by Bill Bernico
I stood there, taking in the scene, thinking about the events of the past few weeks when I heard a sound behind me. I spun around, my .38 pointed at the sound. An old woman, probably sixty or so screamed and threw her hands over her face. I lowered my gun.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The woman spread her fingers and peeked at me through them before lowering her hands, which were shaking like a Parkinson’s victim. I took a step toward her and she stepped back, a frightened look on her face.
“I returned my .38 to its holster and held a hand out to the woman. “Sorry,” I said again. “My name is Matt Cooper. I have the office across the street.” I pointed out the window. “Someone in this apartment used that giant slingshot there to shoot some objects through my office window. I just came over to investigate.”
The woman started breathing easier but she still had one hand covering her heart. “Who did you say you were?” She said.
I pulled one of my business cards out and handed it to her. “Matt Cooper,” I repeated. “My office is right across the street.”
She grabbed my card and read it, looking back up at me suspiciously. Then she looked around the room, her gaze coming to rest on the makeshift slingshot.
I pointed again to the window and then looked at her. “Go on,” I said. “See for yourself.”
She timidly stepped over to the window and looked across at the hole in my office window. Then she turned to me. “How’d you get in here?”
“The door was open when I got here,” I said. “Was someone renting this apartment?”
“Certainly not,” she said as if I should know. “This unit has been vacant for several weeks. I don’t let anyone in here unless I’m with them.”
“Well, somebody got in here and they had to have carried that thing is with them. Maybe it was in pieces and they assembled it here, but they still had to carry it all in. If someone wanted to get up here, would they have to go past your office?”
She nodded. “My office is on the first floor. I’d know if anyone tried to sneak by me.”
“Are you home all the time?” I asked.
Again she nodded. “All the time.” Then she thought for a moment. “Except yesterday. I had to go to the drug store. She pointed down at her feet. “Bunions. I needed some foot wrap for my bunions. I wasn’t gone but twenty minutes.”
“That’s all the time it would take to get up here with all that stuff,” I said. “I didn’t see any signs of forced entry. Someone must have had a key.”
“Nope,” she insisted. “I have all the keys hanging on a rack in my office. And there are none missing.”
“Any good burglar could pick the lock on that door,” I said. “All he’d need are a couple of dental picks and some skill. You’d never even know anyone had been in here. The good ones can even lock up again before they go.”
“My,” she said. “I’ll have to see about getting some new locks installed.”
“Don’t bother,” I told her. “A determined burglar can pick any lock. Now a burglar alarm might help.”
She considered this. “Are they expensive?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “At least the good ones are.”
She shook her head. “I guess I’ll just have to keep a better eye on the place.”
“So tell me,” I said. “Who was the last person to rent this apartment?”
She thought for a moment and then offered, “That would be Mr. Crowley. He was the tenant here until a month ago.”
“Do you know where I could find Mr. Crowley?” I said.
“He’s in Glendale,” the woman said, a sad look creeping over her face.
“Glendale? Do you know the address?”
“No, but you can look it up in the yellow pages. It’s the Forest Lawn Cemetery. Poor Mr. Crowley.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “Would you make sure no one comes in here until the police arrive? And please, Mrs., I’m sorry, what was your name?”
“Darling.”
“Excuse me?”
“Darling. Leona Darling.”
I smiled. “Well, Mrs. Darling, I’ll have the police come over and take a look at this mess. Please keep everyone else out and don’t touch anything yourself. There’ll be time to straighten the place up after they leave.”
We left the apartment together. Leona Darling reached for the doorknob but I pulled her hand back.
“Fingerprints,” I reminded her. “The guy who did this might have left his prints on that knob.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, wiping her hands on her dress.
We shared an elevator to the first floor and Leona walked to her apartment. I followed her and when she opened her door I asked if it would be all right if I called the police from her phone. She agreed and I gave Dan a call and filled him in on these latest developments. He agreed to meet me in a few minutes.
I waited in the lobby of this building and watched the traffic go by to kill some time. Out on the sidewalk people hurried on their way to wherever it is people go during the day. Most kept walking while some stopped occasionally to read the name on the brass star embedded in the sidewalk. All along Hollywood Boulevard stars of radio, records and movies had their own star with their name and an icon representing the field they earned that star for. This stretch of sidewalk was known as the Walk Of Fame. I’d traveled these sidewalks so often that I didn’t even notice the stars anymore.
Lost in a typical daydream, I hadn’t even noticed when a car screeched to a stop in front of the building. Dan, a uniformed officer and another man got out and I met them at the door. I took him upstairs and showed him the room with the giant slingshot setup at the window. A crime lab tech carrying a small black bag followed us into the room. Dan gave him the nod and gestured toward the device. The tech took a few items from his bag and began the task of searching for fingerprints. The officer stood guard at the door to the apartment.
“Wait until you see the mess in my office,” I said. “This guy hurled a rock through my window with that thing.” I pointed at the slingshot. “It looks similar to the rock that hit Gladys. After he had broken a hole in the window, he flung over a large pair of scissors and then a ball of wet paper held together with rubber bands. I came over here, but he was already long gone, but he left that note.” I motioned to the note that the lab tech now held in his hand. He held onto it, but held it up so Dan could read it.
“Ties in, doesn’t it,” Dan said.
“Looks like it,” I said. “Come on, let’s get over to my office and you can see for yourself.”
Dan and I took the elevator to the lobby and then out to the street. Dan held one hand up to oncoming traffic as we crossed in the middle of the block. Cars honked but stopped and sped up again after we’d crossed the street. Once back in my office I didn’t need to point out any of the items. They were lying in plain sight. Dan pulled out his handkerchief and used it to pick up the rock. He laid it on my desk and then grabbed the handle of the scissors that was sticking in my doorframe. He wiggled them back and forth and then pulled them free, laying them on the desk next to the rock. Lastly, he bent over and retrieved the rubber-banded ball of paper. It joined the other two objects on my desk. Dan pointed out each one as he said, “Paper, rock scissors. No doubt about it. That’s the message our killer is trying to convey, but why?”
“If I knew that,” I said, “I’d find him and wrap my fingers around his rotten little throat.”
Dan gave me a disappointing look, which hurt more than a mad look would have.
“Sorry,” I said. “I got carried away.”
Dan looked at the three objects. “If he was out to kill you, he could surely pick better methods that these three. No, I think he’s just out to ruin you. You’d be dead already otherwise.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “I think I’d better concentrate on my past cases and see what surfaces. I probably looked right past it and didn’t know what I was seei
ng.”
Dan headed for the door. “I’ll send the lab tech over when he’s done across the street. I gotta get back. Let me know if anything jumps at you.”
I said nothing, but just nodded and waved as he left. The file from my top drawer was still spread out on my desk and I got to it right away. Twenty minutes later I still couldn’t find anything to tie anyone to the trio of clues on my desk.
The lab tech walked in with his bag and came immediately over to my desk. “May I assume these are the objects that were flung from across the street?”
“You may,” I said and then added, “Don’t mind me. I’ll be looking through my files while you process this stuff. If I’m in your way, just say so.”
“No,” he said. “You’re fine right there. I won’t be but a minute. I can take these with me and process them back at the lab. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
He was in and out in less than two minutes. One minute to pack the items into his bag and another minute to study the trajectory angles from across the street. “Thank you,” he said as he was leaving.
I put the first folder back in the filing cabinet and grabbed two others. The first yielded nothing and I was halfway through the second when something caught my eye. It was a case that involved my tailing a fellow named Chester Alvarado. That in itself didn’t mean a thing to me. It was the name in quotes between his first and last name that got my attention. The heading on the folder read, ‘Chester “Rock” Alvarado’ across the top. Maybe it meant something and maybe it was just a coincidence that I wanted to mean something.
I scanned through his folder and remembered this case once I saw my notes. He was a wandering, cheating husband that I’d been hired to follow and report back to his suspicious wife. As it turned out, he wasn’t having an affair, but he was secretly taking dance lessons every Tuesday night. I told his wife what I’d found and she got the widest grin on her face right before she paid me off and told me to discontinue surveillance. I knew it was too good to be true. It wasn’t going to be that easy.
I continued going through my files and found nothing in the entire top drawer. I was a dozen or so folders into the second drawer when I came upon a case I’d handled nearly seven years ago. It involved a dispute between an insurance company and a man claiming he hurt himself falling in front of a construction site. I’d tailed the man for a few weeks, took a dozen or so photos and reported back to the insurance company that had hired me.
The so-called victim claimed that the worksite hadn’t been adequately fenced off from the public, contributing to his injury. When I turned my photos over to the Prudential Insurance Company they were able to prove beyond a doubt that the man, Victor Valdez had been trying to perpetrate a scam and was later arrested for fraud. Valdez had spent more than six years behind bars before Prudential, who had had second thoughts about negative publicity, agreed to have him released, providing he pay back the three thousand dollars they’d originally paid as a settlement with him.
Finally, I found a solid clue to go on. The Prudential Insurance Company’s corporate logo had been the Rock of Gibraltar ever since the turn of the century. One of their slogans read, “Own a Piece of the Rock” and that to me seemed like a connection.
I didn’t see any connection yet between Valdez and the three murder victims yet, but there had to be one. All I had to do was find it. I put the files back in the drawer and called it a night. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and my stomach was grumbling.
I grabbed a burger and a cup of coffee to go at the diner and took it home. I hung up my coat, kicked off my shoes and settled into my easy chair with the food. I set the empty paper cup on the end table nestled back into the soft chair. I’d nearly dozed off, thoughts of the past month’s events swirling around in my head. I don’t know if I’d actually fallen asleep yet of if the vision that popped into my head made me sit up with a start.
I got up out of my chair and walked over to the coat hook, reaching into my pocket for my notepad. I brought it back over to my chair and sat again, leafing through the pages. Something was nagging at me and I didn’t know what. I’d gone back in my notes to the beginning and still hadn’t found what I was looking for, even though I didn’t know myself what that something was. Whatever it was, it was probably something I’d written in the previous notebook and that was back at my office in my bottom desk drawer. I decided it could wait until tomorrow.
The next morning I found the yellow pages and looked up glass repair. I called a company in Hollywood who said they could be at my office by noon to replace my window. I agreed to meet them there and hung up. I was in a hurry this morning so I settled for a bowl of corn flakes and a small glass of orange juice. After I’d finished breakfast I laid the bowl and the glass in the sink. The dishes would have to wait until tonight.
On my way out the front door, I noticed several envelopes lying on the floor directly below the mail slot. I must have stepped right over them last night and hadn’t noticed them. I picked up three envelopes and glanced briefly at the top one and was about to lay them on the table when something made me look at the other two. The top one was my electric bill. The second envelope was from the finance company. I assumed it was an invoice for their car payment. The third bill would normally have just been tossed on the pile with the other bills, but in the upper left corner I noticed it was from my insurance company. No doubt another bill. But it was that word in the return address that made me stop and pause—insurance.
I dropped the three envelopes on the table and walked out the door. Back at my office I hurried to my desk and pulled open the bottom drawer where I kept my older notepads. On the cover of each pad I always wrote two dates that the notes inside covered. I found the one that preceeded the one in my pocket and flipped it open. I turned pages until I came to the one with Jerry Pike’s name on it. After his name, I’d written ‘adjuster’ and underlined it twice. Claims adjuster, I said to myself. That must be what Starkey meant. I pulled my current notepad and flipped to the last page and wrote ‘Pike – claims adjuster? And under that I wrote Valdez – insurance fraud.
Then an image came flooding back into my mind. It was an image of me and Gladys sitting in the booth at the diner the day Dan had set us up with that obvious blind date. She had told me that before she got the riviting job at Lockheed that she’d been the secretary to a claims adjuster for a national insurance company. Prudential Insurance was about as national as you could get. What were the odds that her boss was the late Mr. Pike?
I called Prudential and got connected to their personnel office. I told the woman I was with the police. I lied. I told her that we were looking into Mr. Pike’s death and wanted to know if she could fill in some blanks for me. She told me her name was Agnes York.
“My goodness,” Agnes said. “We hadn’t heard about Mr. Pike’s death. That’s terrible, just terrible. How can I help you?”
“I wanted to make sure I had the right Gerald Pike,” I said. “Can I verify that he was at one time an adjuster with your office?”
“Yes he was,” Agnes said. “He worked out of our Los Angeles office downtown, but that was several years ago. I haven’t seen Mr. Pike since then. I never did find out whatever became of him. I do hope this helps the police.”
“You’ve been a big help, Agnes,” I said. I was about to say goodbye when I remembered something else. “Oh, just one more thing, Agnes. Do you recall a former employee of yours by the name of Gladys Cummings? This would have been at least seven or eight years ago.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Cooper. I’ve only been here four years myself. Hold on, let me ask someone who’s been here longer.”
The line went silent for a minute and then she came back and said, “Yes, there was a Gladys Cummings working here at one time. As a matter of fact, and this is a real coincidence, she was Mr. Pike’s secretary before the war. She left here to go assemble airplanes in some factory back in ‘42, if my co-worker’s memory is correct. Will there be anything els
e, Mr. Cooper?”
“No, thank you very much Agnes. You’ve been a big help. Goodbye.”
I hung up the phone and opened my notepad again. I drew a connecting line between Gladys and Pike with a note in the margin that said ‘Prudential, pre-war’. Now all I had to do was find out how they connected with Starkey.
I decided to take another look at Starkey’s scrap paper business. It took me the better part of half an hour to make it back to Scrap Paper, Inc. I pulled into the driveway and immediately noticed a sign on the office door that said the business was temporarily closed due to a death in the family. I followed the sidewalk behind the office to the house, stepped up onto the porch and rang the bell. A few seconds later the door opened and I found myself looking at a woman with dark circles under her eyes, in her forties. She looked up at me.
“Are you Mrs. Starkey?” I said.
She said nothing, but just nodded.
“Mrs. Starkey,” I said, “my name is matt Cooper.”
She considered this but didn’t make a connection.
“I was with Mr. Starkey when he, um, when he passed away. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Starkey. I just wanted to know if I could ask you a couple of questions.”
“Please, call me Linder.” She held the door open and I stepped inside. She led me to the kitchen table and we both sat, facing each other.
“Well, Linda,” I began, “I need to ask you if Paul had ever worked for Prudential Insurance.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Linder,” she said, correcting me.
“What?”
“It’s Linder, not Linda. Linder was my mother’s maiden name. All my life I’ve had to correct people when they call me Linda. I wish my mother had chosen another name altogether for me. It gets tiring having to explain it when I meet someone.”
“Okay, Linder,” I said. “I just need to know if there was any connection between Paul and the insurance company. If he didn’t work for them, maybe he had a policy with them or had an employee who was.”
