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

by Bill Bernico

“Huh?”

  “I mean, off of work. Are you supposed to be on a case? Am I keeping you from some important job?”

  “No. That’s the great thing about my job,” I said. “Between cases, I have all this free time. It’s not like I can make cold calls and see if anyone needs a private eye.”

  “I guess you’re right. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. I hope we meet again.”

  “Speaking of work,” I said. “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I work Saturdays so I get one day during the week off, and Tuesdays are my day off.”

  “Oh.” I’d run out of things to talk about and my eyes wandered around the room nervously.

  “Well then,” Gladys said, rising.

  “Yup,” I said. It was an awkward moment for both of us.

  We both started to speak at the same time, both stopped, and both started again and then stopped. We both laughed.

  “You first,” I said.”

  “No, you go ahead,” Gladys insisted.

  “I was just going to ask if you’d seen ‘Red River’ yet. It’s John Wayne’s latest and I heard it was pretty good.”

  “Why, no, I haven’t,” Gladys said. “Is that the one with Montgomery Clift?”

  “That’s the one. It’s playing just up the street at The Pantages. Would you like to go?”

  Gladys smiled. “That sounds like fun. Let’s go.”

  This would be my first real date in more than a year, not counting escorting Dan’s mother to a wedding.

  The next day I drove to the twelfth precinct and knocked on Hollister’s door. He smiled and waved me in.

  “So?” he said.

  “What?” I said, sitting across from Dan.

  “Come on, Matt, you don’t have to play coy with me. Gladys called Phyllis and Phyllis told me. Now all I need are the details. Come on, man, give.”

  I shrugged. “It was no big deal,” I said. “We went to a movie, that’s all. And then I took her home.”

  Dan looked at me sideways. “That’s it? What happened to the details?”

  “What details? Movie and home, that’s all.”

  Dan seemed cheated out of a juicy story. “You gonna see her again?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact…”

  “I knew it,” Dan said. “I knew this would work out for you two. See, what’d I tell you? Is she Miss Right or not?”

  “Miss Right?” I said. “Come on, Dan. It’s too early to tell from just one date. Let’s just say she’s Miss Right Now and leave it at that, okay?”

  “But just think about it, Matt. If she is and you two get married, she’ll be Gladys Cooper. Pretty funny, eh?”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  “Gladys Cooper,” Dan repeated. “You know, the actress. She was in that Bette Davis movie, what was the name of it? Oh yes, ‘Now Voyager’. Five or six years ago. Remember?”

  “I saw that one,” I said. “Which one was Gladys Cooper?”

  “The old lady,” Dan said. “She was probably in her late fifties at the time.”

  “Yes, I remember,” I said, recalling the movie.

  “So,” Dan said, sliding his chair closer to me. “You thought about names for the kids yet? How about Jackie or Gary or Alice?”

  “I get the Gary Cooper and Jackie Cooper jokes, but who the hell is Alice?”

  Dan shrugged. “Just a girl I knew in college. No joke there.”

  “Well, don’t be in such a hurry to get me married off. I just met the woman, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “But you are going to see her again, right?”

  I nodded. “We have a date tonight, if you must know. She wants to go for a walk in the park.”

  “Griffith?”

  “McArthur.”

  “Well, you kids have fun,” Dan said, a sly grin on his face.

  “All right,” I said. “I have to admit I was skeptical when you were hounding me about a blind date, but I’ll be the first to admit that in this case, it worked out. You happy now?”

  Dan said nothing, but just smirked some more while nodding his head. He gestured with his hand, shooing me out of his office.

  Gladys had to work at the flower shop until five-thirty so we decided that I’d pick her up around six-thirty and drive to the park. I had a few things to do myself, but finished them hours ahead of our meet time. I wasn’t sure just how I was going to kill three hours, which seemed to be dragging by. I drove around town, picking up things for my house and office that I normally forgot about and when six o’clock rolled around, I was still putting things away in my cupboards.

  I slipped into a fresh shirt and underwear and pulled my blue suit from the closet, along with a pair of black oxfords. Out of habit, I slipped on my shoulder holster and .38 and slipped my coat over it, looking in the full-length mirror, making sure it didn’t show.

  I thought about bringing Gladys some flowers, but considering where she worked, that probably wasn’t a good idea. Instead I stopped at the store on the way to her house and picked up a box of assorted candies with a fancy ribbon around it.

  It was six twenty-nine when I rang her bell. She opened the door and I pulled the candy box out from behind me and presented her with it. “What is it you’re supposed to say when you give somebody candy?”

  “Sweets for the sweet?” Gladys offered.

  “No, I was thinking more like, ‘Watch out for the hard centers.’” I laughed and so did she. I guess my offbeat sense of humor would work after all.

  Gladys swung the door wide and I stepped inside. She gave me a peck on the cheek and I wrapped my arms around her waist.

  “You ready to go?” I said, kissing her neck.

  “Just let me put this candy away and we can go,” she said, pulling away from me and brushing her dress straight again.

  I took Western Avenue down to Wilshire Boulevard and parked on Alvarado St. I went around to the passenger side and helped Gladys out and we walked toward the park. She locked her arm around mine and I had to admit it felt good having her cling to me. We’d walked a hundred yards or so when we came to a park bench. She stopped and gestured toward the bench with her head. We sat and watched the ducks swimming around in the lake.

  I turned my head away to watch a mother duck and her six ducklings waddle toward the water. I heard a dull thump and felt Gladys jerk in her seat next to me. When I turned back toward her she was already beginning to slump forward, the back of her head spouting blood. She fell to the pavement and began convulsing, her feet twitching until she kicked off one of her shoes. I quickly knelt next to her, trying to assess the damage to her head. I looked behind me, behind the bench and saw a potato-sized rock lying there on the grass. It had blood on it. I stood, pulled my .38 and scanned the immediate area but didn’t see anyone close to us. I holstered the gun and then turned my attention back to Gladys. She had stopped twitching and had also stopped breathing. I felt for a pulse in her neck and found none.

  I stood again, frantic to get some help. A young man on a bicycle was coming my way with a young lady on her own bike close behind him. I waved him down.

  “Quick,” I said. “Go find a phone and call and ambulance. Someone hit my friend in the head with a rock. Hurry.”

  The man turned his bike around and peddled off back toward Alvarado Street while his girlfriend dropped her bike and knelt next to Gladys, trying to help but not knowing exactly what to do. She looked up at me, her face awash with horror.

  “What happened to her?” She said, trying to grasp the situation.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “I turned to look at something in the lake and then a rock hit her in the head and she went down right where she is. That’s gotta be the rock that hit her.” I pointed to the rock behind the bench.

  She started to reach for it but I quickly said, “Don’t touch it. It may have fingerprints on it.” She drew her hand back and wiped it on her slacks.

  A few minutes later the kid on the bike returned, a patrolman follow
ing close behind. The kid threw his bike down on the grass and hurried over to his girlfriend. “How is she?” He asked.

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know.” She threw her arms around her boyfriend’s neck and buried her face in his chest.

  The beat cop hurried over to where Gladys lay and asked, “What happened here?”

  I told him the same thing I’d told the girl and then I pointed to the rock. “Someone threw that and hit her in the head.”

  “You see anyone hanging around afterwards?”

  I shook my head. “No one.”

  A minute later I could hear the scream of the ambulance’s siren coming closer. It pulled up right next to where we stood and two men in white got out. One carried a black bag while the other went immediately to Gladys’s side, feeling for vital signs. The other attendant pulled a stethoscope from his bag and pressed the business end to Gladys’s chest. He listened for a few seconds, pulled the earpieces out of his ears and dropped the instrument back into his bag. He stood and looked at the cop, shaking his head subtly.

  My eyes began to well up and I took a deep breath, fighting back the urge to cry. I reached into my pants pocket for a handkerchief. In doing so, my coat fell open and the patrolman saw my gun. He drew his weapon and stared at me.

  “Don’t move and keep your hands where I can see ‘em,” he said. With his gun trained on me, he reached into my coat with his left hand and retrieved my .38, holding it up by the butt between his thumb and index finger. He backed away from me and then looked at me suspiciously.

  “Relax,” I said. “I have a carry permit for it. I’m a private detective.”

  The cop seemed unimpressed.

  “I can show you my license and gun permit if I may be permitted to reach into my coat for my wallet.” I waited and watched the cop’s face.

  “Slowly,” he said.

  I plucked my wallet out and flipped it open to my P.I. license and gun permit. I held it up at eye level so he could read it. A few seconds later the cop looked away from my wallet and then back at me.

  “All right if I put my hands down now?” I said.

  The cop let his breath out, holstered his weapon and handed mine back to me. I stuck it under my arm and buttoned my coat again. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t take any chances, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I used to be one of you many years ago.”

  The ambulance attendants lifted Gladys onto the stretcher, slid her into the back of their wagon and closed the doors. Before they got back in, I stopped one of them.

  “Where are you taking her?” I said.

  “The medical examiner’s office,” he said. “If you want to stop down, the man you want to talk to is…”

  “Jack Walsh,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. “Yes, I know Jack very well. I’ll be down as soon as I’m done talking to this officer.”

  The ambulance drove away, minus the red lights and siren this time. I turned back to the cop and pointed to the walkie-talkie on his belt. “Can you call downtown for me and ask for Sergeant Hollister?”

  “Why?” The cop said.

  “He’ll want to know about this right away,” I said. “He’s the one who set me up with Gladys.”

  “Gladys?”

  “The victim,” I said. “Please give him a call and ask him to meet me here as soon as he can.”

  The cop called in to the precinct with my request and returned the radio to his belt. He pulled out his notepad and pencil and flipped it open to the last page. He wrote down my name and home address and phone number and was about to ask me more when I handed him one of my business cards. He looked it over and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

  “What was the victim’s name?” He said, ready to write more information on his pad.

  “Gladys Cummings,” I said.

  “Do you know her address and phone number?”

  I provided both pieces of information.

  “Would you happen to know her next of kin?” The cop said.

  I shook my head. “This was only our second date. Sorry.”

  The cop spotted a purse on the bench and gestured toward it with his notepad. “That hers?”

  I hadn’t even noticed that she’d been carrying a small purse. “I guess so, I don’t know. I never noticed it before.”

  The cop walked over to the bench, picked up the purse and rifled through its contents. He pulled a small wallet out, laid the purse back on the bench and flipped the wallet open to a driver’s license under the celluloid window, writing down what he found, all the while reading what he thought was to himself, but I could hear him. “Gladys Cummings, thirty-three, five foot four, a hundred sixteen pounds, brown, brown.” He returned the wallet to the purse.

  Several minutes later a black and white cruiser pulled up in the same spot that the ambulance had just vacated minutes earlier. Dan and another uniformed officer got out. Dan looked at the patrolman I’d been talking to. He looked at the cop’s nameplate.

  “Officer Becker, what’s going on here?”

  I didn’t give the cop a chance to answer. “Dan,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s Gladys.”

  “Gladys?” He said. “What about her?”

  I looked down at the ground, breathed out and looked back up into Dan’s face. “She’s dead.”

  That jolted Dan and he flinched. “Dead? How? What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, pointing to the bench. “We were sitting there, taking in the lake and the park and then someone hit her in the head with that rock.” I pointed to the bloody rock.

  Dan gestured to his partner and then over at the rock. His partner nodded and then grabbed the rock with a handkerchief and dropped it into a paper bag and walked it back to the patrol car.

  “Did you see anyone?” Dan said.

  I shook my head. “No one. I was busy kneeling next to Gladys and by the time I looked up, there was no one around. Dan, this just doesn’t make any sense. No sense at all.”

  Then a thought occurred to Dan. “Oh gees.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Phyllis,” Dan said. “How am I going to tell her?”

  “Can we get out of here?” I asked.

  Dan said something under his breath to the patrolman I’d been talking with and then turned back to me. “Let’s go, Matt.”

  Dan walked with me back to my car. “You feel up to coming downtown and making a statement?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Follow me to the precinct,” Dan said. “Otherwise someone would have to drive you back here for your car.”

  At the precinct I followed Dan back to his office and sat across from him. He pressed his intercom button and asked his secretary, Hannah to come in with her steno pad. Hannah sat next to me as I relayed the evening’s events to Dan.

  “And that’s about it,” I said. “I don’t get it, Dan. This thing just came out of nowhere. Oh, I don’t mean the rock, I mean this whole thing. I’m not on a case now. And I can’t imagine Gladys having any enemies.”

  Dan nodded at Hannah and she left the room to go type up my statement. He turned his attentions to me. “What about a jealous former boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She never mentioned anyone. She never said a word about trouble from anyone at all. I just don’t get it, Dan.”

  “I’ll put a couple of homicide detectives on it,” Dan said. “We’ll get the bastard.”

  I gave Dan a look he knew all too well. “I’m going to...”

  “You’re going to stay out of it, Matt. If you go charging in and muddying the waters you could screw things up for the detectives. Just let us do our jobs, will you?”

  “But I...”

  “But nothing,” Dan was adamant. “Stay out of it, you hear?” He must have realized how harsh he came off considering the circumstances and then added, “Please?”

  “All right,” I finally agreed. “But will you keep me in the loop on this one?” />
  “I will,” Dan said.

  I gave him my skeptical look.

  “I promise. Now why don’t you go on home and get yourself some rest? I’ll let you know the minute we find something. Okay?”

  I nodded and got up from the chair. I wasn’t looking forward to going home. I had too much time on my hands to think and that was never good during something like this. I had to keep busy. I decided to stop at my office instead.

  I walked into my office and locked the door behind me. I stepped over to the window next to my desk and gazed at the street below. Somewhere out there was a killer who couldn’t have hurt me worse if he’d hit my head with that rock instead. I felt helpless having to stay out of it, but I understood why Dan had his concerns. The traffic below was light as dusk fell over the city. Headlights started coming on and the streetlights soon illuminated the boulevard.

  I grabbed that morning’s newspaper and tried to distract myself with the comics. I read and re-read one frame of a comic several times, but could concentrate on it. I folded the paper and threw it down again. I was just starting to lean back in my chair for my daily allotment of ceiling staring when my phone rang. I let it ring, hoping whoever it was would give up and leave me alone. They didn’t. After the fifteenth ring I scooped up the handset.

  “What?” I said impatiently

  There was a second or two of silence and then “Who is this?”

  “Who do you want?”

  “I’m trying to reach Cooper Investigations,” the male voice said.

  “Keep trying,” I said. “You got the wrong number,” and hung up. I didn’t want to admit to the caller that they’d indeed reached the right number. I could retain my dignity and professionalism if I just let the caller think that the mistake was theirs. When they called back, and I hoped they would, I could answer in a calmer, more professional tone. A minute passed and I was starting to regret my hasty decision. Then the phone rang and I let it ring once more, picking up on the second ring.

  “Cooper Investigations,” I said, changing my voice somewhat from the last call.

  “Is Mr. Cooper in?” The voice said.

  “Speaking.”

  “Well, I uh, I wondered if maybe I could hire you to look into a small matter for me. I shouldn’t take you long if you think you could squeeze me in between some of your bigger jobs.”