Clutching at Straws

by J. L. Abramo

  I asked Darlene to get in touch with Bobo Bigelow for a round-trip plane ticket to Denver. She was so excited about the dog and the movie, she didn’t complain.

  The notion that I could learn something from Chance Ryder about what had happened to Judge Chancellor, Tom Katt, Vic Vigoda, or Lefty Wright was vague. There was really no reason to think that he’d ever heard of any of them. It was simply an idea. But for the moment it happened to be my only idea. I went back to my desk to study my lines.

  Darlene entered my inner sanctum at noon and unceremoniously dropped a paper bag on my desk.

  “Veal and peppers from downstairs. Eat up. I’m out of here in thirty minutes.”

  Darlene had told me at least a week before that she was leaving early that day to take her nieces to the zoo. Of course, I’d forgotten.

  “Anything I need to do?” I asked.

  “Just sit up front in the unlikely event someone shows up, and answer the phone if the spirit moves you. I’ll take McGraw with us, I think he’d like the monkeys.”

  I tried to reach Freddie Cash again. Unsuccessfully.

  An hour later I had put the script aside, realizing that I would get nowhere unless I had someone run lines with me. I figured that Vinnie would get a kick out of it. I had the Dumas novel in my coat pocket, so I pulled it out and started reading. I barely got my feet up on Darlene’s desk when there was a knock at the door.

  “It’s open,” I called, and assumed the looking-busy posture.

  The man who walked in was in street clothes, but he was a cop if I’d ever seen one. I rose to walk around the desk and put out my hand.

  “Jake Diamond,” I said, “how can I help you?”

  He took my outstretched hand tentatively and looked around the room. I invited him to sit and asked if he would care for coffee, hoping he would pass on the coffee, since there was none made. He finally settled into the chair across Darlene’s desk, looking all the while like he was going to bolt. I sat and waited for him to speak. After a minute of silence I didn’t know whether to try greeting him again or pick up the novel.

  “Mr. Diamond, I’d like to remain anonymous.”

  “You’re succeeding admirably. How can I help you?” I repeated, hoping for closure.

  “I knew Thomas Katt,” he said.

  I made him for Katt’s partner and did my best to be unthreateningly attentive.

  “What can I call you?” I asked. “Pick something out of a hat, it doesn’t matter what. It will make it a lot easier for me to form sentences.”

  I sat waiting again.

  “You can call me Phil,” he said, after pretending to think about it long enough for me to feel pretty sure that his name was Phil.

  “Okay. Good. Now, Phil, before we go on let me assure you that nothing you say will leave this room.”

  Of course that wasn’t true, and I doubted he would buy it, but I’ve said it so many times it’s become a habit.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

  Jimmy Pigeon had taught me that fishing for information was just that, and there were more ways than one to land your catch. You could toy around and bring it in slowly with skill and finesse, or you could give a strong pull the moment you felt a nibble and hope to sink the hook. The way Phil was squirming in his seat I knew he was very close to being the one that got away. I yanked as hard as I could.

  “But you did come, Officer Moss. And you care about what happened to Katt because he was your partner. And you can’t go to your lieutenant because you’re worried about your job. And I’m kind of busy. So I’ll ask you one more time for the hell of it. How can I help you?”

  I held my breath. He got up, turned toward the door, turned back, and sat down.

  “I think that Tom got himself involved in some real bad shit,” he said.

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Do you have any coffee?”

  “How do you take it?”

  “Light and sweet.”

  I called down to Molinari’s and asked Angelo’s son to run up a couple of cups.

  “Tom had been acting funny for weeks. I kept asking him what was up, but he wasn’t talking.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Showing up late, stopping while we were out on patrol to make phone calls, going off alone when we broke for lunch, saying he had to meet someone. A lot of behavior that was unusual for him. It just wasn’t like Tom.”

  “And you can’t think of anything that may have happened to provoke it?”

  “I’ve been trying, but I can’t.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Phil Moss jumped. I told him it was only the coffee and went to pick it up.

  I placed a cup in front of him and took my seat behind the desk.

  I gave him a minute or so to mix in the sugar and I pondered whether to try to move him along or let him proceed at his own pace.

  I didn’t have to be in Denver until Monday morning, so I decided to go easy.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  “He was jumpy, anxious. And then the thing happened at the Chancellor scene.”

  “What thing was that?”

  “When we came into Chancellor’s bedroom we had our weapons drawn. We found the perp on the floor with his hands behind his head, and the judge under the bed.”

  “How did you happen to be the first on the scene at Chancellor’s?”

  “We were in the neighborhood. Tom was driving. A dispatch came over the radio reporting a disturbance. We were closest to the place, so we went in. The front door was unlocked,” he said. “I took a quick look around the room and I saw a gold Rolex on the floor. I holstered my gun and knelt down to handcuff the suspect. Tom went into the wall safe, ignoring my complaints. Tom came back, kept the perp’s head down in the rug and searched him, thoroughly, as if he was looking for something. Then the other officers ran in. I stepped aside to let the sergeant read the prisoner his rights. I glanced back to where I had seen the watch, and it was gone.”

  Lefty never mentioned that Katt had gone to the dresser and the wall safe and then searched him. Why? Maybe saying something could have saved him. Maybe not.

  “Did you confront Katt about the Rolex?”

  “Yes. Later that night when we were alone. Tom denied taking the watch, and I laid into him. I told him that he was jeopardizing both of us by lifting evidence, and that it was grand theft to boot. I said if he didn’t find a way to turn it in, with a satisfactory explanation, I was going to the lieutenant. That’s when he told me he couldn’t give up the watch and that it was worth five thousand dollars to me if I kept it quiet. I told him that I wasn’t interested in the money, so for good measure he threw in the fact that his life depended on it.”

  “Did he explain?”

  “No. But he promised that he would if I could just give him a few days. Tom swore that if I claimed I never saw a watch he would never say differently. There’s this thing about backing up your partner that gets programmed into every cop from day one. It’s horseshit, but by the time the issue comes up, you’re already hip deep in it. So I gave him some time. Enough time for him to end up with a bullet in his head. And now I don’t know what to do.”

  “I can’t tell you what to do, Phil,” I said.

  “Thing is, if I keep quiet to cover my sorry ass, then no one looks to find out who put the squeeze on Tom and who snuffed him. Unless you do.”

  “Don’t count on it, Moss. I have my own agenda, and it doesn’t include getting you off the hook and I don’t share your sympathy for Officer Katt. My interest is in who’s responsible for Lefty Wright. Odds are that if I stumble onto that, it will answer a lot of questions about Katt. Your partner was working for someone. He coerced Vigoda into complicity, and Vigoda enlisted Lefty. Vigoda and Lefty didn’t know that the judge was going to be hit, but Katt damn well must have known. Who was he working for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

 
“Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I doubt it, considering your track record. I’ll forget that I saw you today for the time being. I’m warning you, Moss, if I find out that you know more about it than you’re telling me, I’ll take you down.”

  I thought I’d better get him out of there before I fell into too many more clichés.

  Officer Moss had confirmed a few things that I had been pretty certain about. But what did I really know?

  It looked as if Katt didn’t knife Chancellor, nor did Vigoda. They both had alibis. Vic was at Carlucci’s and Katt was cruising with Moss, conveniently close to the murder scene. And killing the judge wasn’t enough. Someone wanted the envelope badly, thought it was in the safe, and needed a way to get at it. That’s where Lefty came in.

  The killer waits for Chancellor to enter the bedroom and surprises him with a knife. In a struggle the Rolex falls to the floor. Katt shows up on cue to pick up the envelope where Lefty was told to leave it.

  The envelope is nowhere to be found.

  Katt is forced to keep Lefty breathing until he can find out where the envelope is.

  And Katt grabs the Rolex.

  Did Ryder figure in? What could I possibly learn from his brother? Did a rash of fifty- and twenty-dollar bills tie the Cash ransom money to the Chancellor murder, and where was Freddie Cash? Who was Alfred Sisley? What and where was the missing envelope, and where was the Rolex? I was shooting in the dark. And Jimmy Pigeon had taught me that it wasn’t such a great idea unless you knew exactly who was there in the room with you when you opened fire.

  I was going around and around in my head trying to fit the pieces together.

  So I decided to give myself a break.

  I called Vinnie to ask if he could help me run some lines. As I had expected, he was thrilled. I told him that I would pick him up at six-thirty, buy him dinner, and then we could work here at the office until it was time to leave for the Finnish Line.

  With a few hours to kill before meeting Vinnie, no particular place to go, and a mild feeling of responsibility to man the phone, I put up my feet and returned to Monte Cristo.

  The telephone woke me at seven-thirty. It took a while to remember how to answer it.

  “Diamond Investigation,” I finally stammered.

  “Jake, I’m getting hungry,” Vinnie said.

  Since I was running late, I called in an order of Chinese takeout and grabbed the food and a six-pack of Sam Adams on my way to Vinnie’s place. I asked the restaurant to throw in a few pairs of chopsticks and two plastic forks, in case Strings didn’t have any clean silverware.

  Walking into Vinnie Strings’s apartment was like stepping into a sixties black-and-white French New Wave film.

  I placed the boxes of food and the beer on the only flat surface I could find in Vinnie’s front room, one of those large wooden spools that were popular as furniture around the time Cat Stevens first released “Tea for the Tillerman.” What made this one more than simply anachronistic was that it still had cable wrapped around it. To my amazement, Vinnie produced two heavy white ceramic bowls. They looked as if they had been excavated from an archaeological dig at the site of a mid-depression era diner, but they served well as receptacles for cold noodles with sesame sauce.

  We ate the other dishes, my spicy eggplant in garlic sauce and Vinnie’s roast pork in roast pork sauce without vegetables, out of the paper containers.

  I had brought along two copies of the end of my scene in The Cincinnati Kid, a dialogue between my character and Chance Folsom’s character that takes place just after the poker game breaks up.

  Between bites, Vinnie and I read the lines aloud.

  It didn’t take long to admit that the exercise wasn’t going to help me much. It was no fault of Vinnie’s. If you could say one thing about Vinnie Strings, it was that he tried hard Vinnie had even affected a Southern accent while he read, having noticed somewhere in the script that the Slade character was from New Orleans. It was like having a conversation with Jimmy Carter on tranquilizers.

  But that wasn’t it, either. I was simply preoccupied.

  “What’s wrong, Jake? You look preoccupied.”

  I really didn’t want to get into it with Vinnie.

  “Nothing, Vin, I’m fine.”

  “Listen, we don’t have to go to the card game if you’re not feeling up to it.”

  “It’s okay. I could use the schooling.”

  “There’s nothing hard about pretending you’re in a poker game. Especially when the cards you get dealt and how you play them are in the script, and you know when the camera is on you and when it’s not.”

  “Maybe it’ll take my mind off this case we’re working on.”

  It had slipped out. And it was all Vinnie needed to hear.

  “You know, Jake, there’s something that’s been bothering me about the case, but I’ve been reluctant to mention it because sometimes I feel that you really don’t want to hear what I think.”

  There was no retreat.

  “Sure I do, Vinnie. What’s bothering you?” I said as sincerely as I could manage, while nervously breaking open a fortune cookie.

  “You’re pretty hung up about what happened to Lefty, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Have you thought about why Lefty was killed?” Vinnie asked. It was a good question.

  And the answer was that I really hadn’t.

  “To close the Chancellor case?” I said, trying to sound intelligent.

  “It doesn’t wash,” said Vinnie. “If Lefty was tried and found guilty, it closes the case. If he’s found innocent, the case stays open, but by then the trail is cold as ice.”

  I’d said that very thing to Lefty.

  “To avoid the possibility of something coming out if Lefty went to trial?” I said.

  “From where? Everyone who might have known something is dead. The judge. Vigoda. And finally Katt. Whoever is behind this sealed up all the cracks. Who could possibly have been a threat in court?”

  I suddenly noticed the small piece of paper that I had been unconsciously playing with while Vinnie had been surprising the hell out of me. It had come from the fortune cookie, which I had since mutilated. I glanced down and read the small text.

  “You can expect to find enlightenment in the most unlikely of places.”

  It was an understatement.

  “Lefty himself,” I said, “Lefty knew something.”

  “That would be my guess,” said Vinnie.

  “What could he know? And if he knew something why wouldn’t he have told Kay Turner or me about it?”

  “I don’t know, Jake,” Vinnie said, “but you know he’d been holding out on you.”

  “I’ll admit he was a bit reticent about mentioning the envelope he was sent into Judge Chancellor’s place to get out of the safe,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But Lefty told me that he didn’t know what it was about, that he never found the envelope.”

  “So, why not mention it from the get-go? It could only have helped his case, suggested a motive for the murder that went beyond a burglar caught in the act.”

  “I don’t know, Strings, why did he hold it back? You tell me.” All of a sudden Vinnie had me hanging on his every word and treating him as if he had the answers to everything.

  “Maybe Lefty did find this envelope,” Vinnie said. “Maybe he was still hoping that it was worth ten thousand dollars to him.”

  “Jesus, Vinnie, I don’t know.”

  “Just a thought, Jake,” said Vinnie. “By the way, I’ve been asking all over town about this Alfred Sisley you asked about, and no one I spoke to ever heard of the guy.”

  My head was pounding so loudly I didn’t hear the phone ring. “Darlene,” Vinnie said, handing me the telephone.

  It was one of those old black jobs with a rotary dial and a handset you could have used for bench presses.

  “Call Lopez. Right away,” she said. />
  Darlene gave me the phone number.

  I called the number. I could hear the commotion on the other end of the line when the call was picked up.

  I waited while Lopez was summoned to the phone.

  “If you’ve been trying to get hold of Freddie Cash, Diamond, stop wasting your time,” Lieutenant Lopez said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m over at his apartment on Frederick Street at this very moment. I’m looking down at his body as we speak. I’m looking directly at the large bullet hole in his chest.”

  Twenty One

  The telephone rang, thankfully waking me from a horrible nightmare.

  I was sitting at a round poker table. I was looking down at the cards in my hand, a full house, aces, and eights. I instinctively checked my back. Finding no one behind me I looked up at the other players around the table. Freddie Cash, Vic Vigoda, Tom Katt, and Lefty Wright.

  “I’ll see your toe and raise you one,” said Vigoda.

  “I’ll call,” said Katt, picking up a cell phone and dialing the DA’s office.

  “I’ll fold,” said Lefty, bending an envelope in two and stuffing it into his pocket.

  The table was covered with twenties and fifties.

  A heard a phone ring. I couldn’t find the phone. I heard a voice.

  “It’s Judge Chancellor, Diamond, answer the damned door.” There was a knock on the door, I called out.

  “Who is it?”

  “Alfred Sisley. Answer the damned phone,” a voice said. I found the phone.

  “Jake, its Darlene. Wake up and get down here quick.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Jeremy Cash is sitting in your office. I found him at the door on Columbus when I got here. I told him that I wasn’t sure when you would be in. He said he would wait.”

  I jumped out of bed, and was at Darlene’s desk in less than twenty minutes.

  I walked through the door into my office. Jeremy Cash sat in the client chair, staring out the window with his hands folded across his lap. Cash looked as out of place there as Sir Laurence Olivier would have looked in an episode of The Honeymooners.

  “Mr. Cash,” I said, coming around my desk to face him.