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

by Bill Bernico

  “Sunny,” Jim said excitedly. “Sunny, come here, boy.”

  Matt released the dog’s leash and Sunny dashed across the street and into Jim’s outstretched arms. Jim hugged the dog and then looked up at Matt. “Where’d you find him?”

  Matt had had an hour to think about what he was going to tell Jim about the missing dog. “I found someone in the park who had seen Sunny running away down the street. Well, one lead led to another and before you know it, I had traced her to a farm on the outskirts of town. He didn’t have a collar on, so the farmer didn’t even know where to return the dog until I showed up and showed him the pictures. Once he was convinced that it was the same dog, he gladly turned him over to me.”

  “Matt, I don’t know how I can ever thank you,” Jim said.

  “There is one way,” Matt said.

  “Anything. You name it.”

  “Now that you know Bert Grimes wasn’t responsible for Sunny’s disappearance, I think it would be a nice gesture on your part if you patched things up with him. I’ve already talked to him and he’s willing to put things aside in the name of peace. What do you say? Will you take down your light display? I’ve already convinced Bert to stop blasting that awful music at your house. Come on.”

  Jim looked down at Sunny and gave him another hug before looking back up at Matt. “Oh, all right.”

  “Who knows?” Matt said. “You two may even find out that you have a few things in common. You could actually end up as friends.”

  “Don’t push it, Matt.”

  Matt looked at Jim. “Give me a day to arrange things and then you can both come over to my house and we’ll try to straighten this whole mess out, all right?”

  Jim agreed to Matt’s suggestions and Matt walked back across the street to fill Bert in on the arrangements he’d made with Mr. Wainright. When he finished that part of his job, Matt returned to his own house to tell Chris all about his ordeal with the two hot-headed neighbors.

  “Boy, will I be glad when that’s over,” Chris said. “The kids must have overheard one of us talking about that damned light display across the street. Nicky asked me if he could go over and see Mr. Wainright’s bird. I had to think fast to explain that one.”

  “What did you tell him?” Matt said.

  “I told him Mr. Wainright had a dog, not a bird and that he must have heard wrong.”

  “Listen, Chris, when I get them both over here, can you take the kids and go somewhere in the car until I finish? There’s no telling what either of them might say.”

  “How long do you figure this’ll take you?”

  Matt thought about it for a moment and said, “Fifteen minutes should do it. Then I’ll send them both home and hopefully things will get back to normal around here.” Matt kissed Chris and headed for the door.

  “Now where are you going?” Chris said.

  “I can still get back to the office before Gladys comes in to talk to Dad. I’d kind of like to be there to watch him work.”

  “Who’s Gladys?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get home, all right?”

  Chris waved him off. “All right, go.”

  Matt got back in the office a minute or two past four-thirty to find Elliott sitting behind his desk. Seated in the client chair across from him sat Gladys Bennett. She turned to look at Matt as he entered. Elliott also looked up at Matt and then back at his client. “You already know my son, Matt.”

  Gladys nodded at Matt. “Yes,” she said.

  “Do either of you mind if I sit in on this session?” Matt said, pulling his own client chair closer to Elliott’s desk.

  Elliott gestured toward Gladys. “Do you mind?”

  “Not if it gets me the job,” Gladys said.

  Matt sat back, crossed his legs and listened. Elliott turned his attention back to Gladys. “You were telling me about the last job you had. Won’t you continue?”

  “Well,” Gladys said. “I have to admit that it’s been a while since I held a real job. My kids are all grown and gone and my husband died many years ago. He left me quite comfortable, so I never felt the need to go out and find a job.”

  “And now?” Elliott said.

  “I’m still financially set, but I’m getting really bored with my daily routine,” Gladys said. “Maybe you don’t know what that’s like, Mr. Cooper.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” Elliott said. “I retired from here a while back and it only took me a few months to realize that it wasn’t for me. Luckily I had a job to go back to.”

  “Well I didn’t,” Gladys said. “I’d like to have something I look forward to doing and a place I enjoy going to every day. I really need this job, so anything you could do to give me an edge during the interview would help tremendously.”

  “What is it you’re qualified to do?” Elliott said.

  “I used to be a pretty good secretary,” Gladys said. “I’d like to do that kind of work again. I know Porter Industries has a really nice office environment and I’m sure I’d fit right in.”

  “Matt tells me you have a bird at home,” Elliott said. “What will you do with him while you’re gone?”

  “Larry can be by himself for ten hours at a stretch,” Gladys explained. “He’s not locked in a cage. He has his perch and there’s food and water set out for him. He’ll be fine.”

  “Did Matt mention that I’ll be taking over this case?” Elliott said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Gladys said. “Frankly, I don’t care which of you gets me the information I need as long as I get it before my Monday morning interview.”

  “Well,” Elliott said, “as it turns out, Matt just finished the case he was on, so until something else comes along, it looks like we can both work on it for you. I’d like to thank you for coming by, Gladys. I think I have what I need to get the job done. I’ll be talking to you in the next couple of days.” He and Matt stood. Matt showed Gladys to the door and closed it behind her.

  “What do you think, Dad?”

  “About what?”

  “About Gladys, naturally. What kind of impression did you get from her?”

  “I don’t know,” Elliott said. “Seems normal, whatever normal is. I think I can move on to step two now and recommend her to Clifford Dodd. Then we can collect our fee and get on with our lives, too.”

  “What about finding out something about Dodd that Gladys can use during the interview?” Matt said.

  “I got enough from Angela while you were out chasing down Wainright’s dog. Granted, it’s nothing earth shattering, but it’ll be enough for them to get started on a casual conversation once her interview begins. Angela as much as assured me that Gladys would get the job. Truth be known, it’s not that great of a job to begin with. You know, entry level; the job nobody else wanted, but Gladys will be glad just to have her foot in the door and we’ll be the heroes.”

  “I get it,” Matt said. “By the time she realizes she didn’t want the job after all, we’ll be out of the picture. She can’t blame us if she quits. She’s the one who wanted to get in there.”

  Just before they closed up the office for the weekend, Elliott called Gladys with the tidbits he’d gotten from Angela. Of course, Elliott embellished the tidbits a little; making it seem like Gladys had the inside track over the competition. She thanked Elliott and told him she’d stop by his office on Monday, after the interview was over. Elliott wrote that time slot on his desk calendar, hung up and closed the office.

  Monday morning at precisely two minutes before nine, Gladys let herself into the front office at Porter Industries and told the receptionist that she had an appointment with Clifford Dodd. The receptionist asked her to have a seat and that Mr. Dodd would be with her in a moment. Gladys sat next to a table with several magazines on it, nervously flipping through a magazine without stopping to read anything. There was another woman in a business suit with two-inch heels sitting on the other side of the table, looking through her own magazine without any interest. She sat with her legs crossed
at the ankles and Gladys noticed that the surface of her heels were about the size of postage stamps. The woman looked at Gladys and gave her a half-hearted smile and then turned her attention back to the magazine in her hand.

  Several minutes later the phone on the desk buzzed, the receptionist listened briefly and then hung up. She turned to Gladys and said, “Mr. Dodd will see you now.”

  Gladys laid the magazine down, looked at the other woman and held one hand up toward her, both her fingers crossed. The receptionist closed the door after Gladys and took her seat behind the desk again. She looked over at the second lady and said, “Mr. Dodd will see you right after he talks to that other woman. Please be patient.”

  It took Clifford Dodd just fifteen minutes with Gladys before he decided to hire her. Gladys had charmed her way into the job as well as into Mr. Dodd’s favor. It didn’t hurt that Elliott’s friend, Angela had also put in a good word for Gladys. She and Mr. Dodd emerged from his office, both of them talking and laughing. He looked at his secretary and gave her a nod. Gladys looked at the secretary and said softly, “I got it.”

  The woman who’d been waiting with Gladys to see Mr. Dodd looked totally miffed. She got up from her chair and left the room in a huff. Clifford Dodd’s secretary opened a drawer in her filing cabinet and gave Gladys the necessary forms to get her registered with the company and told her she could start the next morning at eight. Gladys left, feeling like the money she’d paid Elliott Cooper was money well spent. She would easily get that back within her first month with the company.

  When Gladys got back to the parking lot, she fished around in her purse for her car keys, her head bent down and not paying attention to her surroundings. She felt the keys at the bottom of her purse about the same time she felt the postage stamp sized heel crash into the back of her head. Her vision was clouded with bursts of red and yellow stars before she lost consciousness and fell to the pavement. The shoe’s owner delivered three more blows before slipping the shoe back on her foot and hurrying away. She’d go home and wait for the call from Porter Industries to set up an appointment for another job interview.

  Elliott was seated at his desk when he got the call from Lieutenant Cole. “Kevin,” he said. “How’s things downtown today?”

  “Oh, you know, same old, same old. Drunk drivers, petty larcenists, fist fights and a shoe murder.”

  “Excuse me,” Elliott said. “What was that last one? Someone killed a shoe, you say?”

  “Funny,” Kevin Cole said. “No, what I meant was that some woman was killed this morning with a shoe to the head. We found her body in the parking lot downtown. And how’s your day going?”

  Elliott explained about the feuding neighbors, one of whom had flipped his neighbor the bird using his Christmas lights, only to be bombarded with ‘Surfer Bird’ over his neighbor’s loud speaker. He told of Gladys Bennett’s cockatiel telling him to put his hands up. He mentioned the guy near MacArthur Park with the homing pigeon who had flown off with the ring he’d stolen minutes earlier. “Seems to be a bird theme,” Elliott said.

  “What did you say about a cockatiel, Elliott?” Kevin said.

  “Huh?”

  “The woman with the cockatiel, what was her name?”

  Elliott had to think about it for a moment before he offered, “Gladys something or other.”

  “Bennett?” Kevin said.

  “Yes, that was her name. How did you know?”

  “Because when we found the woman dead in the parking lot at Porter Industries we went through her purse and found application papers for employment as well as her driver’s license. I went to her house with another officer and there was this white cockatiel sitting there on a perch squawking at us, ‘Hands up, mister.’ I’m afraid it the same woman, Elliott.”

  “You say someone killed her with a shoe? How bizarre is that?”

  “I guess it was a murder of opportunity,” Kevin said. “The killer used what was handy for her?”

  “Her?”

  “Yes, it was a woman’s shoe that killed her. The heel was only the size of a postage stamp. Now all we have to do is match up the shoe with the dents in Gladys’s head and we’ve got her.”

  “Well, if I can help in any way, don’t hesitate to call me, Kevin.”

  “Oh, I’ll be doing more than calling you, Elliott. In fact I’ll be stopping in to see you in a few minutes, now that I know there’s a connection between our victim and your office. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “I’ll be here when you get here.” Elliott hung up and sat there dumbfounded by the events he’d just learned about.

  Matt came into the office at that moment and noticed the puzzled look on his father’s face. “Something wrong, Dad?”

  “Gladys is dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Gladys Bennett,” Elliott explained. “You remember, the woman who wanted us to tail the personnel manager at Porter Industries so she could use what we found to schmooze her way in?”

  “Oh, gees,” Matt said. “When did this happen?”

  “Apparently just this morning,” Elliott said. “They found her in the parking lot at Porter Industries. She got the job, all right.”

  “How’d she die?”

  Elliott furrowed his brow. “It looks like some other woman smacked her in the skull with a shoe—several times.”

  “Not exactly the way I’d want to go,” Matt said, wincing. “How’d you hear about it?”

  “Kevin just called me. In fact, he’s on his way over here, so stick around. He’ll probably want to talk to you as well.”

  Elliott and Matt concluded their talk with Kevin in just thirty minutes. He got whatever information they had about Gladys Bennett and thanked them for their cooperation. Before he left their office, he turned back to Elliott and said, “Chances are if I go back to Porter Industries, someone in the office there will remember the time frame when Gladys was in the employment office. They may also remember if anyone else was there at the same time.”

  “Now go do what you do best, Kevin,” Matt said. “I’m sure you’ll wrap this one up pretty quick.”

  Kevin left the Cooper office with two pages of notes in his note pad. Elliott looked over at Matt and said, “Well, this has certainly been one for the books, hasn’t it?”

  Matt lifted one leg and sat on the edge of his desk. “What do you mean, Dad?”

  Elliott told Matt the same thing he’d told Kevin about all the coincidental bird connections in the last few days.

  “That is a strange one,” Matt said.

  As if on cue, the two of them heard a loud thump and turned toward the window that looked down onto Hollywood Boulevard. A disoriented sparrow had flown right into the window glass and had bounced down onto the ledge below it. Matt hurried to the window, lifted it up and looked down at the unconscious brown bird. The bird’s head flopped to one side and the animal went limp.

  Matt laid it back down on the ledge and looked at Elliott. “Poor thing,” he said. “Looks like we keep that glass too clean. He probably thought the window was open.”

  Elliott looked down at the bird and then back at Matt. “Hold on there, Chuckie. Our little friend just moved.”

  Matt took another look at the sparrow. Its eyes were open now and his legs were twitching. Another minute of involuntary moves and the bird was on its feet but still hadn’t moved from that spot. Matt pointed a finger at the bird, holding it low, near its feet. He was hoping the bird would step up on to his finger, but it just stood there, still dazed. Matt turned back to his dad again. “What should we do?”

  Elliott pointed to the bird again. “We don’t have to do anything. Look.”

  The bird stretched its wings and then flapped them. A few seconds later it turned and flew away.

  Matt closed the window again and took a seat behind his desk. “At least he made it. That’s something anyway.”

  “I guess so,” Elliott said and plopped down on the leather sofa under the window. In his head was p
laying a song that had been stuck in there for the last two days…‘So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star’ by The Byrds.

  138 - Dressed To Kill

  It was a Saturday morning in May and Matt Cooper was still in his pajama pants, tee shirt and slippers and was planning on spending the day just relaxing around the house and eventually watching the video he’d rented on his way home from work last night. Chris had taken their twins, Nicky and Veronica with her shopping. Matt had the house all to himself and was enjoying the peace and quiet when his phone rang. He let it ring; figuring the answering machine would eventually pick it up and then he could decide whether or not he wanted to talk to anyone on his day off.

  “Hi, you’ve reached the Cooper residence. Leave your name and number and we’ll call you back.” The phone beeped.

  “Matt, it’s Elliott, pick up if you’re there.”

  Matt exhaled and stepped over to the phone. He hesitated, not sure he even wanted to talk to his father. Curiosity got the better of him and he lifted the handset. “Dad, I was just coming out of the bedroom. What’s up?”

  “You’re just now getting up?” Elliott said. “For crying out loud, you gonna sleep your life away? It’s already nine-thirty.”

  “I didn’t say I just got up,” Matt explained. “I said I was just coming out of the bedroom. In fact, I just finished getting dressed.” He lied.

  “Great,” Elliott said, “then you’ll be ready to go when I pick you up in five minutes.”

  “What, huh? What are you talking about, Dad?”

  “They’re having an auction at Paramount Studios and I’m going. I thought you might like to go along with me.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re looking for Star Trek props.”

  “Nothing like that,” Elliott said. “I just want to see what they’re auctioning off. You never know, there might be something there we can use.”