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

by Bill Bernico

  “Great,” Matt said, rising from the client’s chair. “I’m glad to have that off my chest.”

  Matt had mailed Cecil Jacobs’ bill and several days had passed when Jacobs’ check arrived. Matt recorded the income in his checkbook, folded the check and slipped it into his pocket. He’d deposit it later that day. Matt had almost forgotten about his former client three weeks later when he came into work and sat down with the morning paper. Benny was already on the phone with another potential client as Matt sat with the paper, turning pages and folding the paper. There on page three Matt saw an article that made him sit straight up in his chair. He flattened the paper out on the desk and took a closer look at the article.

  The headlines mentioned two deaths in the foothills overlook Hollywood. The article went on to say that Cecil Jacobs, 51, had been beaten to death in his own yard by one Jack Larson, 58, from that same neighborhood. The article also mentioned the death of Larson’s granddaughter, four-year-old Audrey Larson, who had apparently drowned in the Jacobs’ swimming pool. Police questioned Larson, who said that he’d had trouble with his neighbor in the past and that Jacobs had refused to put up a fence surrounding his swimming pool. Larson said that when he found his granddaughter in the pool, he immediately jumped in and pulled her out, but that efforts to revive her were useless. It was at that point that Jacobs came out of his house and confronted Larson. Larson told police that he just snapped and kept hitting Jacobs until other neighbors had to pull him off the man. Jacobs was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Matt finished reading the article just as Benny had concluded his phone call. “What is it, Matt?” Benny said, noticing the blank look on his partner’s face. He stepped over to Matt’s desk and glanced down at the article. He’d only read the first few lines when he looked at Matt. “That was your client, wasn’t it?”

  Matt nodded and Benny finished the rest of the article before looking back at Matt. “Gees, that poor kid,” Benny said. “And her poor grandfather. I can’t say I blame him for doing what he did. I wonder what’s going to happen to Mr. Larson now.”

  “Hard to say,” Matt told him. “It’ll come to trial. There’s no doubt about that, but I’ve got to wonder what the jury will decide when they hear the whole story.”

  “I’m glad I’m not on that jury,” Benny said. “That would be a tough one for me.”

  “Not half as tough as it’s going to be for Larson,” Matt said. “Even if he’s acquitted for the death of Cecil Jacobs, he’ll still have to live the rest of his life with the memory of finding his granddaughter in the pool. And how can he ever face his son and daughter-in-law again after this happened while they were visiting him at his house? No, I have a feeling that Jack Larson will face a tougher sentence on the outside than he ever would have in prison.”

  When Matt got home that night, Elliott and Gloria were waiting for him in his kitchen. “Mom, Dad,” Matt said. “What are you two doing here?”

  “Did you think we were going to forget about the twins’ birthdays?” Gloria said.

  Matt looked puzzled. “But their birthdays aren’t until tomorrow.”

  “We know,” Elliott said, “But we’re going to be gone tomorrow and we didn’t want the kids to think we’d forgotten about them.

  Just then Veronica came running into the kitchen to show Matt what her grandfather had bought for her. She held up the doll as high as she could. Matt looked at it and then back at his daughter. “Wasn’t that nice of grandma and grandpa?” he said. “She’s a real cutie, just like you.” Matt patted Veronica and her doll on their heads. Veronica ran back into the living room to introduce her new doll to her older ones.

  From out of nowhere, the assailant pulled out the gun, leveled it at Matt’s head and pulled the trigger. A stream of water soaked Matt’s face just before Nicky jumped out from behind the kitchen counter and shot his father again in the neck.

  “Nicky,” Matt yelled. “Stop that right now.”

  Nicky ran into the living room and hid behind the sofa, waiting to ambush his next unwary victim.

  “Come on, Matt,” Elliott said. “That was funny and you know it. Lighten up. They’re not going to stay kids forever. Let them have their fun while they can.”

  “Dad,” Matt said to Elliott. “I’m surprised at you. Don’t you remember how I used to drive you crazy with my squirt gun?”

  Elliott smiled and then replied, “I remember.” He let the sentence hang in the air and then looked over at Chris, who was laughing hysterically.

  After a moment, Matt had to laugh, too. At least this was one water activity that wouldn’t result in his kids drowning.

  “Nicky,” Matt yelled. “Would you come in here for a minute, please?”

  A reluctant Nicky slinked back into the kitchen, the squirt gun hanging at his side. He looked at the floor.

  “It’s all right, Nicky,” Matt said. “I’m not mad at you.”

  Nicky looked up and smiled again, relived not to have angered his father.

  “That’s a pretty neat looking squirt gun you have there,” Matt said. “Can I see it for a minute?”

  Nicky handed the water pistol to Matt and said, “It’s just like yours, Dad, see?” He pointed out the molded plastic features on the side of the gun.

  Matt took the gun and balanced it in his hand, pretending to be interested in the details. He grasped the handle and sighted down the barrel toward the living room. Without warning he turned and aimed the gun at Elliott, pulling the trigger several times in rapid succession before Elliott could get out of the way of the streams of water that now ran down his face. “You’re right, Dad,” Matt said. “This is fun.” Matt laughed until he was bent over and soon the whole room was filled with laughter.

  Even Gloria had to laugh at the sight of her retired husband with the dripping face. “He’s got you there, Grandpa,” she said.

  144 - A Game Of Horse

  Lieutenant Kevin Cole looked down at the body of a young woman who had been brutally murdered. The victim looked to be in her mid-twenties with blonde hair and blue eyes. As best Kevin could tell with her being in a prone position, he estimated her height at approximately five foot four and her weight at about a hundred twenty or so. She wore, or at least had worn, blue jeans and a black sequined top. The jeans had been bunched up around the young woman’s ankles while the black sequined top lay in a pile a few feet from the body. Both of her shoes looked as though they’d been kicked off or had been pulled off as she’d been dragged through this alley and lay twenty-five feet from where the body now rested.

  Cole looked at Patrolman Cliff Ambrose, who was the first officer on the scene. “Is this the way you found her?” Cole said.

  Officer Ambrose nodded and pulled his notepad from his pocket, reciting what he’d written earlier. “She was exactly as you see her now, Lieutenant,” Ambrose said. “I didn’t touch a thing, with the exception of the vein in her neck. When I didn’t get a pulse, I pulled my hand away and that’s when her head flopped to one side and I saw the gash in her neck. I hurried back to my cruiser and called it in. No one else has been near the body since.”

  “And just what made you look in this alley, officer?” Cole asked.

  “I was patrolling this neighborhood like I always do around this time,” Ambrose said. “When I got to the alley I noticed two stray cats running out from further in the alley and I got curious so I stopped, got out and walked further in. I shined my flashlight at a couple of trash cans and saw her legs sticking out from behind them. The rest you already know.”

  Cole looked at the area around the body again and then back at Officer Ambrose. “Did you find a purse, wallet or any other source of identification near the body?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’d say those shoes probably came off as she was dragged from somewhere over there to where she is now,” Kevin said. “She probably put up a struggle, causing the shoes to come off her feet. I didn’t notice any blood between the shoes and the body so ch
ances are she was stabbed right here and left to die.”

  “That couldn’t have taken long,” Ambrose said. “Not with a gash that big.” He pointed down at the woman’s neck, which sported a cut so long and so deep that her head was nearly severed from her neck. “What about that,” he said, pointing to the woman’s right hand. It was missing its ring finger and if there had been a ring on it, it was long gone now. “How are you going to identify her, Lieutenant?”

  “Let’s just wait for Gerry,” Cole said. “She’ll handle the body from here.” Gerry was the new medical examiner, Geraldine Winkler, who had taken over the coroner’s office after Andy Reynolds retired. “Maybe this woman’s prints will be on record somewhere. If not, we may have to check dental records to find out who she is, or was.”

  Gerry showed up two minutes later and took charge of the body while Kevin had crime scene tape strung up around the immediate area. The crime lab photographer had hitched a ride with the coroner and was taking photos of the body from several angles, including a few close-ups of the neck, head and right ring finger. When he finished, he stood out of the way and let Gerry conduct the few field tests that she needed to do before removing the body to the morgue. She inserted a sharp thermometer into the woman’s abdomen and recorded the temperature on her clipboard. She pulled the woman’s eyelids back, looked into the lifeless eyes and closed the lids again. Lastly she examined the woman’s fingers and fingernails. When she’d finished, she motioned for her two assistants to wheel a gurney into the alley and take the body back to the medical examiner’s wagon. “Bag her hands,” she told one of the assistants. “Her feet, too. And be careful when you move her. That head’s not attached to the neck by too much anymore.”

  “What do you think, Doctor?” Kevin said, gesturing with his chin toward the rolling gurney.

  “About what?” Gerry said.

  “Time of death, weapon used, anything at all,” Kevin said. “So far I’ve got nothing to go on and I thought you might be able to point me in the right direction.”

  Gerry shook her head. “Won’t know until I get her on my table. So far, all I can tell you is that it was a knife—a very sharp knife and it was used by someone who was pretty strong. They’d have to be to inflict this much damage.” She pushed past the lieutenant. “You’ll have to excuse me now, Lieutenant. I have to get back to the morgue and take a closer look at our Jane Doe.” In a moment she and her assistants were gone, leaving Kevin and Officer Ambrose scratching their heads.

  There had been no leads on the case for more than three days when the call came in to Kevin’s office. A pair of cops on foot patrol in downtown Hollywood came upon an elderly lady, perhaps in her seventies, lying in the street just off Sunset and Cherokee. They immediately called for two squads as backup to block off traffic on Cherokee. They didn’t want any more cars to come past and possibly contaminate the crime scene. Lieutenant Cole got there just a few minutes after the two patrolmen had called it in.

  “What do you have here, Officer?” Kevin said as he approached the two cops.

  The cop who had called in the incident was a rookie named Ken Albright. He explained to the lieutenant that he and his senior partner, a sergeant named Bill O’Hara had been patrolling on Sunset and had witnessed an unidentified young man running away from them as they approached Cherokee Avenue. He explained that they had no knowledge that any crime had been committed at that time so they didn’t pursue him. They did, however, walk up Cherokee half a block and stopped when they came upon the old lady lying between two parked cars. The poor woman’s head had been bashed in with a blunt instrument, possibly a tire iron or some sort of bat. Nothing was found at the scene and it was believed that whoever did this, took it with them.

  A minute later two more black and white patrol cars arrived. One of them stopped his car across the entrance to Cherokee while the other drove around the block and blocked the entrance to Cherokee from the other end of the street. As in the first case, the coroner and her team showed up just minutes later and went through the same routine that they did several days earlier with the other victim. By the time she had left with this second body, Kevin was getting frustrated at the lack of evidence or clues. Once again he had nothing to go on but scoured the area thoroughly nonetheless. All he got for his efforts was a possible partial footprint in a wet spot near the gutter.

  He caught a break on this case, though. The woman’s purse was still lying next to the body by the time the officers arrived on the scene. The wallet had been taken, but the woman had enough other items in the purse to help identify her. She turned out to be a retired school teacher from Glendale named Joyce Harrington, who had taught the fifth grade at the Glendale Elementary School. She was a widow who had lived alone—and died alone, except for the four cats police found when they checked her house.

  The only silver lining in this dark cloud was that after the autopsy of the retired teacher, Gerry had found that the woman was in the onset of Lou Gehrig’s disease. In another two years she would have died a horrible death, struggling desperately to breathe. Gerry thought that even though having her head bashed was not a good way to die, either, at least it was quick. Joyce Harrington had at least been spared the agony of ALS.

  Gerry turned over a copy of the autopsy to Lieutenant Cole, shaking her head as she left his office. Cole filed the report in Harrington’s folder and laid it on top of the first victim’s folder. These two cases were the most frustrating cases Kevin Cole had had since he became a lieutenant.

  Private investigator Matt Cooper had just come from an interview with a potential client that didn’t pan out. As it turned out, there was nothing Matt or his investigations firm could do for the man. On his way back to the office, Matt decided to stop by his sister, Olivia’s house and find out how her husband Tom was doing on his new job with the Burbank Police Department. Olivia and Tom Bowers had moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison but had returned home several years after graduation. Neither one of them could take the harsh Wisconsin winters for another year and decided that Southern California was the place they’d rather live and came home again.

  Matt knocked on the kitchen door and after a moment Olivia opened it and greeted her brother with a hug. “Matt,” she said when she saw him. “What brings you here?”

  Matt hiked a thumb over his shoulder, as if that would point out the direction he’d just come from. “I just came from a client’s house. Turns out he won’t be a client after all. Your place was on my way back to the office and I haven’t seen you for a while and decided, what the heck.” He looked past his sister and said, “Is Tom home today?”

  Olivia shook her head. “He’s got the second shift today, two to ten.”

  “What about you?” Matt said. “Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?”

  “Not today,” Olivia said. “It’s my day off.”

  “However will the rest of the nursing staff get along without you?” Matt said.

  “They’ll just have to manage. Can you stay for a while?”

  “Sorry,” Matt said. “Benny’s at the office alone and I told him I’d be back as soon as I could. He has to see a woman about a possible job she might have for us. What time does Tom get his lunch break?”

  “He never knows,” Olivia said. “It all depends on what’s happening while he’s on patrol or when his partner decides to break for lunch.”

  “Lunch,” Matt said. “Kind of hard to think of it as lunch when it happens at six p.m.”

  “Actually,” Olivia said, correcting herself, “He had lunch here before he left for work. I guess you could call that a dinner break.”

  “Anyway, I’d better be getting back to the office. Do you know when Tom has his next day off?”

  “Actually, he’s off tomorrow,” Olivia said.

  Matt’s eyebrows furrowed.

  “I know,” Olivia said, “but he gets Wednesday off because they have him working this weekend.”

  “Tell him I
’ll stop by tomorrow whenever it’s convenient for him. I just want to ask him about the job.”

  “I will, Matt. And thanks for stopping by. Say hi to Benny for me.”

  Matt drove back to his office and ran into Benny, who was just stepping out of the elevator as Matt was stepping in. Matt held the elevator door and turned to Benny. “Going to see that woman?”

  Benny nodded. “Could turn into a pretty interesting case,” he said. “I’ll fill you in when I get back. Gotta run.”

  Matt rode to the third floor and walked to the end of the hall, letting himself into the office and hanging up his jacket. The morning paper was lying on Benny’s desk, still folded up. He picked it up and brought it back to his desk. He hadn’t even had time to open the paper when his phone rang. Matt picked up the phone, leaned back in his chair and set his feet on the corner of his desk. “Cooper Investigations,” he said in his professional voice. “Matt Cooper speaking.”

  “Matt, it’s Kevin. Did I catch you in the middle of anything?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” Matt said, glancing at the newspaper. “What’s up?”

  Kevin sighed heavily. “I’m up against the wall with a couple of cases and could use a fresh pair of eyes. Can you stop over here for a minute?”

  “Save me a donut,” Matt said. “I’ll be right over.” He pulled his feet off the desk, hung up the phone and slipped back into his jacket. The twelfth precinct was a ten minute drive from his office. Matt parked in the parking lot around the back of the station and walked the hallway leading to Lieutenant Kevin Cole’s office. Matt knocked twice and let himself in.

  Kevin gestured toward the chair across from his desk and Matt sat. “I’ve got a couple of cases…” Kevin started to say before Matt held up one palm toward him.

  “What about that donut you were going to save for me?” Matt said.

  “You were serious about that?” Kevin said. When Matt nodded, Kevin pressed his intercom button and told his secretary, Betty, to bring a donut in for Matt. She said she would and in less than a minute she had set a paper plate in front of Matt with a glazed donut on it. She looked at Kevin. “Will there be anything else, Lieutenant?”