They had FBI written all over them, and I didn't know whether to be glad or sad.
I could see resignation in big Ivan's eyes as he put his gun away, and it could not have been a better cue.
"Thanks for the lift," I said to the back seat, and got the hell out of there.
The feds hustled me into their car and the Mercedes was still sitting there when we pulled away. It had been a damned quick switch, enough to make a guy dizzy, but I really did not know whether I had moved from the frying pan or the fire. There were three of these guys too— I was sandwiched between two of them in the back seat—and they were hardly more communicative than the others had been.
'Tell you why I called..." I said weakly as we sped
off onto the interchange, hoping I guess that a little humor couldn't hurt a thing.
"Shut up," the one to my right said softly.
"Mighty Joe Copp," sneered the other.
Those were the final words for both of them, liter-
ally.
Yet another car pulled abreast to our left and I saw before I heard what it meant. The snout of an automatic weapon was showing in the open rear window. Either I saw quicker or my reflexes were better but I reacted before the others, turned to liquid damn quick and slid toward the floor just as that chattergun opened up and swept our car from stern to stem and back to stern again. The guys beside me were spouting blood at the first cough and I guess the driver too because we were airborne off that ramp and hurtling through thin air while I was still trying to get down all the way.
We came down hard, very hard—squarely on the nose, I think, and kept on bouncing along for what seemed an eternity. The silence that descended after the final bounce and quiver was like the final sigh as the world is dying. It came as something of a surprise to discover that I myself was not dead or even dying. I was lying halfway out of the wreckage on my back and all the pieces of me seemed to be present and accounted for. I tested them all first then slithered on clear. I was in grass and I could see a freeway ramp above me. I could smell raw gasoline, too, and that helped propel me along the grass until I could find my feet and get them under me. I was dizzy and queasy but appropriately thankful to be feeling anything at all.
The freeway ramp was about thirty feet above my head and other motorists apparently were stopping up there and going to the shattered rail for a look-see. I didn't need or want any of that either. I kept moving, not knowing or caring where so long as it was away from the scene. Not far away I could see the upper floors of L.A. County Hospital and that sort of oriented me as to place, and at least it was a comforting passing thought that I was close to medical help if I needed it.
But that was not the kind of help I needed.
What I needed, pal, nobody alive could provide.
Chapter Six
The idea was coming home to me that someone I was trying to make me dead but I really couldn't understand why, not at that point. Okay, granted that the guys at the consulate could have reason to be a little upset at me, that should not translate as a motive for murder unless I was into something a lot heavier than I realized—and anyway, if that had been their game—to make me dead—they could have done it much easier on that deserted mountain road where they'd picked me up. Why haul me all the way back into L.A. just to kill me?
But that was only one of the questions tugging at my dazed mind at the moment. Obviously the motorcycle cop had stopped that car with the diplomatic plates not for any traffic infraction but only to spring me out of it. How had anyone even known that I was in that car? I had long since accepted the unhappy conclusion that Gina had turned me to the Russkies, which explained how they found me, but how could the feds have known about that unless they had been watching the whole thing?—and if they had been watching, why did they wait until we were all the way back into L.A. before moving on it? Again, the intercept would have been much easier and cleaner in the boonies, so why wait? Another: if they were that intent on capturing the killer of one of their own, why the soft collar?—why didn't they close in force and have the whole damned area nailed down the way they usually do?—why do it with a single CHP on motorcycle and no backup whatever? Finally: why the daring hit on FBI agents in broad daylight on a busy freeway, and who was responsible for that?
None of it made much sense, not with myself in the cross-hairs. Why all that desperate attention on a smalltime private cop who didn't even understand the attention?
Strange, isn't it, how some insignificant item of information can be presented to the mind during a peak moment when the mind is focussed on other things, so the item buries itself in some obscure cell of the brain where it could lie forever unnoticed—but then another peak moment brings it howling out of there and it bangs you squarely between the eyes. In my latest telephone conversation with Tom Chase he had given me precise instructions on what to look for and where to find it in Gudgaloff’s office. "It's a black book about the size of a passport, soft leather cover, about fifty pages of vellum quality paper, keeps it in the upper left drawer of his desk." I had wondered at the time how Tom knew all that, but then I figured my question was answered when Gina mentioned "Nicky's black book" in a way that made me think she'd had some kind of personal relationship with the Russian.
I leafed quickly through the book when I found it, just to verify that it was the right one—and of course my mind was busy on several other fronts at the same moment. All I saw in that quick scan was what I expected to see—cryptic jottings in a language I don't savvy but here and there an obvious name. One of the names that leapt into that quick scan was Cherche, and it leapt at me only because it is an odd name that I had encountered before and in a strangely similar context: the Russian language.
Years ago when I was with the San Francisco police I knew a gal who called herself Cherche LaFemme. Sounds like a stage name, doesn't it—and it is, but not in the usual sense. Cherche had a stable of high-priced call girls and I think she probably did tricks herself now and then. I think she borrowed her name from the French phrase "cherchez la femme" but Cherche (pronounced Sher-she) was from San Francisco's aristocratic Russian community. Very flamboyant lady and known to all the vice cops but we pretty much left her alone because she ran such a clean operation and, besides, she had political clout.
Cherche stuck in my mind all the more because I ran into her again just a couple of years ago right here in Los Angeles. She'd grown even prettier with age, like the Gabor girls, and claimed to be retired but I'd figured at the time that this old whore would die a whore and I think I was right. She was running some kind of high- class operation out of Beverly Hills, I was sure of that, but it wasn't any of my business anymore so I didn't look into it.
As I was saying, I saw the name in Gudgaloff’s book but it didn't register until I was hoofing it along the back streets following that freeway shooting and trying to put the puzzle together in my mind. Even then it didn't come with any clarity but it sizzled just the same and I knew that somewhere down deep my mind had made a connection that ought to figure into the problem. Maybe it was just a straw but I was ready to grab at anything, so I put Cherche on a front burner as necessary business to be looked into as soon as the elements of mere survival had been attended to.
As for that, obviously I needed to rethink my decision to withdraw from the case, primarily because it was beginning to appear that I would not survive a withdrawal. Apparently someone thought I knew more than I knew I knew, and that someone was willing to take drastic action to prevent me from telling anyone else what I didn't know I knew. And of course if there were kinky feds involved—as Tom had suspected—then I was now in the same boat that he was in, whatever that was, and we both probably would hang if we should live so long.
No, I couldn't go in.
Not yet, anyway.
I had to get some answers first, and I had to find a place to begin looking for those answers.
I guess that is why Cherche came banging back from my gray matter. The larger
mind was trying to tell me: start here.
So okay, I would do that.
But first I had to get organized. I had to get some arms. And I had to get some wheels. Then I could try getting my head on straight.
A Mexican kid was sipping a coke in a sharply customized low-rider pickup truck outside a hamburger stand near the hospital. I showed him fifty bucks and told him, "I'll give you this to take me home. It's less than an hour from here."
He looked me up and down, not liking what he saw and with plenty of good reason. I looked a mess. "Who kicked the shit out of you, man?"
"Nobody you'd know," I said. "They took my car. I gotta get home. How 'bout it?"
He looked at the money and then again at me, up and down. "I don't want you riding inside my cab, man. You'll get it all dirty."
I threw in another ten and told him, "I'll ride in back. Go north on Mission, for starters."
"How far we going, man?"
"Sixty bucks worth," I told him. "Where else can you earn it in an hour?"
He took the money without a smile, I climbed into the bed, and we headed out Mission Road. That would
link up with Huntington through South Pasadena and San Marino, get me up into the foothills, then we'd work our way eastward while avoiding the freeways. So maybe it would take a little more than an hour on surface streets. It was still the best offer this kid would get all week—and I would break his surly face if he tried anything shitty on me.
He didn't, and he drove the pickup like there were eggs inside the tires and he didn't want to break any, so it took an hour and a half to get into my neck of the hills. I gave the kid a twenty-dollar bonus and got out a half-mile shy, hoofed it the rest of the way in a cautious approach, slipped in through the rear.
Didn't know if the house was under surveillance, didn't know if a posse of feds were camped inside, but I had to chance it because I had nowhere else to regroup and get it together. Besides which, I was aching to be home for a while, to find some comfort. It had been a hell of a day already and I knew that it was going to get worse before it got better.
I hurt everywhere. Literally. Even my hairs hurt. I was torn and bloodied, scratched and bruised, looked like a wino two weeks in the gutter and felt like the walking dead, and I was damned glad to see my castle. At the moment, I think I would have fought for possession of it. But I didn't have to. I live in a somewhat isolated area on a mountainside overlooking the San Gabriel Valley, in a neighborhood of "horse estates" where folks value their seclusion and privacy. I have
acreage, lots of shrubbery and trees, and neighbors who mind their own.
Someone wanting to stake out my house would probably set up at the entrance to a little lane that serves my place and several others, and from that point they could not even see my place but they could monitor all movements in and out by vehicle. My only fear was that someone could be waiting for me inside the house.
But all seemed well in there. I entered through a patio door into my study which is also my bedroom and office, stealthily checked the whole place out room by room before I took an easy breath. Then the first thing I did was put on the coffeepot. The second thing I did was turn on the heater for the Jacuzzi, which also is part of my study-bedroom-office, and the third thing, was to strip naked and throw the clothing I'd been wearing into the trash.
Then I went to the gun cabinet and broke out the arsenal, selected a riot gun and a couple of revolvers, rounded up ammo and took the whole bundle into my study to make it all ready for war. The coffee was hot by the time I was finished with that. I took some frozen pastries from the freezer and heated them in the microwave, took the whole thing into the Jacuzzi with me and made like a hedonist for about thirty minutes.
Felt almost human again after that. Almost. For a moment. Then I checked my telephone answering machine. Had eight messages. Three were personal, one was someone trying to sell me a legal plan, two were on routine business matters I'd been working on, one was from the homicide cop I'd called the night before, and one was from old pal Tom Chase.
The friend from homicide wanted me to call him the minute I came in. Sure. The call had been received at 12:17 p.m. Way I calculate it, that was about twenty minutes after someone shot me off a freeway.
The call from Tom Chase had been recorded the day before. It was timed in at 3:45 p.m., about half an hour after I'd departed for the consulate, and he'd been in a hell of a sweat.
"Don't go," was the message. "I'm calling it off. I'm sending someone to intercept you in case you don't get this message in time. If you do get the message, don't call me back and in fact don't attempt any contact whatever. I'll get back to you when I can. And Joe . . . good luck."
Good luck, sure.
I played the message three times while I rummaged for a stashed, trying-to-quit cigarette—never did find it—while darkly ruminating over that "good luck" wish to someone who'd just been fired from a dangerous mission. That should have been good luck enough in itself, so why . . . ?
Why had he tried to cancel it, when obviously he was still in a hell of a sweat?
What was he sweating over?—and what was he trying to warn me about in that "good luck" goodbye?
I was sitting there naked and troubled, trying to put it together, when I heard a noise from somewhere in the front of the house. I didn't go for a cover-up, just
scooped up one of the revolvers and went to check it out.
I surprised Gina Terrabona in the entry hall, and she surprised the hell out of me too.
She was holding my big blunderbuss in one hand and a burglar tool in the other.
I said, "Thanks for bringing the gun back. Just drop it right there, that'll be fine."
She said, "So you are alive," but she did not drop the gun.
"No thanks to you," I replied. She was half a pound of triggerpull short of dead herself, but I guess I wasn't fully committed to that yet.
"I am glad nevertheless," she said as she backed warily through the open doorway. She pulled the door closed behind her and I just stood there like a ninny and let her do it.
A few hours earlier I would have died for the lady.
Guess I just wasn't ready yet to fully reverse that idea. So maybe, indeed, I would die for her yet.
Chapter Seven
My second set of wheels is a van I use for special work such as extended surveillance and photo assignments, keep it in my garage at home most of the time because I really love the old Cad and enjoy driving it even though it guzzles gas at about twice the rate as the van. Fuel economy was not the reason I bought the van anyway. It can be very useful to a guy in my line of work. I had an assortment of magnetic decals to dress it up to fit the job. It was currently wearing identification as Consolidated Cable Services and that was good enough, all I wanted at the moment was transportation. I put the riot gun in a clip behind the seat and loaded in several other comfort items then got away from there as quickly as I could, didn't exactly feel like entertaining any more visitors.
My curiosity regarding a stake-out was satisfied when I reached the main road. A car was parked in the bushes just above the junction with my lane, two men in the front seat and they were giving me an interested
look as I stopped for the intersection. So let them look. I was dressed for the van, in utility jacket and a Dodgers cap, hornrimmed clear-glass spectacles and stick-on sideburns to the bottom of my jaw—best friends would not have recognized me right off. Besides, these guys were looking for incoming traffic and apparently with a single purpose. They'd allowed Gina access and departure, obviously, so . . .
So what the hell, I figured I'd better cover the bases. I turned right, uphill, instead of my usual left, downhill, and stopped directly across from them, rolled down my window and yelled over, "What?—are you guys in trouble?"
The one in the driver's seat called back, "Just checking our map. That's a dead-end road you just came out of, isn't it? You been in there all day?"
These guys were not local c
ops, maybe not any kind of cops. Maybe feds, maybe anything, but the guy definitely had East Coast in his voice.
I told him, "Naw, I just came through. What're you looking for?"
That hit him hard. "What do you mean, you came through? It shows dead-end."
I said, "You must have an old map," and I eased on up the hill.
Part of me hated to do it to the guys, the part that has empathy for long, boring vigils, but most of me served them right. Last I saw through my rearview was one of them sprinting across the roadway and headed down the lane for a quick check on foot. It would take him at least five minutes to get back to the car. By then I would be well clear of the area and rolling free. Or so I figured, anyway.
It was seven o'clock and getting dark when I reached the other side of Los Angeles and rolled into Beverly Hills. It's a cold city, if you know what I mean, a wallet for a heart, and you feel it immediately. Merely to get your mail there is regarded as an item of prestige and many people who do that do not live or work there. So maybe it's a business or career advantage for some people—but if it is, what does that say about the rest of us?
Whatever, it's a cold city and I don't know why anyone would live there. Well, okay, maybe I did know why Cherche LaFemme would want to live there. When I call this lady a whore, please understand that this is on the same order as referring to Queen Elizabeth as a government employee. When it comes to classifying people by occupation, there are grades and levels that should be considered if you want a clear picture.
Cherche paid five times what it was worth to live in Beverly Hills for the same reason that most other people do: it helped her image in a town where image is everything.
Copp In Deep, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Page 4