by J. L. Abramo
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. Just insisted he had to reach you right away, said 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 correct.
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 sister and brother-in-law were taking the kids up to Stinson Beach for a four-day weekend and the two girls pleaded with Aunt Darlene to let Tug go along.
Darlene couldn’t say no because the nieces 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 that 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 prote
ction 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—he burnt the crap out of it.
And 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.
And 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.
And 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 Medial 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 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 phone 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 insisted 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 sister 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.
Knowing as well as I did who was calling at the moment, I half hoped she would say just that. Instead she picked up the receiver and handed it to me without a word.
“Diamond Investigations, Jake Diamond speaking.”
I lack Darlene’s imagination.
“Diamond.”
“Tony, what a pleasant surprise.”
“It’s Benny.”
“Benny? Benny who?”
“Benny Carlucci.”
“Astonishing,” I said. “You sound exactly like Anthony Carlucci, are you related?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Diamond.”
I thought I was being serious.
“Benny is my cousin Guido’s kid,” Tony Carlucci said.
Cousin Guido. Okay.
“What about your cousin Guido’s son Benny, Tony?”
Darlene was biting on the wooden handle of the letter opener, trying to avoid interrupting the conversation with maniacal laughter.
“He was picked up by the cops last night. He’s in jail waiting on an arraignment.”
The fact that someone named Carlucci was involved in something the police might not cotton to was nothing new; the fact that a Carlucci had been caught doing it was uncommon.
“What was he arrested for?” I asked, wondering why in God’s name Tony Carlucci thought it was any of my business.
“For stealing a Coupe de Ville,” Tony said, and after a short but dramatic pause threw in, “and murder.”
“Oh,” I said. Even if I wasn’t hung over and had all of my mental faculties intact, I couldn’t have articulated my feelings any better.
“They found a dead body in the trunk of the Cadillac,” Tony explained, and before I could say a word, if I’d had anything to say, added, “Benny says he didn’t off the guy.”
“Tough break,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Yes, it is,” he agreed.
It was very close to a grunt.
“So what do you think I can do for you, Tony?” I said, with no clue how I could have been foolish enough to ask.
Carlucci told me exactly what he expected me to do.
I telephoned Joey as soon as I could manage to get Tony Carlucci off the line.
Tony had been rambling and the only way I could cut him off was by giving some him ill-advised assurances.
Joey was obviously waiting on my phone call because he answered, “Give me the good news first.”
There was no good news.
“Carlucci wants me to find out who whacked the guy in the trunk,” I said.
“Oh?”
I ran it all by him.
“Does Tony believe Benny did it?” Joey asked, not that it would make much difference.
“I’d say no,” I said. “But Tony seems convinced they’ll hold the kid until a better solution comes up. Tony may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. Tony says the cops like to have a suspect in custody; it eases some of the pressure from the public and the mayor’s office while they’re trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, Benny rots in jail until the actual killer is found. Carlucci wants me to find the real killer.”
“Tony lacks faith in the police department?”
“Tony said, and I quote, the SFPD couldn’t find a hockey puck in a bowl of vanilla ice cream.”
“What did you tell Tony?”
“I told him I would get on it,” I confessed.
“Did you make any guarantees?”
“Did I have a choice? He asked me if he had to worry about it.”
“And?”
“And I told him not to sweat it, or something as inane or insane.”
“What’s your first step?”
“If I was smart, my first step would be into the path of an oncoming streetcar. In lieu of that, I will stroll down to the Vallejo Street Station and see if they’ll let me talk to Benny Carlucci. It’s doubtful, since I never took the Bar Exam. Maybe if I walk in gnawing on a hunk of provolone they’ll believe I’m one of the family. Then I’ll try to see Lopez, though when the Lieutenant senses I’m in the building, and she always can, she does a marvelous job of making herself invisible.”