Frank came over to where I stood looking down at our town drunk. “She’s on probation, you know.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I know. We’re gonna have to bring her in. You bring your gloves?”
Frank shrugged, and spread his hands. “Guess we’ll just have to scrub up real good before we eat.”
We each grabbed one of her arms and half dragged-half carried her out toward the front door. The bartender stood between the door and us with his palm outstretched. “Her bar tab is a buck fifty,” he said, waiting for his money.
“Looks like she’s tapped out,” I said. “Charge it.”
I opened the back door of the cruiser and we laid her down on the seat. Frank closed the door and we both stepped back to catch our breath.
“God,” Frank said, “How can one woman get that dirty? I’ve been around three-day-old corpses that didn’t stink this much.”
“Hey,” I said, “She’s doing you a favor. You’ve been trying to drop a few pounds, haven’t you?”
“So?” Frank said.
“So you still feel like having lunch?” I asked.
Frank looked in the back seat at the passed out pile of human debris. He pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, shook his head and held onto his stomach.
I slid in behind the wheel as we left the neighborhood and drove back toward the precinct. We’d only gone a few blocks when we heard a rumbling from the back seat. Mary had come to and was trying to sit up. I looked back as she righted herself. Her eyes opened wide, blinked, opened wide again, blinked again and repeated the sequence several times before she realized where she was. Her abuse of alcohol and tobacco added fifteen years to her already rough-looking forty-five.
She got that glazed look in her eyes and smiled at me. “Hiya, Matt,” she said, her breath on the verge of igniting. “Where we goin’?”
The light turned red and I turned around to face her. “You know where, Mary,” I said. “Downtown—again. At least there you’ll get a shower and a chance to sleep it off. You never learn do you?”
“Aw, come on, Matt,” she slurred, “Be a sport and let me off at the next corner, will ya?”
The light turned green and I turned around to face the front again, trying to ignore her. The station was only a few minutes away and if I could keep fresh air coming in my open window, I might make it.
I felt something jab my shoulder and turned around to find Mary’s fingers poking through the wire divider at me. “Come on, Matt,” she said. “Let me out. I’ll do anything for ya—anything!”
I caught her image in the rear view mirror. She had opened her blouse and both of her sagging breasts hung there like a couple of fried eggs, sunny side up. I quickly shifted my gaze to a spot out the windshield and tried not to laugh out loud.
She had perfect timing, too. We’d just pulled up to the curb in front of the station and I was about to get out when I heard that familiar rumble. She picked just then to puke all over the back of the patrol car. Luckily I was already out of the car or my own vomit would have blended with hers. Luckily, mine ended up in the street. Frank’s made it to the gutter.
“Jesus Christ, Mary,” Frank snapped, wiping his chin with his handkerchief. “Couldn’t you have held that for another minute?”
Mary sat up and cried. She cried all the way into the station and all through the booking process. Her crying jag lasted until she was escorted to her cell. She’d no sooner hit the bunk than the crying stopped and she fell sound asleep.
I nudged Frank with my elbow. “Well,” I said.
“Well what?” Frank said.
“Ya gotta be hungry now,” I said, half laughing. “I mean your stomach’s gotta be just about empty. How about lunch?”
Frank looked at me and then down at Mary, asleep in her cell and then back at me. His face turned a pale shade as he held his fingers to his lips and made a dash for the bathroom. I could hear him vomiting again. A minute later he emerged from the washroom, wiping his lips with a paper towel.
“Now it’s empty,” he said.
I checked the sheets later in the week and found she’d been released. The back seat of the cruiser had been scrubbed down and aired out while Frank and I took another squad car for our rounds. We had two more encounters with Mary McGuire over the next few weeks but nothing prepared us for our last run-in with the habitual drunk.
On the morning of August eighteenth we got a call about a woman on a fire escape. The caller was a bit vague and we weren’t exactly sure what to expect when we got there. A small crowd had already gathered between two buildings on El Centro just a few blocks from Jake’s Tavern. They were looking up at the first landing of a fire escape hanging from the side of one of the buildings. As we approached, someone in the crowd looked at me, pointed up and said something about a woman.
Hanging upside down by one leg was Mary McGuire. Her blouse had fallen up toward her head, revealing several puncture wounds to the stomach. The blood had trickled along her chest, up to her head and had dripped off her nose and down onto the ground. A blackish pool of something the flies seemed to like had formed under the fire escape.
“Anybody know her?” Frank asked, already knowing her identity. His eyes scanned the crowd for someone to come forward. No one did but one woman quickly looked down at the ground when his eyes met hers. “What about you,” he said to the woman. “You know her?” He pulled out his notepad and pencil and waited.
The woman shook her head without looking up but mumbled something about Jake’s and a guy named Jesse something or other. Frank pulled her aside from the rest of the crowd. “Now, who’s this Jesse character?”
The woman looked both ways and behind her before answering. “Jesse Parker,” she said. “He lives in this building on the second floor.” She pointed to Mary’s body and said, “I saw her with him last night in Jake’s.”
Frank made notes on the paper. “When was that?” he said.
“Around twelve or twelve-thirty,” she said. “I hadda go home, but I walked right past ‘em on my way out. They was sittin’ at the bar drinkin’ real cozy like.”
Frank jotted the woman’s name, address and phone number in his note pad before releasing her. He walked over to where I was standing to compare his information with mine.
I jumped up and grabbed the first step of the fire escape and pulled it toward me. The section of iron stairs slid down and I secured it with my foot. I plucked my two-way radio from my belt and called for the coroner, Jack Walsh and a lab team to meet us on the scene.
Several minutes later a second cruiser arrived, and two uniformed officers got out. They watched over the body and kept the crowd back while Frank and I entered the apartment building.
The inside of this building made Jake’s bar look like a country club. The smell of musty lives and old garbage filled the hallway. Paint curled and peeled off the walls and ceiling and what once was a banister along the stairway was now just a set of stairs with stubs where the banister once connected to the steps. A single light bulb hanging from the ceiling shone above us. Without it we might not have noticed the graffiti that littered the walls.
There was a row of mailboxes in the lobby, some with nametags and some without. Number 207 identified itself as belonging to J. Parker. Frank and I took the stairs two at a time and positioned ourselves on either side of Jesse Parker’s doorway. I rapped on the door with my nightstick. No one answered but we could hear movement inside.
“Open up, Parker. Police,” I yelled. The inside sounds got louder and we could hear the sounds of a window sash being thrown open. Frank leaned back and kicked at the door near the handle. The door swung open and we found Jesse with one foot out the window on the fire escape and one foot in the room. His hands were raised above his head and his gaze was fixed on the gun outside his window pointing at him. Officer Jerry Burns, who had come in the second cruiser, made sure Parker wasn’t going anywhere.
I pulled Jesse Parker back into the room and pushed him back onto the
bed, turning him over as I did. I pulled a wallet out of his back pocket and eight cents out of his front pocket. He also had a bar chip good for one drink at Jake’s.
Frank slapped his set of handcuffs on Parker’s wrists and turned him around to a sitting position. Jesse Parker was thirty-five years old and like Mary McGuire, looked a lot older. His shoulder length dirty blonde hair was matted and greasy. His eyes had that same glassy look I’d seen a hundred times before in the taverns around town. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred thirty pounds. Maybe even a hundred twenty cleaned up.
We turned the prisoner over to Officer Hanson and his partner and instructed them to take Parker back to the station and book him while Frank and I continued to question neighbors.
Parker was brought in for questioning and booked on suspicion of murder. He was read his rights and brought to the booking room. His possessions were confiscated and placed in an evidence bag and labeled with his name and the case number before he was brought to the interrogation room.
“What happened, Parker?” Frank said. “What happened to Mary McGuire last night?”
Parker just smirked and said nothing. He looked around the room and then back at the empty table where he sat but still said nothing.
Frank slapped the back of Parker’s head and repeated his question. “Come on, Parker, spill it. What happened to Mary McGuire?”
Jesse Parker tried to stand up and defend himself. Frank pushed him back into the chair and grabbed a handful of hair from the back of Jesse’s head and yanked it back. Jesse’s chin pointed at the ceiling, his mouth wide open in pain. Frank released the handful of hair and wiped his hand on the back of Jesse’s shirt.
I stepped between Parker and my partner and told Frank to take a break. I sat on the edge of the table and withdrew a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, pulled one out with my lips and offered one to Jesse. He took it and I lit them both.
I poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Parker. He just looked at it suspiciously at first. “Go on,” I said. “Take it.”
Parker sipped slowly from the warm mug, puffed on the cigarette again and seemed to relax a little.
I said, “You know, Jesse, we’ve got enough evidence to put you away already.”
“Yeah?” he said, blowing smoke in my face, “Then why don’t ya?”
I slid off the table and took a chair across from him. I turned it around and straddled the seat, my arms resting on the back. “Look,” I said, “the lab has already been over your place with a fine tooth comb. They found the mop with the blood on it. You didn’t rinse it out very well. From there it was just a matter of finding some more blood that you missed when you mopped up the hallway. They also found strands of her hair in the hall so we know she was dragged out of here by her heels. You need more proof than that?”
Parker shrugged and sucked on the cigarette again.
“Those blood samples,” I said, “have been identified as belonging to Mary McGuire, so we know she was killed in your apartment and dragged down the hallway and thrown out onto that fire escape where we found her.”
Jesse took a long drag off the cigarette and blew smoke at Frank. “Sounds like you got it all, cop. What do you want from me?” Frank took a step toward Jesse before I stopped him.
“The weapon, Jesse,” I said. “We don’t have the weapon. Oh, we can make it stick without the weapon, but it’s just a quirk of mine. I hate loose ends. Look, if you cooperate and tell us where the weapon is, they might go easier on you. Whaddya say?”
“She shouldn’t have pissed me off,” Jesse said. “She had no right to call me that.”
“Call you what?” I said. “What’d she call you, Jesse?”
Jesse Parker took another drag off his cigarette before grinding it out in the ashtray. I gave him another and lit it. “We was just sittin’ there drinkin’ and I was tellin’ this broad about my mother,” Jesse said nervously.
“And?” I said.
“And all I said was how nice my mother was and how much I liked her,” Jesse said. “And she started callin’ me a ‘momma’s boy’ and makin’ fun of me.”
“Then what?” I said. Frank was still standing near the door, smirking to himself.
“Well,” Jesse went on, “I got mad at her. I couldn’t very well slap her up right there in the bar so I invited her up to my place. I told her I had another bottle of the good stuff. She followed me like a lost puppy. We drank some more and she started in again about my mother and called me a momma’s boy again so I slapped her and she threw her glass at me.”
The tape recorder on the table whirred as the reels spun, collecting the confession from Jesse Parker. “Go on,” I said.
“Like I said,” Jesse went on, “I was only gonna slap her up but she came at me, scratching and kicking and before I knew it I was stabbing her. I didn’t even realize it I was so drunk.” Parker drank some more coffee and puffed on the cigarette before continuing. “I was scared, see? So I dragged her down the hall and put her out the window.”
“We know all that,” I said. “What about the knife? Where is it?”
Jesse looked over at Frank and then back at me. He dragged on his cigarette again. “Okay, I’ll tell you where it is,” Jesse said casually. “It’s in your police department.” He let the sentence hang there and sat back smugly as if he just heard a good joke.
“In our police department?” I said. “Where in our police department?”
“It’s in my evidence bag,” Jesse said.
Frank could remain silent no longer and came over to the table, his fists clenched. “What are you, some kind of wise guy?” he said. “The evidence bag. Bullshit!”
“It’s true,” Jesse said, almost proud of having pulled one over on us. “That dumb flatfoot that booked me made me take everything out of my pockets but never checked my hands. What a rube.”
“Go on,” I said.
“He was busy writing all this stuff down on the envelope,” Jesse said. “And all the while I got my hands in the air, see?” Jesse held his hands up to show us, his fists clenched. “And all the while I got the jack knife in my fist.” He laughed defiantly. “When he turned away for a second, I slipped the knife into the evidence bag. He sealed it up in there without writing it down on the label. What a maroon.” He laughed at how clever he’d been.
I stood up and pulled Jesse to his feet. “Let’s go.”
I turned to Frank, “Would you ask the evidence room to send Parker’s envelope up right away?”
Saturday, June 5, 1943 – Hollywood, CA
Stella and I had been dating for nearly three months. She was a perfect match for me in every way and for the first time in my life, I could actually say that I was in love. When I woke up that morning I had a master plan brewing and I couldn’t wait to share it with Stella. I made two stops before I picked her up after work. The two of us drove up to Griffith Park and parked in the observatory parking lot. I walked with her up to the front door and led her inside. From there we found our way around to a door that led out to the upper walkways. The view of the city from up there was breathtaking.
We stopped at one of the highest points and stood staring down at the city. I wrapped one arm around her and drew her toward me. I pointed out at the Los Angeles Basin as some of the lights were beginning to come on. We could see downtown L.A. and beyond from up there. Below us we could see couples hiking the trails through the foothills. Stella leaned into me and turned her head. I kissed her and held the kiss for a long time. When I released her, I took a step back and dug in my jacket pocket, pulling out a small black box. I opened in so it faced her and she stared inside. A diamond ring peeked back out at her. She looked up at me and tears were welling up in her eyes.
“Stella McCarthy,” I said, pulling the ring from the box, “Will you marry me?”
She held her finger out and I slipped the ring on it. She looked into my eyes and said, “yes,” and then broke into a full-blown cry. She threw her arms around my ne
ck and kissed me again. When she’d composed herself again she held her hand out to get a better look at the ring. Then she looked up at me and said, “When?”
“Tonight,” I said and then held my breath.
“Tonight?” Stella said. “That’s impossible. There’s a wait for the blood test and the license and…”
“Not in Reno,” I said.
“But that’s five hundred miles away,” Stella said. “It would take us more than ten hours to drive that distance.”
I pulled out two airline tickets to Reno and held them in front of her face. “Not if we fly,” I said. “We can be married before the day is up. I wanted June fifth to be a day I’d remember for the rest of my life, and your life, too. So, what do you say, Miss McCarthy?”
She smiled the widest smile I’d ever seen and said, “Yes, Mr. Cooper.”
I hugged her and then checked my watch. It was going on five-thirty. “We’d better get a move on,” I said. “Our flight leaves at eight o’clock. And there’s an all-night chapel in Reno. We can be married by ten-thirty and be back on the plane by eleven-thirty. That is, unless you’d like to spend the weekend there.”
I grabbed her hand and we ran for the car. We didn’t bother stopping anywhere for anything, figuring we could buy a change of clothes in Reno if we ended up staying for the weekend. We made the plane with time to spare and sat back in our seats, giddy with anticipation.
We ended up staying just overnight in one of the many motels and took the morning flight back to Los Angeles. We spent the rest of Saturday and part of Sunday moving Stella’s things into my apartment and her furniture into storage. The following week we’d go looking at houses.
Monday, June 14, 1943 – Hollywood, CA
Jerry Patterson was a good kid. He was in his senior year of high school and working two part-time jobs. One job involved tutoring other students who needed additional help with their studies. Jerry liked that job. He liked the feeling of helping someone else get ahead. His college prep courses in high school were preparing him for the ideal job he wanted when he graduated from college. Jerry wanted to be a teacher. It gave him great satisfaction knowing that his influence on other people would help make a difference in the world.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 138