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

by Don Pendleton

  I had a complete abstract of Abe Johnson's investigation—names and addresses of all the victims, places of employment, a thumbnail history of Wiseman and his record at United Talents, of Moore and Melissa Franklin—plus a set of 35mm negatives processed from my videotape.

  I went into a one-hour photo shop and ordered four-by-five-inch prints of the fourteen negatives, then studied the abstract while waiting for the prints. There was some interesting stuff. Wiseman had a wife living in San Marino; they'd been legally separated for two years and she'd recently filed for divorce. Moore had come to United Talents with Wiseman and had been married to Melissa Franklin at the time. Melissa had divorced Moore less than a year later and immediately married a screenwriter named Charles Franklin—status of that marriage not clear.

  It was beginning to sound like a soap.

  The photo guy was very upset over his prints. They were a bit fuzzy, and he complained about marks on some of the negatives that carried over onto the prints. I told him it was fine, paid him and got out of there.

  The "marks" were actually etchings that had been placed on four of the negatives by technicians at the police lab, identification codes for the latest four victims. They were covered in the abstract.

  I could understand why Abe Johnson had been so edgy during our luncheon.

  The fuse was still burning.

  There could be ten more victims before the thing had run its course. And nobody even knew why the others had died.

  I decided it was about time someone found out why.

  That fuse was burning toward me too.

  It was time to stop feeling like a victim and start acting like a cop. I intended to do exactly that.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I kept my appointment with Mark Shapiro and we spent ten minutes discussing the case in his office, then he volunteered to drive me home and I took him up on it. Not that I intended to go home but I needed my car. To be afoot in the L. A. area is to be stranded. We played bumper-cars along the San Bernardino Freeway. Mark drives like most New Yorkers—with fury and faith in a higher power—it was not a restful trip. We got to my office in record time and it was just past three when Mark screeched out of the parking lot and left me debating with myself about my next move.

  I decided to go inside and check the office for signs. Nothing—nothing on the answer machine, nothing out of place. I don't know what I'd hoped to find.

  On impulse I went next door to the beauty salon for a chat with the owner, a fiftyish woman named Molly who is a terrible advertisement for her business, but any meet with her is good for smiles and excellent coffee.

  She showed me a brightly expectant face and raised a coffee cup as I walked in. Several customers were receiving the usual attentions from beauticians in booths along the wall. I always get uncomfortable looks from the chair-bound patrons when I go in there, sort of like what you'd expect from an intrusion into a ladies' room. I followed Molly to a little alcove in the rear where she served up a fresh brew and the standard running gag. "You look like hell, Joe."

  "Thanks. So do you."

  "So let's go to your place and console each other."

  I faked appropriate disappointment, as usual, as I replied, "Can't. I'm on a case."

  One day I'm going to take her up on that, just to determine if she's faking it too.

  "You're always on a case," she replied tartly. "I saw her yesterday. What's she got that I don't have?—other than youth, beauty and wealth?"

  Exactly why I came in. Molly sees a lot from behind her cash register.

  "Tall blond girl?"

  "Driving a fancy car, yes. Was that a Jaguar?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Don't be so coy. The cops already asked me about

  it.

  "When was that?"

  "This morning. Plainclothes cops. They asked a lot of questions."

  "About me?"

  "No, about Santa Claus, dummy. Don't worry, I told them you're great in bed."

  "Guess I'll have to prove it now, huh?"

  "Any time you feel like you can, Tiger."

  We laughed and lit cigarettes. It was our usual banter. I think she's all talk. Molly has been married to the same man for thirty years. If her usual appearance is any guide, she lost real interest in sex long ago but has fun talking about it.

  I told her, "I'm in some trouble, Molly. For real. I need—"

  "Is it that bombing? I knew it! That was the same damned limousine, wasn't it!"

  "You saw that too, huh?"

  "Sure I saw it. Everyone in this complex saw it. Was that really Bernie Wisemsn?"

  "Looks that way, yeah," I replied. "I was hired to do some routine work for the guy. Now they're trying to implicate me in a string of murders."

  "That's crazy!" Molly said angrily. "You send those guys back around here to talk to me again! I'll tell them!"

  "What did you tell them before?"

  "Not much. Didn't know much to tell. They asked about the blond, the car she was driving. I told them what I knew. Was that wrong?"

  "Course it wasn't wrong. What did you know to tell them?"

  "Well . . . she sat out there for about an hour— waiting for you, I guess. I thought at first maybe she was waiting to pick up one of my customers. We had a rush yesterday, the place was full all day. I asked around after about an hour, but nobody claimed her. I didn't see you arrive, guess I was looking the other way when you came in, or maybe I was busy in the back. I just know I looked out and saw your car parked beside hers and both were empty. Sorry."

  "Did you see her leave?"

  "Heard her leave. That car scream out of here like the devil was chasing it. I just caught a glimpse as it tore past. Figured you'd broken her heart, you devil."

  "How long was that after you saw my car?"

  "Oh . . . just a few minutes, I guess. Short time after."

  "Could you tell if anyone besides the blond was in that car?"

  "Not even her, Joe. It was just a flash past the window."

  "See anything else of interest?"

  "No. I can't think of anything else."

  "Anyone hanging around my office? Anything unusual in the parking lot?"

  "No."

  "Nobody else coming or going."

  "No. I locked up at six. Your car was still out there and the lights were on in the office. I didn't see anything unusual."

  I showed her the bald spot and butterfly bandage on my scalp and told her, "Someone sapped me while that blond was in my office. I must have been lying in there unconscious when you locked up and went home. You can't remember any thing unusual or out of focus or . . ."

  "Just that fancy car tearing out of here. Sorry, Joe. I'm going to have to start keeping tabs on you, Tiger. Sounds like you need a keeper."

  "So do you," I said, resuming the gag and fingering a lock of her hair. "When's the last time you washed your hair?"

  "Same time you aired out your jockeys," she fired back. "Did you get raped in jail, lover?"

  I asked, "How'd you know I'd been to jail?"

  She leaned over and flipped a newspaper from the rack. Big black headlines proclaimed: local pi charged in l.a. bombing.

  I told her, "You had me coming in, didn't you."

  She told me, "I wish."

  I couldn't tell if the gag was still running or not.

  So I thanked my interesting neighbor and got out of there.

  I hadn't learned a hell of a lot in a positive sense, but sometimes there is knowledge from a negative sense. And I decided that I'd better go home and look for signs there.

  I live only about ten minutes from the office, north into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. It's a developed area with a great view onto the entire valley and all its communities, zoned for horses and peopled by folks who like same. I don't, but I like the stretch between the houses so I put up with the flies as a small penalty to pay for the luxury of uncluttered space. My home is my only true luxury, which means that I can't afford it b
ut I'm damned if I'll live any other way and I'm willing to sacrifice in other areas of lifestyle.

  Well, I do have one other luxury, but it's business- connected so really doesn't qualify. It's the van I mentioned earlier. It's outfitted for business but easily convertible for camping. If the IRS is listening, don't worry: I pro-rate it out as a business expense, even though I have yet to use it for any other purpose. I

  consider it a business luxury because I don't use it that often. Usually I drive the old Cadillac, a fully paid for Eldorado built before the EPA standards, three damned tons of beautiful, gas-guzzling decadence. I love it, so maybe it's a minor luxury too when it comes time for the monthly gas bills. I get triple the mileage from the van, and it sits in the garage most of the time.

  So anyway I was driving the Cad. And I decided I needed to go home and scout for signs.

  Signs of what? I didn't know what. Maybe I was just feeling a bit paranoid, maybe something precognitive was growling around in the bowels of the mind—I didn't know. I just knew that I should go home and check it out.

  On the way, I decided that I should clean up and change clothes while I was there, maybe have a bite to eat to fortify the evening—and that leapt me to the realization that I had not been home for a couple of days and the pantry was probably bare. So I stopped at a supermarket along the way and picked up a few items, got home about four o'clock with my sack of groceries.

  I have to confess that I'm a little vain about my home. Maybe it's because I never had one to take much pride in until I was a teen-ager, I don't know. My dad died when I was little and my mother never got over it. All that was good in her sort of died with him, I think. I don't blame her; I can very unemotionally state that my mother was a tramp in all my memories of her—and most of what I feel in that connection is pity, not bitterness.

  I spent my teen years in a foster home, and it was the tender influences of that home that led me into police work. I've never been anything but a cop, never aspired to anything else. But I always had the greatest reverence for a nice home, and I am proud to say that I have one of those now. I also have acreage, and I like gardening—do all my own.

  Neighbors I don't have, not close neighbors. We like it that way in the hills, respect one another's privacy, and the terrain contributes to it nicely.

  I mention all this as background for the next development in the case.

  I arrive home at four o'clock to find a strange car parked in my driveway. It is an unmarked police car, the type used by the County of Los Angeles. The window on the driver's side is down and a police radio mutters at low volume.

  The front door to my palace stands ajar.

  Just inside, on a small foyer table, lies a search warrant with my name and address on it.

  In the hallway leading to my bedroom-study I find a cold corpse lying face down in coagulated blood. I don't recognize the face, but his ID, still clutched between stiff fingers, tells me that he was Detective Herman Rodriguez of the sheriff’s San Gabriel division.

  In my study, slumped over my desk, I find a second corpse.

  I did not need the ID for this one.

  This one is my old pal and confidant, Ken Forta.

  And now Joe Copp was really on fire.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Both men had been shot once in the chest and apparently the shooter or shooters knew how to Mm do it right the first time. Death had come quickly, probably without warning. Neither had drawn his weapon. Rodriguez seemed to have been presenting his ID when he got it. In trying to reconstruct, I knew either there had to be two shooters firing near-simultaneously or one shooter using a silenced weapon, because the two officers had died with no evidence of struggle or even self-defense, and within twenty paces of each other.

  Either someone had been waiting for me when the officers came, or someone had been surprised by their arrival during a burglary. It read the same either way. So ... had someone let them in?—someone who would not arouse particular suspicion by being there?—or had someone hidden when the cops arrived, then came out during the search to blast clear and get away?

  Forta had been sitting at my desk when he got it. He had produced a search warrant and left it prominently displayed in the entry way. Rodriguez was surprised in the hallway, ID in hand. Both had been dead for some time. Molly had told me that she'd been visited by "plainclothes cops" that morning. Same cops? Had they then come up only to search my house?

  There was no evidence of a search by anyone. Everything seemed to be in place.

  I did not call it in and I did not hang around. Dead is dead, I could do nothing for them now. I could do something for myself, though. I left everything exactly the way I'd found it, even the front door ajar, and I got away from there, groceries and all.

  Some crazy son of a bitch was running wild, killing wild, and I had the sick feeling that somehow I'd helped launch this thing. I could do nothing about that now—but for sure I could try to stop it.

  I've never been able to take death casually, not any death anywhere for any reason, not even death in bed from old age. A police psychologist once tried to tell me that was because I feared death so much for myself, but that's a crock. I think it's because I learned at an early age and through personal experience that death is always a personal loss to everyone left alive. Today we take death too casually. Murder is no longer a heinous crime. In this state now there even has to be "special circumstances" before a prosecutor can request for the death penalty.

  But murder is a heinous crime because it takes something irreplaceable from all of us, whether or not we know the victim. Murder touches us all in some fine way. Ken Forta is no longer around to pull your baby from a burning building or to stop a drunk driver twenty seconds before he would've slammed into a school bus carrying your kids and all your neighbor's kids. He isn't here now to coach a Pop Warner team or to take a brotherly interest in screwed-up teen-agers or to turn a street gang onto a Toys for Tots drive next Christmas.

  It touches us all, pal, each of us and all of us in many fine ways. We're all in this thing together and the loss is real for all of us when any of us takes the tumble. Try to remember that the next time you have to wait a couple of minutes at an intersection for a funeral procession; instead of impatience, try a little grief for a stranger whose death has diminished you.

  Of course I was thinking in no such terms at the moment. I was just mad as hell and scared as hell ... I came down out of the hills and onto the Foothills Freeway, cruising west and starting to think like a cop again with Abe Johnson's abstract open on the seat beside me. San Marino leapt to my eye as the home of Justine Wiseman and because it was just a few minutes down the pike. It's one of the more affluent areas, sort of a Beverly Hills East with extensive neighborhoods of stately homes and million-dollar estates. Some of the movie people live out there. It was on my way and I was in rush-hour traffic—which isn't all that different anymore from midnight traffic or midmorning traffic; it's always bumper-to- bumper; there's just more stop-and-go during rush-hour—so I got off the freeway at Huntington and cruised past Santa Anita and on to San Marino. The surface routes were not much clearer than the freeway, but at least there's some justification for stop-and-go there so it doesn't affect my blood pressure as much.

  It was about five o'clock when I found the Wiseman residence—not Bernard's anymore but still Justine's. He'd moved to Bel Air when they separated, poor guy, had to give up one stately mansion and start all over in another—the American Dream in Southern California, his-and-hers mansions.

  This one was no slouch by any standards, not even Bel Air's. It gives me a shiver to even try to guess the current market value of such digs. I pulled the old Cad onto the circular drive and left it under the canopy at the front door behind a gleaming Mercedes SL. A uniformed Chicano maid answered my ring, a lovely young woman with glowing dark eyes that dulled a bit at the sight of my ID. Her English probably was not up to the fine distinction between public and private badges, so I didn't
try to draw it.

  She left me standing in the marbled foyer amid exotic potted trees and museum-quality objets d'art while she went to fetch the lady of the house.

  I did a double-take when that one arrived, heart pounding between takes, because Justine Wiseman was a tall, tanned California-vintage blonde who could double in long shots for Melissa Franklin. Up close the difference was more obvious. This one seemed a couple of years older and didn't have the same thing in the eyes, but she had it all everywhere else. I would not have evicted her from my hot-tub club. She wore workout tights and legwarmers, a towel draped across the shoulders, much irritation in the face.

  "How many times do I have to go through this?" she said.

  "How many so far?"

  "Two policemen were here yesterday and another two today. Can't you people ever get it right?"

  "It's a big case."

  "Well, what is it this time?"

  I produced the photographs and handed them to her.

  "I've already looked at these."

  "Please look again. For me. And look closer this time. Tell me who you see."

  She bestowed a sudden smile. "Oh, I see. The kids couldn't handle the job, so the boss had to come back to handle this difficult lady."

  "Something like that. Look, cops don't work in a vacuum and we're not magicians. We need help. We're asking for yours. And ... you do have a vested interest in all this."

  "Cut the crap, cop. I have no interest whatever. If the son of a bitch is dead, that's too bad for some but it's okay with me. Don't look for tears in my eyes. He used me and left me. I'm supposed to wear black and weep over his grave? Not me. Screw him. And you too. Now get out of here and leave me alone."

  She handed the pictures over and flounced away.

  I called after her, "Screw you too, lady."

  She halted and turned around with a smile; said, in a friendlier tone, "Well I've got a live one here."

  "Too damned close to a dead one, pal. I just left two who died in my place. That brings the body count to thirteen. For what? Who's next? You?"