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

by Don Pendleton

  "Then she would have known he wasn't Bernie."

  "No, I mean—" And then it hit me.

  Justine said quietly, "Don't tell him anything he doesn't know, for God's sake."

  That was okay with me, because now I knew. The "switch" had been made in Mexico two years earlier.

  I asked, "How'd you get Albert to wire his own bomb?"

  "Don't tell him."

  Melissa's eyes were beginning to defog.

  Franklin looked at Justine, then told me, "Thought he was wiring it for Roberto. We just changed the timing a bit after he installed it."

  I tossed the how-to-bomb book onto the table. "Was Albert a quick study or did he have prior experience with explosives?"

  "He learned a lot," Franklin said, "hanging around locations over the years. But these were the first he had built himself. We were proud of him, weren't we," he added to Justine.

  I picked up the marked photos. "Who did the trigger work?" I hoped I sounded more casual than I felt.

  "Justine," he said, "grew up with guns. Their dad was a trick-shot artist. She can shoot the spades out of an ace at fifty feet. Ironic, isn't it, that she couldn't put a bullet in your brain from half an inch away."

  "Closer than that," I said, remembering that moment.

  Justine was looking at Franklin with looks that could kill. About her, that cliché took on fresh impact.

  I pinched Melissa's leg and asked Justine, "Do you want to kill your kid sister or don't you?"

  I had seen the person coming back in those gorgeous eyes. They looked at me, then shifted with understandable horror to her sister when Justine replied, "How much is it worth to you to kill a whore? I'll give you twelve and a half points and that's final."

  "Let's see, that would give me roughly six mil, forty-four between the rest of you. I might go for that but I have to see the money first."

  "It isn't just lying about the house, you know," Franklin said. "You'll need to open an offshore account, then we can transfer it in."

  "How greedy was Cassidy?"

  "Beyond reason. He wanted half."

  "You're getting me cheap."

  "Well, it's all over now. We're home clean. All you have to do is take care of Melissa for us. Do it in Baja. There's a lot of desert down there."

  The girl struggled off the couch and lurched toward the door.

  Justine grabbed her and tugged her back onto the couch, all but crooned at her, "It's okay, baby, it's okay. We're taking care of you."

  I couldn't let it run much longer than that, it was too cruel, too terrifying for Melissa. But I needed a final item.

  "Where's Bernie?" I asked Franklin.

  "T-three," I thought he said.

  "What's that?"

  "Tee Three, right outside the door. They were re-sodding. We planted him there and they sodded him over the next morning."

  So Bernie Wiseman had been dead for two years.

  I went to the window and gave the high sign. The Palm Springs cops swarmed in and took over. I went out and stood on top of Bernie Wiseman's grave and talked with Abe Johnson, who had brought the cops. They had covered it all from out there with super-pickup directional mikes and hi-tech recorders.

  I asked Abe, "Did it pick up okay?"

  "Just fine," he assured me. "I have the feeling we're dealing with deranged people here, Joe. At least I'd prefer to think so. I never heard such cold-blooded stuff in all my years as a cop. I'd hate to try taking this case to the prosecutor without this evidence. We'd never make it, they'd laugh us out of court."

  "Sorry, Abe, they're not deranged. I don't buy that. Lets them off too easy. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they loved it. Like a big game to them. Or a movie production. Take good care of Melissa Franklin, I believe she'll testify for you. And . . . I'd like to be here when you dig up this body."

  "Okay, but why?"

  "I want to see how lucky I am that this tee was not being resodded Friday night."

  He shook his head and went on to join the other officers.

  He was right... This was a case to shake your head over. A lot of people had died, and death is always unlovely. But the unloveliest part of all was with the principals who were still alive.

  If you can call that being alive.

  A geek who eats live chickens in a sideshow is alive, I guess. I had to wonder how alive Justine would feel behind bars for even a week without 3-D sexual fantasy to feed her overwhelming appetite.

  I was standing by and just sort of hanging loose when they brought Charlie Franklin out with his hands cuffed behind his back and a nearly benign smile on his lips.

  "You didn't need it, Charlie," I told him quietly. So why'd you do it?"

  "Why not?" he replied casually. "It was fun."

  Fun. It was fun.

  Be very careful, pal, how you begin to define fun? You could get like Charlie Franklin, or even Justine Wiseman.

  Or you could eat live chickens in a sideshow for twelve-and-a-half percent of the gate.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bernie did have Justine screwed down tight on their premarital agreement—to the effect that she would have been on the street with the clothes on her back and not much more. Of course the California courts have been more than liberal in interpreting such agreements. Bernie was a cagey enough guy to know that she would come out of a court battle with a fair chunk of his net worth unless he had a lot of moral outrage on his side. So he had it all documented before he moved out. He had also cleverly concealed the bulk of his assets, so even in the worst case for him the court would be adjudicating only a small fraction of his actual fortune.

  Justine was pretty cagey herself, but she didn't know about what he'd done until after she had killed him. She had gone to Palm Springs in a rage to confront him on the morality issue he was holding over her head. She took a gun with her. Whether by design or not, the confrontation resulted in her husband's death.

  And then while he was lying bleeding on the floor, she discovered the truth that he had outsmarted her even in death. By the time the estate was settled, she would get even less than through a divorce settlement.

  This was where the game was at when she turned to Charlie Franklin for solace and counsel. They had been friends for years, and apparently Franklin's social bonds to the family were more via Justine than Bernie, in spite of his professed love for Bernie. I think that might have been a crock, anyway.

  Charlie seems to have seen the matter as a fun- challenge. He brainstormed it like any other production challenge and came up with what must have seemed the perfect solution. They would bring Bernie back to life, gather back all the concealed wealth and redistribute it in a more equitable fashion—do it all nice and legal and go through the motions of a divorce—then arrange a method by which Bernie's "ghost" could just ride off into the sunset and disappear.

  It probably was not thought out much beyond that, in the beginning. There was much to do. They buried the body and found the perfect stand-in to replace it. It even worked out beautifully that the stand-in was recently crippled; they could restage that accident and give themselves plenty of time to work out the details of the impersonation. That developed later as a credible way to keep the new Bernie at low profile in the community—he became a recluse, embittered by his misfortune, showing a face just often enough to maintain the deception. They even kept Bernie's new mansion closed off "pending remodeling" to sink lower that low profile.

  Melissa was a threat to the deception, she was considered too unstable to go along with it, and also because Bernie actually had launched plans to launder her past and "discover" her. He had big plans for her, and she knew it.

  So they bought her a new car and kept her at a distance with various diversions, thinking that they needed only a few months to nail down the fun-plot and get on with their lives.

  Didn't work out that way because the new Bernie also had a studio to run. While trying to pick up the pieces there, they discovered some of the litt
le scams that the real Bernie had been into, mostly nickel-and- dime stuff—but they also saw the opportunity to escalate the scams to a grand slam. It has to be an unexpected and ironic note that most of the recognition as a movie whiz was earned by the new Bernie, not the old.

  The legitimate estate was worth a few million at most. They found a way to increase it tenfold by abandoning all caution and digging a bit deeper into the skim that was going to the people in New York. They would stall the final accounting and stonewall to the last possible moment—then whisk their man off stage at the best strategic moment.

  Of course, that scenario also demanded a much revised game. The stakes were much higher, the penalties for failure too forbidding.

  So Franklin rewrote the script and they went for broke.

  Melissa was by now becoming a considerable pain so they contrived the game in Baja to keep her out of their hair. We know how she understood the marriage to Franklin, nutty as it may sound. As for Charlie's logic, he called it a "control flair," designed to give him legal leverage "in case we'd want to institutionalize her." It just wouldn't play, to kill Justine's own sister unless, of course, they had exhausted all other possible solutions first. Couldn't "box office" it.

  With the escalation, Charlie and Justine had to bring the new Bernie more into the open, which meant bringing in additional support—better makeup, stronger coaching for the acting, various special effects. And that was where the NuCal people came into it, and they came in with "points." They also came in with death warrants, because the production company had become too large; it would have to be dissolved in the final scene because too many people now knew the truth about Bernie Wiseman.

  So that was the way it ran, with Charlie Franklin as director and executive producer. His well-honed screenwriter's mind worked at every fine detail and tried to anticipate the smallest threat to credibility.

  Bringing me into it was one of his small "flairs." He picked me because I'd done some recent work for one of the street people trying to find and reunite with his family, and it got a write-up in the paper. Maybe he figured that made me some kind of bleeding-heart to go to all that effort for a wino for free. At the least it satisfied his dramatic sense that I could be counted on to provide information to the police that would lead straight to Wiseman, or apparently so.

  He wanted to make it look like Bernie was caught in one of his own little intrigues and overtaken by retribution from the boys in New York. It was supposed to look as though Bernie had hired me to assist in a plot to silence people who could implicate him in criminal activity. That was the only reason for the formal business deal with the NuCal partners, and of course Charlie expected me to come forward when the bombing started. The upshot of it all was to be that Bernie would be blamed for the shooting deaths and the mob would be the prime suspects in the bombing, or vice versa. Almost worked, because Charlie really knew how to "flair" it. He didn't need my photos—just wanted to make it look like Bernie did—the real Bernie posing as someone else. A new twist, no question.

  Could have worked. Consider the levels of deception here. Someone claiming to be Bernie, but not Bernie, claimed to be a third party who would ultimately be revealed as Bernie. Flair.

  Charlie, by the way, still insists that the original script called for no killings whatever, if one forgot the killing that started it off. But then one thing led to another, rewrite after rewrite, and he claims that Justine "kept getting crazier and greedier."

  Redefine "cold-blooded." More than half the deaths were for no reason other than to make credible the final, for-the-record death of Bernie Wiseman.

  All the others were to keep the truth in the bag.

  Justine killed Forta and Rodriguez, we're sure of that because of the ballistics match. She had probably gone up there to kill me. They surprised her in the house and she shot her way out rather than risk any connection to the other killings, which also were done with her gun.

  She killed Edda Swenson, the housekeeper at Wiseman's Bel Air estate, to plug any possible leakage there, then of course she had to kill Edda's daughter, Hulda—the Viking Woman—because she figured the mother's death would not box office with Hulda. I doubt that either victim had knowledge of the deception. With or without that knowledge they were both excess baggage now and needed to be jettisoned. Justine and Hulda were lovers, yes, but that kind of love is easier to replace than wealth and freedom, and that was the only kind of box office that interested Justine.

  She killed Butch Cassidy, too. Melissa had already "gone home" looking for sanctuary and told Justine about her midnight date with Guilder and me. It was Justine who insisted that Melissa keep that date, and Guilder must have had one of those leaps of mind when he saw Justine roll in there minutes behind her dead-ringer. Maybe he did panic, or maybe he just had good instincts and knew that he was a marked man. That got Justine worried, though. Melissa had told her that Guilder worked for Cassidy, and Justine knew only too well of Cassidy's interest in the case. So she went to his apartment Friday night after she had dumped me in the desert, cut a deal with him and probably took him to bed. I mention the bed because she left a bomb beneath it.

  Must have seemed, though, that they were truly home free after that. Too bad, I guess, that the Aguas couldn't let a white-eyes die in their back yard—too bad for the script, that is.

  Charlie Franklin, it seems, has not stopped talking. Seems to enjoy telling it. He's told it to everyone who expresses an interest, even the feds—with eyes on

  offshore banks and uncollected taxes—and he has told it to members of a New York Crime Commission.

  I understand he has told it to a couple of producers, too, so you might even see all this—or a version of it—on the silver screen someday. Speaking of which, Melissa has a new agent who sees no problem at all with her past credits, especially in light of the recent notoriety. She is already considering several offers.

  I have not seen Edgar since that night at his place. The charges against me were dropped, and I even got a mention in the press by the heads of both rival police departments.

  Abe Johnson came out of it okay, too, I'm glad to say. A hastily scheduled review board rubber-stamped his boss's finding that Abe had "made the proper tactical decision to postpone the apprehension of a suspect (me), which tactical decision led to the apprehension of the true culprits."

  I guess it's a wrap, as I believe they say in Hollywood.

  I also believe I warned you that this would not be a pretty tale. It got a little prettier after the fact, with Copp remembering how nice it can be just to be alive. I drove down to Baja with Melissa to get some things she had left there. The place had been leased by the new "Bernie" and he still had some time left on the lease, so we didn't feel any need to hurry back to L.A.

  Ever do any deep-sea fishing off Baja? Best in the world, they tell me—tarpon and swordfish and all the good stuff—and maybe I'll try it someday. I just didn't have time, not on that visit.

  Ever watch the sun set with all those reds and purples as it sinks into an endless blue ocean? Ever see it from a bedroom window when there are only two people alive in the whole world and you can hear both hearts beating and know that one of them belongs to an absolute living doll who would never wish a moment's harm to another living thing?

  Ever watch a gracefully naked living doll walk along a deserted beach and stand in private thought with the moon glowing behind her, then turn to you with endlessly blue eyes and a trusting smile?

  Ah, yes, life can be beautiful.

  It is beautiful.

  Fade to black. Roll end titles. It's a wrap.

  About the Author

  Don Pendleton is the author of The Executioner series featuring Mack Bolan, which has sold more than 60 million copies to date. Copp For Hire, Mr. Pendleton’s debut hardcover novel, was published to critical acclaim by Donald I. Fine, Inc. Joe Copp returned in 1988 with the popular encore novel, Copp On Fire; in 1989 with Copp in Deep; in 1990 with Copp in the Dark; Copp on
Ice, 1991, and Copp in Shock, 1992. Don Pendleton and his wife, Linda, make their home in West Covina, California.

  First Edition, Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1988

  First Kindle Edition, February, 2010