Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  I thought that I had ruined my only chance to come up with the real answer to the short, mysterious death of Faith Nguyen.

  I left that jail a broken woman.

  14

  I spent the next week in a fever dream. I wrote like I had never written before. I wrote like I had just been diagnosed with some fatal disease and had very little time left to tell some urgent tale that was of paramount importance.

  I thought that the complete answer to the short, mysterious death of Faith Nguyen would just come to me if I wrote everything down. If I remembered every little detail.

  It was a silly fantasy of course, and it didn’t work. I was treating a murder mystery like a romantic comedy. Like the answer was there in front of me the whole time.

  But I did realize something in the process of writing. I realized that I was right about a lot of things. And I was even mostly right about Lakita Howard.

  I realized that Scott Olson, who had been known to flood at least one women with intravenous alcohol and the date rape drug under the name Reginald Capp, wouldn’t have met with me if Lakita wasn’t involved. My letter was cryptic but to the point. Scott Olson never would’ve met with me if he didn’t believe that I might have had some evidence that his forbidden soulmate was involved. That she might go to jail too.

  Not to mention, Scott had an extremely poor poker face. His blue eyes watered. His lips trembled. His lies weren’t given away by microexpressions nearly as much as they were given away by macroexpressions. There was a nervous man under that orange prison jumpsuit in spite of all his seeming poise and strength.

  It was obvious that Lakita was involved, and he knew it. And even after she had betrayed him with a kiss. Even after she had turned him in. Even after she had done everything in her power to make sure that Scott Olson spent the rest of his life in jail. He was still as fascinated with her as a teenager with their first beau who they run back to again and again in spite of shabby treatment.

  Scott had a weird kind of almost solipsism. He believed that the only person who really existed was Lakita Howard.

  So there was no doubt that she was involved.

  And I must confess that I never felt comfortable with hypnosis as an explanation. Sure, I believed that I’d seen it seem to work on my brother during therapy sessions when we were kids. And sure it’s what made Freud Freud. And yes, it supposedly can help people quit smoking. But my therapist had tried to hypnotize me too, on several occasions. And that didn’t work.

  I have a scientific mind. And Freud was doing the best he could with the science of the (Victorian) time. A lot has changed since then. I probably should’ve been more skeptical, but I just couldn’t think of a better hypothesis. So I had to do an experiment to rule it in or out. I did that experiment with Scott Olson.

  And he definitively ruled it out.

  That led me squarely to the original problem. How did they get Faith to walk off that bridge?

  I began to play devil’s advocate with myself. Maybe it was a horrible accident after all. Maybe what looked to me like a willful act really was an accident caused by the cerebellum and the inner ear being unable to keep Faith from walking over the railing and into the river because of gross intoxication.

  It was possible. Hell, it was probably even Ockham’s razor. That was what my hypothesis should be.

  But this was what bothered me. That phone call. That phone call that I was now certain was between Scott Olson and Lakita Howard. And in that phone call, Scott had made reference to the last time.

  It was all intended. It was all intentional.

  Somehow they had made Faith Nguyen walk off of that bridge. Were they out of camera frame holding her at gunpoint? It seemed unlikely since Faith never looked back or really even forward. Besides, anyone who’s ever dealt with a car full of drunk people knows that they can’t even necessarily pay attention to the woman in the fast food drive thru who is trying to get them to shut up and order something, much less someone theoretically holding them at gunpoint from a distance.

  Faith had looked too intoxicated to see someone holding a gun a ways away from her as a real threat. My guess is that she was drunk to the point that she was like a cat. She was living in one perpetual drunken and drugged up moment. She had no idea what happened two seconds ago and no idea what she was going to do two seconds in the future.

  Then I thought, what if they planned to kill her, and they just got lucky and she stumbled off the bridge to her death before they had to.

  That seemed even less plausible. What were they free range murderers? We let them run around on a bridge for fun before we slaughter them. Those kinds of things might happen in a movie or on a TV show where diabolical yet playful serial killers like to indulge themselves in some bizarre kind of almost murderous cat and mouse foreplay, but I was almost certain that Scott and Lakita had no time for that kind of stuff.

  The problem was that I had no other ideas. And I began to criticize myself. I began to tell myself that I had swallowed the whole hypnosis nonsense hook, line, and sinker. Really how much stranger was free range murderers?

  Ok, it was stranger.

  But I was grasping at straws because I was desperate. And I felt that I only had one last move.

  I knew what that move would be. I knew what I had to do. That was the easy part.

  The tough part was that I had to solve the mystery of Faith’s death first.

  I got a call that night. I needed to do another emergency bridge inspection that next morning.

  I welcomed a break from my thoughts which were threatening to turn very negative. I welcomed a break from softly beating myself up.

  And at least this time I had all the equipment that I needed when I showed up.

  I was inspecting the Lake Street Bridge. Lake Street is a very busy street in South Minneapolis. Once you cross the bridge, you’re on Marshall Avenue, and you’re in St. Paul.

  There’s nothing particularly striking about the bridge. It was built to move cars across a river without a wisp of a concern for poetry or beauty. Plus, it’s far enough south that it doesn’t even offer a good view of downtown.

  There is a nice trail that winds along the river and goes under the Lake Street Bridge. I run there sometimes. It’s especially pleasant in the fall when the hardwood deciduous trees erupt in fiery reds, oranges, and golds.

  I only had a small section to inspect, but again I saw something on the other edge of the bridge.

  I had been inspecting on the St. Paul side. There was something wedged in the steel beams under the bridge by the Minneapolis side and it was enormous.

  So I had to do the same drill. First I had to see exactly what it was. That meant that I had to call up our third party vendor and have them move my equipment to the other side of the bridge.

  It was around lunch time anyway so I ducked into a little nearby grille.

  I found my way back to the shore of the Mississippi River, this time on the Minneapolis side. Surprisingly, my equipment had already been moved. I had taken a long hour and half lunch, but still.

  So I went up to take a look at whatever was wedged in the bridge.

  I was rarely surprised at my job. But this was new.

  Somehow somebody had wedged a broken down, rusty golf cart in between the support beams on the bridge.

  I spent several minutes trying to figure out how in the hell somebody had done that.

  The metal frame support beams were well above ground level. The Lake Street Bridge is a very busy bridge. I didn’t think that anyone could’ve lowered it from up top. I also didn’t think that the guard rail on the edge of the bridge would be strong enough to support a golf cart.

  I decided that they had to have winched it up to the supports from below. And then it would have maybe been possible for one or two men in safety harnesses to push the golf cart into place so it would stick up there.

  It was ingenious. It was modern art.

  I called the line for maintenance. I was really hopin
g that Thad would come out.

  And he did.

  We joked around a bit. Then I pointed up to the golf cart.

  “Someone was driving drunk last night,” Thad quipped.

  I chuckled.

  “Seriously though this is a real pain in my ass,” Thad sighed.

  “What are you going to do?” I wondered.

  “I’m on my own,” Thad shook his head. “It’s winter. I’m the only person on. I don’t want to call someone in for this. Plus MNDOT would have an aneurysm over the on call pay. I think that I’m just going to have to go up there and break it down into pieces and hope that the biggest piece isn’t too big for me to lower down with a pulley or something.

  Dammit. This is going to be my afternoon and evening.”

  “Do you want me to help you?” I asked.

  “I do,” Thad nodded. “But I can’t let you help. I’d get fired if you got hurt or something. You get paid because you know stuff. I get paid to fix stuff and take stupid risks. And never the twain shall meet.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to look like the world’s strangest troll trying to maneuver a golf cart chassis around under a bridge after it gets dark in two hours,” Thad sighed.

  “The good news is that MNDOT will probably let you keep the golf cart,” I pointed out.

  “Great, you, me, Jace, and Dave can tool around in a golf cart as a foursome. I think they say that in golf, don’t they? A foursome? Like it’s group sex or something,” Thad shook his head.

  “I don’t know,” I laughed. “You’re the guy who is studying sports for the glory of our trivia team.”

  “I could do this all day,” Thad sighed. “But I have to free a golf cart.”

  “Think of it as conceptual art,” I suggested.

  “I can’t. Because then I’d be defacing a work of art,” Thad concluded.

  I walked away. I walked up to Lake Street. I waited for a 21 bus to take me to the Blue Line and back downtown.

  The commute was long, loud, and crowded. But I eventually made it home.

  I warmed up some dal that I had made the night before. I sat on my couch. I turned on the television.

  My TV was on PBS. It was a nature show. It was about spiders.

  “The female black widow is eager for a mate,” the narrator said. “But first she has to spin a web.”

  I watched the spider drag a silk thread from one part of the web to another part of the web.

  And then I had it! I had solved the mystery! At long last, I knew exactly what had happened to Faith Nguyen. And I had to be right.

  It was like in college when I would be working on a really hard math problem. Then I would visit the professor during office hours and ask about it, half sure that I had the right answer. Then I would realize why I was wrong after the professor would point out something. And when I realized that something and I recalculated, then I knew that I had the right answer to that math problem.

  This revelation was just like that.

  And my call to Marlon at MNDOT confirmed that.

  The first part of my plan was simple. I had to convince the East Wing of Territorial Hall to move my selection of next month’s activity up a month. I needed to be at Cirque du Sota’s last performance of the season on Friday, December 21st at the Walker Art Center. I was hoping that my friends would let me double dip into December because I didn’t want to go alone, and it was unclear when their next performance would be.

  Of course all my girlfriends agreed to that. Every last one of them loved Cirque du ‘Sota and teased me for criticizing it. Every last one of them was glad that I had finally woken up to the fact that those acrobats were amazing.

  This time I rode with Hui to the restaurant and bar where we met for dinner and drinks in uptown. That was so much fun.

  Even though I was so nervous.

  Everything depended upon what would happen later.

  I strategized through yet another weird Cirque du ‘Sota performance. I wondered if I should be out front, at the side, or in the parking ramp.

  I decided on the parking ramp.

  And while everyone was applauding, I checked my phone and turned on the highest rated audio recording app that I could find.

  I had to pay for it. So I hoped it was worth it.

  I turned down Hui’s possible ride home. I had to turn down Alyssa and Maya too.

  I didn’t know what to tell them. So I told them the truth.

  I said that I was going to wait until after the show to try to talk to one of the Cirque du ‘Sota performers.

  “Good call!” Alyssa beamed. “I bet that guy is so flexible that he invents new sexual positions.”

  We all laughed.

  I didn’t think of it. I’m the only one who’s still single. They all assumed that I was out to get the one male performer in Cirque du ‘Sota which honestly hadn’t crossed my mind, but now that it did…

  No, it’d be terrible. I’d have to pretend that I liked Cirque du ‘Sota and go to every blasted show.

  I waited for several minutes after my friends left the auditorium. I made my way down to the parking ramp to wait.

  I waited on the gray sidewalk, just on the other side of where most of the parking was. I was hoping to sneak up on her from behind.

  I checked my recording app again. It seemed to be working.

  Person after person streamed out into the parking ramp. They walked up the rolling gray slopes of concrete. They opened doors gingerly alongside concrete support beams. They started their cars with a grumble, and the scent of exhaust blasted me as they wound up and out in metal segments like a rectangular robotic worm.

  Eventually the flood of people reduced to a trickle, and then nothing. I began to doubt my decision of the parking ramp. And I had to decide how long I was going to wait in the event that I was wrong.

  I was staring out at the lone car left on the parking level in front of me bored out of my mind. Then I heard the door next to me open with a slight almost wheeze rather than a full creak.

  I had long since stopped being excited by that asthmatic door. I began to regard the person coming out of that door with the same boredom that I had hitherto reserved for staring at the one remaining car that was probably theirs.

  I snapped to attention. It was my quarry!

  Step one surprise. Step two excite to jealousy.

  “Lakita!” I snapped from behind in my best drill sergeant/ruthless personal trainer voice.

  She startled. She whirled around to meet me. Why hadn’t I noticed before how suspiciously much she was about my height and weight? How much she looked like me…and Faith Nguyen?

  “Scott,” I said. And I let that sink in.

  Lakita tried to look casual.

  “I’m guessing that you think that you got away with everything. Framing Scott like that,” I paused. “But I know something that you don’t know.”

  Lakita said nothing, but she was turning a little redder.

  “I know you think that you have absolute power over Scott, but you don’t. I do. And he told me everything,” I insisted.

  “Oh, I think I know who you are! You’re that little slut that he picked up at that club and had his way with, aren’t you?” Lakita smiled. “Did he also tell you that you weren’t even very good in bed? Ha, you think that you know something that I don’t know! You wish you knew what I know that you don’t!”

  “You think that I don’t know that he intended to kill me, with your help. Just like with Faith? I talked him out of it, but he said that he was worried that somehow you might know about it. So he took your call, just so he didn’t look suspicious,” I added.

  “Look, Scott’s a sick Nazi pansy ass who does his thuggery with a fountain pen. If you want him, he’s yours,” Lakita decided.

  “That doesn’t change what the two of you did together,” I insisted.

  “What did we do?” Lakita yelled, and it bounced off of the gray concrete walls all around us.

  “It
all started when you were a janitor for MNDOT. You worked in a downtown Minneapolis command center until you got fired for playing around with the cameras. But you weren’t fired before you learned that there’s a gap in between the camera that shoots the deck of the Third Avenue Bridge and a little ways below the Third Avenue Bridge.

  It continued when you spun Scott Olson with charm and lies. Scott Olson fell madly in love with you. The way that he fell madly in love with me.

  Except that you abused that power. You had him pick up a young college girl named Faith Nguyen. You drove his SUV as he intravenously force fed her alcohol and then gave her the date rape drug. But there was no desire to rape her. It was all done to make her completely docile as Scott harnessed her to him and used the climbing gear in the back of his SUV to climb up and move along the supports underneath the bridge.

  Everyone thinks that Faith walked off of that Third Avenue Bridge, but I know who did. Scott told me.

  It was you!

  You were impersonating Faith, and you did a good job. You were about her height and weight. You had her approximate skin tone. You wore her jacket, zipper open and loose so it could look like it fluttered off in the fall. You staggered. You staggered onto that bridge. You paused and pretended to be gathering yourself, but in reality you were doing something much craftier. You were slipping your ankle through a short length of rope painted black to hide in the night, tightening that rope, and then you stumbled over only to acrobatically flip into the supports of the bridge at the same moment that Scott Olson dropped the unconscious Faith Nguyen into the river. You took off her coat and floated it down with her body. It was the perfect crime.

  Scott untied the rope from you and then from the bridge, and you both made your way along the supports of the bridge to land. You had done it! You had murdered an innocent girl.”

  Lakita’s eyes had almost swallowed her face. Her jaw hung open.

  “He did tell you everything!” Lakita gasped.

  “He was right, wasn’t he?” I smiled. “Everything I just said was true.”