Counting to Infinity Read online

  COUNTING TO INFINITY

  A Jake Diamond Mystery

  J.L. Abramo

  Copyright © 2004 by Joseph L. Abramo, Inc.

  Second eBook Edition: February 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Counting to Infinity

  About the Author

  Other Titles from Down & Out Books

  Preview from Criminal Element, a crime novel by Eric Beetner

  Preview from Blacky Jaguar Against the Cool Clux Cult by Angel Luis Colón

  Preview from American Static, a crime novel by Tom Pitts

  For my father...Louis Falco Abramo...

  As a general rule,

  people, even the wicked,

  are much more naive and

  simple-hearted than we suppose.

  As we ourselves are, too.

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY,

  THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

  Cast of Characters

  JAKE DIAMOND—a familiar protagonist

  DARLENE ROMAN—Diamond’s indispensable associate

  RALPH BATTLE—a strong arm

  JONATHAN MAXIMILIAN “MAX” LANSDALE—a Chicago nightmare

  RANDOLPH LANSDALE—Max’s brother and former law partner

  HARRISON CHANDLER—a resurrected L.A. detective

  JOE “CLAMS” VONGOLI—a ghost

  JIMMY PIGEON—a fond memory

  SIMON LANSDALE—a mob lawyer, father of Max and Randolph

  WILLIE DOGTAIL—a Native American phenomenon

  TOM ROMANO—a San Francisco private investigator

  ANGELO VERDI—a talkative specialty-foods grocer

  LAURA LOPEZ—a San Francisco homicide detective

  VINNIE STRINGS” STRADIVARIUS—a kid who tries real hard

  JOHN “JOHNNY BOY” CARLUCCI—a San Quentin inmate

  TONY CARLUCCI—a restaurateur, Johnny Boy’s brother

  STAN RIDDLE—a disaster waiting to happen

  RAY BOYLE—a Los Angeles homicide detective

  CARLA ROSARIO—an essential victim

  SALLY FRENCH—Jake’s ex-wife and current best bet

  EDDIE HAND—a Chicago private investigator

  JILL BALLARD—Max Lansdale’s receptionist

  KATHERINE “KIT” CARSON—Jill Ballard’s predecessor

  PHIL COCHRAN—a Chicago newspaper reporter

  MARY FALCO DIAMOND—Jake’s relentless mother

  RICHARD KEARNEY—a retired medical examiner

  JOEY RUSSO—an Italian American businessman

  SONNY “THE CHIN” BADALAMENTI—Russo’s go-to son-in-law

  VITO VENTURA—a connected New York entrepreneur

  PAUL SACCO—a Connecticut casino executive

  CONNIE BADALAMENTI—Russo’s daughter, Sonny’s wife

  ANGELA RUSSO—Joey Russo’s wife

  CARL HAMILTON—a Chicago money launderer

  TUCKER—a hired killer

  JACK LOBIANCO— Max Lansdale’s critical cousin

  ANNA GIANCANA LANSDALE—Max’s disillusioned mother

  TUG MCGRAW—a companionable canine

  Part One

  Flying

  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 two 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’?” Darl
ene 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 nine-one-one?” 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 out 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.”

  “I was really hoping to take you to dinner, Jake.”

  “And I appreciate it, but I’m really pressed for time. I have bingo tonight. Could you give me a little clue as to what this is about?”

  “Have Ralph call me when he knows your ETA, and I’ll see you at O’Hare.”

  “Speaking of Ralph, you can do me a favor. Tell him what a good egg you think I am and how you would like my journey to be a pleasurable experience.”

  Battle stopped yanking at the radiator and was hanging on my every word.

  “Ralph didn’t inconvenience you in any way, did he, Jake?” Lansdale asked, as if he didn’t know.

  If he kept calling me Jake I was going to shoot myself in the foot.


  “Not a bit, Mr. Lansdale,” I said.

  “Let me speak to him.”

  “Sure.”

  I put the gun down on the desk and walked over to hold the receiver to Battle’s ear, closing my eyes and silently praying that he wouldn’t bite my hand off. He greeted Lansdale with reverence and then listened. He knocked his head against the phone to let me know he was through. I returned the phone to Darlene’s desk and asked her if she had a key for the handcuffs.

  Sadly, she did.

  “Okay, Ralph. I’m going to set you free. You’re going to wait for me in the hall and then we can mosey over to Chicago.”

  After getting back up on his simian legs, Battle reached down to scoop the metal balls off the floor and immediately began working them.

  “How about the gun?” he asked.

  Darlene sat at her desk, playing with the .44, making us both edgy.

  “You won’t be needing it, Ralph. I’ll donate it to the Museum of Heavy Artillery,” I said. “How did you ever get it past airport security in the first place?”

  “I didn’t carry it with me,” he said. “I purchased it after I arrived, at San Francisco International.”

  “You bought a firearm at the airport?”

  “You can find anything at the airport if you know where to look.”

  “Great, maybe when we get there you can find me a decent cup of coffee for less than four bucks,” I said. “Wait in the hall, Ralph.”

  Ralph wasn’t happy, but Lansdale had surely reminded him that he wasn’t getting paid to be happy. He walked out into the hall.

  “Wow, I never knew you were so tough, Jake,” Darlene said when he was out.

  “Aw, shucks. It was nothing. Or are you being sarcastic?”

  “Absolutely. You’re a lunatic. How can you even think about taking a trip with that goon?”