Shadow Roll

Books by Ki Longfellow

China Blues

Chasing Women

Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera (with Vivian Stanshall)

The Secret Magdalene

Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria

Houdini Heart

Shadow Roll: A Sam Russo Mystery Case 1

Good Dog, Bad Dog: A Sam Russo Mystery Case 2

The Girl in the Next Room: A Sam Russo Mystery Case 3

Follow Ki Longfellow on the Internet:

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Official Website www.kilongfellow.com

Sam Russo www.eiobooks.com/samrusso

This is a work of fiction.  Though based on the known facts of people and places mentioned, the events and characters inscribed herein spring from the author’s imagination.  No descriptions of public figures, their lives, or of historical personages, are intended to be accurate, but are only included for the purposes of writing a work of fiction, and are not necessarily true in fact.

Copyright © Ki Longfellow 2013

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by

Eio Books

P.O. Box 1392

Port Orchard, Washington, 98366 U.S.A.

www.eiobooks.com

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Longfellow, Ki,

 Shadow roll : a Sam Russo mystery CASE 1 / Ki Longfellow.

      p. cm.

 ISBN 978-1-937819-00-2

1.  Private investigators--Fiction. 2.  Staten Island (New York, N.Y.)--Fiction.  I. Title.

 PS3562.O499S47 2012

 813’.6--dc23

LCCN 2012007580

eBook ISBN: 978-1-937819-10-1

Cover designed by Shane Roberts

Book designed by Shane Roberts

Cover photo by Shane Roberts

Without limiting the right under copyright reserves above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.  Please purchase only authorized editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted material.  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Dedicated to

Humphrey Bogart & Funny Cide

(And to my beloved grandfather, Lindsay Ray Longfellow, who took a seven-year-old off to the races.)

Chapter 1

“You don’t wanna look,” he said.

I said, “I’ve seen it all before.”

He said, “Not this you ain’t.”

I looked anyway.  He was right.  Three years, more or less, after a war waged over what seemed the whole world, and I’d seen a few things, things I hoped never to see again, but I’d never seen anything like this.

The headache I’d woken up with got worse.

It was already one of those days.  Some sick sonofabitch had decided to deliver a baby the easy way.

Delivery room was in one of those stands of red sumac, the kind that grows all over New York.  As tenacious as pigeons, or drunks, this clump had struggled through cracks in the courtyard of a building Dickens could only dream of.  The beat cop, guarding the courtyard entry, decided he needed to tell me the massive red brick heap began as a charitable infirmary, and ended as an orphanage.

“But now the kids are shunted to the top two floors to make way for the poor saps back from the war.  You know, the one’s so bad off they ain’t never gonna see the outside again.”

The beat cop looked about as old and as smart as a kewpie doll, yet he was already losing his hair.  Wispy dishwater brown, with a comb over.  On his wet upper lip a moustache struggled to grow.  The thing was shaped like a tongue depressor.  He was also wasting his rummy’s breath.  I knew more about the charity this place dished out than he ever would.  For one thing, I was born here.  And for another, I was raised here.  The fact I survived here said a lot about me.  The fact I’m not what you’d call a really nice guy said a lot about the Staten Island Home for Children.  On the other hand, maybe that was just me.  Sam Russo, born anytime, raised anywhere, pain in the ass.  But even a pain in the ass, like every other joe back from Luzon fighting the Japs on horseback, was a hero.  And that’s a fact.  Who knows how many of us scrambling to stay alive were ever seen again.

I got lucky.  I missed the Bataan Death March because my horse had more wits than I did.  Of course, by then, I had enough wits left to fill a shot-glass.

Which means I survived.  I could of bought a little house on the G.I. Bill, filled it with a cute little wife and maybe a couple of cute little kids.  I could of built a rabbit hutch out back—but I didn’t want a rabbit.  Before and after the war, I wanted to be a jockey.  Trouble was, even when I was still a kid, I was always too big to be a jockey.  So then I wanted to be a private dick.  That idea came from sitting in the dark at the Paramount over on Bay Street watching
The Maltese Falcon
.  Bogie’s Sam Spade made it look classy, not to mention maybe lucrative.  Besides, it was either that or cadging an acting job at Fred Scott’s Movie Ranch miles away at South Beach.  Fred’s would of been second on my list if gumshoeing didn’t pan out—except the movies moved west about thirty years ago.

These days, you had to be Seabiscuit to get a decent job.

Meanwhile, what me and everyone else were looking at was as rare as a Fair Deal out of Truman.  Murder on Staten Island.  A real live dead double homicide.  Both the mother—couldn’t be more than fourteen, if that—and the baby, no age at all, were spread out like garbage on a heap of collapsed sumac.  They were in a courtyard stinking of piss, the sour reek of beer our homegrown Germans were busy brewing all over the city of Stapleton, and the sweet scent of tender flesh slowly sliding towards decay.  They’d been there for a week, maybe more.  The never-to-be-mother had that look Halloween pumpkins get just before they collapse in on themselves.

No pretending it was suicide.  Suicides jump, but I’d never heard of one first open themselves up with a saw.  Or sock their own jaw hard enough to knock out a tooth or three.

When I couldn’t look anymore, about two seconds tops, I turned away, cupped my hands to keep the wind in from the sea from blowing out my match, and stared through smoke at the Manhattan skyline.  Five miles away, it looked pretty good.  Haloed in light, it looked like life.  But then, considering—pure pathos at my feet, “home” one whole shabby room with shared bath over a Rexall on the corner of Victory Boulevard and Bay Street, a headache getting worse by the minute—anything would.

When I turned back, a local photographer, moonlighting with the cops, was taking snaps with a fancy instant camera.  A coupla more cops were wandering around in the small maple woods that grew on three sides of the building.  And my old friend Lino, the guy who’d ruined my usual troubled sleep, was nosing about in the rubble and rust of the courtyard.  Me, I was slowly following the bricks up the curved side of one of four towers; there was one of these on each corner of the Staten Island Lock-up for Innocent Kids.  I did this until I was looking straight up.

I said, “Lino?”

“Yeah, Sam?”

“I think you’ll find this didn’t happen here.”

“Yeah, Sam?  So where did it happen?”

I pointed.  “Up there somewhere.”  And then I looked down at what I didn’t want to see.  Seeing felt like a tearing away of the tendons that held my heart in place.  “And then they were thrown away.  Out a window maybe.  A high window.  But probably off the roof.”

Lino did exactly what I’d just done.  Looked up.  Looked down.  “Damn.”

Then I said—because it was either that or bawl in front of a bunch of grown men—“And down will come baby, mother and all.”

Chapter 2

I was born to be a shamus.  First off, I was already a dedicated snoop and second, I’d named myself Sam.  And though Russo wasn’t as much of a calling card as Spade—as in “digging up dirt”—it was the best I could think of after the Sam part.  Third, I went to the movies a lot.  I’d go see anything with cops and robbers.  Before Bogie, I could of wound up a crook thanks to Jimmy Cagney.  Seven, eight years old, I loved Cagney as much as I loved horses, specifically race horses.

First time I saw him was in
The Doorway to Hell
.  He wasn’t the lead actor, can’t even remember who was—all I saw was Cagney.  Then there was the
The Public Enemy
.  Other stuff too, but
Angels with Dirty Faces
and
The Roaring Twenties
did it for me.  He had this way about him, cocky and jumpy and tough as nails.  But then I saw
The Maltese Falcon
and never looked back.

It wasn’t that I stopped loving Cagney, I still loved Cagney; it was because I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a crook.  I didn’t like stealing things or pushing dames around or hurting people.  What I liked was poking my nose into things, asking questions, working out puzzles, making a nuisance of myself.

So when I got my PI’s license and bought my 1947 model snub nosed Colt .38, a gun I was good with—thanks to using guns so much in my part of the world’s slaphappy little war—I thought it was going to be all sleek-looking women, a lot of smart and sassy backtalk, and a mysterious black bird worth enough to chase from one exotic country to the next.  Turned out, it was following some guy’s wife to a seedy hotel in Factoryville, or blending in with the staff in one of Stapleton’s breweries so we’d all find out who was taking home too much hootch.  Staten Island, from top to bottom and side to side, was about as crime ridden as the jolly old Land of Oz.  When the double homicide turned up, I’d already been planning a move to Manhattan or Brooklyn, maybe even a hop across the Kill Van Kull to Bayonne.

Damn.  Where’d that last idea come from?  It couldn’t of come from me; had to be a fleeting fancy.  Bayonne?  Not on your nellie.  More like Long Island halfway between Aqueduct and Belmont.  Find a place on Rockaway somewhere, then just shuttle back and forth between the two race tracks.

But not yet.  A killing on the island was attracting every cop for miles around.  It was like a copper’s holiday.

You could ask why a lowly PI was one of the first on the scene and I’d give you a true answer.  Because I wasn’t the only one born and raised in the heap of filthy red bricks and turrets Bela Lugosi would of scaled sideways.  Once upon a time, Lino was locked up in there with me.  But there’s a truer answer.  Lino Morelli was two years older, he had maybe three inches on me in height and thirty pounds in weight, but his brain was the size of a boiled carrot.  Even so, he was Italian.  As soon as I met him I’d decided I was Italian, although neither of us knew if we even had humans for parents.  And now that big dumb Italian kid was a detective with the Staten Island Police, which was quite a few rungs down from the lowliest New York City precinct (maybe a whole ladder full of rungs), but police nonetheless.