Copp In Deep, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series)

by Don Pendleton

  that appeared—delighted exclamations, smiles, tears, embraces, shy looks as people paired off or grouped off and moved on toward the baggage area.

  My quivers leapt to full alert about halfway through all that when a whitehaired man of military bearing moved through the gate and started along the exit ramp. I had never seen Gordon Maxwell before, nor even a photo of him, but if this was not a retired brigadier general than I had never seen one—man of about fifty-five, vigorous and erect, tailored and coiffed for Wall Street, carrying a light hanging bag suspended from the shoulder.

  One of the "kids" detached from the group of teenagers and stepped forward to take his hand.

  It was Toni, yeah, but it required a good eye and an imaginative leap to identify her. A very expert use of cosmetics had all but neutralized the effects of her beating, except for a slightly puffy eye and lip.

  She looked just like the other kids, in dress as well as demeanor—and I would bet dollars to doughnuts that she could alter herself again in a few seconds inside the ladies' room.

  They moved aside from the flow of traffic to embrace in greeting—it seemed a rather warm embrace— then Toni produced a manila envelope from beneath her jacket.

  That is when I made my move.

  I closed immediately, grabbed the envelope, told them, “I’l have to detain you both."

  Toni was mad as hell.

  "You have no authority!" she cried.

  I unbuttoned my coat to reveal the hardware at my waist, told her, "All I need, kid. I am licensed by the state of California to investigate crimes and to halt criminal activity by deadly force if necessary. Please don't make that necessary."

  She was still mad as hell.

  The PowerTron chairman just looked very sad.

  I escorted them to the cocktail lounge and told them, "Be good and stay put until I get back, maybe I'll return your envelope and you can both go on about your business."

  Then I collected Alexandra and we went on to check out the midnight flight.

  I was feeling a bit sad, myself, about the whole thing.

  Nicky's "black book" was in the envelope, yeah, along with a page-by-page translation into English. As I'd already suspected, it was a record of his many "business contacts" and compromising events beneficial to his mission in this country—very little to do with espionage but quite a bit with business advantages and arrangements, insider trading and the like, all the dirty tricks common to the capitalist creed now avidly sought by a nation just beginning to emerge from nearly a century of economic isolation and hardship.

  The notes contained some pretty good avenues for blackmail, too, in unscrupulous hands—enough so that

  many highly placed individuals in both government and industry might shiver and shake over the prospect.

  Shiver and shake enough, maybe, to produce much of the insanity that had come down during this week of horror, but the mere presence or absence of that book could not account for it all; it was merely a player among players, if my scenario was accurate, and would be seen ultimately as little more than a record of insanity, not the producer of it.

  Alexandra told me that she had seen a familiar face enter the gate area. "His name is John Woodman," she said. "He knows Angelique. And he knows me."

  "This the same guy planned the party for tonight?"

  "Uh-huh. Close to Cherche. Big stockholder, but no portfolio."

  "What does that mean?"

  "All his stock is gratis."

  "Why?"

  "Influence."

  I said, "Okay," and we went to find John Woodman.

  It was five minutes before twelve, so I took a moment en route to call Beverly Hills.

  "Is he still there?" I asked Cherche.

  "Oh yes, darling, and quite comfortable. You see? I knew that my instincts were true."

  I said, "Okay," and went on, hoping that my instincts were as true.

  We looked around the gate area and found it almost deserted, most of the passengers boarded and only a

  handful of hangers-on peering through the windows to watch the plane depart.

  I asked Alexandra, "Your man not here?"

  She said, "No," and neither was mine—and I had a sudden shiver that sent me hurrying back toward the lounge.

  We were about twenty paces out when Alexandra cried, "There he is!"

  It was both her man and my man, he was carrying a trench coat draped across a forearm—and it was the wrong forearm.

  It was also one of those frozen moments when you have the whole picture in view and wonder why you had not seen it much earlier, superimposed by the mind over the visual cortex which is also displaying the physical reality with Toni and Maxwell in the background like immobile targets in a shooting gallery and almost as close, a killer with a concealed, silenced pistol raised in the foreground—and you just cannot move the hand fast enough, it is all dreamlike slow-motion and you are working against some invisible restraining medium— then suddenly the gun was in my hand and banging away.

  It sent three quick shots into that posing figure and flung it on into the lounge, the silencer-equipped pistol falling to the tiles outside and bouncing along wrapped in the trench coat.

  Maxwell, ever the soldier of honor, leapt to his feet and shielded Toni with his own body as I scanned

  around in firing stance seeking another possible shooter.

  But there was only the one—the worst thing to climb out of a cesspool, a kinky fed—Cherche's John Woodman and my Special Agent Theodore Browning, both under the same hat—and this one had died by his own game.

  I called over to Maxwell, "Relax, General, it's all over now but the debriefing."

  And so it was.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  If the human experience could be reduced to a basic exchange in which somehow we all could speak nothing but the truth to one another, then I suspect that a good many of our troubles would disappear. Certainly it would make a policeman's job much easier, because basically a cop has to proceed on the assumption that everyone is lying all the time and that he must determine his truths independent of what anyone may be saying to him. Realistically we know that not anyone lies all the time, but also that most anyone will lie some of the time, and sometimes for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with concealing a crime.

  My big problem throughout this investigation lay in the fact that most everyone, even friends and lovers, had lied to me at least part of the time. That left me in the position of having to constantly build and rebuild a logic that would sort out the truths from the fictions yet use them all in an attempt to understand the moving forces behind it all.

  I had not done so well at that.

  In the defense of my policeman's intellect and instincts, though, please let me point out that there were many moving forces at work here and often at cross- purposes to one another. Many of them had been at play long before I joined the game, some others joined with me, still others came along as a direct consequence of my confused attempts to grab hold.

  As I have stated earlier, Cherche was at the hub of it all—and even she became a confusion factor with her strong predisposition to shield her clients from public embarrassment—also because of her irrepressible romanticism and tendency to invent delightful fiction as a means of explaining an inexplainable world.

  The intrigue did not begin with Theodore Browning—also know as John Woodman—but he was at the periphery of it when it all began and I choose to believe that he simply became swept into the vortex and had to start shooting his way out of it.

  Special Agents Mathison and Vasquez had been in it with him.

  Browning—as Woodman—was the inside man, setting up contacts through Cherche's operation for their double sting adventures and hovering over Nicky's coattails like a hungry seagull watching a fisherman for scraps of bait. He was really a hell of an effective cloak and dagger man, and he would have been a credit to the FBI if he had not grown so cynical and disaffected by the greed he mus
t have experienced all around him—that's my guess, anyway—and decided to save a little for himself.

  He saw guys like Putnam and Delancey feathering their nests with taxpayers' dollars—and God knows how many others—as well as the gentlemen stockholders of Cherche's Beverly Hills Club wheeling and dealing in favors with illegal drugs as well as illegal women, a whole wide range of both personal and corporate "anything goes" corruption to boggle the police mind, and probably knew that he could not do a hell of a lot about it. So, okay, he joined it.

  That is forever a hazard for the good cop, the smart cop who cares. Care becomes frustration and turns into cynicism and then into whatever else is available.

  Browning and crew found quite a bit of availability. They found it all—from industrial secrets to national secrets—sex, drugs, pornography, blackmail—they found it all. And they decided to exploit it all.

  They'd played it cool and cautious and were doing okay until Putnam and Delancey began having trouble maintaining their own merry-go-round of forbidden sex and expensive drugs. That was another movement. These guys had it all, but it was never enough. One pleasure fed on the next until they'd reached a point where it was all about to come tumbling down around them.

  And it was their misfortune to then become impacted by still another movement, the rapid decline of Tom Chase. Tom had never been more than a very junior partner of their triad of coke, women, and secret deals. But he proved to be the most vulnerable to a destructive cocaine addiction and the least able to support such an addiction.

  As another cross-purpose, Tom had also forged links with the Browning-Mathison-Vasquez trio, so his meteoric decline was a matter of consternation for this group also.

  The kinky feds were by this time so enmired in the network that vibrations in any part of it were felt immediately in every part.

  Tom had gone to Putnam to determine a larger share of illicit profits, but Putnam evidently was savvy enough to know that this would be an ever-growing need. He was also savvy enough, I presume, to know that the pressures of the addiction would be stronger than Tom's sense of friendship or loyalty—so surely he could see the handwriting on that wall. Apparently he elected to shut Tom down at that point and began laying plans to shut him down entirely. He got in touch with Browning and suggested that something had better be done about Chase, and soon.

  Tom was not that big a dummy either, whatever his weaknesses. He reacted by coming to me and dragging me into it in the hope that he could get some damning evidence to hold over the others. But then Browning struck and effectively took Tom out of play, protecting the whole network by declaring Tom an endangered witness and secreting him in the safe house until a more permanent solution could be found. I don't have all the particulars of that yet. Possibly he managed to convince

  Tom that he was acting in friendship because, remember, I had to slug Tom to take him out of there.

  But then something got screwed up, I was not stopped in time, so I became another moving force via my burglary of the consulate and the liberation of Nicky's incriminating records.

  Maybe Browning panicked, especially after my run- in with Mathison, and everything shifted into high gear. He either knew or surmised that I had taken something valuable and possibly damning from the consulate, and the rest became preordained. He had to minimize the damage. So he went after everyone, even close associates.

  He or Vasquez killed Putnam and Delancey.

  The mystery of my Smith & Wesson as the murder weapon remains a mystery, but I can offer an educated guess as explanation. I believe that either Browning or Vasquez had been stationed outside Toni's apartment the night that we surprised Mathison inside. We were followed when we left there—or else we were followed from the consulate—and they had us in their sights from that moment on. At some point after Toni left me stranded in the mountains, they found my gun while searching Toni's car—and maybe that is what inspired the fast move against Putnam and Delancey. They killed the two with my gun then planted it back in Toni's car, not even worried about recovering it themselves because I'd already confessed to the Mathison shooting and they knew that the ballistics evidence would tie me to Putnam and Delancey also. I feel that both men were already dead at the time that I was removed from the Soviet car just a few miles away—and that could explain why they waited to make their move on me at that point.

  They were also the ones behind the submachine gun in the freeway shooting moments later, going for me but not at all squeamish about taking out three fellow agents in the bargain. I believe that those three were probably straight and that Browning merely used them in quick reaction to get me "in hand." In the grave was what he'd meant, and he'd damned near succeeded.

  I can only guess as to the bombing of the safe house. Maybe Browning had thought to string Tom along and learn as much as possible from him, either decided that he'd gotten it all or that Tom was simply too dangerous alive—and of course the bombing would play well with the endangered witness idea. At any rate, he was the one who wired the place for destruction, timing it to coincide with a shift-change at seven a.m. and intending to take out everyone who'd been assigned to guard Tom Chase in that house. I learned later that he got only one of them, the guy I left lying there. That one had relieved the night watch thirty minutes early and his partner was delayed in traffic, got there too late to join the fireworks. But Browning had wanted them all, for sure, in his determination to eliminate any threat that could haunt him later.

  Of course, when Tom escaped from my car, the only thing he had in mind was to get back under Browning's wing. He reached him by telephone, and you know what

  happened then. Browning then reached Tom, tidying up the earlier sloppy attempt to erase any possible incriminating connection.

  He killed Vasquez and Dostell for the same reason, then hoped to wipe out every possible connection with the network by removing Cherche's mansion and everything in it from the landscape.

  I doubt that he'd made the connection of "Angelique" as Toni Delancey until very near the end. Apparently not even Tom Chase knew her true identity, and that brings us to the puzzle closest to my heart in all of this.

  Toni Delancey, let me assure you, is truly something else. Some of what she'd told me about herself was true. She had served in the Israeli army, in the Mossad, and she had worked in the Washington intelligence community after returning to this country.

  She's a tough little shit with strong ideals and guts to match. I have nothing but the highest admiration for Toni, even though she used me rather badly all the way through.

  Gordon Maxwell had introduced her to George Delancey, had stood-in as her father and given her away at the wedding, and probably thought at the time that he had done something very nice for both of them.

  Maybe that could have been true. But George was a kinky son of a bitch, always was, still would be if Browning had not straightened him out with a bullet, one of those guys who is all charm on the outside and nothing but sewage on the inside.

  Didn't take Toni long to tumble to that.

  Took her even less time to dissociate herself from it. By then, though, she'd learned enough to know that PowerTron itself along with her old friend Gordon Maxwell was in jeopardy because of her husband's manipulations of the company. Being Toni, she went to Maxwell with the story; being Maxwell, he took instant action and sent Toni right back into the thick of the conspiracy in an attempt to develop intelligence that would shield PowerTron from government prosecution.

  Through their connections in the intelligence community, they worked out the angle of penetration via Cherche. Since Toni actually was from Israel, it seemed an easy enough pose and yet one which would encourage Cherche to provide the maximum protection for Toni. I understand that about all that Toni ever did for Cherche was to ride around town with Nicky in his limousine and front his social contacts. He liked her, and she had all the social graces, made him look good. The association also served Toni's purposes as a good vantage point from wh
ich to discern the various connections of the "network."

  She had never met Tom Chase until his panicky and therefore clumsy attempt to penetrate Cherche in his own interests. But of course she knew his name and reputation, therefore quickly recruited him to her purposes while he thought that he was recruiting her.

  See, all the players had a game.

  And that is mainly what drove me crazy for three days trying to separate it all out.

  Toni's game had been a very direct one, to learn all she could about the network while gathering evidence to absolve PowerTron when the crunch came. Maxwell's major concern was to identify every employee who was involved, and he'd moved quickly once the evidence narrowed it down to the triad, but not quick enough to anticipate the explosive developments that allowed my entry into the thing.

  Who beat Toni up?

  Old pal Tom Chase did that. He'd been going a little crazy since his arrest, deprived of his accustomed massive ingestions of cocaine and suffering from severe withdrawal. Browning knew, of course, that Toni had been part of Tom's little game of intrigue and that she'd become involved with me, but I think he was largely in the dark about her and puzzled. On the other hand, Toni knew Browning only as John Woodman.

  Cherche, however, knew exactly who he was and considered him a protective asset to her operation. When he called in a "dividend" and specifically asked for "Angelique" to deliver a few grams of cocaine, Cherche felt compelled to honor the request—and Toni departed on her date with Nicky already assigned to deliver for "Woodman" after delivering for Nicky.

  She had not known that Tom Chase was being de- tained at that address in Brentwood Park. Browning himself had been standing at that doorway waiting to quickly admit her and take her back to Tom's bedroom. Possibly he'd sent the regular guards on some errand, or maybe he brought her in right under their noses while

  they enjoyed a coffee break in the kitchen or something. Whatever, he sent Toni to the bedroom with the cocaine and ordered her to "also relieve the boy's tensions," possibly as a test of some kind.