The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  The Cooper Collection

  Featuring Matt, Clay and Elliott Cooper

  97 Private Eye Stories by Bill Bernico

  01 - It’s In The Bag

  02 - Petty Crimes

  03 - November Child

  04 - Welcome, Matt

  05 - The Reunion

  06 - Cold Cash

  07 - The Mother Goose Murders

  08 - The Condiment Killer

  09 - A Million To One

  10 - Little Matt

  11 - Find Her

  12 - Hard Bargain

  13 - The Case Of The Plates

  14 - Dead Ringer

  15 - The Stickup

  16 - You Can Bank On It

  17 - The Last Stop

  18 - Violence Is Golden

  19 - Surprise Package

  20 - The Big Sweep

  21 - The Home Sweet Homeless Murders

  22 - Guilty As Charged

  23 - All In The Families

  24 - Paper, Rock, Scissors

  25 - The Other Matt Cooper

  26 - Hit And Run

  27 - Officer Down

  28 - Double Trouble

  29 - Track Record

  30 - Love Finds Matt Cooper

  31 - The Plunge

  32 - Concrete And Clay

  33 - Top Of The World

  34 - ‘Til Death Do Us Part

  35 - Not On Your Life

  36 - One Bad Apple

  37 - Even In The Best Of Homes

  38 - Sgt. Cooper’s Lonely Hearts Club Frame

  39 - The Clay Cooper Cop Killer Caper

  40 - Beatlemaniac

  41 - End Of An Era

  42 - Cooper Generations

  43 - The Cooper Back-Story

  44 - Clay Cooper, Panhandler

  45 - Cooper And Partner

  46 - Mutiny On A Bounty

  47 - Witness Protection

  48 - Diplomatic Immunity

  49 - Justice Delayed

  50 - Two For One

  51 - He Put The ‘Ick’ in Buick

  52 - Revenge Never Expires

  53 - Head Shot

  54 - A Passage From The Bible

  55 - Come Fly With Me

  56 - If Dogs Could Talk

  57 - Trapped Like A Rat

  58 - Pay Dirt

  59 - Take The Money And Run

  60 - Fresh-Faced Kid

  61 - You Ought To Be In Pictures

  62 - Noel

  63 - Classified Information

  64 - Heart Condition

  65 - Reese’s Peace

  66 - The Best Offense

  67 - Jack the Stripper

  68 - Room For One Less

  69 - The Glowing Corpse

  71 - Dead Letter

  72 - Playing The Rolls

  73 - Life Is Boring

  74 - Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Murder

  75 - The Family That Preys Together

  76 - Next

  77 - Change Of Heart

  78 - Road To Nowhere

  79 - I See You

  80 - Single File

  81 - Home, Home Within Range

  82 - Nothing To Sneeze At

  83 - Your Place Or Mine

  84 - Stand-In For Murder

  85 - Auction

  86 - Nut Job

  87 - The Next Great Adventure

  88 - The Friendly Skies

  89 - The Not-So-Private Eyes

  90 - The Hollister Story

  91 - Hell Is Other People

  92 - By Hooker By Crook

  93 - Separated At Birth

  94 - Bleeding Heart

  95 - Baby Steps

  96 - That First Step

  97 – Oscar Night

  01 - It’s In The Bag

  It was going to be another long, hot summer and tempers were sure to flare. The mercury climbed upward toward triple digit status as the call came in. It seemed like a routine call at first. A bartender at a place called Jake’s phoned the desk sergeant at our precinct to report a woman passed out at his bar. That in itself wasn’t noteworthy, but the bar was on our way back to the precinct and we were in no hurry to get back to that oven we called our office.

  Sergeant Dan Hollister and I took the call. We were cruising just three blocks from the tavern and got there just minutes after the initial call. The tavern was located in the seedier section of town on Fountain Avenue just seven blocks south of the Hotel Rector, which had recently been scheduled for demolition. The rest of the neighborhood could have easily been torn down with it and no one would have complained.

  Dan parked the cruiser at an angle in front of Jake’s and we went inside. The bar was long and narrow with a row of stools against the bar. In the far corner sat a single pool table, its felt worn thin and gray in places. A single fluorescent bulb hung over it. There was a large, red and white jukebox in the opposite corner. It was blaring out a country tune by some guy singing how his girl had broke his heart and his scale, too.

  The bartender, an overweight, balding, dirty example of small business, was wiping a beer glass as we entered. His full-length apron might have been white during FDR’s first term, but now it was just two yards of grime on a string. He gestured with his head down the bar. While Dan questioned the bartender, I walked down the length of the bar and found the woman in question. By process of elimination, I determined that this had to be the right woman. This was the only woman in the place. In fact, she was the only customer.

  I nudged her on her left shoulder with my nightstick. She didn’t respond. I placed the stick under her left arm and lifted. What was left of her chewed-down fingernails showed enough dirt under them to plant potatoes. Her elbows had enough dirt on them to pass for a smoking jacket with suede elbow patches.

  The woman’s head lay face down on the bar, her dirty brown shoulder-length hair soaked in spilled beer. Her twelve-hour underarm protection had worn off thirty-six hours ago and she smelled like an open sewer.

  I let her arm drop to her side and slid my stick under her chin and lifted. It was Mary, all right. Mary McGuire, an alcoholic we’d picked up many times in the past. Some people just didn’t get the picture. I eased her head back down onto the bar and noticed a hole in the top of her skirt. It was a cigarette burn hole that went clear through the top and bottom of her skirt and now lay smoldering on the floor beneath her.

  Dan came over to where I stood looking down at our town drunk. “She’s on probation, you know,” he said, shaking his head.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “We’re going to have to bring her in. You bring your gloves?”

  Dan shrugged, and spread his hands. “Guess we’ll just have to scrub up real good before we eat, Matt,” he said, looking down at his hands.

  We each grabbed one of her arms and half dragged-half carried her out toward the front door. The bartender stood between us and the door with his palm outstretched. “Her bar tab is a buck fifty,” he said, waiting for his money.

  “Looks like she’s tapped out,” I said. “Charge it.”

  I opened the back door of the cruiser and we laid her down on the seat. Dan closed the door and we both stepped back to catch our breath.

  “God,” Dan said, “How can one woman get that dirty? I’ve been around three-day-old corpses that didn’t stink this much.”

  “Hey,” I said, “She’s doing you a favor. You’ve been trying to drop a few pounds, haven’t you?”

  “So?” Dan said.

  “So you still feel like having lunch?” I said, laughing a half-hearted laugh.

  Dan looked in the back seat at the passed out pile of human debris. He pursed his lips,
raised his eyebrows, shook his head and held onto his stomach. He slid in behind the wheel as we left the neighborhood and drove back toward the precinct. We’d only gone a few blocks when we heard a rumbling from the back seat. Mary had come to and was trying to sit up. I looked back as she righted herself. Her eyes opened wide, blinked, opened wide again, blinked again and repeated the sequence several times before she realized where she was. Her abuse of alcohol and tobacco added fifteen years to her already rough-looking forty-five.

  She got that glazed look in her eyes and smiled at me. “Hiya, Matt,” she said, her breath on the verge of igniting. “Where we goin’?”

  The light turned red and I turned around to face her. “You know where, Mary,” I said. “Downtown—again. At least there you’ll get a shower and a chance to sleep it off. You never learn do you?”

  “Aw, come on, Matt,” she slurred, “be a sport and let me off at the next corner, will ya?”

  The light turned green and I turned around to face the front again, trying to ignore her. The station was only a few minutes away and if I could keep fresh air coming in my open window, I might make it.

  I felt something jab my shoulder and turned around to find Mary’s fingers poking me. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let me out. I’ll do anything for ya—anything!”

  I caught her image in the rear view mirror. She had opened her blouse and both of her sagging breasts hung there like a couple of fried eggs, sunny side up. She had perfect timing, too. We’d just pulled up to the curb in front of the station and I was about to get out when I heard that familiar rumble. She picked just then to puke all over the back of the cruiser. Luckily I was already out of the car or my own vomit would have blended with hers. Luckily, mine ended up in the street. Dan’s made it to the gutter.

  “Jesus Christ, Mary,” Dan snapped, wiping his chin with his handkerchief. “Couldn’t you have held that for one more minute?”

  Mary sat up and cried. She cried all the way into the station and all through the booking process. Her crying jag lasted until she was escorted to her cell. She’d no sooner hit the bunk when the crying stopped and she fell sound asleep.

  I nudged Dan with my elbow. “Well,” I said.

  “Well what?” Dan asked.

  “You gotta be hungry now,” I said, half laughing. “I mean your stomach’s gotta be empty. How about some lunch?”

  Dan looked at me and then down at Mary, asleep in her cell and then back at me. His face turned a pale shade as he held his fingers to his lips and made a dash for the bathroom. I could hear him vomiting again. A minute later he emerged from the washroom, wiping his lips with a paper towel.

  “Now it’s empty,” he said.

  I checked the sheets later in the week and found she’d been released. The back seat of the cruiser had been scrubbed down and aired out while Dan and I took another squad car for our rounds. We had two more encounters with Mary McGuire over the next few weeks but nothing prepared us for our last run-in with the habitual drunk.

  On the morning of August eighteenth we got a call about a woman on a fire escape. The caller was a bit vague and we weren’t exactly sure what to expect when we got there. A small crowd had already gathered between two buildings on Hobart Boulevard just a few blocks from Jake’s Tavern. They were looking up at the first landing of a fire escape hanging from the side of one of the buildings. As we approached, someone in the crowd looked at me, pointed up and said something about a woman.

  Hanging upside down by one leg was Mary McGuire. Her blouse had fallen up toward her head, revealing several puncture wounds to the stomach. The blood had trickled along her chest, up to her head and had dripped off her nose and down onto the ground. A blackish pool of something the flies seemed to like had formed under the fire escape.

  “Anybody know her?” Dan asked, already aware of her identity. His eyes scanned the crowd for someone to come forward. No one did but one woman quickly looked down at the ground when his eyes met hers. “What about you,” he said to the woman. “Do you know her?” He pulled out his notepad and pencil and waited.

  The woman shook her head without looking up but mumbled something about Jake’s and a guy named Jesse something or other. Dan pulled her aside from the rest of the crowd. “Now, who’s this Jesse character?” he demanded.

  The woman looked both ways and behind her before answering. “Jesse Parker,” she said. “He lives in this building on the second floor.” She pointed to Mary’s body and said, “I saw her with him last night in Jake’s.”

  Dan made notes on the paper. “When was that?”

  “Around twelve or twelve-thirty,” she said. I hadda go home, but I walked right past ‘em on my way out. They was sittin’ at the bar drinkin’ real cozy like.”

  Dan jotted the woman’s name, address and phone number in his note pad before releasing her. He walked over to where I was standing to compare his information with mine. I’d gotten a similar story from several other people in the crowd. Several minutes later a second cruiser arrived, and two uniformed officers got out.

  I jumped up and grabbed the first step of the fire escape and pulled it toward me. The section of iron stairs slid down and I secured it with my foot. I summoned one of the other patrolmen over to where I held the fire escape ladder down.

  “Step on this,” I said. “Hold it down, but don’t go up or disturb anything. We’re going inside.”

  “Right,” the patrolman said, placing his foot where mine had been.

  Dan walked back to our patrol car and called for the coroner and a lab team to meet us on the scene. The second patrolman watched over the body and kept the crowd back while Dan and I entered the apartment building.

  The inside of this building made Jake’s bar look like a country club. The smell of musty lives, stale urine and old garbage filled the hallway. Paint curled and peeled off the walls and ceiling and what once was a banister along the stairway was now just a set of stairs with stubs where the banister once connected to the steps. A single light bulb shown above us. Without it we might not have noticed the graffiti that littered the walls.

  There was a row of mailboxes in the lobby, some with nametags and some without. Number 207 identified itself as belonging to J. Parker. Dan and I took the stairs two at a time and positioned ourselves on either side of Jesse Parker’s doorway. I rapped on the door with my nightstick. No one answered but we could hear movement inside.

  “Open up, Parker,” I yelled. “This is the police.” The inside sounds got louder and we could hear the sounds of a window sash being thrown open. Dan leaned back and kicked at the door near the handle. The door swung open and we found Jesse with one foot out the window on the fire escape and one foot in the room. His hands were raised above his head and his gaze was fixed on the gun pointing at him from the ground below. Officer Hanson, who came in the second cruiser, made sure Parker wasn’t going anywhere.

  I pulled Jesse Parker back into the room and pushed him back onto the bed, turning him over as I did. I pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and eight cents out of his front pocket. He also had a bar chip good for one drink at Jake’s.

  Dan slapped his set of handcuffs on Parker’s wrists and turned him around to a sitting position. Jesse Parker was thirty-five years old and like Mary McGuire, looked a lot older. His shoulder length dirty blonde hair was matted and greasy. His eyes had that same glassy look I’d seen a hundred times before in the taverns around town. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds—maybe even a hundred twenty cleaned up.

  We turned the prisoner over to Officer Hanson and his partner and instructed them to take Parker back to the station and book him while Dan and I continued to question neighbors. When we had what we needed, Dan and I returned to the station.

  Parker was brought in for questioning and booked on suspicion of murder. He was brought into the booking room. His possessions were confiscated and placed in an evidence bag and labeled with his name and the case number before he was brough
t to the interrogation room.

  “What happened, Parker?” Dan said. “What happened to Mary McGuire last night?”

  Parker just smirked and said nothing. He looked around the room and then back at the empty table where he sat but still said nothing.

  Dan slapped the back of Parker’s head and repeated his question. “Come on, Parker, spill it,” Dan said. “What happened to Mary McGuire?”

  Jesse Parker tried to stand up and defend himself. Dan pushed him back into the chair and grabbed a handful of hair from the back of Jesse’s head and yanked it back. Jesse’s chin pointed at the ceiling, his mouth wide open in pain. Dan released the handful of hair and wiped his hand on the back of Jesse’s shirt.

  I stepped between Parker and my partner and told Dan to take a break. I sat on the edge of the table and withdrew a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, pulled one out with my lips and offered one to Jesse. He took it and I lit them both with my lighter.

  I poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Parker. He just looked at it suspiciously at first. “Go on,” I said. “Take it.”

  Parker sipped slowly from the warm mug, puffed on the cigarette again and seemed to relax a little.

  I laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “You know, Jesse, we’ve got enough evidence to put you away already.”

  “Yeah,” he said, blowing smoke in my face, “Then why don’t ya?”

  I slid off the table and took a chair across from him. I turned it around and straddled the seat, my arms resting on the back of the chair. “Look,” I said, “The lab has already been over your place with a fine tooth comb. They found the mop with the blood on it. You didn’t rinse it out very well. From there it was just a matter of finding some more blood that you missed when you mopped up the hallway. They also found strands of her hair in the hall so we know she was dragged out by her heels. You need more proof?”

  Parker shrugged and sucked on the cigarette again.

  “Those blood samples,” I said. “They’ve been identified as belonging to Mary McGuire, so we know that she was killed in your apartment and dragged down the hallway and thrown out onto that fire escape where we found her.”

  Jesse took a long drag off the cigarette and blew smoke at Dan. “Sounds like you got it all, cop. What do you want from me?” Dan took a step toward Jesse before I stopped him.