Diamonds. Doubles. Murder.: A Sherlock Jones Novel

By William J Palmer

Ron Reed, the ace pitcher of the L.A. Wave, the newest franchise in major league baseball, hires our "Celebrity PI" to surveille his lingerie model wife who he suspects is cheating. This fourth novel in the "Sherlock Jones" series of contemporary L.A. murder mysteries finds Sherlock, Sasha (his partner in Ar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798822932173

Book preview

Chapter One:

The WDGA

It was Wednesday night and the usual suspects, the WDGA Disreputables, were just settling around a table on the Venice Public patio. We had just finished our nine holes of golfing idiocy. The sun was starting to set on a perfect Southern California afternoon. It had been hot, but not too hot out on the course, bright but not too bright, windless, rainless, even smogless. If we could have looked down over the city, from up on Mulholland say, we would have seen an L.A. dressed up in its best Oscar night elegance, the whole city sparkling like diamonds in the dark, the freeways lit like strings of rubies adorning the city’s edges. Alex the bartender had just delivered our full round of two beers apiece. We always ordered two at a time to save Alex the walk out to us, but also because we generally inhaled the first one before going on to the second (all except for Doc who is a sort of sorority sipper). Fresh and I were drinking our regular Buds while Panda, Clay-boy, and Jeremy (aka Sno Cone) were all drinking craft beers. I had tried them once. Maybe it had been a blueberry lager or an acorn stout, something ridiculous like that. It only took me about two sips to decide that I hate craft beers. The whole craft beer movement had infected millennials-world like COVID. To me and Fresh it seemed like a really stupid way to ruin a good beer. I’m not even sure you can get very properly drunk on them. Only Frash, our LAPD Homicide Disreputable, wasn’t there this night. He was working a late shift tracking down urban desperadoes.

Oh yeah, I guess I should add that we were all pretty much stoned. Let’s hear it for L.A. legalizing recreational marijuana (or cannabis as all the billboards and newspaper ads call it).

As for me, I just call it weed (as in I’ll never smoke weed with Willie again) and had been calling it that since I started smoking it when I was in ninth grade. On the way to WDGA this afternoon I had hit a dispensary and bought a half gram of Alaskan Thunderbolt to share with the Disreputables. It proved to live up to its name. My pipe went around twice before we teed off on #2. We never lit up until we got out on the course, probably a habit hung over from back in the days when grass wasn’t legalized. By #2 green we were all as happy and laughing as five middle-aged men on beer and weed could be. So, we decided it would be a good idea to hit the pipe again, and we did right in the middle of #3 fairway. Strangely enough, our golf seemed to improve. We seemed to be hitting better shots, chipping and putting better. To face the truth, seemed probably was an operative term for the whole rest of our round. By the time we hit the 9-hole Venice Public’s 19th hole, we were all still floating.

Starting on our second round of beers, I made my big mistake. I should have known better, but I was still half toasted, and I decided to share my dilemma over me and Sasha with the Disreputables. It was a really bad move. That was the thing about the WDGA. You never knew when some off-the-wall topic was going to rise up out of the muck of our beer-addled minds. This night it was me who opened the dumb-ass door.

Check this out. I’m thinking of asking Sasha to marry me, I addressed my fellow floating foursome.

You what! Fresh almost choked on his beer.

You’re kidding? Panda’s head shot up totally amazed.

Whoa! Clay-boy exclaimed.

Really? Doc mused, weighing the idea.

I probably would never have brought it up if I hadn’t been stoned, but it was out there now, and I couldn’t reach out and yank it back. What do I do? I really want to marry her, I think. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

Fresh: Thinking about it? How long have you been thinking about it?

Me: Good question. A long time. But there have been so many things up in the air.

Boy was that the case! That was when my grass-fed mind drifted off, touching down over all the issues between me and Sasha clouding such a decision. Maybe the biggest issue was me getting a handle on just who Sasha was. I had been wondering about her identity, her past, ever since I first met her on the Briarwood case. But after our last case, the murder of her bondage-buddy Parker Werge, everything changed. Poor Parker’s murder shoved us into the middle of Alex Karg’s maze of complications over his proposed casino. That’s when I finally confronted Karg about his relationship to Sasha. Why did he wield such power over her? Why was she so beholden to him? It turned out the answer was ridiculously simple and what I had always suspected. He was her father, sort of. After I got Karg to admit that much, I had sat Sasha down and begged her to explain. It was like pulling teeth, but finally she opened up to me. She didn’t know who her father was, and neither did Karg. Her mother had been gang-bang raped in the city of Dubrovnik in the Serbo-Croatian War sometime in 1994 by soldiers of the Serbian JNA, the Yugoslav-People’s Army. They left her for dead. Her mother and Karg had also been sleeping together. Karg, a Croatian gangster, her lover, revived her, nursed her back to life, and brought her to the states when he himself escaped the war with a moneybelt filled with uncut diamonds acquired god knows how. He brought her first to New York where he turned the diamonds into cash, then to L.A. to get as far away from worn-torn eastern Europe as possible. She was pregnant by the rapists, by Karg, by who knows who. She delivered a baby girl who Karg named Sasha. Sasha’s mother died soon after, by her own hand with pills, certainly traumatized by her wartime memories, the PTSD that l learned all about in the Corps. Sasha had never had a mother, only nannies hired by Karg. For me that explained a lot, mostly why Sasha seemed so confused about what we were feeling toward each other. So much baggage she was carrying around. Was all that why she was afraid to fall in love with me? What bothered me was that Karg was starting to look like the good guy in Sasha’s life rather than the controlling Svengali exercising power over her. I had never like him from the very first day we met. The good thing about all this was that now, after that last case over Karg’s casino, he was totally beholden to her. She had not only saved my life, but his and his casino’s too. After Sasha shot Sean O’Leary as dead as a golf ball in a lake, Karg had offered both of us high-paying jobs as Security Chiefs of his new casino, a job I had already turned down twice in the past. Between us, Sasha and I decided we had had quite enough of Karg for a while (or forever). She turned him down and decided to stay partners with me in Archer Investigations.

So just how long have you been thinking about it? Doc snapped me out of my momentary tour of me and Sasha’s reality. Big difference between thinking about it and actually doing it.

Me: Ever since right after she shot Sean O’Leary and saved my life.

Doc (ever analytic): So you’ve decided you want to marry her out of gratitude? Like you owe her one.

Panda: One. Saved your worthless skin twice if I remember.

Me: Yeah. OK twice.

Clay-boy: Means you’ve got seven lives left. Better marry her. You’re probably gonna need them.

Sno-Cone: If you don’t ask her to marry you, I will.

Me: Yeah right. Fat fucking chance.

Sno-Cone: No way. Excellent chance. I’m younger than you, stronger than you, sure as hell better looking than you.

Me: And dumb as a bag of boulders.

Doc (still the seeming voice of reason): You know, you are both right. That woman is smart, much too smart to marry the likes of you two. Now, if I wasn’t married, I’d marry Sasha in an L.A. minute.

Me: You know what? You’re a dirty old man.

Doc (resigned): Yeah I know.

Fresh: Doc’s right. She’s way too good for the likes of you two, out of your league.

Panda: Way above your class.

Clay-boy: Way better than your skill set.

Fresh: Let’s face it Sherlock, you are in way over your head. Now me . . .

Me: Oh yeah, you got such a great track record with women. Witness your two ex-wives.

Fresh: Ooo. Ouch!

Panda: We’re all amazed you’ve kept afloat with her this long.

Clay-boy: She must like him though. She’s saved his life twice.

Sno-Cone: She’s been your partner for almost a year, saved your life twice. She must want to keep you around though she must know full well that you are a total drunken pothead, a waste.

Fresh: And a third-rate detective.

Clay-boy: Second-rate golfer.

Panda: First-rate drunk and pothead.

Doc (pronouncing the final verdict): I think all those rates are too high. No way he’s a second-rate golfer.

Fresh: Definitely. Third-rate at best.

Panda: Can’t putt worth a shit.

Clay-boy: Chips sort of OK.

Doc (quoting): You know what Sam Snead said. ‘Show me a good chipper and I’ll show you a bad iron player.’

Fresh: You know, when you’re right, you’re right. But maybe third-rate is still too high. More like fifth rate.

Doc (meditating): Oh, that’s so unkind. Fourth-rate at least.

Panda: Absolutely. All those things may be true. Stoner, drunkard, questionable golfer, yet the man still has had the good taste to buy us some primo grass.

That pronouncement pretty much shut all of us up. For a long awkward moment. But then Fresh fractured the cone of silence.

Fresh: But back to the main issue. Married? Are you crazy!

Doc (cautioning): He’s right, it’s a big step.

Me: Terrific. You just said you’d marry her in a minute Doctor Horn Dog.

Doc (defensive): That I would, and I’d do it in order to save her from you.

Me: Save this Doctor Dick Head. (and I friendly fingered him)

Doc (combative): I’d be her escape hatch from you.

Me: Bite me. We’ve been together almost three years. She hasn’t tried to escape me yet.

Panda: Have you ever thought that maybe she was actually aiming at you when she dropped that O’Leary thug with one shot.?

Me: Now this conversation is just starting to get stupid.

I should have known better than to try to talk out my dilemma with those idiots, especially when we were all stoned, or even when we were sober. What was I thinking? Talking to them certainly wasn’t going to solve my Sasha problem. Should I ask her? Would she even say yes? Things were really good between us. Should I just do nothing? Leave things be? Go along like we have been? But dammit, I was in love with her.

My cell phone going off on the table jolted me out of my interior Q and A. Sasha’s name lit up on the screen. I grabbed it, stood up like I’d just got a five iron up my butt, and fled as far away from the WDGA morons as I could go. Sash, hey, I greeted her once I was around the corner of the building and out of earshot, what’s up? I was a little bit surprised. She never called me on Wednesdays when I was with the WDGA.

Some guy called. Wants to see us. Sorry to call you there on Wednesday, but he seemed really stressed.

Who is he? Do we know him?

Don’t think so. Said he is a baseball player. Said he thought you’d recognize his name.

So, what’s his name?

Ron Reed. Is he a friend of yours?

No, but I sure as hell recognize his name.

Great, you want to let me in on it?

"If it’s the Ron Reed then he’s maybe the best pitcher in the American League."

Nicky, I don’t know anything about baseball. Is he one of those really rich ballplayers? Can we get a big retainer out of him if he hires us?

He’s the best pitcher on The L.A. Wave.

What’s The L.A.Wave?

"Geez Sash, it’s L.A.’s newest major league baseball team. The Dodgers have been here like forever, but The Wave has only been here for three years and they’re already starting to make . . . well . . . waves."

Cute! (sarcasm-coated)

The owner paid about a billion for it, to bring it here. Ron Reed is their best pitcher. He signed a five-year contract for a hundred million. He’s their stopper.

What’s a stopper?

He’s the pitcher they can count on to stop a losing streak, to pull the team out of a slump.

A slump?

Geez Sash, c’mon.

A hundred million. Really?

Absolutely. Yes, set up a meeting with him. I want to get his autograph.

Definitely, on a big fat retainer check.

Tell him to meet us here at Venice Public sometime tomorrow afternoon.

He can’t meet us there and it has to be in the morning. He said he has to leave town tomorrow afternoon for a seven-day trip. He said it was urgent, couldn’t wait.

Right. That’s The Wave’s Midwest swing.

Swing?

Forget it. No problem. Tomorrow’s fine. Where? What time?

At nine in the morning at a Wang Shu Park. Where is that park? Chinatown?

It’s not that kind of park. It’s The Wave’s ballpark in Santa Monica off Wilshire.

‘That’s a funny name for a baseball stadium. Who is Wang Shu?"

It’s not a person. It’s a Ramen Noodle company. They bought the naming rights to the stadium.

What a crazy name for a stadium.

I guess so.

You’re getting to be quite the celebrity detective, aren’t you Nicky? I hope he pays better than Mandy Troy did.

So do I. But seriously, I’m really looking forward to meeting him. He won eighteen games last year in only his third year out of college. Book that meeting right now. Did he say what he wanted?

No. I’ll try to find out.

After we hung up, I headed back to the table in sort of a daze. That was an interesting phone call, I said sitting down.

Doc (naturally nosy): Interesting how?"

Me: Sasha said some guy wants to meet with me. Not just any guy. He said I would recognize his name, though she didn’t.

Fresh: So what’s his name?

Me: Ron Reed.

Panda: "Whoa! Not the Ron Reed?"

Clay-boy: Ron Reed. Geez Sherlock, he’s The Wave’s best pitcher.

Panda: My money’s on him getting The Wave to the playoffs at least. Maybe even the World Serious.

Sno-cone: That’s series dumbass.

Panda: Nope, to me it’s totally Serious.

Doc (ever inquisitive): So what’s he want you for?

Me: I’m meeting with him tomorrow.

Clay-boy: Right. The Wave goes on the road for seven games tomorrow.

Panda: This could be a big payday for you. He just signed a five-year deal for Gazillions.

Sno-Cone: You’re really getting to be the celebrity PI, aren’t you? Sherlock Jones, detective to the stars.

Me: That’s exactly what Sasha said. I sort of like being the celebrity PI.

Doc (correcting): No, PA not PI.

Me: "PA?

Doc; Yeah, piss ant.

But then my phone went off on the table again. Sasha calling back. This time I just picked it up and took the call right there. The rest of those mooks tried to listen in like a bunch of eavesdropping housemaids at a bedroom door.

I set up our meeting for tomorrow morning at nine. He leaves in the afternoon. I asked him what his case was, but he said he only wanted to talk to you. I told him I was your partner, but he insisted he would tell us both tomorrow. Sasha seemed perturbed by that.

How did he pick us out? Somebody recommend Us?

My uncle.

Oh great. Karg again. I thought we were free of him."

So, your so-called Uncle knows a pro ballplayer?

"Yes, sort of, said this Reed was a minor investor in his Casino and had read about that case in The Times."

After I hung up with Sasha, I looked up and the other four were leaning into me like a school of hungry piranha.

So, Doc took the first bite, sounds like you’ve got a new case going.

Me: Do I ever. Meeting Ron Reed tomorrow.

Panda: First a sexy movie star, now an All-Star pitcher.

Clay-boy: How about our own skybox?

Fresh: How about unlimited beer coupons?

Me: NO. No. And No. Get real.

Doc (serious, maybe) Man Sherlock, you’re getting into the big time.

Panda: Can’t he at least get us box seats right behind home plate? I always wanted them.

By the time this baseball babel ended, I was completely sobered up and found myself sitting in my car in the dark in the Venice Public parking lot, Ron Reed, Karg, the Disreputables all forgotten, realizing that my Sasha dilemma was still unresolved. It was kind of making me crazy. This being in love deal was something I had never experienced before. Yes, I’m definitely in over my head, but what does she think? Do I dare ask her? Are we just friends with benefits? Or business partners with benefits? Is it possible that we could really be lovers? Will asking her ruin everything between us? Maybe I shouldn’t push my luck. Could the Disreputables possibly be right? Man, that was a sobering thought. So many questions. All still unanswered.

Yet, deep down, I sensed that if our relationship didn’t move to a higher level sometime soon she might get tired of me. Maybe this new case will keep the boredom away I hoped.

Chapter Two:

The Pitcher

The next morning, Thursday, Sasha and I were in the car at 8:15 headed down Main then left to Ocean and on into downtown Santa Monica. From the car, I called Fresh figuring he was just into his morning coffee. I got him and asked if he could do a computer background check on Ron Reed for me. He jumped on my request like a happy hacker. He loved playing cyber detective for me and was really good at it. Sasha was driving and we passed Colorado Boulevard and the entrance to the Pier, then past Wilshire, then finally down the Incline to the One and Wang Shu Park. Sasha’s whatever-he-was Karg’s shiny new Casino/Resort was just north of the Pier on the sand and the Wang Shu was north of that almost to Will Rogers Beach. The Ferris Wheel on the Pier that used to entertain me and my six-packs as I sat alone and lonely on the beach at night in Venice back before I met Sasha sat unlit and unrevolving at 8:40 AM. We parked the car in the empty stadium lot. No ballgame today. The team was leaving town. Two buses were pulled up at the home plate gate waiting to take the team to the airport. A small group of parents, kids, and professional autograph seekers loitered around the buses hoping to get the players to sign their books, their ballcaps, their tee shirts, their