The Subtle Art of Brutality

Here’s a sample from J.L. Abramo’s Circling the Runway, a Jake Diamond mystery.

ONE

James Bingham stood at the curb in front of the high-rise residence, talking with the taxi driver who had dropped off the occupant of apartment 3501 a few minutes earlier. Bingham was inquiring into the availability of deeply discounted cartons of cigarettes. The cab driver assured Bingham he would hook him up that weekend.

Bingham walked back into the lobby as the cab pulled away.

As James Bingham approached the security desk he heard footsteps approaching from behind. Before Bingham could turn to the sound, his head was clamped between two large hands and with the twist of two powerful wrists Bingham was dead.

The woman opened the door leading from the stairwell to the thirty-fifth floor apartments only wide enough to see the hallway in both directions. Finding the hallway deserted, she pushed the door open just enough to slip through. She moved down the hall to the right and stopped in front of the door marked 3501. She pulled a plain white letter-sized envelope from the pocket of her coat and slipped it under the door. She returned to the stairwell doorway, passed through it and started down the stairs. She looked at her wristwatch—it was twenty-six minutes after midnight. She walked down to the thirty-second floor and took the elevator to the lobby. She glanced out of the elevator door. The security guard station was still unoccupied. She quickly exited, nearly colliding with a man walking a dog in front of the building.

The dog walker, Ethan Lloyd, would later say he saw a woman wearing a long blue coat at nearly half-past twelve, alone, sporting sunglasses. A blue scarf wrapped around her head. Ethan considered the coat unnecessarily heavy for such a mild evening, thought the dark glasses were oddly inappropriate for the time of night, and added that the scarf did a very good job of hiding her face and hair. He watched the woman as she moved away from the building along Third Street. Lloyd lost sight of her heading north toward Market Street.

Ethan Lloyd entered the building wondering, as he had wondered going out less than twenty minutes earlier, why James Bingham, the lobby doorman, was not at his post.

Bingham was actually there, but Ethan Lloyd could not see him. James was on the floor, hidden behind the large desk with a broken neck.

The man who had unceremoniously snapped James Bingham’s neck moved to the door of apartment 3501 and he used a key to enter. Less than three minutes later he was about to open the apartment door to leave when he saw a white envelope slide under the door. He stood perfectly still. He heard footsteps moving away from the door and he heard the stairwell door close. He waited a full fifteen minutes before leaving and, as instructed, used a shoe found in a hall closet to keep the door from shutting completely.

The man left the building through the parking garage and he walked calmly down Third Street to Howard Street. Before reaching the intersection of Third and Hawthorne, just beyond the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, the passenger door of a parked Cadillac opened to the sidewalk and he was invited by the driver to get in.

“Well?” the driver asked.

“Done deal,” Sal DiMarco answered.

“Did you ditch the key?”

“I did.”

Fuck me, Sal thought—remembering he had forgotten to ditch the key.

He carefully slipped the apartment key from his pocket and dropped it under the seat of the Cadillac while the driver was occupied watching for an opening in the busy street traffic.

“Any problems?”

“A bit of collateral damage, no worries.”

“Tell me about it,” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.

The woman in blue continued walking up Third Street to Market Street, crossed Market to O’Farrell Street, went west to Powell Street and circled back down to Market.

The woman disappeared down into the Powell Street BART Station.

At half-past midnight the raucous crowd at Johnny Foley’s Irish Pub and Restaurant was so deafening that Tom Romano, Ira Fennessy and Jake Diamond had to escape. They clawed their way out onto O’Farrell Street heading for the Powell Street BART Station one block away to grab a taxi.

“Did you see that woman?” asked Ira, as they crawled into a cab.

“What woman?” Tom asked.

“Going down into the station. Did you see her, Jake?”

“I can’t see anything, Ira. What about her?”

“She was all in blue.”

“And...”

“Should have been green, don’t you think.”