The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  “Thanks, Jack,” Dan said, walking away from the carnage laid out on the table.

  Dan and I returned to his car and he drove me back to my office. I got out in front of my building without a further word to Dan. He drove off and I took the elevator to my floor. The building was dark and it felt eerie to be walking down my hall at this time of night. My footsteps echoed through the hall as I got to my office. I locked the door behind me, slipped out of my shoes and collapsed on my sofa. I was drained and fast asleep before I knew it.

  My ringing phone woke me the next morning and I rolled off the sofa and onto the floor, wiping my eyes and trying to focus. I crawled over to my desk and grabbed the phone, if for no other reason than to make the ringing stop. My voice was still crusty as I answered it.

  “Cooper,” I said, still clearing my throat.

  “Matt, it’s Dan.”

  I licked my lips and said, “Dan who?”

  “Hollister,” Dan said. “Don’t tell me I woke you up. Cooper, did you spend the night in your office again?”

  “Yup,” I said, almost falling asleep with the phone in my hand.

  “You awake enough to listen?” Dan said.

  “Hold on a minute,” I said, setting the phone back on my desk and getting off my knees. I took a seat behind my desk, picked the phone up again and said, “Okay, go ahead. What do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Dan said. “Do you remember anything from yesterday?”

  “Peter,” I said, “Does that ring any bells with you?”

  Dan sounded somewhat puzzled. “What?”

  “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” I began. “Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.”

  “Cooper,” Dan began, “What are you talking about? What’s all this about eating pumpkins?”

  “The Mother Goose book,” I said. “One of the rhymes in it is about Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater.”

  “So?”

  “So think about it, Dan. In the rhyme, the next line is ‘had a wife and couldn’t keep her.’ This guy’s wife left him a couple of times and finally divorced him. He couldn’t keep her.”

  Dan’s memory kicked in and he finished the rhyme. “Put her in a pumpkin shell. And there he kept her very well.”

  “That’s too bizarre even for L.A.,” I said. “What do you know about this McAllister guy?”

  “Peter McAllister. Thirty-nine, no record, a model citizen,” Dan said, reading from his note pad. “He’s not our man. He’s almost not a man at all any more. After he had to identify the remains, he went into shock and he’s been staring off into space ever since. Jack had to sedate him.”

  “Well, if Peter didn’t do this to his wife, then who did?” I said.

  Dan said, “I don’t know, but I’d hate to think what this guy has in store for any other victims, if we don’t catch him first.”

  “What’d you say?” I said.

  Dan sounded puzzled. “I said if we don’t catch him first.”

  “No, before that?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You said something about what the killer had in store for some other victims, or something like that.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You might be onto something there, Dan,” I said.

  “You know,” Dan said. “After you brought up this whole Mother Goose connection the other day, I started looking into the stories behind some of those rhymes.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “If there was a connection, and I’m not saying there was, but if there was, I thought I might stumble across something familiar in my research.”

  “And?”

  “And I read in a reference book that Peter was a poor man who had an unfaithful wife. She kept cheating on him, thus the reference to ‘couldn’t keep her’, so he had to find a way to stop her running around. His solution, fairly common in the middle ages, was a chastity belt, or pumpkin shell, as they called it back then. And, as you might suspect, a chastity belt is roughly a pair of metal underwear with lock and key, so that no one could enter the private region of the woman except whoever held the key, usually her husband. And as the rhyme goes, once he put her in that belt, he kept her very well.”

  “You think this one was cheating on her husband?” I said.

  “It’s worth looking into,” Dan said. “That would be one more reason someone might want her dead. It could also open up the possibility of another murderer, other than the husband.”

  “But didn’t you just say you didn’t think Peter did it?” I said.

  “Maybe it was someone she was cheating with?” Dan said. “Depending on how many outside lovers she may or may not have had, you could be looking for an unknown number of men.”

  “I gotta go,” I said. “I need a shave and a shower and some breakfast. I’ll get back to you later, Dan.”

  I hung up and my mind was swirling with the possibilities in this case.

  Chapter 4

  Old Mother Hubbard

  Next victim, I thought. That gave me an idea—that and Dan’s statement about a reference book. I drove to the library to look into the Mother Goose theory Dan and I were working on. The book I found there provided quite a bit of information. Some of it useless and too late to save the first victims, but some of it was very helpful. Hopefully it could help save this Mother Goose Killer’s future victims if this was any sort of template for what was yet to come.

  On the shelves of the library I found an oversized book with a picture of an old lady with a pointed hat on her head. It looked like a witch’s hat, only more colorful. The drawing depicted her riding on the back of a large goose, reigns in its mouth, soaring over the countryside. Inside the book, three pages in, I found the table of contents. It listed the following stories in the following order along with their page numbers:

  Three Blind Mice

  Jack Be Nimble

  Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

  Old Mother Hubbard

  Little Miss Muffet

  Jack And Jill

  Mary Mary Quite Contrary

  Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Three Men In A Tub

  Humpty Dumpty

  It was a colorfully illustrated book with pictures that looked like cartoons. The drawing of the Three Blind Mice showed three mice, each wearing dark glasses and tapping the ground in front of them with a white-tipped cane. Coming after them and holding a large butcher knife was the farmer’s wife. In the next picture of them she was holding up three severed tails, while the tailless mice ran away.

  On the next page was a colorful drawing of a young boy jumping over a lit candle. The accompanying four-line poem was printed directly below the picture. It told the entire story of Jack Be Nimble in those four short lines.

  Subsequent pages all had drawings to illustrate the poem that went with it. A woman in a ruffled bonnet poked her head out of a large pumpkin while Peter, her husband, looked on from behind. These drawing looked like they’d been painted more than a hundred years ago, judging by the costumes and the backgrounds.

  On the Old Mother Hubbard page I saw a women standing in a kitchen, her pantry doors all hanging open to reveal the empty shelves. A large dog sat looking up at the woman, as if begging for food. The look on the old woman’s face told the whole story. The poor little dog would get none.

  I laid the nursery rhyme book down and wandered over to the reference section. There I found a book that explained the origins of some of the Mother Goose rhymes. As long as I was here and had the reference book in front of me, I thought I’d look up a few more origins.

  I found the Three Blind Mice rhyme with two paragraphs explaining its origins. It claims that the poem and later the song referred to Queen Mary I of England, who blinded and executed three Protestant bishops when rumor got back to her that these three had been questioning the queen’s sanity.

  This was a disturbing revelation, at least for me, to find out that the so-called harmless rhymes of my youth had their origins in the stuff nightmares were made of. I made a few notes
and returned the reference book to the shelf. I hung onto the nursery rhyme book for a few more minutes before putting back where I’d found it.

  The librarian directed me to the shelves with all the L.A. phone books. According to the table of contents of the nursery rhyme book I found, the next story after ‘Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater’ was ‘Old Mother Hubbard’. I began looking up Hubbards in the area phone books. There were six in all. Discounting the Hubbard Aquarium and Fish Shop as well as Hubbard’s Mortuary, that left me with four possibles to follow up on.

  I copied the names and numbers down on my notepad and returned the phone books to their shelves. Just outside the library on the corner I spotted a pay phone and hurried over to it. I waited while a man with a briefcase finished his call and exited the booth. I stepped in and called the first number on my pad. I got a woman named Anne Hubbard.

  “Hello,” I began. “Is this Anne Hubbard?”

  “Speaking,” the young sounding voice on the other end said.

  The woman sounded too young to be the Hubbard I was looking for so I went with my backup story. “Yes, my name is Arnold Lapinski and I’m with the Los Angeles Times circulation department. May I ask your age and whether or not you are the head of your household?”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said, “But I don’t see what that has to do with anything. What is it you want, Mr. Lapinski?”

  “We’re offering a special deal on home delivery of The Times and we’re offering it at a substantial discount. If you take the paper for…” She cut me off.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lapinski, but I’m not interested. Thanks for calling anyway. Goodbye.” She hung up on me and it was just as well. I don’t know what I would have said if she’d shown any interest in getting the paper on a regular basis. I crossed her off my list of possible victims. After all, she wasn’t old or a mother.

  Leslie Hubbard turned out to be a man whose wife had recently died, leaving him with three children. He wanted to know why I asked about him, but I just told him I’d dialed the wrong number, thanked him for his time and hung up. I crossed him off the list and continued with my calls.

  There were two possibles left—R. Hubbard and V. Hubbard. Both had Hollywood phone numbers and neither one had answered their phone. The initials led me to believe that they were both women and that they both might live alone. That was usually the pattern when the listing was just an initial in place of a first name. I jotted down the addresses and left the phone booth with a little better grasp of the situation.

  I drove back to Hollywood Boulevard and turned north on Highland Avenue before turning right again at the next street. I rang the bell at 6755 Yucca Avenue in Hollywood, expecting to see R. Hubbard on the other side of the screen door. No one answered. I knocked on the door panel and still I got no response. I walked around the back to find a woman on her knees, planting flowers in a garden. She seemed startled as I approached and I quickly produced my I.D. and badge. She stood, removed one of her gardening gloves and nervously shook my hand.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” I said, smiling.

  She smiled back. “I just wasn’t expecting anybody today.”

  She appeared to be in her fifties with graying hair and crow’s feet around her eyes. She wore a full-length apron over a flower print dress and flat, brown shoes with white ankle socks showing.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Hubbard,” I said. “My name is Matt Cooper and I’m working with the L.A. police on a case involving people whose names are similar to those in the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book.”

  “Oh my,” Rose Hubbard said. “If I had a nickel for every time someone called me ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ I could have retired years ago. I almost didn’t marry Harold because of his name. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  She held both hands away from her side, her right hand still clutching her gardening gloves. “Look at what the bastard left me,” she said. “The house still has a mortgage, he left me with the bills and he took the car with him. We’re married for thirty-three years and out of the blue he runs off with his secretary. Can you beat that for gratitude?”

  “He ran off?” I said.

  Rose Hubbard hung her head. “Yes, and with some twenty-seven-year-old stenographer from Van Nuys. Traded me in for a newer model. He always blamed me for not having any children. I suppose now he’ll have that big family he’d always wanted.”

  “Sounds like you got the better end of this deal.” I said, chuckling.

  Rose looked puzzled. “How do you figure I got the best end of it? If you ask me, I got the shaft.”

  “Think about it,” I said. “He’s what, fifty?”

  “Fifty-three,” Rose said, a quizzical look playing on her face.

  “Fifty three,” I echoed. “Let’s say he starts that big family right away. And let’s say they have four or five kids in a row.”

  “So?” Rose said, still puzzled as to where I was going with this.

  “He’ll be fifty-four before the first kid comes along and at least fifty-nine or sixty before the last one is born.”

  “Yes, and…?”

  “Before the last of those kids is grown and gone, Mr. Hubbard will be long dead or too senile to enjoy that family. I find that kind of ironic. Don’t you?”

  A smile crept onto Rose Hubbard’s face and in a moment she’d broken out into a full-blown laugh. “Mr. Cooper,” she said, “Thank you.” She grabbed my hand again and shook it.

  “For what?”

  “For making my day.”

  It’s all in how you look at it,” I said. “If life deals you lemons, and all that.”

  I thanked her for her time and returned to my Olds, all the while hearing her whistling a joyful tune. I crossed R. Hubbard off my list and drove away, smiling and thinking about Rose Hubbard’s golden years and how peaceful they were going to be compared to he ex-husband’s. Payback can be a bitch sometimes.

  V. Hubbard’s address was in the 200 block of Alta Vista. I knew the area. It was about a mile from where I was. I headed south on Highland and turned west on Beverly Boulevard. Alta Vista was just three blocks away. I pulled up in front of 212 and parked. The house was a white two-story model with a red Spanish tile roof, like so many others in the area.

  I leaned on the doorbell and heard the familiar ding-dong chime inside. No one answered. I rang again with the same results. I opened the screen door and began knocking on the inside door. It swung open from the force of the second knock.

  I leaned in and said, “Hello. Anyone here?” There was only silence. I stepped in another few inches and repeated my question. Still nothing. I turned to leave when something caught my eye. It looked like it could have been a rabbit’s foot—if the rabbit had been five feet tall. It was lying near the corner of the living room. Around that corner lay what I assumed to be the kitchen. I could see the table and chairs from the front door. I could also hear a faint buzzing in the background, like the sounds I’d heard around my own garbage cans when I’d forgotten to take them to the curb on garbage pickup day.

  A few cautious steps further and I was in the living room. It was no rabbit’s foot. It was a Doberman’s foot and it was still attached to the Doberman. The dog’s mouth hung open, it’s teeth covered with blood and a meat-like substance. It had apparently been shot once in the head, but not before doing what it had been brought here to do.

  Next to the Doberman lay the body of an old woman whom I assumed to be V. Hubbard. It looked as though she’d been savagely attacked by the huge dog. Her throat had been ripped open and her arms were full of scratches from the dog’s sharp claws. The woman’s eyes were fixed open in a wide, incredulous stare, her mouth frozen in a silent scream. From the smell and the condition of both bodies, she and the dog had been lying here for more than a few days.

  The mail lying on the kitchen table confirmed my suspicions. This was the body of Veronica Hubbard and someone had emptied her cupboards. The doors were sti
ll hanging open but the shelves were all bare. I backed out of the kitchen and quickly searched the rest of the house. I was alone, save for the two bodies in the kitchen. Nothing else looked like it had been disturbed or ransacked.

  I ended up back in the living room and found the phone on a table alongside the sofa. I pulled out my handkerchief and picked the handset off the cradle. I called Dan and told him what I’d found.

  “Wait right there, Matt,” Dan said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I hung up the phone and went back out the front door to catch my breath. I sat on the front stoop and waited for Dan and his men to show up. ‘Old Mother’ Hubbard had paid the price for her unusual name, like the rest of the victims in this bizarre case.

  Dan showed up a few minutes later followed by two black and white cruisers. A few minutes after that Jack Walsh pulled up in the coroner’s wagon. Two men in white carried a stretcher into the house and set it on the floor. A police photographer snapped a few pictures of the woman from several angles and then took one or two of the Doberman. Dan gestured toward the front door and the photographer nodded and made his exit.

  Jack Walsh knelt next to the body and examined the throat wound before announcing, “This was the cause of death, gentlemen. The dog obviously bit her in the neck, severing her carotid artery and she bled out.”

  Dan looked at the dead dog and then over at me. “Well, it’s obvious she didn’t shoot the dog.”

  “But somebody did,” I added. “And it took him three shots.”

  “Three?” Dan said.

  I pointed to two bullet holes in the wall behind the dog. “Missed with the first two shots. Third shot caught the dog right between its eyes.

  Dan looked over at Walsh. “I don’t suppose you have some little nuggets of wisdom about the story behind ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ do you Jack?”

  Walsh shook his head. “‘Fraid not, Dan. The ‘Jack Be Nimble’ rhyme is the only one I cared enough about to look up. Sorry.”

  “Then I guess it’s up to me to enlighten you this time,” I said.