Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  There was that lone, fat fingered text that I believed was supposed to read: “Reginald Cab or Capp”.

  And now I had found him. After he found me.

  There was a reason that I grabbed that contact list from that little Neo-Nazi party that I had just accidentally walked in on in the hotel conference room. My hands were quicker than my brain.

  I scanned all of the names on the contact list again and again when I first got home, and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t see it. Then I checked the letterhead.

  Reginald Capp was the “distinguished” (their words not mine) speaker.

  I knew right away that it was him! I had hooked up with the guy who drugged a girl, got her drunk, and somehow got her to lurch to her death off of a bridge!

  And he had intended me to be his next victim!

  I was at the same club. Granted it wasn’t exactly the same club. It wasn’t Club Canoodle. But it was exactly where Club Canoodle had been. And it probably hadn’t been significantly remodeled.

  And Reginald had probably found me exactly the way that he found Faith. He was off camera, over by the bathrooms.

  David Sanborn had thought that Faith had run into somebody while she was looking for him. Reggie White, the good Reggie, had thought that Faith had immediately walked out after he informed Faith that David was a womanizer. Neither one of them was right.

  Yes, Faith had headed toward the exit. But then she did something that will be familiar to every woman out on the town. She realized at the last second that she better use the bathroom. There was no telling where the next one would be.

  So, like me, Faith was by the bathroom. And Reginald swept in with his tired line about being fascinated by death.

  Oh, he was so smooth. And he thought of everything. We hadn’t walked out together, just like he hadn’t walked out with Faith. He had made up the line about needing to get his car. Then he had met me, and Faith, on that same corner. He met us on the corner of Fifth and Marquette away from the prying eyes of a camera.

  He had asked me where I wanted to go, his place or mine. That meant, presumably, that he had everything that he needed to do to me what he did to Faith in his SUV. Of course he did. He had a big bag of soccer balls with him. He had everything anyone could ever need in that vehicle.

  I had followed in nearly the exact footsteps of Faith with one exception.

  Faith was dead. And I was alive.

  I turned my attention to that bizarre phone call. Even in my extreme drunken state, it had sounded like a conversation about more than dinner plans. But then he explained that it was his sister. And I thought about my brother. Every conversation that I have with my brother is about more than dinner plans. Even if it’s about dinner plans.

  But now I realized the true import of that call. Reginald Capp was talking to someone about killing me the exact same way that they killed Faith. And whoever was on the other end of that phone call had saved my life.

  That meant that whoever was on the other end of that line was the real mastermind behind what happened to Faith. That person probably wasn’t real happy with Reginald Capp’s freelancing.

  I tried to think of who that person could possibly be. My first thought, because I want to blame all of the evil in the world on Neo-Nazis, was that Reginald Capp was acting under the direction of a higher ranking Nazi.

  That seemed unlikely, however. Reginald had just found a mixed race woman who was certainly much closer to grossly intoxicated than Faith had been when Reginald swept in and picked her up. I had done half the work for them. Plus, they got away with whatever they did the first time. I couldn’t imagine any good Nazi not greenlighting my murder.

  Also, it seemed unlikely that Reginald would be freelancing if it were an official Nazi operation. My guess was that there was a pretty rigid pecking order among Nazis, and you knew your rank.

  So who could it be?

  I decided that it had to be a woman, as strange as that may seem. He had pretended to be talking to his sister. I was convinced that he had said that he was talking to his sister because he believed that I might have heard the clearly female voice on the line.

  I started to wonder if Reginald had a Mrs. Capp. I had seen no wedding ring on Reginald, but those slide off easily enough as long as you don’t put on weight after marriage. And I can confirm to you that Reginald may be a Nazi, but he is one physically fit Nazi. I’m sure he could still slide a wedding ring off quite easily.

  Maybe he had a homicidal Mrs.

  But she knew he was with me. What did she think when he didn’t come home until the next morning after being with me? She had to know what he did.

  Maybe they had an open relationship. It seemed possible…until it didn’t.

  Aren’t Nazis like super orthodox? An open relationship just seemed completely out of bounds.

  But then what was sleeping with a mixed race woman?

  Even the Nazis weren’t very good at being Nazis. Like the slave owners who made time for their slaves.

  Chastity was probably only for women in Nazi culture anyway. A proper Aryan man could probably have as many blonde haired, blue eyed baby factories as he could wrangle himself, and there was nothing that the womenfolk could do about it.

  So maybe it was a wife.

  Or maybe he wasn’t even lying. Maybe it was his Norwegian, Aryan sister with a similar bent. Maybe she was a Nazi too.

  I put a big x through everything that I had just written. If Reginald really was a Nazi, and, in spite of all appearances, he had to be Nazi. (He was the “distinguished” Nazi speaker after all.) Then there was no way that women were anything better than second fiddle to him. How could there possibly be a woman who could pull rank on him? There just couldn’t be.

  But he slept with me. And that wasn’t supposed to happen either.

  Maybe someone had power over him somehow. Maybe that person was a woman.

  How?

  Then I came up with an answer. Blackmail.

  Of course, some woman saw him do something illegal, in the course of his ordinary Nazi doings perhaps, and she is blackmailing him. But she doesn’t want money. For some reason she wanted him to round up Faith Nguyen. She wanted him to get Faith very drunk. She wanted him to give Faith the date rape drug and then just not rape her.

  And that was where things got weird. (Okay, well I guess it’s all weird, weirder.) Everyone thought that the story was a real tragedy in this sense. Everyone thought that Faith had actually escaped the man that meant to rape her. But what if she hadn’t? What if rape was never part of the plan?

  What if Reginald Capp administered all of that under the strict control of a blackmailing woman who demanded that Faith be killed but not raped?

  If that was the case, and I thought it was because in that weird telephone conversation, Reginald hadn’t expressed any surprise that Faith had fallen to her death. In fact, it sounded like her death had pretty much just gone according to plan. And it was a plan that he had wanted to revisit with me.

  Faith’s death was starting to look like less than even a semi-suicide.

  But how could you predict that Faith would stagger and stumble over the railing to her death. Hundreds of grossly intoxicated people have probably bobbed and weaved their way safely across that bridge in the time that it had stood. How could anyone know that Faith would stumble and fall?

  Then I remembered something. I thought back to my Freudian psychotherapy.

  Do you know what made Freud come to the conclusion that there was an unconscious mind that we are generally not aware of? It was hypnosis.

  Freud’s interactions with people who had been hypnotized convinced him that there was a part of the brain that acted below the level of conscious awareness.

  The degree to which hypnosis works or can work is hotly debated. Some therapists will use it. Others consider it quackery. Some believe that people supposedly under the influence of hypnosis are just voluntarily doing the things that they do.

  Myself, I
was never able to be hypnotized. But my brother was. And I don’t think that he was faking.

  But I was stone cold sober all those times that my psychoanalyst tried to hypnotize me. I had all my ego defenses in place.

  What would happen if I had a nearly lethal blood alcohol level and the date rape drug swimming around in my system? Would I be more suggestible then? Would I yield to hypnosis then?

  Would I stagger out on to that bridge, take three steps perhaps? Stop. Gather myself. Lurch hard. Over the railing.

  And maybe I too would’ve passed out before I kissed the river good night.

  It seemed absurd. But it was also Ockham’s razor. As complicated as it was, it was the simplest explanation that I could come up with that fit the facts.

  So I fired up my laptop. I had to learn as much as I could about Reginald Capp.

  The interesting thing about Reginald Capp was that he was all over the seedier side of the internet. Yet I couldn’t find a single picture that would allow me to confirm for absolute certain that the man I had seen in my bedroom and out on the street was Reginald Capp.

  Even the book that he presumably played an important role in: “Words of Wisdom: The Collected Speech Excerpts of Reginald Capp” did not seem to have a photo of him anywhere.

  Reginald Capp’s speeches had been reproduced on unsavory sites that I didn’t dare check out for fear of malware or something. He was oft quoted. I saw parts of the quotations in my search. But again, I didn’t dare click on anything.

  He had his own page on the official Nazi party website. I decided that the official Nazi party website, while evil and completely irredeemable, was probably free of malware as long as I didn’t jump on any of the clickbait.

  I felt like a traitor to my family, my forbears, and especially, strangely enough, to my deceased, white great uncle who fought the Nazis in World War Two. But I had to know. I had to know about Reginald Capp.

  I studied his page in detail. Here’s what it said:

  “Reginald Capp served with honor in the Marines. He was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who came home to fight for an equally noble cause: his race. A brief stint in college convinced him of the institutional (n word), Jew, and homosexual agenda in all places of so called higher education.

  Reginald did study enough to realize that without radical action to stop out of control migration of (Hispanic slur) and miscegenation, the white majority that have made America, and Western Civilization, great will be eroded. Given the lower IQs of criminal illegals, (n words), (another Hispanic slur), and mixed race peoples, the emergence of a dumber non-white majority should instill both fear and inspiration in all of our race warriors, and it certainly did in Reginald.

  Reginald is a gifted speaker who knows how to tell the truth about the story of the glory of the white race. He has inspired many to become involved or more involved in the American Nazi Party and the alt right.

  Reginald is the single person who is most responsible for our new emphasis on miscegenation and so called mixed race or biracial half breeds. He really helped draw attention to how the ill-informed white man or white woman is betraying their race when lying down with half breeds, (n words), Jews, and other undesirables.

  Reginald is in this respect the conscience of a movement. We in the Nazi Party haven’t paid nearly enough attention to the white men and white women who fraternize with the enemy. No more. We have Reginald’s idealism, political savvy, and unparalleled oratory to thank for that.

  Catch one of Reginald’s heart felt and inspiring speeches for yourself. Below is a list of all of Reginald’s appearances for this year starting on January 6th in Sacramento.”

  I leaned back in my chair for a moment. I was unpleasantly surprised at how well written Reginald Capp’s page was compared to what I expected it to be. I expected it to read like it was written in crayon on a cocktail napkin by a drunken idiot with dyslexia. This bordered on a professional bio.

  After reflecting on that with dismay, I moved on to the next logical question.

  I made a note of the exact day that Faith Nguyen stumbled off of that bridge to her death It was early in the morning on January 7th. Reginald Capp would have been speaking in Sacramento on the 6th at seven in the evening Pacific time, meaning nine in the evening here. Maybe he could’ve caught a flight back in time. But it was unlikely.

  Of course it was unlikely. Reginal Capp was not hard to find on the internet. Of course the police would’ve suspected Reginald Capp the same way that I did. Well, I mean not exactly in the same way. It’s not like he hooked up with the police at some club on trivia night, but you get the idea. A mixed race woman dies and her final message to anyone appears to be the name of a literal Nazi who actively preaches hatred and probably violence directed at mixed race individuals:

  Reginald Capp was a suspect right out of central casting.

  The problem was that Reginald probably had a dozen or more lying Nazis who were all willing to say that Reginald Capp stayed in Sacramento on the night before the murder. Certainly the police realized that Nazis might lie, but they must just not have had enough evidence to charge Reginald.

  Or maybe they didn’t know what he looked like.

  I wondered if I should go to the police.

  Then my father’s fear of the police rose up in me. And I started to think.

  I started to realize how thin my theory was, how little substance there was to it.

  If I went to the police to positively identify Reginald Capp, they might say something to me like how can you be sure it’s him. And I couldn’t be sure. I was sure my intuition was right, but the cops wouldn’t go by my intuition. I’d needed to have seen his driver’s license or something. And I hadn’t even gotten his name that night.

  I still didn’t know in a scientific sense if my super soldier hook up was Reginald Capp. I couldn’t prove it.

  I couldn’t even prove that what the man I believed to be Reginald Capp was wrestling off of his arm when I saw him outside of that hotel was a red Nazi arm band. I had no definitive scientific proof that the man was even a Nazi, much less THE Reginald Capp.

  Yes, his name was on the letterhead, but there were other people there. I couldn’t prove that he had picked me up with plans to murder me. I couldn’t prove that the weird phone call that he took was with the mastermind and co-conspirator in his murderous schemes who talked him out of killing me for some reason. I couldn’t even prove that the person on the other end of that phone call was a woman.

  I knew in my bones that all of those things were true, but juries don’t hear testimony from bones.

  No, going to the police was a bad idea. I might go there to finger Reginald Capp and end up in a locked psych ward.

  I had to gather more evidence at a minimum before I went to the police.

  Reginald Capp was likely only free because of the false alibis of a dozen or more Nazis, but those Nazis had a better story than I did.

  Or did they? There were no pictures of Reginald Capp. How would someone in Sacramento know him?

  This could be an, “I am Spartacus!” thing. There could be a half dozen people that speak under the name Reginald Capp.

  It would be easy, all too easy to game that somehow. And it probably counts as an excused absence among those in the know if the reason that you couldn’t make your Nazi speaking engagement was because you were murdering a mixed race college student.

  It frustrated me to no end to know that the Nazis were winning. Even after all that I knew.

  Then I started to really worry. Maybe these Nazis had mastered some new kind of hypnosis. Maybe Faith’s death was a precursor, an augury of what was to come. Maybe these Nazis, who I had always considered pretty stupid, had mastered a new mind control technique. Maybe a real race war was coming and Faith was the proof of concept.

  I shuddered at the thought.

  I decided to do some more research. I did a search for “finding Reginald Capp”.

  This time I found a site that tr
ied to get people out of hate groups. They had a “Do you really know Reginald Capp?” page that I clicked on. This was what it said:

  “Did you know the following five facts about Reginald Capp?

  Reginald Capp is actually three different men, one in the Midwest (probably Iowa or Minnesota), one on the West Coast (probably rural Oregon), and one in the Deep South (Mussel Shoals area).

  Only one of the three men who identify as Reginald Capp have served in the military at all (the Midwestern one), and he was discharged from Marine Corps before he even completed boot camp. None of them have ever served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  Reginald Capp’s speeches are not his (their) own. All of them are written and approved by a Nazi steering committee. The exact name of the real speechwriter is not yet known to this website.

  Two women of a non-white racial background claim to have had a romantic link with two of the Reginald Capp’s (the West Coast and Midwestern ones). A third woman, who is Jewish, claims to have dated the Reginald Capp in the South.

  The Reginald Capps are accused of a half dozen crimes ranging from arson to attempted murder, and in at least one of those crimes a white man who didn’t seem to have any ties to any other race or political involvement was the primary victim.

  So there it all was. Faith’s death was just one of a handful of crimes that these three stooges had committed in some kind of Nazi shell game.

  I looked at the list of accusations with more and more disgust. I picked up my phone. I called the hotel. I informed them that they had let their conference room out to Nazis.

  They apologized profusely. The Nazis had used some bland euphemism as the name of their group when they rented the conference room. The manager of the hotel immediately agreed to never let a conference room out to that group again and to do a better job vetting their conference room rentals in general.

  I was pleased. And that’s why I haven’t named this hotel.

  And their response heartened me. And as I stared at the ashes of the fallacy of Reginald Capp, I ceased to feel disgusted.

  And I began to feel determined.