The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli
Page 1
For Donald
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Chapter 1 - A Late Night Chat
Chapter 2 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Vamping Valkyrie
Chapter 3 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Quartered Main
Chapter 4 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Un-Tracy-able Underworld
Chapter 5 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Jumping Jax
Chapter 6 - Damian Spinelli and Great Alan’s Ghost
Chapter 7 - Damian Spinelli and Yes, Sometimes It Really IS Brain Surgery
Chapter 8 - Damian Spinelli . . . Back in the USSR
Chapter 9 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Treacherous Teacher
Chapter 10 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Dame Who Knew Too Much
Chapter 11 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Contrived Contralto
Chapter 12 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Muscle-Bound Mama
Chapter 13 - Damian Spinelli and . . . There Are Those Who Enjoy It Uncomfortably Warm
Chapter 14 - Damian Spinelli and the Case of Dante Falconeri, DOA
Chapter 15 - Damian Spinelli . . . MIA
Chapter 16 - Their Man in Caracas . . . and Los Teques . . . and Esmeralda . . . and Damned Near Every Place in Between
The Final Chapter - Damian Spinelli and the Case of the Lady on the Train
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
Publisher’s Note
Roughly one year ago, the following manuscript appeared at our offices in a manila envelope bearing no return address. A note inside read simply “No one fires me and gets away with it. From the files of Ms. High-and-Mighty Diane Miller. Publish it . . . and blow the lid off Port Charles.”
It was the mention of one of New York State’s more infamous cities that got our attention. For years, veteran journalists and cub reporters alike have been searching for ways to infiltrate that warren of iniquity, psychological mayhem, debauchery, and ancestral (potentially incestuous) families residing on gated compounds and private islands.
Now, thanks to one disgruntled employee, we have a glimpse inside the high stone walls and elaborate defense mechanisms of New York’s very own riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. These are the tales, dating, as close as we can guess, from 2009 to 2010, of one man’s nearly superhuman crusade to save, protect, heal, and fight for what is right for the citizens of Port Charles . . . a town not his birthplace, but one he has taken to his heart.
These pages contain only a fraction of the stories found on Ms. Miller’s stolen computer disk; judicious prudence determined what has comprised this volume. We have striven to protect the residents of Port Charles and are also dubious as to exactly what effect the entire collection of tales of derring-do might have on a populace sorely in need of a hero; we do not want either the citizens of Port Charles or Damian Spinelli to be swamped with groupies, stalkers, and fanatics (the city has enough problems).
It is doubtful we will ever see more clues, more insight into the man himself than what Mr. Spinelli and Ms. Miller have, unwittingly, provided us on that disk. To that end, we regard it as something approaching a national treasure; a man like Damian Spinelli comes along very rarely.
And so . . . we ask you to . . .
Enjoy.
Chapter 1
A Late Night Chat
Brusque Lady . . .
Please meet the Jackal at the bar in the Metro Court at 10:00 PM sharp. Although it is somewhat past my his bedtime, he must speak with you on a grave matter concerning many of your clientele. Do not fail me him.
Regards,
The Jackal
I’d been sitting at the tiny table for about an hour, twirling the note around in my fingers and wishing, as the minutes ticked by, that the note was Spinelli’s neck. The cocktail waitress was giving me the evil eye and I didn’t blame her. The look said I had better tip big for taking up a prime seat or I’d never be welcome back at the Metro Court.
I like the Metro Court. Max and I both like it . . . a lot.
Ten minutes and two bowls of cashews later, I’d had enough. I was stashing my tape recorder, notepad, and Uni-ball fine tip into my purse when suddenly I got a tap, hard, on my shoulder.
“Ms. Miller.”
The voice was soft but commanding. I turned to find my panzer tank of a guy standing in a three-piece suit, complete with matching tie and pocket scarf. Classic.
“Hi Max.” I coughed. There are times when the sight of this man still does the strangest things to me. “Why so formal, handsome?”
“I hope I didn’t startle you. I just came by to give you a message from the Jackal.”
“Oh, sweet-Jesus-on-a-popsicle-stick, are you in on these shenanigans too? What’s going on, Max?”
“Mr. Spinelli . . . he apologizes for being late. Said he ran into some trouble on the waterfront, but he’s on his way and asked if I would relay the message to you.”
“Are you working for him too now?”
“Me? Work for Spinelli? Of course not, Diane.”
“So why are you relaying a message from him?”
“Because I’m a nice guy.”
He turned to go, his glutei maximi straining the seams of his Armani slacks.
“Have mercy!” I thought. “Yes . . . yes you are.”
“Max?” I called after him.
He turned around.
“Buy some Häagen-Dazs and warm up the sheets. This shouldn’t take too long.”
“You got it, lamb chop.”
I unpacked my purse, laying the recorder and notepad carefully back on the table, and ordered my third Southern Comfort Manhattan . . . very dry vermouth, up, with a twist. I spent the next few minutes clicking the cap of my Uni-ball and thinking about Max Giambetti’s set of glutes and that getting to squeeze those cantaloupes made me a pretty lucky lady.
Suddenly my reflection in the martini glass dimmed slightly. Before I could look up, a slim figure in a cheap black suit slid into the chair across from me. More precisely, the upper half of a cheap black suit, as I noticed the cargo pants and a bizarre green shoulder sack slung across his sunken chest.
“Most profound apologies, Brusque One. The Jackal is deeply and most assuredly mortified at having kept one so prestigious as you waiting a jot past our appointed time.”
Once I got past the jacket, which hung on him like a wet sheet, I took note of the pencil-thin tie loosely knotted around a tie-dyed crew-neck, and the fedora, which was also cheap but fit him to a tee. Sinatra goes to the skate park.
“Um . . . that’s okay, Spinelli.”
“Jackal, please. Thank you for coming at my request.”
It was only when I spent any length of time with Spinelli alone that I remembered that he talked like an idiot . . . an idiot right out of Dashiell Hammett. And Star Trek . . . with maybe a little Shakespeare thrown in.
“Did you ever find it?” I asked.
“Humble apologies once again . . . I don’t understand. Find what?”
“The Maltese falcon.”
I laughed. Hard. He just smiled and tried to straighten his sad little tie. I got a queasy feeling in my stomach. There was no way Spinelli could afford to buy drinks in this saloon, and I’d just hurt his feelings with a bad joke. Nice, Diane. Nice way to start off.
“Sorry. You just . . . you look . . . great. You look great.”
“I know, and thank you for agreeing to pen my memoirs. I think you’ll find . . .”
“Whoa! Your what? Wait just a second, Spinelli . . .”
“Jackal. Or Grasshopper, if you prefer.”
I took a sip of m
y drink and wondered if a “trip to the ladies’ room” could actually get me out the door.
“Look . . . Jackal. I haven’t agreed to pen anything. I didn’t even know what this meeting was really about.”
I tossed his note across the table.
“I find this under my office door . . . You say you have information of a serious nature about my clients. That’s why I’m here, Spin . . . Jack . . . hop . . . Jackalhopper. Not to write the story of your life . . . as if I even have time . . .”
“The tiniest of interruptions, She Who Stands For Justice . . . This is not the story of my life. These are the stories of my life. And they all involve your clients or those close to them; their actions and behaviors in times of crises and triumph. These are tales of incredible cases . . . episodes . . . actions yearning to be told. While I don’t feel that anything would be of an embarrassing nature to those you know . . . I . . . I . . . I harbor the strongest hope that you will find what I have to say worthy of notation. I’m staking much upon it, in point of fact. I am to embark on a journey upon the morrow from which I may return or I may meet my untimely fate. It is on the chance that I will not return that you must listen to what I have to say tonight.” He ran his forefingers across the brim of his fedora.
I was silent for a moment.
“My clients, you say?”
“And those connected to them in intimate and not-so-intimate relationships.”
Well . . . damned if the skinny kid didn’t have a point.
“Yes, well, I don’t necessarily want or need to know where you’re headed tomorrow morning, but if you have something to say about Sonny . . . or Jason . . . or anyone else for that matter, whether I represent them or not . . . it’s . . . it’s probably best that you do tell it to me. I can afford you attorney/client privilege, thanks to Jason Morgan’s wide-spreading umbrella of protection and Sonny’s generous retainer. But I don’t know about creating a memoir. I don’t have time to turn around, Mr. Grasshopper, let alone . . . Why are you . . . why are you dressed like that?”
His face fell and nearly oozed across the table. I kept forgetting; this guy bruised easily . . . like a banana.
“To what do you refer?”
“Ol’ Blue Eyes meets Tony Hawk. The combination of gangsta and suave, if slightly . . . extra large . . . sophistication?”
“I am not clothed cap-a-pie in any one period . . . this is true and an astute observation on your part, solicitor. But I was attempting to fly under a certain radar tonight, hence the post-Depression togs, and I found that when I had completed the assignment and returned to my base camp . . . some of my clothes had been poached by hoodlums of the night.”
“I’m sorry. The pants, the shirt . . . you look like a regular Joe. But the jacket and the hat say you’ve been watching Sunset Boulevard. A lot. It’s just that it’s so . . . so . . . of a certain period.”
“The era in which I like to think I would have flourished to my fullest potential. The American late 1930s and ’40s. Most of my exploits, which involve your clientele and hence are the reason you are here, as you will see, are, to no credit of my own, almost rotogravure reproductions of the feats of daring and action that dotted that landscape. It’s almost as if the Jackal is channeling Sam Spade!”
I was getting a headache.
“Okay . . . but why me? Why don’t you just write these yourself?”
“My prowess and forte is in the technical arena. Words fly out of my mouth, but when I attempt to put pen to paper, as it were, my fingers go numb and nary a line is written. Also . . .”
Suddenly, a slow sly smile wiggled its way across his chin, and damned if there wasn’t a twinkle in his eye. I chalked that up to the Manhattan, but then the smile broke into a grin, and suddenly I found myself in Wonderland.
“. . . I’ve read your work.”
“My what? What work?”
“Your contributions to the Law Review. Your articles for American Jurisprudence. Law Today. Attorney Style. You write particularly well.”
“Thank you.”
Come to think of it, I had always liked the boy.
“Also,” Spinelli went on, “in many of our brief interactions, I have come to feel as if you also share in my deep appreciation for the noir, yes? The darker side of things. I occasionally hear it in your own patterns of speech. The less than fragrant underbelly of society.”
“I’m a lawyer. A working one, you understand, not just some name on an office shingle. I’ve seen it all. I’m jaded for my years, I’ve lost whatever idealism I once had and I watch Sunset Boulevard. A lot. Patter like this is standard issue. Ask Max.”
The cocktail waitress set down a bowl of potato chips and an orange soda in front of the brother from another planet. And she slammed down another Manhattan for me.
“Thanks, Madison,” said Spinelli.
“ ‘Madison.’ ” I laughed as she sloped away. “Have you noticed that everyone around here has a name you’d only hear on a soap opera? I got off the elevator tonight and Carly brushes by me. Jax was just paying the check and he calls out, ‘Carly, hold the lift!’ And she just giggles and says, ‘I’ll race you up to the penthouse, Jax!’ The elevator doors close, boom, just like that. And Jax dashes out of the stairwell, laughing like he’s going to the circus! And then I realize, I can’t remember: Are they divorced? Are they back together now . . . again? How many times? The back and forth . . . well, of everyone, really. The whole place is a roller coaster, but those two are ridin’ at the front.”
“The Valkyrie and the White Knight.”
Maybe it was the Manhattans . . . or maybe it was the fact that, with that fedora so close I, too, was really mouthing it like Jimmy Cagney . . . but I was starting to get the hang of this guy.
“Yeah.”
“Carly . . . the Valkyrie and her White Knight, Jax . . . are the subjects of my first tale. How the White Knight was taken from his ladylove and she, being the unstoppable warrior maiden of myth, decided to find him. She engaged the Jackal in the quest only to fall madly in love . . . shouldn’t you be writing any of this down?”
I looked at my Uni-ball and my notepad. I looked at my watch and thought about Max and the pint of Vanilla Swiss Almond he was already scooping into. Then I looked at the eager face of Mr. Spinelli aka Jackal aka Grasshopper aka certifiable nut. And yes, there were a thousand different things I should have been doing at that moment. But I uncapped the pen, just in case a thought struck me, positioned the notepad, and hit the “record” button on the tape recorder. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“What the hell, Mr. Jackal . . . talk to me.”
Chapter 2
Damian Spinelli
and the Case of the Vamping Valkyrie
I had just walked back into the offices of Spinelli/McCall, P.I. The corned beef on date-nut bread with sweet pickles and extra mayo was sittin’ heavier than usual in my tummy . . .
“Tummy?” I interrupted.
“You object?”
“Not if you’re a fourth-grader.”
“But I always refer to my gaping maw as my tummy,” Spinelli said.
“How far could this guy’s face fall?” I wondered.
“If you’re gonna do this,” I said, getting into the feel of the memoirs, “then do it right.”
“I bow to your intellectual magnificence.”
“You bet you do. ‘Gullet.’ ”
“Oh, Ms. Miller! That’s sheer . . .”
“Whatever.”
“Uh . . .”
. . . sittin’ heavier that usual in my gullet. I chalked up the ringin’ in my ears to the six orange Nehis. Too much sugar for an already sweet guy. Then the ringin’ became a five-chime train whistle on a diesel headed straight for my head.
“ ‘Cabeza,’ ” I said.
“Right, ‘cabeza.’ ”
. . . I realized the phone was ringin’. I picked it up, but the call had already gone to voice mail. A good thing, too . . . because if I had actually heard her
voice, I wouldn’t have been able to say no. Ultimately, I didn’t say no anyway, I just wouldn’t have said it a lot sooner. I tossed my hat onto the hat rack, un-holstered my rod, put my feet up on the desk, and hit a button on my cell. “Listen to your messages,” the nice lady said. “Yes, I will, Gladys,” I thought. One new call. It had to be from a minute ago. I had only heard the first few frightened words when, from the sound of shatterin’ glass, the outer office door blew off its hinges.
I grabbed my heater, levelin’ it at my private office door. A silhouette loomed large in the yellow light from the hallway.
“Stone Cold? That you?” I called. “Timmy Two-Fingers? Mister Sir? Joey the Squirrel?”
Suddenly, the silhouette shook its hair. I mean a mane-full, and I realized this was no guy . . . no regular guy, anyway.
“You can come in, but just know that you won’t be talkin’ only to me; I got my best friend here.” I patted my gun.
She opened the door and walked in. Blue eyes the color of billiard chalk and blonde hair so bouncy I wanted to jump all over it. She had legs that could cause a heart attack in a caribou, and they went all the way up under her mink mini-jacket. At least, I hoped they did.
“That’s good,” she said, wipin’ away a tear. “Because I need a friend right now myself.”
Carly Corinthos Jacks was standin’ in my office. She lifted one leg onto a chair and set it down like she was stampin’ out a ciggie.
“I called a minute ago, but there was no answer, so I decided to take my chances and come on by. I told myself I’d wait all night if I had to. Got a light?” she purred.
I went all tapioca inside, but kept the outside cool. In the day-to-day world, this woman wouldn’t speak to me in the supermarket, she wouldn’t stand five feet from me in any direction . . . but now she wanted my help. They all wanted my help. Sooner or later. I had the upper hand.