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

by Don Pendleton

"What was he looking for in my office?"

  "Answers."

  "To what?"

  "To this crazy business ... I think somebody tried to kill me."

  "You were supposed to have been in the limo when it blew?"

  "I think so, yes. I was supposed to meet Mr. Wiseman at eight o'clock. I was a few minutes late. I got into the car and . . . and it wasn't the right car. Not the same car, I mean. And the man looked like Mr. Wiseman but it wasn't him."

  "Wrong car, wrong man. Wrong chauffeur, too?"

  "No . . . that's the odd part. I'm sure it was Albert. We were married for three years, I couldn't have mistaken—that was Albert."

  "Definitely not Wiseman?"

  "No. I mean yes. Anyway, I don't really know him all that well. I knew, though, that something was strange there. It sent chills down my back. I don't fight those feelings, I just react. Good thing I did, huh. I wasn't half a block away when . . ." She shivered. "I could feel the heat in my own car."

  "And you kept right on running."

  "I sure did. I was already starting to wonder about all this."

  "All this what?"

  "I mean, even before I came back. It just wasn't making sense anymore."

  My data pool was getting flooded. I said, "Back from where?"

  "What?"

  "You said, before you came back. Back from where?"

  "From Mexico. They sent me down there nearly a year ago. Made sense at the time, but now—well it all sounds kind of crazy. Then they called and told me about you and—"

  "What about me?"

  "That, you know, you were getting the films back."

  "What films?"

  "The old movies? And everything was going to be just fine and we could go ahead now. So—"

  "Wait. Let me get this ... you've been in Mexico for the past year?"

  "Almost, yes, because, well they said because—"

  "And all the time you've been married to Franklin?"

  "Well, yes, see, that's ... it sounds crazy, I know, but that was part of the package, the image thing. But that was all over, see, that part was over and they sent for me. We were meeting at eight o'clock and ... but the damned car blew up in my face. I was scared to death, I'm still scared to death, and I was even afraid to go to the police because it all sounds so hokey. So I called Walter Guilder. We were friends a long time ago and I knew that he was in Mr. Wiseman's security force. I really had no one else to turn to. Walter decided we needed to find out exactly what you were doing for Mr. Wiseman, and that's why we went to your office yesterday."

  She'd become a wind-up talking doll and was showing no signs of winding-down. Which was okay, she was venting and that was good, talking herself back to sanity, and I was willing to let her do it—I was eager for her to do it—but we had not yet reached the rational level and I was just trying to guide her toward it.

  "You see, they'd told me all about you, your background with the regular police and all, that you were this straight-arrow guy and could be depended on for discretion, that you were so thorough and had this great reputation and all, and . . ."

  I'd lost track of what she was saying because my attention was distracted by movements down below. The fog was really settling in heavy and even the light standards were hardly more than faint shrouded beacons in the gloom, so the visibility had fallen rapidly. The occasional cars moving along Cahuenga were just dim globs of light in an ethereal background. So I didn't know exactly what I was seeing down there in the turnaround, but it seemed like a car or cars moving without lights through the fog.

  I closed my door to extinguish the dome light and

  put a hand on Melissa's mouth to shush her as I asked, "Is Guilder down there?"

  She said, "He thought we should come in separate cars, but he should be here by now. I think he's very nervous about all this."

  "How good a friend is Guilder?"

  "We met in an acting class. That's all. We just knew each other. Never dated or anything like that. Ran into each other at the studio last year and he told me he'd given up acting and liked his new work very much. So naturally I thought of him when—"

  "Frying pan to the fire maybe, kid. Tell me something, what's the first thing to come to your mind when you hear the phrase fifty million bucks?"

  I could not see her face too clearly now but those eyes were only inches from mine and I thought I could see something happening in there as she said, "What do you mean?"

  "Means nothing to you?"

  "Well sure, it means something to me. But what do you mean?"

  "Something worth dying for, maybe. Or killing for."

  "I don't understand."

  Neither did I, not exactly.

  I asked her pointblank, "Are you a whore?"

  Eyes flashed at me across the darkness but it took a couple of beats for her to reply. "That's a hell of a thing to say."

  "Didn't say it. Someone else did. I'm asking. Are you?"

  "Depends on the definition, I guess," her voice suddenly weary. "I've never stood on a streetcorner, if that's what you mean."

  "Were you Wiseman's woman?"

  "No."

  "You never lived with him, slept with him, rubbed his back, drove around town at his feet in the limo and kept him comforted?"

  "Never did," she said quietly.

  "You didn't come to my office with him earlier this week hiding behind sunglasses?"

  "No, I did not."

  "When did you get back from Mexico?"

  "Tuesday afternoon, to meet him at eight in Hollywood."

  "You didn't come to my office on Monday?"

  "I told you, no. I was in Mexico Monday."

  "Can you prove that? Airline ticket or—?"

  "I drove up."

  "In this car?"

  "Yes. I left Monday morning, spent the night near Tijuana, came on in the next day."

  "Starting where?"

  "Baja. Mr. Wiseman has a place on the ocean near San Quintin. It's about a four-hundred-mile drive to Tijuana."

  "You were staying at Wiseman's place?"

  "Yes."

  "Did he give you the car?"

  "Yes. It was a wedding gift."

  "When you married Franklin."

  "Yes."

  "What sort of dues did you pay to get it?"

  "In this business, the usual. But the personalized tags were Mr. Wiseman's idea too. He wanted me to think of the whole year that way."

  "The year in Mexico."

  "Yes."

  "How did your new husband want you to think of that year?"

  Silence.

  I tried another. "Why was Guilder staking out your husband's house earlier today?"

  "Was he?"

  My talking doll had run down and was becoming very guarded again. Never mind. This girl was the master key. Either she was giving it to me straight or she was a damned fine actress. To believe her, I first had to believe that she was indeed Melissa Franklin. Then I had to believe that someone was playing a most tricky game with stand-ins and stuntmen, false fronts and special effects—a real Hollywood production. But why not? These were Hollywood people, after all. First, though, I had to convince myself that this was the real Melissa Franklin, be patient until she came up with—

  What came up was gunfire, a volley of three quick shots followed by two from a different gun, coming from somewhere down in the gloom of the turnaround.

  I shoved Melissa onto the floorboards and took off running with gun in hand toward the sounds. But I got there a couple of shots too late. Both of them had gone into Walter Guilder's head, and there was nobody else around but me.

  The death count had risen to sixteen, and the answer to it all nearly ran me down as she powered the dues-paid Jaguar through the latest killing ground and onto Cahuenga boulevard.

  Even her headlights were instantly swallowed by the fog. The living doll was running again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I'd heard tires screeching on pavement down there while
I was closing on that scene, and I found shattered auto glass thirty feet from Guilder's Honda. He was slumped over his steering wheel with two gunshot wounds in the face. A pistol lay on the seat beside him. Not too difficult to reconstruct the action. Evidently he'd fired first, broadside through the open window that I'd broken earlier, and the return fire had come back at him via the same route because the windshield and other areas looked good as new. Either someone was a hell of a marksman or got very lucky from thirty feet away.

  I was kneeling on the asphalt and looking at the broken window glass when Melissa had come out of the fog in her Jaguar. I didn't think she was trying to run me down. I doubt she even saw me. She was just trying to get the hell away from there. As I dove for the grass to get out of her way I was deciding that she had the best idea of the moment. Those shots must have been heard all the way down at Hollywood and Vine. Police response could be quick.

  I ran back to the Cad and beat it out of there too, running without lights until I was moving clear and free down the hill. Cahuenga is split at that point, southbound lanes west of the freeway and northbound on the other side. I could hear the police sirens up the north leg before I traversed the split, it was that close. I went on down Cahuenga and swung west on Sunset. The visibility was much better down there and the traffic light. I kept hoping to spot the Jaguar but of course I didn't.

  I also didn't know where I was going or should go. I just knew it was not smart to be cruising Hollywood at that time of night in a hot car. I had already beat down an urge to duck over to my friend Nancy's for another go at sanctuary. She lives only five minutes from the Bowl and I was sure she'd let me in again. But that would buy me nothing but a bit of rest, and I didn't feel like resting. I still needed answers, not comforting.

  Why the gunfight at the Hollywood Bowl? What had that bought anyone? To listen to Melissa tell it, Guilder had just been trying to help a friend in need—and I felt like maybe it was true. The guy had liked to talk tough but he was a lightweight mixing it up with the heavies, and I just couldn't see him as a bad guy in this piece. An actor—okay—I could see it, a make-believe tough guy, and he'd come to grief fast in the real world. Melissa said that he'd panicked at my office when he conked me; maybe he'd panicked again and started shooting when a couple of toots of a horn would have served the moment better. If he'd been down there acting as a lookout, and if Melissa had mentioned her midnight meeting to the wrong person ... it could have gone down that way. Or maybe Guilder himself had let it drop to someone—maybe someone like Butch Cassidy.

  I kept moving out Sunset and found myself on the Strip before I knew it. Beverly Hills was just around the corner and then Bel Air... Maybe I'd been on that heading subconsciously all the way. I pulled over at the Comedy Club to consult Abe Johnson's extract of the case, found Wiseman's Bel Air address and located it on my map.

  Beverly Hills is its own city, you know. Bel Air is not. It is a section of Los Angeles and probably the most expensive turf inch-for-inch in the city, sits just west of Beverly Hills and north of UCLA, east of the San Diego Freeway and nestled into the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. It has gated entrances off Sunset, and the terrain behind those gates creates a natural maze from which the most determined tourists often emerged dazed and shaken after wandering through it for hours. I don't recommend that you venture in there, especially at night, without a finely detailed road map of the neighborhood.

  I found the Wiseman palace off Bellagio Drive, one of the main roads, for which I was very grateful, and I proceeded to play second-story man. Had to scale a wall and move through a half acre of natural booby traps in the stygian darkness, then had to go around an electronic security system and climb a balcony to an upstairs window to get inside the house.

  This place made Justine's San Marino digs look like poor relatives. I had to wonder what a fifty-year-old paraplegic needed with a place like this. According to the record Wiseman had never been a social lion, rarely entertained at home and had been antisocial since his accident.

  Well, I had the place to myself. Johnson's notes indicated that the household staff had been dismissed even before Wiseman's death and that a lone housekeeper lived in a guest house at the rear. All the furniture was covered, and the place felt like a mausoleum. I found the kitchen, which could have prepared state banquets. Everything draped, disconnected, deactivated.

  I wandered about in the dark, using a pencil-flash now and then, found a library and a study and a game room and a ballroom.

  What was more important was what I did not find there. During my years as a cop I have been inside many homes of deceased people. A home can reveal a person—even a dead one—at least some of the personality and character values. It was why I was here.

  I found no magazines in Wiseman's house, dusty- layered books that looked never to have been taken down off the shelves—strange for an ex-whiz kid—no newspapers, no photographs, no bills paid or unpaid, no food, no booze, no clothing, no cosmetics, no trace whatever of the man or how he might have lived there.

  Of course the man was dead—but only very recently. Why should every trace have been wiped away so quickly?

  I'd never seen the likes of it, and I wasn't buying it.

  I went to the guest cottage and woke up the housekeeper—a vigorous-looking woman of indeterminate middle years who slept in an old-fashioned

  flannel nightgown and nightcap and had further bundled herself in a heavy chiffon robe to answer the door.

  I showed her my ID and apologized for the intrusion, told her I urgently needed to talk with her. She spoke with a heavy European accent—maybe German or Dutch—and seemed flustered by my visit. She insisted on making coffee, which sounded fine to me, so we went into her kitchen and I made myself comfortable in a little breakfast nook at the window. She didn't ask how I'd gotten onto the grounds and I was hoping she wouldn't; it was obvious she thought I was a public cop. I've found that people from Europe tend to accept most anything from a cop; most of those countries don't have a bill of rights, or at least don't honor them. Her name was Edda.

  "What can I help you, sir?" she asked once the coffee was on and cooking.

  I told her, "I'm a bit puzzled, Edda. There's no sign of living in there. It wasn't closed up like that just since Mr. Wiseman died, was it?"

  "Oh no, sir." Her hands were clasped across an ample belly. "Is the way it was."

  "It has always been closed up this way?"

  "Yes, sir, as same as Mr. Wiseman first come." She pronounced it Viseman.

  "He bought the house this way, completely furnished, the way it is now?"

  "Same as now, ya."

  "Everything all covered up and all that?"

  "Ya."

  "Never wanted the covers taken off?"

  "Ya, same as now."

  "How did he live in that, Edda?"

  "No no, live not in that, live in this." She opened her hands to indicate the guest cottage.

  "Show me, please."

  She took the coffee off the burner and led me to a large room at the rear of the cottage. It was very homey, soft and clean and simple—an all-purpose room containing a double bed, a small desk, a couch and a couple of overstuffed chairs, table by the window but no chairs at it, hardwood floor with plenty of open space and no rugs to interfere with the movement of a wheelchair.

  And a wheelchair, yes, stood beside French doors at the back wall.

  I said to the housekeeper, "He left his wheelchair."

  "Oh ya—yes, sir—this chair is the home chair, not the car chair."

  "He used a different chair for traveling about?"

  "Oh ya, this chair will not..." She made a squeezing sign with her hands.

  "Doesn't fold up."

  She smiled. "Ya. This chair better comfort for home."

  There was no television in the room but it had an elaborate audio system, compact disc player, the works. I found a whole library of Verdi's compositions, remembered the tapes I'd found in the glove b
ox of the UT limo.

  "He liked opera," I commented.

  "Very much the opera. Verdi."

  So the home reveals the man. I found a lot of stuff back there that told me something of Bernard Wiseman—a man of obvious sensitivity and culture, refined tastes, great intellectual capacity. Sounded like the man described to me by the screenwriter, nothing at all like the other reputation.

  I said to the housekeeper, "This is where he lived, then."

  "Oh ya," she replied proudly. "This is where he is comfortable, this is home."

  "How long did you know him, Edda?"

  She smiled and told me, "Not so long, but very well. Wonderful man. So young to die."

  "Did you know Albert Moore?"

  "Oh ya."

  "Melissa Franklin?"

  Her face tightened and she tried to cover it but not in time. "Ya."

  "What's wrong, Edda? You don't have to hide anything from me. What's wrong with Melissa?"

  She would give me nothing more than a pained smile on that subject, so I let it go. She offered to serve the coffee back there, which suited me fine. I kept on poking around while she was getting it, found nothing more of specific interest until I opened a book that was lying on the bedside table. Inserted into it like a bookmark was a polaroid snapshot. It depicted Wiseman in sunglasses similar to those worn at our meeting, seated in a compact wheelchair somewhere outside. A white limo was in the background, and a man in a chauffeur's uniform was kneeling beside the wheelchair.

  I showed the snapshot to Edda when she returned with the coffee. "Do you know when that was taken?"

  "Yes, sir, I take this last month."

  "You took it? Who's the man in the uniform?"

  "This in uniform is Albert."

  "Albert Moore?"

  "Ya."

  "How well did you know Albert?"

  "He too here lives. Over garage."

  I had myself a double bingo. But at the moment I did not know exactly what to make of it.

  I just knew that the chauffeur in that snapshot was not the Albert Moore I knew, or thought I knew. I had never seen that fellow before.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I connected with a Times editor, fellow I'd known since my LAPD days, and he let me into their morgue to search out Wiseman, though he assured me he had already done that and could gist it for me in two minutes. I'd already been gisted; I wanted a close look for myself. The editor was very interested in the Wiseman affair, of course, and he also knew that I was hot. I promised him a lock on the story if I ever put it together for myself. He set up the equipment for me and then left me to my own devices.