by Bill Bernico
Cooper by the Gross
Featuring Matt, Clay, Elliott, Gloria and Matt Cooper
144 Private Eye Stories by Bill Bernico
01 - It’s In The Bag
02 - Petty Crimes
03 - November Child
04 - Welcome, Matt
05 - The Reunion
06 - Cold Cash
07 - The Mother Goose Murders
08 - The Condiment Killer
09 - A Million To One
10 - Little Matt
11 - Find Her
12 - Hard Bargain
13 - The Case Of The Plates
14 - Dead Ringer
15 - The Stickup
16 - You Can Bank On It
17 - The Last Stop
18 - Violence Is Golden
19 - Surprise Package
20 - The Big Sweep
21 - The Home Sweet Homeless Murders
22 - Guilty As Charged
23 - All In The Families
24 - Paper, Rock, Scissors
25 - The Other Matt Cooper
26 - Hit And Run
27 - Officer Down
28 - Double Trouble
29 - Track Record
30 - Love Finds Matt Cooper
31 - The Plunge
32 - Concrete And Clay
33 - Top Of The World
34 - ‘Til Death Do Us Part
35 - Not On Your Life
36 - One Bad Apple
37 - Even In The Best Of Homes
38 - Sgt. Cooper’s Lonely Hearts Club Frame
39 - The Clay Cooper Cop Killer Caper
40 - Beatlemaniac
41 - End Of An Era
42 - Cooper Generations
43 - Clay Cooper, Panhandler
44 - Cooper And Partner
45 - Mutiny On A Bounty
46 - Witness Protection
47 - Diplomatic Immunity
48 - Justice Delayed
49 - Two For One
50 - He Put The ‘Ick’ in Buick
51 - Revenge Never Expires
52 - Head Shot
53 - A Passage From The Bible
54 - Come Fly With Me
55 - If Dogs Could Talk
56 - Trapped Like A Rat
57 - Pay Dirt
58 - Take The Money And Run
59 - Fresh-Faced Kid
60 - You Ought To Be In Pictures
61 - Noel
62 - Classified Information
63 - Heart Condition
64 - Reese’s Peace
65 - The Best Offense
66 - Jack the Stripper
67 - Room For One Less
68 - The Glowing Corpse
69 - All The Write Moves
71 - Playing The Rolls
72 - Life Is Boring
73 - Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Murder
74 - The Family That Preys Together
75 - Next
76 - Change Of Heart
77 - Road To Nowhere
78 - I See You
79 - Single File
80 - Home, Home Within Range
81 - Nothing To Sneeze At
82 - Your Place Or Mine
83 - Stand-In For Murder
84 - Auction
85 - Nut Job
86 - The Next Great Adventure
87 - The Friendly Skies
88 - The Not-So-Private Eyes
89 - The Hollister Story
90 - Hell Is Other People
91 - By Hooker By Crook
92 - Separated At Birth
93 - Bleeding Heart
94 - Baby Steps
95 - That First Step
96 – Oscar Night
97 - Second Chance
98 - California Or Bust
99 - It’s Worth A Shot
101- Mention My Name In Sheboygan
102- Memories Are Made Of This
103 - Call 911
104 - Mysterious Ways
105 - No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service
106 - That’s Show Biz
107 - K-9 Cooper
108 - Go To Heller
109 - Rock Bottom
110 - A Really Good Friend
111 - Tall, Dark and Dead
112 - Gone With The Window
113 - Eight Grand Down The Toilet
114 - The Return Of Mrs. Cooper
115 - That’s A Stretch
116 - The Three Faces Of Steve
117 - South By Southeast
118 - Gentlemen Prefer Bombs
119 - Hollywood Parade
120 - The Marks Brothers
121 - Cooper And Son
122 - Scared To Death
123 - Scavenger Hunt
124 - Dead Silence
125 - LOL
126 - Re-Cooper-ation
127 - To BB Or Not To BB
128 - South Of The Boarder
129 - Look Who’s Stalking
130 - Badge To The Bone
131 - The Domino Effect
132 - The Good Humor Man
133 - Full Circle
134 - About Face
135 - Egg Zackly
136 - Double Take
137 - The Bird
138 - Dressed To Kill
139 - You Snooze, You Lose
140 - The Merchants of Venice
141 - The Mentor
142 - Here Comes The Bribe
143 - Man With A Plan
144 - A Game Of Horse
01 - It’s In The Bag
It was going to be another long, hot summer and tempers were sure to flare. The mercury climbed upward toward triple digit status as the call came in. It seemed like a routine call at first. A bartender at a place called Jake’s phoned the desk sergeant at our precinct to report a woman passed out at his bar. That in itself wasn’t noteworthy, but the bar was on our way back to the precinct and we were in no hurry to get back to that oven we called our office.
Sergeant Dan Hollister and I took the call. We were cruising just three blocks from the tavern and got there just minutes after the initial call. The tavern was located in the seedier section of town on Fountain Avenue just seven blocks south of the Hotel Rector, which had recently been scheduled for demolition. The rest of the neighborhood could have easily been torn down with it and no one would have complained.
Dan parked the cruiser at an angle in front of Jake’s and we went inside. The bar was long and narrow with a row of stools against the bar. In the far corner sat a single pool table, its felt worn thin and gray in places. A single fluorescent bulb hung over it. There was a large, red and white jukebox in the opposite corner. It was blaring out a country tune by some guy singing how his girl had broke his heart and his scale, too.
The bartender, an overweight, balding, dirty example of small business, was wiping a beer glass as we entered. His full-length apron might have been white during FDR’s first term, but now it was just two yards of grime on a string. He gestured with his head down the bar. While Dan questioned the bartender, I walked down the length of the bar and found the woman in question. By process of elimination, I determined that this had to be the right woman. This was the only woman in the place. In fact, she was the only customer.
I nudged her on her left shoulder with my nightstick. She didn’t respond. I placed the stick under her left arm and lifted. What was left of her chewed-down fingernails showed enough dirt under them to plant potatoes. Her elbows had enough dirt on them to pass for a smoking jacket with suede elbow patches.
The woman’s head lay face down on the bar, her dirty brown shoulder-length hair soaked in
spilled beer. Her twelve-hour underarm protection had worn off thirty-six hours ago and she smelled like an open sewer.
I let her arm drop to her side and slid my stick under her chin and lifted. It was Mary, all right. Mary McGuire, an alcoholic we’d picked up many times in the past. Some people just didn’t get the picture. I eased her head back down onto the bar and noticed a hole in the top of her skirt. It was a cigarette burn hole that went clear through the top and bottom of her skirt and now lay smoldering on the floor beneath her.
Dan came over to where I stood looking down at our town drunk. “She’s on probation, you know,” he said, shaking his head.
I nodded. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “We’re going to have to bring her in. You bring your gloves?”
Dan shrugged, and spread his hands. “Guess we’ll just have to scrub up real good before we eat, Matt,” he said, looking down at his hands.
We each grabbed one of her arms and half dragged-half carried her out toward the front door. The bartender stood between us and the door with his palm outstretched. “Her bar tab is a buck fifty,” he said, waiting for his money.
“Looks like she’s tapped out,” I said. “Charge it.”
I opened the back door of the cruiser and we laid her down on the seat. Dan closed the door and we both stepped back to catch our breath.
“God,” Dan said, “How can one woman get that dirty? I’ve been around three-day-old corpses that didn’t stink this much.”
“Hey,” I said, “She’s doing you a favor. You’ve been trying to drop a few pounds, haven’t you?”
“So?” Dan said.
“So you still feel like having lunch?” I said, laughing a half-hearted laugh.
Dan looked in the back seat at the passed out pile of human debris. He pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, shook his head and held onto his stomach. He slid in behind the wheel as we left the neighborhood and drove back toward the precinct. We’d only gone a few blocks when we heard a rumbling from the back seat. Mary had come to and was trying to sit up. I looked back as she righted herself. Her eyes opened wide, blinked, opened wide again, blinked again and repeated the sequence several times before she realized where she was. Her abuse of alcohol and tobacco added fifteen years to her already rough-looking forty-five.
She got that glazed look in her eyes and smiled at me. “Hiya, Matt,” she said, her breath on the verge of igniting. “Where we goin’?”
The light turned red and I turned around to face her. “You know where, Mary,” I said. “Downtown—again. At least there you’ll get a shower and a chance to sleep it off. You never learn do you?”
“Aw, come on, Matt,” she slurred, “be a sport and let me off at the next corner, will ya?”
The light turned green and I turned around to face the front again, trying to ignore her. The station was only a few minutes away and if I could keep fresh air coming in my open window, I might make it.
I felt something jab my shoulder and turned around to find Mary’s fingers poking me. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let me out. I’ll do anything for ya—anything!”
I caught her image in the rear view mirror. She had opened her blouse and both of her sagging breasts hung there like a couple of fried eggs, sunny side up. She had perfect timing, too. We’d just pulled up to the curb in front of the station and I was about to get out when I heard that familiar rumble. She picked just then to puke all over the back of the cruiser. Luckily I was already out of the car or my own vomit would have blended with hers. Luckily, mine ended up in the street. Dan’s made it to the gutter.
“Jesus Christ, Mary,” Dan snapped, wiping his chin with his handkerchief. “Couldn’t you have held that for one more minute?”
Mary sat up and cried. She cried all the way into the station and all through the booking process. Her crying jag lasted until she was escorted to her cell. She’d no sooner hit the bunk when the crying stopped and she fell sound asleep.
I nudged Dan with my elbow. “Well,” I said.
“Well what?” Dan asked.
“You gotta be hungry now,” I said, half laughing. “I mean your stomach’s gotta be empty. How about some lunch?”
Dan looked at me and then down at Mary, asleep in her cell and then back at me. His face turned a pale shade as he held his fingers to his lips and made a dash for the bathroom. I could hear him vomiting again. A minute later he emerged from the washroom, wiping his lips with a paper towel.
“Now it’s empty,” he said.
I checked the sheets later in the week and found she’d been released. The back seat of the cruiser had been scrubbed down and aired out while Dan and I took another squad car for our rounds. We had two more encounters with Mary McGuire over the next few weeks but nothing prepared us for our last run-in with the habitual drunk.
On the morning of August eighteenth we got a call about a woman on a fire escape. The caller was a bit vague and we weren’t exactly sure what to expect when we got there. A small crowd had already gathered between two buildings on Hobart Boulevard just a few blocks from Jake’s Tavern. They were looking up at the first landing of a fire escape hanging from the side of one of the buildings. As we approached, someone in the crowd looked at me, pointed up and said something about a woman.
Hanging upside down by one leg was Mary McGuire. Her blouse had fallen up toward her head, revealing several puncture wounds to the stomach. The blood had trickled along her chest, up to her head and had dripped off her nose and down onto the ground. A blackish pool of something the flies seemed to like had formed under the fire escape.
“Anybody know her?” Dan asked, already aware of her identity. His eyes scanned the crowd for someone to come forward. No one did but one woman quickly looked down at the ground when his eyes met hers. “What about you,” he said to the woman. “Do you know her?” He pulled out his notepad and pencil and waited.
The woman shook her head without looking up but mumbled something about Jake’s and a guy named Jesse something or other. Dan pulled her aside from the rest of the crowd. “Now, who’s this Jesse character?” he demanded.
The woman looked both ways and behind her before answering. “Jesse Parker,” she said. “He lives in this building on the second floor.” She pointed to Mary’s body and said, “I saw her with him last night in Jake’s.”
Dan made notes on the paper. “When was that?”
“Around twelve or twelve-thirty,” she said. I hadda go home, but I walked right past ‘em on my way out. They was sittin’ at the bar drinkin’ real cozy like.”
Dan jotted the woman’s name, address and phone number in his note pad before releasing her. He walked over to where I was standing to compare his information with mine. I’d gotten a similar story from several other people in the crowd. Several minutes later a second cruiser arrived, and two uniformed officers got out.
I jumped up and grabbed the first step of the fire escape and pulled it toward me. The section of iron stairs slid down and I secured it with my foot. I summoned one of the other patrolmen over to where I held the fire escape ladder down.
“Step on this,” I said. “Hold it down, but don’t go up or disturb anything. We’re going inside.”
“Right,” the patrolman said, placing his foot where mine had been.
Dan walked back to our patrol car and called for the coroner and a lab team to meet us on the scene. The second patrolman watched over the body and kept the crowd back while Dan and I entered the apartment building.
The inside of this building made Jake’s bar look like a country club. The smell of musty lives, stale urine and old garbage filled the hallway. Paint curled and peeled off the walls and ceiling and what once was a banister along the stairway was now just a set of stairs with stubs where the banister once connected to the steps. A single light bulb shown above us. Without it we might not have noticed the graffiti that littered the walls.
There was a row of mailboxes in the lobby, some with nametags and some without. Number 207 ident
ified itself as belonging to J. Parker. Dan and I took the stairs two at a time and positioned ourselves on either side of Jesse Parker’s doorway. I rapped on the door with my nightstick. No one answered but we could hear movement inside.
“Open up, Parker,” I yelled. “This is the police.” The inside sounds got louder and we could hear the sounds of a window sash being thrown open. Dan leaned back and kicked at the door near the handle. The door swung open and we found Jesse with one foot out the window on the fire escape and one foot in the room. His hands were raised above his head and his gaze was fixed on the gun pointing at him from the ground below. Officer Hanson, who came in the second cruiser, made sure Parker wasn’t going anywhere.
I pulled Jesse Parker back into the room and pushed him back onto the bed, turning him over as I did. I pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and eight cents out of his front pocket. He also had a bar chip good for one drink at Jake’s.
Dan slapped his set of handcuffs on Parker’s wrists and turned him around to a sitting position. Jesse Parker was thirty-five years old and like Mary McGuire, looked a lot older. His shoulder length dirty blonde hair was matted and greasy. His eyes had that same glassy look I’d seen a hundred times before in the taverns around town. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds—maybe even a hundred twenty cleaned up.
We turned the prisoner over to Officer Hanson and his partner and instructed them to take Parker back to the station and book him while Dan and I continued to question neighbors. When we had what we needed, Dan and I returned to the station.
Parker was brought in for questioning and booked on suspicion of murder. He was brought into the booking room. His possessions were confiscated and placed in an evidence bag and labeled with his name and the case number before he was brought to the interrogation room.
“What happened, Parker?” Dan said. “What happened to Mary McGuire last night?”
Parker just smirked and said nothing. He looked around the room and then back at the empty table where he sat but still said nothing.
Dan slapped the back of Parker’s head and repeated his question. “Come on, Parker, spill it,” Dan said. “What happened to Mary McGuire?”
Jesse Parker tried to stand up and defend himself. Dan pushed him back into the chair and grabbed a handful of hair from the back of Jesse’s head and yanked it back. Jesse’s chin pointed at the ceiling, his mouth wide open in pain. Dan released the handful of hair and wiped his hand on the back of Jesse’s shirt.
