by Bill Bernico
Gloria had looked up from the morning paper long enough to say, “Mid-life crisis again, Elliott?”
“Don’t patronize me, Gloria,” I’d said. “There has to be more to life than just getting up, going to work, coming home and going to bed only to start the whole boring process over again the next day.”
“What would you like me to do about it, Elliott?” Gloria said, raising the paper in front of her face.
I’d left the office yesterday morning in a huff and hadn’t back until three o’clock that afternoon. Gloria had gone out to talk to a prospective client and hadn’t even missed me. It had all been for nothing. I was still in the same grind, like a gerbil on a wheel, running fast but going nowhere.
Right now I’d be willing to settle for the swivel recliner chair and my desk back at the office. This ordeal was more than I could absorb. The pair of red lights appeared again and moved slightly to the left before going out again. I jumped back instinctively and retreated through the door I’d just opened. The pair of red lights appeared again, this time coming closer toward me. I quickly looked around me. I had nowhere to retreat to and stood frozen in my tracks. From the darkness I could hear a low, throaty rumbling, like a large motor smothered by a pillow. The rumbling got louder and closer and seemed to be attached to the pair of red eyes, or lights or whatever they were.
I felt a warm feeling in front of me and soon my legs were warm and wet. I’d wet myself and had involuntarily begun to cry. Suddenly the lights in the second room flashed on and three dozen people yelled in unison, “Surprise.” Someone started singing Happy Birthday and then stopped when they saw the look on my face. Everyone in the room fell silent.
There in Gloria’s hand I spotted a small troll doll with a pair of red eyes that lit up when you squeezed its tummy. She was standing there in her stocking feet. Behind her and to the right stood my father, Clay Cooper, also in his stocking feet. He was holding a large cassette player boom box. He pressed the play button and the sound of the lion’s rumble played. He shrugged and smirked briefly and then his face went somber.
My eyes rolled back into my head and I fainted.
When I came to again there were three dozen people standing over me looking down into my face. Gloria was patting my forehead with a wet towel and Dad’s face showed more concern now. I sat up and the rest of the room erupted in spontaneous laughter. This time they all joined in for a chorus of Happy Birthday and applauded when they’d finished.
Gloria whispered in my ear, “Happy Birthday, Elliott. Still think life is boring?”
73 - Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Murder
The crisp fall day creates swirling piles of dried, brown, yellow and orange leaves at his feet. He playfully kicks at them as he walks along his route, up one sidewalk and down the next, depositing various size envelopes into the various size mailboxes. At several houses, he must ascend the porch and ring the doorbell to get the required signature from the recipient before he’ll release the package to them. The door opens and the mailman reaches into his shiny brown leather sack and produces a small packaged wrapped in plain brown paper. He gets the required signature, hands over the package and descends the porch stairs again.
A small boy watches him from under his porch. The boy looks out through the criss-crossed trellis design in the painted wood that covers the bottom of his porch. He notices the white stripe running up the mailman’s blue pant leg and he fanaticizes about how the mailman is actually a Civil War soldier on a mission to search out and destroy those southern rebels in their gray uniforms. But the mission actually consists of nothing more than dropping letters into the slot in the boy’s front door. The boy sighs in disappointment as the mailman moves on to the next house, quickly reduced to a fleeting memory in the boy’s mind.
The mailman’s routine remains the same for the next three blocks, up each sidewalk and back again after dropping off the mail. In the middle of the fourth block, his routine makes a slight variation from the norm. This time he rings the doorbell and waits for the door to open. When it does, there’s a large, burly man in pajama bottoms and a strapped tee shirt on the other side of the door. He’s barefoot and seems annoyed by the intrusion. The mailman greets this man and tells him that he has a package that requires a signature from the recipient. There’s a light rain falling and the barefoot man invites the mailman to step into his foyer.
The recipient pats his pants pockets, looking for a pen and finding none. The mailman holds up one finger and then reaches into his shiny brown leather mail sack. When his hand comes back out of the sack’s opening, it’s holding a .45 automatic with a suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel. He lifts the gun to eye level and there are two muffled reports as the bullets tear into the front of the barefoot man’s face and out the back side. The man falls backwards, the wall behind where he once stood now covered in blood spatter and gray matter. The man’s foot twitches twice before he falls silent and still.
The mailman slips the handgun back into his mail sack, turns and exits the house, walking down the sidewalk as if what had just happened was a normal, everyday occurrence. For him, it was. There will be more days like this for him. They will be good days, but not for the unlucky chosen recipients on his route.
*****
Lieutenant Dean Hollister of the Los Angeles Police Department is a large, muscular man whose hair is starting to shows small patches of gray near his temples. Hollister has been on the force for more than thirty years and now holds the position that his late father, Dan once held. Dean figures that this year will most likely be his last before he succumbs to the urge to retire and take life easier. The more he thinks about the prospect, the more excited he becomes and has to put the thoughts aside in order to get any work accomplished.
The phone on his desk rings and he reaches across his desk to pick it up, bending in an unnatural arc. He hears something that sounds like someone clipping a toenail and stops in mid-reach, unable to straighten up again. The phone goes on ringing until his office door finally opens and Dean’s secretary, Abbey pokes her head in and sees her boss bent over his desk. From her perspective, he looks like a man bent over a pool table, trying to decide which ball to sink next.
“Lieutenant Hollister,” she says. “Are you all right?” She starts to lay a hand on the lieutenant’s back but he flinches.
“Could you get the hot water bottle out of my closet and fill it up with hot water for me, please?” Dean says, the words coming out edgewise and with obvious pain.
“Right away,” Abbey says, hurrying toward Dean’s closet and pulling the red rubber bottle off the top shelf. She takes it down the hall to the ladies’ bathroom and runs the water in the sink until it’s nice and hot and then holds the neck of the water bottle under the faucet. She caps it off with the threaded plastic stopper and hurries back to Dean’s office, placing it carefully on the small of his back.
Dean moans, partially with relief and partially with more back pain. He lowers himself all the way down onto his desk and exhales a deep breath, closing his eyes in the process and laying his cheek against the wooden desk top.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Lieutenant?” Abbey says.
Dean thinks for a moment and then says, “If you would please just close the door and don’t let anyone in.”
“Yes, sir,” Abbey says.
“And Abbey,” Dean says as an afterthought.
“I know,” she says, “hold your calls.”
“Thank you, Abbey,” Dean says as she leaves his office and eases the door shut behind her. Dean takes several more breaths and thinks about trying to stand upright again. He makes a slight movement in that direction and decides to let the water bottle do its job for a little while longer before he tries that again.
Ten minutes pass and Dean works up the courage to try straightening up again. Before he gets the chance, his office door opens slightly and Abbey slips in, closing the door quickly behind her. “Are you feeling any better, sir
?” Abbey says.
“A little bit,” Dean tells her.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Abbey says.” And I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but Clay Cooper’s here. What should I tell him?”
Clay Cooper was Dean’s oldest and best friend. Both of their fathers had worked together on the L.A.P.D. before Clay’s father, Matt, left to start his own private investigations business. Matt Cooper had lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one, but Dean’s father, Dan had died from cancer when he was just sixty-eight. That worried Dean and made him wonder if his own lifeline would be that short as well.
Dean turned his head toward Abbey and whispers, “Show him in, please.”
“Right away, sir,” Abbey says, leaving the office door open.
Clay Cooper walks in and is surprised to find Dean in the bent over position. He laughs at first. “And me without a rubber glove,” Clay says. He stops laughing when he realizes that the man who’d been his friend since they were little children is in severe pain. “Oh, I’m sorry, Dean,” Clay says. “Did your back go out again?”
Dean nods but says nothing at first. A moment later he asks Clay to remove the hot water bottle. “I should probably try to stand up again,” he says to Clay. “You want to help me?”
Clay took hold of Dean’s shoulders. “Say when,” he tells Dean.
“Okay,” Dean says, starting the painful ascent back to an upright position. When he is vertical again, he exhales and then holds his breath, letting a little at a time out of his lungs. He follows that with deeper, more frequent breaths before arching his back a little past vertical and slowly twisting from side to side.
“Is that any better?” Clay says.
“You know,” Dean says. “I don’t know what I’d do without that hot water bottle. That made all the difference, let me tell you.”
“Don’t chew my head off,” Clay says, “But have you given any more thought to retirement? I can tell you first hand that I’ve never felt more liberated and carefree than when I made that decision last summer.” To Clay’s surprise, Dean doesn’t voice his usual objection.
“Funny you should mention retirement, Clay,” Dean says. “Just before you got here that’s exactly what I was thinking about. Hell, if you can retire at sixty-two without any kind of a plan, I’m sure I can put in for my pension and let someone else take over this zoo.”
Clay smiles. “Now you’re talking,” he says. “Just think of all the things we can do together once you pull the plug. Did I tell you about the club I recently joined?”
“Are you talking about that A.A.R.P. club?” Dean says. “What, are you getting really good at shuffleboard and canasta?”
“It’s not like that at all,” Clay says. “The Action-Adventure Role-Players club is a lot of fun, actually.”
“The what?” Dean says.
“The Action-Ad…”
“Never mind,” Dean says. “I’m not going anywhere for at least another two months. After the first of the year I can put in my papers and sit back with my feet up and then you can tell me all about it again. So what brings you here today?”
“I wanted to invite you to dinner Saturday night to meet my brother,” Clay says.
“Excuse me,” Dean says. “I think this is my bad ear. I thought you said your brother.”
“Half-brother, actually,” Clay says. “Oh, that’s right, you haven’t heard about Nicholas yet, have you?”
“Nicholas?” Dean says, his face scrunching up.
“Yeah,” Clay says, “That’s his name, Nicholas Sawyer. It’s a long story and I can fill you in Saturday. You free?”
“Sure,” Dean says. “What else have I got to do?”
The phone on Abbey’s desk rings and Dean can hear it from inside his office. He eases himself over to his office door and peers out. Abbey catches his eye and he nods.
“Just a moment, please,” Abbey says into the phone. “I’ll connect you.” She hangs up her phone and nods at Dean. “It’s the captain.”
Dean eases himself into his chair and picks up his phone. “Yes, captain,” he says. “Uh huh. No, I hadn’t heard about it. When did this happen? Yes, I’ll get right on it.” Dean hangs up the phone, closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Come on, January,” he says, stretching out the second word, like he was urging a race horse on to the finish line.
“What is it?” Clay says.
“Another murder,” Dean says. “Same M.O. as the last two. I think it could be the same guy in all three cases.” He looks at Clay out of the corner of his eye. “Say Clay, do you suppose you could drive me to…”
“You got it, buddy,” Clay says. “Let’s go.”
Dean walks slowly out of the precinct to the parking lot behind the building. Clay opens the passenger side door and waits for Dean to ease onto the seat. He closes the door and then slides behind the wheel and starts the cruiser. “Where to?” Clay says.
“Lexington near Bronson,” Dean says. “There’s already a black and white on the scene and the M.E.’s on his way as well. I just hope there are no eager beaver reporters listening to their police band radio today. I couldn’t take dealing with any more of them.”
Clay pulls the cruiser up behind the black and white patrol car and comes around to Dean’s side of the car and helps him stand up. Dean waves him off after that, not eager for his men to see him in this condition. He walks slowly up to the front door and lets himself in. The two patrolmen inside straighten visibly when Dean enters the room.
“What do we have here?” Dean says.
The first patrolman, a sergeant named O’Dell gestures with his chin at the man lying on the floor. “No I.D. on the victim, Lieutenant,” O’Dell says. Looks to be about fifty-five, six foot one or so, two hundred twenty or thirty pounds, brown and brown. Looks like someone met him at the front door and put two slugs in his face before he knew what hit him. That’s just the way we found him.”
Dean looks at the splatter on the wall at the six foot mark. “Looks like he was standing there facing this way,” Dean says. “Not much of a mystery as to the ‘how’ but the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ is another matter entirely.”
Clay surveys the immediate area and then turns back to the front door, examining the frame. “Doesn’t look like a forced entry,” Clay says. “So either the killer had a key, or it was someone the victim knew and let him in.”
“With friends like that,” Dean says, without finishing the thought.
Footsteps sound on the front porch just before the front door opens and Andy Reynolds, the county medical examiner walks in. He stops just inside the door and looks down at what was left of the victim. “This is about the dumbest part of my job, checking for a pulse on a man in this condition,” he says, pulling on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, bending over the body and pressing two fingers to the victim’s neck. He knows there’ll be no pulse, but it is standard protocol to go through the motions before officially declaring the man dead. Andy stands up again and notes the official time of death on his clipboard. “I can narrow this time down a bit once I’ve completed the autopsy, but off the record, I’d say he’s been dead for no more than three hours.”
“Thanks, Andy,” Dean says, stepping carefully past the bloody mess in the front hall and moving on to the living room.
Clay follows Dean into the living room, looking on shelves and the fireplace mantle at framed photos that were probably this man with other family members. Clay stops at one picture in particular that rests on top of a console piano in the corner. “Hey, Dean,” Clay says. “Take a look at this one.”
Dean steps over to the piano and tilts his head down to look at the picture. Clay notices Dean wincing and lifts the picture to Dean’s eye level. “Thanks,” Dean says. “Now what did you want me to notice about this photo?”
“Doesn’t he look familiar?” Clay says. “Take a closer look.”
“Okay,” Dean says. “What am I looking for?”
“Clear your mind,” Clay sa
ys, “And picture him behind a podium speaking to a union hall full of Teamsters.”
Dean looks more closely at the picture and then shifts his gaze to Clay without actually turning his head. “Mad Dog Vogel?” he says, not believing what he was saying. “You think that’s him?”
“Kind of hard to make a positive with half his face missing,” Clay says. “But that’s definitely him in the photo.”
Dean turns to look more closely at some of the other photos on the shelves. He picks one off a high shelf and pulls it closer to his face. He turns to Clay and says, “It’s him. He’s in this one, too.”
“Where do you suppose everyone else is today?” Clay says. “From these photos, it looks like he has a family.”
“Had a family,” Dean says. “Don’t you remember that massacre two or three years ago in that beach house in Santa Monica? That was Vogel’s family. He and his wife and two kids were shot and left for dead. The house was torched, but Vogel managed to crawl out before it burned to the ground. Someone was sending a message to Vogel.”
“I do recall that one,” Clay says. “Word on the street was that Francisco Vasquez was responsible but no one was eager to step forward with any information.”
“Can’t say that I blame them,” Dean says. “I wouldn’t, either. Vogel swore he’d even the score once he was released from the hospital.”
“Yeah,” Clay says, “But that was more than two years ago. What was he waiting for?”
“He spent ten months of that time flat on his back or in physical therapy.” Dean says. “And he spent another year and some in a wheel chair hidden out in protective custody. He couldn’t have been in this place too long.”
“Long enough for Vasquez to find him,” Clay says.
“You think this is Vasquez’s handy work?” Dean says.
Clay shrugs. “If not his, then someone who works for him,” he says, and then turns to check out some of the other rooms. As he passes the kitchen, he looks in at the kitchen table and whistles.
