by Chip Jacobs
The narrative city hall wanted emphasized—the narrative superseding the whats and whys of calamity—was the story of the courage exemplified by the workers rescuing their colleagues amid danger that could’ve killed any one of them anytime. Just one eight-foot-by-eight-foot timber or ruptured beam dropping on them would’ve orphaned their children.
Pasadena had enjoyed noteworthy moments in its illustrious, if short history, but this ranked up there. The LA Times, in its write-up, described blue collars that’d valiantly “burrowed into the heap like prairie dogs, sawing their way as they went.”
The newspapers highlighted those who’d jeopardized themselves for others, particularly the men who’d scooped by dim oil lamps. Nick’s name was missing in the coverage, and Fleet could see the slight chafed his pal. He urged him to register a correction. Nick, after chewing it over, said that struck him as vain. What mattered was that he knew what he’d done, as did the Mercereau Company. It was his solar inventions, anyway, that’d engrave his legacy, though he did store copies of the bridge-rescue accounts in his desk drawer.
On the back page in one of those papers was something everyone missed in the frenzy over the precious bridge: an article about police searching for a man they suspected was continuing to snatch and kill stray dogs near Devil’s Gate Dam with a chloroform rag.
—
Jules, who’d mistakenly entered Pasadena eight months ago and was delighted she had, inserted herself into all this that Monday. It’s why she was sitting where she was: in a building that purchased formaldehyde by the truckload.
She’d heard over the weekend that a “coroner’s jury” assigned to determine John Visco’s cause of death would be convening at the Turner & Stevens mortuary on North Raymond Street. Could she attend “for general perspective,” she’d requested of Lilly.
“By all means,” said the wife of America’s ailing beer king. “You’ve spent months researching the history around the gardens. A day learning about its present would be aufschlussreich, insightful.”
The inquest was being conducted in a small room down the hall from the autopsy tables and body saws, and Jules snagged one of the few public seats. The men bidden to testify assembled in another area, looking alternately stone-faced or emotionally sledgehammered.
A bureaucrat in wrinkled trousers called the proceeding to order. Before any witnesses spoke, the clerk reported on the wounded. C. J. Johnson, despite a fractured skull, severe cuts, and broken ribs, might recover. Harry Collins was in direr shape with internal injuries, two compound fractures, and a decimated eye. R. H. Newcomb, who’d administered him that painkiller from a winch, spent the weekend with the nurses scraping and chiseling dried concrete off his body.
A cross section of people involved with the project took the stand next, all of them trying to explain (or rationalize) whether those men were victimized by Murphy’s Law, institutional overconfidence, or the unforeseeable. What stuck out most to Jules was the collective anguish: the fidgeting, the admissions of puzzlement—the obliquely pointed fingers. For these witnesses, she reported to Lilly, the pain was existential, not clinical.
“Something gave way—nobody knows what,” testified F. W. Proctor, a Mercereau Company vice president and civil engineer. “It’s one of those things that makes a man wonder how much he knows after all.” Proctor didn’t blame the concrete dumpcart. He suggested an alternative scenario: that a length of defective timber used to mold concrete midway up the arch “gave way.” When it did, it ruptured other attached falsework, inciting a domino effect. All that heavy material must’ve crashed onto the scaffolding where Visco, Collins, and Johnson were. After it took them out, the vibration rippled upward, flipping over planks and forcing men to scramble for their lives.
Under questioning, Proctor dropped some of his earlier humility. “Our falsework was the same (on this part of the job) as on the others,” he said. “If we hadn’t known our business we would have been (stopped) on the first arch.” Pasadena, he noted for the record, assigned its own engineer to the jobsite. Where was he on Friday? Now it wasn’t the only the bridge that’d fissured.
Four carpenters who routinely scoured for structural fatigue disagreed with the substandard-lumber theory. They’d seen no sign of any “strains and shocks” that day.
C. K. Allen, head project civil engineer for the bridge’s celebrated design firm, Waddell and Harrington, expressed an opinion no obsessive detective or victim’s family would’ve cared to hear. Barring any new evidence—and how many smoking guns are isolatable in a debris field—he doubted that “anyone can tell” what piece of wood was guilty.
Citizen juror F. F. Berry was disgruntled by the testimony—disgruntled and curious. What about safety precautions, he asked John Galloway, the foreman-carpenter who’d inspected the timbers twenty-five minutes before the incident? Galloway answered something about “ropes” but appeared confused. Could he have meant the straps, from which Nick and others dangled?
Before the jury could grill anyone further about the specifics, City Coroner Calvin Hartwell effectively pulled the curtain on the hearing. As inquest czar, he was up against jurisdiction. Of the hundreds of tons that’d fallen, the bulk of it dropped from Arch Number Nine. And the Big Whopper, technically, rested outside Pasadena’s western border, in the unincorporated San Rafael Heights’ side of the Arroyo. He wasn’t the coroner there. With that, Hartwell ordered the audience to vacate so the jurors could deliberate. Even mortality required a paper trail.
Later the jurors issued a verdict assigning responsibility to shoddy lumber. John Visco’s death, they concluded, was the result of a fractured skull “caused by faulty construction of the falsework of the Colorado Street Bridge.” There’d be no further investigation, no referral for prosecution, no fine levied, despite the word “faulty” being typed on their report.
Jules was scribbling notes as the jurors filed out of the mortuary. She then departed for Ivy Wall to brief Lilly on the baffling testimony, walking along a high shrubbery planted to block Turner & Stevens’s corpse-loaded property from its neighbors: a bell-tower church and parcels razed for development.
It was there, on the opposite side of the hedge, where she overheard an unfamiliar man’s voice speak harshly to the coroner, who’d trod outside himself. “Mr. Hartwell, you’re using an imaginary border to look the other way. Color me disgusted.”
Jules never caught his face.
—
Four days later, Nick was in town on a buying spree, glad to be here instead of at Tilly’s Emporium in downtown Los Angeles for a few dollars’ savings. As much as he cherished his Saturday adventures with Royo, he was wearying of the city’s boorish capitalism and freaks. How many times can you watch a preacher holding a drugged Copperhead to entice sinners into a crackpot church? Three: that’s how many.
By staying in orderly Pasadena, Nick also avoided running into the Spring Street graybeard, the twinkle-eyed charlatan who’d guessed his name and talked codswallop about how he was “selected” to expose a pervasive myth.
On Colorado Street, Nick had everything he required to start fashioning dozens of new solar lamps: an apothecary that sold passable phosphorous gel, a hardware store that stocked gaskets and filaments, and a convenient trolley to Buford’s should he need rejuvenation by greasy sandwich. Bruised, not bowed. That was him: a realist Pollyanna always searching for the upside. Not every tragedy needs villains.
Jules, who’d once mulled writing a book about the spectacular Ashtabula train disaster, which had killed ninety-two people on a badly designed and inspected Ohio bridge, agreed. And, from what she discerned from the coroner’s inquest, nothing shady was being covered up here, “just men grappling with carnage they never anticipated.”
Nick was thinking about her en route to the hardware store when he noticed something past Warner’s Photoplay Theater that he never anticipated. A five-deep crowd was mobbed arou
nd the Union National Bank at Colorado and Raymond Avenue. Was it free ice-cream day, the return of Teddy Roosevelt (not that he’d be doing backflips seeing his Stumper)? Whatever this attraction was, people were packing themselves in, or rubbernecking the action with dreamy expressions from building windows.
Nick’s eternal fear of missing out switched on, to heck for now with his errands. He walked up for a view, soon realizing he could’ve used a ladder. There was no seeing over the forest of undulating hats and kids atop their fathers’ shoulders. Behind them on Colorado Street, a chubby street cop was directing traffic by flashing hand signals rather than using his whistle. This was no ordinary happening.
He meandered for a few minutes along the perimeter, hunting for an opening. There was none to be had. Spectators were squished in cheek-to-jowl in U-formation at whatever this can’t-miss event was. Salesmen were loitering around, waiting for the horde to break up so they could pass out fliers for digestive tonics, mini hot dogs, and William Thum’s amazing Tanglefoot Flypaper.
Then, finally, he spotted a bystander hovering about whom he could quiz: a freckle-faced bystander who knew his way around a mangy ostrich. “RG,” Nick said, striding up to him. “Fill me in. Is it a fire-eater from a traveling carnival causing all the fuss?”
RG, holding a bag of Daughtery’s potato chips, which Nick could’ve binged on until the end of time, smirked. “Not even close,” he said. “They’re filming a moving picture, about what I can’t fathom. But it’s got a razzmatazz feel. Maybe you can find out. I can’t stick around any longer. I don’t fancy the boss man on my case.”
Nick promised he’d tell RG the subject at their next night of Budweiser and football in Busch Gardens. “Provided,” he said, “I can steal some of your chips.” RG shrugged okay, and began to walk away when he flipped around.
“I neglected to mention,” he said, “I saw your dog loping along Orange Grove Boulevard the other day. You might want to corral him better.”
“Wrong hound,” Nick said. “Royo’s penned up during my work hours.”
“If you say so. Sure looked like the same rascal to me.”
Waldo headed out, and Nick carried out his scheme to learn the film’s plot. He cut up to Union Street and then south into the alley, where he knew he could get within twenty feet of the movie production without having to battle the crowd. Once there, he regretted downing any of those salty chips. The backstreet wafted a nauseous bouquet of wet garbage, horse apples, and tossed-out fish from a café. It was more vile than Juana’s place.
Nick, consequently, watched the cinema-in-the-making pinching his nostrils.
“Stop, stop!” yelled the director, a short, weak-jawed man who pretentiously tucked his knickers into his boots. “You call those lovebird eyes after declaring your undying affection for each other? I’ve seen department store mannequins evoking more passion.”
Len Siegel—his name was written in cursive on his folding chair—threw his script onto the sidewalk in a melodramatic fit. “While we break to reload film, you two go practice your chemistry if you intend to make acting your profession. Broadway veterans are relocating to Los Angeles every day.”
His browbeaten thespians stared at each while Siegel marched off, turning right into the fetid alley. He and Nick were alone.
“Must make you want to pull your hair out when people waste their opportunities,” Nick said, trying to flatter the showboat director into recounting the storyline.
Siegel picked his nose and examined the contents. “Brother, ain’t that the truth?” he said looking up. “I wrote this. Blocked it. Fundraised for it. I can’t do everything.” Then he paused, giving Nick the once-over. “Don’t tell me you’re spying for D. W. Griffin—or trying to steal my idea.”
“Me? Heavens no. I work for Mercereau Bridge and Construction Company.”
Siegel’s face relaxed. “The Mercereau Company. Are you here about tomorrow, because we’re definitely going to require assistance with the lighting and camera set-ups down there? Audiences crave realism nowadays.”
Nick’s cheeks flushed. Nobody mentioned anything to him about a film shoot at a bridge limping post-tragedy. “Consider me a point man,” Nick said, doing his own acting. “It’d be beneficial for our preparations, though, if you went over the plotline. You know, so we can be ready.”
After Nick heard what The Bridge of Sighs was about, he promptly thanked the director and speed-walked west on Colorado Street before he did something rash—like kicking over one of Siegel’s pricey cameras. Despicable fiction was being filmed close to where the carnage that inspired it occured, and city hall, located in a Mission Revival building not far from here at Fair Oaks Avenue and Union Street, condoned it? And his employer was assisting? Sonofabitch.
A morality tale wrapped around a love story: that’s how Siegel phrased it. In his story, a talented architect, designing a bridge similar to Pasadena’s, swoons for the daughter of a bank president. Stunner: the structure falls, compelling the guilt-wracked banker to make painful choices.
The more Nick fumed at the heartless insensitivity of it, the faster his legs moved. Pretty soon, he was trotting past storefronts he knew like the trails of the Arroyo: Nash Bros. Grocery, whose jingle was “Rich and poor treated alike,” and a horseshoe-maker; Vroman’s and Arnold’s Jewelry; Juddah and Seaman’s Art Store; and Wetherby and Kayser’s Fine Shoes. Would any of the respectable merchants in there, many of whom once revered his father, endorse this insult? Not on their lives.
It was another scorching August day, and Nick was lathered in sweat as he reached base camp; he’d neglected to buy a single part he needed. He stormed toward Marcus’s tent, as livid as he’d been since Otis uttered those unspeakable things in the Cawston gift shop.
Yet when he lifted up the flap, he knew he wouldn’t be lodging any moral objections about The Bridge of Sighs. How could he? Marcus was behind his messy desk getting his hat handed to him. The same suits critical of Marcus’s decision to fire Nick were now lambasting their task-mastering construction chief for his priorities, however ably he’d managed the post-collapse triage and the Visco condolence visit. “Stop worrying about the rumor mill,” one said, “and recommit to production that avoids us another fiasco. This city is depending on us.”
See, there’s accountability. Nick released the tent flap and tried persuading himself that he’d overreacted about the film. A little piece of his compartmentalizing soul even sympathized with Marcus.
The next day Nick’s trust was further restored. When Siegel and the Lubin Company crew unpacked their gear for the movie shoot, scant accommodation was provided. No machinery was idled, no debris cleanup slowed. They were just little maggots fooling themselves that they were serious artists.
Besides, real life took precedence. Harry Collins died the following day from his extensive injuries, leaving behind a wife and five-year-old son. Seventy-two hours later, C. J. Johnson, who’d previously shown signs of improvement, joined him and John Visco in the concrete-free afterlife.
Auf Weidersehn
There were Airedales to the left of her, greyhounds to the right.
On her last, full day in the “paradise” her husband blabbed to his tycoon pals about, Lilly Busch was surrounded by a kennel’s worth of lolling tongues and wagging tails. To Nick, her goodbye party, thrown in Ivy Wall’s bluff-perched backyard, was classic Lilly: as in not about Lilly.
She’d insisted that her Millionaire’s Row girlfriends bring along their cosseted pooches so they could romp with the two-dozen children, ages eight to ten, she’d invited from the orphanages her family supported. Noblesse oblige didn’t always mean cash, though greenbacks were always welcome. Serving up the magic of dogs, for kids usually bereft of them, was her latest shrewd philanthropy.
This is what she hopes to remember crossing the Atlantic: the giggling, the woofing, anything except the idea of Adolphus with coin
s over his eyes. Nick, waiting in a line to bid farewell, felt a hollow pit in his gut, his joy of the canines notwithstanding.
By this time tomorrow, she’d be on Adolphus’s luxury railcar speeding toward New York City. From there it’d be an ocean liner to Lindschied, a German hamlet west of Frankfurt, where her blustery, brilliant spouse of fifty-two years was shuffling closer to a deathbed his assorted doctors were unable to keep at bay.
Somehow, Nick knew he’d never see his accidental godmother again.
Even as a middle-class kid who’d received his early education in a one-room schoolhouse, he recognized many of the elite here as FOL (friends of Lilly). There were Rockefellers and Huntingtons, a Wrigley and that tobacco doyenne, as well as others from the Hotel Green hoedown. It wasn’t, however, aristocratic airs most palpable today. It was how the guests’ full-breed dogs embraced the orphans, licking hands, playing tug-of-war, and chasing anything without a whiff of snobbery. Even Maty, Lilly’s ne’er-do-well schnauzer, was fetching sticks for a waifish boy in scruffy trousers.
Nick, who’d trod here straight from an ostrich rodeo, observed the column of expensively attired women tear up and clutch Lilly, who sat on a regal chair padded with a pumpkin-colored cushion. Something grander than blue-blood status was about to be ripped away from them on this Indian summer September day: an original spirit. Lilly dabbed her bloated eyes, periodically glancing at the kids between well-wishers.
Where Jules was, Nick could not say. To his delight, he did know that her employment at Ivy Wall would extend beyond completion of the “Pasadena Perfect” award application; she was that irreplaceable as a Girl Friday. Pity she was absent now, for she was missing heartwarming scenes of high-legged dogs and ribbon-wearing poodles gamboling among kids fed too much gruel; kids who watched Rose Parades through the slats in the grandstands, not in them. This day was also especially worth treasuring given the other lurking development.
