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

by Bill Bernico

  “Mrs. Humphrey,” I said. “Do you happen to remember the name of that pre-school teacher?”

  “Oh Lord, let me think,” she said, and then it came back to her. “Beatrice Crosby. Yes, that was it. I remember it because of those Road pictures with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Funny, the things you pull from your mind to remember other things.” She signed. “I was hoping I’d never have to hear that name again.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had top bring it up just one more time. You’ve been a big help, Mrs. Humphrey. And again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  She looked at me, obviously puzzled. “You never did tell me why you asked about Donald, Mr. Cooper”

  “I’d rather not say until we’re certain, Mrs. Humphrey. I don’t want to needlessly worry you. I’ll be in touch.”

  I thanked her for her time and got up to go. She returned to the kitchen and didn’t see me leave. I had a little different picture of Donald Humphrey after that. It was obvious that his cheese had slipped off his cracker during his stay at the asylum, but was he capable of the kinds of murders we’d been discovering these past few days?

  Chapter 7

  Jack And Jill

  The next day I got a call to meet Dan Hollister on Mulholland Drive near Laurel Canyon. When I got there, I saw Dan’s car, a black and white, an ambulance and a small red sports car. A rescue squad was just coming up from a ravine off Laurel Canyon. They carried a stretcher with a body covered by a sheet. A few seconds later another stretcher emerged with a second body draped in white. Dan followed the second stretcher up to the road.

  “Dan,” I yelled, “What’s all this?”

  Dan mopped his brow and wiped the back of his neck as he reached the road. He was breathing heavily.

  “Take your time, old man,” I said. “Catch your breath and take it easy. I don’t wanna have to give you mouth to mouth necessitation.”

  “That makes two of us,” Dan said.

  A minute later when Dan was breathing normally again I asked, “So what did you find down there?”

  “Two kids, Matt, a boy and a girl, seventeen and sixteen. They must have parked up here on the road when he came along.”

  “He?” I said. “Are we talking about Humphrey?”

  “Probably,” Dan said. “He hasn’t been to work at the Olds dealer in a couple of weeks. His boss said as far as he’s concerned Humphrey doesn’t have a job to come back to even if he did show up again.”

  “Well, what have you got here to tie him into this?” I asked.

  Dan gestured with his chin at the two stretchers. “These two kids were found at the bottom of the hill,” Dan said. “Both of their necks were broken. The boy apparently fell down first and the girl fell after he did.”

  “How’d you determine that?” I said.

  “Her body landed on top of his, so he had to have tumbled down first,” Dan offered.

  “You I.D. them yet?” I said.

  “I almost hate to say it,” Dan started. “According to the registration we found in the glove box of the sports car, the seventeen-year-old’s name is Jack Palmer. We also found a purse in that car. According to identification found in that purse, the girl’s name is…”

  “Jill?”

  “Lawrence,” Dan said, filling in the last name of the young female.

  “Jack and Jill?” I said.

  Dan looked to me for a reference from the rhyme book. “How did this rhyme go?”

  I skipped the first verse and went right to the ending. “Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.”

  “She certainly did,” Dan said.

  “Let me ask you something, Dan,” I said. “How hard do you suppose it would be to find a young couple that just happened to be named Jack and Jill? Then, how much of a huge coincidence would it be to find them at this particular location at this particular time? Is it possible he lured them up here somehow?”

  “I suppose,” Dan said. “He’s clever, and somewhat resourceful, by the looks of it.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “Think about it, Matt. How could he be sure that simply pushing these two down this hill would result in broken necks for both of them?”

  “He couldn’t,” I said.

  “Exactly. He must have broken their necks up here and then tossed the bodies down there.” Dan pointed to the spot at the bottom of the hill where the bodies had been discovered.

  “When’s this madman had enough?” I said. “What the hell’s wrong with a guy who’d do this? None of it’s going to bring his daughter back. And now he’s taking children away from other parents.”

  “We’ll get him, Matt,” Dan said. “He’s bound to slip up and when he does, we’ll be there.”

  “You have any ideas where to look for Humphrey?” I said. “He’s been pretty elusive so far.”

  “We’ve got an all points out on him,” Dan said. “Squads all over the city have his picture and sooner or later our paths will cross.”

  It wasn’t very comforting to think that more people might have to die before we caught this guy. I’m glad this particular book didn’t include the ‘Little Bo Peep’ rhyme or our next victims might just include several sheep and a girl in fluffy pantaloons.

  Chapter 8

  Mary Mary Quite Contrary

  It had been a couple of days since the young couple was found at the bottom of the Laurel Canyon ravine. Dan asked me to stop by the precinct with my notes. We pooled our information and began mapping our strategy when Dan’s intercom buzzed. It was the desk sergeant. Dan left the room and returned a few minutes later.

  Dan took his seat behind his desk, pressed his intercom button and said, “Officer Bernard, would you come in here?” Dan rifled through the drawers and retrieved his .38 and shoulder holster. He’d just strapped it on when a woman entered the room. “Matt Cooper, this is officer Linda Bernard,” Dan said, slipping his coat on over his holster.

  I shook the officer’s hand and nodded. “Glad to meet you, officer.”

  “I’ve heard a few things about you, Mr. Cooper,” she said.

  “All good, I hope. Where’d you hear about me?”

  She gestured toward Dan. “Sergeant Hollister speaks very highly of you.”

  I looked at Dan for a reaction. “That so?”

  “Let’s go,” Hollister said. “The mutual admiration society is closed.”

  I knew better than to ask where we were headed by now. I simply followed Dan in my Olds as he and officer Bernard pulled away from the curb in his squad car. We stopped at a house on Alta Loma. I could see the Hollywood Bowl from the street.

  The three of us walked up to the front door. Dan rang the bell and we all waited. A middle-aged woman answered the door, followed closely by a man of approximately the same age. Dan showed his badge and I.D. and we were invited into the living room. The couple introduced themselves as Ted and Amy McLaughlin. Mrs. McLaughlin offered us coffee while her husband invited us to sit.

  It was Mrs. McLaughlin who began. “Have you heard anything yet?”

  “Mrs. McLaughlin,” Dan said. “I understand that this whole incident began three days ago with a missing persons report on your daughter, Mary.” Dan checked his notes.

  “That’s right,” she said, “Mary wasn’t here when we got home last Wednesday and we both went to bed, figuring she’d gone out. We usually didn’t wait up for her.”

  “How old is Mary?” Dan asked.

  “She just turned twenty-two last month,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “We usually don’t worry about her like this, but it’s not like her to stay away this long. I’m afraid she might be in some sort of trouble.”

  “Mary lived at home, then?” Dan said.

  “Lived?” Mrs. McLaughlin said? “Has something happened to her?”

  “Excuse me,” Dan said. “Lives.”

  They both nodded. Mrs. McLaughlin sighed and squeezed her husband’s hand.

  “Tell us about her,” I said. “Did she ha
ve visitors, friends, anyone who might have seen her last?”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” her mother began, “but shy, a loner. She keeps to herself a lot. Why, if it wasn’t for her garden and her flowers, I don’t know what…”

  I turned to Dan and gave him the nod. “Officer Bernard and I will have a look around while you talk to Mr. and Mrs. McLaughlin.”

  Dan continued with the interview while the two of us went back outside and hurried around to the back yard. There was the garden fenced off from the rest of the yard. In the corner of the garden we noticed rows of tomato plants, cucumbers and beans. The other part of the garden had been planted with beautiful flowers. I noticed the usual rose bushes, daisies and the tulips but wasn’t sure about the last two rows of flowers that had sprung up.

  “Wonder what kind these are,” I said, almost to myself.

  Officer Bernard pointed to the first row and said, “These are sometimes called ‘Silver Bells’ and those in the next row are…”

  She stopped and we turned to stare into each other’s eyes. We knew that the last row of flowers would prove to be ‘Cockle Shells’. We also knew what that probably meant and scoured the garden for any telltale signs. Everywhere there was freshly tilled dirt, so at first glance nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  At the very edge of the garden there was one last row with nothing sprouting from it. I grabbed a hoe that stood nearby and walked over to the last bare row of dirt. Officer Bernard walked up to me.

  “You look like you know how to use that thing,” she said.

  “I have two of these myself at home,” I explained.

  “Why do you need two,” Officer Bernard asked innocently.

  “I keep one for tending my own garden,” I said. “And that’s all I use it for.”

  “What do you do with the second one?” she said.

  “Well, I’m pretty fussy around my house,” I said. “That is, when I get the time. You know how those pesky weeds sprout up in the cracks in the sidewalk? Well, I keep that second hoe just for cleaning out those cracks.”

  “So that would be your crack hoe?” she said, trying to lighten the moment and delay the inevitable.

  I smiled nervously and then began dragging the hoe through the soil. It pulled smoothly at first. Suddenly it snagged on something and I discarded the hoe as Officer Bernard and I both dropped to our knees and spread the dirt with our hands. The nervous smiled dropped off my face and suddenly I could feel my pulse quicken.

  The ground parted, revealing what looked like a small branch at first sight. Closer examination proved it to be a human finger. Linda Bernard gasped and stood up quickly. I spread some more dirt with my hands. In just a few seconds, I pulled what appeared to be a single ear. Officer Bernard ran back to the house to alert Dan and to call the coroner. A minute later Dan and the girl’s parents came running over to where I’d been digging in the soil.

  I stood up and held them back with my arms. “You don’t want to see this,” I said.

  Mrs. McLaughlin spotted the body parts and began screaming. She was quickly wrapped up in her husband’s arms. He turned her away from the sight. Dan and I escorted them back to the house and waited for Jack Walsh and the lab crew.

  It took half an hour before all of Mary McLaughlin’s parts had been found. They had all been buried in that last single row of fresh dirt. I thought it strange that no one in the neighborhood reported seeing any strange activities in the garden in the last few days.

  “So where’s the Mother Goose connection here?” Dan said.

  I took Dan aside and finished the last line of the familiar rhyme. “In this case,” I said, “the pretty maid’s all in a row.”

  The image of Mary McLaughlin’s body parts came back to Dan and he turned away, bent over and vomited all over the grass.

  Jack Walsh and his crew took Mary McLaughlin’s parts back to the morgue in a box. I waited until Dan had composed himself and walked back to our cars together.

  “Don’t worry, Dan,” I said. “My stomach doesn’t feel so good, either.”

  “Keep this to yourself, will you Matt?” Dan said, somewhat embarrassed.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Dan and Officer Bernard drove off in the patrol car and I decided to stick around and have a closer look at the back yard and garden area. I wanted to make sure that we’d left no stone unturned, so to speak.

  Chapter 9

  Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Three Men In A Tub

  According to the table of contents in the nursery rhyme book, I knew what we’d find next. I just didn’t know where or when. Two days later at ten minutes to midnight we learned the ‘when’ and the ‘where’.

  Officer Jerry Burns accompanied Hollister to the scene. I met them there a few minutes later. It was the town dump and at first glance I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I walked over to where Dan stood talking with Officer Burns.

  “It’s getting stranger by the minute, Matt,” Dan said, pointing out what had now become so obvious to me. Standing a few yards away, separated from the regular garbage was a bathtub, an old cast iron model with claw feet legs and chipped enamel.

  I shined my flashlight into the porcelain container and peered over the rim, pretty sure of what was in it. I took a quick look and stepped back just as quickly. There were three human heads and a lot of blood. It was a grisly scene and no one else seemed to want to get any closer than I was. I bent over, resting my hands on my knees, trying to breath through my nose. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else—anything else. It didn’t work. I could feel my stomach rumbling.

  Burns was talking to the medical examiner, Jack Walsh while I spoke to Dan. “Know any of em?” I asked. “I mean, I know they don’t look anything like they would have in life, but…”

  “Nope,” Dan said. “But Burns recognized the one in the middle as a man named Harold Rimshaw. Says he saw him over on Wilshire working at the Wilshire Street Bakery. He thinks Rimshaw was just an employee there, since he knows the owner personally. Nobody seems to know either of the other two. We’ll have their identities once we run them through records.”

  “And how you gonna do that without fingerprints?” I said. “All you have are the heads.”

  “The rest of the bodies will turn up sooner or later,” Dan said. “How many places can that kind of stuff go unnoticed? Besides, once Walsh gets the heads back to the morgue, he can clean them up and we’ll bring in a mortuary makeup artist to make them look presentable again. A little artwork on the eyes, a little rouge on the cheeks and we can put their mugs shots in the paper and see if anyone comes forward with an identification.”

  “Before you go through all that, you might wanna take a peek in your mug files.” I said. “You never know, you might get lucky and find out that these three all had rap sheets and that society is suddenly a better place with three fewer criminals walking around in it.”

  “You always have such a cheery outlook on life, don’t you, Cooper?” Dan shook his head and walked away.

  I followed along behind Dan, retrieving my notepad and looking at what I’d written the day I was at the library. “Dan, according to the Mother Goose book I looked at, the next story in the table of contents was ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Three Men in A Tub’,” I said.

  Dan looked down at the ground and let out a breath he’d been holding. “I suppose once we look into the other two guys, we’ll find that one was a butcher and the other had something to do with making candles.”

  “Humphrey has certainly stepped up his game with these three,” I said. “Anyone who could do this to another human being is quickly deteriorating into an animal. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “We will,” Dan said. “We just have to try to think like he does and get one step ahead of him.”

  Two days later, after the mortuary makeup artist had touched up the three heads and Dan had run their pictures in the Los Angeles Times, he got a hit. A man from Encino who wouldn’t leave his name called to say th
at the face on the left belonged to a guy named Eddie Dobbs, a reputed hit man for the West Coast mob. He’d been given the nickname “The Butcher” because of his preference for using a meat cleaver instead of a gun to dispatch his victims. It was said that he’d slip into a white butcher’s apron to turn his victims into cutlets, disposing of them out in the Pacific Ocean from his thirty-five foot boat. He was reportedly so emotionless about his job that he could dispose of a body at noon and then go to lunch without a worry in the world.

  The following day, a man who recognized the other face in the paper had identified the last beheaded victim as having been his brother, Archibald Crane. That third victim was, indeed, a candlestick maker from downtown L.A. He’d worked at the Zenith Candle Company near the corner of Pico and Stanford for the past several years. His foreman said that Crane hadn’t shown up for work for the last five days. It looked like the Zenith Company would have an opening in their candle-making department.

  I pulled my notebook out and ran a line through the ‘Rub-A-Dub-Dub’ notation. I headed back to my office for some much needed rest and time to gather my thoughts on the case. I still had the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book that Dan had taken from the library. I’d also gone back and checked out the reference book and thought it might be a good time to check their contents once more.

  Chapter 10

  Humpty Dumpty

  It was almost exactly twelve hours later that we learned of another Mother Goose victim. I didn’t have to look at my notes to know what the next theme was. I’d stared at that list so often that I knew it by heart. I sat at my desk, the Mother Goose book laid open in front of me.

  It was the last page of the Mother Goose book that had really left an impression with me. It had two pictures to go with this last poem. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall in the first cartoon. The artist had portrayed Humpty Dumpty as a large egg with arms and legs and a face. In the second frame, Humpty’s body, or in this case, the eggshell lay on the ground in many pieces. In the background the artist had drawn knights and horses, all gathered around the remains of the egg person. They all looked like they had no idea how to put the character back together again. That vision had made me curious about the origins of the rhymes contained within the pages of the Mother Goose book.