Clutching at Straws

by J. L. Abramo

  “I’ve got it confirmed a number of ways. As you said yourself, Lefty Wright had to have a reason to go into the house if the money was outside. I don’t believe he went in to kill the judge, so it had to be to hit the safe. Chancellor’s law clerk saw an envelope matching the description that was given to Lefty, Katt searched the judge’s cabin in Mill Valley, and someone turned Chancellor’s office upside down. On top of that, Judge Chancellor mentioned something about a document that had come into his hands and he wanted it explored.”

  “Mentioned to whom? Explored by whom?”

  “I can’t say,” I said, keeping Carlucci out of the conversation.

  “Incriminating whom?”

  “I don’t know. Charlie Mancuso?”

  “Not too helpful, Diamond,” Lopez said.

  “I’m trying my best, Lieutenant. Freddie Cash was in to Mancuso for some hefty gambling debts. That might explain the twenties and fifties going around.”

  “So, let me see if I follow. You think that Freddie Cash paid off Mancuso with the ransom money. Charlie paid Katt to lift the gun from evidence holding, get an envelope from the judge’s safe, and frame Lefty. Then Bones killed everyone who could tie him to the judge’s death, the ransom money, and the stolen gun.”

  “Isn’t that what you think, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “I’m not entirely convinced.”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “There’s nothing more you can tell me about the envelope?” she said.

  “I think it had to do with someone that the judge was searching for. That’s the best I can do.”

  “That’s worthless information, Diamond. No offense.”

  “What is it about Mancuso as the lone assassin that you’re having trouble with?”

  “Tell me your doubts and I’ll tell you mine, Diamond.”

  “What makes you think I have any?” I said.

  “What happened to give and take, Jake?”

  “I’ve told you all I know, Lieutenant. Scout’s honor.”

  “You want to know what doesn’t work for me, Diamond? I’ll give you a hint. I can’t decide if Charlie Bones is very smart or real stupid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it,” she said, “and don’t let the door hit you on your way out.”

  I left it open.

  I walked back to my office. The note taped to the inside of the door informed me that L. L. Bruno had dropped by to take Darlene and McGraw out for lunch.

  I went back to my desk. I determined that Angelo was deep-frying calamari for his lunch special. I turned on the pole fan and aimed it at my desk toward the window.

  I lit a cigarette and I thought about it.

  Charlie Bones was either very smart or very stupid.

  He was either smart enough to work out an intricate plan. A plan to make the gun he used on his brother-in-law disappear, beat the murder rap, eliminate any threat Chancellor may have posed, silence everyone who could finger him, and all with cash that would be difficult if not impossible to trace back to him.

  Or he was stupid enough to use the same gun he used on Mike Flanagan to kill Freddie Cash.

  Either way, Mancuso was in the soup. If the weapon surfaced, even if he didn’t use it to kill Freddie, it nailed him on the Flanagan murder. Mancuso had good reason to make himself scarce. There was really nothing he could say in his defense. He’d have to stay silent and invisible and take the credit for all five murders.

  And I was at the point where all I could do was give him all the credit.

  Twenty Six

  Over the next two days, a few jobs actually came through the door of Diamond Investigation.

  On Thursday, I helped the owner of a busy luncheonette on Market Street discover who was stealing him blind at the cash register. One of his cashiers had been under-ringing sales and walking out with fifty to seventy-five bucks in his pocket every afternoon. I watched the kid for a while from a table near the register. He was jotting numbers on a small slip of paper, keeping track of the money he was putting in but not ringing up. I told the owner to pull the register in the middle of the kid’s shift and cash it out. The drawer held almost sixty dollars more than the register tape could account for. I sat down to a complimentary breakfast the next morning, watching the owner as he hung a Help Wanted sign in the window.

  Later on Friday, I was looking down at an alternator from a 1999 Pontiac Grand Am that was sitting in the middle of my desk. The client suspected that his mechanic had charged him two hundred dollars for replacing a part that had never been replaced. He claimed that the greasy thing on my desk, which the mechanic claimed was the dead alternator he had removed, wasn’t from his car. God only knows what could possibly have made him think such a thing. He had called the police and was told he would have to come up with something more than a hunch before they would investigate. I called Vinnie Strings. Vinnie was positive that the alternator on the desk came out of a 1995 Bonneville. Then he followed my client down to the street. Vinnie crawled underneath the Trans Am and asserted, without doubt, that the alternator on the vehicle was a factory-installed part. I assured the client that the cops could take it from there. He picked up the alternator and left for the police station.

  Diamond Investigation was on a roll. A two-for-two streak. Not much to beef up the memoirs, but it was always good to solve a few.

  And it paid the bills.

  Charlie Bones hadn’t surfaced. He was now officially wanted by the SFPD for questioning in the murder of Freddie Cash. Mancuso apparently had nothing he cared to say about it.

  On Saturday morning, an article in the Examiner attempted to tie together five killings that had raised the city’s homicide statistics through the roof over the preceding three weeks.

  Charlie Mancuso’s Cadillac had been found in the long-term parking lot at San Francisco International Airport.

  Sitting on the front seat was the gun that had killed both Mike Flanagan and Freddie Cash.

  A gun registered to Charlie Mancuso, which for a short time had resided in the evidence holding room at Vallejo Street Station.

  As the Governor may have put it, it was quite a stroke of luck that Charlie Bones had carelessly left such damning evidence behind before flying off into the sunset.

  Bones could hardly have been more helpful, short of leaving a signed confession.

  Or a nine-by-twelve manila envelope.

  Or a street address on Alfred Sisley.

  The hunt for Charlie Mancuso was in full swing and would continue.

  Meanwhile, the state would be indicting Mancuso in absentia. The DA’s office announced that they would proceed, sparing no resource and no expense, to present a criminal case that would guarantee the conviction of Charlie Mancuso for the murder of Judge J. Andrew Chancellor, and five others, whether Mancuso showed up for the trial or not.

  It was all quite sensational.

  The excitement surrounding the successful resolution of the multiple murder case didn’t quite capture me. The news didn’t make my day.

  The word anticlimactic came to mind

  I entertained the possibility that it was disappointment, or jealousy, that I hadn’t broken the case myself.

  I decided that wasn’t it.

  And I have to admit I was more thrilled by the fact that the Mets and the Yankees would be starting the World Series in New York that evening.

  I was having difficulty deciding where to watch the game. Life is full of tough choices.

  Vinnie had invited me to watch game one at the Finnish Line on the big screen. He said he would buy the pizza, though he didn’t say whose money he’d be using.

  Joey asked me to join him and Sonny at the Russo house. His wife, Angela, was making stuffed manicotti, and there was a case of Sam Adams on ice.

  Darlene said I was welcome to attend a World Series party with her boyfriend and some of his sports buddies. She said that Jerry Rice would definitely be there, and maybe Barry Bonds.

/>   Of course my mother, one of the most vocal Met fans west of the Mississippi, begged me to drive out to Pleasant Hill for the broadcast. She enticed me with the promise of her famous homemade eggnog, which glided down the throat like silk and could take the paint off an automobile hood.

  The most tempting invitation came from Sally. She told me that if we watched the game together at the house in the Presidio and the Mets lost, she would do anything she could do to make me feel better. The thought nearly had me wishing for a Yankee victory.

  In the end, I accepted an offer that I couldn’t refuse. Tony Carlucci phoned and asked me to meet him at the restaurant at seven, as a personal favor to his brother John.

  “Just say yes,” Tony recommended, before I could get in a word about baseball. “My brother won’t forget it.”

  I knew without having to check in with Joey Russo that if I said no, Johnny Boy Carlucci would really not forget it.

  I told Tony to expect me at eight, he told me to bring my appetite.

  When I arrived at Carlucci’s, Tony greeted me at the bar with a menu in his hand.

  “Whatever you want, Diamond, on the house. What are you drinking?”

  “That’s not necessary, Tony,” I said.

  “I insist, Diamond,” he said. “My mother will box my ears if you don’t eat.”

  Just then Mama Carlucci herself rushed up and gave me a bear hug. When I enthusiastically requested the linguini with mussels in marinara sauce, the woman was beaming. She rushed off to greet a new group of guests.

  Tony had the bartender pour me a bourbon; he put in my food order and asked me to follow him to the back of the restaurant.

  “Sit, relax,” he said, indicating the sofa in his office.

  I sat. I looked around the room. There was a small TV on a wall shelf over Carlucci’s desk. The game was scheduled to start in fifteen minutes. I wondered if it would be totally inappropriate to ask him to switch it on. Tony sat at the desk, looking up at me occasionally with a manufactured smile. Otherwise, he kept glancing back and forth between his wristwatch and the other door in the room, which I guessed connected to the side alley, as if he were waiting for Godot, or Santa Claus, or both. I couldn’t have been less comfortable or more apprehensive if I had a daughter and she was just about to be married to a divorce lawyer. A light tapping on the alley door came just in time to keep both Carlucci and me from suffocating due to lack of exhalation.

  Carlucci jumped up and over to the door, opened it quickly and let in a tall well-dressed man. The man had thick, wavy jet-black hair. He was movie-star handsome. He greeted Tony with a slap on the back and then immediately turned his attention to me. He walked up to the sofa, unthreateningly, and extended his hand. I rose and accepted the handshake.

  “Charlie Mancuso,” he said. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Diamond.”

  “Sure,” I said, wishing I were anywhere else.

  “I’ll go check on the food,” said Carlucci, “and leave you two to talk.”

  “Why don’t you put the linguini on hold for the moment, Tony,” I said, “maybe send in another bourbon.”

  “No problem, Jake,” he said. “Charlie?”

  “Just some ice water, thanks, Tony,” said Mancuso.

  And then we were alone in the room.

  “Mr. Diamond, what would you do if someone beat your sister so badly that she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair?”

  It was a challenging question, one that I would have had trouble with even if I had a sister.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what Mike Flanagan did to my sister. I confronted Flanagan, one thing led to another, and I shot the sick bastard. When the police stormed into my home to arrest me, terrifying my wife and my three children, they found the gun that killed him. And that was the last time I ever saw that weapon. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A police officer named Katt approached me before my trial. He said he had the gun in his possession and would be willing to turn it over to me for a price. I told him that I wasn’t interested,” Charlie Bones said. “I wouldn’t pay the price.”

  “Which was?”

  “Katt wanted someone muscled for information and silence. He never said who.”

  “Did Katt say he wanted you to kill someone?”

  “No, only that he wanted the fear of death clearly stated and understood. I’m not a hired gun, Mr. Diamond. I never killed anyone before or after Flanagan and then I couldn’t help myself. My lawyers seemed confident that when they rolled my sister into the courtroom the jury might have understood my motivation somewhat. But then when the weapon went missing, the case against me was dropped. So I chalked it up to unbelievable luck and forgot about it. Until I learned that I was wanted for killing the Cash kid, Judge Chancellor, and I can’t even remember who else.”

  “What about the money Freddie owed you, what about the ransom money?”

  “I don’t know about any ransom money, and I never collected from Freddie. I never really pressed him for it. I just told him that he couldn’t bet anymore until he squared up. I’m no leg breaker, at least not over a couple of grand.”

  “Freddie Cash owed you two thousand dollars?” I said.

  “I can’t even remember, twenty-two, twenty-three hundred tops.”

  “Word on the street was that Freddie was in to you for a hundred thousand.”

  “Absolutely false,” said Mancuso. “I would never let a kid like that get in so deep.”

  There was a knock on the office door. Tony Carlucci walked in, handed me a glass of bourbon and Mancuso a glass of ice water, and quickly vanished again.

  “What about your car? They found the gun that killed Flanagan and Freddie Cash in your Cadillac.”

  “I don’t know how the Caddy got to the airport. I certainly didn’t leave it there. I had a few things to take care of before I disappeared.”

  “And you have no idea who set you up?” I asked.

  “Aside from Katt, none. But whoever did, did a fine job.”

  “And you know nothing about a brown manila envelope?”

  “No clue,” said Charlie Mancuso.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Who else could I tell? I can’t see that the police would be too interested in my sad tale. My wife believes me, thank God. I talked to John Carlucci on the phone from Quentin; I asked him if he knew of anyone who would care. He said that he thought you would.”

  “I don’t know that there’s anything I can do to help you,” I said.

  “But you would if you could. Johnny Boy told me about how you went to bat for the Wright kid, and how hot you were to find out who ran him over. I thought that you should know that it wasn’t me. Maybe it’s selfish of me. Maybe I’m thinking that with you back on the case there’s an outside chance it might indirectly help my cause. In any event, there it is, now it’s out there.”

  “Like the knowledge it took to invent the radio,” I said.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “I wish I had the slightest idea where to begin.”

  “I’d better get going, I’ve got a ride out of town waiting. Way out of town, Good luck,” Mancuso said, extending an open hand. I took his hand and looked into his eyes.

  I knew that everything he had told me was the truth. “Good luck to you,” I said.

  “Isn’t the series on tonight?” Mancuso said, switching on the television.

  I watched him slip out the alley door and then looked up at the TV screen. The Yankees were ahead. I thought about Sally’s offer. I used the office phone to call her.

  I’d lost my appetite.

  Fortunately, Mama Carlucci had left for the evening. I thanked Carlucci for the drinks, apologized for passing on the food, and begged him to tell his mother that I had thoroughly enjoyed my meal.

  Th
at night, Sally did help me get over the Mets’ twelve-inning game one loss to the Yankees. More than that, she helped me put Lefty Wright and Charlie Mancuso temporarily out of mind.

  The next morning, Sally and I slept late. We spent the morning with pancakes, French roast, and the Sunday Examiner. We took in a movie matinee. Chance Folsom had a short scene in the film, battling with sword and chain in the Roman Coliseum. I couldn’t take my eyes off him while he was on-screen.

  We had dinner at Thanh Long, a Vietnamese restaurant on Judah in the Sunset. We talked about Sally’s new job, set to begin the next day. We talked about planning a trip down to San Diego one weekend, soon. We talked about ways to avoid anything to do with Halloween.

  There was no talk of murder and deception.

  After dinner we returned to Sally’s house and watched the Mets lose game two. I somehow found the courage to leave and spend the night at home alone.

  I read Dumas for a while before I turned in.

  Dantes had located Caderousse, a former neighbor who had conspired to ruin Edmond for reasons of pure envy. Disguised as an Abbe, Dantes gives his enemy a priceless diamond. Caderousse’s greed inspires him to kill a jeweler and then murder his own wife; so as to keep the treasure for himself. His actions lead to his own doom, which was exactly Edmond’s intention.

  Edmond Dantes had a knack for dealing out retribution to the guilty.

  The advantage Dantes had over me was that he knew who the guilty were.

  Twenty Seven

  Call it faith, stubbornness, or the lack of sense to say no. In any case, invest enough in what appears to be a hopeless cause, occasionally the long shot comes in.

  When I walked in to the office Monday morning, I was greeted with a wet nudge from Tug McGraw. I opted to believe that it was an affectionate gesture, which surprised me, since the dog had barely acknowledged my existence since the day I rescued him from Katt’s apartment more than a week earlier. I looked up at Darlene and could see by the expression on her face that there were bigger surprises to come.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Vinnie is waiting back in your office,” she said.