Chasing Charlie Chan - Special Edition: Includes Catching Water in a Net

by J. L. Abramo

  As I fumbled for my keys the deli bag dropped to the floor, landing neatly in a standing position.

  I managed to get the door unlocked and grabbed the receiver of Darlene’s desk phone in the middle of what may have been the fifth ring.

  I had intended to greet the first caller of the month with the standard salutation, “Diamond Investigation, Jake Diamond speaking,” but he didn’t let me get the words out.

  “Is this Jake Diamond?”

  “Diamond Investigation, Jake Diamond speaking,” I said. Give me a chance to slip it in and I will.

  “This is Lefty Wright. You can call me Al,”

  “What can I do for you, Al?”

  “Find out who really killed Judge Chancellor,” he said.

  The conversation consisted of a good amount of incoherent babbling on his side and exhortations to calm down from my end. If Lefty hadn’t mentioned the name Sam Chambers in the midst of his jabber I would have done the smart thing.

  I would have vehemently insisted he locate a good lawyer. And fast.

  Sam Chambers was an old buddy and fellow movie bit-player currently residing at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo on an armed-robbery conviction. To say that any friend of Sam’s was a friend of mine might be stretching it, but the mention of Sam as a personal reference did warrant my consideration.

  From what I could get out of Lefty on the telephone, he had helped Sam out of a tight spot at the Men’s Colony a few days before Wright was released. Another inmate had provoked Sam into an altercation, which didn’t take much, and the guards were on both of them within seconds. They were about to shackle the two for a trip to solitary when Lefty called one of the guards over and whispered into his ear. The guard let Sam and the other convict off with a warning.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked Lefty.

  “I told him he could have my autographed Mo Vaughn poster when I left.”

  In return for the assist, Sam offered Lefty the only thing he really had to give: the green light to call me if Wright was ever in a jam himself. It didn’t take long.

  I told Al that I would be down to see him at Vallejo Street as soon as I could, since we were getting nowhere on the phone.

  I placed the receiver down, my impression being that Lefty Wright was innocent. The notion wasn’t based on what he had said, most of which was unintelligible, but in the way he had sounded. The kid was clearly frightened to death. One of the things I have learned in this business, and in my personal experience as well, is that it’s a lot scarier being accused of murder when you’re not guilty.

  It was at that point in my presumptive analysis that I remembered the coffee in the fallen paper bag, started toward the hall to pick it up and saw the dark brown liquid seeping into the office from under the door. Then I noticed the doorknob turning and instinctively ducked behind Darlene’s desk.

  “Sorry about that, Jake. Not a great place to leave your break-fast,” said Vinnie Stradivarius, tracking in Italian roast and talking through a mouthful of buttered hard roll. “Luckily this bread didn’t get too soggy.”

  “Glad to hear it, Strings,” I said.

  I moved past Vinnie into the hallway to fetch a mop from the janitor’s closet.

  Vinnie just stood by watching me clean up the mess. I finally accepted that I was going to have to ask.

  “Vinnie.”

  “Yeah, Jake?”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure, Jake. Anything.”

  “Would you run down to the deli and grab a couple of coffees,” I said, as nicely as possible. “And when you get back you can tell me what you’re doing here so early.”

  Seeing Vinnie Strings awake before noon was a rarity.

  “I figured you could use the help, with Darlene not back yet.” Great.

  “Oh,” I said, “well how about just getting the coffee then.”

  Strings looked at me as if I’d asked him to explain the theory of relativity and had warned him not to budge an inch until he did. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill, handed it to him, and watched him skip off toward the elevator.

  “Take the stairs, Strings,” I cautioned.

  I had quasi-employed Vinnie Strings to do odd jobs for me, hoping it would allow him less free time to get into trouble. On top of that, Vinnie hit me up for money so often that I thought I might as well give him the opportunity to earn some of it. It was a rational and noble gesture, but not a very successful one on either count. Since I had inherited Vinnie from my old friend Jimmy Pigeon, I kept trying.

  We sat over coffee for a while, Vinnie doing most of the talking, primarily about his consummate bad luck in picking horses. Like everyone who was hooked on playing the ponies, Vinnie Strings had a system. His was like a sewerage system. I asked him to stay by the phone, write everything down, and not try to solve any mysteries without me.

  Then I headed over to the Vallejo Street Station to talk with Lefty Wright.

  Three

  My mentor, the late Jimmy Pigeon, wisely suggested that before agreeing to accept a case I should always get the question that was nagging me most out of the way as soon as possible.

  “So, let’s see if I have this straight,” I said, “Lefty is your given name and Al is your nickname.”

  “Correct.”

  Great.

  Now I could move on.

  “Okay, you’re going for the Rolex and you trip over the body.”

  “Yeah. And I’m half wondering why his watch is lying there.

  Whoever iced him had to be waiting for him in the room,” Lefty

  Wright said. “The poor bastard didn’t even get his jacket off.”

  “And the knife that killed him?”

  “It came from Chancellor’s kitchen, had the judge’s prints all over it, but the cops are ruling out suicide.”

  “And he was dead for how long?”

  “I’m being told the body was still warm. And that’s the thing. The judge gets home, gets a knife in the chest, and my timing is right on. I’m in the place for less than fifteen minutes and the police are all over me like it was Waco. If that isn’t a setup then Nixon erased the tapes by accident. And the worst part is that I never saw it coming.”“So, who’s the guy who sent you in and how do I find him?”

  “Vic Vigoda, and I’m guessing that finding him is going to be tricky.”

  “Where would you start?” I asked.

  “The way my luck has been going since I dropped off a balcony a few weeks ago, I’d start with the morgue.”

  “You should try being more optimistic.”

  “It’s not in my nature. Look, you don’t have to be Galileo to figure out that someone put Vigoda up to it. Vic could hardly spell his own name. And he’s far from a saint, but he wouldn’t have sent me in if he knew what was under the bed. Someone wanted the judge dead, and an idiot to take the rap. That’s why I called you. Sam Chambers told me that you were skilled at rescuing idiots.”

  “Have you found a lawyer?”

  “I have a lawyer, but she’s not going to do me much good if you can’t give her something to work with.”

  “I don’t remember saying that I would take the case,” I said.

  “Who are you kidding? How could you resist?”

  Lefty Wright was one perceptive felon.

  Back to TOC

  A sample from the second JAKE DIAMOND novel, COUNTING TO INFINITY.

  One

  The scent of deep-fried calamari floated in through my office window like an invitation to triple-bypass surgery. I could almost have tasted the squid if not for the Camel Non-Filter dangling from my lip. I was working the Sunday Examiner crossword, grasping for a four-letter word for Egyptian goddess. I was sure Darlene would know it, but I was being stubborn. It was well after noon on a Sunday and not a single telephone call. I had vowed that I would hold off ordering lunch until my desk telephone rang at least once. The last time I’d tried that, I hadn’t eaten for tw
o days.

  When Darlene called out my name from the front room my heart sank.

  “Use the telephone,” I called back, “while we have one.”

  The phone rang. The blinking button indicated that it was Darlene. I wanted to call in my food order to Angelo at Molinari’s Salumeria two floors below before picking up the interoffice line. I got a grip on myself.

  “Yes, Darlene,” I said.

  “Get out here, Jake, before this gorilla trips over his own shoelaces and blows my head off.”

  The urgency in her voice was convincing.

  I pulled open my desk drawer to fetch my .38 police special. I figured it wouldn’t take much more than two hours to locate it beneath all of the accumulated debris. Near-empty cigarette packages, partial bottles of antacid, books of matches from every dive in San Francisco, long-expired fast-food restaurant discount coupons.

  I closed the drawer.

  Truth was, I hadn’t fired the .38 in so long it would more than likely have exploded in my hand.

  Assuming it even held bullets.

  “I’m on my way,” I said into the phone receiver.

  The line was dead.

  “Jake, I’m losing my nerve,” Darlene shouted.

  “I’m coming,” I called, turning up the volume. I clawed my way out of my desk chair. The springs were so rusted that it sat at a perpetual forty-five-degree angle.

  “With your hands above your head, Diamond.”

  The guy had a voice like a wood chipper.

  I walked through the connecting door and threw my arms into the air. Darlene sat at her desk with her hands together, fingers interlocked, like a kid in Sunday school. The gorilla with the sawmill voice pointed his arm in my direction and I was looking down the barrel of a handgun so long that it could have been used for a tent pole.

  Darlene let out an involuntary sigh when she found herself out of the crosshairs.

  “Sit,” he growled, indicating the client chair with his free hand.

  “You picked the wrong place to come waving that cannon around,” I said.

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  Good question.

  I sat.

  “You okay?” I asked Darlene.

  “Ask me tomorrow,” she said.

  “So,” I said, turning to our first customer of the week at the office of Diamond Investigation, “how can we help you?”

  It was then I noticed his free hand wasn’t exactly free. He was rolling a pair of metal balls the size of large marbles in his left paw. Either he was brushing up on an audition piece for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, or we were in really deep shit.

  “It’s this babe here that you’ll be helping, Diamond,” he grumbled.

  “Did you say ‘babe’?” Darlene hissed.

  “Easy, Darlene, I’m sure that our guest meant it only in the most general way. Please forgive my rudeness,” I said, turning back to the ape, “I haven’t thanked you for dropping in or asked your name.”

  “Here’s the deal, Diamond,” he snarled. “You come with me to talk with the Boss and nothing gruesome happens to the dame. You try anything funny before we get there and she’ll be seeing me again, and she’ll like me a lot less the next time.”

  “I doubt that’s possible,” said Darlene.

  I would have told her to keep quiet but the look on her face scared me more than the barrel of the .44 grazing my chin.

  “Oh, it’s possible. Extremely possible,” he promised.

  It was definitely a good time to intervene.

  “Sure, pal, let’s go see the Boss. Where to?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Put it out of your mind, Kong. It’s the middle of winter. There’s no football, no baseball, and the wind-chill factor is minus infinity. I wouldn’t go to northern Illinois in February if my life depended on it.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, pulling back the hammer of the sidearm.

  “Is the pan-style pizza as good as they say it is?” I said, catching myself checking his shoelaces. “I’m going to need a heavier jacket.”

  “I’ve got just the thing down in the car,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  I began to rise slowly from the chair, placing my hand on the corner of the desk for balance.

  “Darlene,” I said, “what’s a four-letter word for Egyptian goddess?”

  “Isis,” she answered.

  “Well, kick the dog,” I said, trying to make it sound like “Well, I’ll be darned.”

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Well, kick the dog.’”

  “Oh, Jake.”

  “Darlene.”

  She kicked the dog. Tug McGraw yelped and jumped straight up, lifting the desk off the floor. The desk slammed back down, the primate shifted the large gun toward Darlene’s feet, and I grabbed the three-hole punch from the desktop and clocked him. He went down to his knees, the .44 squirted out of his hand and landed on the desk, and I snatched it up by the barrel and whacked him across the head again. He went flat on the floor. The two metal balls spilled out of his hand and rolled across the room.

  I turned the gun around and pointed it his way.

  He wasn’t stirring.

  Darlene was busy apologizing to the mutt.

  “Darlene, do you think you can find something to tie him up with?”

  “I’m sorry, boy, Jake made me do it,” she was saying, stroking the confused canine’s neck with one hand while she reached into her desk drawer with the other.

  “Darlene, please.”

  “Try these,” she said, handing me two pairs of handcuffs.

  I didn’t ask.

  I dragged the body over to the wall radiator, cuffed his arms to a leg of the cast-iron eyesore, and cuffed his feet together around another iron leg for good measure.

  I rifled through his pockets until I found the wallet.

  Then I sat down in the client chair and tried breathing again.

  “Should I call 911?” Darlene asked, finally satisfied that she was forgiven, the dog having planted a half-liter gob of drool on her left cheek.

  “Give me a minute,” I said, placing the gun down and going through the wallet. “Here we go. Ralph T. Battle. This driver’s license photo looks like an illustration in a Jane Goodall book. Twenty-seven forty-one Central Avenue, Cicero, Illinois.”

  “He moved, Jake.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “I just saw him move.”

  I looked over to Battle, who was slowly coming awake. Even as big as he was, I was convinced that he couldn’t budge the radiator.

  Well, fairly convinced.

  I picked up the gun.

  I watched as Battle began to wriggle, then began struggling against his restraints.

  “You’re going to pay for this, Diamond,” he croaked.

  Battle was quickly using up his store of well-worn phrases.

  I decided to pull out a few of my own.

  “Look, Ralph, here’s the deal. If your boss wants to speak with me, all you had to do was ask nice. How about we start over. The Boss doesn’t have to know that we were anything but civil to each other. Let me give him a quick jingle and ask him what he needs.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Glad you got that off your chest, Ralph. I’m not going to Chicago anytime before June. I’m not going to think about how you threatened my associate, because it makes my trigger finger itch. But if you ever refer to her as a babe or a dame again, I’ll let her shoot you. And if you don’t give me a phone number for your employer in thirty seconds, I’m going to show you what assholes San Francisco cops can be.”

  “And you won’t tell Mr. Lansdale that you got the drop on me?”

  Unbelievable.

  I had once asked Jimmy Pigeon what he thought was the most surprising thing about private investigation work. He had answered without hesitation: When you try something stupid and it works.

  “Not a word, Ralph, honest.”

  Battle spit ou
t the ten-digit number.

  “I’m tempted to call collect, Ralph.”

  “Give me a break, Diamond.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  I dialed the number. After three rings it was picked up. It was a woman’s voice. She sounded like a babe.

  “Mr. Lansdale, please.”

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Just joking,” I said, wasting a few more words. “Tell him it’s Jake Diamond.”

  “Hold just a sec, Jake,” she said, stretching my name into two syllables.

  I held.

  Ralph squirmed.

  Darlene fidgeted.

  Tug McGraw disappeared back to his stronghold beneath the desk.

  “Is that calamari frying?” Ralph said.

  “Jesus,” Darlene said.

  “Mr. Diamond,” the tenor voice on the Chicago end of the line said, “it’s good of you to call.”

  “Mr. Battle put it so nicely I could hardly resist. Unfortunately, I’ll have to pass on the invite to the Windy City. I’ve given up air travel for Lent.”

  “How about I come to see you?” Lansdale asked.

  “These telephones are a pretty neat invention, Mr. Lansdale,” I said. “Seems like a pity not to take full advantage of the technology.”

  I was already getting tired of hearing myself speak.

  “I need to talk with you face-to-face, Mr. Diamond. I’ll be happy to come to you if it’s necessary. Or perhaps you might consider giving up bungee jumping instead, just until Easter of course, and hop a jet. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Battle was distracting me with his attempts to tear the radiator out of the wall.

  All I could think of was getting him as far away from Darlene as possible, as soon as conceivable.

  I decided that Chicago would have to do.

  “All right, Mr. Lansdale. I’ll come up there. I’ll meet you in the airport, we’ll chat, and I’ll hop the next jet back.”