The Innocents

by Richard Barre

  “And how. I’d almost rather take the rap than admit that I took my mother to see a Sandra Bullock movie.”

  “What’s with the coffee, Jake, Darlene get stuck in Denver? I can’t believe that Chancellor bought it that way,” he went on. “It’s like a guy who just negotiated a minefield getting hit by a bus on the other side. I threw in a hard roll.”

  Angelo Verdi was a master of the non sequitur.

  “Darlene said she was staying the extra day to lick Bruno’s wounds. I’ve been trying not to picture it,” I said, grabbing the deli bag and heading for the door. “What do you think about the Giants and the Athletics in the World Series?”

  “I don’t know if I could handle the excitement,” Angelo Verdi said. “The last time they played each other, in the eighty-nine series, an earthquake postponed game three for ten days. I’m making sausage and peppers for lunch.”

  I was halfway down the hall from the stairwell to the office when I heard the phone begin to ring. I had taken to walking up the two flights to the office lately, partly because I understood the benefit to my cardiovascular system and mostly because the elevator had the knack of absorbing the odors of whoever slept in it the night before. For some indefensible reason I decided to try to catch the phone call.

  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 fig
ure 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

  Here's a preview from Wiley’s Lament by Lono Waiwaiole.

  ONE

  THURSDAY NIGHT

  I picked Seattle because you don’t piss in your own peonies, and because Seattle’s tendency to look down on the rest of us had always rubbed me a little raw.

  That’s the problem with having the Space Needle for a nose—the thing sticks straight up in the air. But to me, Seattle was nothing but a safe-deposit box to which I had the matching keys. Every time I needed some money, I just drove three hours north and picked up a bag or two.

  I got the idea from the evening news. You’ve probably seen the same story—a drug bust hits the airwaves, the first thing the cops do is flash the thousands of dollars they found. I could occasionally use thousands of dollars in those days, so I eventually decided to wage my own little war on drugs.

  Ripping off a drug dealer sounds tougher than it actually is, mostly because I never met one who wanted his money more than his life. It makes perfect sense when you think about it, because money is easy to come by in the drug business and life isn’t.

  I liked midlevel targets, which is why I’d been on the skinny kid in the Seahawks jacket for almost five days without harming a hair on his cornrowed head. The kid was doing all right for himself that night, but he wasn’t doing well enough for me—that’s why I was waiting for his connection to arrive.

  I’m better at waiting than most people, and waiting on the skinny kid in the Seahawks jacket was a piece of cake because he looked right through me every time he glanced in my direction. You hear all the time that appearances can be deceiving, but I don’t know many people who really believe it. It’s amazing how invisible you can get when you mix two weeks without a shower or a shave with an overstuffed shopping cart and a bottle of Mad Dog in a brown paper bag. I was only half a block to the kid’s right, but I could have been on the far side of the moon for all the attention he gave me.

  The Lexus was late that night, so the kid and I were both ready to move well before it appeared. The car rolled to a stop, the window on the passenger side slid down and the kid leaned inside. I pushed my cart in his direction while he did it, using my right hand for the cart and my left to lift the Mad Dog bottle to my mouth. I don’t drink alcohol, so the Mad Dog ran down my chin and collected in my grimy undershirt every time I tipped the bottle.

  I could see the driver watching me idly as I approached, but my target was sitting next to him so I didn’t give the driver much of a look. One of the odd things I had learned about this kind of gig is that you don’t have to count the hired hands as long as you get your gun in the right guy’s ear.

  The kid was trading cash for product, and he and my target were absorbed by the transaction until I was only four or five strides away. They both looked my way at the same time, but the kid was the one who spoke.

  “Get lost, muthafuckah,” he said, but he was turning back to my target before the words were even out of his mouth. I staggered another step or two closer, hurled the bottle at the open window and then tried to beat it to the car. The bottle got there before I did, but not by much. My target saw it coming and ducked, but the kid was just beginning to turn back in my direction when it splattered against the door frame a few inches above his head.

  The kid started to say something, but I hit him in the mouth with a forearm and knocked the words back down his throat.

  He bounced off the door and fell to the pavement, but I kept my eyes on the prize.

  “What the fuck?” someone shouted, but I’m not sure who. All I know for sure is that I grabbed the hand coming out of the window with a gun in it and cracked it against the door frame until the gun fell out. By that time, my .38 was in my left hand and I was jamming it into my target’s closest ear.

  “Everybody chill,” I said quietly.

  I looked at the driver and the kid on the pavement to my left, and they both showed me the palms of their hands. They didn’t look afraid, exactly—the expression in their eyes more closely resembled curiosity than anything else—but they didn’t look ominous, either.

  “Get up,” I said to the kid in the Seahawks jacket. “Bring the gym bag on top of the shopping cart over here.” The kid got up and did as he was told.

  “Get in the backseat,” I said, and that’s what the kid did next.

  “Now put fifteen grand in that bag and throw it out on the sidewalk.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” said the guy wearing my gun in his ear. “Why fifteen grand?”

  “Why not?” I asked, mostly because that answer was shorter than explaining the actual reason. I liked to give the victims something specific to do while I was setting up my departure from the scene.

  “What makes you think we have fifteen grand in here, you fucking idiot?”

  “I don’t much care if you do or you don’t,” I said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You live if you have it, you don’t if you don’t. It makes a lot more difference to you than to me.”

  “You think you can cap all three of us and walk away from it?”

  “I think I can cap you, and I think I don’t give a fuck what happens after that.”

  “You’re fuckin’ insane,” he said.

  “Possibly,” I said, “but I don’t see how that improves your situation.”

  “This is a fuckin’ public street—you can’t stand here and do this kind of shit!”

  “Do you see anything stopping me so far?”

  “How long do you think it’s gonna be before someone calls the cops?”

  “About sixty seconds,” I said. “The cops are the reason you’re gonna drive off and leave me standing here.”

  My target swiveled his head slightly to improve his view of me, and I swiveled my .38 right with him. His eyes were cold and lifeless, just like mine, but he smelled a lot better than I did.

  “You are so fuckin’ dead it’s not even funny,” he said finally.

  “I know,” I said. “The only question here is how dead you want to be.”

  “Give it to him,” he said, his frigid eyes still locked on mine.

  The kid reached down behind the driver’s seat and picked up a dark brown satchel. The satchel was open, and I could see the cash inside it from my vantage point outside the door.

  “What am I supposed to do?” the kid asked. “Count this shit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Think you can tell by the weight?”

  “What?”

  “Start with the hundreds,” I said. “Then you only have to count to ten fifteen times.”

  The kid looked at my target for directions, but my target was still looking at me. “Tell the kid to get started,” I said.

  “Do it,” my target said, and the kid started shuffling through the satchel.

  “Now pick up your phone,” I said to my target, adding a little pressure to the gun in his ear for emphasis. “And make sure it’s the phone—you don’t wanna come this far and still not make it.”

  My target reached carefully between the front seats and produced a phone.

  “Dial nine-one-one,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Dial nine-one-one.”

  He punched the buttons and slowly extended the phone in my direction. I took it with my right hand and sent another
little reminder into his ear with my left.

  “I need to report a shooting across from that museum on First,” I said into the phone. “Send an ambulance—it looks like there’s at least one man down.”

  “I can’t see the cross street,” I said when the operator asked for that information. “How many museums do you have on this fuckin’ street? It’s the one with that piece of shit tin man out in front.”

  I cut the connection and tossed the phone into my shopping cart. “Do you think they’ll find us?” I asked.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” my target asked.

  “Why? Does it make a difference somehow?”

  “There ain’t enough hundreds in here,” the kid said from the backseat at about the same time as the sound of the first siren reached us.

  “How many were there?” I asked.

  “Seventy-six,” he said.

  “And a big parade,” I said.

  “What?”

  “‘The Music Man,’“ I said as the second siren horned in on the first. “We’ve got the seventy-six trombones, and here comes the big parade.”

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” the kid said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “You folks better be going. Just dump the rest of the cash into my bag and toss it out here.”

  The kid followed my instructions, so I tried my luck with his boss. “You can drive away from this gun in your ear whenever you’re ready,” I said. “If you don’t get stupid on the way, you won’t lose anything but money tonight.”

  “Let’s go,” he said to his driver, but his eyes were still fixed on mine. The driver did as he was told, even though he had to cut off a taxi to do it. My target finally turned away from me as the Lexus moved to the left lane, and after a block it turned uphill and out of sight.

  I picked up my gym bag, dropped the .38 inside and closed the zipper. By the time the ambulance and the cops hit First, I was through the door of The Lusty Lady. I had paid Gladys in advance, so she led me past all the naked girls in the fantasy booths and let me out on the fire escape.