by Bill Bernico
“Just remember to leave your .38 hanging on the hook here in the office before you go over there,” Gloria said. “I’m sure the school is a no-weapon zone.”
“Tell that to some of the kids,” I said.
“I had a thought,” Gloria said.
“Yeah, what’s that?” I said.
“Maybe you could talk to the kids about how you’re going about getting your own book written and published,” Gloria said. “Or tell them about Clay’s book.”
“A cookbook?” I said. “I’m sure they’d all be riveted to a story like that.”
Gloria shrugged. “It was just a thought. I guess you can always wing it.”
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” I said, and then I remembered something from the other day. I must have had a faraway look in my eye because Gloria snapped her fingers in front of my face.
“Earth to Elliott,” Gloria said. “Is anyone in there?”
“I was just thinking about Joe’s recollections,” I said. “And that lead me to thinking about what I’m going to say to these kids, and of course that lead me to what I might include in my book.”
“What about it?” Gloria said.
“Nothing,” I said, “except it suddenly reminded me of that old Dean Martin song, Memories Are Made Of This.”
“What song?” Gloria said.
I repeated the title and added, “Dean took it to the number one spot on the charts back in 1956. Since then it’s been recorded at least a dozen times, including one recording by Dean’s buddy, Frank Sinatra.”
“If there’s a connection here, I’m missing it,” Gloria said.
“I was just thinking,” I said, “that this could be the title of my book. It’s perfect.”
Gloria thought about it for a moment and then said, “I like it, too. But can you use it if it’s already been used for Dean Martin’s record.”
“Sure,” I said. “While songs can be copyrighted, titles can’t, so I guess it’s fair game.”
“And there you have it,” Gloria said. “The hard part is done. Now all you have to do is write the book around it.”
At one o’clock I looked at the wall clock above the office door, let out a deep breath and rose from my desk. “Well,” I said nervously, “looks like this is it. Wish me luck.”
Gloria walked me to the door. “You’ll do fine, Elliott,” she said and kissed me before I left.
I found room one twenty-two and knocked on the door frame before walking in. Mrs. Lawrence was sitting at her desk and smiled when she saw me coming. She got up and shook my hand.
“Thank you for coming today, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “It’ll mean a lot to the kids today. I’ve been telling them about you and the business you’re in and they all seemed eager to hear what you have to say today. Do you know what you’re going to say to them?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t got a clue,” I said. “And to be perfectly honest with you, I’m scared shitless.” I winced and bit my lip. “Excuse me, Mrs. Lawrence. I didn’t mean…”
She waved me off. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I know exactly how you feel. I felt that same way on my first day here. But then that was so long ago. Did you know that when I went to high school here that our history book was just a four-page pamphlet?”
It took a few seconds for the joke to set in before I nervously laughed. “Good one,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll do just fine. Just make believe you’re on some street corner talking to normal, average, everyday people.”
The bell rang and twenty teenage kids filed into the room and quickly found their assigned seats. When the second bell rang, Mrs. Lawrence closed her classroom door and took her place at the head of the class. “Class,” she said. “Last week I was telling you about the guest speaker we were going to have today and I’m pleased to announce that he was able to take time out of his busy day to be here. Please give a warm welcome to Elliott Cooper of Cooper Investigations.”
The kids gave a half-hearted applause for two or three seconds and then fell silent again, all their eyes on me. I felt my ears get hot and my throat go dry. Mrs. Lawrence extended a hand toward me and I took up the position next to her.
“Mr. Cooper is here to tell us…” Mrs. Lawrence stopped, turned to me and said, “What was it you were going to talk about, Mr. Cooper?”
“Well,” I said, “this is a literature class and without writing there’d be no literature, so I thought I might talk to you about the process of writing, if you like.”
A hand in the middle of the room shot up and I pointed to the young boy. “Yes,” I said. “Did you want to say something?”
The kid stood up and said, “Did you ever shoot anybody?”
Mrs. Lawrence stepped forward and gave a kid a stern look. “Joey, sit down,” she said. “That’s not an appropriate question for Mr. Cooper.”
Another hand went up on the left side of the room. Mrs. Lawrence called on the girl. “Yes, Trudy,” she said. “Did you have a question for Mr. Cooper?”
“I, uh, I just wanted to know if Mr. Cooper has to carry a gun,” Trudy said.
Mrs. Lawrence turned to me, her eyebrows turned up. I nodded to her and then looked at Trudy. “Yes, I do, Trudy,” I said.
Another hand shot up on the opposite side of the room. “Let’s see it,” the kid said. Suddenly everyone was talking among themselves all at the same time.
Mrs. Lawrence banged her ruler down on her desk several times. “Class,” she said. “You’ll have to be quiet and then just one question at a time.”
I pulled my jacket open to show the class that I was not carrying my weapon today. “Normally,” I said, “I carry my revolver here under my arm, but after all, this school is a no-weapon zone so I left it at the office this afternoon.”
Seven hands all shot up at the same time. I chose a kid who had not yet had the chance to speak and pointed at him. “Yes,” I said, “you in the front row.”
A skinny blonde kid stood up and looked at me. “Do you get to arrest people?” he said. “Do you carry handcuffs with you?”
“No and yes,” I said. “I can cuff and detain a suspect, but I’m not empowered to arrest him. I have to call the police in at that point.”
I pointed to another kid who now had his hand in the air and was waving it back and forth frantically. I figured I’d better call on him before he wet himself. “Yes,” I said, “you in the blue shirt.”
The kid stammered for a second and then asked, “Do you wear one of those slouchy hats and smoke a pipe?”
“Sounds like you’ve been watching a few old Philip Marlowe movies,” I said. “Yes, that was the style back before the sixties. My grandfather wore one of those hats. It’s called a fedora, but no, he didn’t smoke a pipe. I don’t either. Pipe smoking is not good for you at all, and fedoras went out of style when Kennedy took office.”
Twenty faces all looked like just I’d asked them the meaning of life. They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. “John F. Kennedy,” I said, “became our thirty-fifth president in 1961 and he never wore a hat. Up until that time, it was fashionable for men to wear fedoras but when President Kennedy began showing up without any hat at all, the fedora just fell out of style and hasn’t made a comeback since. Sorry.”
A girl in the back row raised her hand and I pointed to her.
“Could you tell us what kind of cases a private eye would take?” she said and then immediately sat back down.
I backed up and lifted one leg, resting on the edge of Mrs. Lawrence’s desk. “Maybe I could tell you about a couple of interesting cases that my grandfather, Matt Cooper worked on back in the forties, fedora and all.”
Twenty faces smiled in unison and nodded.
“Well,” I said, trying to recall some of the stories Grandpa had told me. “I remember once case Grandpa told me about, but it was before he became a private eye. He was still a policeman here in Hollywood and it was during
World War II. 1944 if I recall correctly.” The classroom fell silent and forty eyes were glued on my face as I began.
“This isn’t really a case,” I said. “It’s more of a story to show that there’s a humorous side to cops as well as the serious side that most people see. Well, as Grandpa told me, one night when he was a young officer riding squad on third shift, he and his partner left the police station in their patrol car. Grandpa was driving and his partner, Jerry was sitting in the passenger seat. I should mention, by the way, that one of the policies of the police department is that before he ends his tour of duty, each officer had to gas up the squad car to make sure it is full of gas and ready for the next shift coming on. Grandpa and his partner started patrolling their beat, driving around the neighborhood. When he turned a corner, they both heard a loud scraping, crashing noise and the two policemen looked at each other. They had no idea what could have made such a noise.
Grandpa continued driving and drove maybe six or seven blocks further and all of a sudden the car just went dead and stopped. He pulled over and looked at the gas gauge and it was on E. Naturally he assumed that the previous shift had neglected to fill up the gas tank before they turned the car in.
So they radioed to headquarters and asked them to send an officer out with a can of gas. Ten minutes later another patrol car pulled up behind theirs and an officer came out carrying a gas can. He took the can of gas and started pouring it into the pipe leading to the gas tank and suddenly his shoes were getting all wet. He looked down and noticed all this gas was just running out onto the street.
So Grandpa got down and looked closer with his flashlight and discovered that there was no gas tank on the squad car. Then he remembered hearing that scraping crashing noise just before the car died on them. Grandpa and his partner had that officer drive them seven blocks back to that location and sure enough, laying on the street by the corner was a complete gas tank full of gas lying in the street. The straps had broken and it had fallen off.”
Several seconds had passed after the story ended and I got no reaction. Then it must have sunk into the kids that I was finished. A few nervous laughs followed and I immediately knew that this was not the kind of story they were looking for.
“Well,” I said, “that was just one of the examples of the funny side of cops. But I suppose you’d rather hear about an actual case.”
That brought the class back to life and they all started talking at once again until Mrs. Lawrence tapped her desk with the ruler again. The class quieted down again and looked to me for further entertainment.
“Okay,” I said, trying to come up with a grittier example of police life. My dad, Clay Cooper, worked with the police on a case involving a missing girl. The girl, I’ll just call her Angie, worked in Burbank and she was followed home one night by some guy who was interested in her. Angie got home that night and went around to her back yard. She was going in her back door when the guy who was following her grabbed her and raped and killed her in her own back yard garden.”
The room fell silent as all eyes were on me. I had everyone’s undivided attention now.
“Anyway,” I continued, “he buried her in a shallow grave right in her own back yard before he left. Everyone was looking all over for Angie and they ended up finding her a week later buried in her own back yard. They might not have found her at all had it not been for Angie’s dog. It must have smelled her body in that shallow grave and started digging in that exact spot.”
“Did they catch the guy who killed her?” one boy asked without bothering to raise his hand.
“They did,” I said. “He left telltale clues on Angie’s clothes that led the police right to him.”
“What happened to that guy?” a girl up front said.
“If I remember correctly,” I said, “he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He never got out. Another prisoner stabbed him after he’d served less than three months.”
“Tell us another one, Mr. Cooper,” one boy said. Several other kids voiced their agreement at once.
“How about if I tell you about a suicide case that a police friend of mine was involved with?” I said.
The classroom erupted in conversations again but quieted down as soon as I held up one hand.
“This happened about ten years ago,” I said. “One of Dad’s close friends at the police department was a lieutenant at the time. He and his partner were called to a home just a few blocks from here, as a matter of fact. They rushed into the side door of the house and the woman who had called them said that her husband was hanging downstairs in the basement.
The lieutenant and his partner ran down the basement steps. The woman’s husband had taken a little stool and placed it below the I-beam in the basement and had tied a rope around his neck. He threw the other end up around the beam and tied it off. He had stepped off of the stool and he was hanging there when the two cops found him.
The lieutenant grabbed the man around the waist and held him up in the air while his partner took his pocket knife out and cut the rope. They eased him down onto the cement floor onto his stomach and got on his back right away and started to perform resuscitation on him. They heard a gasping noise a couple of times and thought that they were bringing him out of it, but it turned out to be just the air that they were forcing out of his lungs. The rescue squad came shortly thereafter and tried to give him oxygen, but the man did die.
There were two interesting things about this call. The two cops looked on the man’s workbench and discovered that he had lit a cigarette and placed it in the ashtray just before he stepped off the stool. There was a long ash on the cigarette but it was still burning, so it just shows you how fast the cops got there from the time he tied himself up until he stepped off the stool, but he still didn’t make it.
The other thing was that his wife heard him holler in the basement when he stepped off the stool. She ran downstairs and saw him hanging. She was no doubt suffering from shock because she ran upstairs into the kitchen where the phone was and called the police and then stood there waiting for them to arrive. She never thought about grabbing a knife and running down there and cutting him down. Some time that had elapsed after the cops got there they were talking to her and all of a sudden it dawned on her. She said, ‘Oh, my God, I could have cut him down.’ It just shows you what shock will do to people in those situations.”
The classroom was silent again and I could see one kid grabbing his own throat and rubbing the skin. He was wincing and shaking his head. Mrs. Lawrence stepped up to where I was and looked at her class. “I think that’ll be all for today,” she said.
The kids all started talking at once again. They were all complaining to her that they wanted to hear more police stories from me.
“I’m afraid our time is up,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “And I’m sure Mr. Cooper has to get back to work, too. Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooper?”
She was standing with her back to the class so they couldn’t see her face, but I could. She was clearly annoyed with my choice of material and wanted me out of there and the sooner the better.
“Yes,” I said to the class, “I do have to get back to work, but thanks for having me today. I enjoyed our little talk. Maybe we can…”
Mrs. Lawrence hurried me out of the room and into the hall, closing the door behind her. “Mr. Cooper,” she snapped. “When I asked you to speak to the class, I assumed you would be talking about writing, not killing. These are just kids after all.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think…”
“That’s right,” she said. You didn’t think. Good day, Mr. Cooper.” Mrs. Lawrence returned to her classroom, closing the door and giving me one last dirty look through the glass before turning her back on me.
I walked back to my car with mixed emotions. Glad that I had beat my fear of public speaking but disappointed that the speaking engagement didn’t produce the results Mrs. Lawrence had hoped for. Chances are that I won’t be asked back again and that was just fin
e with me.
I walked back into the office to find Gloria on her feet. “Well,” she said, “how’d it go? Did you get to talk to the kids? Did they seem interested?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I talked and they seemed interested.”
Gloria glanced up at the wall clock and noticed that it wasn’t yet two o’clock. She frowned. “But you’re back so quickly,” she said. “Did you talk fast or did you just run out of things to say?”
“No,” I said. “I was nervous at first, but I got into it after a few minutes. I was telling some of Matt’s old stories and the kids were eating it all up with a spoon.”
“Then how come you’re back so soon?” Gloria said.
I looked at the floor for a moment and then offered, “Because my speaking engagement was cut short,” I said. “Mrs. Lawrence didn’t feel my material was suitable for seventeen-year-olds. She kind of gave me the bum’s rush out of there and I got the feeling I wasn’t going to be asked back for a return engagement.”
“What?” Gloria said. “Just which stories did you tell them?”
“Well,” I said, “I told them about when Matt was a cop and the gas tank fell off the patrol car.”
“That seems innocent enough,” Gloria said.
“Then I told them about a girl who was raped and murdered and buried in her own back yard and how her dog dug her up,” I said.
“And that got you thrown out of there?” Gloria said.
“No,” I told her. “I think it was the third story about the guy who hung himself in his basement that was the last straw for Mrs. Lawrence.”
“I can see why,” Gloria said. “I wouldn’t count on any more high school speaking engagements, Elliott. She’s probably typing up a memo at this very moment and passing it around to the other teachers.”
“Well then, that’s that,” I said. “I’ll stick with the cases and you can hit the lecture circuit.”
“Speaking of cases,” Gloria said, “are you all packed and ready to hit the road tomorrow?”
“Sounds painful,” I said. “Could be hard on my knuckles.”
“What are you talking about?” Gloria said.
