The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  Dan scratched his head. “Why would you be out looking for bums at all? You that hard up for company?”

  I smiled, trying to keep my composure. “Yeah, that’s it. I was playing bridge with two other bums and we needed a forth. Just thought I’d check the alley for any other bridge players.”

  “Don’t get smart with me,” Dan said. “I wanna know what you’re doing here.”

  I shook my head. “Unless and until I know that my case has anything to do with your case, I don’t have to say a thing. So, if you’ll excuse me.” I turned to go.

  “Hold on, Cooper,” Dan said. “What’s with the attitude? Don’t we usually give each other a little latitude or at least some semblance of respect?”

  “That’s a good one, coming from you,” I said. “How much respect did you give me that last time we butted heads?”

  Hollister said nothing.

  “And how much latitude did you give me when I came to you asking for a little help with the Butler case?” I said.

  Dan gestured with his chin. “Go on, Cooper, on your way. I don’t have time for this. But if I find out you’re holding out on me, I’ll come down on you with a ton of bricks. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  I drove back to the county morgue and found Walsh’s office. The attendants were just wheeling the latest homeless body in and Jack was directing them where to put it. I walked over and looked at Walsh with something akin to frustration.

  “Can I take a look?” I said, pointing at the body with the sheet over it.

  “Help yourself,” Jack said.

  I stood next to the gurney and lifted the sheet, looking down at the face of a man obviously in his late sixties. His face was gaunt and hollow and he had the stubble of a man who hadn’t shaved in nine or ten days. His mouth sported just three or four teeth and the ones that were left had been reduced to brown stubs. I drew the sheet back over him and stepped away.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not him.”

  Walsh was still making notes on his clipboard. When he finished, he looked up at me. “You really think you’re gonna find your guy like this? Gees, Matt, you’ve been looking at more dead bums than any man has a right to.”

  “All part of the job,” I said. “I get paid whether I find him or not, but I’d like to give my client their money’s worth.”

  “Money’s worth of what?” Walsh said.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Jack. Client’s got a right to privacy.”

  Jack shrugged. “I suppose. Well, I guess I’ll see you when the next body turns up.”

  “I sure hope not,” I said. “Thanks Jack.”

  I returned to my car and made a few notes of my own before driving home. I’d get back at it in the morning, but for now, I needed food and sleep. I had a ten o’clock appointment with my client and that left me plenty of time for my personal errands in the morning.

  The man I’d been hired to find had been a useful member of society up until five years ago. Frank Conklin had been a doctor in a previous life. He once had it all; a wife and two children, a house in Bel-Air, two fancy cars, a fat bank account, a circle of society friends and more pressure than he could stand. One day he just walked away from all of it and let alcohol take him away to a simpler lifestyle. Mrs. Conklin eventually accepted her husband’s decision and moved on with her life. But it was Conklin’s daughter, Vivian who still needed answers from the father who’d left her.

  I got to my office around nine the next morning. The Conklin case was my only case and I intended to give it my undivided attention. Vivian Conklin had hired me to find her father. For years now she had considered this chapter of her life just one big loose end and she meant to tie it up before she could move on. I gathered everything I’d documented on the case and was thinking about what I’d tell Dr. Conklin’s daughter when she got here.

  It was hard enough to track down a person still living within society. They usually left paper trails and people that I could talk to, but a homeless person leaves no such trail and finding him can become a real ordeal. In the days since I’d taken the case, I’d checked homeless shelters, alleys, bars, abandoned buildings and park benches with no luck. It was like finding a needle in a stack of other needles. Most of these bums looked alike at first glance and if you stuck around long enough for a second glance it could literally take your breath away. Bathing was not on any of their short lists of things to do on a regular basis.

  I laid out my receipts and fully expected to tell Vivian Conklin that I’d done all that I could and that I thought it best that she not waste any more of her money trying to find a man who obviously did not want to be found. It was closing in on ten o’clock when my outer office door opened and footsteps came toward my inner door. I stood just as my inner door opened and Vivian Conklin stepped inside. I invited her to have a seat.

  “Any luck on your search, Mr. Cooper?” she asked without any small talk.

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not, Miss Conklin. I’ve exhausted all my avenues and quite frankly, I don’t know what else I can do. I’ve looked at all the regular places where these people hang out and no one can tell me anything. And the other possibility is that he may be living his homeless lifestyle in some other city altogether, in which case we may never find him.”

  Vivian sighed. “I was afraid it might come to this.”

  “Come to what?” I said.

  “Mr. Cooper, have you considered possibly going undercover to find my father?”

  “Undercover?”

  “Yes, you know, stop shaving for a few days, get yourself an old suit from the thrift shop and gargle with whiskey until your breath could knock out a nun. Get into the character and revisit some of those same places you talked about. Those same people who didn’t want to talk to you before might just open up to another homeless person.”

  I looked sideways at her and raised my eyebrows.

  “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” she said.

  I thought about for a moment. I’d tried everything else and she was a paying client. “If you think it’ll do any good I’ll take a shot at it. It’s still twenty-five a day and expenses so if you’re sure you want to spend your money like that…”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “Give me a few days to get into character and to look the part and I’ll let you know if anything develops. Check back with me in, let’s say, a week. If I still don’t have anything more by then you can decide if you still want to take this any further. Fair enough?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cooper,” she said, forcing a weak smile. “This had been bothering me for nearly five years now, ever since dad left. I was still in high school and for a long time I thought he left because of something I did. As an adult now, I realize that it probably wasn’t, but I still need to know.”

  I stood. “I’ll do what I can.”

  She gave me a detailed description of her father and then without a further word, Vivian Conklin turned and left my office. I made another entry in my expense log for one used suit, one brown fedora, a pair of old shoes and a white dress shirt, preferably yellowed by ages and with a frayed collar. I slipped the journal back into my desk and headed downstairs for my car. Before I searched through any thrift shops, I knew one place that might even be better.

  I pulled my Olds into the parking lot outside of Jack Walsh’s office. The M.E. was in his office when I knocked on his door and poked my head in.

  Jack looked up from his newspaper. “Matt, what brings you down here this early in the day? Come in, come in. Have a seat.”

  I sat across from Jack and he folded his paper and set it on the desk.

  “Well, Jack, I was wondering about that bum that was brought in here last night.”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you still have the suit he was wearing?”

  Jack turned around in his swivel chair and grabbed a brown paper grocery bag from the floor and held it up. “I was just gonna throw it out. Why?”r />
  “So you don’t need it?”

  Jack shook his head. “Why, you want it for something?”

  I nodded. “It might help me in my investigation. What’s all in here?” I said, lifting the bag as if I was guessing its weight.

  “Just the suit coat and pants and shoes. The shirt was too bloody and I tossed that in with the other trash, that and the guy’s underpants and socks. Wasn’t much left of them, either.”

  I opened the bag and pulled out one of the shoes and looked inside. I could just barely make out the size ten label inside. No good. I wore a size eleven. I held the suit up and checked the label inside the collar. I could fit into it if I didn’t button it up. The pants would work, too. I stuffed everything back into the bag and stood.

  “Want me to throw these away when I’m done with them?”

  Jack shrugged. “Throw ‘em away, hang ‘em up, eat ‘em, I don’t care. Just get ‘em outta here. They stink.”

  I waved. “Thanks. I’ll let you know how it goes.” I left the office and stepped back out into the parking lot. I threw the shoes into a trashcan next to the building, set the bag on the seat next to me and drove off toward the second hand shop in search of suitable accessories to go with the suit.

  The second hand shop was on Ivar and the sign over the door identified it as the ‘Second Chance Clothing Shop.’ I walked in and went immediately over to a rack of shirts. They hung there according to size. I thumbed through the shirts in the section with sizes one larger than what I needed. It might make me look hungrier if my shirt didn’t fit right. There were blue dress shirts, striped shirts, plain white shirts and short sleeve shirts. I finally found exactly the right one to make the look authentic. It probably started out as a white dress shirt but had yellowed with age and machine washings. The collar wasn’t frayed at all, but I could remedy that with a piece of sand paper. It couldn’t hurt to also rub a little extra dirt into the collar. I grabbed it.

  On a shelf near the suits I found a selection of porkpie fedoras in several colors. I decided that the brown one would go best with the suit I’d chosen. I tried on three until I found one that fit my head size. It was a little ratty around the brim and that gave it the character it needed, but then the price on it was only fifteen cents so I snapped it up.

  In the shoe section I found the perfect pair of brown lace-up oxfords. Again, my piece of sandpaper could scuff them up just right. I tucked them under my arm and headed for the sock section. The socks were rolled up in balls and I had to unroll a few pair and hold them up to my foot to get an idea of their sizes. I chose a pair of white socks that I could dirty up a little before I put them on. As for underwear, I decided no one was going to look that closely and kept my own underwear on. Somehow it just seemed like the thing to do.

  My purchases came to a dollar eighty and I walked out of there with enough vintage articles to turn me into a believable homeless person. I’d wait another couple of days and give my beard a chance to make me look scruffy before I set out in search of Dr. Conklin.

  I used the two days to drive around Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, scouting out the places most frequented by the homeless. I made notes for myself about soup kitchens and abandoned buildings as well as street corners where they panhandled or offered windshield-cleaning services on the streets. I also made a note about which businesses in the area tolerated the homeless and which ones were likely to have you run off the property. By the third day I pretty much knew where I was most likely to start looking for the elusive Dr. Conklin.

  The morning of the third day I woke up as usual and had a good breakfast, which I knew might have to last me for a while. I dressed in the last murder victim’s suit, along with the garments I’d purchased at the second hand store. Once I had the shoes laced up I checked my image in the full-length mirror and decided I could pass for a homeless man. No sense going out there completely broke, so I tucked a couple of ten-dollars bills and some singles in both shoes. I grabbed a couple of coins from the coin jar on my dresser and dropped them in my pants pockets. In the cupboard above my icebox I pulled down a bottle of Old Granddad whiskey and took some into my mouth. I gargled a while with it before spitting it into the kitchen sink. I didn’t need to be drunk to play the roll. I left my car in the garage and locked my front door, leaving the key under a rock in the garden.

  Hollywood Boulevard was just two blocks south of my house and I picked it up at Wilcox Avenue and walked west. Near the corner of Las Palmas I found a soup kitchen where a man could get a square meal. All he had to do for it was sit through a sermon by some self-righteous preacher out to try to save souls. Most of the men figured it was a small price to pay to fill their stomachs, even though quite a few of them slept through the sermon and woke up immediately following the ‘Amen’ and the call to supper.

  I walked in to find that the morning service had just concluded and the men were scrambling for their place in the food line. Long rows of tables with attached benches lined the room with seating for probably a hundred or more saved souls. I got in line behind a guy in a faded blue pinstriped suit with a brown hat. It didn’t exactly match the suit, but I was sure that somewhere there was a man in a brown suit who was missing the hat he’d let on top of a coat rack in some restaurant.

  In a minute or two I’d made it to the front of the line, where a fat man in a white apron was scooping his ladle into a large metal pot and dumping the contents into the men’s bowls. It looked like Yankee Bean soup, not exactly a staple of mine back home, but I accepted the meal nonetheless and carried it to one of the tables and sat. I’d been sitting for only a few seconds when another man stood over me, looking down at the place where I’d chosen to eat.

  “You’re sittin’ in my place,” the man said. “That’s where I always sit.”

  I looked up to see a frail old man, perhaps seventy or so, anxiously waiting for me to move. I pushed my bowl down one place and slid over. The man smiled contently as he sat in his usual place.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know it was your seat. This is my first time here.”

  The old man looked at the hat on my head. “You always eat with your hat on? Where’s your manners?”

  I snatched the hat off my head and set it on the bench next to me. The man set his hat on the bench to his left and started right in with his soup. He grabbed a couple of crackers from a bowl, crumbled them into his soup and scooped up a mouthful with his spoon. I followed his example and tried to act like this was the best meal I’d had in along time.

  “Pretty good, ain’t it?” I said, gesturing at the soup in front of me.

  The man ignored me and went right on eating.

  I turned to the man and said, “My name’s Matt. What’s your name?”

  The man scooped the last spoonful of soup from his bowl and nearly licked the spoon before upending the remaining contents of his bowl into his mouth. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and smacked his lips with a loud, “Ahhhh.” His basic need for food satisfied, he turned to me. “Clem Buchanan,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Matt.”

  I finished my soup and, trying to fit in with this crowd, wiped my mouth on my sleeve before remembering where I’d gotten the suit. I quickly grabbed a paper napkin off the table and wiped my mouth again, this time a bit more vigorously. I set the napkin down again and said, “Clem, I just got in from Fresno, me and another guy I was traveling with. We kinda got separated a couple of days ago in the railroad yard. I was wondering if you might have seen him around here. His name is Frank, but he sometimes goes by his nickname, Doc.” I gave him a quick description of Dr. Conklin. “Know anyone like that?”

  I could almost see the wheels in Clem’s head turning as he tried to recall if he’d seen anyone like that. He slowly shook his head. “No, can’t say that I do. Of course, I don’t pry into anyone else’s affairs. I mind my own business.”

  “You know anyone here who might know more of these people?” I said.

  Clem gestured with his chi
n across the room. “See that guy sittin’ on the end, the guy with the gray coat and bushy mustache? He’s the one you wanna talk to.”

  “You know his name?”

  “Only name I heard was Randolph. I don’t know if that’s his first name or his last name, but he’s been here every day that I have and maybe even before.”

  I turned to Clem. “Thanks Clem. If I can ever do you a favor.”

  I got up from the table and carried my bowl to the kitchen window and laid it on the shelf. I casually walked over to where this Randolph character was sitting and took the seat directly across from him. He looked up briefly and then concentrated on his soup again. When he looked up again he saw me still staring at him and an annoyed look crept onto his face.

  “What the hell you lookin’ at?” He said, still shoveling soup into his mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look like someone I once knew, a guy named Randolph.”

  He looked up and gave me a better look this time. “That so?” he said, “Well, I don’t know you.”

  “Couldda been another Randolph,” I said, trying to draw him out. “I guess in here everybody looks more or less the same.”

  He ignored me.

  “My name’s Matt, by the way.”

  “Good for you,” he said. “You want a medal or something?”

  I knew that if I wanted to get anything out of this guy that I’d probably have to build him up a little and work on his ego. I tried another ploy. “Word around here is that you’re a pretty important guy.”

  “I guess I am,” he said. “What of it?”

  “Oh nothing,” I said, and started to stand.

  He looked up at me and gestured with his soup spoon at my seat. “Go on, sit down.”

  I sat again and leaned in closer. I could smell the liquor on his breath even over the soup smell. “I came into town the other day with a friend of mine and we kinda got separated in the railroad yard. I wondered if you might know him.”