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

by Bill Bernico

  “Tell me what?” Chris said, a look of concern on her face now.

  “The doctor tells me there’s twenty fingers and twenty toes,” Matt said. “Otherwise there are no health problems at all.”

  Chris looked at Matt and then switched her gaze to Gloria, looking for some sort of answer. Gloria suppressed a smile and said nothing. Chris turned back to Matt, who was also smiling now.

  Matt broke out in nervous laughter, which soon turned to tears of joy. “We have twins,” he said, squeezing Chris’s hand.

  Chris’s eyes got wide and soon she was crying, too. “Really? Twins?” she said.

  “Really,” Matt assured her. “A boy and a girl. How perfect is that?”

  Now Chris was crying full out and even Elliott had to turn away to wipe his eyes. Gloria stepped up to Chris’s side now and held her other hand. “Now you don’t have to decide between either name,” she told Chris. “You can use them both.”

  “Nicholas Matthew and Veronica May,” Chris said.

  “May?” Elliott said from the foot of the bed.

  Matt turned to his father. “What month is this?” he said.

  Elliott smiled at the realization. “May,” he answered.

  “Well, then it’s a good thing she wasn’t born five months from now,” Elliott said. “Can you imagine going through life with a name like October Cooper?”

  Chris laughed and then winced at the pain of her stitches.

  “Sorry,” Elliott said. “I shouldn’t make you laugh until you’re fully healed.”

  Gloria turned away and stared off into space for a moment before turning back to Matt. “Do you even know which one is older?” she said.

  Matt shrugged and spread his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to ask someone.

  At that moment the door to Chris’s room opened and two nurses walked in, each one carrying a wrapped, newborn baby in her arms. They each took up a position on either side of the bed and laid their respective bundles in Chris’s outstretched arms. The first nurse laid the boy on Chris’s left arm and said, “Mrs. Cooper, here’s your son.”

  The second nurse laid her bundle on Chris’s right arm and announced, “And here’s your new daughter, Mrs. Cooper.”

  Chris smiled broadly and looked back and forth at the two tiny faces before looking back up at one of the nurses. “Do you know which one is older?” she said.

  “I’m not sure,” the nurse said. “Let me take a look at their I.D. bracelets.” The nurse examined Nicholas’s bracelet and read its contents aloud. “Baby boy Cooper, born 2:22 p.m. this date.”

  The second nurse examined the other ID bracelet and read what she’d found. “Baby girl Cooper, born 2:03 this date.”

  “Oh boy,” Elliott said.

  “What?” Matt said, turning to his father. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Elliott said. “Just that Nick’s going to have to go through the rest of his life with a big sister, and I’m sure she’ll remind him of that fact every day, too.”

  “What’s the matter with that?” Matt said.

  “What if tables were turned and Olivia had been born before you,” Elliott said. “How’d you like to go through life being the kid brother?”

  “I see what you mean,” Matt said. “But what’s nineteen minutes?”

  Gloria started to laugh and then remembered Chris’s stitches before she stopped and reminded everyone that Chris needed her rest. She looked at her daughter-in-law. “Elliott and I will visit you again tomorrow. You get some rest now, you hear?” She laid her hand on Chris’s forehead and then took one more look at her new grandchildren before stepping away from the bed.

  Elliott held Chris’s hand again and whispered in her ear, “Good job, Chris,” and kissed her cheek. He joined Gloria and the two of them left Matt alone with his wife.

  Matt pulled up a chair and sat next to Chris’s bed now, looking back and forth at his instant family. He smiled at Chris and kissed her. “Looks like there just may be a fifth generation Cooper in the P.I. business after all.”

  “And what about Veronica?” Chris said.

  “She’s welcomed to join us, too, if she wants,” Matt said. “Her grandmother didn’t do too badly in the business, now did she?”

  “No she didn’t,” Chris agreed. “Not too badly at all.”

  Chris closed her eyes and sighed just as the two nurses returned to take the babies to the nursery. They looked at Matt. “Better let her sleep now,” one of them said. “You can come back tomorrow.” The other nurse smiled at Matt. “Congratulations, Mr. Cooper,” she said and followed the first nurse back to the nursery.

  Matt bent down and kissed Chris’s forehead and whispered. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And he did. The next morning he stopped at the candy store and picked out a dozen pink bubblegum cigars with a band around them that said, ‘It’s A Girl.’ Then he found a dozen blue bubblegum cigars with a band that announced, ‘It’s A Boy’ and filled his pockets with the gum before he returned to the hospital. Before the day was up, Matt would make sure he gave away all two dozen cigars, saving one of each for Elliott.

  131 - The Domino Effect

  “I have to go out for a little while,” Elliott said to his son, Matt. “Can you keep an eye on the place for an hour or so?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Matt said. “Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back. If I have to go anywhere I’ll leave you a note.”

  Elliott looked up at the clock above their office door. It was a few minutes before noon. He turned back to Matt and said, “I should be back by one-thirty. You’ll probably have to send out for lunch.”

  “I’m fine,” Matt said. “I brought my lunch today. Go.”

  Elliott left the office and rode the elevator down three floors to the lobby. His van was parked behind the building and he had an appointment to see a potential client who wanted Elliott to tail his wife to find out if she was seeing another man on the side. It wasn’t one of Elliott’s favorite kinds of private investigator cases, but it helped pay the bills for the business that his grandfather had started shortly after World War II.

  Matt rose from his desk and walked to the window that looked out onto Hollywood Boulevard. Street traffic was light but pedestrian traffic seemed unusually heavy for a weekday. No doubt some of the neighborhood stores were running pre-holiday sales. Matt couldn’t think of anything he needed badly enough to make him brave those kinds of crowds. He preferred to do his shopping online from the comfort of his chair.

  The phone on Matt’s desk rang, stirring him from his trance. He turned back toward his desk and picked up the receiver. “Cooper and Son Investigations,” he said. “Matt Cooper speaking.”

  “Good morning, dear,” Christine Cooper said in a cheery voice. “Would you do me a huge favor?”

  “Name it and it’s yours,” Matt said to his wife of one year.

  “On your way home, would you pick up two more packs of those disposable diapers for me?”

  “Gees,” Matt said. “We just bought two packs day before yesterday. What are we raising, a couple of poop machines?”

  That got Chris laughing. “We go through supplies twice as fast as anyone else,” Chris said, referring to their three-month-old twins, Nickolas and Veronica. “Just be thankful we didn’t have quintuplets.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “I’ll pick some up on my way home.”

  “Thank you, Matthew,” Chris said. “You know the brand I like.”

  “Does it matter?” Matt said. “I know this warehouse where I can buy them in bulk and…”

  “No thanks,” Chris said. “I’ve seen those and they’re the next level up from them is sandpaper. Please, just get my usual brand, would you, dear?”

  “All right,” Matt said. “Anything else, as long as you’ve got me on the line?”

  “That should do it,” Chris said. “Thank you, dear.” Chris hung up and turned her attentions back to her two needy babies.

 
; Matt hung up his phone and made himself a note to pick up the disposable diapers on his way home. He pulled an inch of tape off his dispenser and attached one end to the note and taped the note to the office door so he’d see it on his way out. Matt had just secured the note to the door when he looked down at the floor and noticed wisps of smoke curling up from under the door.

  “What the…” Matt said, opening his inner office door. The outer office door to the hallway was open and Matt could see thicker smoke pouring into the space. He retreated back into the inner office and quickly closed the door. Smoke continued to seep under the door. Matt hurried over to the sink in the corner of the office and grabbed the towel from the towel rack. He stuffed it under the inner office door and stepped back to his desk. He picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  “9-1-1,” the operator on the other end said. “What is your emergency?”

  “There’s a fire in my building and I’m trapped in my office on the third floor in the front,” Matt said frantically and then gave the operator the address of the Cahuenga Building.

  “Fire trucks are already on their way,” the operator explained. “Don’t go near any warm doors. Get to a window for fresh air and yell down to the firemen to let them know where you are. They’ll be there shortly.”

  Matt hung up the phone and hurried back to the window, trying to lift the sash. As long as he’d worked in this office with his father, he’d never seen any of the windows open and now he could see why. They’d been painted over so many times that the windows and the frame looked like one continuous piece of wood. He lifted with all he had, but the sash wouldn’t budge. He tried the window behind Elliott’s desk with no better results. When he looked back, Matt could see smoke seeping past the towel under the door. Through the frosted glass Matt could make out an orange glow. The fire was getting closer and if he didn’t get one of those windows open soon, he’d suffocate to death before the fire trucks could get here.

  Matt pulled the .38 out from his shoulder holster and tapped the window glass with the end of the barrel. The glass held fast. He tried again with more force this time and the glass shattered, sending shards down to the sidewalk below. People looked up from the street, pointed and shouted. The crowd on the street spread out as soon as the glass began to fall. Matt smashed the rest of the glass out of the frame until there was enough room for him to stick his head out and breathe clean, fresh air.

  He looked back at the office door again. Flames began licking at the frosted glass and a few seconds later the glass shattered, sending billowing smoke pouring into the office. Matt turned back to the window and broke the rest of the glass away from the frame. He had a choice at this point, burn alive or step out onto the ledge outside his window and hope the firemen got there before vertigo set in and he fell thirty-five feet to the street below.

  Matt pulled his client chair over toward the window and stood up on it. He holstered his .38 again and grabbed hold of the wood with both hands, carefully stepping through the shattered window frame and out onto the ledge. He kept his back to the street, hanging onto the window frame. Looking toward the office door again, Matt watched as the flames consumed the entire door and lapped upward at the ceiling tiles. Before too long, the temperature in the office had reached triple digit status and Matt’s fingers began to feel the heat. He had to move away from the window, but where to? It was a good eight feet to the window behind Elliott’s desk and soon the flames would reach that part of the office as well. He had two choices again. He could try to ease himself to the area between the two windows, hanging onto the spaces between the bricks and hope that the flames didn’t lap out the windows and curl around toward him, or he could ease his body in the other direction and try to make it around the corner of the building to the east. He decided to try for the corner.

  Matt slid his feet to the right, hanging onto the window frame until he got past that point. Then he transferred his hands from the frame to the spaces between the bricks. His body was slapped tightly against the building as his feet slid inches at a time toward the corner of the building. He’d never bothered to look, but had always assumed that the ledge he was on continued around the corner to the east side of the building. If it didn’t, he’d have to wait there, holding onto the corner of the building until the firemen could get a ladder up to him.

  He kept sliding his feet and finger holds all the way to the corner. In the distance, Matt heard the sounds of sirens coming closer. He also heard the gasps from the crowd on the street below him. He couldn’t look down, he told himself, so he just kept staring straight ahead at the bricks, while hanging on for his life. A few moments later his right hand reached out and felt the corner of the building. He slid his right foot a little further to the right and it dropped off the edge of the ledge. He quickly pulled it back toward him. The ledge ended here on the south face of his building. He couldn’t go any further and he was only twenty feet or so from his office window. He hoped the flames couldn’t reach him from there.

  It’s funny what goes through a person’s mind at perilous times like these. At that moment, Matt got a mental picture of Harold Lloyd climbing the outside of that building in the 1923 silent movie classic, Safety Last. Harold had made it look so easy to climb to the roof, but then Matt had remembered seeing some behind-the-scenes photos of how the feat had been accomplished with building façade mockups and perfect camera angles to make it look like Harold was dangling a hundred feet above the street, when he was actually dangling just three feet above a padded platform. This was not the case today. Matt clung to the side of his building three stories above the street. He could fall from here and probably live the rest of his life as a cripple. That was an option he didn’t want to have to choose.

  Cars on the boulevard scattered, making way for the approaching fire trucks and within minutes, one of the trucks had positioned itself directly beneath Matt’s ledge. Matt kept staring straight ahead. He couldn’t bring himself to look down, but something made him look up. On the fourth, fifth and sixth floors flames shot out the windows ten or fifteen feet and Matt could hear screams from above as well as gasps from below. He tried to slap himself even tighter against the building, his heart pounding out of his chest by now.

  The gasps from the crowd below turned to screams as something sailed past Matt on its way to the street. It missed Matt by less than a foot and one second later he heard a sickening thud below him and more screams from the throngs of people watching. Acrophobia notwithstanding, Matt forced himself to glance quickly toward the street. A body lay between the sidewalk and street, a red pool forming around its head. Firemen scurried to cover it with a blanket as Matt picked his head up again and stared at the bricks. Now he was really terrified. At that instant Matt could hear the clattering crank of the ladder coming up behind him. A few moments later, from the corner of his eye, he could make out the tip of the ladder as it came to rest next to him, against the building. A few seconds after that a fireman had climbed to the top of the ladder and was calmly instructing Matt to slowly and carefully ease himself closer to the sound of his voice.

  Matt turned his head to the left and made eye contact with the fireman. His breath was shallower and faster now, keeping pace with his heartbeats. He slid his left foot toward the ladder, following it with his right. After three or four slides like that, Matt found himself standing less than a foot away from the fireman’s grasp. The fireman reached out to Matt, fastening a harness around his body. The other end of the harness was attached to the ladder itself. It was a safety precaution in the event the person being rescued lost his footing and toppled away from the building.

  “You’re doing great,” the fireman told Matt in a low, calm tone. “Now just ease yourself a little closer toward me and place your foot on the first rung of the ladder.”

  Matt did as he was told and picked up his left foot, feeling for the ladder with it. His foot hit something solid and he put some of his weight on the first rung of the ladder. Suddenly the fl
ames from inside Matt’s office reached out and curled against the building, causing Matt to release his grip on the bricks. He tumbled backwards and fell from the ledge for a split second before the slack in the harness was taken up, leaving Matt swinging beneath the ladder. He dangled there for a moment before he could feel the ladder being lowered toward the truck. Matt closed his eyes tightly and his heart beat wildly. The descent to the street seemed to take forever. Soon Matt opened his eyes again to find that he was dangling just three feet above the bed of the truck and suddenly he knew what Harold Lloyd felt like dangling from that clock face.

  Two other firemen grabbed Matt and pulled him close to them, unfastening the harness and easing him onto the truck. The crowd exploded in cheers as Matt stepped down onto the street again, exhaling a deep breath as both feet hit the pavement.

  “Are you all right?” one of the firemen asked Matt.

  Matt patted his chest and arms and legs before announcing that he didn’t think anything was broken. The same fireman asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital just to be safe?”

  Matt shook his head. “No, really, thanks. I’m fine. I don’t know what I’d have done if you guys hadn’t gotten here when you did. I ran out of ledge up there.”

  “I’m going to let the EMTs have a quick look at you just to be safe,” the fireman insisted. “You may not feel anything now, but you could be in a world of pain later on.” He led Matt to the back of the emergency vehicle that had accompanied the fire trucks to the scene.

  A medical technician spent ten minutes with Matt, thoroughly checking his body where the harness had been attached. There were signs of some slight bruising starting around his waist, but nothing was broken. The technician plucked the stethoscope ear pieces from his ears and nodded at Matt. “You’re a very lucky man,” he told Matt. “No telling what might have happened to you without that harness.”

  Matt looked back at the area where the poor man had fallen or jumped from the seventh floor. He quickly turned away and vomited, the action turning his almost empty stomach inside out. It felt like he’d been punched in the stomach by a line of Hell’s Angels with week-old grudges.