California Gold (87 page)

The Texan drew a long soft breath. “I think I’ll take advantage. Pack my valise and light out for good. Reckon I was a damn fool to come back at all. You can stay here with the curtains shut—pityin’ yourself—pickin’ at your own misery and swillin’ wine and snarlin’ like a rabid dog, but I don’t have to sit around like I think it’s a whole lot of fun. Like I approve.”

He walked out and shut the door so hard a picture fell off the wall, a framed photograph of the iron gateway arch at San Solaro. The glass cracked and the photo leaned crazily against the baseboard. Mack left it there.

Ten minutes later he heard the irregular rhythm of Johnson’s boots on the stairs. Bang, went his crippled right foot, and a couple of moments later, bang again. He listened to the street door close, then the crown of Johnson’s tall hat sailed past the bay window.

Mack rubbed his flushed face. He hated the self-righteous Texan. He hated him for his arrogance, and he hated him even more because Johnson knew the truth—that his rich shiny world was falling apart.

He tried to forget that by opening another Sonoma Creek red.

Out in the Valley, Hellman tripped on the stair at the boardinghouse and wrenched his leg. His landlady said he fell because he was old, couldn’t see, yet was too vain to wear glasses. Mack heard that and laughed in a chilly way; he understood perfectly.

He drove to Sacramento and found his father-in-law confined to bed for a month. The sight of the old man saddened Mack. Hellman swore he was as hale and vigorous as ever, then fell asleep with a sentence unfinished, dribbling out the last words as slowly as the drool in the corner of his mouth.

“He’s too old to live alone,” Mack said to Alex when he returned to the City. “Find him a place. I’ll move him bodily if need be.”

Mission Street smelled of mud and new lumber. Mack and Margaret stood on the corner of a vacant lot on the south side. Two muddy men worked on a broken main in a deep ditch bisecting the lot. A donkey engine chugged, pumping water out of the ditch.

Mack and Margaret were watching the lot across the street. There, carpenters were hammering in the first-floor framing of a new building. The sunshine flattered Margaret, accentuating the red in her auburn hair. She was elegant in wine velvet, lace gloves, an immense picture hat. In the shadow of its brim, her marvelous smile shone out. She was as delighted as a child.

Mack smoked a cigar with scarcely a change of expression.

She took his arm and they resumed their walk. “I’ll be open by March. The contractor told me yesterday.”

“Good,” he said. His hazel eyes got lost somewhere above a windowless brick wall, somewhere up in the fat breeze-driven clouds.

She stopped and touched his chin. “When will you ever get out of this misery?”

“When the police or the Pinkertons find my son.”

“Is there anything…?”

“Nothing.”

They walked on, alternately in sun and shadow as the autumn clouds sailed over. At the corner, two dray horses lay stiffly in a lake of congealed blood. Horses dropped in their tracks every day, worked so hard in the cleanup that their hearts burst. Crews hauled them away at night.

Margaret choked at the odor, then apologized selfconsciously. “Pigs smell worse. Now you know why I ran away from the farm.”

They went up toward Market Street. A wrecker’s ball crashed against a wall somewhere. In the middle of Market, a small SP switch engine pulled three gondolas piled with rubble. The temporary railroad tracks were new, for the cleanup.

A newsboy’s shrill cry sounded before me wrecking ball crashed again. “Something about Ruef,” Mack said, livelier suddenly. “I can’t quite hear—”

They hurried and found a small crowd around a boy hawking early editions of the
Examiner.
Hearst had ordered new presses for a new building, but even so, the paper would have to be made up and printed in Oakland for months yet.

“Paper here, latest paper. Abe Ruef and Mayor Schmitz charged with crime.”

Mack pushed through. He and a sallow man reached for the last paper. Mack was faster. He showed Margaret the twenty-four-point screamer:
RUEF, SCHIMITZ INDICTED
!

It was the news the reform group had awaited from the grand jury for weeks. “Five counts of extortion,” Margaret exclaimed, scanning quickly. “The Poodle Dog—Delmonico’s—Marchand’s—Mack, they’ve got the evidence. Amounts, dates paid—”

“Burns and his detectives are doing a fine job. The French restaurant case is just the start.”

She clapped her hands. “Oh, my. At last. Isn’t this something?”

Something,
he thought.
But not enough.

Bitter Bierce sent him a note from Washington.

Nellie’s earthquake tale is published in
The S. E. Post.
Envy rages in my ink-stained bosom. She continues to achieve, while I hack on for the Great Wm. R. Hooey, whose cheap yellow journalism I hate, but whose pay checks somehow retain their power to enthrall.

On December 6, Fremont Older arranged press credentials for Mack, and the two squeezed into the crowd at the Ruef-Schmitz arraignment. Courtroom space was still limited because of the destruction. Mack thought it a fine irony that this proceeding was held in a room customarily used for Sabbath school at Temple Israel.

During the reading of the first indictment, Handsome Gene Schmitz stood before the bench, fidgeting. The Boss remained seated, legs crossed, gazing at the ceiling with affable unconcern.

It was too much for Judge Dunne. “Defendants will stand for arraignment. No one receives special treatment in this court. The clerk will start over.”

Ruef snapped to his feet, genuinely shaken.

Wild Bill Flyshack visited Greenwich Street a week before Christmas. Darkness was settling outside. His report was succinct.

“Still no sign of him.”

“Have the flyers produced anything?”

“Five more leads, all bad.”

Mack hit the desk. “Flyshack, I’m not paying you to take the train up here and recite your failures. Put more men on the case.”

“Mr. Chance, just a minute. We’re already using every available—”

“Then find him. Pinkerton’s is supposed to be the best bureau in the country.”

Flyshack jammed his cigar into a glass tray, splitting the cigar and ruining it. “I’ll stake my personal reputation on Pinkerton’s any day of the week. You’re just not facing certain facts.”

Mack snapped on a dim electric light, brass with a green shade, and its glare washed over Flyshack’s pocked face. Mack gave him a hard stare. “Such as?”

“Pinkerton’s is a private bureau. We don’t have the full resources of police departments. Not that they’re giving us any help, especially here. You aren’t popular with the city government, Mr. Chance.”

“You think I don’t know that? What the hell does it have to do with this?”

“Plenty,” Flyshack shot back. “Most of the cops in this town hate you, or at least they won’t go out of their way to help you. It’s more than your opposition to Ruef; it goes all the way back to Lon Coglan. He was a stalwart on the detective squad for many years.”

“Get to the point. What’s the connection?”

Flyshack didn’t like being tongue-lashed. He reacted with high color, hovering on the edge of rebellion. His voice actually shook. “I didn’t like the cooperation we were getting from the cops, statewide, so I put an informant into the department here. Low-level, but he sees and hears plenty. I understand there have been some telephone calls made about your flyer to other major departments in the state. San Diego, Los Angeles, the Valley…nothing clearly illegal, you understand. Just a slow-down. Flyers pulled off station bulletin boards, inquiries from my operatives lost or misfiled—nothing big, nothing noisy. But it has an effect, like a stone thrown in a pond.”

“Did Abe Ruef instigate this? Do you mean to tell me he’d get even at the expense of my son?”

“I’m not saying Ruef directly. Friends of Ruef. Associates of Ruef, in the city government. They have connections all around California, and a big dislike of you and your reform crowd. It’s all kind of like moonlight. You can’t take it into a court as evidence, but it’s there. It’s real.”

“And that’s why Jim hasn’t been found?”

“It’s one reason, yes.”

“You’re giving me excuses.”

Flyshack jumped up. “I’m giving you what I see. I can also give you my notice, right now.”

The harshness sobered Mack abruptly. “No, no, I’m sorry. I believe what you say. I want you to stay on the case. Sit down.”

With an air of reluctance, perhaps exaggerated, Flyshack did. He examined the ruined cigar, grumbled, and lit another. “Mr. Chance, I’d like to give you soothing words and promises, but frankly, I’m beginning to think we’re pissing uphill. All this underground stuff I mentioned, it contributes, but it’s secondary to something else: It’s December already. You’ve ragged the police, you’ve nailed up thousands of flyers, and after eight months, your son is still missing. We must at least recognize that the boy may have died in the quake, or the fire afterward.”

“No. He didn’t. You find him.”

“California’s a huge state. An enormous amount of territory to comb for one boy who may be lying low—”

“Find him.”

Flyshack glared, then contained it. With a flicking motion he drew a paper from an inner pocket of his chalk-stripe suit.

“I have this month’s bill. Do you want me to give it to Mr. Muller?”

“Mr. Muller is on his honeymoon. Leave it.”

The detective slapped the paper on the desk, then picked up his travel bag. “As a client, I won’t say you’re easy, Mr. Chance.”

“No, but the money is—right?”

Flyshack managed a grudging laugh, and Mack walked with him to the foyer; their tempers were settling down.

Flyshack looked around. “You’ve no Christmas decorations.”

“Is there reason for any?”

“Well—I don’t suppose—” Flyshack’s shoulders drooped noticeably. “I see your point. Merry Christmas anyway.” He tipped his derby, and as he went out into the dark Mack slammed the door behind him.

I
N 1907, THE UNITED
States plunged into another financial panic. Stock prices fell, banks failed, unemployment rose. Pierpont Morgan telegraphed capitalists around the country to secure private loans to shore up the shaky bank and credit system. Mack pledged $7 million of his personal fortune.

Aeronautics and airplanes crept into the news. The Wrights had flown at Kitty Hawk in ’03, but respectable, conservative people hooted at flying as they’d hooted at autos in the 1890s. They believed that anyone seriously interested in flying belonged to the lunatic fringe. Mack qualified.

Nellie wrote from Florence, Italy, to say she had nearly finished her novel, squeezing it out nine hundred words a day, in pencil, on lined copy paper. She said the book was “sure to make me hated by Collis Huntington’s heirs and appointees. Those of Uncle Mark Hopkins too.”

Mack traveled to New York on business, and returned to California via a steamer for Colon, Panama. He crossed the Isthmus and inspected the great raw wounds in the earth where thousands of workers were digging and blasting Teddy’s Big Ditch, the canal to join the oceans. On the coastal ship for San Francisco he read
The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair.

Vacationing in California, Willie Hearst took Mack horseback riding at his Piedra Blanca ranch, a vast property in San Luis Obispo County. Willie’s father, the senator, had bought up the original forty-five thousand acres of Spanish land grant back in ’65. Willie was married now, and the father of three sons, and he was serving a second term as a U.S. Congressman from New York City. But he spoke little of Washington or his family. Instead, as he and Mack galloped along the wild coast above the Pacific, he talked nostalgically about the beauty of California, and particularly this site. Here, he said, he would build his dream castle someday.

Mack began to hear of a new and radical labor organization, International Workers of the World. Wobblies, some called them. In public statements, they said their aim was to educate “the oppressed working classes” as a prelude to “world-wide revolution.” In a news article listing IWW men arrested for street-corner speeches in Visalia, he saw the name D. Marquez.

Mack moved his father-in-law from Sacramento to a pleasant house far out on Lombard Street, within earshot of the Bay, and hired a nurse and a cook. Hellman was sickly, suffering from angina and enlarged veins in his legs, and his memory was failing. He denied he needed help from anyone, though he relied on Mack.

Professor Lorenzo Love had enough of waiting for his pupil to be found and accepted a post at a female academy in Bakersfield. When he said good-bye, he told Mack he prayed for Jim’s return someday. But if it was not to be, he knew Mack would survive. “Lear said, ‘I am tied to the stake, and I must stand the course.’ Longfellow wrote that it is sublime to suffer and be strong.”

“Lorenzo, that’s bullshit and you know it.”

The men embraced. “Bring back that boy, Mr. Chance. Bring back that fine boy.”

Flyshack reported regularly, though there was nothing new. One night toward the end of 1907, sleepless, Mack rolled over and stared into the dark and let the cool dispassionate truth take hold of him.

There wasn’t any hope. Jim was gone.

Meanwhile, the graft prosecutions moved forward. In March 1907 the grand jury had returned sixty-five indictments of bribery and fraud in the fight-trust case, seventeen in the gas-rates case, thirteen in a telephone franchise case, seventeen in the United Railroads trolley-line case. Special prosecutor Heney locked Ruef in a secure house at 2849 Fillmore Street and negotiated with him. The Boss agreed to testify for the prosecution in return for limited immunity.

In June, Ruef had testified against his crony Schmitz in the French restaurant case. The jury’s verdict: guilty of extortion. Schmitz was at last removed from office and sentenced to five years in San Quentin.

The year was not without its perils for friends of the prosecution. Mack received three anonymous death threats in the mail, and Rudolph Spreckels took a telephone call late one night warning that his home would be dynamited. While Fremont Older was on a trip to Southern California, three men attempted to kidnap him when his train was stopped at a station. The men were armed and carried a warrant for Older’s arrest, but Older shouted that it was a forgery, and station employees and passengers helped him drive off the would-be kidnappers.