Daniel Linden's Blog

The Aikido Aspect – An Aikido Mystery

I’ve been fascinated by serial novels for years. The idea that you write a chapter, post it up and work forward with no revisions is scary as hell, but is also exhilarating, Like Dickens or even Steven King you just have to roll with it and try to let your imagination carry you.

I’ve written ten Aikido Mystery novels, and one Black Diamond Mystery. Even though they all tend to involve the same folks the Aikido Mysteries are written in first person and that is one hard medium to work with. You need to have all the information flow through the main character with no god-like oversight from afar. I think it’s the hardest way to write. So why do I choose it? It has to do with creation and the creation process.

Somehow my mind can form the wants, desires, pain, and all the other personal emotions for one character, but in order for me to do it for a half dozen or more I need to stand outside myself. And when I write, being outside is the last place I want to be. I need to be inside and to feel the grit and grind that my main guy is suffering. That’s it in a nutshell.

I will be posting new chapters every week or two. Please feel free to comment and or speculate. I will not edit and expect to regret that somewhere down the line. If you enjoy the process, pass it on and tell your friends. We’ll be at this together for quite a while, I think.

The Aikido Aspect – An Aikido Mystery by Daniel Linden
Chapter 1
I’m the boss.

That was the first thing I thought when I sat behind the big desk where Fat Albert Diamond used to sit. I didn’t have a lot of time to think of anything else though because Melissa Brown called me on the office phone and said a client was in the lobby and wanted to speak with me. Melissa spent a number of years with the Missoula Montana Sheriff’s Department and is now my office manager. She is also six feet tall in her stocking feet and what the Assistant Chief of Police in Missoula once called ‘the finest-looking law enforcement officer west of the Mississippi’. He was so wrong it makes the head spin.

She was the finest-looking law enforcement officer in the whole damn country. Smart, too, and that’s why she worked for me now. The smart part.

I said, “Is he just looking for the manager, Fat Albert, or me, specifically?”

“He said Albert Diamond.”

“Did he say what he wants?”

“Isn’t that your job?”

Like I said, smart.

I wanted to ease my way into my first morning, have a cappuccino from the new Italian coffee maker that takes up half the kitchen counter in the break room, read the paper, check my emails, make a few calls to the left coast where my wife works and lives, maybe watch a little Fox News and then Sports Center, have another cappuccino, and then go out for a late breakfast like all the other entrepreneurs and business fat cats I’ve always read about. That’s what I wanted to do. But I knew as soon as she said the words I’d be standing up and going down the hall and introducing myself because that’s what I would tell my students to do.

In Aikido, you always do the hard work, all of it, and never shirk. Those are the rules.

I sighed, stood and headed down the long hallway to the reception area where Melissa is the sole lord and master of all she sees. I saw a big man, not as big as me but pretty damn formidable, standing over Melissa’s desk and speaking to her with a certain smarmy familiarity I didn’t like. The word grease swam to mind.

He didn’t bother to look at me at all when I walked up, kept trying to get her to meet his eye with whatever he was saying, but she had returned to her keyboard and monitor and was typing like Hemmingway beating out the Old Man and the Sea. When I stopped and stared at him she looked at me and then smiled slightly before she returned to her typing.

“Can I help you?”

He slowly turned his head and looked at me.

I hated him at first sight. Total revulsion, like seeing a rat bent over your cat’s bowl. It was a visceral reaction and I had no control over it.

Sorry, but you want truth from books you read and there it is. I just write down what happens no matter how bad it paints me. I absolutely hated the bastard. He had those eyes. They were big and brown and should have been lady-killers, but they were too close together. He had a jaw that the Oxford English Dictionary would have had a picture of under the word ‘lantern’. He was wearing what looked like a three thousand dollar Seville Row suit, but it might have just been a cheap eight-hundred dollar Hong Kong knock-off. Somehow I doubted it, though.

And to make matters worse, he had on a pair of the best looking Italian hand-stitched loafers I’ve seen in years and they were scuffed. Fifteen hundred bucks for shoes and he didn’t even take care of them. I really hated him.

He was looking at me the same way with absolute wonder in his eyes. The last time I’d seen a look like that I was at an Aikido seminar in New York and I’d spent the morning working with three or four big, strong, young men from Ohio with terrific Aikido fundamentals. I was so impressed I went out of my way after class to talk to their teacher and tell him how impressed I was with his students and his obvious teaching skills. As I turned away I heard him say to someone standing there, “Who is that asshole?”

That’s the way he was looking at me. I waited.

He took his time. He gradually shifted back to his heels from the over-the-desk pose he’d taken while trying to look down Melissa’s blouse. Then he did something that surprised and bothered me, he took what I would call a stance. His right foot edged slowly to the front and all his weight shifted to his rear foot so he was about ninety percent balanced on his back foot.

In Karate we would call this posture nekoashi-dachi, or cat stance. It is a terrific position for a lightning-fast first kick to the lower body or legs. Of course it’s also a dancing position, too. I doubted he was going to dance.

I looked up at him is surprise and at the very same instance Melissa said, “Remember when I said they wouldn’t fix it?” She opened her second desk drawer and took out a Colt Combat Commander .45 caliber semi-automatic. It was locked and loaded and she was saying, “The warranty department at Colt won’t fix the grip. I’ve complained for a couple years now. Hold it and you can see what I mean…”

I took it and held it up. I pointed it over the big man’s shoulder and then wriggled it around. It was perfect, not a problem anywhere. “I see what you mean,” I said. “I have a good gunsmith I can take it to, if you want.”

“Terrific, Boss. That’s great. I can just use my Browning in the mean time.” She reached into her desk drawer and took out a vintage High Power and put it on the desk in front of her. The hammer was back and the safety was off.

“Looks good,” I said.

We both turned to the guy with the karate stance and waited. He hadn’t moved a muscle. But then he did the most incongruous thing I could have imagined. He executed a perfect pirouette and then jumped up slightly and clicked his heels in the air. He landed like a feather.

He actually grinned at me. “You look like you want to fight,” he said. “But now I see all these guns and wonder if you know what you want.”

I shook my head. “Not me. Who would want to fight me or Mello? We don’t usually fight.” I continued to stare at him.

“We deal in hard calibers,” Melissa said almost absentmindedly. “We deal in lead.” Her face was turned to the monitor again and she was typing. The Browning was nowhere in sight. I still held the Colt. Did I mention she was a cop in Montana?

“So can we talk?” he said. Imagine Joe Pesci or any other hood from Brooklyn saying it. Same exact accent.

I nodded, handed Melissa the .45 and turned in a three quarter pirouette and took a step leading into a jump and click-the-heels that Fred Astaire would have approved of. I can dance, too. “Let’s go.”

Fat Albert had all the big-time business in Central Florida and some of it was with some shady characters. He’d told me I’d meet them eventually and I figured I was meeting one now. Being the biggest and most successful private investigation firm in Florida had some advantages, but at the moment I could not think of a single one. When I got to my desk I hit the intercom and told Melissa to have Opie come to my office as soon as he was in.

She answered that she would let him know. He wasn’t scheduled to be in the office for a week, but I knew she would be on the phone with him before I was rubbing my butt against that fine Corinthian leather that all Office Depot chairs seem to claim as their own.

I sat.

He sat.

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“Where is Albert Diamond?”

“Mr. Diamond is in Los Angeles. He is now the proprietor of Black Diamond Investigations of Los Angeles. I am the new manager, slash, owner, of Black Diamond Investigations of Orlando, Florida. We are incorporated and he is the Chairman of the Board. I am the President. Do you have any more business related questions before you tell me your name?”

“I usually deal with Diamond. I really don’t like things to change. Don’t deal well with it, if you see what I mean. So is Diamond coming back?”

“No. Oh, he might come back for Passover or something, but he lives in L.A. now.”

“I still want to deal with him.”

I stood up. “Wonderful!” I pointed at him. “Should I let him know you will be coming to see him? When do expect to arrive in the city of angels?” I reached for my pen and pulled a sticky page off the top of the pad. “And whom should I tell him is coming to visit?”

“Sit down, asshole.” He reached into his jacket and I was instantly reaching for the desk drawer where I keep a Ruger 9mm, but he merely pulled out a folded grip of legal sized papers and threw them on the top of my desk.

I froze but my heart was still in the adrenalin rush of reaching for a gun. I nearly hyperventilated. So much for thirty years of Aikido. A guy six feet away does nothing but reach in his pocket, and I’m reaching for a gun. Get a grip.

I’d spent a lot of time out in Montana recently dealing with some truly bad people. I’d been looking for the man who had killed my father and eventually it had brought together all the bad elements in one momentous showdown. It all ended in a bizarre rendition of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, only this time instead of Doc Holliday, and the Earp brothers I had Opie Taylor, Warren Biggs and Melissa Brown beside me. It was a pretty fair stand.

I was still jumpy I guess.

I sat and reached for the papers and began to read.

When I saw the number $750,000.00 I stopped, went back to the beginning and read slower. After ten minutes I looked up at him and said, “So?”

“I’m a bit shorthanded right now and in the past Fat Albert always helped out.”

“How? Doing what?”

“I just need a man. One shift a day, you know, working hours? I’m strung too thin and can’t seem to find any good skip-tracers anywhere. But I think he uses this apartment and I need someone to watch it.”

“Back up. What’s your name?”

He frowned as if I was either pulling his leg or just being a jerk. Then he finally said, “Louie Danza. You need to call Albert and get clear on what’s happening here.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

He sat up resigned and leaned forward a bit. “I own Acme Bail Bonds.” He seemed to reconsider. “I represent the people who own Acme Bail Bonds. You could say I’m one of the owners. Seven months ago I wrote a bond for this banker putz who embezzled a bunch of money, blah, blah. Three quarter of a mil. Then last week the cops found out he also might have killed someone, nobody important, just a mug. But they decided to revoke his bail and the little greaseball bolted on me. I checked and the house he put up has all kinds of cracks in the foundation and nobody thinks it’s safe to live in except for this asshole who built it. Anyway, bottom line, he built it on a sinkhole that’s slowly collapsing and now the place ain’t worth a dime and I hold the paper on it.”

He looked up and shrugged. “So you see I sort of have to find him, put him in 33rd Street, and get the money back.”

I nodded in agreement. Even when your wife is richer than God you have to think that three quarters of a million bucks is a lot of money.

“So what are you doing here?” I smiled.

“I just told you. I need a man to watch this apartment for a few days, see if this pudknocker shows up.”

“Well, if that’s all, I can certainly assign a man to keep an eye on…” I looked at the papers and found the address. I was about to say it aloud, but saw Louie shaking his head.

“It ain’t like that. Fat Albert always done it off the books, as a kind of favor…”

“I can’t ask a man to work for nothing. I need to charge you.”

“What you need, is to call Albert Diamond and get on the same page. That’s what you need to do.”

I picked up the telephone and said, “Okay Google, call Fat Albert mobile.” I waited and after about ten rings heard Albert say hello. I swiveled in my office chair and told him what was going on. After about three sentences he interrupted and asked, “Is he there? In person?”

“Um, yeah.”

“That’s not good.”

“If you say so…”

“Wait, is he sitting right in front of you?”

“Yes.” I looked up at Danza and smiled again diplomatically.

“Give him whatever he wants and don’t charge him. I’ll cover anybody’s time. Just bill the office here for something, I don’t know… think of something. Make him happy.”

“Okay, but why?”

“Because he is the right hand of the goomba that runs all of organized crime in Florida, that’s why.”

“I don’t care. I run a straight business here.”

“No, you don’t! Okay, well mostly you do, but we got a couple things going with Danza that I guess I should of told you about.”

That made me do two things. First, I simply looked at the smartphone in my hand like an idiot and the second thing I did was to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. “How bad is it?” I asked slowly. Danza was smiling now and watching me.

“Oh, it’s only those times we need a little muscle and being good detectives won’t get the job done. We scratch each other’s back. We lend a helping hand. We get by with some help from our friends. And even mobsters need legit gumshoes with a license to carry, you know. Sometimes. Didn’t you see the Godfather? Anyway, it that kind of shit.”

“Okay, Albert, I’m going to do what you ask, but I’m going to call you around noon, your time, and you are going to tell me all about this and any other little secret things you might have forgotten to mention when I signed that big stack of legal papers.”

“I’ll be in the office waiting for your call. Oops, gotta go…” and just like that I was talking to dead air. I looked across the desk at Danza.

“Okay,” I said. “You need one man from eight to five, is that right?”

“Well, close to it. If he could get there a little earlier it would help my guy who’s going to be there all night. And my guy might be a little late getting there in the afternoon, but he should be reasonably punctual.”

We were all business now.

I found the address, 1239 Edgewood drive; it was in
College Park just a few miles across Colonial Boulevard. “Okay, I’ll have him there…”

“Today.”

“Okay, Mister Danza.” This time I stared hard at him. “I’ll get someone up there today. Do you have a picture of the guy you’re looking for? No? And who do we contact if our man sees him? Our detectives are not skip tracers or bounty hunters. I’m not going to let him try to apprehend a wanted felon.”

“He ain’t a wanted felon, yet. He’s a wanted fugitive.”

“Whatever. Who should he call?”

Danza leaned forward and put a card on the desktop. I picked it up and saw it had his name and a number. That was it.

“Okay. You got a picture?” He slowly handed me one. The guy looked about as normal as a guy could look.

Then he said, “So did Albert straighten you out?”

I stood up and leaned over the desk. “Albert Diamond and I have the kind of relationship that doesn’t include me being straightened out,” I said. “Just because you had a cozy relationship with Fat Albert doesn’t mean anything to me. I’ll help you out this affair this one time and Albert is going to pay me for it. But don’t ever walk in here again acting like you’re going to kick someone’s ass and then start dancing. Because if you do I…”

“What?” He leaned forward suddenly smiling with absolutely no humor. “What are you going to do? You obviously don’t know me and that is a real problem for you. You think you can talk to me like I’m some shitbag repo man who’s gonna take your lousy mouth smiling. You fucking punk! You think you can talk to me like that? You think you’re a tough guy?” He snorted. “I eat bastards like you. Oh, oh, Jesus, look at you…” He put his hands up to his head like he was startled or afraid. “You look like you want to kill me!”

I’ve heard this before. Lots of the Irish mafia up in Boston use this line. It’s supposed to make you argue that no, you aren’t looking like that… whatever. It confuses and it’s supposed to. But I just nodded and said, “You are a perceptive man, Mr. Danza.”

It stopped him cold. It also made him furious. He actually snarled. “You think you can take me? You think that? ‘Cos if you do we can just waltz our way down the hall and outside and get it done. Is that what you think? You fucking Irish piece of shit, is that what you think you’re going to do?” He started to stand and then we both heard the sound of a shotgun ratchet back and forth. We froze.

I looked to my left and saw Opie Taylor standing in the doorway with his street sweeper, a semi-auto 12 gauge shotgun with a thirty round magazine. “We don’t fight here,” he said. “We deal in lead.”

Danza’s face went white, whether with fury or fear I had no idea, but he settled down slowly and then after at least two minutes he grinned. For the first time it felt like his grin was genuine. He nodded his head at Opie and then at me a few times and then laughed again.

“Well okay then.” he said. “About time somebody around here got serious. See, now we’re finally starting to communicate.” He stood and pushed the visitor’s chair back and then shuffled a little samba step, or maybe it was a tango, who knows, jigged his way to the door, past Opie, and then down the hallway.

I heard him say a suave goodbye to Melissa and then heard the door close.

Opie put the shotgun on my desk with the business end pointing toward the bank of windows and then scratched his chin. “I didn’t know you knew Dancing Louie, what was that all about?”

“Dancing Louie? Louie Danza?” I laughed. “We just met.”

Opie turned slowly and looked at me. He doesn’t look like much: cowlick, freckles, gap between his front teeth, average everything, except he can look like whatever he wants whenever he wants; he’s an easy going guy that I know has killed something like forty men. Now he looked worried. “They used to call him Louie the Killer but he got on that T.V. show Dancing with the Pros or something like that and now all the guineas call him Dancing Louie behind his back. I don’t know what they call him to his face. Sir, maybe.”

“Louie the killer? Are you serious?”

“He was a hit man for the Tampa mob for fifteen years, got a rep, made his bones or whatever they hell they call it, and rose in the ranks. He liked arson and small explosions and car bombs, but he did his share with knives, guns and even piano wire if everything you hear can be believed. Anyway, when Vincent LoScalzo got ready to retire about ten years ago he wanted to reward Louie for all his good work and he set him up in the Bail Bond business here in Orlando and other some spots in Central Florida.”

“I thought you couldn’t be a felon in that business.”

“Why do you assume they ever caught him? I doubt that Dancing Louie has ever been convicted of a parking ticket.” Opie got up and walked to the window. He glanced out quickly and then moved back before actually coming to rest there leaning on the window sill.

All I could do was stare at him. The Tampa mob has a long and storied history that goes far back even before Jack Kennedy and the Havana connection. Santo Trafficante, known as Junior to most of the Cubans and Italians in south Florida after his father Santo Senior died, ran things for years. He was the Capo di tutti Capi, along with J. Edgar Hoover that put out the hit on Kennedy. Several associations came and went over the years and then the Tampa mob hooked up with the Maglianos & Granados from north Florida. The last I’d heard was that John Gotti’s son was now running things for the Gambinos. The Tampa mob may now be under the New York mob’s thumb, but you have to consider long and hard before you screw with it. And I had just made an enemy of their Luca Brazi.

What’s wrong with me? I looked up at Opie and must have had a question in my eyes because he leaned back and sighed.

“Hey, you’re the one had him sitting in your office all riled up and wanting to take you out and kick your ass…. Boss… I just wanted to get his attention. I think he liked it.” Opie was now looking like what he was, a U.S. Marine sniper with a thousand yard stare.

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably enough to plant a… what did you call it? A small explosion? Or start a fire? What the hell just happened?”

“Don’t ask me. Melissa called and said get down here pronto with some firepower and I never asked, just put the pedal to the metal. She said she had you covered if it came to it, but I keep the Saiga shotgun and the big mag in my trunk so I just drove over.”

I picked it up. I was black and heavy and looked like it was made to do one thing, kill people. “You shoot trap and skeet with this?”

He laughed and suddenly he looked like Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. “I actually have. You need to burn through a lot of shells with that before you can actually use it well. I’ve practiced.” Opie is a human chameleon.

“It’s a serious piece,” I said. “Get it off my desk, please. And by the way, both you and Melissa said the same thing. We deal in lead. What’s that all about?”

He laughed again, delighted “We were watching The Magnificent Seven in bed the other night and when Steve McQueen says that line, we both broke up laughing. We’ve been saying it as a joke the last few days. It worked, didn’t it?”

“It worked because you were pointing an assault shotgun at the man when you said it.”

“That works for me.”

“Put it away. And by the way, we deal in confidentiality and finding things out, and keeping secrets. That’s far more important and powerful than lead.”

“Sometimes…”

I shook my head and called down the hall to Melissa. “Get Walter in here as soon as he can make it, okay?”

“You got it, Boss.”

“Jesus, Parker, don’t tell me you actually made a deal with the devil.” Opie sat down and stared across the desk at me.

“Nah, we’re just going to stake out an apartment. What could go wrong?”

***

Check back in a week or so and join us for Chapter 2.