Cooper By The Gross (All 144 Cooper Stories In One Volume)

by Bill Bernico

  Archer rose from his chair and gestured toward the door I’d come through. “I think Rufus may still be in the lobby.”

  “Rufus? Rufus who?”

  “Just Rufus,” Archer said. “We don’t always get last names here at the shelter. I couldn’t even be sure that Rufus is his real first name.”

  I backed up, out of the office and Archer followed me out. He started walking toward the cots and I followed. He stopped alongside one of the cots and nudged its occupant.

  “Rufus,” Archer said, nudging the sleeping man’s shoulder. The sleeping man didn’t stir. “Rufus,” Archer repeated.

  Rufus grunted and rolled over, pulling his Army blanket over his exposed shoulder.

  Archer pulled the blanket off the man and repeated. “Rufus, wake up. There’s someone here to see you.”

  Rufus opened one eye and looked up at Archer and then closed it again, hoping we’d both just go away.

  “Come on, Rufus,” Archer said again. “We need to talk to you. Sit up.”

  Rufus didn’t stir. I pulled a fifth of bourbon out of my pocket, unscrewed the cap and held the cap under Rufus’ nose. Both of his eyes popped open and he sat up, licking his lips. I poured a capful of bourbon and handed it to Rufus, who downed it in one quick swallow. He smacked his lips again and he held the empty cap out to me for a refill. I took the cap from him and twisted it back onto the bottle.

  “Rufus,” Archer said. “This is Mr. Cooper. He’d like to ask you some questions about your friend, Mr. Polanski.”

  “Hello Rufus,” I said. “I understand you knew Mr. Polanski and his two blind friends pretty well.”

  Rufus shrugged and kept staring at the bottle in my hand.

  “Can you tell me anything about them?” I said. “When was the last time you saw any of them?”

  Rufus found it hard to concentrate on his answers as long as my bourbon bottle was still in his line of sight. I tightened the cap and slipped the bottle back in my pocket. Rufus stretched his eyes open and shorted through his nose.

  “Let’s see,” he said, scratching his stomach. “I seen ‘em a couple of days ago. Yeah, that’s it. It was last Friday.”

  “You sure it was Friday?” I said.

  “Yup, Friday. I remember ‘cause that’s Yankee Bean day.”

  “Yankee Bean?” I said, I said, looking to Archer for clarification.

  Archer looked at me. “Friday is the day we serve Yankee Bean soup here at the shelter. The men find it somewhat soothing that we have a regular schedule, something they can count on so we always serve the same thing on any given day.”

  “I see,” I said, turning back to Rufus. “So you saw them last Friday. Where was that?”

  Rufus stared at the floor for a moment and then offered, “They was just goin’ out the front door.”

  “Do you remember what time that was?” I said.

  “Right after dinner,” Rufus said. “They finished their soup and then all three of them left together.”

  I looked at Archer.

  “That would put it sometime after five thirty,” Archer said.

  I turned back to Rufus. “Did you see anyone follow them out? Or do you know where they went when they left here?”

  Rufus looked at the bulge in my pocket. “I’m tryin’ to remember, but it’s hard to think when a guy’s thirsty. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, pulling the bottle from my pocket and pouring another capful.

  Rufus downed it quickly again. “I didn’t see them after they left and as far as I remember, no one followed them out of here.”

  “Thanks, Rufus,” I said, handing him the bottle, which had one more swallow left in it.

  Rufus tipped the bottle up to his lips and swallowed. He licked the rim of the bottle and laid it down next to his cot. He lay back down and pulled his covers over himself and in no time at all he was snoring again.

  I shook Archer’s hand and thanked him for his time. If there was an answer, it surely wasn’t in this place. I walked back outside trying to guess which way the three men would have walked.

  I decided they would have turned right, staying close to the buildings. A couple of doors down from the homeless shelter I found a second hand clothing store. In the front window was a display featuring a used pair of shoes, arranged as if they were in the display window of a fancy shoe store, with one heel resting up on the top of the other shoe. Above the shoes hung a used pair of pants, neatly ironed to show off the crease. And just above that, as if fitted to the invisible man, hung a white shirt with a tie neatly knotted around its neck. A few inches above the entire ensemble hung a brown felt fedora. The effect was a bit spooky.

  As I entered the store, a bell over the door tinkled, announcing my presence to the woman behind the counter. She smiled as I approached and said, “Good morning, young man. May I help you?”

  Young man, I thought. I guess age is all relative. She looked as if any man would be young compared to her. I pointed out her front window to the sidewalk pedestrians just outside the store.

  “Looks like you have a pretty good view of the street from here.”

  She followed my finger’s line of sight and then looked at me. “I guess I do.”

  I pulled my I.D. and badge from my pocket and held it where she could see it. “My name’s Matt Cooper.”

  The woman smiled and offered, “And my name is Eloise Blount. I’m so happy to meet you, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Blount,” I said. “As in Cecil B. DeMille?”

  “Excuse me,” Eloise said.

  “Cecil B.,” I repeated. “The famous director.”

  “Yes, I know who he is,” Eloise said, “but I don’t see the connection.”

  I smiled and suddenly realized that not everyone shared my passion for entertainment trivia. “The B in Cecil B. DeMille stands for Blount. Probably some family surname somewhere down the line. See, you learn something new every day.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” Eloise said, a puzzled look playing on her face.

  “It’s a hobby of mine,” I explained. “I have all this useless celebrity trivia in my head and I rarely get a chance to use it. I don’t know why it sticks in my head. Sometimes I have trouble remembering the names of people I meet in real life, but for some odd reason, I can remember all kinds of useless information about famous people.

  Eloise smiled, obviously a little more proud of her name than she was before I came in here.

  “Eloise,” I said. “I was wondering if you might have seen three old gentlemen come past your store in the past couple of days. These three would all have been blind, probably tapping their canes ahead of them and sticking close together. You remember seeing anyone like that recently?”

  The woman thought for a moment, looked back out the picture window to the street and then turned back to me. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I did see three men just like the ones you described.”

  “You remember what day that was, Eloise?”

  “Let me see,” she said, her finger on her chin. “It was Friday. I remember because we’re open an hour later on Friday and those guys came past here around quarter to six, just before closing time.”

  I made a note of it on my pad. “You didn’t happen to see where they went once they passed your window, did you?”

  Eloise shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Cooper. I had other customers to check out and I didn’t look out the window after that. Sorry I couldn’t have been more help to you.”

  “You’ve been a big help, Eloise,” I said, pinching her cheek and showing her a broad smile. She blushed and turned away.

  I turned to leave and over my shoulder I could hear Eloise talking to herself. “Cecil Blount DeMille,” she said.

  I turned back for a second. “Thank you,” I said, and left the store.

  The door next to the clothing store belonged to a vacant building, as did the next two after it. All three storefronts sported a sign in their windows announcing the
future opening of one major retail outlet taking up the space now occupied by the three empty buildings. According to the sign, the grand opening was just two months away.

  One door down from the vacancies was a diner called “Sloppy Joe’s” and it looked like the kind of place three blind men would frequent. Sighted people might think twice about eating in a place like this. I walked in and took a stool at the counter. A fat waitress behind the counter waddled over to where I sat and pulled a yellow pencil from somewhere behind her ear.

  “What can I getcha?” She said, poised over her order pad.

  “Just a cup of coffee,” I said, certain I didn’t want to eat anything from the grille behind the waitress. It was sizzling and smoking from bits of leftover food that had been neglected on the hot surface. A man with three-day stubble on his face, wearing a full-length apron and white paper hat had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was busy flipping a couple of burgers over and pressing down on them with his spatula. The burnt meat flared up in flame as he scooped them up and deposited them on buns open on a plate next to the grille. A bit of ash dropped off the end of his cigarette and onto the plate with the burgers on it. He lifted the plate to his face and blew the ashes off before slapping his palm down on a small bell and setting the plates on the counter where the waitress picked them up.

  The waitress brought me a cup and saucer and poured coffee from a glass pot that should have been washed weeks ago. “Anything else?” she said, indifferently.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a question,” I said.

  “Make it snappy, bud, I have customers waiting,” she said.

  “Last Friday did you happen to see three blind men come in here or go past your window? This would have been around quarter to six.”

  “Nope,” she said quickly.

  “How can you be so sure?” I said.

  “Because I don’t work on Fridays.”

  From the grille I could hear the burger flipper yell, “I seen ‘em. They was in here, all right.”

  The waitress walked away without further comment and the cook came out from behind the grille and stepped up to the counter in front of me.

  “You remember them?” I said.

  “You don’t forget three stumblebums like that. I thought they was gonna break the place up, pokin’ them canes around at everything.” He pointed to a booth against the west wall. “Sat right there, they did. Took up a whole booth for an hour and only had coffee.”

  “So they left before eight?” I said.

  “Around then,” the cook said. “Thirty whole cents and no tip, either, the bums.”

  “You see where they went from here?” I said.

  “No, and good riddance to the lot of ‘em,” the cook said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and swiveled around on my stool.

  I stood up and started for the door when the waitress called out from behind me. “You haven’t even touched your coffee, bub.”

  “Not really thirsty,” I said.

  “That’s still a dime,” she said, her hand outstretched.

  I dropped a dime in her chubby palm and said, “Keep the change, doll.”

  She looked at me as if I’d spit in her eye. I left before she could think up a good insult.

  Well, now I at least knew that the three blind victims were still alive as of eight o’clock Friday night. The M.E. thinks they died around ten so that just left a two-hour window of opportunity. The bodies were found on Santa Monica and the homeless shelter was on Las Palmas. The two streets intersected and Sam’s Bar and the homeless shelter were only three blocks apart from each other. At least it was a limited area that I still had left to canvass.

  Chapter 2

  Jack Be Nimble

  Two days passed with nothing I could call out of the ordinary happening. I picked up my Raymond Chandler book, thumbed to the page where I’d tucked my card as a bookmark and began reading, trying to remember where I’d left off. I was almost to the end of the first paragraph when my phone rang. At least I didn’t have to move my card to another page. At this rate Muriel Chess would be a waterlogged mess by the time they got her out of the lake.

  This was my forth trip downtown in two weeks. It was getting so that I could find the coroner’s office in my sleep. Hollister and Walsh were there in the examination room as I entered. The two stood near Jack’s worktable. Dan motioned with his head and I followed the two men over to a place I knew better than I wanted to. Jack pulled the drawer open and laid back the sheet that covered this latest victim. I quickly looked away and held my stomach. A few seconds passed before I could catch my breath again. Even Dan’s face looked like he’d been on a sea voyage on rough waters.

  The victims face, hands and genitals had been blackened and scorched as if burned with a flame. His body was covered in second-degree blisters and boils. At least that’s what it looked like from where I stood. Some of the blisters were white while some showed a definite red hue to them. Other places sported both red and white with black highlights.

  “This is where it gets strange,” Walsh said, producing a scalpel. He proceeded to scrape residue from the body and held the results out in front of Dan and me.

  “What the hell is it?” I asked, wincing a bit.

  Walsh looked up from his instrument with a blank expression. “Wax.”

  “And the rest of his body?” Dan asked.

  “Wax,” he said. “Ordinary candle wax. Whoever killed this guy seemed to take extra pleasure in charring the face, hands and…” Jack paused and then continued. “When he was done burning the body, he had to have taken ten or fifteen minutes to drip all this wax all over him. This guy’s killer was sadistic—methodical, but sadistic. He made sure he covered almost the whole body with this stuff. Sure, he could have poured it all at once from a kettle, but there are way too many droplets for that to have happened. No, I’d say he held burning candles over the body.”

  Dan pulled his note pad from his inside coat pocket and posed with his pen, waiting. “What’s the victim’s name?” he said, ready to write.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Dan,” Walsh said, flipping the sheet back over the victim’s face.

  “Try me.”

  “John Bernard Nimbull,” Walsh said, reading from the form on his clipboard and spelling the last name.

  Dan began writing and was almost finished when he stopped and looked up at the coroner. “No. Tell me this guy didn’t use a nickname.”

  “I’m afraid so, Dan,” Jack said. “I can just imagine that he’d have taken a lot of ribbing about it throughout school but he was known as Jack then.”

  “Jack B. Nimbull,” Dan said. “Come on. Parents couldn’t really be that cruel on purpose, could they?” Dan finished his notes and shook his head in disgust. “They must have thought they were being cute at the time but it looks like this guy’s name may have cost him his life.”

  I couldn’t help but add my two cents worth. “Looks like he should have jumped a little higher over that last candlestick.”

  Jack Walsh turned from the victim to us and said, “Looks like he didn’t clear the candlestick.”

  I looked puzzled. “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  Walsh said, “Pretty much. But it made me think more about the nursery rhyme itself.”

  “Whaddya mean, Jack?” Dan said.

  “Well, the whole rhyme is just four lines:

  Jack be nimble,

  Jack be quick.

  Jack jump over

  The candlestick.”

  I clapped, like the sarcastic smart ass that I am. I stopped clapping when neither Jack nor Dan even broke a smile. “Sorry,” I said. “Go on with your story.”

  Jack gave me a dirty look and then turned to Dan. “Anyway, as I was saying. This one doesn’t have any intrigue or politics in it, just part of a celebration—a wedding celebration, in fact. During the festivities, a candle was set up, and people took turns trying to jump over the candle. If you extin
guished the flame, you were in for a year of bad luck, but if the candle remained lit, you could look forward to a year of good luck. Of course, another part of wedding celebrations was drinking alcohol, so the people who got really drunk would likely be the people stuck with the bad luck.”

  “And just how do you know this?” I said.

  “Same way you know all that useless stuff about celebrities, Matt. You’re always telling me some trivial bit of information about some movie or radio star. Well, I happen to know about this particular rhyme because of my name. When I was a boy my mother read me the Jack Be Nimble story and pointed out to me that the boy in the rhyme had the same first name as me. When I got older, I looked up the origin of the rhyme to see what they were talking about and that’s what I came up with. Some guy made up the rhyme in 1815 and this useless bit of information has been rattling around in my head all these years.”

  “And you finally get a chance to work it into the conversation,” Dan said.

  “Ain’t no way I was gonna miss this opportunity,” Walsh said. “I could live another fifty years and never get the chance again.”

  “So now you can die a happy man,” Dan said.

  Walsh nodded. “I guess so. Unless someone is watching me work and tells me I have nimble fingers. Then they’re in for this same explanation.”

  “Okay, so where’d they find the body?” I said, turning to Dan.

  Dan’s stomach made a gurgling sound. He placed one hand over his belt buckle. “Actually, his dog found the body,” he said. “One of his neighbors called in a complaint of a barking dog and when the patrolman on duty approached the house, he went around to the back yard and there the dog was, standing over his master’s body, barking non-stop.”

  “Dan,” I said, “You know the papers are gonna call this guy the Mother Goose Murderer if they get their hands on what we know so far. Three Blind Mice and now Jack Be Nimble. Who’s next, the old woman in the shoe or maybe Wee Willie Winkie?”