Cooper By The Gross (All 144 Cooper Stories In One Volume)

by Bill Bernico

  Dan said nothing. “Come on, Matt, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  It had been nine days since the incident with the lady on the ledge. Now every time I drove by the apartment building, I couldn’t help but look up toward the top and then down at the street below. Any trace that a couple had crashed down to earth on this spot had disappeared and life went on.

  I drove on to my office building and went upstairs and down the hall to the last door on the left. It had been almost six weeks since my last paying client and my bank account was beginning to feel the pinch. I hadn’t sunk my teeth into a good murder investigation or a scandal or even an insurance scam and I was getting restless.

  I sat behind my desk with my feet up, leaning back in my swivel chair. As I looked at my office door, reading my name and title backwards, I noticed a shadow on the glass and immediately sat upright, trying to look professional. The door opened and I focused my eyes on my desk top, trying to look preoccupied with my work.

  It was Sergeant Hollister. I stopped pretending to be absorbed in the papers on my desk and let my breath out in one long sigh. Dan saw my disappointment and gave me back a look that said more than a thousand words and I understood it perfectly.

  “What’s the matter, Cooper?” he said. “You were expecting someone else?”

  “Sit down, Dan. I’m in no mood for a lecture about anything today. It’s already boring enough around here without you starting in on me.” I leaned back again and returned my feet to the desktop and locked my fingers behind my head.

  Dan took the seat across from my desk and placed his hat next to my feet. “Might have something for you. That is, unless you’re too busy to take on another assignment right now.”

  From my reclined position I pulled open my top left desk drawer and retrieved my appointment book, knowing the whole month was open. I pretended to page through it, looking for an opening. “Let’s see, I think I have all of the rest of this year open. Yeah, I can squeeze you in…” I hesitated just long enough for effect and finished with, “right about now.”

  My feet swung off the desk and I straightened up in my seat, looking to Dan for further information. “What you got?”

  Dan stood up and said, “let’s go.”

  “Go where?” I wanted to know, following him out of my office, down the hall to the stairway. We were out on the street before he answered.

  “To the morgue.”

  We drove over to the city morgue and found the room where coroner Jack Walsh was busy with a body on one of the stainless steel tables. I could hear him speaking into a microphone as he made his initial Y-cut from each shoulder and then down the length of the man’s chest. Spreading the ribs, he continued with his narration.

  “The body is that of a well-formed male in his late thirties with no distinguishing marks or scars. There seems to be no trauma to the torso or limbs and all organs appear normal.” He continued to remove various organs, placing them on the scale and recording their weights.

  Hollister and I took our place next to the table and continued to watch as Walsh moved around to the front of the table and went on to inspect the head. On the left temple I could make out a black, scorched area and a small hole with dried blood that had oozed out and down the side of the head. I heard the steady whir of a small motor and the high-pitched whine as the small circular blade cut a path around the top of the victim’s head.

  Jack lifted the crown of the skull off the rest of the head and set in on the table. I felt my stomach getting queasy as Jack placed his hands inside the cranial cavity. “This what you waiting for, Dan?” he said, producing a small caliber slug. He threw the chunk of metal into a small pan next to the table. The sound of the slug echoed in the nearly empty room.

  Walsh rinsed the slug under the tap and handed it to Dan. “Twenty-five caliber all right,” Dan said handing it to me. I held it up to eye level, inspecting the grooves and twists and folded back pieces of lead. I returned the slug to Dan and looked down at what was left of the body on the table.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’d seen plenty of dead guys in my time and it never got any easier seeing someone topless like this.

  Walsh finished with his preliminary examination, stripped off his rubber gloves and called for his assistant to cart the body away. The attendant covered the body with a plain white sheet and wheeled it over to the room where a refrigerated cubicle waited with its door open.

  “Thanks, Andy,” Dan said, following the attendant and the cart. I followed close behind, my stomach still rumbling. We stopped at the open cubicle and Dan flipped the sheet off the deceased’s face.

  “Know him, Matt?” Hollister asked.

  “Jerry Abrams,” I said. “Small-time hood and numbers runner. Looks like Jerry won’t be running any more.” I positioned my brown felt fedora on my head with a tilt and straightened my suit. “Just why’d you call me down here?”

  Hollister finished jotting the last of his notes on his note pad and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “This.” He handed me a business card and I read it. ‘Matt Cooper—Investigations’.

  “So? I give out hundreds of ‘em. He could have picked that up anywhere,” I said, handing the card back.

  “Are you saying you weren’t working for him?”

  “That’s right. We went to the same high school twenty years ago. Besides that, I only know the guy from seeing him in the precinct house so often. Jerry never could stay out of trouble, could he?”

  “Matt, that single shot to the head wasn’t some run-of-the-mill hit. This was a pro job. Someone wanted to get a message across.” Hollister stopped walking and turned to me. “I could use a break on this one, Matt.”

  “What can I say? I don’t know any more than you do at this point. Why don’t you check the files?” I asked him. “I’m sure a few familiar names will jump out at you.”

  “Already did that, Matt,” Dan said. “I’ve got Burns and Koogan out picking up Eddie Tucker now. Eddie and Jerry were both suspects in that gas station murder last year. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Too bad you couldn’t make that one stick, Dan.”

  “Pretty hard to bring them to court when the only witness turns up in the weeds with her tongue cut out and shoved down her throat.” Hollister flipped the sheet back over the deceased’s face and nodded toward the morgue attendant, who slid the drawer back into the refrigerated slot.

  I nodded toward the drawer where Jerry Abrams lay. “Well, if there’s any justice left in this world, Eddie’ll soon be in the drawer next to Jerry.” I laughed a short, stifled laugh. Hollister didn’t share my sense of humor.

  “Save it, Cooper. I don’t wanna hear…”

  “You don’t wanna hear that you still have to play by the rules and they don’t. Right? Well, the scales of justice just tipped our way. Score one for the good guys for a change.”

  “Listen,” Hollister snapped, “I’ve gotta get back to the office. Meet me back there. Pick up Burns and take him with you out to the Abrams place and bring in Mrs. Abrams. She may be able to shed some light on this one for us.”

  We both got onto the elevator and rose to the ground floor. The doors opened and we walked down the hall and out to the street. I stopped at the water fountain and leaned over it, pretending to drink until Dan was out of sight.

  I returned to the morgue and found the attendant. “Let me have another look at number seventeen, will ya?” I said.

  The attendant pulled the drawer open again and pulled the sheet back, exposing Jerry Abrams’ gruesome face. The attendant walked back over to his desk and sat. He continued to read his magazine while I scanned the body.

  Aside from the obvious hole caused by the .25 caliber bullet, Jerry also had various cuts and scrapes all over his hands and knees.

  The attendant was still reading when I walked over to him and asked, “you got this guy’s personal effects yet?”

  Without looking up the attendant answered, “didn’t have any. Ju
st the pants he was wearing.”

  The attendant handed me Jerry Abrams’ pants. They were plain, blue pinstriped dress pants. The material was relatively new but was torn and dirty. In the cuff of the left leg there was one small sprig from some sort of weed. It was just a typical green weed on a single stem. I pocketed the weed and threw the pants back onto the table next to the attendant.

  “What about the rest?” I said.

  “What rest? That’s it. All he had on when they brought him in was those pants,” he said pointing to a dirty pile on the table next to his desk. “Ain’t nothin’ in ‘em. Not even a belt. This guy musta hadda run in a hurry. Didn’t even have time to get dressed. If ya ask me, looks like he was pokin’ some other guy’s dame.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  I left the morgue and headed back to my office in West Hollywood. I retrieved the piece of weed from my pocket and placed it in a plain white envelope. I sealed the envelope and deposited it in my bottom right drawer.

  Officer Burns and I approached the Abrams farmhouse. Burns walked toward the house but something made me turn and head for the barn. I shined my flashlight across the floor and up into the rafters. The main barn was empty except for the obvious hay, tools and spider webs. There was an attached tool shed on the back of the barn. It was connected to the main building by a single wooden door. I opened it and stepped in. I didn’t step high enough and tripped over the doorsill, which jutted up about six inches. My flashlight flew out of my hand and I fell to the floor, rolling over onto my back.

  I sat up and looked around in the darkness, trying to find the flashlight. As I backed up, I bumped into something solid. The flashlight lay at my feet and I picked it up, shining it on the object that I’d bumped into. It was a shoe and it was dangling a few inches above the floor.

  I shined my light upward, following the legs up to the torso. The body was hanging from the lone rafter that supported the tool shed.

  “Cooper,” Burns yelled out as he entered the main barn.

  “Back here,” I answered. It only took a few seconds for Burns to join me in the tool shed. The light of his flashlight joined mine as we both illuminated the face of the hanging bundle.

  Burns aimed his flashlight along the wall of the shed and stopped on a kerosene lantern hanging on a nail. He lifted the lantern chimney and struck a match. The wick sucked at the flame and soon the lantern illuminated the room enough for us to turn off the flashlights and see the surrounding area.

  There was a small three-step ladder lying on its side just behind the body. The rope was attached to the rafter with a double knot and it hung down about four feet. The body would have originally hung about a foot from the floor, but the weight of this body had stretched the neck to the point where the feet were pointing straight down just inches above the floor. It had the effect of a ballet dancer on tiptoes.

  Burns set the lantern on a nearby shelf and grabbed the body around the middle and lifted. I set the stepladder upright and climbed to the top step. I sawed at the rope attached to the rafter with my pocketknife. As I sawed, the neck let loose and Burns tumbled backward, still holding onto the body. The head flipped sideways and bounced down onto the floor, rolling a few feet from where Burns lay.

  I quickly stepped off the ladder and bent down to help Burns to his feet. Burns stood up, looked at the two body pieces and immediately turned away, retching violently into the hay.

  I patted him on the back and said, “I’ll be right back. Don’t go away.” I ran back to Burns’ black and white and radioed back to the department for the medical team, lab boys and backup. The dispatcher acknowledged the call and I ran back to the tool shed.

  Within twenty minutes the driveway of the farm was filled with squad cars, medical wagons and a few detectives. Dan Hollister was first to enter the tool shed where Burns and I waited. He looked at the two separated body parts and then at us. “Jesus Christ, what happened here, Burns?”

  Burns said nothing. He just tried not to look at the body and was still apparently shaken. Hollister repeated himself. “Burns, what . . .”

  “Easy Dan,” I interrupted. I walked over to Hollister and took him aside. “Lay off, will ya. Burns has probably never seen a body in this condition and yelling orders at him won’t help.”

  “Cooper,” Dan said, “seems everywhere you go bodies turn up. What the hell happened here?”

  I explained how I’d followed Burns here and how the two of us split up to check out the place. When I told him of finding the body hanging from the rafter, Hollister pushed the hat back a little further on his head and just stood there.

  “Any idea who this guy is, or was?” Hollister asked.

  “You tell me. He’s over there—and there,” I said, pointing to the two separate pieces.

  By now the coroner’s men were in the room taking pictures and jotting down notes on their pads. One of them, oblivious to this sort of grisly scene, picked up the head by the hair and held it up in front of Hollister so that the top of the head reached the five-foot level.

  “Anyone you know, Dan? I thought it was Leo Miller but Leo was taller than this.”

  Dan grimaced and quickly looked away. The guy from the morgue laughed and set the head on the stretcher. The rest of the body was eventually placed alongside the head and the whole mess was carried out to the waiting wagon. It silently left the farm yard and headed back to the city.

  “Dan, that was Max Branigan,” I said. “I saw him yesterday at the track.”

  “He say anything?”

  “Nope, I don’t think he even saw me. I was leaving as he was coming and he was too busy talking to some woman that was hanging on his arm to even notice me.”

  “Did you know the woman?” Dan asked.

  “Never saw her before.”

  “But you’d know her if you saw her again?”

  “No doubt.”

  I turned and walked out of the tool shed and into the main room of the barn. Dan followed me out and we both exited to the driveway. “I gotta get back, Dan.”

  “Matt, stop by my office tomorrow morning. I’ll need a statement and a formal I.D.”

  “Sure.”

  I got the call at 7:00 A.M. Tuesday morning to meet Sergeant Hollister at Griffith Park. It took me fifteen minutes to drive to the park entrance. There were already two squad cars parked next to Hollister’s when I arrived.

  As I exited my car, the ambulance drove past me and stopped near the spot where the police officers were already crouched around a body. A police photographer was busy snapping pictures from several angles and Sergeant Hollister scribbled notes in his notebook.

  The body lay face down in the dirt, an eight-inch knife protruding from the back of his neck. “What do we have here, Dan?” I asked, looking again at the stiff body.

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. So far all we know is the victim’s name, Ray Carlson. He lives in Glendale and he’s thirty-seven years old. Other than that, we’re not sure of anything.”

  “Ray Carlson,” I said, scratching my left eyebrow. “That name sounds vaguely familiar but I can’t place it.”

  “You know him?” Hollister asked, looking to me for some sort of clue.

  “I don’t know,” I said, as one of the coroner’s assistants turned the body onto its back. “The face doesn’t ring any bells, but I know I’ve heard that name somewhere before.”

  Ray Carlson was lifted onto the stretcher and slid into the back of the ambulance. The doors slammed shut and the vehicle sped away. I turned back to Hollister who had just put the finishing touches on his notes and was stuffing the pad into his lapel pocket.

  “I think I went to school with a Carlson,” I said, “but his name was Ed or Ted or something. Maybe a brother or a cousin, I don’t know.”

  Hollister headed back to his car but yelled back to me over his shoulder, “We’ll run a check on this guy, Matt, but be sure and let me know if you find anything out on him.”

  I stood
in the entrance of The Spot, a well-known eatery on Sunset catering to the elite of Beverly Hills. Lee Draper, an old high school acquaintance of mine, and I bumped into each other as we left the restaurant.

  I didn’t really know him all that well back then and we hadn’t kept in touch, but I recognized him instantly when we met. It was like stepping back two decades and I was seventeen again. We exchanged small talk about the good ol’ days of Central High School and how fast the last twenty years seemed to fly by.

  We politely excused ourselves, saying something about keeping in touch and how we’d meet again at the twenty-year reunion our school was holding in four months.

  As I turned to go to my car, I heard a muffled sound from a distance and a second later heard a thud that was much closer. It was Lee. He had fallen on the sidewalk eight feet from where I stood. His head had exploded and he lay in a pool of his own blood.

  I pulled my .45 automatic and crouched in the doorway of The Spot, trying to see where a shot might have come from. There were several tall buildings in this block but none offered any clues about the origin of the bullet that had snuffed out Lee Draper.

  A streetcar passed in front of the restaurant just then and I seized the opportunity to run alongside it long enough to make it across the street and into the adjacent alley. My heart pounded as I ran down the alley toward the next street.

  At the end of the alley there was a fire escape ladder hanging down, almost to the cement. It was still in motion as I approached. As it made its way back up to its original position, I grabbed it and held onto it, looking down the alley and the street. I was alone as far as I could tell.

  I wasted no time in climbing to the top of the ladder. The alley was four stories below me and I got a little dizzy looking down. I swung my feet up over the top of the arched ladder and landed on the roof. Actually it was a series of roofs connecting the buildings on this block.

  By the time I’d made my way back to the end of the building facing Sunset I was winded. I looked over the edge and down at the entrance to The Spot. Lee Draper was surrounded now by police and medical people. A large crowd had gathered to gawk and traffic had ground to a halt.