by Bill Bernico
No eyewitnesses, Claire thought. That was perfect. Now, after at least two broadcasts of the murder Claire was certain that her payment would be waiting for her when she arrived at the post office later this morning. She turned off the television, dropped her cup and plate into the dishwasher and returned to her bedroom to get back into her Beatrice O’Malley disguise before stepping out of the house. Claire also packed her shopping back with a second disguise that she would change into between her house and the post office. She left nothing to chance and that was how she had managed to remain a free woman for all this time.
Claire never used the same service station rest room more than once, either. This morning she’d change in the ladies’ room at a Clark station on Fountain and Sycamore. When she emerged several minutes later, she was dressed as a middle-aged housewife in a green skirt and white blouse. Inside the shopping bag Claire also carried another similar shopping bag neatly folded with a blue and white design on the outside. Inside of this bag she carried her Beatrice disguise and the original folded brown shopping bag. She didn’t want anyone to remember seeing Beatrice hanging around this neighborhood for too long.
Claire walked north to Sunset and caught the bus heading east. She transferred at Hollywood and Vermont, riding north several block before exiting at the post office. Claire walked inside, pulled her post office box key from her pocket and inserted it into her box. Inside she found a tightly wrapped bundle in plain brown paper and withdrew it, dropping it into her purse and exiting the way she’d come. She walked the half block north to Franklin and caught the westbound bus. Her whole post office trip had taken her just over an hour, including two changes of clothes at two different service stations. She was dressed as Beatrice again and back in her house before ten-thirty.
Once inside, Claire shed the Beatrice disguise again and dressed in comfortable pajamas. She had nowhere else to go today and wasn’t even planning on answering the door or the phone. She retired to the living room with her wrapped bundle and a pair of scissors. Claire snipped the string that had been tied around the package and pulled the brown paper off a stack of bound hundred dollar bills. There were two bundles of a hundred bills each and Claire was now looking at twenty thousand dollars, her usual fee for a good, clean hit. Now all she had to do for the next month or so was relax and enjoy her blood money.
*****
Monday morning, three weeks later found Matt Cooper stuck in traffic on his way to the office. There was a light drizzle and the pavement glistened with water. He could see a quarter mile ahead of him and it looked like there had been one hell of an accident, according to the numerous red lights flashing up ahead. Traffic had come to a standstill and Matt was growing impatient. He normally didn’t have to take the freeway to work. He could usually get there over the surface streets, but this morning he had to make a side trip to pick up Elliott’s laptop from the repair shop. His father had dropped the laptop four days earlier and had left it at the repair shop on Lexington Avenue. Matt could have taken Lexington to Cahuenga and then straight north to their office, but he figured the shortest distance would be via the freeway. He hadn’t counted on the refrigerated tractor-trailer jackknifing across three lanes of traffic. People in California just didn’t know how to drive in the rain, Matt decided. They should try it in Chicago in February.
Matt dialed his office and waited. Elliott answered on the second ring. “Cooper and Son Investigations,” he said. “Elliott Cooper speaking.”
“Dad,” Matt said.
“Matt, where are you?”
“Stuck on the Hollywood Freeway,” Matt said. “Some big rig jackknifed and I’m sitting here at a standstill. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they get this mess cleared up.”
“Can’t you get off and take an exit?”
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” Matt said sarcastically. “I can see the next exit up ahead, but it looks like everybody and his brother has the same idea. It’s jammed, too.”
“Well, then just sight tight and let me know when you start moving again,” Elliott said. “I can hold down the fort for a while yet.”
“Not much else I can do,” Matt conceded and closed his phone. Nothing ahead of him was moving so he killed his engine and sat there listening to the honking horns and yelling drivers. The line of cars ahead of him didn’t start moving again for another thirty-five minutes.
Elliott had just hung up his phone when his office door opened and his wife, Gloria stepped in. Elliott looked up, somewhat surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you again, too,” Gloria said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Elliott explained. “I just left you at home half an hour ago. Miss me already?”
“No,” Gloria said and then quickly amended to, “I mean yes, I missed you terribly—you and your wallet both.”
“Huh?”
“You left this morning before I could ask you for some money,” Gloria explained. “I need to pick up Olivia’s cap and gown this morning and I need some cash. They don’t take credit cards and the bank is out of my way and I have so much to…”
“All right,” Elliott said. “Don’t sell me the watch. Just tell me the time.”
Gloria gave Elliott her annoyed look that usually let him know she didn’t appreciate being cut off in mid-sentence. She held out her hand and said, “Olivia’s cap and gown, please.”
Olivia was Elliott and Gloria’s eighteen-year-old daughter who was graduating from high school next weekend. She would be starting her freshman year at college in the fall.
Elliott pulled his wallet off his hip and opened it. “Okay, how much do you need?”
“Eighty should do it,” Gloria said.
“Eighty?” Elliott almost shouted. “Last time we checked they were thirty. We’re not buying the gown. We’re just renting it. What happened?”
“That was for Matt’s graduation,” Gloria explained, “And that was six years ago. Besides, Olivia’s going to need a new pair of low pumps in black to go with the gown.”
“No one will be able to see her feet,” Elliott protested. “She could wear sneakers and who’d know?”
Gloria just stood and stared at her husband. Elliott knew better than to try to reason with her and just gave in, handing her the four twenties. “Thank you, Elliott,” Gloria said, taking the bills from him and kissing him on the cheek. “See you later.” She was gone before Elliott even had time to close his wallet.
By ten-fifteen Matt still had not come into the office and Elliott was beginning to get worried. He dialed Matt’s cell phone and said, “Still stuck in traffic?”
“Oh, didn’t I call you about this already?” Matt said. “I thought I did. No, I’m off the freeway but it’ll still be a while yet before I can make it in.”
“Why?”
“When the cops finally cleared the truck off the freeway and I could move again, I ran into Lieutenant Anderson at the off ramp,” Matt explained. “We got to talking and time just sort of slipped away. You know how it is?”
“Does that mean you’re on your way here now?”
“Not quite yet, Dad,” Matt explained. “Eric asked me if I had anything going at the moment and I told him I just had to deliver your laptop to you. Then he asked if that could wait another hour or so and I said, sure. And he asked if I’d pull my car over so he could talk to me about a possible case for either of us, and well, here I am.”
“So you picked up some business for us?” Elliott said.
“You betcha, Buckwheat,” Matt said.
“Buckwheat?”
“Sorry Dad,” Matt said. “I guess I just had Buckwheat on my mind.”
“Why?” Elliott said.
Matt chuckled to himself and said, “Oh, because Eric’s case involves a guy by the name of William Thomas.”
Elliott remained silent for a moment while he tried to absorb and decipher Matt’s statement. “I don’t get it,” he finally said.
“That was
Buckwheat’s real name,” Matt said. “You know, the black kid with the frizzy hair from the Our Gang comedies, Billy Thomas. Anyway, Eric would like me to do a little discrete snooping into this Thomas character’s background and to kind of keep an eye on him.”
“Why?”
“Eric wouldn’t tell me that part yet,” Matt said. “He said he’d fill me in when I got to his office. I’m meeting him there later. This whole thing sounds a little mysterious to me.”
“I’m sure he’s got his reasons,” Elliott said. “So what about my laptop? When are you going to bring that back here?”
“I’ll be there in half an hour or so,” Matt said. “But then I’ve got to leave again. You got anything going for yourself today?”
Elliott sighed. “Yeah, I have to get back to work on that damned client database, but I need my laptop for that.”
“Why don’t you go get yourself some chocolate milk and a donut?” Matt said. “By the time you finish that I should be there with your laptop.”
“I think I will,” Elliott said, looking up at the clock over his office door. “I’ll see you around eleven.” Elliott hung up his phone and headed for the door. The coffee shop was two doors down from the entrance to his building and he could almost taste that donut already.
*****
Claire had enjoyed these last three weeks with nothing on her plate and she had planned on taking a whole month off, but the offer she got was too good to pass up. This time she was getting thirty thousand dollars to dispatch one Alex Brendel, an accountant at Ashford and Sikes who had apparently done something to prompt Millard Sikes to order him killed. Claire was never given the details of why her target deserved what she was about to deliver, and she preferred it that way. She didn’t need to know what he’d done to provoke the man who wanted him dead. She’d just do her job, collect her pay and move on.
Dressed as a variation of Beatrice, Claire walked south on Seventh Street toward MacArthur Park. In her grocery bag, on top of her change of clothes lay her .32 snub-nosed revolver. This particular job didn’t call for the big .44 magnum that she liked to use when fulfilling a contract. She planned on getting close enough to make the .32 just as deadly. Screwed onto the end of the barrel was the suppressor to ensure no one would notice in the event that other people were close enough to hear the shot.
She entered the park from the south, cutting across the park with the lake on her right. It was coming up on midnight and the park was nearly deserted. Beatrice knew that her target liked to cruise the park at night, looking for action from hookers and hustlers who frequented the area at this time of night. As she walked southeast with her old lady shuffle, she looked up and saw two young men coming toward her. She watched as they punched each other in the arm, talking smack and laughing like a pair of lunatics.
When they saw Beatrice, the two young men stopped talking and lowered their voices to whispers, occasionally looking her way. When they were twenty yards in front of her, they split up, each of them walking on either side of what they considered an easy target. Beatrice pulled her shopping bag up closer to her chin and stuck one hand inside. When the men were within five feet, one of them lunged at her, grabbing for the shopping bag.
“What you got in there, lady?” One of the men said with a menacing snarl. The second man positioned himself behind Beatrice and stopped. He laid one hand on her shoulder when the first muffled report tore through the shopping bag, hitting the first man squarely in the chest. He went down in a pile, clutching his wound and writhing on the ground. Beatrice spun around to see the wide-eyed look on the second man’s face. She pulled the .32 from the bag and leveled it at the second man’s face. Before he could utter a single syllable, Beatrice fired once, taking out his left eye. She turned and put one more into the first man’s head before clutching the torn shopping bag to her chest and retreating from the park.
Beatrice was back on the surface street again, seeing no one else in the immediate area. She hurried away, back toward Hollywood. Her target would have to wait a few more days until things cooled off around here. She was in no hurry and Alex Brendel wasn’t going anywhere. Beatrice walked behind the hardware store that had closed hours earlier and slipped out of her disguise. She changed back into her recognizable outfit before continuing home for the night. The busses had stopped running by ten p.m. so Beatrice walked a few more blocks away from the park and then flagged a cab.
*****
Matt walked into the twelfth precinct and down the hall to Eric Anderson’s office. Eric wasn’t behind his desk so Matt found the desk sergeant near the front door and asked if Lieutenant Anderson was in the building.
The desk sergeant picked up his phone and pressed two numbers before speaking. “Lieutenant Anderson to the front desk please, Lieutenant Anderson.” He hung up the phone and turned back to Matt. “He should be her in a minute or so. Won’t you have a seat?”
Matt didn’t get a chance to sit before a door down the hall opened and Eric walked toward the front desk. He smiled when he saw Matt and extended his hand. “Don’t tell me you’ve got something to report on William Thomas already.”
“You mean Buckwheat?” Matt said with a smirk.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. No, that’s not why I came to see you, Eric. I was just wondering if you’d found out anything more on the two killings in MacArthur Park from last night.”
Eric looked at Matt suspiciously. “How’d you hear about that already?” he said. “I haven’t even released anything to the press yet.”
“Have you forgotten already?” Matt said. “I live in that neighborhood and word got around even before the sun came up. By the time I came into work this morning, it was old news. So, you get any leads?”
Eric shook his head. “Two punks must have rousted the wrong guy, from the looks of it. Both of them shot in the head. One of ‘em had two bullets in him—one in the belly and one in the head. Looks like a professional killing all the way.”
“Any witnesses?” Matt said.
Eric shook his head. “Andy figures these two got their tickets punched sometime around midnight or shortly after,” he said, referring to Andy Reynolds, the county medical examiner. “No one saw anything and the park was all but deserted. But one of the punks apparently didn’t die right away. His fingertip was bloody and he must have struggled to write three letters on the sidewalk before he died. All he managed to write was LOL. Make any sense to you, Matt?”
“Laughing out loud?” Matt said. “I can’t imagine anyone getting shot in the head and having LOL as their dying statement. It’s ludicrous.”
“Same thing I thought,” Eric said. “But that’s all there was. Maybe it was just part of someone’s name and he died before he could finish it. We’ll probably never know now.”
“Tough luck for you,” Matt said. “Maybe it was someone named Lolly or the last name could have started with Lol. Anyway, as long as I’m here, I wanted to ask you about this William Thomas character.”
“Sure,” Eric said, leading Matt back toward his office. “What’d you want to know?”
“It seems like I’m getting stonewalled,” Matt explained. “Everyone I ask about him either doesn’t know anything about the man or doesn’t want to talk to me. What makes this guy so special anyway?”
Eric closed his office door and invited Matt to sit. “Thomas is running for city council and he’s going up against Burt Walker.”
“And?”
“And Walker is not about to sit still while Thomas closes the gap at the polls,” Eric explained. “You have heard of Burt Walker, I take it.”
“Who hasn’t?” Matt said. “You really think Thomas has a chance of beating Walker?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Eric said. “But it does matter what Walker thinks and apparently he thinks Thomas has a chance. He also thinks Thomas is using some less than ethical tactics to get what he wants in this race.”
“In other words, he’s just acting like
a typical politician,” Matt said.
“I guess so,” Eric agreed. “I still need you to keep an eye on what he’s doing and let me know if he crosses the legal line.”
“What do you think he’d going to do?” Matt said, scratching his head.
Eric shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, but the mayor is looking out for his boy, Walker, and he’s after me to see to it that Thomas doesn’t do anything to hurt Walker’s chances. And he was very adamant about wanting to know if any laws are being broken in the process. I don’t think Thomas himself will get his hands dirty, but his people will be acting on his behalf, so just keep your eyes peeled for any irregularities. And with the election just two months away, the mayor wants to make sure he’s got all his bases covered.”
“Okay,” Matt said, “But I don’t know what I’ll find, or if I’ll find anything at all. These kinds of guys are slippery and careful. But I’ll let you know if anything turns up. Listen, I gotta get back to the office before I set out after Thomas. I’ll talk to you later, Eric.”
Matt left Eric’s office and drove back down Hollywood Boulevard, pulling into the parking lot off Cahuenga. When he walked into the office, Elliott was pecking away at the keys on his laptop. Elliott looked up when Matt entered.
“You done with Eric already?” Elliott said.
Matt nodded. “Didn’t take long at all and I’m still in the dark with this whole thing. I’m not even sure Eric knows what I’m supposed to be looking for. I think it’s a case of knowing it when I see it, or something like that.”
Elliott looked back down at his laptop, turned it toward Matt and said, “Sorry to change the subject on you, but what the hell does ‘LOL’ mean?”
