by Bill Bernico
I leaned back in the chair and put my feet up on the edge of his desk. It clearly irritated Becker to see me in this position and that made me enjoy it all the more. “You wanted to talk,” I said smugly, “TALK!”
Becker sat upright and wiped his upper lip with his handkerchief. “What’s a gumshoe like you make a year?” He said. “Eight, nine thousand? Maybe ten? That’s peanuts. You could have that much every month if you played it right by me.”
I wasn’t interested in his games but I amused myself by letting him continue.
“I could use a smart guy like you, Cooper,” he said. “You got balls. I like that. With my connections and your savvy we could own this god damn town.” He tried to turn in his seat but was restricted by the cuff on his wrist. “Open that bottom left drawer,” he said, pointing to his desk. “Go on.”
I slid it open and pulled out a black leather bag like the kind a doctor might carry. I set it on top of the desk and looked back at Becker.
“Go ahead, hotshot, open it,” Becker said, smiling nervously.
I opened the bag and pulled out six or seven bundles of crisp, new money. There were plenty more just like them still in the bag. I dumped the rest on top of the desk and threw the bag on the floor. The bundles each had five thousand dollars wrapped up in them. There were thirty bundles in all. Each one looked identical to the first, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the bundle Dan Hollister had shown me in my office.
This is what Hugh Grossman had died for. It was the reason Maggie McMillan took a blood bath. It was the reason Ike and Vince were taking a dirt nap.
“Just be a smart guy and take it,” Becker said. “You can walk away and I give you my word you won’t be followed.” Becker sat back, waiting for a response.
Someone else might have been tempted with this much money at stake. Someone else might have seen retirement in his future. Someone else hadn’t seen the gaping hole in Hugh Grossman’s head or Maggie McMillan in a tub of her own blood.
I threw the last bundle at Becker and it bounced off his face. The band around the bills broke and five thousand dollars scattered around Becker’s feet.
I walked over to where he sat, bent over and picked up one of the bills. From my coat pocket I produced my cigarette lighter, flipped open the cover and pulled my thumb back on the wheel. The flame licked upward as I touched it to the bill. Becker’s eyes widened as I dropped the burning bill onto the pile that lay at his feet. The fire spread quickly to the rest of the bills as Becker tried in vane to stamp out the flames.
“Are you nuts?” Becker screamed. That’s a fortune there and you’re just gonna burn it up? Don’t be a jerk. Spend it. Live it up for once in your life. Spend it, for Christ sake,” he said, still stamping on the smoldering bills.
“Oh really?” I said. “And just where did you think I was going to be able to spend this phony crap?”
Becker looked surprised that I knew about the bills. I closed the cover on my lighter and made a fist around it. The fist swung around and connected with Becker’s face. He flailed back on the chair, his mouth dripping crimson.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” I said. “Cooper doesn’t take. Cooper gives—and right now I feel like giving again.” I cocked my fist and aimed at his cheek.
Becker flinched and cowered behind his free forearm. “What do you want?” he cried.
I returned to the chair behind Becker’s desk. Once again I put my feet up and reached for the phone and dialed the precinct. “Let me talk to Hollister,” I said. “Well, can you patch me through to him? Okay, I’ll wait.” I leaned back in the chair and smiled at Becker, who was pulling feverishly at his cuff.
In a minute or so I heard someone on the other end again. “Dan,” I said, “it’s Cooper. Get over here to The Indio Club. It’s on Santa Monica just west of Olive. Never mind, I’ll show you when you get here. Yeah.”
I hung up and stood once again. I walked over to where Becker sat sweating all over his upper lip. “You got about three minutes to tell me where the rest of this phony fortune and the plates are,” I said, pulling my .45 from its holster. I aimed it at Becker as I tossed my handcuff key at him.
Becker quickly unlocked the handcuff and stood rubbing his wrist. I stepped back a safe distance and watched as Becker walked toward me. “That’s far enough, Becker.”
“You want the rest of it or don’t you?” he said, pointing to a painting on the wall behind me. I stepped back and to the side allowing him to pass. He pulled at the painting and it swung out on a hinge. Behind it there was a wall safe with a combination lock. I held my gun on him as he twisted the dial this way and that. With a final click the door swung open.
As he was about to reach into the safe, I heard the office doorknob jiggle and a gruff voice say, “boss, you in there?” The jiggling turned to beating and the beating got louder. I turned back to Becker just as his hand emerged from the safe holding a .38 revolver. Becker swung and fired in my direction. I could feel the slug tear into my left thigh. Instinctively I fired off three rounds in Becker’s direction before falling to the floor. My .45 flew out of my hand just out of reach. The door to the office nearly came off its hinges as a large man entered, holding a silver plated Smith and Wesson.
He paused momentarily, looking at Emil Becker, who lay on the floor near the charred remains of five thousand counterfeit dollars. Becker now sported six holes in his head—five that nature had given him and one from my .45.
The figure looked at Becker’s body before shifting to the bills on the desk and then to the open safe. “Looks like it’s a lucky day for one of us,” he said.
He pointed his revolver at my head and pulled back the hammer.
“Freeze. Police!” The large man pivoted on his feet, his Smith and Wesson still pointed out in front of him. He was ready to plug away at the source of those two words but never got the chance. Three shots rang out in rapid succession before his body hit the floor.
Dan Hollister and Officer Burns entered the room with their service revolvers leading the way. Dan looked over the room and then down at me before holstering his piece. “Cooper, why is it...”
He didn’t finish his sentence. I finished it for him.
07 - The Mother Goose Murders
Chapter 1
Three Blind Mice
I was leaning back in my swivel chair reading a good book. It was raining outside and there was no one to play with anyway, so I decided to sit by the window and read one of Chandler’s latest. It was a book about private eye Philip Marlowe, who’d been hired to chase after a missing woman who eventually turned up drowned in a lake in the mountains.
I was just getting to the good part where Marlowe and Bill Chess find the body under the pier when I got a call from Sergeant Dan Hollister. He’d been my sergeant when I was on the force. Since I’d started my own investigations business three years ago, we’d kept in touch.
“Matt,” Dan said cheerfully, “How’d you like me to throw a little work your way?”
I sat up straight. “What’s the catch? You never throw anything my way unless there’s something in it for you. Come on, give.”
Hollister sighed. “Can’t a guy even do a friend a favor without him being suspicious?”
“Friend?” I said sarcastically. “Since when am I all of a sudden your friend? You use my services when you’re in a pinch and…”
“All right,” he snapped, “I’m in a pinch. You happy now?”
A smirk played on my face. “That’s more like it. Now what was it you needed me for?”
“Can you meet me at the County Morgue in twenty minutes,” Dan said. “I’ll fill you in when we meet.”
I paused for effect. “And just what’s in this for me?” I asked.
“The usual,” Dan said.
“The usual?” I said. “You mean like last time’s ‘usual’ where you took the credit and I got the shaft? No thank you, Sergeant Hollister. Good bye.”
I hung up the phone and went
back to leaning in my chair with my feet up. I’d just grabbed my book when the phone rang again. I let it ring four times before I picked it up.
“Cooper Investigations, you’ve reached Matt. How may I direct your call?”
“Don’t hang up, Matt,” Dan said hurriedly. “Hear me out.”
I said nothing but let out a sigh loud enough for Dan to hear. I didn’t have to wait long.
“Matt, just meet me at the morgue and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. That’s all I can say at this time until I know if you’re in or out. Whaddya say? Unless, of course, you’re too busy with all your other cases to take on another one.”
Truth was that I had not had a good case for nearly three weeks and although a paying job would be helpful to my financial situation, I’d be just as grateful for something to do.
“That’s a pretty long way for me to drive.” I said. “And gas doesn’t grown on trees, you know. Last time I checked gas was up to fifteen cents a gallon.”
“Five bucks for gas and another five for just meeting with me,” Dan said.
“And another five for lunch?”
“Ten’s all I have in the budget,” Dan said. “You want it or not?”
“Twenty minutes,” I said and hung up.
I slipped one of my business cards between the pages of the Chandler novel and laid the book back on my desk. Muriel Chess would have to wait a while longer to be pulled from the lake.
I drove through the rain for twenty minutes and when I got to the morgue, Dan was talking to the coroner, Jack Walsh. Jack was in his early fifties with a full head of gray hair, which was proof that life was not fair. I was more than a decade younger and mine was thinning out more each day. Walsh had been the county medical examiner since before I’d started on the L.A. police force all those years ago and he certainly knew his way around a corpse. He and Dan were standing near the wall of drawers and one of them was pulled out. Its occupant stared up at the ceiling as I approached. Although the victim’s eyes were open, they looked dark and sunken as if they had been useless even in life.
“Okay, what’s the story, Dan?” I asked, gesturing toward the body.
Dan looked at Walsh, excused himself and pulled me aside. “All right, Cooper, here’s the thing. Captain’s been after me to wrap this one up and I’m still no closer to solving it. And it’s a strange case. I’ll tell you what I mean once I know you’re in on this with me.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. “But I still don’t see how I fit in. What can I do that you can’t? What’s my incentive here?”
“You can blend into some places easier than any uniform cop or detective could. Cooper, you help me out on this one and I’ll get the D.A. to drop the case he has on you.”
Now he had my attention. On one of my last cases I’d had to shoot the guy I’d caught beating up my client. I knew it was self-defense and so did Dan, but the evidence suggested otherwise and the D.A. was determined to drag me down. This was one favor I needed.
“All right, I’m in. What’ve you got?”
Dan guided me back toward Walsh and the drawer and gestured with his head. Walsh turned the corpse over to reveal the victim’s buttocks, which had been sliced off, leaving a flat effect of exposed, meaty flesh. The edges of the wound were a bit jagged, as if the cutting instrument had had a serrated edge to it. Walsh returned the body to its original position and replaced the sheet over the victim’s head.
“Blind?” I said.
“Yup,” Hollister answered. “We found his red-tipped cane under his body in the alley off Sam’s Bar over on Santa Monica. Name’s Polanski, Adolph H. Age sixty-seven. No permanent address, just like these other two.”
There were two other drawers next to Polanski’s that had been pulled open. Each held a similar corpse with identical wounds. The other two victims were also obviously blind and about the same age as Polanski. The man lying next to Polanski had no teeth and his mouth was caved in from the loss of dentures. The third man’s mouth hung open to reveal exactly two teeth, one on top and one on the bottom. They didn’t meet.
“You I.D. these two yet?” I said.
Dan checked his notes. “The one on the end there is Willy Rosen, sixty-nine, and the other guy is Ronald Mavis, seventy-two. All three of them were street people who spent a lot of time at the homeless shelters. They were all blind and I guess that gave them something in common, because they all hung out together.”
“Talk about the blind leading the blind.” I said. “Where’d you find these two?”
Dan didn’t have to reference any notes before he answered. “All three were lying together in the same alley.”
I looked at Walsh. “You have the T.O.D. on these guys?”
“Without doing a full autopsy, best guess as to the time of death would be around ten, ten-thirty Friday night.”
Dan turned to me. “This isn’t some random mugging or a fight gone wrong. The guy who killed these three has got some serious issues. One killing could be an accident, accept for the sliced off ass. Two killings would indicate a maniac, but three? That’s a serial killer, Matt. We’ve go to get this guy and soon. Can I count on your help?”
I looked over all three corpses, their dead eyes and their mutilations and in a few seconds a child’s nursery rhyme came to mind.
“Did you ever see…?” I started to say aloud.
“Knock it off, Cooper,” Dan shouted. “I thought of that one myself when I first saw these three lying here. Now, you want this job or not? If so, let’s get started. If not, I have a meeting in the D.A.’s office.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m going,” I said, walking away as I finished the rhyme in song under my breath. “…Such a sight in your life as three blind mice.” All three victims were blind, after all. And all had had their butts sliced off, probably with a carving knife. I suppose next Hollister’ll have me out looking for a homicidal farmer’s wife.
The nursery rhyme song stayed with me as I left the building and slid back behind the wheel of my Olds. I made it to the alley behind Sam’s Bar in eighteen minutes. The crime scene of these three victims yielded nothing I could call a clue. It was just an alley, nothing special about it. By the time Adolph Polanski’s nude body had landed on top of the other two bums in this alley, any trace of evidence had long since been lost. It was apparent that the three victims had been carved up somewhere else and dumped where they could be easily found. I had the feeling our killer was trying to tell us something and he wanted to make sure his clues were clearly understood.
I decided to visit the homeless shelter. It was the only lead I had at this point and maybe some other residents there had seen something. The shelter was on Las Palmas in a somewhat seedy neighborhood. The homeless shelter itself had obviously been a movie theater at one time. It still had the marquee that hung over the sidewalk. I imagined stars of days gone past with their names in large black letters up on that marquee. Stars like John Barrymore and Lon Chaney and movies like “Tug Boat Annie” and “Manhattan Melodrama.” The latter had been playing at Chicago’s Biograph Theater the night federal agents gunned down John Dillinger in the street on a hot July night just thirteen years ago. It was the last movie Dillinger ever got to see.
The ticket taker’s booth just outside the two sets of double doors had been boarded up, its once grand glass façade’ invisible now. The front door was unlocked and I stepped inside to what once was the theater’s lobby. Where the candy counter once stood, now there was an L-shaped section of bare floor, surrounded by worn carpeting. The main part of the lobby had been furnished with several dozen Army surplus cots with olive drab blankets and flimsy pillows. There were a dozen or more homeless men still asleep on those cots. I tiptoed past them, trying not to wake any of them. As I passed one of the cots, its occupant smacked his lips and ran his tongue around the rim of his mouth. He was obviously having a pleasant dream about his favorite gin bottle.
I walked over to one of the doors that, in its heyday, would hav
e opened to the screening room. Inside I could see five rows of seats that had been left in place, probably for the sermon that the bums had to endure before they were entitled to their free bowl of soup and crackers. The rest of the seats had been removed, leaving a bare cement floor with holes where the seats would have been bolted down.
I closed the door and returned to the lobby. At the far end of this room I could see a door. It had probably once been the manager’s office. I knocked and pulled the door open. A white-haired man turned in a wooden swivel chair and looked up at me.
“Can I help you?” the man said, obviously startled by my sudden presence.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. My name’s Matt Cooper.” I held my hand out toward him. He grabbed it and shook it briefly before releasing it again.
“Hello,” he said. “My name’s Conrad Archer. I manage this homeless shelter. How can I help you, sir?”
“Well, Mr. Archer,” I said, showing him my P.I. license and badge. “I’m looking into the deaths of those three bums, that is, I mean those three…”
“You can say it,” Archer said. “Bums. That’s what most of them are. We know they’ll never be anything more than they are now, but then our purpose is not rehabilitation, but rather food and shelter to those in need.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m looking into the deaths of those three gentlemen who were found the other night. I understand they were residents here. I looked at my notes. I’m talking about Polanski, Rosen and Mavis.”
“A terrible tragedy,” Archer said. “And all of them blind, too. They couldn’t even defend themselves against whoever did this to them.”
They never saw it coming, I thought, but kept it to myself. And even if any of them had lived, they wouldn’t have been able to identify their attacker. “Can you tell me anything about the three men? Did they have any other friends here in the shelter, someone who might have seen something?”