Copp In The Dark, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series)

by Don Pendleton

  I didn't even know at the time if Jimmy lived there anymore, but I was soon ushered inside and escorted through the mansion and out onto the dizzying deck that

  I still remembered in all its vertiginous splendor with its potted trees and tropical plants, hot tub and small pool, maybe a quarter of an acre complete with lawn sodded onto floating concrete several hundred feet above terra firma.

  Six technically naked space cadets were adorning the sunning boards beside the pool and Jimmy was holding court beneath a nearby umbrella table with three Oriental gentlemen. The years had been kind to him physically, didn't look much older than the first time I'd seen him— at first appearance, a good-looking young businessman with the world by the tail. That impression would change.

  He grabbed my hand and shook it warmly, then introduced me to his other guests. They had Japanese names which I don't remember and they were visiting from Tokyo.

  It seemed that they were just leaving.

  I was made comfortable with a drink while Jimmy walked the others out, and I was getting a lot of smiles and silent invitations from the sunning boards during his absence. But I cooled it and sipped my drink and waited.

  Jimmy was looking very tired when he returned to the table. And all the warmth was gone. He asked me, "What do you want? Things getting tough out there in the big wild world all by yourself alone?"

  I told him, "I've always been all by myself alone and so have you, pal, so have we all. What's with the Japanese?"

  "Strictly legit," he replied. "It's been that way for a long time. I don't fuck around with crazy stuff anymore. Do you?"

  "Never did," I told him. "What kind of legit?"

  He lit a cigarette and told me around the smoke, "Not that it's any of your business but I'm a packager and promoter now."

  "You always were. What are you packaging and promoting now?"

  He leaned back in his chair and regarded me with speculative eyes for a long moment, then he chuckled and said, "Some people never change. Joe, you never will. You were an asshole when I first met you and you're an asshole now. Why all the sudden interest in Jimmy DiCenza?"

  I told him, "Your old man is going down hard."

  Those dark eyes flared and went very flat, he sucked hard on the cigarette. "Says who?"

  "I have an inside line."

  "Then you'd better check the connection. I talked to him not an hour ago. He's going to walk."

  I said, "Oh. Well I'm glad to hear that."

  "Are you?"

  "Sure I am. I've always been kind to the elderly. I see no sense in sending a dying man to jail."

  Jimmy said, "He's not dying."

  "That's not the way I hear it. But I'm not worried about Vin, Jimmy. I worry about you."

  "Why would you do that?"

  I looked around, asked him, "Is this your palace guard? Are they going to protect you with their bare assess, Jimmy?"

  "I don't need protection," he replied in a hollow voice.

  I unholstered my pistol and placed it on the table between us. "That's not what I hear."

  Jimmy was ignoring the pistol. "What do you hear?"

  "Your old man is going down hard. Forget anything else you heard. He's going down hard, and the only way he can prevent that is to send a bunch of other people down in his place. These are very powerful people, Jimmy. They don't want to go down."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "For old times sake."

  He looked at the gun and then quickly back at me. "What old times? You never wanted to dance with me, Joe. Why now?"

  I sighed heavily and told him, "Maybe I’m getting tired of dancing alone. I’m into this thing to my eyebrows."

  "What thing?"

  "This DiCenza thing, dammit. I’ve been shot at, beat up, set up, thrown into jail—I’m tired of it. I want it to stop."

  He was looking at me as though he were an artist measuring me for a canvas. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about, Joe."

  "What are you packaging and producing these days, Jimmy?"

  He worked at the cigarette for a moment, gave me several fast glances, looked into the sky just past my head and said, "I’m in show business. Legit show business. I’m not shooting at or beating up anyone, and I wouldn't know how to set anyone up for jail. Just because I’m Vincent DiCenza's kid doesn't mean that I am heir-apparent to anything or that I want to be. I've never really been in the rackets and never wanted to be. Vin has always respected that. In fact, he has always preferred it that way. He sent me to Columbia to keep me out of the rackets. So I don't know what you're talking about."

  "You're exporting shows to Japan?"

  "Among other places, yes."

  I had a sudden inspiration; asked him, Do you have any connection with the East Foothills Dinner Theater?"

  He looked me straight back with a curled smile. "So that's it."

  "You've heard?"

  "Sure I've heard. Did Judy send you?"

  Judy, yet. I guess my own lips curled on that one. "Not that she knows," I replied, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice. "What's the connection?"

  "What's your interest?"

  I’m trying to keep alive. Maybe you should be trying that too. A lot of people already tried too late and they are running out of morgue space out my way."

  Jimmy stared at me for a long moment, then he sighed and put his feet up, took a pull at his drink, finally said to me, I’ve known Judy a long time. She used to work for me, sort of. Now sometimes she sends me talent."

  "What kind of talent?"

  "Not your kind," he replied smilingly. "How'd you get into this?"

  "What kind of talent?" I repeated.

  He kept on smiling. "Singers, dancers, that kind of talent. I told you I'm legit."

  I asked him, "Are you the mysterious producer who was going to package La Mancha for a national tour?"

  Jimmy DiCenza laughed at that. When he was done laughing he looked over at the sunning boards and invited me with the eyes to do the same. "I don't package national, I package international, and I don't waste my time with boy shows, they wouldn't play on my circuits."

  "Boy shows?"

  "Not enough female involvement in La Mancha," he explained. "It's a boy's stage, not a girl's. American

  entertainers have gotten very big in Japan. But they want girls, see. Long-legged, big-busted Caucasian girls." His eyes jerked again toward the sun boards. "Like these."

  "So you're still packaging flesh shows."

  He frowned at me. "Somebody pass a law against that?"

  I shrugged and told him, "Depends on what's in the package. I'm no moralist, Jimmy, you know that. I didn't come here to shame you."

  "So why did you come?"

  I retrieved my pistol and holstered it, told him, "Maybe I came to save your life. Vin is going down hard unless he can find some replacements. That means people close to him in business."

  Jimmy DiCenza was getting pissed at me. His lips were curled in a snarl as he said, "You trying to tell me that my own father would sell me down?"

  "Are you in business with Japanese politicians, Jimmy?"

  His eyes recoiled a bit on that one. "Get out of here," he said in a flat voice. "And don't ever come back."

  "Does Vin know that you're connected with the judge's daughter?"

  That one brought a solid reaction. His feet came down and he jerked forward in his chair. "Jesus! I never made it! Never put it—never realized—Jesus!" The Don's son was beginning to look old and tired.

  I was suddenly feeling very old and tired myself. I got to my feet and walked away, then turned back for another look. The guy hadn't moved, hadn't changed his face. I said, "Everyone's dying, Jimmy. Why?"

  Then I let myself out and went slowly back down the mountain, down into the valley of despair and utter darkness.

  It was a long way down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Hell, I didn’t know what I had now. There are times when too much
equals nothing, when the puzzle gets so broken and jumbled that the sheer mass of it defeats you. That is about where I was at when I left Jimmy DiCenza. I was in a whirl. And why not? Every piece I touched fragmented into several other pieces and the puzzle was breaking apart, not coming together to form a true picture of anything.

  I didn't even know if Jimmy had been straight with me. Why should he be? On the other hand, he'd popped me right in the snoot with Judy. So why shouldn't he be? And no way could he have been faking the sudden realization that Judy White was Judge White's daughter.

  I had left a frightened man behind.

  Granted, I'd been trying to frighten him—but why had it worked? What was he frightened of?

  I was inclined to believe Jimmy's claim that he was in no bigtime involvements with his old man. I'd seen enough over the years to make that sound credible, and in fact it had been more or less common knowledge for years that Vin DiCenza had gone to pains to keep his kid at a distance

  from the crime families and their internecine disputes. He'd bankrolled the kid, sure, in various quasi-legal pursuits, and he'd extended his own protective umbrella several times to keep the kid out of trouble with the law, but that was about the extent of it in any way that I'd ever heard about.

  Like I said earlier, Jimmy DiCenza had kept himself pretty clean through the years.

  But it was begging too much to chalk it all to coincidence that the kid apparently had a longterm relationship of one kind or another with the daughter of the judge who now held the old man's fate in his judicial hands.

  I mean, okay, coincidences do happen but...

  I needed to know a lot more than I thought I knew about the DiCenzas and the Whites.

  So okay, I knew where to start on that... but did I really want to start there? Did I want to confront Judith with this new information and challenge her to come clean with me?

  Not yet, no.

  So I went for the other White.

  I'd filched the judge's West L.A. address from an address book while I was at Judith's place but with no particular plan at the time to do anything with it. You don't just barge in on a federal judge, especially under the circumstances, but those very circumstances now seemed to demand it.

  By now it was seven o'clock and the day was trying to drag me down. I pulled through a McDonald's and choked down a Big Mac enroute to the highrise section of Wilshire in West L.A., just to keep my motor running and the juices circulating. That particular strip of L.A. looks more East Coast than West, I think maybe because East Coast money built it and inhabited it, sort of like a fashionable neighborhood in Manhattan. I think they're all crazy, myself, to put up those kind of residential buildings in earthquake country, state-of-the-art engineering notwithstanding, but what do I know?

  I could see a bigshot lawyer inhabiting one of those million-dollar condos, though. Not necessarily a judge of any kind who depends on his salary for lifestyle—but again, what do I know?

  At least this judge was not living in a penthouse. He had a corner of the twenty-first floor in a very swank building but the apartment is no great shakes. I know that because I let myself inside and snooped around just for feel. It felt more like chambers than home, the same leather and dark wood and books, books, books. One bedroom, very plain, queensize bed, TV, VCR, a locked cabinet of tapes. Small study, small desk littered with papers and legal tablets, portable typewriter, snubnosed pistol in the top drawer- loaded—not much else.

  Small bar off the living room—the usual liquids in fancy bottles—and I finished the tour more puzzled about the man than when I'd come in. There was no signature here, no statement, no proclamation of self: "This is me. It's what I'm like, what I do, who I am."

  It occurred to me then that I'd found the same lack in the mansion at San Antonio Heights. I'd chalked it up to the idea that it was more a museum than someone's home—and I got that same idea here at the highrise condo.

  I went a step farther in my investigation and became even more puzzled. There was a walk-in closet in the bedroom. One side contained men's suits, shirts, shoes, the usual stuff. The other side was devoted to dresses, furs, the usual feminine stuff.

  So I tried the bathroom.

  It was a his and hers arrangement, with all the usual stuff for both.

  It seemed that the judge had a live-in girlfriend.

  And I wondered if Judith knew about that.

  Federal judges get their jobs by presidential appointment. This means that they are political animals, like it or not, the same as all judges everywhere in this country— and I always figured that the system works against the electorate, you and me, in that mainly what we get as judges are people who do not do too well as lawyers.

  Last time I noticed, District Court judges get an annual salary of under ninety thousand dollars. That may seem like a lot if you're only getting twenty or thirty but even ninety a year does not buy that much these days.

  A rookie cop at LAPD fresh out of the academy draws down about thirty-three as a minimum, with some closer to forty. I've known married cops—two cops married to each other, I mean—with a combined salary of more than ninety a year. So what hotshot lawyer with all those years of struggling education behind him would want to settle for a judgeship?

  See?—it’s an inverse system in which the cream does not rise to the top but lurks along the bottom. You could argue, and I've done it myself, that many lawyers are scumbags anyway who have no respect whatever for the law except as they can twist it around to their own advantage, so the system actually works better than it would appear—that the best lawyers can't be measured by their incomes but by their love of the law and a strong desire to serve same, and that these are the ones who are drawn toward the political arena and public service.

  Sure, I've argued that. But I haven't always convinced myself that it is true. I've seen scumbags on the bench too, and of course our whole political process in this country has been taken over by the lawyers. It is rare to find a congressman or a legislator or even a city councilman who did not begin with a law degree. What makes a judge that different from any of those? He has had to kiss somebody's ass to get that job, probably a horde of somebodies.

  So what was I thinking about here?

  I was thinking that politicians as a class are as dishonest and self-serving as any occupational group in the country, probably more so, and that every judge, even a highly respected federal judge, is a politician. They're all of a stripe, and pardon my cynicism but you'd have to search high and low to find a political animal who is scrupulously honest and the sole owner of his own soul.

  Sometimes I get mad that I have to think that way. Shouldn't be that way. But I felt that way because I had spent fifteen years watching these guys enrich themselves at the public's expense and I know how the games are played.

  I knew also that ninety thou a year does not buy the lifestyle that Judge White enjoys.

  So what was I thinking?

  Tell me what I was thinking. I was staggering about in the dark, sure, but I wasn't totally blind yet. I knew, too, that it was time to get back to the basics of police work, and I knew where to start again.

  I made another call enroute to my own valley but this time I didn't pick a lock, I just kicked the door open and went on in.

  It was a crack house on the east side and I instantly had

  four Chicanos brandishing knives in my face but I pushed on through that and went into the back room where I expected to find Cholly Esteves, head of a neighborhood gang coalition and reputedly "the man to see" for drug distributorships east of L.A.

  I found him okay, seated at a big dining room table covered with stacks of old bills and running a tabulation on a small portable computer. I found also a dozen or so other people in various states of dress and undress, men and women, bombed out of their heads and just sitting around grinning vacancy at one another.

  Never figured out the appeal of that shit.

  I mean, is this paradise?—this mindless,
careless, sexless, meaningless zombied state? Is this something to spend your entire life pursuing, something for which you'd betray parents and children, employers and employees, friends and neighbors and ultimately the world? Is it? Before a kid can take his first hit, he needs to see inside one of these places and get a good look at the zombies. I think he'd change his mind, damned quick.

  Esteves looked up at me with a frown and growled, "Whattaya mean coming in here that way? Go back outside and try it again."

  I said, "Get screwed, Cholly, if you're not afraid your dick will fall off into the crack."

  "You want one of the women?"

  "I wouldn't do it with your dick, pal," I told him. "I wouldn't wearing a wetsuit and twenty condoms."

  "Okay, you made your point," he said, grinning. "You don't like my women."

  I said, "I don't like a damned thing I see here. Not even you—and that goes back a long time, Cholly."

  "So why'd you bring your stiff ass in here?"

  "Couldn't help myself. And you owe me."

  The big Mexican laughed and scooted his chair back to face me full on. "How many more times do I have to pay you, man?"

  "As often as I'm in need," I told him.

  "Uh huh."

  I said, "Okay, well settle the tab in full this time."

  "What do you need?"

  "Who's supplying the East Foothills area?"

  "Go to hell," he said.

  "Someone out that way made a big buy earlier this week. I have to know who."

  "Have to know?"

  "That's what I said."

  He glared at me for a moment then reached for the telephone. "Which brand of passion?"

  "Coke. Pretty white powders."

  "That's west side passion," he grunted. "People out here prefer the rocks."

  "Makes your little task all that easier," I suggested. "I really need it, Cholly."

  "Okay." His hand was hovering above the telephone. "But then you owe me."

  I said, "Let's see what you score, first."

  He made the call, rattled off a long question in Spanish and received a long rattle in reply, put his hand over the transmitter and turned to me with a crooked smile. "How much it gonna be worth to you, man?"