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

by Don Pendleton

  I waggled the gun at him. "Blow on this, guy."

  Tony had been staring at his friend with great interest from the beginning of the exchange. Now he interrupted. "Let's do a movie on this. This is really far out. By the way, what man are we talking about?"

  "Just shut up," Roberto told him. "Stay out of it. You got no piece of it, remember?"

  "Up yours, you little queer," said Tony right back.

  "Good question, though," I said. "How would you answer it, Roberto? Who is the man?"

  "I guess it was Wiseman," he said quietly.

  "You guess."

  "Well, okay, it was him."

  "The real McCoy? Or the real decoy?"

  "I thought it was him."

  "Still think it was?"

  "How do I know? All I did was drive the car. Wish I'd never seen the damned thing. A hundred bucks, a lousy hundred bucks. I'd give them a hundred of my own to take it all back. This has been a nightmare for me, man. A nightmare. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

  "Maybe it should," I said. "Maybe you were just a bystander like me. If that's true, then it'll all come out in the wash. If not... well, kiddo, it's people like you they invented gas chambers for."

  Tony fairly shivered. "I think it'd make a hell of a picture," he said seriously.

  "Shut up," Roberto instructed.

  Which brought the expected response, followed by: "What film did you take?"

  I said, "Right, what did you do with the package of film after I delivered it?"

  "I left it in the car when we changed."

  "Where was that?"

  "Straight down La Brea, corner of Beverly. He was at the curb in the studio limo. He transferred the man over—that's when he carried him—he put him in my limo, I got in his and drove away. That's the last I saw of it."

  "They definitely left the wheelchair in the studio limo."

  "I'm pretty sure . . ."

  "It is a movie," Tony declared. "No question ..."

  Roberto lost it then. Not a really together personality there, I think. You see it come out with some people under pressure. He had to lash out at something, knew better than to aim it my way. So he threw an open-hand slap at his pal and shoved him hard against the garage door. Tony came back at him and they had at each other right there, clawing and yelling and rolling all over the place.

  Didn't appear as though anyone was going to get hurt seriously in all that, though.

  I advised them as they fought, "Don't go to the Springs," and left them to their own disposition.

  I didn't know if Roberto could build bombs or not. At the moment it didn't really matter to my agenda. There would be time for Abe Johnson to sort all that later. I left it to his interested ear and went on to Palm Springs. It seemed that it had all begun at the desert. Now I had to try to end it there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  There were subtleties I didn't have a firm grip on yet, but I thought I had it pretty well figured out by the time I got to the Springs, although I wasn't sure of anything. But I was ready to put theory to the heat test, and I had taken it to the only testing ground I had left.

  It was shortly after two o'clock on Monday morning when I got there. Temperatures drop quickly on the desert when the sun goes down because the air is usually too dry to hold the heat. Must have been pretty hot that day, though. The temperature was holding at about seventy, downright balmy, with a light wind blowing out of the southeast.

  The Mercedes stood in the driveway just outside the garage, same as before, but now the door was down, so I didn't know if the Jag was there. I could not see any lights inside. These condos were built as separate units with maybe six feet of grass between the buildings, two-storied, rear to the street, oddly shaped sides and a sharp pitch to the roofs. So it would be difficult to spot signs of life from the street, anyway. Ditto the other way, unless the garage was open. But something you can usually count on in this area are quiet evenings. I think the average bedtime is about nine o'clock. Sleeping is right up there with golf and tennis as favored pastimes.

  I went on by and used the guest parking at the back. The Honda's lug wrench had a wedge at one end, designed for popping off hubcaps—very useful also in various similar applications. I placed it on top of Cassidy's boxfile and took it with me to the Mercedes. Required a couple of quiet pops before I found the vital spot, then it opened the trunk almost as quietly as with a key.

  I found bloodied towels and a collapsed wheelchair in there.

  Note how the wounded mind operates. I'd been in there with that wheelchair folded up like that. I probably did not actually see it at the time but I experienced it and my mind recorded it as a visual event along with the others; I just didn't select it out.

  I opened the wheelchair and put the box in it, pushed it around the side of the building. Lights were on at the front—softly, though, and not providing much illumination. The golf course was right there, the third tee not twenty feet from the condo.

  A sliding glass door was open, music was coming from inside, and Charles Franklin sat on a folding chair in the grass. He saw the wheelchair first, then looked up until his eyes were in alignment with mine.

  He said, "My God!"

  "You keep getting farther away," I told him. "It's still Joe Copp, still doing it the only way I know how."

  I had to give the guy credit, he handled it very well—on the surface, anyway. Eyes were a bit wild but voice steady as he said, "Guess there's no such thing as a sure thing."

  "That's the only sure thing."

  He looked at my gun, quickly looked away from it, took a deep breath. "I guess, as they say, the jig is up."

  I kept on my toes, remembering the last time. "I think that's probably true, Charlie. Someone said a little while ago that it would make a great movie. I think you screwed it up, though. Probably a great script but you lost it somewhere."

  He looked at the wheelchair with a sour smile. "There's always that one little screwup, isn't there."

  "In the movies, yeah. They don't have much time. In real life it's usually a lot of little ones. You've had your share."

  "And one of them is standing here with a gun turned on me."

  "That's a big one, no question."

  "Next time I do my own casting."

  "No more next times, Charlie."

  "You were the difference," he said. "Of all the private investigators in town . . ."

  "I never could follow a script."

  "Won't even die on cue, will you. I still don't believe it. Nothing should have lived through that. What are you, a werewolf or something?"

  He was talking his senses back. I encouraged it. "Your red herring was great, though. I especially like the Mexico bit."

  "Sheer inspiration. I actually did an outline on a

  similar idea years ago. Got busy on something else, never developed it. Maybe it would have won an Oscar. You never know."

  "Lots of Oscars are lost on the cutting room floor, I hear."

  "Oh, before that too. It all begins with the script, you know."

  "The writer deserves all the credit?"

  "Didn't say that. But the ultimate credit, or ultimate blame. Don't forget that."

  "I'm not forgetting it, Charlie. I'm conferring upon you the ultimate blame for this bloody travesty."

  "Okay," he said after a moment, "I accept it." After another moment: "I'm curious—do you have a bullet in your head?"

  "Ask your stage manager. Or is it the prop man?"

  "Prop man . . ."

  I was wondering if Franklin had lost his focus. He smiled, though, and said, "Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. What do we do now?"

  "Let's go inside. Do you have a VCR?"

  "I think so. Something special you want to see? Justine could probably dig up something fresh for you."

  "Brought my own," I told him. "Is she here?"

  "Oh yes. And I can't wait to see her face."

  Neither could I. "Melissa here too?"

&nbs
p; "To be sure."

  "You told me nothing's for sure."

  He smiled. "That's right, I did. The Baja thing you had twirling, eh? That's good, that's good. Poor dear, I guess it twirled her a bit, too. But after all, we couldn't just kill her."

  "Why not?" Nobody else bought a bye."

  "Well, true, but not Melissa— not at first—I mean,

  you could never box office that sympathetically. First we had to try every reasonable alternative."

  I wondered if the guy had gone unhinged and actually thought we were discussing a movie script. He seemed really to be getting into it.

  "Like," I suggested, "setting her up in Mexico."

  "Yes, and we had to make it believable. For her, believable. Had to make sense, otherwise she wouldn't want to stay down there. And if she came back too soon...”

  "Bottoms up?" I suggested.

  "Absolutely. Melissa is a dear girl but she's not capable of abstract concepts. She would never have understood about Bernie. Well, you've seen the way she reacted."

  "Right. She didn't want to sit there and get blown up with the guy."

  "She didn't know that. She simply reacted bizarrely to a minor anomaly. That's characteristic of Melissa. She gets 'vibes,' you see, or thinks she does."

  "This time she got lucky."

  "Yes, but it wasn't in the script."

  "She knew it wasn't Bernie. Why didn't you just tell her it wasn't Bernie. Then you wouldn't have had to blow her up."

  "I told you that we tried every reasonable alternative. It finally came to the climactic scene, and Melissa wasn't ready. She would have ruined everything."

  "That's what she did."

  "I know ... I knew it would happen this way if we didn't just kill her at the top of the script. I told Justine that. But that woman can be very determined."

  The guy had lost it, now I was sure of it. I picked up the box and pushed him inside the house.

  I wanted to see what we had on Butch Cassidy's videocassette.

  The pictures I'd taken during my day-long stakeout at NuCal were spread across the coffee table like cards in a game of solitaire. Someone had drawn a line from corner to corner with a grease pencil across most of them. A 9mm pistol lay to one side. I scooped up the pistol and dropped it into my pocket.

  Franklin sat on the floor beside the TV, back against the wall, looking, I thought, a bit dazed. I loaded in the videocassette and took the remote control to the other wall, the outside wall, and started the play.

  Soon as the titles began rolling, Franklin perked up. "Oh, bet I know what this is."

  Not many people would. It was a ten-year-old low- budget film produced by Bernard Wiseman. His was the only name I recognized in the credits.

  "Shouldn't we call the girls down?" Franklin said.

  "In a minute," I told him. "Let's first see what we've got here."

  It was an entirely ho-hum production, a bit arty in places but too consciously so. I couldn't decide if it was a romance or a crime melodrama, but I saw a familiar face about ten minutes into it.

  "There he is," Franklin said, his voice hushed.

  There he sure was.

  Could've been a Hitchcock touch.

  I froze the picture. "Didn't know Bernie ever appeared in his movies."

  "No, he didn't," Franklin said.

  "Then who is this?"

  "This is ... Oh! You don't know? Thought you were onto it."

  "The stand-in."

  "Right. This is Victor Nesmith. Very good character actor. Until a few years ago, of course."

  I said, "And a good double."

  "Good enough. Right age group, right height and build, little heavier but—we all go up and down. Look at the hairline, though. Perfect, perfect casting!"

  "This is the guy that died in the limo."

  "With Albert, yes. Poor Albert, he never suspected. Went along with it to the bitter end. Of course it wasn't bitter for him. Never knew what hit him, I'm sure. Don't feel too sorry for him, Albert thought he was in for a share. He wasn't virgin. It was good enough box office, it would play."

  "What about Victor Nesmith though?"

  Franklin smiled craftily. "Well, you know, he had a pretty good run at it, the role of a lifetime. Don't think he wasn't eating it up. And just when things looked blackest for him. Tell the story from his point of view and you've got a whole new angle on it."

  I said, "He was the medical stand-in, too."

  "Sure. Here was this very competent actor, down on his luck and I mean way down, not a soul in the world to hold his hand, and he could very easily become a dead ringer for Bernie. Heaven cooperated, that's all."

  "Sounds like the Mexican doctors cooperated, too.

  Or couldn't they tell the difference between an old and a new injury?"

  "Wasn't that old," Charles replied smugly. "Besides, medicine is not that precise a science. Have you ever known three doctors who ever agreed on anything? They see what they expect to see."

  I released the freeze and turned off the VCR, told Franklin, "Let's get the girls down here now."

  Like Franklin, I was a bit dazed myself. There'd been no accident in Mexico, right, I had that one. But there had been an accident in Burbank two months earlier, and it'd made a paraplegic out of a very competent character actor.

  So they had just moved the scene south, rolled the date forward a couple of months, changed the name of the victim, had given him several months secluded in Mexico while he learned his role . . . and behold the new Bernie Wiseman, paraplegic.

  Movie magic at its best.

  This affair had been brewing for two whole years. And it had been, in its fashion, a brilliant production.

  I asked the auteur, "Did Victor like Verdi?"

  "Loved Verdi," Franklin replied. "We discouraged it, of course. Bernie couldn't tolerate opera."

  Of course I'd never met Bernie Wiseman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  They came down the staircase all disgruntled, still half-asleep and wondering what was so urgent to get them out of bed in the middle of the night—attired for the bedroom almost identically in becoming shorty pink babydolls. In most any other circumstances a treat for the male eye, all the golden hair and long bronzed limbs in a ding-dong double for the fantasy-mind. They looked enough alike to be sisters, and in fact, it turned out that they were.

  Sleepiness changed to shock when Justine saw the reason for the awakening.

  Melissa sank slowly and seated herself on the stairway, trying to focus puffy eyes.

  Justine grabbed hold of the rail and leaned back against the wall, settling into a murderous gaze.

  Franklin, gloating, informed them: "It's really him. He's not dead. Not even damaged much. How could you miss from that close, Justine?"

  Without taking her eyes from me, she said, "What's the matter with you, Charlie? Are you hitting the coke again? What are you talking about?"

  "You'd stonewall it to the grave, wouldn't you," I said to her. "Save us all a lot of dumb time. Go put your clothes on, unless you want to get booked in your nightie."

  She looked at my gun, looked at Franklin, said to him, "We'll have to write him in."

  "How many points?" he said, bargaining about shares like it was still a real unreal scenario.

  She looked at me. "You know what's at stake here?"

  "Cassidy pretty much told me."

  "Learn from his failure, then. Don't get too greedy." She came on down the stairs and settled onto the couch. "Ten points," she said to Franklin, carrying on the movie jargon.

  "Probably not enough. Ask him."

  I said, "No, it's not enough. But let's talk about it."

  I eased Melissa off the staircase and placed her on the couch beside her sister Justine. She pulled away from me. I didn't like the look in her eyes.

  "What have you got her on?" I asked big sister.

  "Just a little downer, she's under control."

  "Can't keep her like this forever."

&n
bsp; "We'll have to write her out," Franklin said regretfully. "You know that, Justine."

  "Yes, I know it." Regretfully.

  "She was blowing a week ago," I pointed out. "Came back and screwed up everything."

  Justine gave me a wondering scrutiny. "Have you been in this with Cassidy all the way?"

  "We met just recently," I told her.

  I took some stuff out of the box and placed it on the

  coffee table beside my photos. "Part of his file. You might find it interesting."

  She picked up the packet provided by her husband's spy, flipped quickly threw it, tossed it back. "Wasn't interesting the first time I saw it. You keeping those for the wall above your bed?"

  "You're very photogenic in any position, but it wouldn't match my decor. I'm not into gruesome."

  "Get fucked," she said. Tough.

  Franklin said, "Let's settle this about Melissa."

  Justine told him, "He hasn't declared himself. Let's get that first."

  "Well, maybe he'll be willing to take care of Melissa for you if you make it good enough."

  "How do I know what he thinks is good enough? What if he wants it all?"

  "He could never have it all, he's smart enough to know that. Make the man a decent offer."

  It was very weird. Not only were these people either detached from their senses or totally evil, they were talking about me as though I were somewhere else. Like the director and producer discussing an actor's role in front of him—like he was a pawn. Like I was. I had been for too long . . .

  I asked, "Can I get into this story conference?"

  "Sure, Joe. We respect your input."

  "Thanks. First I need to understand what I think I know about the lead characters. Background, motivation, that sort of thing. Melissa, for example, thought she was in Baja being prepped for a major debut. That's okay, I get that angle. But then why was Justine being seen around town as Melissa at the same time?"

  "We had to establish Melissa as Bernie's consort,"

  Franklin said. "Couldn't just have her appear out of nowhere for the climactic scene."

  "Why couldn't Melissa establish that for herself? And then make the switch afterward?"