Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels Read online

  “Yeah, yeah.” Ross’ face split into a Howdy Doody grin. “That’s what the hero always says, right before he runs off with the money and the girl.”

  Angie slammed the trunk. “It’s not like we’re going away empty-handed. We’ve got all this evidence to get rid of.”

  “Any dumpster will do,” Tony said.

  “We’ll keep the guns,” Ross said. “Long as we have those, we’ll never go hungry.”

  Chapter 2

  Nick Papadopoulos couldn’t concentrate on what Lola was saying. A fluorescent light above their corner booth was dying, and the buzzing and flickering drove him crazy.

  The whole damned casino was falling apart. The interior hadn’t been updated since the Starlite was built forty years earlier, and it still looked like something out of “The Jetsons.” Contoured booths and lollipop chairs and light fixtures shaped like Sputnik. All very cool in the days when Rat Packers in sharkskin suits stopped in Fowler, Nevada, for “one night only” shows on their way to Las Vegas, but dated as hell now.

  The Starlite already felt like a retirement home for astronauts when Nick took over as managing partner eight years earlier. Since then, he never got far enough ahead to pump any money into renovations. Just limped along, year after year, while his more up-to-date competitors siphoned the traffic off Highway 95.

  You’d think any damned fool could make money running a small-town casino, but profits were eaten up by repairs and taxes and payroll and payoffs and the percentage raked off by the Mob. Nick could make more dough (and suffer less indigestion) in some other kind of business, but how would he tell Roberto “Bobby Crabs” Calabrese he no longer wanted to be his front man?

  Nick suspected that Bobby had known the Starlite was a dud when he offered the partnership as payment for services rendered. Nick had eliminated several protected rivals for Bobby, so the mob boss could step up. After he was comfortably in place as a capo, Bobby suggested the time had come for Nick to pursue another line of work. The Starlite’s manager having recently met his unfortunate demise (thanks to Nick), Fowler seemed the perfect place to start a new life. Bobby had insisted that a share of the Starlite was a better long-term investment than a simple cash payment, and even a tough guy like Nick Papadopoulos had known better than to argue with Bobby Crabs.

  Looking around the outdated casino now, though, Nick thought: I should’ve demanded the fucking cash.

  “Nicky!” Lola’s voice sliced through his recollections. “You’re not even listening to me.”

  “Sorry, hon. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  She was moving into a full pout. Christ, she had the lips for it. Nick wondered once again about the transplanted fat pumped into those lips. Every time he kissed her, he had the niggling feeling he was smooching someone’s ass.

  Lola admitted having “some” work done, but she wouldn’t reveal details of her plastic surgeries. In the bedroom, she kept the lights low. Like it mattered. Whenever they were in bed together, Nick wasn’t hunting for microscopic scars. That would’ve been quibbling.

  Lola Cantrell had the face of a co-ed (granted, one who was awfully fond of cosmetics) and the curvy body of a stripper, tucked and inflated in all the right places. She was pushing forty, but she remained as firm and ripe as a fresh grape.

  Nick, meanwhile, was speeding through his fifties, going to flab, silver sprinkled through his thinning black hair, his face etched with worry. Sometimes he could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his temples, like he was listening for it to stop. He should be taking it easy, putting together his retirement portfolio, pursuing a mindless hobby. Instead, he’s sitting in the Starlite Casino at midnight, smoking Winstons and drinking whiskey, listening to this blow-up doll give him grief.

  “Clearly, you don’t want me around, Nicky. You don’t want to take me to Frisco and you don’t want to listen to me. Maybe I should just go home.”

  She gathered up her tiny purse, taking her time, waiting for Nick to stop her. They’d been seeing each other for seven months, and he knew how her mind worked. He was supposed to apologize and promise to do better. Cave in and agree to take her with him to the trade show in San Francisco. If he did, all would be forgiven. She’d go home with him tonight and reward him with that sculpted body, maybe a blowjob from those pneumatic lips.

  Nick didn’t move. He didn’t want to take Lola to the trade show. He needed to go alone, and focus on business. And he didn’t particularly want to take her home with him tonight. He needed sleep.

  Lola pressed her lips together, frustrated. She was used to getting her way, every time, by tossing her blond mane and batting her eyelashes. Nick liked to screw with her expectations. It kept her on her toes.

  Then she looked past him, at someone approaching, and her green eyes widened. Nick’s neck tingled and his senses went to full alert, but he didn’t move as a shadow fell across their table.

  “There’s old Nick!” the intruder brayed. “How you doing, boy?”

  Nick winced. Last thing he needed tonight. He pasted a smile on his face as he looked up at Big Jim Kelton.

  Kelton stood well over six feet, and his ever-present cowboy hat made him seem even taller. He wore a Western-cut suit in a shiny brown polyester that complemented his pointed boots. A fancy rodeo buckle hung on the front of his paunch like a hood ornament, right at Nick’s eye level.

  “Kinda late for you to be out, isn’t it, Jim?”

  “I’m on my way home,” Kelton said. “Shamu and I like to stop by once in a while, check out our competition.”

  Kelton’s sidekick loomed behind him, a brick wall wearing a black-and-white bowling shirt, black slacks and black tribal tattoos on his thick arms. His brown feet were bare, as usual. Big Jim had to search hard for a bodyguard even bigger than himself, but he’d found his man in Shamu, a double-wide Polynesian who went nearly four hundred pounds.

  Word around Fowler was that Shamu liked to bite. He’d grab a man and lift him off the ground so he couldn’t fight back, then take big bites out of him, spitting flesh and blood on the ground. He didn’t swallow; he wasn’t a cannibal, for Christ’s sake, just a biter. Every time Nick saw the guy, he fixated on Shamu’s wide mouth and pointy white teeth.

  “I gotta say, Nick, it’s pretty damned slow in here, ain’t it?”

  Kelton turned, fists on his hips, his gaze sweeping the casino floor. Nick looked, too, at the paltry collection of truck drivers and old ladies scattered among the slot machines. Only one blackjack table was in use. The dealer looked bored.

  “Business has been off lately,” Nick said. “How is it at your place?”

  Kelton’s eyes twinkled behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Never better. Things are always hopping at Rancho Palomino. I’m thinking about expanding.”

  Rancho Palomino already was the largest casino in Fowler, making Big Jim Kelton the town’s de facto mayor. The brash back-slapper contributed to local charities and supported local businesses. Slipped a little dough to the town council occasionally to keep everyone in line. Fucking owned the police department.

  Nick turned back to his drink, but Kelton wasn’t done.

  “And how’s the lovely Miss Lola? You doing good, sugar?”

  Lola flushed and smiled and practically wagged her fucking tail. “Just fine, Mr. Kelton. Except I can’t get Nick to take me to his trade show next week.”

  “The one in San Francisco?”

  Nick sighed.

  “Aw, hell, honey,” Jim said, “you wouldn’t like it anyhow. Bunch of big talkers standing around, gawking at slot machines.”

  “You’re not going?” she asked.

  “I never go to those things. When I want to see the latest the industry has to offer, I pick up a phone and they bring it to me.”

  “You must be a big shot.”

  “That’s why they call me Big Jim.”

  “Oh, is that why?”

  She smiled suggestively, making Kelton loose a hee-haw of a laugh. Nick felt like kicking her
under the table.

  “Hey, Nick, that trade show might do you good,” Big Jim said. “Give you some ideas how to fix up your casino.”

  “I was just thinking that. The place could use a makeover.”

  “You could stand to beef up your security, too. Casinos are awfully attractive to crooks. Even old ones like the Starlite.”

  When Nick didn’t reply, Kelton said, “Well. Guess we’d better get going. I’ve got to get some shut-eye. Let’s go, Shamu.”

  The barefoot Polynesian glided away without a sound. Kelton tromped along behind him, never looking back.

  “Really, Nicky?” Lola rested her manicured fingers on top of his stubby hand. “You’re planning to renovate the Starlite?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Ooh, that would be nice. I could help. I’ve got a real eye for color—”

  She kept talking, but Nick wasn’t listening. Something Big Jim said had caused an idea to pop into his head, a way to make the Starlite finally pay off. He turned the notion over and over in his mind, searching for ways to make it work.

  The fluorescent tube sizzled and winked out, but Nick barely noticed.

  Chapter 3

  Tony Zinn paged through the San Francisco Chronicle, looking for any mention of the movie theater holdup. The Pleasanton heist made headlines for a few days, but faded from the news when there were no new developments. If the cops were onto Tony’s crew, they weren’t telling the media.

  He sat on a stool at the Laughing Mermaid café, a tiny diner that catered to locals in the city’s Richmond District. The café had an ocean view, perched on a steep hillside where Geary Boulevard skirts Sutro Park, but the tourist buses stopped at the larger, more famous Cliff House farther down the hill. That seemed to suit Laughing Mermaid proprietor Maggie Wynn. She had all the business she could handle from people like Tony, who lived within walking distance.

  He usually waited until after the breakfast rush to stop by for blueberry pancakes. He usually came alone. Eve liked to do her yoga in the mornings, and she preferred silence. Good time for Tony to be away from their apartment.

  Her curly hair tied back with a bandana, Maggie patrolled the area behind the counter, topping off coffees and gossiping with the locals, while her dour husband, Bill, rarely came out of the kitchen. Tony often thought they made the perfect team.

  People in coastal areas tend to be sunburned and windswept, but life by the sea is extra hard on strawberry-blondes like Maggie, whose fair skin suffered from the abuse. Her freckled cheeks were chapped and her pink nose was peeling. Tony guessed that Bill had once again coerced her into a ride on the bay in the old sloop he kept at a marina near Candlestick Park.

  “Don’t know how you stand to read those newspapers every day,” she said as she topped off Tony’s cup. “Nothing but bad news in them.”

  “Part of the job,” he said. “I’ve got to keep up.”

  Tony told his neighbors he was a technical writer who worked at home. Some people thought writing was a glamorous occupation and wanted to chat him up, but when he mentioned the technical part, they usually stopped asking questions. Which, of course, was the idea.

  The others in his crew had straight jobs – Ross and Don ran Cooper Auto, a repair shop founded thirty years ago by their late father; Eve worked part-time editing documents for Silicon Valley start-ups, and Angie Hernandez was a furniture mover, a job perfectly suited to a former All-City defensive tackle – but Tony kept his days free to research heists and set up jobs. What was the point of risking a life of crime if he had to waste time sitting behind a desk?

  He set the newspaper aside as Maggie moved down the counter to a middle-aged guy in a nylon windbreaker. Tony had noted the square-jawed stranger as soon as he entered the Laughing Mermaid. Didn’t seem like a tourist. Haircut like a cop.

  Tony swiveled on his stool and looked out the tall windows. Fog sat just offshore, a gray curtain hiding the horizon. This time of year, inland heating drew the fog into the city, dropping the temperature and casting a pall over Tony’s neighborhood. Rest of the country faced another scorching summer, according to the newspaper, but here in San Francisco, the tourists would freeze.

  He cast another glance at the man in the windbreaker, who was paying his tab. Tony waited until he was gone before settling his own bill and setting off for home. He made sure no one followed him.

  A stiff breeze blew from the ocean, and he turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the chill. He walked faster.

  Tony did a lot of walking. The building where he and Eve lived perched on a steep avenue just off Geary. A five-minute walk, mostly downhill, and he could be among the ponds and lawns and wind-twisted cypresses of Golden Gate Park. Short strolls away were Lincoln Park and Sutro Park, both with stunning ocean views. A perfect day for Tony was wandering the shady parks, stopping occasionally for coffee and reading and people-watching. Maybe making a few notes about plans for a future larceny.

  Just hanging out. Where better than San Francisco to do that?

  This neighborhood near the ocean was much quieter than where Tony grew up, which had been a pocket of poverty near the Cow Palace on San Francisco’s south side. All bulldozed now to make way for yuppie condos. Good riddance, as far as he was concerned. He had no connection to that part of town anymore, no family left to visit there. His crew was his family now.

  When he was a kid, he was always trying to escape, taking the bus around the city, imagining himself living in this ritzy neighborhood or that one. After he and Ross Cooper became best friends, most of his bus rides ended at Cooper Auto.

  Mack Cooper, a freckled redhead like Ross, was a gruff old bastard with a barrel chest and scarred knuckles, but he was a good father figure. And the garage was a more stable environment than Tony’s home, where he woke up every morning wondering what gun-toting fugitive he’d find smoking cigarettes at the breakfast table.

  Funny how it all turned on its head in the end. Mack struggled for years to keep the garage open, running up debts that he left to his sons when he died. Ross and Don paid them off with proceeds from heists masterminded by Tony. Mack never would have approved, but the money had to come from somewhere.

  The Coopers and their garage. Angie and his many mouths to the feed. They couldn’t survive in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world, without the income that Tony arranged. He lined up four or five jobs a year, enough so they could continue to live in their beloved hometown.

  Rents were slightly cheaper out here in the Fog Belt, but Tony and Eve paid sixteen-hundred dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Their white stucco fourplex was a two-up, two-down affair squeezed between a taller apartment building and a flat-roofed house occupied by an extended Laotian family. The downstairs tenants in Tony’s building were also Asian, and they kept to themselves. Just the way he liked it.

  The entrance opened to a small tiled lobby and a carpeted staircase. Tony trotted up the stairs, running his hands through his wind-tangled hair. He froze when he saw the door to his apartment was open a few inches. Not a sound from inside.

  “Eve?”

  “In here.”

  Her voice came from across the hall, and he turned to find the door to the facing apartment ajar, too. He pushed it open and stepped cautiously inside.

  Eve stood by the picture window. She was dressed in snug jeans and a green sweater, and her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that hung between her shoulder blades.

  “What do you think? Do we like this one more than our place?”

  Tony took a deep breath and tried to relax. He didn’t know why he was so jumpy. First the stranger at the café, now this.

  The apartment was vacant, and for the past week they’d seen workmen coming and going. Sawhorses stood in the middle of the living room, and a ladder leaned against one wall. Toolboxes and paint buckets sat on the tarp-covered floor.

  “It’s exactly like our apartment,” he said. “Why would we move?”

/>   “I think the view’s a little better. You can see more of Ocean Beach.”

  “Did the landlord let you in?”

  Eve grinned and held up a couple of lock picks.

  “Keeping in practice,” she said. “I was getting rusty.”

  “What if the painters show up? How would you explain what you’re doing in here?”

  “I figured I’d give them hell for leaving the door unlocked.”

  That made him laugh, but before he could comment, their phone rang across the hall.

  “I’ll get it.”

  He went into their living room. The phone sat on a low table next to the plump sofa that lined one wall.

  “Hello?”

  “Tony? Is that you?” The voice was a raspy croak. “It’s Leo Berg.”

  “Leo. What’s up?”

  Tony sat on the sofa. This could take a while. The old man loved the sound of his own voice.

  Leo Berg ran a dusty pawnshop in the Tenderloin, shoehorned into a block of junk stores and takeout joints and wino hotels. He sometimes went days without customers, but he didn’t get lonely because he spent all day every day on the phone.

  Leo was one of the biggest fences in the city. Crooks all over the Bay Area knew they’d get a decent price from the crusty old man. He’d learned long ago what happened to fences who tried to cheat people. That’s how he’d ended up with hooked pincers instead of hands.

  Thirty years earlier, Leo got greedy while meeting with some yakuza types, and their boss decided to send a message to fences everywhere. They’d been in a warehouse south of Market Street at the time, and there was a fire ax handy. Leo lost his hands, and nearly bled to death before help arrived. He didn’t rat out the mobsters – he’d known better than that – but he’d gotten his eventual revenge by outliving them all. Leo was past eighty now, bent and toothless and bald, but he still loved to tell that story, holding up his curved prosthetic claws and clacking them for emphasis.