Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series)

by Don Pendleton

  About a foot above my head and no more than an arm's length removed, the gilded cage rocked with the energetic movements of two naked Mexican girls with long black hair and oiled bodies who were engaged in a simulated wrestling match, though it really did not look like that. Each seemed to be struggling for a leglock on the other's head but the oil was making it difficult. Noise level in there was almost dizzying, and the guys around me at the bar were adding to that as they egged the girls on: "Bite 'er clit, Lola"—"Get 'er by the short hairs, Izzy!"

  I have to admit that there's something about the sight of two pretty girls going at each other that way that turns most men on. I don't pretend to understand it even though I'm affected by it myself; most of those guys in there would have puked or thrown something at the cage if it'd been naked guys slithering around together in there—outraged, yeah.

  Speaking of which, a bartender finally found his way to me and asked, "What's your pleasure?"

  "Someone just got killed," I told him glumly.

  "Yeah? Who?"

  "Some little kid, don't know his name. Drive-by shooting victim."

  The bartender said, "Oh, that. What're you drinking?"

  Oh, that, sure.

  "I'm not drinking. Looking for Tim Murray. He around?"

  The bartender wrinkled his forehead. "Tim? Naw, I'm sure he's not. He comes in about two, usually. Anyone else? Looking for a job?"

  I said, "I got a job. Who's in charge right now?"

  "That'd be Vic." He pointed toward another bartender at the far end of the bar. "Hey, I got drinks cooking. Catch ya."

  I went to the other end of the bar and stepped behind it. "Vic" gave me a quick, questioning look and moved toward me. "Stay on the other side of the bar, please," he said in a no-nonsense tone.

  I stood my ground and told him, "Can't reach you from that side. I'm Joe Copp. Looking for Tim Murray."

  He said, "I don't care if you're Alley Oop, you can't come behind the bar. Step back out, please."

  So I stepped back, told him, "At least I got your attention. It's important. Where can I find Murray?"

  "We're very busy."

  "I can see that. Tim won't like it when he finds out you gave me a bad time. This is for him, not for me."

  "Are you a cop?"

  I nodded my head and showed the ID. "Tim's replacement."

  Vic said, "Oh, well."

  I tried to look as friendly as possible under the circumstances. "One more time, pal. Where do I find him?"

  "Find a table, why don't you? I'll try to reach him."

  I said okay and went looking for a table. One of the jigglers grabbed me and steered me to a booth in the rear, behind the other cages. I'd seen Vic give her a high sign just before she closed on me, so figured he'd know where to look for me. The girl massaged my shoulder as she sat me down and asked, "What can I get you?"

  "Coffee," I replied.

  "Nothing in it?"

  "Just coffee."

  She smiled and swayed away. Before I could get settled, another came along and moved on me with a seductive smile, a goodlooking brunette with hair to her hips and not much else for concealment. She slid into the booth and leaned into me, one hand rubbing my leg just below the hip, and said, "Hi, honey, I'm Sandra."

  I said, "Hi, Sandra—get lost, Sandra. I'm here on business."

  The smile vanished with a crash and she replied, "Oh! Well, they put you—okay, I thought you were here to cage up. No big deal." She slid out and strode away with an angry bounce.

  The other girl came back with my coffee and set it down without a word. She was going to leave that way but I called her back. "Worked here long?"

  "Too long," she replied warily. "Vic told me who you are so please don't try to be funny."

  "I'm not feeling especially funny," I told her. "Four of my people were killed last night."

  She said, "Yes, I heard it on the news this morning driving in."

  "Did you know any of those guys?"

  "I don't think so. A lot of the Brighton cops come in here when they're not on duty. But I don't much know for names. Please, I can't stand here and talk to you like this."

  "Just one more. Do you know Tim Murray?"

  "He's my boss, now. Sure, I know him."

  "Did he come in here much while he was chief at Brighton?"

  She wrinkled her nose. "You're trying to get me in trouble."

  I held up both hands, smiled, told her, "No way, kid. This isn't my territory."

  She said, "I know," and looked toward the bar. Then she turned back to me and added, "I think Tim Murray got shafted. He used to come in here as a customer now and then, sure, but he was always a gentleman and he still is a gentleman."

  "Was he here when you came to work today?"

  "No." Another glance toward the bar. A bouncer was coming our way. "His car is here, though. It's the gold Chrysler parked in back in the reserved slot. I have to go."

  She went, opposite to the approach of the bouncer. He leaned over the booth to tell me, "Vic says he can't find him. Sorry. But the drinks are on the house. Stay as long as you like. Want me to send a girl over?"

  I said, "No, thanks," and the guy smiled at me and went away.

  If the drinks—and maybe some other things—were always on the house, maybe I knew why Brighton cops liked the place. Of course there was nothing irregular about that. Even the doughnut shops give freebies just to have cops around during the haunting hours.

  I finished my coffee and went on out, walked to the back of the lot and found the area reserved for employee parking, spotted the gold Chrysler. It was one of the small ones, convertible, sort of sporty, a bit out of character for a public official. So maybe it was brand new, bought from the proceeds of public service after the service had ended.

  The door opened to my touch. Keys were in the ignition. I just had a feeling, took the keys and went to the trunk, opened it.

  I don't know, maybe I smelled it.

  But I knew what I would find in that trunk.

  He'd been dead long enough to go stiff.

  I closed the trunk, returned the keys to the ignition, and went quietly away from there.

  This murder would make the headlines, sure. But for all the wrong reasons. And business in Helltown would go on as usual, that much you could bank. Tomorrow's headlines would be concerned with the budget crisis in Washington, or maybe what one gubernatorial candidate said about another. People in this country are no longer outraged by the truly outrageous.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I called in my crisly find via police radio enroute to the victim's home. It would be an item for the sheriffs, and I was glad for that. I didn't know how many more of these my department could handle without zonking out. Things were already bad enough.

  Murray's widow was sprawled beside the pool in a teeny bikini when I got there, and she looked marvelous, which is an understatement. She was smooth as velvet all over, soft but not too, curvaceous but not exaggerated. It seemed even more certain, with the truth in full display, that she was too young a woman for Tim Murray.

  I'd rung the doorbell several rimes and got no response, so I'd let myself in through the side gate, suspecting that I might find her back there. She rose to an elbow and twisted to one side at my approach, repositioned her legs and gave me a long, silent look.

  "You're bringing bad news," she decided.

  I hadn't thought it showed, but it probably did. I'd always hated a task like this one.

  I pulled up a chair and sat down beside her, said, "Yes, I'm afraid so. Is anyone here with you?"

  "My daughter is on her way over from Chaffey College, but don't keep me waiting. How bad is it?"

  I took her hand and said, "Can't get any worse, Mrs. Murray."

  "Please. Call me Patricia." She was cool as ice, which is often very misleading. "Tim always called me Pat and I never liked it. He knew I didn't like it, but he always called me Pat." I noted the past tense and wondered how long she'd been prepa
ring herself for this moment. "Except when he was making love to me. Then he called me Patty, and he knew I hated that too. No, that's wrong, Tim never made love to me. Tim fucked me. He fucked me like I was a common whore. I never saw his penis soft. He always came in hard and ready, he fucked me in the dark, and then he left me. That is what life with Tim Murray has been. So don't take it easy with me, Mr. Copp. Exactly what has happened to him?"

  "He was shot. Death was instant, I'm sure."

  "I always took such good care of myself, exercised faithfully, played tennis and hated it twice a week, kept myself looking pretty for him. He liked to show me off, like one of his trophies. Do you know I haven't the faintest idea how much money we have? He never told me what his salary was. Gave me an allowance for the routine expenses, never quite enough to stretch from one payday to the next so I never had any just for myself. I was his housekeeper, Mr. Copp, and he condescended to fuck me once or twice a month when I behaved myself."

  "Well, I—"

  "I'm not shocking you, am I? That's okay, I shocked

  myself awhile ago. Didn't realize I had sunk so low until I saw it in your eyes. I mean when I asked you about Lydia Whiteside. I don't know why I did that. It couldn't possibly matter. It has been one woman after another for the past twenty years, so how could it matter? But I always wondered . . . was he making love to any of them?—or did he treat them the same way he treated me? Was he shot in the head?"

  "Yes."

  "Odd how it comes out that way, isn't it? That was what he feared most. I don't think he was afraid of death. But he was afraid of being shot in the head. Was it in the front or the back?"

  "Squarely between the eyes," I replied quietly.

  "Uh huh." She lay there and stared at me through a moment of silence, then scrambled to her feet and said, "If you'll excuse me for a minute, Mr. Copp, I want to get into some clothes. If I suddenly shatter, I don't want to be dressed like this. Will you come inside with me?"

  I went with her into the house and helped myself to a Coke from the refrigerator while she threw on a dress— probably right over the bikini because she was back before I got the can open. I've had considerable experience in this kind of situation—notifying the widows—but this one beat all. It had me off-balance, waiting for the emotions to break through that stiff layer of self-defense, wondering how the hell to respond to the embarrassing chatter.

  She took a Coke, too, and sat on a stool at the counter, holding the icy can to her forehead.

  I said, "If you've had any reason to suspect that Tim may have been in trouble..."

  "Trouble?" she replied numbly. "Trouble—yes, he's been in terrible trouble his whole life. Trouble, you see, was Tim's middle name. If he didn't have trouble, he went

  out and found some. Do you know that I have been a single parent for nearly twenty years? I raised these children all by myself. I'm surprised that he could keep their names straight. Oh, let's see, Keith must be the boy—that's a boy's name, you see—and Kelly must be the girl. Well, isn't that neat! Mr. Copp?"

  "Yes?"

  "It hurt me terribly when I saw that look on your face."

  "Which look was that?"

  "When you learned that I had left here this morning and did not even know that my husband had not come home all night. That hurt, it really hurt."

  "Sorry 'bout that," I said, with a forced smile.

  "But this does not hurt. I can say that. It does not hurt. I don't know he's dead, you see, any more than I didn't know that he didn't come home last night. Tim did not really live here, you see. He merely slept here, now and then. So you can leave any time you're ready to leave. You don't have to stay here and hold my hand. I am not going to shatter."

  "Feel like talking some more?"

  "Okay. Sure." She popped the can and took a swig of the Coke. "Go ahead."

  "How old are you, Patricia?"

  "I'm thirty-eight. Got married at eighteen, straight out of high school. Had a baby at nineteen, another at twenty. What else do you want to know?"

  "You're in great shape for thirty-eight."

  "Well, it hasn't been easy. Tim likes them young. I believe he lost interest in me the day my pregnancy began showing. He was thirty when we met and I was sixteen. He likes them best at sixteen. Because at sixteen they're too stupid to realize how inadequate he is as a man, a real man. An artificial man likes them very young, you see."

  "A girl down at the club awhile ago told me that your husband was always a perfect gentleman."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Didn't catch her name. She waits tables."

  "That explains it. The whores always think he's a perfect gentleman. If I sound bitter, Mr. Copp, it is only because I am very embittered. Tim Murray was no gentleman. Never. Tim Murray was a selfish son of a bitch whose own comfort was always the first priority. He was playing handball with his cop pals when I delivered Kelly and he was in the mountains with his nursing pals when Keith was born. And that is the whole story of our lives."

  I sighed and said, "Well, let's make it his epitaph. So... what now for you? You know nothing about your financial position?"

  "Well, I guess I do have some money, after all."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. It's out in the garage. Found it last week, I guess it's still there. In his locker. But what can I do with it? How do I explain where it came from?"

  "How much money are we talking about?"

  She waved a hand and said, "I don't know. Go look in the tan locker in the garage. The bottom lifts out from the inside. It's down there."

  The garage was off the kitchen. The "locker" was a double-door metal cabinet of the type you see in business offices for storing stationery and the like. The "bottom," indeed, lifted out. The six or so inches of dead space was about four feet wide and maybe eighteen inches deep. It was filled with money, not new money, old bills which had seen many hands—fifties and hundreds in thousand-dollar packets.

  Mrs. Murray had followed me and stood watching as I examined the cache. "How much would you say?" she inquired casually.

  "Maybe a hundred thou," I told her.

  I reinserted the bottom shelf and closed the doors on the cabinet. We returned to the kitchen. She sagged onto a stool and asked me, "Where does a policeman get that kind of money?"

  "Only one place I can think of," I replied.

  "It's why he was shot, isn't it?"

  I said, "There's probably a connection."

  "What should I do with it?"

  "Let it sit for now," I suggested. "Let me try to find out what it means."

  The daughter came in about then. Even if I had not been expecting her, I would have known who she was. Almost a carbon copy of the mother, adjusted for age. An absolute knockout. She looked at her mother, and at her mother's bare feet and slightly disheveled appearance, at me, and then said, "Oh, wow. Don't let him get away. I'm leav ing."

  Her mother said, "Don't be silly, Kelly. This is Chief Copp. He's filling in for your father at the department. He's brought us some bad news, I'm afraid."

  The daughter gave me a stricken look and said, "Daddy's dead."

  I said, "Yes."

  She said, "Oh God, I knew it." Her eyes were wide, staring but seeing nothing. She dropped onto a chair and bent forward to massage an ankle. "Didn't I tell you?"

  "Yes, you told me," Mrs. Murray replied in a mechanical voice.

  "I get these dreams," the daughter explained to me. "I had another one this morning." A tear popped out of one

  eye and slid quickly along the smooth cheek. "We've known it was going to happen. We just didn't know when. And then I had the dream." She looked at her mother. "What time?"

  The mother looked at me. I shrugged, said, "Probably early morning. I saw him about three o'clock. He was okay then. I'd say somewhere between three and eight."

  The daughter said, with considerable animation, "Okay, I saw him at about five o'clock."

  I said, "You saw him? Where?"

 
"In my dream. He was naked. When I see someone naked, they have just died. Wasn't it about five o'clock when I called you, Mama?"

  "A few minutes past, yes."

  "He was dead, then," the daughter said, and released another tear.

  It was all too weird for me. I was gathering myself to leave when Mrs. Murray asked me, "Can he have a department burial?"

  "I believe it would be appropriate," I replied. "I'll see if I can set it up."

  "Don't mention the locker yet," she said, with a flick of the eyes toward the garage door. "Wait until he's buried."

  I gave her an OK with the hand and let myself out.

  I've seen a lot, and I've seen a lot of weird, but I'd never seen anything like those two.

  Tears I can handle, screaming and anger and denial I can handle, but I didn't know what to call this.

  Someone told me—oh, years ago, I don't even remember who said it—but I was told that you can know a man by the reactions of those who mourn his passing.

  But I still did not know Tim Murray.

  And I hoped I never would.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  i had a mechanical lunch at a downtown coffee shop, don't even remember what I ate. I was a total stranger there and I was glad because the place was buzzing over the events of the night. Apparently the news of Tim Murray's murder had not yet hit the streets; I heard a couple of dark hints between tables to the effect that the ex-chief was still running the department and was probably "behind" the latest intrigues. It seemed that most of the patrons here were local business people who worked in the neighborhood—probably merchants, since it was a Saturday and also because the old downtown district had suffered the same fate as many other towns and dues in the age of the shopping malls. Nothing really exciting went down those streets anymore. There were a couple of small drugstores, a barber and a beautician, a shoe repair shop, two florists, a few small cafes and a saloon, several dress shops, a second-hand book store, other odds and ends of small, struggling businesses—all confined to a three-block