"You think I'm in danger?"
I knew damned well she was. I just wasn't sure why.
Chapter Seven
WE DRANK SOME coffee and Linda decided I needed some ice beneath the eye. She wrapped an ice cube in a paper napkin and was dabbing at the mouse with it. The napkin got soaked and started dripping onto my shirt, so she suggested I off with the shirt.
One thing led to another, there, and we ended up in the spa.
Like I've told you, I've been a cop most of my life. A cop usually finds himself living in the seams of life. I mean, we spend our days and nights involved in the lower depths. Gorgki. I'm no illiterate. What we have not experienced with people does not happen with people. We live with them all: murderers, rapists, psychos, thieves, con men, hookers, pimps, addicts, pornographers, screwed-up kids, mean-ass dudes, wife beaters, husband beaters, child abusers, parent abusers—we get them all, all the time. These are the people we live with.
But, you know, a cop has a different view of all this—different than the average citizen, I mean. Maybe it's the way news gets reported, but I think the average citizen tends to think in labels more than cops do. A murderer does nothing but go around murdering people; right? A hooker does nothing but screw people for a fee; right? From a distance, see, the criminal becomes the crime.
Not so, for a cop. We are dealing with these people as people, not as crimes. What they do is against the law. What they are is very human. And we have to deal with that. What I am trying to say is that these are the people of our world. As people, the murderer might be admirably devoted to his bedridden mother and the whore might spend all her afternoons at the old folks home cheering up the residents. The child molester might be the leading philanthropist of the community and the shoplifter might be a loving wife and mother having trouble with menopause.
We're always hearing about brutal cops with anesthetized feelings and arrogance and how they're all cynics. Some, yeah; some get that way, or some start that way and get worse. But we're affected by our environment, just like everybody else. I guess that's why some cops go bad; why some cops who start bad go worse. We're subject, believe it or not, to the human condition, such as it is.
I have known cops who married hookers. Hookers they'd busted over and over again. End up marrying them. I have known cops who formed strong friendships with hardened criminals and went to bat for them, even visited them in prison or took care of their kids or whatever. We're involved in this world, see, and we're influenced by it, and we see these people as people, not as crimes.
All of which, I grant you, is a long way of saying that I was falling for Linda. Not that I put her in the class with any of those above. But, face it; she was living in the seams, too. Many people in our society—most people, I guess—would tend to judge her harshly for the way she makes a living. Any woman, they'd say, who romps around a stage bare-ass to incite lust in a gathering of men is really just a whore at heart. That’s an extension of the label. A "whore at heart" is a whore indeed, in that line of thought.
I am here to tell you that Linda Shelton was not a whore to me, at heart or indeed. As between her and me—she, woman; me, man—the only remarkable difference about Linda lay in the person she was, not in what she did for a living.
And she was a delightful person.
She may have thrown off her clothes and thrown her muff into the faces of several hundred guys every night, but she slipped out of her clothes this time and into my spa with the same mix of timidity and uncertainty as any woman might show in similar circumstances. Which is to say she did not act the brazen slut. She did not act that way because she was not one.
I would almost have wished otherwise, at the moment. I am a direct person. I also have a direct sexuality. When a beautiful naked woman slips into the warm waters beside me, I have a very direct reaction—the kind my creator designed me for. And I stay that way until some sort of direct action brings me down. Not only do I stay that way, but the pressure to bring me down grows by quantum leaps and, by God, demands that something bring it down.
So, hell, I just grabbed her by the hips and hauled her over onto the lap.
In a muffled little voice she said, "Oh shit, Joe, don't do that."
I told her, "Every cell in my body is screaming at me to do that."
She said, "Dammit, so's mine—but let's not, huh? I mean, not like this."
"Like how, then?"
"Later. Okay? Please. Let's talk awhile first."
"Hell," I groaned. "We've been talking for hours. What do we talk about?"
She slid away, moved to the opposite side—the moving waters waving those marvelous tits at me—and said, "Let's talk about Joe. What makes him tick. What makes him mad, glad. You know. Introduce yourself first."
I said, "Oh, well, my favorite subject."
"Okay. Tell me."
I said, "Suddenly my mind's a total blank. Barely remember my name."
"It's Joe. Joe Copp. Remember now? Who is he?"
"Copp for hire, yeah. Right now, he is ninety-nine percent ..." I let my eyes finish the statement.
She giggled. "Another theory exploded."
"What theory is that?"
She said, "Has to do with strong men and— you know."
I sighed. "Maybe it's all relative."
"Not in your case," she said. "Dammit, Joe. No wonder you scare your women."
"That's not what I meant and you know it. Anyway, there's nothing here to scare anybody."
Those eyes gleamed wickedly. "It could be an interesting investigation, I guess."
"I'm interested," I assured her.
"Me, too. But I have some scruples about these things. I don't lay with a man I know nothing about."
"Didn't ask you to lay."
"Okay. I don't sit on their flagpoles, either."
It became a laugher.
"Born in Palo Alto," I told her.
"Oh, very good. I love Palo Alto."
"I didn't. Stodgy and dull. Nobody's sweat even smells there."
"So where did you go?"
"San Jose."
"Gritty."
"You bet. Everything smells in San Jose."
"Just your cup of tea, then. What happened there?"
"Forgot myself, one day. Had a little rhubarb with the chief, knocked him on his ass."
"It seemed wise to leave after that."
"Seemed wise, yeah. Went to San Francisco."
"Even grittier than San Jose."
"Oh. Say. Much more. You haven't smelled life at all until you've smelled it in San Francisco."
"What happened there?"
"Come back over here and I'll tell you."
"Tell me right where I'm at, Samson."
"Let you cut my hair."
"Darn! Forgot and left my chainsaw at home."
"I bleed like other men."
"Sure, but you've got more to spare."
I said, "See? I do intimidate you."
She said, "Of course you do. What happened in San Francisco?"
"Replay of San Jose. But with the mayor."
"Wow. You don't fool around."
"He was an asshole."
"The way I hear it, most mayors are."
"Yeah, but this one used his for politics, I think."
"You couldn't tolerate that."
"Not usually."
She laughed and I laughed.
Then she came back to me and climbed aboard. Not altogether aboard but close.
"I really like you," I told her.
"Think I kind of like you too," she told me.
"Raise up," I suggested. "And come just a little closer."
"How do you do this?"
"This what? Surely you know how to do this."
"Not that. This." She nudged me. "That. How do you keep it there like that for so long?"
I assured her, "It keeps itself. Come on. Up and over. We'll see how well it keeps itself under the gun."
She said, "Huh uh. So far we're still in
San Francisco.”
We were not destined to get any farther than San Francisco this time.
The picture window about ten feet to our right exploded inward. It's one-way glass—I can see out but others cannot see in without really working at it—and we were in muted lighting, so I guess the guy was firing blindly and trusting to luck, but somebody just beyond that shattered glass was pumping buckshot into the room in a murderous fire pattern via a semiautomatic shotgun.
Stuff was flying everywhere and moving our way by the time my reactions took hold. I pulled Linda to the bottom of the tub with me and held her there until she began to fight me, then gave us nose depth and no more until I could assure myself that it was reasonably prudent to expose more.
I charged up out of there then with a mad like I had not tasted for a long time, grabbed a pistol from a drawer of the desk and quietly went out the back door.
Caught a glimpse of the guy in time to get off a couple of rounds as he disappeared at the corner of the house—but it was only a glimpse and I knew better than to chase after him.
I was, after all, balls naked and dripping wet.
But I was alive and Linda was alive.
I figured we got lucky. And I felt like the biggest jerk in town.
I should have been expecting something like that. Somebody was on a killing streak, and it was not just for kicks.
Jerk, yeah. I'd damned near got the lady killed. It was time to stop being a jerk. It was time, maybe, to start giving back.
Chapter Eight
I GUESS MORE than anything else I was fuming over the loose way I'd been playing the thing, like it was some kind of game and I was having fun with it, in spite of the deaths of three people in a matter of hours. In defense of my stupidity, though, let me point out that I'd gotten into the thing sort of edgewise. If I'd been a public cop I'd still be working on my reports. A lot had gone down in a very short time. There had not even been time enough for me to start having a good theory about the case.
With Juanita in the early going, I had been sort of halfway inclining toward spurned lover or fruitcake. I figured she hadn't come entirely clean with me and that the hidden facts would emerge on their own with even a shallow investigation. If she'd been stalked, raped and killed in a sex crime, that would have been a case with a familiar color. To be run down by a car, though, moments after consulting a private investigator for help, suggested a totally different sort of motive for murder. Also, early on there, I could not even entirely rule out a purely accidental death. After all, the girl had not come to me asking that I save her life. A guy was bugging her—or that was the story—and she wanted him bugged-off; no big deal.
Before I could even begin to assimilate those ideas, I go and find her roommate murdered beyond any doubt. This could have been a sex crime, though, with no relation to the first death; all the marks were there. Even the torture angle. But a sex killer does not usually tear the scene apart in a search of the premises. Looking at the whole picture there, it would seem that the murder was almost incidental to something else. The torture and the frantic search of the premises pointed to that "something else." But that was all I really had, at this point.
Then I have my little run-in with Tanner and Jones; they both seem more interested in what I know about Juanita than in what happened to Juanita. During the two hours I have been away someone has ransacked my office in a way strongly similar to the scene at Juanita's apartment. Is it coincidence that I find Tanner and Jones waiting for me there? Is it also coincidence that Tanner logged himself onto the case before he was even officially on duty? And wasn't it just a bit too sloppy, even for Tanner, to let the traffic detail conduct the only official investigation at the scene? Sure it was; but again and still, all I had were deep rumbles and a what-the-hell.
So I go to talk to George the bartender for a bit of insight. He gives me a "could-be" ID of Juanita's pest as a reserve cop but the situation is a bit too tense at this point to question George in fine detail. He has given me further reason to wonder about Ed Jones, though, and while I am off trying to learn more about Jones I learn also that Jones' partner and mentor apparently has some private police arrangement with the management at the New Frontier, which joint appears to be at the eye of this storm. Tanner and Jones have apparently responded privately to a trouble call brought on by my visit to that establishment; while there, then, George the bartender becomes the third fatality in this rapidly developing case—I'm still cop enough to fall into such bullshit jargon—which began so innocuously several hours earlier. Then a girl who I'd seen earlier as the bewitching and bare- ass Belinda on the stage at New Frontier enters my vehicle—cops have "vehicles," never "cars"—and urgently requests that I get her the hell out and gone from there. Ed Jones has apparently "found" in her car the gun that killed George the bartender.
Now I am already in violation of my license. I have failed to report a capital crime; I have withheld information concerning another one; I have destroyed private property and improperly intimidated citizens during the course of an investigation.
So I figure what the hell and take it a step farther; I directly interfere with a murder investigation by spiriting away the prime suspect of the moment.
Which is about where I was at, in the spa with Linda before the gunplay began. In the case, that is where I was at. In my head, I was nowhere in the case. Linda had fingered Ed Jones as definitely the guy who had been bugging Juanita Valdez. That did not necessarily mean that Jones had anything to do with the death of Juanita, or any of the other stuff. I had no ID whatever linking Jones to the death car. But at that moment when gunfire shattered the window of my bedroom, none of that was at the surface of my mind.
I'd had only one thing on my mind at the time, and that was why I felt such a jerk.
I had damn near got the girl killed ... over my hankering for a piece of tail.
And, yeah, that rankled; it really burned, deep down. So I guess that feeling had a lot to do with the way I reacted to the incident.
Linda was still sputtering and gasping in the spa when I came back from the yard and hauled her out of there. I toweled her down and commanded her to get dressed while I did the same for myself. This time I installed the hardware in a shoulder holster; I am licensed to carry, of course, and I would have been an idiot to do otherwise, even without the license. I was finally starting to think, and the thoughts were not pleasant.
So we were out of there within five minutes of the attack. I wanted to drop the lady into a safe stash and then I wanted to invade this case in at least a semi-intelligent fashion.
I have a scanner in the car. I turned it on and punched up the local police channels just to keep an ear on my world, then told my passenger, who had uttered not a word since the shooting, "I need a live client. Tell me I'm hired."
She stirred beside me; muttered, "Hired for what?"
"Hired to keep you alive. It's a technicality. Don't worry about the fee. I'll make it a dollar a day. Just tell me I'm hired."
She asked in a muffled voice, "Why would anyone want to kill me?"
"Funny, I was about to ask you the same question."
She shook her head. "I figured they were after you."
"Maybe," I said, "and maybe not. And maybe both of us. Do you own a gun?"
She made a face. "Absolutely not. And don't even suggest to me that I should carry one."
"Not suggesting that," I told her. "Just wondering how good the frame."
"What frame?"
I said, "The cop claims to have found the death weapon in your car. You claim that George was shot by someone as he walked away from your car. So—"
"What do you mean, I claim."
"Just telling it like it seems, kid. It's your word against the cop's, and that could get very sticky. Especially if the gun turns out to be directly connected to you before the fact."
"That's ridiculous. I have never so much as touched a gun in my whole life. Hate the damned things."
; "Simmer down," I said. "Just trying to cover the bases here. Why were you and George sitting outside in your car?"
"Well, we for sure weren't necking."
"So why outside instead of inside?"
"He followed me out. I left early. You tore the place up—remember? Then those cops came, and I guess most of the customers had already decided it was not a good night to hang around. The place was nearly empty. So I left. George came out to see if I was okay. That's all."
"So you sat there talking about how okay you were."
"No, we sat there talking about Juanita and what kind of trouble she'd been in."
"So what kind of trouble was it?"
"Well, it got her killed, didn't it?"
"Looks that way, yeah. Got George killed too, maybe. And almost you. So what kind of trouble?"
"God, Joe, I don't know. I just know that George was very upset. He wanted to talk about Juanita. Wanted to talk about you and your interest in all this."
"So what was the verdict on all that?"
"I don't know what you mean! There was no verdict. We just knew that Juanita was in some sort of trouble and we'd been trying to help her, that's all. Now it was too late to help her, and we were wondering what it was all about."
"George was wondering that?"
"Yes. Me, too. George told me he'd figured it out, he thought—that she was into something heavy and the cops were watching her. He was puzzled by your interest in the thing. I told him I'd recommended you to Juanita. I hadn't known about this police angle. I just knew—or I was told by Juanita—that some creep was following her around and she didn't want to go to the police with it."
"So how'd you know about me?"
She moved to the far side of the seat. I felt her eyes on me for a long moment but I was busy driving so couldn't try to read anything there. Finally she told me, "I've started work on my doctoral thesis."
"That's nice," I said "Good luck with it. Hope you live to see it through."
She said, "Don't do that to me, Joe."
"Do what?"
"You're pulling away from me. Please don't. I'm scared to death. Please help me."
I said, "Tell me I'm hired."
Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Page 4