find a boxy bungalow on the west side of the street, sitting a bit higher than the rest. I cut diagonally across the road and park the car, wrong-way-forward, on the opposite side. Most of the yard sits empty, plain grass and some old scraggly rose bushes that gave up trying long ago. The house itself is an off pink, the color of Mamie Eisenhower on a bad morning. I mount the six steps, feeling the mixture of reluctance and excitement that always hits me before talking to a stranger. I knock, the door creeks slowly open.

            “I’m looking for Stefania?”

            Through the door I can see a tall figure, a black woman, her hair in a tight Afro, wearing a tight cable-knit turtleneck sweater and dark wool pants. “Can I help you?”

            “I’m looking for Nick Chisholm. Is he here?”

            “Who wants to know?”

            “I’m his brother.”

            She pulls the door open, inward, a bit wider. “Prove it.”

            I feel my eyebrows raise, but reach back into my hip pocket, pull out my wallet, and hand her my license. She reads it, her shoulders fall a little, she hands it back.

            “Sorry,” she says. “It’s just a lot of people have been looking for him lately, and I don’t trust any of them.”

            “Really? Who’s been looking for him?”

            The woman nods to her left, and the little alcove of the porch where a bench is. She steps through the door and pulls it shut behind her, and leads me to the bench and sits. The bench is not large, and I squirm a little sitting in it, but the woman seems perfectly comfortable.

            “So far there’s been two other men. Oh, and I am Stefania,” she says, reaching across her body to offer her right hand for a shake.

            “About these men…”

            “Well, one was kind of a weasel of a man, more a boy really. Real angry but trying to keep cool, kind of desperate to see Nick. He was here the other day. Then this morning was some delivery guy saying he had a registered letter or something and needed Nick’s signature, but something about him bothered me.” From a pocket whose location I could not fathom, Stefania brought out a gold cigarette case, something straight out of a 1920s gentleman’s wardrobe, popped it open, took out a slim cigarette, and lit it.

            “Was Nick here?”

            “No.” Stefania took a long pull of the cigarette. “He hasn’t been for a long time.”

            “How long?”

            “Months.” Another drag. “He started to see someone else, the way he does. He drifts in, he drifts out.” She casts her eyes over at me. “I’m sorry. He’s your brother. I don’t mean to be mean. Anyway, why are you looking for him? Why is everyone looking for him? What’s he done? Sleep with the wrong man’s wife?”

            I shake my head. “I don’t know about anyone else. I just haven’t heard from him in a few days and I’m a little worried.”

            “He’s a big boy. He’ll be fine.”

            “Can I ask… how did you two meet?”

            “A poetry reading at Rainbow House.”

            “Who was reading?”

            “Me.”

            “Oh.” I shift in the bench. “Well, do you have any ideas where he might be staying?”

            “I guess you’ve already been to the studio down by the water?” I nod. “Is his car parked at his apartment?”  

            “His car—wait, apartment? What apartment?”

            Stefania shoots me a look.

            “Nick’s never shared much,” I say. I feel my face flush, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Where is this apartment?”

            “Fourth and 17^th, other side of the lake. Big place on the south corner. Number 7.”

            I stand. I thank her. “Say,” I ask, “did you see the cars from any of those other guys who were here looking for Nick?”

            “Only the first one. Something small and blue, I didn’t get a good look.”

            “Domestic or foreign?”

            “Too small to be American.”

            At a phone booth on San Pablo, I call to Laura’s office, to let her know what I am up to. When I ask if Nick has called, she tells me no. “But I have other news,” she says. “Those missing ballots? They showed up finally.”

            “Where?”

            “At the impound lot where the elections courier’s car is, with a big U-shaped hole in the passenger side.”

            “What happened?”

            “Narcolepsy. He fell asleep at the wheel. He’s at Highlands now, broken nose, broken arm, but otherwise okay.”

            “And the ballots?”

            “At Alameda County Elections, being counted. The seals on the boxes were still intact. The incorporation vote was up by ten points, though, so it’s unlikely they’ll change the outcome.”

            I ring off. Back in the car, I take 80 to 880, feeling like I am a taxi driver now, for all the back and forth I had done all day. I just miss the rush hour window, and in the darkness the tail lights ahead of me continually recede, making space for the nose of the Volvo. I get off at the same ramp I used earlier, but this time I cruise around the bottom of the lake up to Eighteenth. At Park I turn right onto Fourth, pass the big contractor-grade apartment block on the corner of Seventeenth, then park the car around the corner, in front of a house on Foothill. I walk back along the west side of Fourth, and across the street see the three-story apartment building, like so much that had been built in this neighborhood over the last decade or so, its plain stucco walls, its thin aluminum-framed windows, its flat roof slammed on at the least possible cost. The first floor is entirely a row of garages. I move to cross the road when one of the garage doors begins get soft around the edges, so that I wipe my eyes, thinking that they’ve gone blurry for some reason. The softness around the door begins to solidify, and my nose confirms the smell of smoke. The doors suddenly buckle outward, reducing to free-floating panels slowly cartwheeling into the street. A wave of air and heat hits me, and I hold up an arm. From the opening of the garage, a great candle of fire runs up the façade of the building, at its base the tail end of an Opel GT, its blue paint peeling rapidly in the heat.

---

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 28th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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 16

Morning. After a late breakfast, Laura and I caravan out to Rancho Santa Rita, her in the white Mercedes, I in the Volvo. It is election day, and Laura will be on the phones at the campaign office, trying to drum up the vote. At the office, I stop to file the Xeroxes and the original prospectus in the safe, then put in a call to a buddy at the corporate division in Sacramento to get the list of directors on New Woods Ventures. He promises to call back later that day. Before leaving, I promise Laura to drop by or call later. She gives me no recriminations for the almost divorce case I’ve gotten myself into, but makes me promise to do some grocery shopping before I go home, and tells me to be careful.

            In the Volvo I drive up Phoebe Road and off onto one of the side-roads up to Hayhurst, hoping to catch David Carpenter and ask him about the prospectus. I am nervous. He had asked me to follow Santini rather than his wife, though the end result, had he been right about their affair, would have been the same anyway. Stealing the valise and the prospectus inside, however, was far beyond his instructions, yet it also concerns his wife. I can’t see not telling him.

            The road twists a bit in the hills, but the country is mostly open, grass and some occasional oaks. Will Iris still be there? If she is, would that prove she hadn’t been ransacking my home last night while Laura and I ate burgers in a bowling alley cafe? No matter. Someone like Iris wouldn’t ransack someplace herself anyway. She wouldn’t even know how. She’d hire it done.

            I decide driving right up to the house is a bad idea so I pass the driveway then pull over onto the shoulder of the road about a quarter mile on, under a tuck of oaks. Locking the car, I walk back to the driveway. The entrance is simultaneously discrete and pompous, a pair of open, decrepit gates under two massive live oaks, and a gravel road between them. The road presses up the hill, lined by old, scraggly, dying poplars, and at the end I can see a pile of stone rubble that, as I slowly walk closer, turns into a disused fountain in the French style. At the fountain, the road turns and winds up the canyon a bit, the shrubbery, mostly manzanita, coming in close against the lane. After a long shallow bend, the road takes a sudden right, and I catch the corner of a house, something old and outdated and stucco, with many windows.

            Not wishing to be spotted, I hang back, then notice that the slope to my right is fairly clear yet also protected by more oaks, so I reach up, grab a sturdy manzanita trunk, and pull myself up the embankment and onto the grassy hill. Staying in the shadows, I walk slowly from one tree trunk to the next, and as I do the branches thin just enough to look down the slope at the house. Most of it turns away from the hill, a big lumpy mansion of mock Spanish style with dun colored plaster walls and a clay tile roof with more angles than a Picasso. One room, at the far back, has great windows opening up onto the slope, and it looks from here like a ball room, with a full grand piano in an unusual burled, golden finish.

            To my left, the sound of crunching gravel. I move a few trunks closer. Down below, in the loose drive in front of the house, the orange Alfa sits baking in the sun. The noise, however, is growing louder, and then I see a car pull up and park beside the Alfa. A young, thin man, wearing a pale ochre leather jacket and tight blue bell-bottomed jeans, his hair long, his face smooth and hiding partly behind shooting glasses.

            The car he has left behind him is a sports car.

            He stands on the stoop, fidgeting, wiping his hands on his pants, bounding on his heels a little. Then he takes up his right hand and knocks on the door. Nothing happens. He knocks again. He leans forward and puts his ear against the door, to listen, then straightens up with a start as the door swings inwards.

            Iris stands at the door, looking at him. They talk for a moment, he gestures broadly, yet smoothly, not like a salesman as much as one of those women on The Price is Right. Behind door number one, we have a new television! Iris invites him in, and shuts the door behind them.

            The sports car he drives is light blue.

            I hustle over to the far end of the trees, to where I can see the windows of the house better, but all I can see is that damned music room and they aren’t in it. My heart pumping, I leave the security of the shade and keep walking down the hill, closer, hoping to find a way around the house to a window that looks in on the living room where no doubt she would be talking with him. I decide to go around the back way, around the music room, then I see shadows inside move and I see Iris, not thirty feet from me, walk into the room. I freeze, half of a rhododendron between myself and full view. Slowly, I step backward, and as I do I see the young man enter the room as well. A few breaths, and I round one of the many sharp corners of the house and am out of sight. Using the bulk of the house as cover I sprint back for the oaks and the shade, then approach the far end of the oaks again, to where I can see the music room windows. From this distance I can see all of the pair of them, standing, talking to each other. Iris is stable, solitary, her arms crossed in front of her, while the young man talks animatedly, his arms wild, his stance uncertain, rocking back and forth on one foot, his left one.

            The young man makes another grand gesture. Iris turns half away, then saunters to the piano and fingers some of the keys, idly. I cannot hear the notes, but they’re on the low register of the keyboard. Again the young man gestures, and this time Iris looks up at him and says just one word, her lips moving just a little then not at all. The young man throws up his arms. He turns left and disappears out of the room. A moment passes then I hear an engine start up, and I move back to the start of the stand of live oaks in time to see the blue sports car make a three-point turn then disappear in a cloud of dust down the driveway.

            It is a blue Opel GT. It is the same car that was in the driveway at 6860 Balsam, the house above Tunnel Road that belonged to Leonard French, mobster, drug dealer, and beater of old women.

            I walk back the way I came. I get back to the Volvo, start the car, and head back to the center of the Rancho and to the office. It’s closed for election day, it’s quiet, and I don’t bother to put the lights on. I call David Carpenter’s office, but he isn’t in. Only now, I notice the light on the big plastic answering machine is blinking. Working the buttons, I find a message from my friend in Sacramento, a list of directors for New Woods Ventures. The board of three consists of Iris Woods Carpenter, and two names I’ve never heard of, with a registered agent being a big law firm in Los Angeles. As if reading my mind, my contact has looked up the names; one of the two is an executive at Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati, the other is a banker from Philadelphia. Pulling a legal pad out, I write out “FRENCH,” and under that, “GOONS.” At the center top I write “SANTINI” and below that “IRIS.” Under it all I write “MALL + ELECTION = $$$.”

            I try calling David Carpenter again, but his secretary says he is out for the rest of the day. “If he calls, can you tell him I am trying to reach him? It is urgent.” I leave the number of the office. An hour later, the phone rings, and Carpenter’s secretary tells me that he will be at several election parties during the evening, but would be available to meet at the Pied Piper, in the city, at ten.

            At five I grab my coat and walk over to the campaign office to check in with Laura. She’s busy with phone calls, but we take a break long enough to share a sandwich, and I tell her I am going to see David Carpenter and try and hand off the whole case to him then, and be done with it. At six I go back to the office, lock everything up, then I and the Xeroxes get into the Volvo and head back to El Cerrito. I do some shopping at the Lucky’s, put the groceries away at home, then hit the road again, Marin to San Pablo, San Pablo to University, University to 80 to the Bay Bridge. The city glowers through settling fog down below, like lanterns through gauze. Down on the city streets, I find a parking spot near the SRO hotels on Third. I’m too early, so I walk over to David Apfelbaum’s on Geary and grab a Reuben, a slice of cheesecake, and a coffee. At 9:30 I use a phone booth and call over to the campaign office, and ask for Laura.

            “Things are a mess over here,” she tells me, almost without missing a beat.

            “Why, what happened?”

            “The county elections office says they never received the ballot boxes for one of the precincts.”

            “One of the precincts from the Rancho?”

            “Yes, it never arrived.”

            “Did it ever leave the polling place?”

            “Yes. It was out at the old Groner school. The ballot boxes left at just after eight. They should have made it to elections by now. Traffic was nice and clear, the boxes from here in town made it there forty-five minutes ago.”

            “How is the vote going so far?”

            “From what’s been counted? Pretty good. And frankly I don’t think the missing ballots hurt us, that end of the county is pretty against incorporation anyway. But it’s strange.”

            “It is.”

            “I wish you hadn’t taken a divorce case.”

            “I know.”

            “I still haven’t forgiven you.”

            “I know that, too.” Then, “I’ll see you around midnight, at home.”

            She agrees, and I hang up. Picking up my coat, I walk down Geary towards Market and then over to the Palace. Entering by a side door, I go down the short steps and then right into the Pied Piper, its dark wood sucking up all the light except for that spilled all over the big, macabre Maxfield Parrish painting of the namesake villain, stealing the children from Hamlin. The bar is half full, with no clear election parties underway. I sit at one of the high tops in the middle of the room, order a rye whiskey, and sip it slowly while waiting.

            At fifteen past ten, David Carpenter walks into the room. He and his suit are at war, and though rumpled, the suit appears to be winning, with his tie loosely knotted and his coat looking for all the world like a broken straightjacket. He scans the room spots me, comes over. Sitting on the stool opposite my high top, he raises a hand towards the bar and snaps his fingers. The black barman, who appears to be adding up his receipts, doesn’t notice, so Carpenter does it again, clears his voice, and says, slightly above what is polite, “excuse me,” but it is not a question so much as a command. The bartender looks up from his receipts, his eyebrows arched. “A White Russian.” Then, Carpenter turns to me. “It’s been a long day. I just got back from the Republican Women’s Club, if you can believe it. They’re all crying over Flournoy’s loss. It’s like Ike died all over again.” The drink arrives. “You have news?”

            “Your wife and Mr. Santini are involved, but not romantically.”

            Carpenter looks at me and says nothing.

            “They are involved in a major property deal, without you.”

            “Don’t be absurd.”

            The drink arrives, halting our conversation. Once the bartender walks away, I continue: “Mrs. Carpenter has hatched a scheme to create massive regional mall in Rancho Santa Rita. She is arranging financing on her own, or possibly with her father, though I haven’t found any evidence of that. To make the deal work, she needs—”

            “What the hell!” Carpenter’s voice is angry but low, like a fire running in underbrush. “I hired you to follow Richard, not to dig into my wife’s life. They are having an affair, and you couldn’t even dig that up. What the hell did I hire you for?” His hand opens and contracts, opens and contracts around his glass. I half think he is going to throw it at me.

            “With all due respect, Mister Carpenter, you’re a replaceable executive running a mid-level construction firm that my father would eat for breakfast, if he had a mind to. Even so I don’t tell you how to build buildings. You are not an investigator, you have no training for it, and don’t know the first thing about the business. I do. It’s why you hired me. And yet from the very beginning you’ve told me what to do, every step of the way, and every step of the way you’ve been wrong. Now you can pay me, right now, for what I owe, and I can walk away with everything I’ve found, and leave you none the wiser about the shit storm about to descend onto you, or you can shut the hell up and listen. You might learn something.”

            Carpenter leans back in his bar stool a bit. Finally, “Jesus, you’re touchy. No wonder you aren’t out fucking around with tilt-up concrete. You’d never make it on a job site with that thin skin.”

            “Do you actually want to know what I’ve found, or not?”

            “Relax.” Carpenter puts a hand out and waves down towards the high top. “Relax. Tell me.”

            “Here.” I take the envelope with the Xeroxes off my lap and put them on the table top, pushing them over at him. “Take a look at these.”

            Carpenter takes a sip of his disgusting milky drink and then takes the envelope, opens it, and begins to read. He’s fast with it, only a few minutes, and then he’s turning as white as his drink. He sets the Xeroxes down. “Shit.”

            “New Woods Ventures is your wife, her name is on the board. The other two are out of state. But I assume there are other, silent interests. Probably her father, and probably a man named Leonard French. Do you know who he is?”

            “Not in particular.”

            “A mobster. A big mobster. A drug pusher and a beater of women.”

            “Why would someone like that be involved in this?”

            “Muscle. Did you notice the balance sheet?”

            Carpenter nods.

            “Note how much more money the mall will make if the Rancho is incorporated. More population nearby, a higher rate and type of clientele, and cheaper overhead. It’s way more attractive an investment if the town incorporates. And guess what is being voted on today, out in the east end of the county?”

            “Sure, but so what?”

            “I talked to one of my sources earlier today. About an hour ago, in fact. The ballots from the outlying areas of the proposed city have disappeared. The boxes with the ballots never made it to Alameda County Elections. Those are ballots from an area that is almost certainly opposed to incorporation.”

            “Do you know the outcome of the vote?”

            “The last word is it is passing, but it can’t hurt to get rid of some no votes, can it? It makes things a bit more certain, more of a sure bet.”

            “And you think that French’s guys are involved?”

            “I think they’re the reason those ballots didn’t make it. Don’t you? It would be pretty simple for some goons to go hijack them, or run the courier’s car off the road, or whatever.”

            “Do we know where the ballots are?”

            “No.”

            “But how do you know French is involved? Specifically?”

            I tell him about following Santini to the house French owns on Balsam, and the visit that one of French’s men made to Iris just that morning.

            “That’s not proof of anything,” Carpenter says. “You have no evidence of what went on in those meetings or why.”

            “It is proof. Of a relationship between Santini, French, and your wife. These aren’t just coincidences. And the evidence is in those missing ballots, those very real ballots that never made it to the elections department.”

            Carpenter fiddles with his glass. “Maybe.”

            “You’re damned right, maybe.”

            “But it’s still not proof. I need proof, real proof, hard evidence. This—” Carpenter pats the Xeroxes “—is a start, but it makes no mention of Richard and none of this French fellow. I might be able to initiate divorce based on Iris doing this all behind my back, but from what I can see she’s probably already planning to do that to me, or maybe to push me out of my own company and take my place. So I’d just be giving her what she wants. No, this, this is no help to me at all.”

            “Sure it is. It’s warning. It’s foreknowledge. It means you know what is coming and you can plan for it. That’s invaluable. If your wife is trying to hide this from you, then it’s all the better that you know.”

            Carpenter finishes his drink. “Fine. You’re right, for once. Maybe you don’t belong pouring concrete for your father after all. But listen.” Carpenter points down at the Xeroxes and drums them with his index finger so that this finger bends and, even in the darkness of the Pied Piper, turns a bright red. “I. Need. Evidence. Hard evidence. I need to know for sure what is going on.”

            “I don’t know what more I can find.”

            “Well if you want to be paid, you’ll find it, whatever it is.”

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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 21st, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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

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Chapter 15

It’s early in the morning, and I arrive on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, parking on the street right out front of the old Savoy offices. I check to make sure none of the lights are on upstairs, that there’s no sign of Paul being around. Up in the office, I go in and sit at Paul’s desk, the valise in front of me. The leather is halfway between the color of wine and of chocolate, shiny, with no imperfections, and a smell is so fresh that it must have been in a window at I. Magnin not long ago. It’s a simple case, soft-sided, something to carry documents from the car to the office and back again, its brass locks more perfunctory than security.

            With some trepidation, I break out my lock pick kit and, after a few minutes of fiddling, I open it. Inside there are a few folders and a small bound book, and I pull these out. The first few are gibberish about a divorce case that don’t involve anyone related to the Woods-Carpenters. The same is true of the second folder. The third contains a legal pad with some cryptic notes, a and sheet with a set of names, dates, and locations. Today’s date—or that is, yesterday’s, considering the hour—lists “Sea Ranch.” Underneath, the names “Woods Carpenter” and “Hoffman” are penned in.

            The bound volume proves more useful. Beyond the blank vinyl cover, a title page reads:

Paseo Plaza

A Deluxe Shopping Experience

Construction and Five-Year Operations Prospectus

New Woods Ventures, Inc.

The table of contents is relatively dull, with entries like “contract estimates,” “regulatory framework,” and “corporate governance.” Flipping through, the whole document has about as much personality as a sleeping Spiro Agnew, with typed tables and business lingo galore. At the back, though, is a section titled “proposed development,” and here, several gate-folded pages undo themselves to reveal drawings, diagrams, and illustrations. Several are clearly architectural plans and elevations, all for some sprawling complex of boxy buildings. One, a site plan, catches my eye, as I notice a label for Phoebe Road, though I can’t make heads or tails of where along this road the place is.

            The illustrations are more useful. Each looks to be pen with washes of ink, and they fill out the details. There are views of the buildings, from a great distance, as on a hill or in a plane, the complex surrounded by trees and lawn. There’s a low view back at the complex across a rolling landscape of sand traps, turf, and pines, with jaunty little figures playing golf in the middle distance. Another shows an entrance much like a castle gate, but blockier, with a large script sign reading “Paseo Plaza” and, below in serif type, “FASHION SQUARE.” Small, impressionistic figures carrying many bags emerged from the entrance, while couples and single women walked toward the doors in angular, dance-like poses. The entire foreground is comprised of stylized cars, parked in an endless parking lot. A double gate-fold, in color, shows an interior view, a broad and impossibly deep corridor with two mezzanine levels, all lit by a glass ceiling above. The ground floor and each mezzanine are faced by row upon row of glass-front stores, each with colorful displays inside.

            I look at the clock. It reads five in the morning. I go out to the lobby space and lay on one of the couches and allow myself to drift to sleep for a bit. At eight, I wake up, splash some water on my face in the restroom, then go back into Paul’s office. I put the two divorce files back into the valise, then put it in the back storage room alongside the floor soap and the mop. The third folder and the bound proposal I put under my left arm, then I close everything up and leave.

            It takes me twenty minutes to get up to Berkeley. Up by the campus, I find a print shop and, for a fair chunk of change, manage to get a complete Xerox copy of the proposal. I stuff the Xeroxes and the original under the passenger side seat of the Volvo and then head for the Richmond Bridge. Once more past San Quentin, through San Rafael, and out the Tiburon peninsula to Belvedere. This time, in the Volvo, and this time I make no attempt to hide as I park at the bottom of the former island. I walk up to the little gate, Japan by way of Cape Cod, find a buzzer and press it.

            “Who is it?” The voice comes from a small metal box near the buzzer. The voice sounds like Iris Woods-Carpenter but strained through Jello.

            “This is Ken Chisholm. I’m here on business.”

            A few heartbeats pass. “One moment.”

            A couple minutes later, and the latch makes a rattling sound from the other side of the big, solid oak gate door. It swings open, and Iris Woods-Carpenter is standing there, holding the door with one hand. Her hair is up, purely for utility, wrapped under an old scarf tied around her head, and she wears a baggy sweater of mohair the color of the Adriatic. As she looks at me, it only just dawns that I have no plan, none at all.

            “Is Mr. Carpenter in?”

            “No, I’m afraid he’s not.”

            “Do you know where he is?”

            “I’m afraid he’s gone for the weekend. A business trip.”

            “Would there be a calendar inside, or a note, or something that might say where he has gone, or how to reach him in an emergency?”

            “Is this an emergency?” Her hand still has not left the edge of the big oak door.

            I blink. “I don’t know, that’s up to Mister Carpenter to decide, but it is a time sensitive matter.”

            A few more heartbeats. Iris steps backwards one step, the heavy gate opening wider with her move. “Come in. Let me see if I can find something.”

            I step past her. The garden inside is pitch pine and eucalyptus, and the smell of it, already potent from the street, turns to an overpowering perfume. The ground is fallen, dun-colored needles, with an occasional rhododendron, now dormant. The property slopes downwards towards the house which, from this distance, is mostly a series of roof planes and no more. A stone path drops to the house, and halfway down is a stone Japanese lantern stands higher than the height of a man, looking like some ossified trunk of a tree.

            Behind me, I hear the groaning of wood and the metallic sounds of the latch. Iris then passes me, and proceeds down the path. I follow. The house, as we near, begins to come into focus, a modernist thing, the exterior all board-and-batten redwood or giant panels of plate glass.  The bay beyond sparkles right through the glass parts. There is no clear front door. Instead, Iris slides one of the glass panels sideways, and we step through. The room beyond is oblong, glass on the two long sides, one facing the hill and the other the bay. A handful of angular, uncomfortable looking furniture dots the room, and a flagstone fireplace anchors one end. “Please,” Iris says. “Sit. Can I get you some tea? Or coffee, if you prefer?”

            I politely decline, but she insists, and Iris disappears around the side of the fireplace. In a moment she returns with a tray bearing a bright turquoise teapot and two hand-fired beige clay cups without handles. She walks over to the jagged looking white couch and sits, putting the tray on the burl-wood low table before her. I sit at the head of the low table on a matching white armchair, find it less uncomfortable than it looks, and extend my right hand. Iris pours from the pot into one of the cups and hands it to me.

            “I was just about to pour some, so the water was already up.” I take short smell of it. “It is a custom blend tea with rose hips, bergamot, and vanilla.” It smells like a ladies’ cosmetic counter in a Macy’s, but I lie and tell her it is good. “Now, let me see if I can find anything about David’s plans in his study. He usually leaves a note or something. I’ll be right back.”

            Iris sets her tea back down on the tray, gets up, and leaves the room. I take a sip of mine, make a face at the empty room, and set it back down. After a few minutes, I stand up and survey the room. At the far end is a long formal dining table, a rectilinear surface that is so polished it glows. On it at one end are several boxes, papers, and books. Curious, I walk over, and find that there is a single, hefty old book, bare without a cover, set atop several sheets of newspaper. Nearby is an old, empty binding, leather, its gilt lettering nearly flaking off. There are scissors, knives, glues, along with scraps of canvas-like fabrics and tapes and threads and needles and any number of other supplies. It looks like a surgery bay crossed with a grade-school art room.

            “You want to know what it is.” The words, Iris’s, come from behind me. They are not a question. I half turn and find her standing at the entrance by the fireplace. I nod, and she walks over until she stands behind me, behind one of the tall-backed dining chairs. “It is a copy of Figueroa’s Manifesto to the Mexican Republic, the first book printed in California.”

            “What happened to it?”

            “The book was printed in 1855, the first English edition. After the earthquake and fire in the city in 1906, this volume was found near the wreckage of the Merchant’s Exchange Building, on Sansome. The binding of thick leather had almost burned all the way through, but the actual core of the book survived.”

            “So this binding doesn’t belong to the book?”

            “It was cut from a rather common volume of no worth. I am preparing it to fit the Figueroa volume. A binding transplant. Book restoration is a hobby of mine.”

            “Why not use a new binding?”

            “Old books should have old bindings.”

            “You own it?”

            “I purchased it at an estate auction several years ago.”

            I nod, but run out of things to observe about the book. I consider asking what the glue is made of, and whether they still use horse for it, but then remember that Iris rides, and I flush.

            “Look,” Iris says. “I looked through David’s desk, but—” From behind the fireplace divider comes a shrill ringing noise. “I’ll be right back.”

            Iris disappears behind the stone wall of the fireplace once more, and I hear her answer the phone:

            “Yes… yes?

            “Alright….

            “When?

            “Have you reported it?

            “What else is gone?

            “I see

            “Yes, I rather agree.”

            At this, Iris’s voice grows quieter. I move closer to the center of the room, so as to be nearer, but I catch only a few words. A mention of her husband. Something about care, and concern. Uncertainty. No, a no. She will… something… herself. Thanks. A promise to be in touch.

            I pace quickly across the floor. I sit down in the chair again, I reach out for the tea, and take a sip. Iris returns.

            “I’m so sorry. Business.”

            “Your husband?”

            “No… but I think he may call this evening. What is it you’d like me to tell him? Do you have a report or something you can leave?”

            “No, no I do not.”

            Iris crosses the room and sits down on the couch again. She reaches out and picks up her tea, takes a sip slowly, then puts it in her lap between her hands.

            “May I ask, how did you get into this line of work?”

            “Through a friend, John Yorba, a lawyer. Years ago, he hired me as a researcher on a case he was working on, and I never looked back.”

            “I think I know that name. Don’t the Yorbas own a small portion of Fresno County?”

            “That’s his grandparents.”

            “How did you get to know the Yorbas?”

            I set my tea down. “I met John in college.”

            “In law school?”

            I shift in my chair. “Yes.”

            “So you were also in law school. But you’ve never taken the bar?”

            “No.”

            “What is working as a private investigator like, anyway? Is it anything like those movies we watched as a kid, The Big Sleep, and all that?”

            “I didn’t see The Big Sleep. I wanted to, but I was only eight.”

            “Well.” Iris leans forward and sets down her cup, then stands. “If I hear from David, I will tell him you stopped by, and have him call you at your office.”

            “Sure. Swell.” I stand and shake her hand. At the gate, Iris shuts the door behind me with no more comment, not even a goodbye. It’s small, but it feels like an insult.

            At the Volvo, I nervously reach under the seat to touch the envelope of Xeroxes and the bound prospectus, just to be certain they are there. I straighten up again, and in the mirror, I see the larger driveway gate to the house open. I stiffen. A set of headlights appears, set into a car the color of a mandarin. Iris’s Alfa Romeo. It passes me, and Iris, behind the wheel, doesn’t even turn her head, doesn’t even notice me.

            I start the Volvo, count to ten, then pull out after her. I make a gamble, driving slowly, just under the limit, figuring that she was headed to the freeway and all I had to do was get in sight of her in time to see which way she headed. It is a smart bet. I get to the last bend before the straight stretch to the freeway just in time to see Iris turn right, onto 101 north. The drive is a familiar one now, 101 to 17, 17 past San Quentin and over the Richmond Bridge and down onto 80, 80 to 580, 580 through the MacArthur Maze and then off into the surface streets of Oakland. We swing about the north shore of the stinking lake, through the old apartment district, and it becomes clear that there can be only one destination. I ease off. Lights turn, the Alfa turns left, then curves around the bottom of the Kaiser building. I ease off more, letting her gain, hoping to stay out of her mirrors, and then pass the building and go around and park a block beyond, on Franklin.

            I suddenly feel stupid. What am I to do? Go into the building, and see what floor she gets off at? And there’s only one possible answer anyway, the Carpenter-Santini offices. There’s nothing to actually do. But what is she doing there, in the offices? David Carpenter is gone for the weekend, on the theory that Iris and Richard Santini are lovers and would make use of his absence for an assignation. 

            I look at my watch. It’s well past three, and I want to go home and have a proper meal for once, but leaving feels wrong. I realize that where I am parked it is madness, that even if I stay, I’ll never know when or if Iris leaves. She has been inside for at least twenty minutes, so I figure she can’t still be in her car. I take a risk again, start the Volvo up, and turn right on 21^st and again on Harrison, circling the block. I turn in to the drive for the garage, then begin circling it slowly, looking for the Alfa. I find it on level three, the top level, and pass it back down to level two. On a Sunday, the garage is only half full, but I find a slot between two other cars and tucked on the inside of the garage, where any car passing me will be in clear view, but my car will only be a momentary glimpse before disappearing behind the clip of a Corvan.

            I shut off the car, then begin rooting around for something to occupy my time. I consider the prospectus again, but I can’t mine anything more from it, and besides, I don’t want to fall asleep. Behind my seat I find the stack of novels from my stakeout in the Caddy, and begin pulling them forward into the passenger side. I’ve already done with Kidnapped and I don’t feel much like getting back to David Balfour. The Deighton novel is all garbled hard-boiled talk and stuff about admirals and submarines. The leCarré novel proves equally unpromising, more a study of smoldering bureaucracy and Henry James density than of adventure, but my attempt to chew through it helps me while away the time. As minutes turn to hours, I start to worry. The light will begin to fail soon, and the only way I will be able to read is by the dome light, and that will be too risky.

            I have left the window cracked, so as to hear the garage as well as watch it, and now I am glad for it. An engine starts somewhere else in the garage, an angry engine revved by an angry foot. It must be the Alfa. There is the sound of tires on smooth concrete, and the engine grows faster, and in a flash the orange Italian coupe passes at a speed far beyond what anyone ought to do inside a parking garage. Only through a miracle am I able to follow Iris. We return to the freeway, but she turns right onto 580, and I settle in, letting her gain a gap as large as a half mile with plenty of cars between us. It’s easy work, knowing she must be headed to Rancho Santa Rita. In a little over twenty-five minutes my hunch is proved right, as she dives down onto the Phoebe Drive exit, then swings around the town and up into the hills. I skip the ramp and let her go, figuring that there would be nothing more to learn by following her. She was certainly headed for the house she had, the old Woods ranch that was once known as Hayhurst.

            At the next exit I pull off and tuck into a gas station, an old Richfield, and use the payphone there to call Laura’s office. I propose a dinner out at a cheap diner in Albany, on San Pablo, at seven, and when she accepts I hang up and point the Volvo back onto 580. Early, I head over for a drink at one of the dive bars north of Solano, then at seven wander over for dinner at the small café attached to the bowling alley, a greasy spoon meal straight out of our courtship. At eight we head back to our respective cars, with my hands smelling like onion rings and pickles, and drive up the hill to the house. Our street is dark, quiet, the leaves on the trees still stubbornly verdant in the half gloom, and some confused daffodils sprouting up far too early on the neighbors’ lawn. I pull into the drive first, and Laura parks the Mercedes out on the street.

            “I’m surprised you can drive on such a full stomach,” Laura tosses over at me, as she gets out of the Mercedes.

            “It’s not my fault they had cake today.”

            “Bleh.” Laura makes a retching sound as she saunters over towards me. “You can keep your cake. I’d rather have pie any day.”

            “I like frosting.”

            “I know.”

            The reproach is playful, but also meaningful, and I feel suddenly fat. I’m about to make a retort when I look up at the door to the house, and notice it is not shut. I hold out my left hand, gesturing to Iris behind me. I feel many things rush over me: the sorrow of not owning a gun, the urge to kick the door in and shout at the top of my lungs, the wish that I could call the police without stepping inside. There’s nothing for it, though, so I go to the door and push it in slowly, gently, then reach out with my right hand, find the switch, and flip on the light.

            Inside, there’s nothing wrong. Other than some damage to the door frame near the lock return, I can see only the same house I see every day. Then I round the screen, and notice the pillows on the couch are all on the floor, their covers removed and tossed aside. The dining table is fine, the silly old Edwardian sideboard is fine, unmolested, the pictures on top of it still all where they should be, even the ones in expensive Sterling frames.

            The kitchen is another matter. The floor is covered in cereal and dried pasta and empty boxes and tins. The cupboard doors are all either half open or fully open, and every canister has had its lid unscrewed and left off. The fridge, when opened, has been rearranged hastily, but also nothing seems missing.

            “I’ll go check the bedroom,” Laura says behind me.

            I turn. “No!” I say, and step towards her. “No. Let me.” I leave her in the kitchen and go to our bedroom, where I find all the drawers in the dresser ajar, and every luggage bag unzipped or unlatched. But, also, nothing actually missing, not even a single thing disturbed in Laura’s jewelry box, and not a single watch taken from my collection. In my study, the big file drawers of the desk are open, as is the closet, but nothing else has been touched.

            “Ken!”

            I run, I don’t know why, I don’t know what I fear. Laura stands in the kitchen, behind the island, and in her hands is a piece of paper. I slow, I approach, I reach out for it. It reads:

GIVE IT BACK OR ELSE.

            “What does it mean?”

            I go out to the Volvo and pull the prospectus and the Xeroxes from under the seat. Back in the kitchen, I put them on the island in front of Laura, in a spot where the corn flakes have been cleared. She looks at them, then at me, then back at them again.

            “What have you done?”

            “It’s part of a case.”

            “Is this the case that man came in to talk to you about last week? The one you shooed away?”

            “Yes. His name is David Carpenter. Of Carpenter-Santini, the construction firm.”

            “I know who he is. He also wanted you to follow his wife. And you don’t do divorce work.”

            “I know. I know. But I took the job. And I don’t think it’s actually about divorce at all. Or, I mean, I don’t think there’s an affair going on or anything, I think this is something bigger. Way bigger.”

            Laura thumbs through the prospectus and frowns a little. “This is a proposal for a mall… in Rancho Santa Rita.”

            “Yes.”

            Laura picks the bound volume up and, still reading it, walks through the passage into the dining area. She chooses a chair on the window side and sits down, putting it open on the table. I put on the overhead light unasked, then sit opposite of her. Slowly, she flips through the volume in silence. A few times, she asks for things—paper, a pen, a calculator. Methodically she goes through it, and uncertain how long she will be, I get up and go out to the kitchen, find a mop and a bucket, and start to clean up the mess. Time passes, and every once-in-a-while I stick my head through the door to check in on Laura, but every time she is engrossed in the prospectus.

            I am in the living room, putting the cushions of the couch back into their covers, when I hear Laura speak for the first time in over an hour. “This is fantastic!” she says. I drop a pillow and walk over to the dining room table.

            “What is?”     

            “This mall. It will be a huge boom for the Rancho. It will raise property values throughout the community, bring in jobs, growth, tax revenue to keep the city afloat, if the incorporation measure passes Tuesday. No wonder Iris Woods is volunteering on the campaign.”

            “Iris Woods?”

            “Iris Woods Carpenter, yes. You notice the company that produced this is called ‘New Woods Ventures,’ I bet that’s Carpenter and his wife.”

            I shake my head. “Not David Carpenter. I don’t think he knows.”

            “Where did you get this?”   

            I describe, in very circumscribed details, how I saw Iris meet with a man and a woman at Sea Ranch, and how I managed to snag the book from the man’s car, without letting her know the extent of the operation or the key party the man’s car was parked at.

            “Who was the woman?”

            I mention the name from the lawyer’s legal pad, Hoffman.

            “Wow. A Bank of America board member. So, she’s still looking for financing then,” Laura says.

            “I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything except the drawings.”

            “Yes, they are impressive. The mall will be huge, almost a million square feet, with several major department stores. This ‘fashion square’ development is like the ones that Bullock’s have in Southern California. But look at the numbers!”

            Laura shoves the book over at me, showing a table spread across two pages. It’s some kind of balance sheet but it doesn’t look like anything remarkable to me. I shrug.

            “This!” She taps her finger on a series of projections.

            “I need a translator.”

            “Look, a mall is huge. It requires a vast amount of maintenance, electricity, water, security. Now this column here—” she taps the book again, “shows what the mall might gross over its first five years, assuming that Rancho Santa Rita is incorporated, and the mall uses city water and city police. But this column—” she again taps the book, “shows what the mall would make if there is no incorporation.”

            I slide the book closer a little. “It’s far lower.”

            “Yes.”

            “And so is the revenue number up above—that’s what this gross sale number means, right?”

            “Right!”

“But why would sales be worse without incorporation?”

            “No incorporation means lower population near the mall. It would have to rely on traffic from Walnut Creek or driving over the hill from Oakland and San Leandro and Hayward. Or even traffic from valley towns like Stockton and Tracy. That’s a different kind of shopper, more of a discount shopper, but mostly that’s just less people. But if the Rancho is incorporated….”

            “It means houses. Lots and lots of houses.”

            “And lots of shoppers. Lots and lots of shoppers.”

            “So, without incorporation, the mall still pencils out….”

            “Barely. And it won’t be nearly as lucrative an investment, so a lot less attractive to investors. Six figures a year less.” Laura sits back in her chair. “So whoever broke in here and left that note, this is what they were looking for?”

            “I think so.”

            “Who was it? And how did they know you had the prospectus, anyway?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “If Iris Woods Carpenter knew you had stolen the prospectus, wouldn’t she just call the police? Or send a lawyer after you? Breaking in and spilling all our cereal onto the floor doesn’t seem like her.”

            “Perhaps you’re right,” I say, but do not tell her about Lenny French or the connections I was sure he had with Richard Santini and, maybe through Santini, with Iris. “All the same I’d better hide these someplace safe, just in case.”

            “If this is what they were looking for, they’ve already been here and not found it. It’s as safe here as anywhere.” Her words are wise, but they don’t stop me from sticking the bound volume in the freezer, and putting the Xerox copies between the mattresses on my side of the bed.

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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 21st, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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

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Chapter 14

I leave the Caddy along a side street in Piedmont, then swap to the Volvo to drive home and catch an early night, but seeing as I have to be up again early, all I do is toss and turn and keep waking. At four, I give up, and creep into the kitchen to make another thermos of coffee. I make too much noise, and a bleary-eyed Laura ambles into the great room wearing a yellow robe, her reddish-brown hair all wiry and akimbo, her hands trembling in the cold room. “Go back to bed,” I tell her, softly, almost a whisper, but she insists (without even saying a word) on making me a sandwich of Italian ham and salami and fresh Mozzarella. When she takes out the rolled aluminum foil to wrap it, the sound of it is so loud against the early morning stillness that my ears hurt. Taking the metallic torpedo of sandwich in hand, she walks over to the kitchen table and stuffs it into my nylon duffle. I walk up behind her and put my arms around her, feeling her warmth, feeling her lean back and into me. I kiss the back of her head gently. “Go back to bed,” I whisper again. “I’ll probably be home late.”

            Out in the car, I run the heater and the defroster. It is amazing how fast the heat of October has disappeared, how the dank last week has turned into downright predawn chill. Back in Piedmont, I swap cars again, then take the Caddy north over the Richmond Bridge and then to Tiburon and Belvedere. It feels riskier this time. Already, Iris has seen the big Cadillac in her neighborhood, and my encounter with her yesterday has left me unnerved, even though she never saw me and the Caddy at the same time out in Rancho Santa Rita. By dawn, I am parked again at the T-junction at the bottom of Belvedere, reading Len Deighton and waiting to see Iris’s orange Alfa Romeo go flying out beside me. Only a half hour past dawn and there it is, the glint of paint, the low raspy rumble. As she passes me, I swear I hear her tap the throttle a bit, rev the engine a bit, and then her tail lights go streaking around the bend. I set the Caddy off after her, fighting the urge to pop on the headlamps in the darker shadows of some of the narrow roads.

            Again we head right onto 101, but instead of the Richmond bridge, she keeps going, heading north past San Rafael, Novato, Petaluma. By nine we’re past Santa Rosa, and I am thankful that I filled the Caddy’s tank last night before parking it in Piedmont, and then we turn down River Road and begin cruising down the banks of the Russian River. Her car is made for this, and as I hang back, I can see the little Italian orange monster seeming to exude joy in every bend. The Caddy, to keep her in sight, has to take the same curves at a speed slightly above what Detroit had thought of as necessary, so that I felt my stomach moving inside of my torso every few minutes. At some small town several miles down-river she stops in at a gas station. I pass, pushing onwards to the next town, risking that she wasn’t going to turn off behind me, stopping at the next gas station I find to piss, top off the tank, and grab some cheap prepackaged donuts.

            Around 9:30 the orange monster passes me again, snorting lowly, and I set off in her wake, holding back. Not long passes before we plunge into the foggy coastline, the sound of the ocean to my left more present than any visual clues. We’re running north now, north on the old Highway 1, and at times it makes me long for the relative simplicity of the Russian River’s geometry. I begin to regret the little ball of cinnamon crumble donuts now in my stomach, bouncing back and forth like a sloshy game of internal ping-pong. We pass Fort Ross and Timber Cove, and keep heading north, then through Sea Ranch and a few miles beyond, where she pulls off into a golf course. I pull to the side of the road, where I can see the parking lot over my left shoulder. The Alfa Romeo is parked right out front, and I see Iris get out of the car wearing tight pants and a cable-knit sweater, go around the back, pop the trunk, and pull out a set of clubs. Ugh. How long does a game of golf last? And how do you discreetly watch a game of golf when you yourself don’t play? Still, it seems an unlikely prelude to a romance with Richard Santini, so I let her wander onto the links, then use my binoculars to observe the cars in the lot. None are Santini’s moonbeam copper-flake Lincoln, so I let it go, start the Caddy, and drive a bit further north into Gualala to find a proper breakfast.

            A couple hours pass. I take the Caddy back down, slowly passing the course, noting the orange Alfa is still there. I take a risk and pull into the lot, parking the Caddy right next to the Alfa, swap my suit jacket for a parka, kit myself out with a few essentials including my bird book, and then get out of the car. Walking back to the highway, I cross it and begin hiking through the unimproved hillside above the course, my bird book conspicuous for the first few yards. Scouting the hill, I spot a few rocks among the pines and grass and plop myself on one of the stones and set in to wait.

            Around 1:30, and through my binoculars I see Iris approach the Alfa, open the trunk, and shove the bag of clubs back in. Along side her is an older woman, plain, almost stern even, and the two exchange pleasantries, then the old woman walks over to a large black car with a driver, gets in, and departs south. Iris, meanwhile, approaches the clubhouse and goes inside. I go back to waiting. Another hour passes, then Iris comes back out, gets into the Alfa, and starts the car. I hustle down the hill, pausing at the edge of the highway, then dash over it and to the cover of the brush between it and the parking lot. I hear the Alfa start up, and I make my way to the edge of the parking lot, keeping my body turned towards the course as if admiring it. I count to ten, then turn, and see that the Alfa is now facing out into the highway traffic, and Iris, being a good driver, is too intent on making certain the road is clear to pay any attention to me on the other side of the lot. I walk swiftly over to the Caddy and, using its bulk as cover, peel off the parka and get in. She pulls south into traffic, and I start the Caddy but deliberately count to ten once more before backing out of the spot and pulling after her. The journey is not a long one, and Iris is in no hurry as she dawdles down the two-lane for about twenty minutes, back into Sea Ranch, where she turns into the lodge parking lot. I pass. A bit beyond the lodge is a lot for a trailhead, and I put the Cadillac there, put my parka back on, and resume my birdwatching cover, again taking to the hills on the east side of the highway where the lodge is fully visible. Time passes, and it is a while before I see Iris, though I know she is there because of the orange sports car. After much patience, I am rewarded, spotting her walking through the lobby, then out to the lot. I panic: Is she leaving again? How much time would it take for me to get down off my rocks again and into the Caddy? And why had she even been to the lodge, anyway? I had no idea, and I began to feel the day was a wasted one. I notice that she doesn’t go for the driver’s door, however, instead going to the trunk of the Alfa, opening it, and then withdrawing a small weekend bag. She closes the trunk again, goes back into the lobby, makes a comment to the concierge there, and then walks out of sight down a hallway.

            More grueling waiting, and I don’t trust myself with the distraction of a book, and I run out of nursery school rhymes and song lyrics to silently recite in my head. I check my watch: It’s well past four. Cars begin to pull into the lot, and glancing through the binoculars I can see that the bar and restaurant has opened and is beginning to glow, ever so faintly. I catch a glimpse of purple, and focusing my glasses I see Iris in a long, flowing dress in the color that emperors and popes once envied, walking through the lobby towards the restaurant. I can’t get a good glimpse inside, so I shift my position hurriedly, crossing the highway and setting back up along one of the public trails down to the cliffs just north of the lodge.

            It’s getting cold, and I am growing a bit nervous about being spotted. It was one thing to be a bird watcher, a nature watcher, a tourist; it was entirely something else to be an immobile stalker of nature, never moving and never looking anywhere but one way. Thankfully it is growing dark. I now stick out less, out on the grassy outcroppings to the north of lodge. There is no longer much chance that I will run into joggers and idle hikers or other, more legitimate outdoor enthusiasts on the little foot-worn trail. With the darkness, though, the cold arrives. The few sparks of sun, far out distant in the Pacific, do nothing for the temperature, and they are themselves fast disappearing, just as the lodge behind and above me begins to bloom into a low, rambling Japanese lantern on the rocks.

            I raise the binoculars to my eyes. Inside the restaurant, I see Iris’s head, and the head of the old woman, the same from the golf course earlier, but little else. I need a better angle, and after a bit of visual scouting in the paltry available light, I spot suitable higher ground, a bit more distant to the north but with a better angle. I move, and I hope that my growing nearness will not mean I will be more likely to encounter other people. I wish now that I had brought along Laura. A single man alone along the rugged coast, after dark, that was suspicious. A couple? Nobody would think twice.

            Setting back up, I glance through the binoculars and find my situation considerably improved. The pair are sitting along the long back wall, near the north window, and now I can see the side of the older woman’s face, and a good three-quarter view of Iris, and while the table top itself remains out of view, I can see their arms, and sometimes their hands as they talk. The conversation is, however, almost unreadable. There is no great passion, no sense of emotional tells that might provide context. Is this woman her mother? A favorite professor from her days at Mills? Her sixth cousin, twice removed, if that was even such a thing?

            As I speculate, and worry if frostbite is possible in California, someone approaches their table from the length of the restaurant, a man in a dark blue suit with fine, salt-and-pepper hair, carrying a plump burgundy valise. Iris rises to greet him, but the older woman merely smiles thinly, nods, and holds out her right hand. Mr. Valise shakes it easily, then sits down beside Iris, and I can tell that the tenor of their conversation picks up considerably. The waiter comes, offers a menu, but Mr. Valise turns it down, asks for something, sends the waiter away. A few minutes later, and the waiter is back bearing a large bucket glass of something amber and expensive. I wish, then and there, that I also had a nice bucket glass of something amber and expensive.

            Thereafter a new pattern emerges. The old maid speaks at regular intervals, and Mr. Valise then responds, earnest and at length. Through most of this Iris sits quiet, though now and then she sticks in a word edgewise, mostly seemingly directed at Mr. Valise. After some time, Mr. Valise’s answers grow shorter, more confident yet also more calm, and the Old Maid speaks more, never animatedly, but at greater length and with greater warmth. The waiter comes back for more orders, everyone gets a second glass—something in a Martini glass for Iris, a red wine for the Old Maid, another bucket of amber for Mr. Valise. The conversation is more relaxed. Iris takes greater part. Mr. Valise leans down out of view, and when he comes back up he has something large and flat in his hand—an envelope, thick, weighty—and he sets this on the table between them all. A few more words, a few last drags off the drink, then he rises, shakes hands all around, and leaves.

            Make. Something. Happen. The words are silent, they are inside my head only, but they are no less potent for that.

            I scramble, dashing through the grass but trying not to make any noise. Not that I have to worry, as the sound of the ocean is oppressively loud. I get to the tree line of the parking lot just in time to see the dome light go off on a car there. It is big, some pea-green-gold monster, something by Chrysler. Its lights flick on, and Mr. Valise begins to back out of his spot.

            I turn and jog across the football field’s length to the little trailhead parking lot, get in the rented Cadillac, and start her up. I manage to get her to the edge of the road just in time to see the big pea-green-gold Chrysler turn south onto Highway 1. I pull out after it, letting the tail lights recede a bit so as not to be too obvious. He doesn’t go far, maybe a half mile, before the lights turn off the road again, into a driveway to the right, on the ocean side of the road. I pass him by, slow, find a wide spot of highway, make a U-turn, and backtrack. I let myself pass the drive again, turning into the next one, which I discover to be a small residential road. The first driveway to the left is ungated, so I turn into it, dousing my headlights and markers. It leads down to a dark house under construction. I stop the car, shut her off, and get out. To the south, through the trees, I can see the glow of another house, the house that Mr. Valise must have gone down to. Between me and it is a low gully, manzanita and grass and pines, just enough to block a good view, and just enough to make me doubt walking through it in the dark. I grab the binoculars and head back up to the side road by foot, then turn onto the shoulder of the highway. A couple trucks pass the other way, but there isn’t much traffic besides them. I reach the driveway and turn right down it. It curves considerably back to the north and, I can see ahead, back to the south and the house; instead of following it, I cut across the relatively open ground towards some trees on the slope above the house, on the little rise the drive is circumnavigating. It is easy enough to sit here, well protected from view, but looking down onto the driveway and the little gravel field that served as a parking lot. A very busy parking lot, tonight. There are four cars there already: Two are big, dark colored sedans. One is a red Jaguar sportscar that is glossy even in the darkness. The fourth is the color of Midas’s vomit, a pea-green-gold Chrysler.

            From behind me a noise, tires on pavement and a motor growing nearer, not on the highway but on the drive. A flash of metal swings down the drive and comes to a stop beside the Chrysler. It looks European, German, a BMW I am pretty sure. The dome light pops on, and out of it emerges a man with thick spectacles and a starched white shirt and a plain black tie, a man who looks more like an engineer from the Johnson Space Center or IBM than someone headed for a weekend at a tony California coastal resort town. As if he hears my thoughts somehow, he pops open the rear door of the BMW and takes out a bright mustard sport coat and puts it on. Pulling a comb from a pocket, he touches up his hair using the side view mirror, then heads towards the house, tossing his keys up and down in his right hand as he walks. At the house, he rings the bell. The big wooden door swings inward. A woman stands, one hand on the knob, one on her thigh, smiling. Words are exchanged, but the Pacific washes away their sounds. Mr. BMW passes her, and she gives him a European kiss on each cheek, then takes his keys in her left hand. She turns, almost a pirouette on her left foot, swinging the door gently and slowly with her right hand until it glides resolutely shut. Thankfully, the door’s solidity is more a symbolic statement than a measure of attitude, and the sidelights around it are massive, clear plate glass. The two are mostly hidden by the door, but I can see her left hand outstretched, receding down the foyer, and as it passes a small credenza, I can clearly see her drop the key set into a small Indian basket of woven grass.

            Mr. Valise has gone to a key party. How long will he be in there? I check my watch—it is 9:35, early for a party, especially for a party where you got liquored up enough to go to bed with a friend’s wife. And I begin to wonder—do you take your work briefcase in with you, to a key party? Hello, darling! Kiss-kiss. Here’s my bag, would you be a darling and put it with the coats, upstairs on the bed? Or do you do as Mr. BMW has done, and transform yourself into Mr. Party in the parking lot, toss off your suit jacket and your bag along with your ambitions, run a comb through your hair, and walk in? I point the binoculars at the putrid Chrysler—is there a jacket hanging above the back seat, from one of the handles above the rear doors? It is hard to tell. And is it late enough that everyone who was arriving has now made it? Or will the parking lot get busy again with new arrivals as the night wears on?

            I watch and wait. It is a Friday; nobody has to be up early the next morning, but also part of the point of a key party is what happens afterwards. My watch now shows ten. They are probably only into their second drink, perhaps the third for the earlier arrivals, and surely nobody else will arrive now. I get up off the ground, dust myself off, and hike back to the Caddy. There, from under the back seat, I pull out a long, thin, slim piece of black metal, along with a roll of duct tape and a crowbar.

            The trip back to the house takes a bit longer, with the crowbar slid down the side of my pants and the thin metal strip up my left sleeve. It is awkward, but if a car passes—especially a sheriff’s car or a state cop—the last thing I want to be seen carrying is a crowbar. At the drive, I walk calmly, slowly to the parking lot, keeping to shadows at the edge of the road as much as possible. I pass around the nose of the BMW, then the big putrid Chrysler. Even in the night, it reminds me of canned split-pea and ham soup. Beyond it, the bulk of one of the big dark sedans protects me from the lights of the house.

            I go to the driver’s-side door and slip the thin metal strap slowly down into the gap between the window and the door. Sliding the strip around a bit, I feel it catch, pull gently, and am rewarded by the clunk of the door lock releasing. I slide the strip back out and pop the door handle, and open the door just an inch or two.

            Getting the duct tape out of my coat pocket, I pull off a hunk with my right hand, then slide my left into the jam of the door, where it hinges against the car, trying to feel for the dome light button without opening the door enough to set it off. It is damn near impossible, but then I think I spot it. I pull my hand back out, walk around, and then open the door wide with my left hand while quickly ducking down into the door, my right hand with the tape finding and taping over the button. In all, the dome light is on for no more than a second or two. Still, my heart is now playing an Art Blakey solo in my chest. I sit there, frozen, listening in the dark, crouching in the open door, waiting. No noises come to my ears, other than muffled music from inside the house. I turn my head slowly, but I see nobody. I got away with it, at least so far.

            I sit in the driver’s seat. With access to the car, the crowbar is now useless, so I set it on the passenger seat, then look around inside. The valise is there, sitting on the floor behind the passenger side seat. I pull it slowly up and over the head rest, and then pop it into my lap. There are locks—it will take a little time to get it open, and it feels like it has a fair amount of paper in it. I look at my watch: 10:30, no time. Pulling a cloth from my coat pockets, I wipe down all the surfaces I have touched, including the door jams. I pull the valise out of the car, along with the crowbar and the duct tape and the thin metal strip and set them on the ground. I shut the door gently, bumping it with my ass to get it closed without much sound, then wipe down the door handle and the rest of the door. I know the small strip of duct tape is still in the jam, still holding down the dome light actuator, but I am not willing to risk the attention of removing it. Then, picking up the crowbar, the thin metal strip, the duct tape roll, and the valise, I walk back up the drive, back along the highway, back down the side street, back down the other drive, and back to the Caddy. Nobody comes out shouting, nobody chases after me, no cop cars pass on the road and shine their lights on me and pop on their cherry gumballs.

            I put all the tools back into their proper places in the Volvo, stick the valise behind my seat, and then turn the motor over. In less than two more minutes, I am on Highway 1, headed south back to the city and home.

---

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.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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 19^th 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.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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 12

It is just past six in the morning, and I am sneaking quietly out of the bedroom and trying not to wake Laura. In my underwear I gingerly make my way into my study, and there put on the dark gray suit I laid out last night. Pulling a duffle from the closet, I stuff it with a few useful items. A packable parka. A set of binoculars. My new Pentax SLR and a few long lenses and some film. A birdwatcher’s guide, a set of Thompson’s street guides for Marin, Sonoma, Contra Costa, and Alameda Counties. A bunch of books off Moe Moskowitz including the latest Le Carré and Deighton novels, a book of crosswords, a notebook, and some Bic pens. In the kitchen, I make some coffee and fill a Stanley Thermos with it, grab a few candy bars from a cupboard, and then go stuff those in the bag, too. Then I get a hair-brained idea, and go back into the study and root around in the closet again. On a top shelf, there are some old hats, and I find the one I am looking for—a black peaked cap—and blow the dust off it and toss it into the bag as well.

            The walk out to the car is unnerving, the bag’s strap wearing down on my shoulder with no small bite of pain, and the keys in my hand seem to jingle all the louder in the pre-dawn stillness. Outside it has stopped raining for the moment, and opening a door to the Volvo, I sling in the bag, then go get behind the wheel, start the car, and back out onto the street. There are no big plum-colored Lincolns waiting for me this time, nor any unmarked cop cars from Oakland, nor any other cars other than the ones belonging to my various neighbors. I pop the car into gear and head for the road down to the freeway, which even this early is already starting to back up with Bay Bridge traffic. I hold onto the steering wheel for dear life, KJAZ on the radio playing some smoky saxophone and piano number from about twenty years ago. The bottleneck thins after I get up on the double-deck above West Oakland and then sail down into downtown and past it, out, out, and out to the miles and miles of low brick and concrete warehouses and machine shops and other industrial jungles that stretch along the Alameda channel and the bayside until the Coliseum and the exit for Oakland Airport. On the wide boulevard between the freeway and the airport is a ghetto of motels both fanciful and cheap, a few auto dealers, several diners, and as I near the terminals, rental car lots. It is still early, some of the lots aren’t open yet, but from the road I am able to scope out their inventories, and find most of them wanting, the vehicles too new, too small, too dull.

            Stopping at a Denny’s, I make use of the phone book to find some local, off-brand rental firms, something in the vein of a Rent-a-Wreck. Twenty minutes later and I am at a used car lot that is just opening for the day, an old gas station out along East 14^th with an inventory that ran from old Nash Metropolitans to nearly-new Mustangs that probably had ended up on the lot after a bad interaction with a loan shark. The dealer is a short fat man in a windowpane jacket and white spats who, despite his colorful appearance, seems perfectly rational and sane. I explain what I am hoping to rent, and he holds up his hand as if to signal “say no more,” then disappears into the back of the old service bays and out a door. In less than a minute, a big gray car pulls up and around under the old canopy out front, a big, hard-top, fishtail Cadillac with presentable chrome. I go outside to look at it better, and the salesman gets out from behind the wheel and waves his arms at it. “Huh? Huhhhh? Huhhhhhhhhhhhh?” I figure out quickly this is his way of selling me on the vehicle, but it is unnecessary. The car is perfect. Giving him a thumbs-up, I sign off the paperwork, fork over some cash, and transfer my bag from the Volvo into the back seat of the car.

            Back in the old gas station office, I leave my Volvo’s key with him, and tell him to expect it to be picked up sometime later in the day, then go out to the Cadillac and point it towards the freeway. The car is like a pass made by an 80-year-old ladies’ man: Somewhat inappropriate, outdated, and yet still so smooth that you have to admire it. Around the time I make the Richmond bridge, I dig out the peaked cap from the bag and place it on my head. Past San Quintin, then south past the marshes, over the rise, then right and down along the back leg of the Tiburon peninsula and into its namesake town, and then I am out on Belvedere Island, threading the gleaming iron monster through the narrow roads that had been excruciatingly jammed between the jacaranda and cypress and miniature Xanadus of another generation. I begin to wish I had brought along Gatsby to read. I know the Carpenters live at the very bottom of the island, out on Peninsula Point at the bottom of Belvedere. With only one way out, I set the Caddy down just past a T intersection of, the car pointing back towards Tiburon and tucked tight against the curb and the landscaping.

            Turning the engine off, I reach behind the seat, rummage around, and dig out a dog-eared old copy of Kidnapped. I am racing across the moors with young Davie and his proscribed Highlander when I see in the rear view mirror the mint green flash of David Campbell Carpenter’s DeVille swinging through the intersection. He pays absolutely no mind to me or the car as he passes, floats up the street, and disappears around some manzanita bushes and carefully haphazard stone walls. Checking my watch, I see it is now nearly ten.

            I finish Kidnapped, then pick up the John le Carré. Hardcover, the thing feels like a brick, nearly four hundred pages long. I weigh it, I sniff the new page smells, I crack it open and flourish the paper and consider the text in an aesthetic sort of way, then tuck it back into the bag behind the seat. Instead, I pull out David Balfour, Stevenson’s sequel to Kidnapped, and begin a journey through Scotland once more. About a third of the way through—young Balfour is all muddled up with Rob Roy’s granddaughter—my reading is interrupted by a smooth but snarly engine noise, and from behind the Caddy a glare of orange whips around, all swoops and scoops and Italian poise, and then it passes me and charges away on the bend of the street. I set the book on the floor on the passenger side, start the Caddy, and glide out after it. It passed so quickly I can’t be entirely sure of the driver, but something—perhaps instinct, perhaps a barely perceived glimpse—tells me that this is Iris’s car. The curves and tightness of the roads slows me down, but by the time we reach the yacht club the road widens and straightens and completely oblivious to posted speed limits or any sense of propriety, the orange sports car ahead of me buzzes Tiburon and then performs a barnstorm of the boulevard up to 101. I barely see her turn signals as she ducks right onto the highway, and I take a guess that she’s heading back to the east side of the bay, but this news is of little comfort, for the way she drives, there’s no telling if I will be able to keep her in my sights. It helps that the car is orange. My hands are sweating by the time we pass the race track, but the thickening traffic begins to help, and just past Berkeley she pulls off onto Ashby, and I am able to manage a better bead on her. We cross all the major boulevards: San Pablo, Sacramento, Grove, Adeline, Shattuck, Telegraph. At College she swings south, and by now I can see I made the right bet, can see the long golden hair under the Italian silk scarf, see even that she is wearing string-backed racing gloves. Past Alcatraz, past Claremont, then right up a gently sloping road. I ease off the gas, and let her make a right turn ahead of me before slowly rolling by and glancing to see that she had parked the car on this side road, up a steep slope. I slide the Caddy to a stop just past the intersection and crane my neck, hard. There’s motion, and then Iris steps up out of the car, shuts it behind her, and walks down the slope towards the street I am on.

            I shut the Caddy down, making sure my foot isn’t on the brakes, then hunker down in the seat, my peaked cap off. If anyone is looking out their windows at me right now, they’re going to wonder about my motives, but I am more worried about Iris than about the nosy neighbors. Risking it, I reach up and snap the rear-view mirror so I can see the road behind me from my midget-like position, and am rewarded with a reversed image of Iris reaching the corner then turning, opening a metal gate right at the peak of the turn, and ascending a set of stairs behind it.

            I get out of the car and walk calmly across the way towards the gate. The stairs are brick, piercing a white plastered wall and rising under a canopy of pines towards one of those oversized mock-Spanish houses that were popular in the days of Eddie Cantor and Mildred Pierce. Going back up the side street, I pass my eyes over Iris’s car—a rather aggressive Alfa Romeo coupe—and then consider the second gate next to a garage inset into the hill, wondering if I can jump the gate without anyone seeing and calling the police, and wondering too if there’s enough cover on the other side of the gate that I would be able to approach the house without being seen. How many people live there? How likely am I to run into witnesses? I decide against the idea, and walk back down the hill to the main entrance, and a stroke of luck, spotting a mail carrier doing his rounds up the main street. Hustling back to the car, I grab the peaked cap off the front seat then go back over to the main entrance and wait beside it, resting on the wall nonchalantly, the cap in my left hand held low and casual, sometimes raised slightly as I periodically glance at my watch in an undisguised gesture. The mailman hits the house next door, then comes around their gate and back to the street, and approaches.

            “Got anything for six-thousand-and-one?” I ask, nodding behind me. The mailman stops, flicks through the stack of letters in his bag, and then hands me four envelopes and a few flyers. “Thanks.”

            I glance at the address fields—a few “resident” addressees, and then a few with actual names: R. Woods, Mr. R. Woods, and finally the whole kit and kaboodle, Robards Woods. I take the bundle of mail, walk over to the gate, open it, open the mailbox, toss the mail inside, close it all back up, then resume my station against the wall. It is excruciating to wait there, knowing that any moment Iris could come walking down those steps and catch me there, but I have to maintain my air of calm, my pantomime, for the only way to lower the suspicions of the three old ladies who are no doubt watching me with concern from the neighboring houses is to sell how normal I am, to sell it with absolute steadiness. Criminals flee, innocent men stay right where they are, placid and proud. If I smoked, I would have brought out a cigarette, but as I didn’t, I recite a few old grammar school poems in my head and, between each, glance at my watch as if impatient. After ten minutes pass, I walk as confidently as possible over to the Caddy, open the trunk, find a rag, and proceed to wipe down the chrome on the front of the car with painstaking detail. Five minutes of this is enough, and I put the rag back, get back into the driver’s seat, and open up David Balfour and finish it. This done, I swap out Stevenson for a Len Deighton novel about convoluted KGB plots that, coincidentally, also happen in Scotland. I’m knee-deep in mysterious women and Soviet vice-admirals by the time I hear the distinctive engine noise of the Alfa. According to my watch, over an hour has passed. The Alfa is about halfway down the road back to College before I have the Caddy turned in a nearby driveway and pointed after her. I hang back a bit, and see her turn signal indicating a left. A few minutes of tentative shadowing and we are on the freeway again: Highway 24, the Warren, past Mills and onto 580, out through the Castro Valley. As we crest over the hills, I realize that a kind of personal autopilot has kicked in, and that her destination is one I have visited nearly every day for the past three years: She is headed for Rancho Santa Rita.

            We pull off the freeway onto the old road, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as we cruise through the heart of the town and past Laura’s office. A few blocks away, Iris turns the Alfa into the oak-shaded parking lot of the old grange hall, and I pass her by, stopping the Cadillac in front of an appliance store and shutting it off. I walk briskly back towards the grange, which I now notice is surrounded by political signs. Most support Flournoy for governor, but there’s also several advocating a yes on the Rancho Santa Rita incorporation measure.

            I adjust my tie and then walk into the old, almost musty building, its white stucco peeling, its doors chalky from old paint. Inside, there’s a small lobby with corkboard and flyers and thumb-tacked business cards, and beyond a set of double oak doors is the main hall, a spare but large space that might have been the inside of one of the Pentecostal churches favored by the few Mexican laborers who had stopped going to Catholic mass. Instead, there are folded tables set up like desks, with similar folded wood or metal chairs at them. Each has stacks and stacks of papers, notebooks, and phonebooks. Most have telephones, and indeed there is a veritable spider’s web of cables running from the tables to an open window at right towards the back, an impromptu solution to the sudden plethora of Bell receivers. Most have people sitting at them, going through notes, seemingly busy. At one I catch glimpse of familiar golden hair. Up front, just inside the door, is a main desk, and behind it sits a prim young man with a recent manicure and clothes a bit too formal and a bit too tight. “May I help you?” He asks.

            “I was wondering, is this where the campaign for the incorporation vote is headquartered?”

            “Yes, it is.”

            “I was wondering if I could speak to someone about the campaign. My wife and I have the Savoy agency down the street…”

            “Oh!” The boy adjusted his spectacles. “Yes, you are Missus Savoy’s husband. I knew I recognized you from somewhere. Well the campaign manager is out right now, and we’re rather busy setting up for a phone blitz tonight—”

            “Phone blitz?”

            “Yes, we’re going to start calling likely voters starting at four, to remind them of the measure, and to educate them on its merits.”

            “Who are likely voters?”

            “We go through the voting records from the last two elections in the county and see who has voted in both, and then we put them on our list of who to call.”

            “I had no idea you could access such things.”

            “How people voted is secret, but whether they have voted is public record. I could look up in our rolls and see if you voted in the last election, for example.”

            “My wife and I do not reside in Alameda County.”

            “Oh.”

            “Is there someone around in charge? I’d like to learn more about the campaign.”

            The boy puffs slightly behind the desk. “I am in charge, at least until mother gets here.”

            “Mother?”

            “Missus Forsythe.”

            “Esther Forsythe?”

“Yes.”

            “Isn’t she the county clerk?”

            “Her work here is strictly in her capacity as a private citizen. Her work and political life are entirely separate.”

            “Did you read that from a card?”

            The boy wriggles his nose in a peeved gesture. A chair scrapes somewhere on my left, and I hear a familiar voice: “Funny to run into you here, again!” I turn. Iris Woods-Carpenter is walking slowly through the tables towards me, holding forward a hand. “Mister… Chisholm, correct?”

            “Yes.” I take her hand as she approaches. “My wife runs Savoy Real Estate, just up the block.”

            “Oh, yes! Laura Savoy. Your wife is a lovely person, I had the pleasure of meeting her at a chamber function last week.”

            “Really? I had no idea.”

            “You must have dropped in to learn more about our campaign…?”

            I nod. “I wanted to see how things were going. Unfortunately the campaign manager seems not to be in.”

            Iris turned slightly to the boy, as if noticing him for the first time. “I’ll take care of this, Ruppie.” Turning to me, she gestured towards the back of the room, and then leads me through the tables and beyond, to the small raised stage area. At the back right corner is a door, and we open it and go back out into the glare of the late afternoon, walking back to the shade of one of the live oaks.

            “Ruppie?” I ask.

            “He’s eager. I hope he didn’t embarrass us too much. Cigarette?” At the end of her slender fingers is a silver case, open. I have a hand at it and shake my head. She snaps the case shut and slips it into a pocket of her coat, a camel hair that fell almost to her knees. “What do you want to know about the campaign? Perhaps I can help.”

            “I didn’t know you were involved.”

            “Oh, yes. It’s one of my causes.”

            “Why this campaign, though?”

            “It will be good for the Tri-Valley. It’s logical, it makes sense, it will bring new opportunities for growth, and good services to the people who live here.”

            “That sounds like a brochure.”

            “It is a brochure. I wrote it. And aren’t you for incorporation as well?”

            “Laura says it will mean a lot more business for us. A lot more houses to sell, and resell.”

            “She’s sensible.” Iris rolls a cigarette around in her left hand, back and forth between two fingers, but seems to have forgotten that it is a cigarette at all, never having lit it much less put it to her lips. She glances over at me. “We paid for a poll. From what I can gather, it seems likely to pass by eight percentage points.” Iris looks down and seems for the first time to notice the cigarette. Lighting it, she begins to casually smoke. “What about you? What are you working on?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I know David hired you for some job. You told me so yourself two nights ago.”

            “Did I? I don’t think that I did.”

            “Oh? Perhaps someone told me. Perhaps David.”

            “I’m just working on some property research for him. Nothing special.”

            “He has staff for that. Why does he need you?”

            I shrug. “In all honesty, I don’t really know. All I know is he has given me some tasks, and he’s cutting checks for the cost.” What really kills me is what I cannot say, that it isn’t a lie, that I genuinely have no idea what is going on inside David Carpenter’s head.

            “You have a brother, don’t you?” Iris pulls one long drag off the cigarette, and the remainder of its white cylinder turns to ashes. She drops the butt onto the ground and steps on, gently, squishing out the last of the flame.

            “Yes. He was at the party the other night, at the Mark Hopkins.”

            “Are you two close?”

            “I suppose. Considering we are brothers.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “He’s my little brother. He’s a pain in the ass. He usually gets into trouble, and usually thinks he is smarter than me.”

            “Is he?”

            I feel my eyebrows shoot up. “I don’t know if he’s smarter. I do sometimes think he is cleverer, though. It’s probably how he gets himself into trouble.”

            “Well I envy you. I have never had a brother. Not really, anyway.” Iris wipes her hands on the front of her coat, down low along her thighs, as if they were sweaty. “I should probably get back inside, it’s almost dinner hour for the old ladies around here, and I’ll be needed on the phones for the rest of the decent hours of the night. But I’m afraid I never answered any questions about the campaign for you.”

            “It’s alright. Ruppie—what sort of name is that, anyway?”

            “His full name is Rupert. He hates it.”

            “Well anyway, Ruppie filled me in some, and your information about the polls was helpful. I’ll tell Laura to begin expansion plans right away.”

            “You joke,” Iris says, tossing it over her shoulder as she turns to walk back towards the grange hall’s back door, “but I really would, if I were in your place.”

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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.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.

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

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Chapter 11

“And what are you supposed to be?”

            The voice is my wife’s, at the door. This is not the first time she has said this tonight, for it is Halloween, and our doorbell has been under constant assault from tiny, greedy fingers. Usually this sort of exclamation means that the child or children standing on our stoop, begging for candy, is not wearing one of the four stock costumes of cowboy, pirate, vampire, or ghost. “Come look at this,” I hear, and I turn around in the avocado green settee by the fireplace to glance towards the door, and spot an imp wearing what appears to be a set of cardboard beer boxes, papered over and decked out in old stove knobs and screens made from tinfoil.

            “Is he a robot?”

            “No!” The voice from inside the cardboard, though muffled, is high and squeeky and frankly rather annoyed.

            “Are you Mission Control?” My wife asks, her tone of voice all lace doilies and teacups. “In Houston?”

            “No!” I swear I hear a little stomp. “I’m a tee-vee!”

            Laura: “Here you go.” The rustling of little hands in a cheap plastic pumpkin filled with candy. A tiny, hollow, cardboard-muffled, perfunctory “thank you,” and the door closes.

            My eyes, meanwhile, are in my lap, on the yellow sheets of the legal pad there. At the tip of my old blue Cross, a blot of black-blue ink was spreading onto the page, wearing through the pages below, staining everything. I lift it, blow on the blot to dry, then attempt to mentally kick myself into gear. On the left-hand side, in a small column, I write the days: Monday 10/28. Tuesday 10/29, Wednesday 10/30, Thursday 10/31. Next to them, in a column, I pen in $200 for each, and next to that some estimates of the gas I spent on, but then scratch out the $200 next to Monday. The total is $606, give or take, the amount of money David Carpenter owed me so far for the work that I had done. Below all this I penned in some thoughts:

• Q: Is Santini with Iris? Probably not. Maybe?
• Q: What is Santini up to? Probably a drug habit.
• Q: Is Iris up to something? Don’t know.

This, in total, is what Carpenter’s money has bought: A whole lot of nothing.

            I cap the pen to keep from spreading it all over the page again, and consider whether I should just write out an invoice in the morning and beg off the job, or if I should keep going. As it is, there’s not much I can tell Carpenter, and I have the distinct impression that if he doesn’t like my results, he’ll just not pay me, and good luck getting anything out of him in court. I never gave him a contract, just a verbal agreement in the Three Star. Sure, I could give him circumstantial evidence that his partner was a drug user, but that didn’t amount to much. It occurs to me that Carpenter never gave any real explanation of why he thinks Santini and his wife were at it, nothing to work on at all, just the admonition to follow Santini. Maybe news of Santini’s drug habit is what he was actually fishing for? Some kind of dirt, so he could push his partner out? Maybe, maybe, maybe—too many maybes.

            The door rings. More little ghouls and hobgoblins. I spell Laura for a bit, then she’s back at the door.

            “Did you ever think it’s weird,” I ask her, refilling the plastic pumpkin with miniature Mars Bars, “that election season overlaps Halloween?”

            “They both have villain themes.”

            “True.”

            “I hope the election goes well in the rancho, all the same.”

            “The incorporation vote?”

            “If Rancho Santa Rita becomes a city, it will make development far cheaper and easier, and there will be a building boom.”

            “They really need a new name, though.”

            “It is such a mouthful, but shortening it will be tough.” The doorbell rings, and a small gang of cowboys gets their payday. After they’re gone, Laura picks up where she left off. “You can’t call it ‘rancho,’ it sounds like a town filled with trailer parks. And Santa Rita is just one more California vanilla town. People will think it’s just Santa Rosa’s evil twin sister.”

            “Maybe they can call it Phoebe. Or Appleton. Or Hearst. Her house practically overlooks all of it anyway.”

            “I don’t think ‘Hearst’ is a good name right now.”

            “Maybe they can call it Tania.”

            “Hah, hah, hah.” Doorbell, costumes, candy. Shut door. “Whatever they call it, it means a city sewer system, water system, police department. Increased taxes but those increases will actually drive some of the farmers to find a higher and better use, which usually means tract houses. There’s enough land in the proposed boundaries to build houses well into the 1980s.”

            “Won’t the developers have their own agents, though?”

            “Sure, but who stays in the same tract house for long? More houses means more reselling.”

            “Why don’t you go get dinner rolling. I’ll watch the door for the next hour.”

            Laura relinquishes her stool to me, and walks off towards the kitchen. “They should slack off a bit and start getting older, it’s getting darker.”

            Perhaps they should slack off some, but it feels like the pace picks up if anything. I become the beaches of Guadalcanal, and the costumed hoards outside become the USMC. I refill the pumpkin bucket twice, then start to break into the ever-unpopular candy corn. The costumes are the same as always, ghost, ghost, Dracula, cowboy, ghost, pirate, ghost. Once or twice, there’s a combination pirate ghost or cowboy ghost, and I suspect these are children playing Halloween tourism, up from the poor flats of Richmond with money only for a hat, a sheet sufficing for the remainder of the costume, here to gather in the higher quality candy of Arlington Boulevard and environs. Poor them, they have not reckoned with my tardy supply runs, and go away with the tooth-destroying, waxy weirdness of the candy corn. Then there are the elaborate costumes, mostly older children who wear vacuum-formed and brightly painted plastic face masks from the local dime store: Colonel Sanders, Spiderman, Superman. I refill the bowl, and smell the intoxicating smell of frying onions and peppers and sausage wafting from the kitchen. A lull, and I get up and go to investigate, but get cut off in the dining room by Laura, who is standing in front of the old buffet table again, rearranging the picture frames on top of it for the umpteenth time.

            “What are you making?”

            “Minestrone with sausage.” She tucks a framed photo of her mother closer to a more recent photograph of her father. “I felt like we needed something comforting.”

            “Put Nick in front of my Mom and Dad, and you can squish the whole shebang a bit further from the edge.”

            Laura looks up at me, then the photos, sees what I see, and pushes the constellation of frames a little more towards the center. “Good idea, that way if anything happens….”

            “It won’t”

            “You never know.” She makes a few minor adjustments with her fingers, then declares “there!” and wipes them on her knee-length skirt. “I’d better check on the soup.”

            I return to door duty, but the pace is certainly falling. For some reason, the night’s cavalcade of costumes has me unnerved. All the masks, all the roles these children were learning to play, all to get their candy.

            The phone in the kitchen rings. A few beats pass, and Laura comes up behind me.

            “Phone. For you. A client.”

            I stand up. “I’ll take it in my study.”

            “I’ll hang it up and take door duty for a bit. The soup will be fine on its own for a while.”

            I walk into what was once the front bedroom, a simple box with a set of sliding glass doors onto a northward facing patio. Sitting in the orange plaid armchair behind the walnut desk, I pick up the plasticky receiver of the extension phone and say my name. I hear Laura click the receiver down on the other end, and then a familiar voice.

            “Chisholm? Carpenter. Any news?”

            “Not much.” I stand up and carefully walk to the door, stretching out the coiled phone line to reach it, then use my left foot to slowly and gently shut it. “I haven’t confirmed your suspicions as yet.”

            “Have you disproved them?”

            “No.” 

            “Well you have more opportunities ahead. Friday night I leave for a business trip—doesn’t matter where, really—and anyway I won’t be back until Monday. If Richard and my wife are having an affair, this will be an opportunity they won’t be able to pass up. I want you to get back to following Richard. Catching them in the act.”

            For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe David Carpenter is the one having the affair, and he wants to find a reason to end the marriage, penalty-free, and be with his own lover. “Did your wife mention any weekend plans of her own?”

            “Something about golf on Saturday, painting on Sunday. It’s probably all a ruse.”

            “Well maybe it would make more sense to just wait and see if Mister Santini appears at your house, or if she leaves to meet him?”

            “I don’t want you to meet my wife. Especially not after that debacle at the Mark Hopkins. I still don’t understand why you were there. I hope I’m not paying for that.”

            “No, no, I was there because of my father.”

            “Your father? What’s he got to do with any of this?”

            “I mean it was personal, not business. It won’t be on the invoice.”

            “It better not.” Then Carpenter hangs up.

            I consider crossing out yesterday’s two hundred on the legal pad, but then remember that he agreed to pay me by the day, not the hour. This makes me unreasonably happy, as does the quick mental math that he’s now specifically asked me to keep working the case through the weekend, another three days, another six-hundred plus expenses. The smile disappears when I remember that golfers get up at the crack of dawn, all the better to get on the course in the cool morning. Is that still a thing, even in the relative chill of San Francisco Bay? I sigh. Probably it is. So that means I’ll need to be up early on Saturday, and despite Carpenter’s constant nagging, the smart money was to wait out at Belvedere at the bottom of the road to his house and watch for Santini to arrive or Iris to leave.

            Well, hopefully something will happen, at last. And maybe Carpenter is right: A whole weekend free, there’s no way that two secretive lovers wouldn’t take advantage of that. So if it happens, or if it doesn’t, delivering an invoice to Carpenter on Monday and calling the job done seemed more and more plausible, and more and more likely to actually result in getting paid. I liked this new plan, even if it meant finding an excuse for Laura about getting up and going to work in the Saturday pre-dawn.

            I walk through the hall and slip through the pocket door into the great room. From across the space, Laura asks me who had called.

            “Oh, a developer I haven’t worked for before. I’m doing some work for him that is time sensitive and he wanted to make sure he got to me tonight.”

            “He said he called the office but didn’t leave a message. How did he get our home number?”

            “I don’t know, I must have given it to him.”

            “Was it really that important?”

            “Yes. He thinks there’s a deal going on that he is being excluded from.” It was mostly true. “I’m supposed to watch a meeting at a golf course on Saturday morning and see who shows up.”

            Laura frowns, and the doorbell rings again. She opens it, and on our stoop is a boy wearing an adult’s London Fog rain coat, a crumpled, moth-holed old brown fedora, a woman’s sunglasses, and a giant white bandage on his nose.

            “Oh, what happened to you?” The concern in Laura’s voice is palpable.

            “Someone tried to cut my nose off!”

            “Why would anyone want to do that?”

            “I don’t know, it’s in the movie.”

            “Movie? Who are you supposed to be?”

            I step closer. “He’s Jake Gittes. From Chinatown.”

            Laura frowns. “Your parents let you watch that movie?”

            “Where’s the candy?” Was the child’s reply. Laura sticks out the plastic pumpkin, and he rustles around in it, but manages only to get a small bag of yet more candy corn. “You got anything else?”

            “No,” I respond. “Candy corn is all that’s left.”

            “Buptkis,” was his reply, but he takes the small bag of sugary poison anyway and leaves.

            Laura closes the door. “They let him watch Chinatown? The movie has incest in it! It seems wrong.”

            I take the pumpkin bucket from her hand and set it down behind the door, then flip off the porch light. “Come on, we’re done for the night, let’s go eat some soup.”

            Laura nods and we turn to walk towards the kitchen.

            “You know,” I say, following her, “I don’t really get that movie. Why did Gittes see it all the way to the end?”

            “He was paid to.”

            “Sure, but after he almost gets his nose cut off, doesn’t Faye Duniway offer him a check and tell him to go away? And doesn’t he tear up the check and keep going?”

            “I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re remembering it right.”

            “I’m pretty sure. And I just think, why? You nearly lost your nose. Why wouldn’t you just cash the check and go? He’s not in love with Faye Duniway. At least, he’s not then. Maybe later, but not then. He’s got a thriving practice, he’s got enough employees and has his own building and a car and probably a nice house in Glendale or something. He doesn’t seem to need the business that bad, and he sure doesn’t need to lose a nose.”

             “That’s simple,” Laura replies, setting out her mother’s old china on the dining room table. “He wanted the world to make sense.”

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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 7th, 2024. Previous chapters can be viewed here.

A note about sharing. While this novel is released to the public free of charge, I reserve all rights to publication. You may send links to friends, post excerpts on social media, or share it in any reasonable way, but please do not repost whole chapters, nor print and distribute paper copies. Please also, whenever possible, share a link back to the content.