Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  Bedbugs are nocturnal, but I never wanted to rely on their biorhythms to keep my place bedbug free. So I started sitting in hard chairs.

  Fortunately there was an open table for two. One chair for me and one for my laptop bag.

  I took out my notebook. I took out a pen. I began to ponder. I tried to think of a story that united the disparate facts that I had gathered. Or I was thinking of a hypothesis that fit the facts if you have more of a scientific bent.

  I started with what I felt I knew. I began to jot down the facts.

  Faith was at a bar or club with a friend. That friend left with a guy shortly after arriving at Club Canoodle. Faith remained at the club. At that club she met a guy named David. She talked to David for roughly two hours. At that point, David went out back to smoke. Faith was seen exiting Club Canoodle alone while David was out back smoking. David stated that Faith didn’t appear intoxicated and that she had a two drink limit when she went out. That was a limit which she did not exceed even in spite of multiple efforts by David to buy her more drinks.

  I sat back in my chair. I touched my pen to my lips.

  I was hoping that my high intensity run and a caffeine buzz would clear my mind enough for a new idea to wend its way in, but it still seemed to me that David was right in a way.

  The most obvious reason for Faith leaving without telling David is that she met another guy that she liked better.

  That seemed impossible to me though. It had been reported that Faith had left the bar by herself.

  It seemed more likely to me that she had actually changed her mind about joining David who had invited her out to the smoking area. (Oh, that’s right. David asked her to join him when he went out to smoke. Jot that down with the facts.) So David was probably right, and Faith didn’t know that Club Canoodle had a small smoker’s area out back. She just assumed that he’d be out front. She realized her mistake as soon as she walked out front and no one was smoking. So she walked around the building, possibly to try to find David. But instead she found a kind of murderer.

  I felt like I had sold David some snake oil comparing my mother’s suicide to his predicament. I had been clearly wrong about my mother’s death. But he was maybe kind of right.

  But then I did a little brainstorming exercise that I learned in college. The object of it is to come up with as many alternate explanations that fit the facts as you can, even if they’re absurd.

  I slurped down half of my cold press for needed mental energy.

  Why might Faith have left that had nothing to do with David?

  The first one came quickly. Reginald Cab/Capp worked at the bar. He approached her when David left. She liked him better than David. She agreed to meet up with him after he was off work. So rather than break David’s heart, she just snuck out.

  The second one came quickly too. Someone texted her. It may have been just a friend in trouble or maybe some guy she’s wanted to date for like forever. Maybe she felt that she didn’t have time to tell David. If it was just a friend, Faith may have been confident that she had created a good enough impression with David that he’d ask her out later anyway.

  The third took a little more time. I thought that maybe one of Faith’s friends was meeting her at the bar and they couldn’t find the place. So she said that she’d stand out front or maybe go down to the corner and flag them down.

  I thought of several more, but I was getting diminishing returns.

  I believed that I had a good starting hypothesis. I had a good through line for a story.

  And it was one that mostly exonerated David. Reginald Cab/Capp seized his opportunity when David was out of the way. (Don’t feel too bad, David. Either you or Faith would have had to go to the bathroom or something eventually. Eventually you would have had to separate for long enough for Reginald to make his move.) Reginald won the heart of Faith for at least the evening, with or without a roofie. (I really wished that I could see the security video of Faith leaving Club Canoodle myself.)

  But how did she get all that alcohol into her system?

  I bit my lower lip. I drank most of the rest of my cold press.

  Faith had a two drink limit.

  Can you drink after you’ve been roofied? The answer might be yes, but could you drink enough to have a possibly lethal blood alcohol content? You really have to drink a lot to have a BAC of .42 like Faith had when authorities recovered her body from the river. (Jot down her BAC as a fact too.)

  So she probably wasn’t roofied when she left. That probably happened after she had something like at least a dozen drinks.

  But she had a two drink limit!

  Then I thought of something. There are two types of people who have rules about their drinking. The first type consists of the people who don’t want to get drunk. The second type is heavy drinkers and/or alcoholics who think that following some arbitrary drinking rule proves that they don’t have a problem.

  I think that such rulemaking (and rule breaking) is nearly universal among people with a drinking problem. It certainly is in my family. My brother has broken so many rules that his rule now is something unbelievably Byzantine and absurdly specific like as long as he can turn down a shot of tequila perfectly balanced on the back of a literal scapegoat during Kwanzaa he’s not an alcoholic.

  So maybe Faith had a drinking problem. Maybe trying to limit herself to two drinks was one of the first (and definitely one of the last) rules that she broke.

  Even if the rule was designed to keep her from getting drunk, she was young. Rules are not for the young. Maybe she just went to a different bar to wait for Reginald. Maybe they had something like a daiquiri at that bar. Faith seemed to be a good, studious and probably somewhat sheltered girl based on her childhood home. Maybe she saw a daiquiri for the first time in her life and thought that it was just a slushy. It would be easy to drink and drink those and not realize how much alcohol was in them.

  Then all that was missing was the roofie.

  It was clear. To test my hypothesis, to find the rest of the story, I had to solve the mystery of this Reginald Cab/Capp. To do that I needed to talk to Mark the jailbird.

  I sighed. I drank the rest of my cold press. I bussed my glass. I walked downstairs. I walked back over the bridge. (Not nearly as good of a view in this direction.) I walked home.

  I checked to see if the mail had arrived yet. It had arrived.

  My how it had arrived!

  7

  I finally got something besides pieces of junk mail forwarded to my address from my post office box! I got a letter!

  (Admittedly, I was perhaps taking a small risk by forwarding the mail from my post office box to my home address. But I couldn’t imagine that the post office would reveal the address that they were forwarding mail to. Plus, that way I didn’t have to make a trip to the post office a regular part of my day. And I figured that I’d probably get it just as soon if I forwarded my box to my home address.)

  I studied the envelope, holding the letter as if it held some impenetrable clue that would come to me in a moment of insight if I examined it long enough. Mark wrote my name and the address of my post office box in black ink with a shaky hand. My name and the address of my post office box sloped downhill on each line and the letters took a right turn that became more pronounced as the line continued. I wondered if that meant something. Then I realized. Of course that meant nothing.

  Or maybe it did, but how would I ever know that? It’s not like I’m some handwriting expert or something.

  Then I decided that it probably wouldn’t be too hard to go to the downtown branch of the Hennepin County Public Library and become something of a handwriting expert.

  I shook my head. Why would I waste my time with that? I was almost certain that Mark had nothing to do with Faith’s semi-suicide. He was just the most probable way that I could maybe, possibly figure out who this Reginald Cab or Capp was.

  I stopped staring at the envelope and opened it.

  The letter had been folde
d to excess, in thirds and at least once more. I pulled out the dense, compact piece of paper. I unfolded it…for a while.

  The letter, like my address, was in black ink. The sloping of the lines was less pronounced, probably because Mark had written the letter on lined notebook paper. The tilt of letters to the right as the line rambled on was still just as evident though.

  The letter read:

  “I would be delighted to speak with you! I must say that I’m curious about what exactly you are curious about. You certainly are a woman of mystery. That’s okay. I like that.

  Visiting hours are from noon until six on Sunday. Family may visit for up to an hour. Everybody else is limited to one half hour per Sunday. My mom will be visiting this Sunday from noon to one. My kids will be visiting from five until six. Between one and five I am wide open.

  Our visit will have to be over a telephone with a pane of glass between us, but I’m hoping to get cleared for face to face visits soon. Then I would be handcuffed to a table but other than that we could talk more or less face to face.

  If you want to visit, you need to call Hennepin County Adult Detention Center and set up a time.

  Your pretty.”

  I did like the way that he included that I was pretty at the very end, like a loquacious schoolboy with a crush who talks to the object of his affection for fifteen minutes about something pedestrian only to timidly blurt what he wanted to say all along, what he’s wanted to say since the schoolyear started and he noticed those adorable curls. I didn’t like the fact that I was obviously not pretty enough to proofread for.

  I was reminded of a friend of mine back in high school. She had a boy send her a love letter. (Technically it was more of a love note.) That love letter/note was filled with grammar and spelling errors. So she took out a red pen and corrected and graded the love letter/note.

  You may not be surprised to learn that she was still single when I went to my ten year class reunion.

  I immediately looked up the number to the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center. Calling jail is really no different than calling any government thing in the county, state, or nation. There are automated menus without the selection that you want. So you have to guess at a selection because they don’t give you the “or stay on the line and we will answer your call in the order that it was received” option that they give you on almost any call line from almost any large company in the private sector. So I guessed a selection. Of course I guessed wrong. So I exited to a different menu. I guessed wrong again. I exited to yet another menu. Finally I got to wait for a person. It was the wrong person, but they transferred me to the right department. I still had to face yet another automated menu, but this time they had the option that I wanted. “Set up a visit with someone incarcerated at Hennepin County Adult Detention Center”. I selected that option and waited along with low quality audio of jazzy renditions of the music from classic ‘80s songs.

  I finally got through and set up my meeting for three o’ clock in the afternoon on that next Sunday.

  I leaned back in the stylish office chair at my desk. My desk is also my kitchen table. My stylish office chair also doubles as an expensive kitchen chair. I looked across my blended dining area and small kitchen with its stainless steel refrigerator, dishwasher, and stove. (All of those thanks to whoever lived here before both me and the person who lived here before me.) I looked at the kitchen tile, black and streaked with white and orange occasionally, like a black panther had an offspring with a Siberian tiger. I looked at the smart, digital clock on the wall that automatically updated itself every daylight saving time. I leaned back even further. This was a moment to savor.

  I had achieved my goal. I had been right. My feminine intuition was uncanny. I did indeed have a modicum of attractiveness.

  There was no time to celebrate though. Sunday was only three days away and I had some heavy (for the offseason) work days ahead. I had a bridge plan in my area that I was going to have to analyze.

  That meant that I was going to be doing calculation upon calculation to quadruple check and make sure that the engineers who created this bridge plan (and checked their calculations like ten times) were right.

  This part of my job is fairly new. Engineers are famous for being detail oriented. So why have multiple people check multiple times now?

  The collapse of the old 35W bridge changed everything. And it should’ve changed everything. Because I’m sure that the engineers on that project went over everything ten times. And they made the same mistake on the gusset plates ten times. And it was a horrendous tragedy.

  I remember that when I’m checking bridge plans. Thank God the old 35W bridge collapse didn’t happen on my watch, because Minneapolis is my responsibility now. It wasn’t back then. Fortunately.

  Checking bridge plans takes a long time. You have no idea how much math there is in building a bridge. How thick do the cables have to be to hold the bridge deck? How thick do the support beams have to be to effectively distribute the weight of the deck?

  And you’re looking for miscalculations that may be only slightly off. Because if the cables on a suspension bridge are even a fraction of a millimeter too thin, they could snap and cause a catastrophic failure. Checking these bridge plans requires mind numbing math that needs to be absolutely perfect.

  I would get the plans at the close of business. They wanted them done by Monday which would probably require working a full Saturday.

  I only had one day to figure out how to approach Mark.

  I thought and thought. Then it became too obvious.

  The Hennepin County Adult Detention Center is as unpleasant and in need of a good interior designer as you think it is. The walls are white block. The doors are plain and obviously heavy. There are uniformed guards everywhere. It smells like a high school locker room.

  I had been instructed not to bring things like a purse or a cellphone in with me when I made my appointment to visit Mark. I obeyed.

  A female guard still patted me down. And I had to go through a metal detector. And I had to have a dog sniff my butt!

  Yeah, like I’m going to stash drugs up my keester.

  But talk about a dream job for a dog!

  I walked down another hall surrounded by white, concrete block, under buzzing fluorescent lights, and over this kind of ‘50s jade colored tile.

  Mark was waiting at the little corral for me. I took my seat. He held up his hand and touched the pane of glass between us.

  Mark looked gaunt and a little haunted. His face seemed to be slowly swallowing the meat off of itself. Now it was almost all bone and gristle. His eyebrows were particularly bushy, like something you usually only see on a Muppet. His shaved black hair was running away from his forehead. He looked like a guy who should be greasy but was as dry as a sun bleached corn husk. He wore an orange jumpsuit.

  He motioned to the phone and grabbed it. I picked up my phone.

  “So what is your name?” he asked. “And how did you find out about me?”

  “I have a question for you first,” I said. “And if you answer it honestly and allow me follow up questions until I’m satisfied, then we can spend the rest of the time, that I think will be at least twenty minutes, talking about anything that you want. Provided of course that you keep it PG, or at least PG-13. Is that a deal?”

  “So mysterious,” Mark observed. “You drive a hard bargain, but I agree.”

  “Great,” I nodded. “So do you know a Reginald Cab or Capp? Did he ever work for you at Club Canoodle? Was he a regular at Club Canoodle? Do you know anything about him?”

  Mark sighed and touched his wasting chin. “I don’t know any Reginald Cab or Capp, but we had a Reggie who worked for us. He was Reggie White, like the former pro football player.”

  I could feel my eyes open wide. Of course a person might not give their real name to someone that they planned to ply with alcohol, roofie, and presumably have their way with before they escaped only to meet a different terrible fate. Re
ggie White could absolutely have called himself Reggie Cab or Capp.

  “So Reggie White worked at Club Canoodle?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mark nodded.

  “And he was working the evening shift at Club Canoodle the night that Faith Nguyen fell off of the Third Avenue Bridge?” I asked.

  “Are you with the police?” he asked me.

  “Remember our deal,” I insisted. “Would the police let you ramble to them about whatever for twenty minutes?”

  “No,” he shook his head.

  “Then answer the question,” I stated.

  “He was. He was first off. He was off around ten,” Mark declared.

  “You seem awful sure about that,” I observed.

  “I’ve been over and over it with the police,” he stated.

  “Did your staff wear name tags?” I asked.

  “Yes, and it just showed the first name unless two people had the same first name in which case we added the first initial of their last name. And, yes, we only had one Reggie,” Mark almost seemed to be reading a prepared statement.

  I nodded.

  “Reggie is a good guy,” Mark insisted.

  “Are you a good guy?” I asked.

  “I am. I just made a mis-ooooh,” Mark trailed off.

  “Why are you asking about all of this if you’re not a cop?” he asked me.

  “We’re into your twenty minutes. Is this really what you want to talk about?” I asked.

  “No,” he decided.

  It took him twenty minutes to work up the courage to ask me out. I told him no.

  “This was all a set up so that you could ask your questions wasn’t it?” he sighed.

  “Mark,” I said. “At least you got a photo out of it.”

  “That’s true,” he smiled a little. “And even little things like that mean a lot in here.”

  I hung up my phone. Mark waved at me through the glass. I gave a feeble wave back. I walked out of a green door out into the hallway with the white block walls, the jade colored tile, and the buzzing fluorescent lights. I walked out through the security checkpoint. I had somehow failed to notice just how much the little security checkpoint looked like a smaller version of the ones that any traveler would be familiar with at the airport.