You can use the wp_get_nav_menu_object
to retrieve the menu as an object, which you can subsequently establish the length of. Like this:
$wpse140949_menu = wp_get_nav_menu_object( 'your-menu-name-or-slug' );
$tabcount = $wpse140949_menu->count;
You can the use this on your call to wp_nav_menu
:
wp_nav_menu ( array (
'menu_class' => 'item-' . $tabcount,
....
));