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

by Bill Bernico

  “How many other people had that same thing to eat today?” I said.

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Maxwell said. “It was the special. Maybe a dozen other people ordered the same thing that old guy had. And they’re all happy and healthy.”

  “Then it had to come from his table,” I said. “What happened to the condiments from that table?”

  “The cops hauled the whole table and everything on it was away this afternoon,” he said. “Check with them. And if you would tell them that I’m gonna need that table back soon, I’d appreciate it.”

  I looked out the small window in the swinging kitchen door out into the dining room and then turned back to Maxwell. “Were all your tables set up the same way?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, did every table have the same kind of tablecloth, the same ketchup and mustard bottles and the same salt and pepper shakers on them as the ones that were on the old man’s table?”

  Maxwell looked at me as if I’d sneezed in his face. “What are you getting at, Mr. Cooper?”

  “I’m just trying to get a mental picture of what every table looked like,” I said. “Sergeant Hollister downtown told me that the old man had been poisoned with arsenic.”

  “Arsenic?” Maxwell almost shouted, and then whispered, “Arsenic? Are they sure?”

  I nodded. “They’re sure. And they’re also pretty sure that it didn’t come from the ketchup or mustard containers. But the salt shaker could be a perfect vessel for getting the poison onto someone’s food. I was just wondering if I could take a pair of your shakers with me downtown for comparison sake. Do all your shakers match?”

  “Yes,” Maxwell said. “I bought two dozen sets all from the same distributor and they’re all identical.” He turned around and reached up onto a shelf and pulled a pair of salt and pepper shakers down, handing them to me. “Here, take these. Now would you please leave? I have customers waiting out there.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Maxwell,” I said. “I’ll get these back to you just as soon as I can.”

  I drove back downtown to the morgue. Jack Walsh was not at his desk, but I found him in the large room just off his office. Set up next to the stainless steel table where seventy-eight-year-old Emmett Stokley had been autopsied earlier was the table from the diner. On it sat what was left of Stokley’s lunch as well as the condiments, his napkin, plate and utensils.

  Jack looked up from his examination. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “What brings you out this time of night?”

  “Hollister’s got me looking into Stokley’s death. Thought I might pick up a lead here. Got anything?”

  “The salt killed him,” Jack said without hesitation.

  “The salt?” I said.

  “Well, not the salt itself, but the arsenic in the salt shaker,” Walsh explained. “Nothing else was touched.”

  “Does Hollister have this yet?” I asked.

  “Just found it myself,” he said. “I was just going to call him when you showed up.”

  I picked up the ketchup bottle and examined it. “Why didn’t his wife get poisoned?”

  “She didn’t use the salt,” Walsh explained. “She had pancakes and bacon. Didn’t need any salt. The old guy used the salt for his soup, though. Poor devil.”

  “So you think someone doctored the salt shaker?” I said.

  “That’s the only explanation that fits,” Walsh said. “What else could it be?”

  I picked up the salt shaker off the table and held it up to eye level in my left hand. With my right hand, I reached into my coat pocket and held up the salt shaker Maxwell had given me. I held them up next to each other for comparison. They looked similar at first glance, but upon closer examination I noticed that the screw-on tops had slightly different hole patterns in them.

  I showed them both to Walsh. He slipped his glasses on and then took the two shakers from me.

  “Interesting,” Walsh said. “If we hadn’t known to look for it, we’d have missed it altogether. What made you look?”

  “I was talking with the owner of the diner,” I said. “All his tables were equipped the same with pieces from the same supplier. That made me wonder if anyone might have substituted salt shakers on an earlier visit.”

  “Good thinking,” Walsh said, unscrewing the top off the shaker Maxwell had given me. He turned on the light from a gooseneck lamp, picked up his magnifying glass and looked inside the cap. There was some small writing around the rim identifying it as having come from the Taggert Restaurant Supply House in Inglewood. He set the cap down and unscrewed the cap from the shaker taken from the crime scene. He held it under the light and looked inside the rim. It had come from a place called RSCI, Restaurant Supply Company, Inc. in Alta Loma.

  “What’d you find?” I said.

  Walsh handed me both caps and his magnifier. I made a note of both supply houses in my notepad. “Thanks, Jack,” I said. “Mind if I take these caps over to Hollister’s office for a minute. I’ll make sure I get them back to you before I leave.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Jack said. “I’ll be here for another hour at least.”

  I returned to Hollister’s office and laid it all out for him. He suggested that the restaurant should be closed until we concluded this part of the investigation.

  “Maybe it’s Maxwell’s diner the guy was after,” I said. “Maybe it’s restaurants in general. Maybe he’s got a bone to pick with the salt company. The world’s full of kooks, Dan. But closing Maxwell down for even a few days would ruin him.”

  “You’re probably right,” Dan said, “I’m not ruling out any possibility but so far we only have the one incident at this one diner. But what else can I do?”

  “I’m just saying,” I told Dan. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just grasping at straws. How do you really know who the intended victim was supposed to be? You could check Stokley’s background, waste a few man-hours and come up empty. I mean, what kind of enemies could an old man like that have anyway?”

  “I know,” Dan said. “But the captain’s going to want to know what I’m doing about this. I’m sorry, but I have to close Maxwell down until we know otherwise.”

  Hollister was right. Up until now the arsenic laced salt had showed up at only one location. Then three days after the incident he got another call that echoed the one to Maxwell’s restaurant. A choking victim at the sidewalk cafe on Sunset Boulevard near Laurel Canyon Drive had become victim number two. This time it was a woman in her thirties.

  Her face had turned a bright blue and the veins in her forehead looked like they were about to explode. Dan and I showed our shields and struggled to get past the cop at the door. The other patrons inside had all gathered around the table where officer Jerry Burns was on his knees, slipping his coat over the woman’s face.

  “What have we got here, Burns,” Dan said.

  “I got the radio call ten minutes ago,” Burns said. “And when I got here, the waitress told me that the woman on the floor had vomited next to her table and then she fell over, clutching at her throat.”

  Two more officers entered the restaurant behind a couple of guys in white coats. The two ambulance attendants laid down their gurney and quickly checked the woman for vital signs which were by now nonexistent. They hoisted the woman onto the gurney. Burns retrieved his blue coat and the attendants replaced it with a sheet and draped it over the woman’s face. The white coats left with the gurney between them, slid it into the back of the ambulance and drove away.

  Dan looked around the room at the other customers. “Nobody leaves here until I get each of your statements. Please have a seat and I’ll get to each of you as soon as I can. Thank you.”

  He turned back to the table where the woman had been sitting. A waitress with a small tray was about to clear the table when Dan held his hand in front of her. “Please don’t touch anything,” he said. “I’ll need to take all this with me.”

  Over the next hour Dan conducted his interviews with each customer
before allowing them to leave. The items on the table were bagged and tagged and taken downtown.

  Early the next morning the coroner handed his findings over to Sergeant Hollister. I was in his office when Dan read the contents of the folder.

  “The salt killed her,” Dan said, shaking his head. “Arsenic again. “Looks like a serial killer, Matt.”

  Did you compare the shaker from her table with the rest of the shakers in the place?” I said.

  “Way ahead of you,” Dan said. “They are similar, but just like in Maxwell’s case, there was a slight difference in the shaker caps.”

  “Same supplier in Alta Loma?” I said.

  “The very same,” Dan said. “I think we need to pay a visit to RSCI. You want to ride along?”

  “Can’t this morning,” I said. “How’s this afternoon work for you? I can make it then.”

  “One o’clock?” Dan said.

  “I’ll be here,” I told him.

  Later that morning, as I was returning to my office, I came upon a crowd of people gathered around a man who was lying in the intersection at Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard. I parked my Olds at the curb and ran over to the edge of the crowd. Between showing my badge and pushing my way through I was able to make it to the center of the crowd. A man in his mid-thirties lay on his back, his left leg twisted beneath him and his head laid open with a four inch gash.

  “Anybody call an ambulance?” I said to no one in particular.

  A voice from somewhere behind me said that he had. I turned toward the sound of the voice and saw a man holding up one arm as if to identify himself. We exchanged glances and I nodded. Behind him and to the right stood another man who seemed out of place in this crowd of gawkers. Almost everyone else’s face showed horror, disbelief or concern. This guy was smiling. I turned my attention once again to the guy lying at my feet. When I looked back up again, the smiling man was gone.

  The sound of a siren in the distance parted the crowd and within a minute two men in white were kneeling next to me, trying to find a pulse from the man and wrapping a brace around his neck.

  I stood back and helped part the crowd so that the ambulance attendants could get through with their stretcher and equipment. The two men carried the victim off to the waiting ambulance, and just as quickly as it had arrived, the ambulance was gone.

  It wasn’t until four hours later that Dan Hollister called me to say the man had died. He asked to see me right away in his office. I drove downtown and walked in on him without knocking. I took the seat across from Dan’s desk and waited. Dan sat at his desk and pulled out a manila folder from his drawer. He pushed it at me and I opened it to the first document.

  “Poisoned?” I said, reading from the page. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Al Powers,” Dan began. “Thirty-six, six-one, one-eighty-five, brown, blue, no priors, no record of any kind, husband and father. Model citizen. Poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” I repeated. “In the middle of the street?”

  “No,” Dan said. “He’d just finished a hamburger from one of those sidewalk vendors and was crossing the street when the poison took hold. The light turned red on him while he was still in the intersection. He fell over right there and started convulsing. Traffic came to a standstill.

  “There was one guy,” I said, “who seemed happy or even excited at what was going on.”

  Hollister sat up straight in his chair. “What guy?”

  “I don’t know. Just some guy smiling when I looked at him.”

  “So?”

  “If you’d have been there and seen the looks on everyone else’s faces,” I said, “you’d have seen how out of place he was.”

  “Think you’d know him if you saw him again?” Dan said.

  “You bet,” I said. “It’s not a face you forget easily.”

  Hollister and I zigzagged across town to the restaurants where the three victims had dropped dead. We learned that all three restaurants had purchased their salt supplies from the Death Valley Salt Company. Each restaurant purchased a twenty-five pound bag of salt once every other month.

  As we headed for the warehouse on San Vicente, Dan said,” Matt, I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach and I hope I’m wrong on this one.”

  “What is it, Dan?”

  Hollister hesitated for a moment. “What if our boy’s after bigger thrills this time?” Dan said. “If he got a kick out of people dropping dead one at a time, imagine the feeling of seeing hundreds die all at once.”

  “The salt supply company?” I said. “You think he’ll try for the source?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Dan said. “Let’s pay them a visit.”

  We rolled up to the warehouse and Dan parked the squad in front. He tried the front door while I carefully made my way around to the back. At the rear of the building I found the overhead door. It was locked. I tried the access door that stood alongside the overhead. It wasn’t. The interior was dark except for a few rays of sunlight that found there way between the exterior boards. Inside I found pallets piled high with bags. From the printing on the bags I could make out that they were filled with salt. The piles easily stood twelve feet high.

  I stopped and listened. I could hear a faint rustling sound coming from the far end of the building. My .38 found its way into my hand and I crept past the piles of salt bags toward the sound.

  At the far end of the building I located the source of the sound. It was the sound of a knife sliding into a salt bag. The man holding the knife had the same smiling face I’d seen in the crowd at the scene of what I thought at the time was an accident. He was slitting the bags and inserting another substance. It was obvious that our boy was indeed after the biggest thrill of all—mass murder.

  I stepped out from behind the pallet, my .38 aimed at his chest. “Drop the knife.”

  I had no idea his instincts and reaction would be so instantaneous. He threw the knife toward my voice and jumped back at the same time. The blade creased my hand and my .38 dropped to the floor. By the time I’d retrieved it again he had ducked behind a pile of salt bags.

  “You might as well come out,” I yelled. “The place is surrounded.” Well, I guess Dan could surround the place by himself if he really tried, but this guy didn’t know how many policemen were involved.

  There was no response, just the sound of someone running. I followed the sounds to another corner and proceeded cautiously, my .38 leading the way. I had him trapped and he knew it. And like any trapped animal, he could become even more dangerous and desperate. I was all that stood between him and the door out of here. I could see the door from where I stood and I wasn’t about to let him get by me again.

  A sliver of sunlight widened as Dan stepped through the door. He looked over at me and I silently gave him a sign to let him know where the suspect was hiding. We both started toward the corner from opposite ends of the room. From behind one of the pallets I could hear a struggle and then a single shot.

  “Dan,” I yelled, “You okay?”

  No answer. I pulled the hammer back on my gun and stepped lightly toward the sound. I rounded the corner where Dan lay on his stomach, the back of his head bleeding. I knelt by his side and turned him over. He was still clutching his service revolver. His eyes fluttered open and before he could say a word his eyes widened and he looked up past my head. I began to turn around.

  My arm felt like it had been run through a punch press as the bag of salt came down hard on it. I dropped the .38 and fell over backwards, dropping Dan in the process. We fell onto the ground and were coated with salt from the many bags that had spilled in the area.

  The man scooped up my gun and quickly stepped back. “Not so brave now, are you, copper?” he said, edging closer to us. Pointing my gun at Dan, the man held out his left hand and curled the fingers up a few times.

  “Let’s have it,” he said. “Slow and handle first.”

  Dan handed him his gun butt first. I leaned back and grabbed a hand
ful of salt from under me.

  As he bent down to take Dan’s gun, I flung the handful of salt in the man’s face. He yelled, dropped Dan’s gun and tried to rub his eyes. Instinctively he fired my .38 a few times into the air. I pulled Dan behind some pallets and looked back around the piles of salt bags. The man was still there, blinking and trying to see through the salt residue in his eyes.

  I rushed him and my automatic flew out of his hand and skittered into a corner. My fists slammed into his gut and kidneys and he fell to his knees. I stooped over him to pound the back of his neck when he emerged with both fists flying. He caught me off guard and I staggered back. The man ran at me, his head down, and tried to batter me. I stepped aside and he slammed into a pallet of salt bags.

  I looked up and saw the pile move. My reflexes were quick and I dove to safety behind another pile of bags. The pile he’d hit came down hard. Twenty bags of salt dropped down on him. In a couple of seconds the building was quiet again.

  Dan tried to stand, staggered and limped over to where I was already standing. We both looked down at the one arm that was still visible beneath the pile of salt bags. His pinky finger twitched several times and then stopped. I bent over and felt for a pulse. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find one.

  I looked at the load that covered our killer. “What’d I tell ya? Too much salt will kill ya.”

  Dan gave me a funny look.

  “What?” I said. “You gonna tell me that the thought hadn’t occurred to you?”

  Dan shrugged and then smiled. “Any cop worth his salt would have said the same thing.” He chuckled but stopped when he noticed I wasn’t laughing along with him.

  “Yeah,” I added, “But this guy was guilty of assault and battery.” Dan didn’t laugh either. It was a test of wills now.

  “That joke ain’t worth a pinch of salt, “Dan said. He waited for a response from me. I held back any instinct I might have had to laugh.

  I couldn’t let it rest. I didn’t want Dan to have the final word on this matter. “Where do you suppose this guy is from, Salt Lake City?”