The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  And just when I thought my day couldn’t possibly get any worse. I hurried back to my desk and dialed Dan Hollister.

  “Dan,” I said. “What do you suppose the odds would be that I’d be close by when two murders happened?”

  “Two?”

  “Better come over to my office. There’s a guy lying in the hall just outside my office with a pair of scissors sticking out of his back.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You comin’?”

  “Don’t touch a thing, Matt. I’m on my way.”

  I stood out in the hall next to the body, making sure it wouldn’t be disturbed. Though I didn’t see how that could happen, being that I was just about the only person left in the building this time of night. While I waited for Dan I didn’t think it would do any harm to verify the victim’s identity. I reached into his coat and retrieved his walled and flipped it open. His license read Gerald Pike and said that he was thirty-seven years old and that he lived in Pasadena. He had twelve dollars in his wallet and that made me wonder what kind of job he expected me to do for twelve dollars. The only other thing in his wallet was a business card that read “Scrap Paper, Inc.” and the name Paul Starkey with a Hollywood phone number. I made a mental note of it and slipped it back into his wallet. I put the wallet back where I’d found it just as the elevator opened and Sergeant Dan Hollister stepped out with two uniforms following close behind.

  The three men met me in front of my office and their eyes immediately fixed on the body. Dan looked at me.

  I nodded. “Yup, he’s dead. I checked.”

  “Who is he?” Dan said.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said, not wanting to admit I’d gone through his wallet. “I’d just be guessing but I think his name is Jerry Pike.”

  “Jerry Pike?” Dan said. “Where’d you come up with a name like that off the top of your head?”

  I told him of the phone call and that I’d seen him leave the phone booth but that he never got to talk with the man.

  “Then I heard the thump and when I came out into the hall I found him right there and I called you. That’s all there is to it.”

  “This really isn’t your day, is it, Matt?” Dan said.

  “I’m starting to think I should have listened to you and gone home earlier. Pike might still be alive if I had.”

  “It could all be a coincidence,” Dan said. “But it would have to be one hell of a big coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “And what if it isn’t?” I said.

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if the two incidents are connected? I don’t see how, but what if they are?”

  Dan thought about it for a moment. “Remember I told you to stay out of the investigation involving Gladys’s death, but if you want to snoop around on this one, I don’t have a problem with it. Just make sure you keep me informed with whatever you find.”

  “I don’t know what I’d look for. Pike never did tell me why he wanted to hire me.”

  Dan picked up my phone and called the medical examiner, Jack Walsh, to come and get the body and then turned to me. “I’ll leave an officer to stay with the body until Walsh gets here. I’ve got to get back downtown. Now why don’t you close up and go home, like I suggested earlier?”

  “I think I will, Dan. I couldn’t stand one more tragedy today.”

  After Dan left I grabbed a pencil and wrote Paul Starkey’s name on my notepad along with Scrap Paper, Inc. It could wait until tomorrow. I stuck around until Jack Walsh and his men took Jerry Pike’s body away. There was no blood left in the hall to clean up. The killer must have hit the heart right away and dead bodies don’t bleed. I locked up and drove home, ready to put the day behind me. Tomorrow could only get better.

  After breakfast the next day I sat in my overstuffed easy chair and picked up the phone on the end table. I looked again at the note I’d written the night before and called Paul Starkey. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Scrap Paper, Incorporated,” he said.

  “Paul Starkey, please,” I said.

  “This is Paul Starkey. How can I help you?”

  “Mr Starkey, my name is Matt Cooper. I got your number from Jerry Pike.” It wasn’t a lie.

  “Yes, Mr. Cooper.”

  “I was wondering if I could stop by and talk to you for a couple of minutes.”

  “What’s this regarding?”

  “It’s about Jerry Pike,” I said.

  “Has he done anything?” Starkey asked.

  “Not that I know of. I just need to ask you a few questions, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Yeah, I guess I could spare a couple of minutes. You know where we’re located?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Starkey. All I got from Jerry was your name and number.”

  Starkey gave me the address in Silver Lake. I thanked him and told him I could be there within the hour. Silver Lake was a short drive just east of my neighborhood. His business turned out to be nothing more than one small office building, about the size of a single car garage. A house sat behind the office. Next to the office stood a warehouse two stories tall and probably measured thirty feet by thirty feet. The huge double door stood open and I could see stacks and stacks of bundled newspapers piled up against the back wall.

  I rang the bell outside of the office and looked around but didn’t see anyone right away. A minute later the door to the house opened and a man stepped down off the porch and came toward me.

  “Mr. Starkey?” I said as he approached.

  “I take it you’d be Mr. Cooper.”

  I nodded and extended my hand. Starkey shook it twice and let go. “I came to ask you about Jerry Pike.”

  “So you said on the phone,” Starkey said. “What is it you need to know?”

  Before I could ask the first question, Starkey held his hand over his eyes, shading them from the sun. “Come on into the warehouse,” Starkey said. “Let’s get out of this sun.”

  I followed him into the newspaper warehouse and he lowered his hand.

  “I gather from the name of your business that you do something with scrap papers.”

  Starkey nodded. “That’s right. We go through the neighborhoods and collect old newspapers once a week and when we get enough for a full load, we take them to the paper mill and they turn old newspapers into news print paper and other pulp products.” He pointed to the pile of papers behind us. “What you see here represents just two weeks worth of collecting. My trucks are due back this afternoon with half again as many bundles. By next week we’ll be making another trip to the mill.”

  “And did Jerry Pike work for you?”

  “Jerry? No. He wanted to but we had all the help we needed at the time. I told him we’d keep his name on file in case an opening came up and gave him one of my cards.”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw the card. You wouldn’t happen to know what Pike did for a job before he came to you, would you?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember,” Starkey scratched his neck. “Wait a minute. He mentioned something about having been an adjuster or something.”

  “Adjuster?” I said. “What did he adjust? Trouser inseams, adjustable rate mortgages, what?”

  “He might have said, but I guess since I wasn’t in the market for help, I probably tuned him out. I don’t know, Mr. Cooper.”

  I wrote the word, ‘adjuster’ on my notepad next to Pike’s name.

  “You said something about getting some information from Jerry,” Starkey said. “What did he say?”

  “You see, that’s the thing,” I began. “I never really met Jerry. I only talked with him on the phone for thirty seconds.”

  “Hold on,” Starkey said. “What’s this all about? If Jerry’s in some kind of trouble, I already told you he doesn’t work for me. Now you wanna tell me just what Jerry’s done that brought you to me?”

  “Jerry’s dead,” I said, waiting for a reaction.

&nbs
p; “Dead?” Starkey said, obviously shaken. “When did this happen?”

  “Yesterday,” I said.

  “How? What happened?”

  “I’m afraid he was murdered.”

  “Murdered? What? I mean, who...?

  “I don’t know who,” I said. “But it happened just outside my office in the hallway. He was on his way over to see me but he never made it. I found your card in his wallet and it was my only lead, so here I am.”

  “Lead? What are you, some kind of cop or something?”

  “More of an ‘or something’,” I said. “I’m a private investigator and Jerry was trying to hire me. For what, I never found out.”

  “Gees,” Starkey said nervously. “Wait a minute, I wonder if it was about...”

  Just then the piles of bundled papers began to move. My instinct automatically made me jump to the side, but the first thought that occurred to Starkey was to raise his hands in a useless effort to hold back the papers. The move reminded me of a deer caught in the headlights. It was a futile effort as three whole rows of paper came tumbling down on top of him. I looked up just as a man in a red and black plaid short jumped down off the paper and landed somewhere behind the stacks. I heard a door open and close and then nothing. I ran around the end of the piles and found the door. It led to an area behind the warehouse but by the time I got there, the man had disappeared.

  I hurried back into the warehouse and quickly began pulling bundled stacks of paper off of Starkey. He was buried four or five stacks deep. I saw a part of his sleeve under the papers and pulled several more bundles off before I could get to him. He lay on his back, his face a black and red mess from the newspaper print and the blood. Bubbles of blood were coming out of the corners of his mouth. More blood trickled out of one ear. He looked like he was trying to say something.

  “Don’t try to talk, Mr. Starkey,” I told him. “I’ll get some help.” I tried to stand up but lost my footing and fell down beside Starkey. We were face to face now. One last gurgle came from his mouth and then his breath came out all at once and he was silent. I stood again but was in no hurry to call for a doctor now.

  I’d never heard of anyone dying under a stack of papers, but then again before yesterday I couldn’t say that I’d ever known anyone who’d died from getting hit by a rock, either. I’d seen stab victims before in my line of work as a private detective and earlier as a cop, but never from a pair of... Then it hit me like a lightning bolt. Paper, rock, scissors. This couldn’t be a coincidence, I told myself. I had to let Dan know that I’d found not only a connection, but also the strangest connection ever.

  “Are you kidding me?” Dan said when I told him about my suspicions. “I don’t get it. Besides that stupid kids’ game, where’s the connection between the three victims?”

  I shrugged. “Hell if I know. I’m just telling you what had occurred to me and you have to admit, this is about as strange as it gets. Only two of the victims were connected; Starkey and Pike, and only then because Pike applied with Starkey for a job and had his business card on him.”

  Hollister looked at me sideways. “Now just how would you know that Pike had Starkey’s business card on him?”

  “You told me.”

  Dan shook his head. “No I didn’t. I didn’t even know about the card until we went through his wallet after they brought the body back here. So, what, are you superman or something? Do you have X-ray vision, perhaps?”

  “All right,” I admitted. “I looked in his wallet before you got to my office. So what? I’m a trained sleuth who wouldn’t be worth his salt if he didn’t check for clues.”

  Dan’s gaze burned into me for another few seconds before he turned away. “And that’s why you went to see Starkey?”

  I nodded and tried my innocent smile on him. “That’s about it. And even that connection may be a coincidence. Think about it. What if I’m the connecting thread between the three victims?”

  “You? How are you connected, except by association?”

  “No wait, Dan,” I said shaking a finger in his direction. “What if the victims just happened to be anyone seen with me or around me? Someone could be trying to discredit me or put me out of business. What better way than to let it get out that so far three people in my life, no matter how remotely connected, turned up dead? Do you think potential clients aren’t going to think twice about hiring me or getting near me?”

  Dan’s face scrunched up and she scratched his neck. “You might be onto something there, Matt. So, who’d want to see you fail in business?”

  I thought for a second. “Other private investigators looking to eliminate some competition or maybe someone who turned up in one of my investigations and they ended up going to jail. There’s always the revenge angle. Then there’s the friends or relatives of both those groups. Someone trying to help their nephew break into the P.I. business or someone exacting revenge for a loved one I put away.”

  “You really think a new P.I. is going to go to those lengths to ruin your business? How many other P.I.’s do you think there are in the Los Angeles area? He’d have to me a mass murderer or serial killer to eliminate enough people to get the job done. No, I think you can rule out the competition angle. But the revenge angle makes some sense. Why don’t you check your files? Start with your latest cases and work backwards and let me know what you find. If something turns up, I’ll give you as much help as I can.”

  Three weeks passed and no new victims turned up in my life. I’d gone through the files and couldn’t think of any past clients or suspects who’d want to see me run out of the business. A few might want to kill me, but that was expected. It came with the job. I sat there at my desk, not knowing exactly where to look next.

  The sun was coming in my office window, casting a shadow across my floor. I got up from behind my desk and walked over to my filing cabinet. I’d just pulled the top drawer open when I heard the crash and flinched. I turned around to see my window shattered with a large hole in the middle. On the floor in front of my desk I saw what looked like a potato. Upon closer examination it found it to be another rock just like the one that had killed Gladys.

  I was about to go and pick it up when another object came hurling through the open hole in my window. I sailed past my desk and stuck in the doorframe to my outer office, vibrating back and forth before stopping and just sticking there like a dart in a dartboard. It was a pair of scissors and could just as easily have stuck in me if I’d been at the window. I looked over toward the window just as the third object flew it and landed on top of my desk, sliding until it slid off the edge and landed on the floor. I looked like a baseball but as I looked closer, saw that it was a mass of paper held together with dozens of rubber bands.

  What the hell was going on here? I was three floors above the street, for crying out loud. No one could toss these items that far and with enough force to shatter my window. I stood to one side of my window and glances out quickly. Directly across the street I saw a third floor apartment with an open window. I didn’t see anyone looking back at me. I hurried out of my office and bypassed the slow elevator in favor of the steps. I took them three at a time and soon found myself at street level. I darted between the traffic and made it to the other side without getting run over.

  I found the staircase and quickly climbed to the third floor. The apartment was down a hallway and to the left. The door to the apartment that faced my office was yawning open. My .38 found its way into my hand as I cautiously entered, sweeping the room with my gun as I proceeded. The apartment was vacant and empty of any furniture. I went to the room facing Hollywood Boulevard and found the window still open. Propped up in front of the window I saw to pipes, probably and inch and a half around screwed into collars that were bolted to a metal plate on the floor. Attached between the two upright pipes were two long rubber pieces connected in the middle by a leather pouch—a large slingshot. Could work, I supposed. Obviously it did work, based on the evidence that was in my office.
r />   Lying on the floor next to this over-sized, modern day David and Goliath contraption I found a single sheet of paper. On it, in letters cut from newspapers, looking like ransom notes from past cases, I read the simple three-word message—’Paper, Rock, Scissors.’ What the hell was going on here? I needed more to go on and I was getting frustrated.

  I stood there, taking in the scene, thinking about the events of the past few weeks when I heard a sound behind me. I spun around, my .38 pointed at the sound. An old woman, probably sixty or so screamed and threw her hands over her face. I lowered my gun.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The woman spread her fingers and peeked at me through them before lowering her hands, which were shaking like a Parkinson’s victim. I took a step toward her and she stepped back, a frightened look on her face.

  “I returned my .38 to its holster and held a hand out to the woman. “Sorry,” I said again. “My name is Matt Cooper. I have the office across the street.” I pointed out the window. “Someone in this apartment used that giant slingshot there to shoot some objects through my office window. I just came over to investigate.”

  The woman started breathing easier but she still had one hand covering her heart. “Who did you say you were?” She said.

  I pulled one of my business cards out and handed it to her. “Matt Cooper,” I repeated. “My office is right across the street.”

  She grabbed my card and read it, looking back up at me suspiciously. Then she looked around the room, her gaze coming to rest on the makeshift slingshot.

  I pointed again to the window and then looked at her. “Go on,” I said. “See for yourself.”

  She timidly stepped over to the window and looked across at the hole in my office window. Then she turned to me. “How’d you get in here?”

  “The door was open when I got here,” I said. “Was someone renting this apartment?”

  “Certainly not,” she said as if I should know. “This unit has been vacant for several weeks. I don’t let anyone in here unless I’m with them.”