California Gold

by John Jakes

  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.

  65

  IN 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 Old
er’s arrest, but Older shouted that it was a forgery, and station employees and passengers helped him drive off the would-be kidnappers.

  At least once a week in 1907 and early 1908, Mack drove to Lombard Street, picked up Hellman, and took him to the courtroom for the day. Hellman reveled in the dishonesty of his fellow man. Mack supposed he liked to know that others were as crooked as he’d been.

  The Parkside Realty case came up for trial early in April of ’08. Parkside was a development firm, and one of its principals was William Crocker, president of the Crocker Bank and son of Cholly, of the Big Four. Parkside had schemed to spur sales of an oceanside tract with a new trolley line. A trolley line required a franchise. A franchise meant a bribe paid to Ruef. The trial was bound to be complex, because Ruef himself had helped secure the indictments against Parkside’s officers, testifying before the grand jury in return for limited immunity. Between that time and the start of the trial, Ruef and the prosecutors had quarreled repeatedly; Heney wanted Ruef to testify to more than he was willing to say. As a result, the immunity arrangement had broken down, and Heney and his staff were once again after the Boss on every front.

  “They’re having trouble finding jurors now,” Mack said as he helped his father-in-law down the steps at Lombard Street. Hellman labored across the unpaved sidewalk to the Oldsmobile.

  “Is that what’s on today, more jury-picking?”

  Mack nodded. “The dynamiting of Gallagher’s house threw the graft trials back on the front page in a very lurid and emotional way. It’ll be damn hard to get jurors who are objective.”

  He was referring to an event two nights before. Dynamite had blown out the front of the residence of former supervisor James Gallagher. Under immunity, Gallagher was giving evidence in the trial of Tirey Ford, an official of United Railroads; Gallagher had been a go-between for Ruef, carrying Ford’s bribe offers to City Hall. Gallagher and his family had miraculously survived the dynamite attack.

  Hellman wheezed and grimaced as Mack helped him into the auto. “Thanks, Johnny. I ain’t so spry anymore.” Mack walked around the hood. “What d’you hear about Hetch Hetchy these days?”

  “Dragging on,” Mack said as he climbed in. “No decision yet.”

  When he reached for the brake release, the old man grasped his sleeve. Hellman’s hand was red and flaking; he had a vile skin rash, and smelled heavily of tar-based ointment. “Listen, I never been good with compliments. But I got to tell you I appreciate all you done for me. Finding me this place. That dandy little nurse with the round bottom. Coming out here and taking me to court every week when you’re so busy—”

  “That’s a real carnival downtown. I know you love it.”

  “Watching them fry those crooks is more fun than watching bare-assed girlies dance the hoochy-kootch. It is at my age, anyhow.”

  Hellman’s smile was sad somehow, the smile of a man keenly aware of his own mortality. Mack felt old himself.

  “It’s nothing,” Mack said finally.

  “Hell it isn’t. Ever since the ranches got too much for me to manage and I moved into that boardinghouse, Carla stopped coming around much. Now she don’t come around at all.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you know why. She’s getting long in the tooth, like the rest of us. She ain’t helping matters, drinking and carousing with those nancy-boy artists she runs with. But her pa—oh, no, she don’t want to look at him; he’ll show her that old age is real. She don’t want to be reminded.” He squinted into the sunshine, his eyes gleaming as though they were watering. “I’ll always love that girl, Johnny. But I don’t like her very much.” Mack was silent; he shared the feeling.

  Francis J. Heney approached the bench. In the witness chair sat a man recalled from the panel of provisional jurors, a man with unruly yellow-gray hair, a big mustache, and a wall eye that gave him a slightly mad air. There were about thirty people scattered in the spectator section of the courtroom. Three of Abraham Ruef’s four expensive defense lawyers—Shortridge, Ach, and Fairall—conferred behind their hands while the judge said:

  “Morris Haas was accepted yesterday as a juror in the Parkside bribery trial. You now wish to challenge that, Mr. Heney?”

  “I do, your honor.” Heney handed up a sheet of stiff paper. “This evidence is new. Unearthed by our staff.”

  Morris Haas sweated and squirmed while the judge studied the photograph.

  Heney said, “I’d like permission to present the evidence to Mr. Haas.”

  “Proceed,” the judge said, nodding.

  Heney marched to the witness box. “Mr. Haas, I show you this twenty-year-old photograph from the Department of Prisons. A photograph of a man with a shaven head, a man wearing convict stripes.”

  Haas’s eyes bulged and sweat streamed down his yeasty face.

  “Are you not the man pictured? Were you not at the time serving a term in San Quentin prison for embezzlement?”

  In the second row, his favorite place, Hellman leaned over to whisper, “That Heney’s a tough little apple. I wouldn’t want to get him interested in what I done fifteen or twenty years ago.” He rolled his eyes.

  Heney pounded the witness box. “Mr. Haas. If you please.”

  “The governor granted me a pardon,” Haas exclaimed. “Restored me to full citizenship—”

  “Then you don’t deny the evidence?”

  “No, I don’t deny it. How can I? There it is. But I paid my debt. I came back to San Francisco, married, and raised four children. You didn’t have to rake it all up again.”

  Heney was icy. “I beg to differ. Your Honor, the prosecution cannot accept a juror susceptible to undue pressure, for whatever reason. A concealed criminal record certainly makes a man a potential target of extreme pressure. Our investigators unearthed these facts about Mr. Haas, and I regret having to bring them forward. But I must ask that he be stricken as—”

  “Damn you, Heney,” Haas yelled, jumping up. He was a small man, five feet six at most.

  The judge gaveled him silent. “Mr. Haas, step down. You’re dismissed.”

  Haas lunged at Heney, who had already turned his back, but a deputy sheriff strong-armed Haas away from the prosecutor, and Foley, the prosecutor’s bodyguard, rousted him out through the gate in the rail separating lawyers from spectators. A massive woman with a dark mustache rushed to Haas in tears.

  “I won’t let this pass,” Haas yelled as the bailiff and the woman pushed him toward the courtroom doors. “You’ve ruined me in San Francisco—you’ll pay…”

  “Crazy man,” Hellman said with a shiver. Mack was about to comment when the hall guard slipped into the vacant seat beside him.

  “There’s a gentleman hunting for you, Mr. Chance. He went to your house and your assistant sent him here.”

  He handed Mack an engraved card. Intrigued, Mack studied it, then, noticing Hellman craning to see, gave him the card. “Can you read it?”

  “Sure I can read it.” Hellman was defensive about his afflictions. He held the card three inches from his nose. “Shit. What’s it say?”

  “Gilbert M. Anderson. Essanay Manufacturing Company, Argyle Street, Chicago.”

  “Never heard of him, Go on, go see him. I’ll be fine.”

  Mack hurried down the aisle. For the first time in a long time, there was a sparkle of interest in his hazel eyes, inspired by a decorative device on the card: a crudely drawn strip of movie film.

  In the New Golconda Saloon and Grill two blocks from court, Mack ordered schooners of beer. Gilbert Anderson was a thickly built, rather plain young man. About thirty, Mack guessed. He had soft luminous brown eyes and a magnificent nose that would suit a statesman. He was dressed as drably as a bank officer.

  “Essanay”—he pointed to the card lying between them— “that’s S for George Spoor, my partner, and A for Anderson. George handles our business affairs. I’m in charge of production.”

  “You’re talking about moving pictures.”

  “Yes, sir
. I appreciate your taking time to discuss the subject. I was told you’re an investor who isn’t afraid of new ideas.”

  Mack packed tobacco into his meerschaum. Was he wasting his time? There was nothing dynamic or forceful about Anderson. He seemed, instead, rather shy. Yet that very lack of sophistication, that sincerity, was curiously winning. Mack nodded to indicate that he should go ahead.

  “I’m a stage actor,” Anderson began. “That is, originally—”

  “From New York?”

  “Yes, but born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.” He studied Mack and seemed to decide that he could trust him. “Gilbert Anderson’s the name I adopted for the theater; It’s more—ah—acceptable than Max Aronson. Some producers don’t like Jewish actors. Some theatrical boardinghouses won’t rent to Jews.”

  “The world is full of stupid people, Mr. Anderson. Do I understand that you quit the stage for moving pictures?”

  “That’s right. I’ve been roaming all over the West shooting one-reelers for Essanay. I even shot two down in Westlake Park in Los Angeles. But we need a permanent base out here. I want to buy land, establish a studio to take full advantage of me constant sunshine. Unfortunately every cent of Essanay profit goes into operating the Chicago studio. I have to find supplementary capital.”

  “What kind of pictures do you want to produce?”

  “Pictures that make money.”

  Mack laughed. “The best kind.”

  “You like pictures?”

  “I love them.”

  Anderson leaned in, so eager he nearly upset his beer. “Actually, I’m most interested in pictures about the West. The old West is practically gone. Autos, interurbans, modern roads—and all those midwesterners coming in with their real estate offices and tourist cabins—they buried it.”

  “I have a partner who’d agree with you.” Or do I? Johnson had disappeared as completely as Mack’s son, his oil royalties continuing to pile up in his account in Los Angeles, untouched.