by Chip Jacobs
Nick now was inches from his ragged-breath beauty. “They were peccadilloes compared to willful burglary,” he said softer. “What should I do with you, Jules? Go to the police? Alert Lilly? I was intending to ask you to marry me. Tonight.”
Jules dropped her voice, too. “And I was going to say yes, before this ended so appallingly. Follow any course of action that suits your conscience. Before they arrested me yesterday, I completed Lilly’s portion of the committee application. Here’s my belief: the Svengali recruited both of us, and others, for something beyond our comprehension. At any rate, I’ve fulfilled my duty to him. Do with the plaque as you will!”
“And?”
“And this is where we part.”
“Part?”
Jules and Royo had been exchanging subtle glances since she walked out of police headquarters, glances that weren’t telepathic but darn close. From under the table, he was gazing at her in a manner that communicated that he’d assist her to do what she must. And that he was contrite, mostly, for the leg-humping indiscretion.
In the darkness, Nick wasn’t aware that Royo was flying at him until the dog was inbound for his solar plexus. The two tumbled backward into the hut, striking the floor inches shy of the miniature table. “Hey, dunce,” Nick said with Royo splayed over him. “You’re supposed to be siding with me.”
Jules immediately slammed the door shut and, with a vigorous kick, whacked its brass handle out of alignment. Nick pushed his seditious mammal off him and tried twsiting the knob. It was broken. “Let me out,” he said. “You want false imprisonment added to your charges?”
Jules, without saying a word, dragged the ceramic grandma over and tilted the smiling old lady against the door.
“Jules,” Nick called out. “This is oppression.”
He heard an ick and fading steps next. Terrific. The Gingerbread hut was too well-constructed for Nick to bash his way out. After shouting for rescue for twenty minutes, he gave up, lying down next to Royo for warmth. “How could you?” he asked him before a restless sleep.
Easy, Royo could’ve told him—if Nick could’ve sliced through his membranes of self-absorption to recognize that mind reading worked both ways. Royo, you see, served two masters: Nick and the graybeard. He was also comfortable in the hut; it’s where he frequently slept as a canyon dog.
At morning light, a Busch Gardens groundskeeper who noticed the leaning ceramic grandma jimmied open the door with his German-produced Boker pocketknife, which Adolphus gave his gardeners for Christmas years back. As soon as they were out, a bleary-eyed Nick ran home to Green Street, dropping off the plaque and Royo. He then went to Jules’s cottage on Delacey with a fatalistic sense.
“Where is she?” he asked Stella, once she answered the door.
“Long gone,” she said. “She packed a bag last night, embraced me, and took off.”
“To where? Seattle?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. She asked me to give to you this, if it’s any consolation.”
Nick read the letter at the tail end of sunrise, the Sierra Madre range brooding in shadows.
Nick: I am composing this farewell note tonight in haste. Please know I abhorred trapping you and the butterscotch wolf in our special hut, which was never my intention. But I will always adore you for saving me from that berserk cow at the Hotel Green, and, more importantly, saving me from an existence previously bereft of joy and laughter. Unhappily, I must depart Pasadena. I cannot head to jail knowing my sisters are picketing without me. Nor will I tarnish the Busches’s good name by association. I beg you to refrain from searching for me, for I do not wish to be found. As Charlotte Brontë once wrote: “if you are cast in a different mold to the majority, it is no merit of yours. Nature did it.” So I must obey my mold. Everything I confessed last night was the truth, and I am confident that you will eventually unlock the mystery of the plaque. In the meantime, I will forever adore the bountiful error that relocated me to Pasadena. Had I not met you, my love, I would’ve skidded off the edge of the Earth.
Goodbye, solar boy. Eternally yours. J.
A Damnable Curve
The best salve for Nick’s broken heart wasn’t any rebound fling or drunken escapade in Busch Gardens. It was his belief in his solar lamps and his attachment to the Colorado Street Bridge. You want to squelch the painful past? Renew yourself in your present. It sounded pithy, anyway.
By early November, seventy-eight of his eighty planned lights glowed nightly around the bridges’ banks. His days of stomping about the hillsides, fly-specking where to house each unit, were over; so was his time as a one-man assembly line manufacturing them. Soon, he’d be assisting electricians wiring the deck’s grape-bunch lamps, eye-catching fixtures, even if they required bulky, black wires.
He didn’t even have to speed through mess-tent lunches anymore and could listen to the Nellies’ fizzy scuttlebutt without worrying whether they mistrusted him.
In a way, their tales symbolized how Pasadena was steamrolling its own past. Like how one of them overheard a son of the deceased J. W. Scoville arguing with a bureaucrat about “the insulting price” the city was offering for the family land it seized for the bridge’s right-of-way. Like one of them reading a story about how a masked man with a revolver robbed one of the Arroyo’s last gold prospectors of two of his mules near Devil’s Gate, and the ensuing police gunfight with the criminal two days later on an Oxnard beach; while the robber wasn’t apprehended, authorities did return “Bossy” and “Missy” to their grateful owner.
For all the Nellies’ colorful yarns, for all their gossip du jour, Nick found Jules Cumbersmith’s story the most compelling. After hours trying to untangle it, he reached a pair of mutually reconcilable conclusions. She was being honest about the stolen plaque, and that the graybeard and Svengali were the same man: a masterful PI hired by her domineering father. One way or another, he pledged himself, he’d be seeing her again, even if he had to employ his own detective.
Staying busy until he did was his drug, this canyon his therapist. And he’d need to keep sharp, for 1913’s wild weather wasn’t relenting. The slopes bracketing the roadway were sodden after the constant rainstorms; property owners were gnawing their cuticles about erosion. Their apprehensions soon infected him, because if more topsoil slid in a deluge, it could undermine the pits where his lamps were trenched and send them sliding, too.
Nick was on his haunches, spading the earth around one of his lights to gauge how loose it was when he noticed men swarming around the base of the arch closest to him, the arch next to the rebuilt Big Whopper. He couldn’t ignore the hullaballoo. The Nellies called the bridge “a drama queen,” and they weren’t half-wrong.
Workers were lowering a body down from the bottommost scaffolding onto a plywood board as he got there. The corpse, which was draped in a tarp, was then carried behind the company administrative tent. Fourteen men, most of them blue collars, removed their hats as it passed. Turner & Stevens mortuary probably got itself more business.
Marcus, back to being his sardonic, whip-cracking self, was acting the grief counselor, going up to everyone to console, back pat, and point to where the death occurred. Faces were grim, but not shocked. Not anymore.
Nick waited until Marcus was alone to inquire about the particulars. The unfortunate man, he said, was foreman Normal Clark, whom Nick didn’t know. A screwy accident killed him. He’d tripped on one of the bottom-level planks and fallen headfirst onto the one below. Snap went his neck. “I’ll spare you any homilies about construction being a rough trade,” Marcus said. “You’ve learned that firsthand.”
The next morning, Nick arrived at base camp before most everybody else, including Marcus, who must’ve slept in his own bed for a change after losing another employee. He was in the supply tent checking out bags of decomposed granite, thinking he might salt some of the material around his lamps to stabilize them. When
he heard someone else enter the tent, he spun around anxiously.
“So,” said Chester. “We sacrificed another one yesterday.”
“Terrible. I hope Mr. Clark didn’t have a big family counting on him.”
“Between you, me, and the tent, that’s five men we’ve buried to date.”
“Five?”
“No one told you? Another fella, a new one, died last week, if my sources on the late shift are right. I guess he was up top, alone, scooping cement into the concrete mixer while it was spinning. That greenhorn must’ve dropped something in there, a tool or glove, and climbed in to fetch it, and couldn’t climb out of the mush. You know how powerful that mixer is. It’d chew steel. If he yelled, nobody could’ve heard him over the earsplitting racket.”
Nick already doubted this was true and was about to doubt it even more.
“Grisliest thing of all: after it ripped him to smithereens, his shift-mates didn’t know, and when they poured the next batch, he was in there.”
What was Nick supposed to say to the man who saved his ass August 1: that he now was adding kook to a résumé that already included the jobsite’s preeminent crank and rumormonger? Playing dumb was the most courteous tactic to make him go away. “Excuse me if this sounds naive. Wouldn’t somebody, though, have spotted part of a leg, or skull bone, or blood in the hopper?”
“Good question, college boy, but no, not when everybody’s racing willy-nilly to finish on time. Not unless they were looking. This job’s a hot potato. Let’s suppose the suits did know something. You think they’d halt operations to chisel open a beam to investigate? There’d be scandal like you couldn’t believe.”
And because Nick didn’t believe Chester, he didn’t bother posing the obvious follow-up: that colleagues and loved ones of this unnamed victim, this man supposedly hacked to ribbons and embedded in concrete, would’ve been raising holy hell about his whereabouts. Instead, he said, “That is disturbing. I’ll keep my ears open.” Jules’s eagle-fighting-dog myth was more credible than this.
“Good,” said Chester, giving him a chummy thumbs up. “Let’s stick together.”
—
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but Nick had his opening to flip that proverb on its head, with one proviso. That William Thum would still be in the mood to hear Nick advocate for his solar lamps, and apologize for previously wrecking his slacks, after bridge architect John Alexander Low Waddell was done tearing him asunder.
Thum’s house off Orange Grove Boulevard, where miniature palm trees and spritzing fountains were der-rigueur landscaping, was pure Craftsmen panache. The sconces and wainscoting inside accented the varnished beams, and the Tiffany-style mosaic lamps bathed the living room in tasteful radiance. Still, for all that refinement, you’d suspect that Thum’s recliner was fashioned from itchy horsehair, not fine leather, by how he squirmed on it listening to Waddell hand it to him.
“Never,” he said from Thum’s sofa, “have I had plans bastardized to this extreme. I realize that you’re out of office, but I thought it only proper to air my grievances to somebody with whom I’ve developed a professional relationship. This isn’t personal, William. I admire you.”
“And I you, John, immensely,” said Thum. “No one wants to disillusion someone with your credentials. Any alteration to your firm’s blueprints, as I’ve tried assuring you, was done strictly out of our familiarity with the Arroyo’s fickle terrain.”
Waddell blotted his forehead with his handkerchief. “For the record,” he said, “there were multiple revisions.”
Nick witnessed the fight parked on a maple-wood chair in the corner of the room. He was an unintended observer here, having knocked ten minutes after Waddell showed up for an unscheduled meeting with the former mayor. When he wasn’t keeping his head down, simulating interest in the papers that Marcus asked him to deliver, he stole peeks at the erudite combatants glaring at each other.
Thum, an efficiency zealot and consensus builder, had smooth, light features under his spectacles that reminded Nick of a slice of sourdough. Over his tenure, he’d ably guided a city putting its upstart, Indiana-Colony roots behind it as it flexed into a self-sustaining force. The bridge, a municipal water system, garbage collection, bronze streetlamps, an updated charter; Thum had advanced it all with a measured disposition.
And now he was being eviscerated in his own sanctuary, one partially bankrolled by the sales of his Tanglefoot Flypaper.
Waddell was fifty-nine, eight years older and incontrovertibly more famous than the man opposite him. A shaggy mustache swept over his small nose into an upside-down “V.” If he slicked his gray, curlicue hair back and squinted more, he could’ve been Teddy Roosevelt’s grumpy older brother.
Neither gentleman, Nick noticed, had the slightest interest in the wafers or hastily prepared tea that Thum set out on a silver tray. Not that he was offered any.
“Again,” Thum said, “we never intended to insult you. Our people, in conjunction with the contractor, believed the alterations were necessary to address the precarious soil around the footings. I cannot tell you on how many occasions city engineers complained about how the earth there changes from bedrock to sand to loose granite in a matter of feet. We had to curve it.”
“Be that as it may, William, you were obligated to confer with me before your men redrew anything. None of my clients, neither foreign nor domestic, would’ve taken such liberties.”
With every cross word, any hope this flashpoint would metamorphose into rapprochement diminished, and that pained Nick, who respected both men. He also, though, hungered to pounce on his opportunity after Waddell departed. By making him his errand boy today, Marcus was granting Nick access to a VIP: a Very Important Pasadenan.
“This is my gift to you, Chance, a door opening to present your case for your metal petunias,” Marcus said. “It’s on your shoulders what you do with it.”
“I don’t intend to waste it,” Nick said. “I’ll plant a lamp in his flowerbed if need be or next to an outhouse.”
He’d have to bide his time as Waddell rounded third on his scolding. Before taking on Pasadena’s ravine, his firm had engineered a futuristic bridge over the Mississippi River. Its showstopper feature was a movable deck that lifted vertically, enabling ships and barges to pass underneath it.
“We simply differ,” Thum said, “about whether liberties were taken in the name of a joint effort. We retained the vast majority of your ideas. The concept is uniquely yours.”
“Immaterial. It’s the principle,” Waddell responded. “Accordingly, I’ve committed my objections to paper. I’d like to read you the first stanza in the event I make my letter public.”
“Please do,” Thum said with the expression of a man determined to maintain dignity during a lengthy proctologic checkup.
Waddell unfolded his two-page letter and began.
“Mr. Mayor, it is all very well for you to state that the people of your city understand the reason for building the structure on a curve; but in the future when intelligent people view the bridge they will exclaim, ‘what kind of city engineer did they have.’”
Waddell ran his finger down the page, skipping ahead a few lines.
“Unfortunately, the real reason for this peculiar layout is hidden from sight.”
“Hidden?” Thum said, stifling his pique. “Please elaborate?”
“Gladly. As you recall, I objected when I learned that your team implemented such an unorthodox contour instead of seeking a meager six thousand dollars more to construct what I designed: a straighter, marginally longer bridge. You insisted that your hands were tied. I questioned by whom, and never received a satisfactory response. To this day, I am hazy about who navigated this ship: your political brethren, the contractor, private parties guarding their interests, or some inestimable combination.”
Thum answered
with a soft-spoken defense of city decision-making. Nothing unseemly occurred. Bending the bridge, as Marcus continually reminded Nick, guaranteed that most of the footings were sunk into firmer substrate.
The sparring between the two gentlemen with pocket squares ended not in melodrama but in dialectical stalemate. Thum walked the globally-in-demand bridge architect to his wide front door and clasped hands.
“Thank you for your time, William,” Waddell said. “I must now inform you that, in good conscience, I’ve opted not to attend the ribbon cutting. I appreciate that’s a disappointment. I, nonetheless, wish your town well and the bridge a long life.”
Blindsided by this latest piece of bad news, after just hearing part of Waddell’s incendiary letter, Thum remained a model of restraint. He told him he understood, considered the job “an overall success,” and wished his guest an uneventful trip home to Kansas City.
Nick stood up, too, waiting for Thum to collect himself. When he pivoted, he looked like a man who could’ve used more than a Budweiser.
“Mr. Chance, I’m afraid we’ll have to discuss your business at a future date so I may relay what’s transpired to my former colleagues. Leave the papers with you on the credenza. Between this and your scuffle at Cawston, we never seem to have our timing aligned.”
“No, sir, we don’t.”
“Do not be discouraged, though. The city remains supremely intrigued by your solar lamps, and I will remind the appropriate personnel to schedule an exclusive meeting with you about them early in the New Year, if that’s satisfactory?”
“Quite satisfactory. And, before I go, please accept my belated apology for ruining your trousers that embarassing day. I lost my cool.”
“All’s forgiven,” Thum said. He paused for a moment, watching from his lead-glass window as Waddell drove off. “When you ponder what you saw today, I encourage you to take the thousand-foot view. To build something this complex is to invite, well, a schism between pride and thorny reality.”
