The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  I found Sergeant Hollister in his office and walked in without knocking. Dan looked up briefly and then back down at his paperwork.

  “What is it now, Cooper?” He said without looking up.

  “Well, it’s good to see you, too, Dan,” I said. “What are you in such a pissy mood about now?”

  Dan spread his hands apart, gesturing toward the paper mess on his desk. “It never ends,” Dan said, picking up random papers and dropping them again. “The tide comes and goes, the grass keeps growing and the damn paperwork never stops. And now you drop in unannounced.”

  “I could take my business over to the two-nine,” I said. “I’m sure Captain Reynolds can use the work.”

  Dan folded his arms across his chest. “I know I’m going to regret asking, but what brings you to me?” he said.

  I sat in the visitor’s chair across from Dan. “I just came from Harry Ambrose’s office,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he was responsible for Leo Costa’s death and for the explosion and fire at Twin Palms.”

  Dan unfolded his arms. “And of course you have the proof to back up your theories.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well,” Dan said. “For a minute there I thought you were going to give me something flimsy. Let me call out the troops. I’ll get right on this.”

  “Dan,” I said. “You know it has to be Ambrose. It all adds up.” I bent my little finger back. “One, he offered to buy Twin Palms from Leo Costa.” I bent my ring finger back. “Two, Leo turns up dead; run down in the street by a stolen car.” I bent the middle finger back. “Three, he makes the same offer to Costa’s widow. And four,” I said, grabbing my index finger and shaking it, “She refuses his offer and suddenly Twin Palms blows up and burns. I’d say those are mighty long odds in case you’re even considering coincidence.”

  “Cooper,” Dan said, “Don’t you think I know all this? Don’t you think I’d love to put Ambrose away? Don’t you think we’ve tried? He’s too smart to take a personal hand in any of this. And trying to catch, let alone convict any of his associates with the crimes is like trying to catch a greased pig at a picnic. Just what do you expect me to do?”

  “Uh, your job?” I said, a touch of sarcasm poking through my words.

  “Get out of here,” Dan said. “And go back to that cushy office of yours and dangle your feet or finish your crossword puzzle. Anything, just go away, will you?”

  “And can I say I told you so when Mrs. Costa turns up dead?” I said. “She will, you know. Sooner or later Ambrose is going to remove that last stumbling block and then he’ll buy the Twin Palms lot from the estate and it’ll be too little too late for poor Audrey Costa. Can you live with that?”

  Dan considered it for a moment. He let out a deep breath and said, “You got any ideas?”

  I smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do.” I filled him in on what I had in mind and he listened without interrupting.

  When I’d finished Dan leaned toward me and said in a low tone, “If this goes sour, you don’t know me, understand? We never had this conversation and you were never here.”

  I stood and extended my hand. “You won’t be sorry,” I said. “You just sit back and play dumb and I’ll take care of everything. If the shit hits the fan, I don’t know you. But if I can pull this off…”

  “Even if you pull it off,” Dan said, “you still don’t know me. Got it?”

  I made a circle out of my thumb and index finger and left Dan’s office without further comment. What I had in mind for Harry Ambrose could solve Mrs. Costa’s problems. It could also get me killed. I needed to talk with Audrey Costa.

  I called her from a pay phone on Vine Street and asked if I could stop by her house. She agreed and I told her I could be there within the hour. She was sitting on her front porch as I pulled up to the curb in front of her house. She stood to greet me as I stepped up onto the porch. There were two wicker chairs and a small round wicker table between them. On the table were two glasses and a pitcher of what I assumed to be lemonade. She gestured toward one of the chairs and invited me to sit. Before she sat opposite me, she poured two glasses from the pitcher and handed one to me.

  “Lemonade?” Audrey said. “Fresh-squeezed this afternoon.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Costa,” I said, removing my hat and setting it on the table.

  “Uh uh,” she said. “Call me Audrey. And may I call you Matt, Mr. Cooper?”

  “Please do,” I said, sipping some of the lemonade and setting the glass back onto the table. “Now, Audrey,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about the trouble you’ve been having with Harry Ambrose and I think I may have a solution, but I’m going to need your help.”

  “My help?” Audrey said. “What can I do to help?”

  “Well,” I said, “I got to thinking about why Harry would want to buy Twin Palms after he’d blown it up and burned it down. It didn’t make any sense until I started digging around down at the county planning building downtown. It seems that Twin Palms was built partially on city property and partially on county property. Whoever allowed it to be built twenty-eight years ago must have been bought off. No surveyor worth his salt would have signed off on a plan like that. There’d be too much chance for something to go wrong down the road.”

  “Really?” Audrey said. “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?” I said.

  Audrey’s eyebrows furrowed as she recalled an incident. “A little better than a year ago there was some guy who came around and said he needed to take some measurements of the property. Leo said he could and then we never heard from the guy again. Don’t you think that’s odd, Matt?”

  “I might have if I hadn’t hung around and dug a little deeper,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Audrey said.

  “I mean I found some papers dated last year that mentioned your property,” I said. “I have a contact at city hall who helped me trace the paper trail and she told me that the county was planning to extend the highway for another twelve miles in your area. That would have brought it within a hundred yards of Twin Palms. What’s more, they had plans for an off ramp almost directly in front of your property. Now it makes a little more sense to me why Ambrose would still want your property even without the building on it. If he could buy the lot for peanuts and put up his own nightclub there, he’d clean up once the highway came in. Sure, it would have been handier for him if he could have bought the place with the building on it, but you were so adamant about not selling that he had to revert to Plan B, just the lot.”

  “Matt,” Audrey said. “Leo and I already knew about the highway coming in and I’m guessing so did Ambrose. That’s why Leo wouldn’t sell and neither would I.”

  “Audrey,” I said, “If I tell you something would you swear not to breathe a word of it to another living soul?”

  Audrey looked a little scared as she leaned in closer to me. She looked both ways to make sure we were alone and then nodded.

  I scooted my chair a little closer and leaned toward Audrey and in a low tone said, “You remember I said I had a contact at City Hall?”

  Audrey nodded again.

  “Well,” I said, “something has come up that’s going to change the plans they had for the highway. As it turns out, the geologist and the surveyor got together and compared notes on the proposed route. It seems that just a few miles out of town on a parcel of land that had been slated for highway use, the geologist confirmed that the area was rich with oil deposits just twenty-eight hundred feet below the surface.”

  “Oil?” Audrey said. “How exciting.”

  “I’ll say it is,” I said. “That tract of land is already owned by the county and they stand to make millions from the oil under that area, so naturally they don’t want to run the highway over that and miss out on an opportunity to clean up, so to speak.”

  “So what’s going to happen to the highway project?” Audrey said.

  “Oh, they’re still planning to extend the highway, only now
they have to divert it slightly so they won’t mess up their plans to drill for oil. Now instead of coming within a hundred yards of where Twin Palms sat, the diversion will bring the highway right through where Twin Palms’ bar used to sit. In other words, your property is in the way and the county can buy it for next to nothing, claiming eminent domain. When you think about it, Harry Ambrose unwittingly did you a favor by burning it down. This way you collect full value from the insurance company. If he’d left you alone, the government could have stepped in and bought it for whatever price they deemed fair, only it would have been fairer for them than for you.”

  “Can they do that?” Audrey said. “Can they just step in and take the property from me for whatever price they say?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “All they have to do is declare that the property is condemned and claim that they need the property for easement to the highway, since it is for public use.”

  Audrey thought about the implications and then said, “So I’m pretty much screwed? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “To the contrary,” I said. “No one knows about the new highway route yet. It won’t be made public for another month or so, while the country firms up the plans for the oil field that they have to put in. I only heard about it through my City Hall contact. That’s why it is imperative that you say nothing about this to anyone. And you have to let Ambrose think that he’s worn you down or scared you into selling. You can ask more for the lot than it’s worth and he’ll still pay it, because as far as he knows, the highway is still going to come within a hundred yards of the lot. He’ll figure he can make his money back ten times over once he puts up the club and the highways comes in. Only we’ll know better, so we have to act fast.”

  Audrey smiled for the first time since her husband had been run down and killed. “What do we do first, Matt?”

  “Leave the first part to me,” I said. “I’ll contact Ambrose and give him a story about you telling me you want to sell the lot. I’ll tell him that I’m going to talk you out of it unless the price is high enough to make up for your trauma over having the place burned down. I’ll wing it from there but I’ll keep you informed about everything that’s said so we can both keep our stories straight. You game?”

  “You bet, Matt,” Audrey said. “Go get the pigeon and we’ll pluck him together.”

  I finished the lemonade in my glass, set it back on the table and grabbed my hat. I nodded, smiled and stepped back off the porch and drove back to my office to set the wheels in motion.

  Back at my office, I hung my hat and coat on the rack. I picked up the phone and dialed Harry Ambrose at the Pot O’ Gold nightclub. The phone rang twice before Harry answered.

  “Pot O’ Gold,” Harry said. “Harry Ambrose here.”

  “Ambrose,” I said in my best straightforward business voice. “It’s Matt Cooper. Remember me?”

  Harry’s voice changed immediately. “Cooper, you’re a dead man, you hear me?”

  “Hold on, Harry,” I said. “You might want to hear me out before you decide my fate.”

  “You got nothin’ to say that I wanna hear,” Ambrose said. “Except maybe your prayers.”

  “You want the Twin Palms property or not,” I said.

  Harry calmed down considerably. “I’m listening.”

  I shifted in my chair. “After I left your place I paid a visit to Audrey Costa just to let her know what was going on and that I’d been to see you.”

  “So?”

  “So I tried to convince her not to sell to you just out of spite, out of a sense of justice and fair play and all that.”

  “And what did she say?” Ambrose said.

  “She actually surprised me,” I said. “I could see the fear in her eyes and it got to me. By the time we’d finished talking she told me that she just wanted to move away from California altogether and try to pick up the pieces of her life and move on.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Cooper,” Ambrose said. “You wanna cut to the chase and get to the part where I’m interested?”

  “I’m getting there,” I said. “She wants to sell, but she also doesn’t want to be taken advantage of by you or anyone else. She’s set a price that she wants for the lot and it’s firm. If you’re still interested you can have first chance at it, otherwise it’ll be listed in tomorrow’s real estate section of the L.A. Times. So what’ll it be?”

  I could hear a muffled sound, like Harry had clamped his hand over the mouthpiece and was barking orders at someone near him. He came back on the line after a few seconds.

  “What’s her price?” Ambrose said.

  “We’re talking prime real estate here,” I said.

  “The price, Cooper,” Harry repeated.

  “And it’s almost a full five acres with a paved parking lot and…”

  “The price,” Ambrose barked.

  “Fifty-five thousand,” I said. “And for that price you have to clean up the burned mess left on the lot. Seems only fair considering.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Ambrose said. “I can buy five acres lots in town all day for thirty grand. Why should I pay fifty-five for this one?”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “That sounded high to me, too, but then again, I’m not the one who lost a husband and a thriving business and we both know why, don’t we, Ambrose?”

  “You tell her…”

  “I’ll tell her to call the L.A. Times classified section as soon as I hang up, unless you want to exercise your right of first chance to buy. I don’t have all day. The classified section is closing in twenty minutes. If you take more than ten minutes to give me an answer, you can just compete with the other people who read the ad and decide to put in their bids.”

  Ambrose hesitated for three seconds and then said, “Oh, all right, you crooks. Tell her I’ll take it.”

  “And that’s cash,” I added. “No checks, no escrow, no closing costs and she wants it by noon tomorrow. If that’s acceptable, well, then we’ll arrange a meeting place and exchange your fifty-five thousand for the deed. Can you handle those terms or not?”

  “I’ll have it by noon tomorrow,” Harry said. “And you better be there with her and the deed.”

  “I’ll call her now and tell it you’re buying it,” I said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow at eleven thirty and let you know where the transaction will take place. Oh, and one more thing, Ambrose.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You come alone,” I said. “If we see any of your muscle around the deal’s off and we’ll just walk away. You come unarmed and you come with just the fifty-five grand in a briefcase. And just so you know, I’ll be armed, just in case you’re thinking of trying anything. If that happens, I’ll leave you there dead and take the money anyway for my troubles. So it would be in your best interest to follow my direction to the letter. That way everyone comes out a winner. Be at your phone tomorrow by eleven thirty.”

  I hung up and immediately called Audrey Costa to fill her in on tomorrow’s chain of events. I told her I’d come by to pick her up in twenty minutes.

  “Why so soon?” She said.

  “I don’t want Ambrose getting any ideas about visiting you himself,” I said. “I don’t trust him one little bit.”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said and hung up.

  I slipped into my coat and hat and headed downstairs again. I drove the three and a half miles to Audrey Costa’s house and found her still sitting on the porch. The pitcher and glasses had been removed and he was just sitting there watching the traffic go by. She was wearing a coat and clutching her purse and when she saw me she stepped down off the porch and hurried over to my car. I opened the passenger side door and she slid in next to me.

  “Got the deed with you?” I said.

  She patted the side of her purse. “He must really want that property bad,” Audrey said, “if he’s willing to comply with all our terms.”

  “Oh, and one more thing, Audrey,” I said.

&n
bsp; “What’s that?”

  “After we exchange his money for your deed,” I said, “I know it’ll be tempting to rub his face in it, but it’s important that you don’t say a word about the new highway plans. Part of fleecing this guy is letting him simmer for a while and think that he’s gotten the best of you. Then if you really do want to leave the state and start over, you’ll have a longer head start. We don’t want him coming after you once he finds out that the government is going to steal those five acres away from him for around twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Twenty-five hundred?” Audrey said. “Five hundred an acre?”

  “That’s about the going price for condemned property,” I said. “Of course he won’t know that for another month and by then you can be long gone.”

  “What about you?” she said. “Won’t he come after you when he find out?”

  “Let him,” I said. “I can handle guys like Harry Ambrose. Besides, I can always claim I had no idea the highway route had changed. No one will know for another month.”

  Audrey absorbed all this and then turned to me. “And where am I staying tonight, Matt?”

  “You’re coming home with me,” I said. “I have a guest bedroom and you’ll be safe there.”

  She patted me on my hand. “Thank you, Matt. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you.”

  I laughed. “You’ll get my bill,” I said. “I get thirty dollars a day and so far you’ve racked up more than sixty dollars. Think you can handle that?”

  “With a bonus,” she said and laughed along with me.

  The next morning I was up early and had the eggs and bacon sizzling in the pan when Audrey came into the kitchen. She pulled out one of my chairs and sat at the table, rubbing her eyes.