by J. L. Abramo
I dropped my unfinished cigarette to the ground, to be picked up and discarded at some later time, and returned to the chill inside. I removed the jacket, grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and I carefully negotiated the stairway. Up. I washed down a couple of Excedrin to ease my aching body—understanding it was like using a Band-Aid to treat a severed limb.
I struggled free of my party clothes and into sweat pants and shirt. There are many good things to say about down comforters which you forget completely when you are not under one. I covered myself to my chin in an urgent attempt to recall the wonders of goose feathers. I used the remote control to start up a Five For Fighting CD and prayed against all odds that the gentle piano would quiet the drum beating in my head. The projection on the ceiling insisted it was twenty-three minutes after six. I promised myself I would figure out how to disable the slideshow as soon as humanly possible. I closed my eyes and begged for sleep.
My prayers were answered for precisely six minutes.
My eyes popped open. I looked up. The lit numbers on the ceiling screamed six twenty-nine. Judging by the sound that woke me I expected to find myself sitting beside Quasimodo atop the cathedral tower, him pulling the rope with one hand and punching me in the side of my head with the other. Another peel of the deafening bell and another sock in the ear and then another. When it happened the fifth time, I realized at last it was the telephone. I struggled to grab the receiver and hit the talk button. It reduced the buzzing in my head by fifty per cent.
“Jake.”
“Darlene?”
“Since when does my name have five syllables?”
“Give me a break, Darlene. I’m not doing very well.”
“I’ll say. I’ve heard myna birds with better diction.”
“Did you call this early to torture me?”
“I called this early because Joey tried calling you and when he couldn’t reach you he called me.”
“I was outside smoking and must have missed the call.”
“Well, I was having a very pleasant dream featuring Hugh Jackman.”
“What’s so special about Hugh Jackman?”
“You’ll never know until you see the X-Men movies.”
“And what is it with grown women dreaming about movie stars?”
“It’s probably a bit like a World War Two G.I. keeping a photo of Betty Grable in his locker or like the picture of Rachel Weisz you keep in your wallet. Are you going to ask why Joey called, or do you want to continue trying to beat the subject of idol worship to death?”
“Why did Joey call?” I asked.
“Tony Carlucci called Joey so Joey called you.”
“I’m having some difficulty putting the two actions together.”
“The way you’re slurring your words makes me wonder if you could manage to put your two hands together,” Darlene said, without a hint of sarcasm. “Call Joey.”
“Are you going back to sleep?”
“Too late for that, Hugh’s gone. I may as well go for my morning run and get ready to go to the office. Pay some bills, stare at a silent telephone, and calculate the odds that you will show up there before noon. Call Joey.”
The line went dead.
Joey was Joseph Vongoli a.k.a. Joey Russo a.k.a. Joey Clams.
From the day I met him, and for the next five years, he was Joey Russo. Nearly a year ago he took a trip to Chicago to save my neck, and while he was at it he avenged the death of his sister and reinstated the family name.
Joey’s father, Louis Vongoli, a.k.a. Louie Clams, was forced out of the Chicago suburb of Cicero, Illinois by the Giancana family in the thirties. Vongoli relocated to San Francisco with his wife and son and he changed his name to Russo for protection against reprisal. When Joey reclaimed the name Vongoli he went from being known as Joey Russo to being known as Joey Clams, vongoli being the Italian word for clams and clams being easier to pronounce for Anglos.
Tony Carlucci was generally a world of trouble.
I called Joey to find out exactly what sort this time.
He picked up the phone after half a ring.
“Joey, what’s up?”
“Jake, you sound like crap.”
I’d managed three words and he already had me pegged.
“Too much Jameson’s last night.”
“Don’t tell me you went Irish pub hopping.”
“It was Ira Fennessy’s idea.”
“You call that an idea?”
“We got together to play cards with Tom Romano and Ira talked us into checking out Celtic landmarks instead.”
“Sorry to hear it. Tony Carlucci woke me up earlier this morning.”
“I heard.”
“Tony needs to speak with you as soon as possible.”
“What did I do this time, leave food on my plate?”
Carlucci ran a restaurant in North Beach where I ate occasionally because his mother was on some kind of mission to fatten me up. Not unlike my own mother’s crusade. If I didn’t clean my plate it caused undue grief. If Tony’s mom was not happy, Tony was not happy.
And when Tony Carlucci was not happy with you, he was a nightmare.
“It’s no joke, Jake. Tony sounded very upset. Don’t ask me what about, he wouldn’t say—but he insisted he had to talk with you right away. He will call at your office at nine and expects you to be there. Be there, Jake.”
Great.
“I certainly will be, Joey.”
“Give me a call as soon as Tony’s done with you.”
Interesting choice of words I thought.
I promised Joey I would call immediately after Tony was done with me and then I painfully negotiated my way across the hall toward the shower.
THREE
Kenny Gerard was nothing if not punctual.
Kenny was never late for work or, for that matter, early.
His work was that of a doorman slash security guard in a high-rise apartment building at Mission and Third. Kenny worked the day shift, seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, five days a week. His work area was limited to the building lobby, the street-front just outside the building entrance, and occasionally the elevator bank if a tenant needed help with shopping packages. Radios, iPods, portable televisions, chats with friends and book reading were all prohibited while on duty. Fraternizing with the tenants was frowned upon—though there were a good number of young woman residents who Kenny would have loved to do some fraternizing with.
Gerard bounced into the lobby at exactly seven on that Thursday morning. The first thing he noticed was that Jim Bingham was absent from his post.
The large duty desk was an L-shaped affair, fronted by a tall counter which hid the desktop and all but the top of the head of a seated person. Kenny often used the cover of the counter to take in a few pages of a graphic novel or to struggle with the Examiner crossword puzzle.
The days were long and boring.
Kenny sometimes thought he might prefer the three to eleven shift, when there was more activity—tenants coming in from their jobs and going out on the town. Women were friendlier in the evenings than they were rushing away in the morning to their workplaces. But Gerard would rather have the day shift than the graveyard. Kenny pitied James Bingham. The poor bastard was stuck with nothing to do and not much to see from eleven at night until he was replaced at seven. And at seven, Bingham was usually standing right at the doorway itching to get away, waiting on Kenny Gerard like a member of a tag team race.
But not this morning.
And Kenny Gerard continued to wonder where Bingham was until he discovered James hidden behind the security desk.
Bingham didn’t look good.
First at the scene were two San Francisco patrol car officers who were closest when the call came in. Murdoch, a rookie, and Winger, a three-year veteran. The pair were affectionately known at the station as the tall skinny kid and whatshisname.
Kenny Gerard thought they appeared to be very young, and he was correc
t.
The two officers looked down at the body, which was stuffed under the desk between the counter and the chair. Only Winger had touched the body, and only long enough to check for pulse. James Bingham’s head sat at an angle to his torso that brought Linda Blair to Kenny Gerard’s mind, though he didn’t mention it.
“Do you think he slipped way underneath the desk and snapped his neck?” Murdoch asked.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Winger answered.
“Who do we call now—the forensic guys, the M.E., or homicide?”
“Call it in as a D.O.A., cause of death unknown,” said Winger. “Let them figure out who the hell to send.”
Darlene Roman did her laps around Buena Vista Park alone.
She missed having Tug McGraw running beside her.
Her best friend Rose and Rose’s husband were taking the kids up to Stinson Beach for a four-day weekend and the two little girls pleaded with ‘Aunt’ Darlene to let Tug go along.
Darlene couldn’t say no because the girls were just too cute and the dog loved the beach. Darlene had joined them for dinner the night before and she left Tug there with them when she left for home, so they could get an early start north in the morning. At the dinner table with Rose, Daniel, and the two girls, Darlene wondered how she would like a family of her own.
She often speculated, but never for very long. There was a lot about being free to be herself she was not willing to give up. Sometimes Darlene felt it could be a selfish reluctance. Most of the time she understood she definitely had it in her to love and comfort and be loyal and be compassionate and passionate, but she was far from ready to have anyone be wholly dependent on her and would never let herself be totally dependent on another.
Meantime, she did have her trusty pooch.
And she did have her fun.
Darlene jogged in place for a minute before skipping up the front stairs and entering her small house opposite Buena Vista Park.
Norman Hall stood across Roosevelt Way in the park and watched as Darlene Roman closed the front door. Norman had been watching her jog around the park nearly every morning for more than a week. Hall sat down on a park bench and he stared at the house. He lit another cigarette and wondered where the dog was.
Sergeant Johnson was having one of his worst days in recent memory and it was not yet eight in the morning.
Things had actually been going downhill since the previous day. His wife had flown to Philadelphia in the afternoon. She was attending a big bash to celebrate her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary on Saturday. Johnson politely declined the invitation to join her. He didn’t get along particularly well with his father-in-law. If he had to describe the man in two words they would be pompous ass. The man never missed the opportunity to insult Johnson, never blew a chance to remind his daughter she could have done a lot better choosing a husband. Johnson’s wife, Amy, came from Pennsylvania aristocracy—and marrying a police officer, the son of a San Francisco welder, was something her father and other members of her self-important dynasty could never understand. Even after the old man’s stroke, nearly eighteen months earlier, when for two months he could hardly speak, he managed somehow to articulate his lack of respect for his son-in-law and his disappointment in Amy for bringing someone so common into the family.
Rocky could only imagine what they all would think if they had known Johnson in his late teens and early twenties, when he ran with the Polk Street Pirates, a gang that plagued the neighborhood with an extended rash of vandalism and petty burglary. But, then again, to these people, being a cop was not all that different from being a thug.
Johnson had seen plenty of ugly things in his sixteen years on the job and sometimes had difficulty seeing the distinction himself, but he always saw a bad cop as the exception and not the rule and did not abide with anyone who preached police corruption was a given. He never saw himself as a knight in shining armor, but he knew when citizens needed protection or sought justice a good cop was their best bet.
And he was a good cop.
Every time Johnson was forced to deal with Amy’s dad he was given grief and the only thing that kept him from tearing the old goat’s head off after another barrage of unveiled insults was the thought of his own father and the pride in his dad’s eyes when Johnson graduated from the police academy after all of the troubled years when Bert Johnson feared his only son might end up on the wrong side of the jail cell bars.
The only ally he had in his wife’s family was Amy’s mother, who apparently cared enough about her daughter to wish her well. But to have to put up with an arrogant jerk-off like her husband for forty years made Amy’s mother a saint or a masochist or both. Johnson felt sorry for the woman, but not sorry enough to join the festivities in the Quaker State.
Amy, of course, was on his side.
She recognized his dilemma. She was very familiar with her father’s rudeness and understood Johnson’s reluctance to subject himself to verbal abuse. Amy Johnson could not insist her husband accompany her to Philadelphia, nor could she ignore her mother’s pleas that Amy be there.
So Johnson stayed at home alone.
And he tried preparing his own dinner after Amy left but he burnt the crap out of it.
He was cajoled into a drink fest with one of the old gang from his Polk Street days and was sick as a dog and couldn’t sleep, especially without Amy there to scold him and then hold him.
After lying in a very hot bath for more than an hour and drinking more than a gallon of water he finally achieved some semblance of sleep.
And less than two hours later the telephone rudely woke him.
Now, before eight in the morning, the sergeant was crowded behind a desk in the lobby of a high-rise apartment house looking down at a dead doorman.
The lobby was a menagerie by now. Police officers escorting tenants from the elevators out to the street, keeping them away from the security desk and the victim, more officers outside interviewing tenants and trying to keep rubber-necking pedestrians moving along the street, crime scene investigators collecting evidence, ambulance personnel waiting for the body.
Dr. Steven Altman, the Medical Examiner, rose from the corpse to stand beside Johnson.
“How did he break his neck?” Johnson asked.
“Someone broke it for him,” Altman said.
“Great.”
“Where is the lovely Lieutenant Lopez?”
“She has the day off.”
“Lucky girl.”
Johnson tried to imagine anything less appealing than attempting to create order out of this chaos.
For an instant, he thought that being in Philadelphia wishing a pretentious old fuck a happy anniversary might be worse. But maybe not.
FOUR
I walked into the office at ten minutes before nine. I looked like a million bucks. Green and wrinkled.
Darlene was sitting at her desk with her head in the morning Examiner. She looked up at me long enough to say, “I’m amazed to see you so soon you look terrible.”
Darlene’s brutal honesty is one of her strong points.
“I’m expecting an important phone call and I’d be foolish to miss it.”
“Are you going to tell me about it,” she asked, giving me another quick glance, “or should I just ignore you?”
“Ignore me. Check back me with me after the call if you’re still interested, and if I haven’t jumped out of the window. Where’s the wonder dog?”
“Obedience school. He wouldn’t finish his spinach.”
I let it go.
“Is there anything worth learning about in the newspaper,” I tried.
“The government doubled the reward on Osama bin Laden to fifty million dollars.”
“What does that tell you?” I asked.
“We should consider moving the office to Kabul.”
Darlene was on a roll.
“Alright,” I said, knowing it was the only way to slow her down. “Tony Carlucci is going to phone and he in
sisted I be here to take the call. I have no idea what it’s about but Joey said it sounded urgent and he strongly recommended I be accessible. So, where’s the dog?”
“At Stinson Beach with my friend Rose and her kids. I’m leaving early today, probably before three. I want to get my run in this afternoon so I can be ready for tonight.”
“Heavy date?”
“Not your concern.”
“I like you better when the dog is around.”
“He’s gone until Sunday, live with it. What time is Carlucci supposed to call?”
“Nine. Sharp.”
Darlene looked up at the wall clock.
“Five, four, three, two, one,” she said.
The telephone rang.
For nearly two years I had been trying to talk Darlene into putting her name up on the door with mine. Time after time she had shown she was as good at this business as I am. She claimed it would overcrowd the opaque windowpane and be a tongue twister when the occasional telephone call came along. I don’t know. I have a sneaking suspicion she kind of likes the quaint role of unsung hero.
Darlene answers phone calls according to her mood. It is a cheery Diamond Investigations, how can we help you? when she’s having a good day.
Otherwise, the list of possibilities is endless.
Diamond Investigations, I hope we can help you.
Diamond Investigations, please let us help you.
Diamond Investigations, no assignment too mundane.
Or one of my favorites in Darlene Roman’s arsenal of endearing salutations: I’m sorry you’ve reached the wrong number.