The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  “You will,” I said. “I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.” I rushed out the door without even stopping to grab my hat.

  As soon as the door closed, McDonald rose from the client’s chair and stepped over to the coat rack. He plucked Matt’s hat off the hook and plopped it on his head. He practiced taking it off with a flourish and then putting back on again. He walked over to the window, still wearing the hat and looked down onto Hollywood Boulevard. He saw Matt dash around the corner and knew he still had a minute or more to play the role of Matt Cooper, Private Eye before the real Matt returned. Kevin sat in Matt’s chair, swiveling it back and forth and then swiveling it into one complete circle. Finally he stopped, faced the desk, picked up the phone and pretended to be me speaking to an imaginary client.

  “Cooper Investigations,” he said into the dial tone. “Matt Cooper speaking.”

  The door to the office opened and a large man in a blue pinstriped suit stepped in. “Hello, Mr. Cooper,” the man said to McDonald. “I told you I’d be back.”

  “But I’m...” Kevin started to say.

  I rounded the corner and found the hot dog stand closed up. Mike was standing next to it, holding my wallet out toward me. I took it from him, tucked it into my pocket and thanked him.

  “Gotta run,” Mike said. “Catch you later, Matt.” Mike got into a Chevy sedan and pulled away from the curb.

  I hurried back around the corner and nearly collided with a large man in a blue pinstriped suit.

  “Excuse me,” the man said in a low throaty voice.

  “Excuse me,” I said in return.

  We’d bumped shoulders and stopped momentarily, realized neither of us was hurt and continued on our ways.

  I rode the elevator to three and hurried back to my office. As I opened the door a familiar smell wafted past my nose. It was cordite. Kevin McDonald sat at my desk, wearing my hat and sporting a new hole in his head right between his big blue, horrified eyes. I pulled my .38 out from under my arm and quickly looked around the room. Kevin and I were alone. I stepped over to where he sat in my chair and pressed two fingers to his neck. As I suspected, there was no pulse. Kevin clutched the phone receiver in his left hand, the annoying pulsing sound cutting through the silence. I tried pulling the phone out of his hand but his dead hand held tight to it. I peeled each finger away, one by one, before the phone would come free. I hung it up, waited a couple of seconds and then put it to my ear, listening for the dial tone.

  I dialed my friend at the twelfth precinct, Sergeant Dan Hollister, and got his secretary, Hannah.

  “Sergeant Hollister’s office,” Hannah said.

  “Hannah, it’s Matt. Is Dan in today?”

  “He was just here,” Hannah said. “Let me see if I can find him. Hang on a minute?”

  I said I could and waited. I glanced down at the client who’d never be able to pay my fee and winced.

  Hannah must have simply laid the phone on her desk because I could hear footsteps in the background. The got louder before Hannah came back on. “Hold on, Matt. I found him,” and put me on hold this time. A second later Dan came on the line.

  “Hollister,” Dan said in his official-sounding voice.

  “Dan.” I said. “It’s Matt.”

  “Matt Who?” Hollister said.

  “Matt Dillon,” I said. “How many Matt’s do you know?”

  “Matt, I’m a little busy,” Dan said.

  “Too busy for murder?” I said.

  “Cooper, what did you do now?” Dan said.

  “It wasn’t me,” I explained, but I think I was the intended victim. Can you come over to my office right away?”

  “Can’t you just come here?” Dan said.

  “I would,” I explained, “but it would be a little hard having to drag this corpse with me all the way downtown.”

  “Corpse?”

  “In my chair,” I said.

  “Stay put, Cooper,” Dan said. “We’re on our way.”

  “We?”

  “I might as well bring Jack Walsh with me,” Dan said.

  Jack was the county medical examiner. I’d worked with him on several occasions in the past.

  “I’ll be here,” I said and hung up.

  I took another quick look at McDonald’s face, trying to see any similarity between us. He was wearing my hat and sitting at my desk. The killer could have peeked in, made the wrong snap decision that it was me sitting there and put one between his eyes. I wasn’t gone that long and I didn’t see anyone in the hallway. Wait a minute; there was the big guy in the street that bumped shoulders with me on my way back to my office. He could just as easily been running from my building. I was still around the corner at Mike’s hot dog stand and couldn’t have seen where he ran from. I tried to conjure up a mental picture of the man I’d seen for only a second or two at the most. His face wasn’t coming to me.

  I turned back to McDonald and was about to pluck my hat off his head but thought it would be more of a clue right where it was. I lifted McDonald’s chin to get a better look at his face. When I lifted him I could see under the rim of my hat. Blood had spattered up under the rim. Oh great. I’d just had a bullet hole repaired last month and now this. It’s my favorite hat and I didn’t like to be without it, but I was sure Hollister would take it with him as evidence of a case of mistaken identity. I’d have to pick myself up another hat soon. No two ways about it.

  It seemed like an hour had passed since I’d called Hollister, but a quick glance at my wall clock assured me that only twelve minutes had passed. I heard the elevator clunk to a stop on my floor and then I heard multiple footsteps approaching. I looked at the second hand on my watch and said to myself, “Three, two, one…” And the door to my outer office opened. A second later Dan opened my inner door and stepped inside, followed by Jack Walsh and two uniformed officers. Behind the two officers were two of Walsh’s men, pulling a gurney behind them.

  I closed my door and looked at Dan and the instant crowd that had come with him. “You sure this is everybody?” I said.

  Dan ignored me and stepped right over to my desk to get a better look at the corpse in my chair. Dan crouched to get a better look at the face, stood, turned to me and looked at my face. “Long lost brother?” He said.

  “No relation at all,” I said. “Met him for the first time less than half an hour ago. Said he wanted to talk to me about something. We came up here, I had to go back down to Mike’s hot dog stand to get my wallet. Wasn’t gone more than two minutes. When I came back up I found him just like that.”

  “Well,” Dan said. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that someone thought they’d killed you.”

  “That thought had occurred to me as well,” I said. “Not the most comforting thought in the world, but I had it nonetheless. I’d say my absent-mindedness saved my hide this time.”

  “Huh?” Dan said.

  “Hey,” I said, “if I hadn’t left my wallet laying on the hot dog counter, that would be me sitting there with a third eye.”

  Dan scanned the room, looking at the two morgue attendants, the two officers and Jack Walsh. He looked at Walsh but when he spoke, his words were directed at everybody in the room. “Someone thinks they’ve succeeded in killing Matt Cooper here. And we want to go on letting him think that, so I want to tell each of you that this discovery does not leave this room. Is that clear?”

  The two officers answered immediately. “Yes, sir,” they said almost in unison.

  Dan turned to Walsh’s men and raised one eyebrow. “Yes, sir,” they said.

  “Mum’s the word,” Walsh added. “But why, Dan?”

  Dan looked at Walsh. “Because,” he said, “if the killer thinks he got away with it, he may slip up somewhere down the line or brag about it to someone. We have eyes and ears all over town and all he has to do is mention it within earshot of just one of our informants. It’ll make our job of catching him that much easier, so this doesn’t go any further, okay?”

&
nbsp; Everyone nodded in agreement. Dan turned to me. “That means you’re gonna have to lay low for a while. It wouldn’t do our cause any good to let it leak that you’ve been killed only to have someone see you walking around healthy, now would it?”

  “I know you’re right about this,” I said. “But I’d like to see this guy caught as much as you would. There has to be something I can do to help.”

  “Staying out of sight will help me, Matt,” Dan said. “Can you do that much for me? Otherwise I’ll have to take you into protective custody and I know you don’t want that.”

  I held up both palms toward Dan. “No I don’t. All right, I’ll go home and stay out of sight, but you keep me up to date on your progress.”

  “I can do that much for you, Matt,” Dan said. He turned toward the corpse and noticed Walsh checking for vital signs. Jack turned back and shrugged. “Gotta do it, Dan. Wouldn’t be official if I didn’t declare this man dead at…” He looked up at the wall clock. “…Twelve sixteen.” He made a note of the time on his clipboard and jotted down the location where the victim was found. Jack flipped the papers back down on the clipboard and said, “I can fill in the rest back at the office.”

  Jack gestured to his two assistants, who lifted the body out of my chair and onto the gurney, pulling the sheet over McDonald’s face. They wheeled the gurney out of my office, followed by the two officers.

  Dan turned to me and said, “I’ll pull my cruiser around to the back door. You meet me there and I’ll drive you home. Pull your shades and stay quiet inside. Okay?”

  I nodded agreement and rode the freight elevator down to the back door while Dan took the passenger elevator to my lobby and walked out to his patrol car. By the time I opened the back door to my building Dan was pulling up in his car. He looked around the area, didn’t see anyone and motioned for me to come out. I slid in beside him and sat low in the seat as Dan drove me home.

  Dan kept looking straight ahead as he questioned me about McDonald. “So you never did find out why he wanted to see you?”

  “Never got to word one,” I said. “By the time I got back he was dead.” I remembered the big guy I bumped into on the way back. “But I did run into a guy on the street that seemed a little peculiar.”

  “The guy was peculiar?” Dan said.

  “Well,” I said, “not so much that the guy was peculiar, but running into him at that particular time and at that particular place, that’s what was peculiar. He just seemed to be running from something and I couldn’t swear to it, but he may have come out of my building.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “You mentioned that earlier. What made you think of it again?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to picture the guy’s face in my mind. I mean I looked right at him for a split second and you think I could remember what he looked like now? Hell, it might have been nothing more than me not looking where I was going. The guy might be just another guy that was walking fast for all I know.”

  Dan pulled into my driveway and looked over his shoulder at my immediate neighborhood. It was clear. He nudged me with the back of his hand and I slipped out of his car and closed the door. The window was open and I leaned over.

  “Keep me in the loop, now,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dan said, backing out of my driveway and driving away.

  I walked around to my back door and let myself in. I immediately walked around the house pulling shades and drawing curtains closed. I sat in my overstuffed chair and untied my shoes, kicking them off. I put my feet up on the coffee table and grabbed the paper off my end table. I flipped the paper open to the comics and went immediately to The Katzenjammer Kids. They were my favorites. Little Orphan Annie was my second favorite. When I finished the comics I turned to the entertainment section and noticed that Key Largo was playing several times today. There was one showing at twelve forty-five. I glanced at my watch. It was nearly one o’clock, too late for that one. The next showing was at two-forty. I laid the paper down open to that page and went into the kitchen for a cup of juice. It was still too soon after my two hot dog lunch for any more food, but the juice just appealed to me. I brought it back to my chair, set it on the end table and continued with my paper.

  I turned to the city beat section, where I usually looked to see what was happening in my own town. There was an article about a woman who had crossed the street on a red light and had been sideswiped by a bakery truck. She’s be all right, the article went on to say, but the accident played havoc with her taste buds. She claimed she could no longer taste anything sweet. The owner of the bakery truck offered her free donuts for life as a partial settlement, but she declined, saying that if she couldn’t taste them, then it wasn’t much of a settlement. They ended up paying her medical bills and giving her an additional thirty-five hundred dollars.

  Further down the page I spotted an article concerning a shooting in Hollywood. All right, I thought, a meaty story that I could sink my teeth into. It turned out not to be when I discovered that Harold Blake had shot himself while cleaning his hunting rifle. He’d live, the article said, but any dreams he may have had about pitching for the Yankees went out the window with his shoulder wound. I guess Harold would have to be content with his job delivering baby diapers around the neighborhood.

  It must have been a slow news day because nothing else of consequence happened around here. I laid the paper down and stepped over to my console radio. I flipped it on, waited for the tubes to warm up and then twisted the dial until I found that familiar voice I’d grown accustomed to over the years. It was George Burns trading quips with his wife, Gracie Allen. Next to Jack Benny’s program, it was my favorite radio show.

  I sat back down and was soon lulled to sleep by the sounds of the radio. When I woke up I blinked a few times, wiped my mouth and glanced at my watch. It was quarter after three. It struck me that I’d missed the second showing of Key Largo. There wouldn’t be another until four thirty and I was already getting restless as a prisoner in my own home.

  I went into my closet and pulled my spare .38 off the shelf. I took it along with the one in my shoulder holster to the kitchen table. I laid yesterday’s paper down, laid the two revolvers on top of it and retrieved my gun cleaning kit from the cabinet under the kitchen sink. I emptied the shells out on the table and began running the cleaning rod down the barrel of my backup piece. When it looked clean enough I started in on each cylinder. I’d only gotten two cylinders cleaned when my phone rang. I picked it up and listened without speaking.

  “Matt,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Dan.”

  I breathed easier. “Yes, Dan,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” Dan said. “Just wanted to let you know that Walsh finished the autopsy on your client. Looks like your guy bought it with a slug from a .22 Smith and Wesson. The bullet was quite a bit deformed, but there was enough there for a positive caliber make as well as the manufacturer.”

  “A .22, huh?” I said. “Sounds like a professional job.”

  “They use the .22 so the bullet will stay inside and bounce around,” Dan said. “Creates maximum damage that way.”

  “Find out any more about the man?” I said, remembering that I’d forgotten all about going through the man’s wallet while he was still in my chair.

  “Just the bare minimum,” Dan said. “Kevin McDonald, thirty-five, five-ten, brown, brown, no distinguishing scars or marks. You know, the usual.”

  “What about his address?” I said. “Anything jump out at you there?”

  “Nothing,” Dan said. “He lived in the valley and worked in Burbank at a Chrysler dealership. Single, no wife or kids to get in the way. I have a couple of my men going through his house now, looking for a connection to anything. Right now, he’s Mister John Q. Normal Citizen with nothing to show for his thirty-five years of taking up space on this planet.”

  “In other words,” I said, “no reason for anyone to want him dead.”

 
; “Another case of being in wrong place at the wrong time,” Dan said.

  “That and the misfortune to look enough like me to take a bullet,” I added.

  “There is that,” Dan agreed. “So, are you enjoying your solitude at home?”

  “This really stinks,” I said. “I’m so bored now I’m cleaning my guns.”

  “That is boring,” Dan said. “What’s next, vacuuming the floor and dusting the blinds?”

  “Was there anything else you wanted?” I said. “Otherwise I have dishes in the sink that need cleaning and I could stand to do a load of wash. So if there’s nothing else...”

  “Nope,” Dan said. “That’s all I have. You have fun now, Suzy Homemaker. Don’t forget to...”

  I hung up the phone and sighed. I’d never been this bored in all my life. I got back to the kitchen table and finished cleaning my revolvers. I slipped my main piece back into my shoulder holster, slipped out of that and hung it on the coat rack. My backup piece went back on the closet shelf. By the time all that was done, it was just past four o’clock. I hurried into my bedroom and slipped out of my brown suit and into a pair of jeans, a plain white tee shirt and a pair of sneakers. I slipped my shoulder holster back on and covered it with a lightweight jacket, zipping up far enough to conceal my holster. I had a blue baseball cap from my days on the force. I often wore this same outfit when I had worked under cover.

  Then I remembered something else from my plain-clothes days. I opened a small brown wooden box on my dresser and withdrew a bushy brown mustache and a small bottle of adhesive. I brushed some of the adhesive onto the mustache and applied it to my upper lip, adjusting it until it looked just right. Lying in that same box was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with black frames and plain glass for lenses. Along with the phony mustache it usually did the trick of transforming me from private eye to ordinary guy. I checked out my image in the mirror and when I was satisfied that my own mother wouldn’t recognize me, I stepped out my back door and opened the garage. I backed my Olds out and closed the garage door again. It took me only six minutes to pull into the parking lot behind the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.