The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

I tossed and turned all night and got maybe three hours of sleep before the sun washed over my face through the bedroom window. I got up and tiptoed into the bathroom for my shower. I didn’t want to wake Elliott just yet. After my shower, I got dressed and ate a light breakfast. Elliott was still not up so I retrieved the morning paper from the front porch and settled in to my easy chair to catch up on the news.

  Twenty minutes later Elliott was still not up so I quietly opened his bedroom door and peeked in. His bed was messed up and the room was empty. I walked through the rest of the house, including the basement looking for him. I was alone in the house. When I walked past his laptop I saw the paper taped to the flipped up screen. It was a short note saying that he’d gone to the store for more coffee and that he’d be right back.

  I waited for the better part of an hour before I tried his cell phone number. It went directly to voice mail. He must not have turned it on yet this morning. When another twenty minutes passed I began to worry. The store was just six or seven blocks away and he should have been back long before this. I grabbed the phone and called the store where Elliott and I always went for groceries. No one there had seen him today.

  Elliott had the car and I was stuck here at the house, unless I wanted to spring for a cab. I looked out the side window at the driveway. Elliott’s car was sitting right where it always was. An internal alarm went off and I hurried outside to the car. The doors were closed but not locked. I opened the driver’s side door and stuck my head in. The keys were dangling from the ignition. That was not like Elliott to leave his keys in the car, especially in this neighborhood. I yanked them out and hurried back into the house just as the phone on Elliott’s desk rang.

  “Elliott,” I almost yelled into the phone, “Where the hell are you?”

  “Cooper,” the voice said, “Don’t talk. Just listen.”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “I said don’t talk,” the voice repeated. “If you want to see your boy alive again all you have to do is drop the Harrington case and he’ll be returned unharmed. If you persist with the case, we’ll mail him back to you in pieces. Am I clear?”

  “But…” I started to say.

  The phone went dead and I stood there looking at the receiver, as if it was going to hop out of my hand and dance the Samba. I hung it up and picked up the receiver again. I dialed Dean Hollister downtown.

  “Hollister,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Dean,” I said, “They snatched Elliott.”

  “Clay? Is that you?” Dean said. “Who did what?”

  “Dean, listen,” I said. “I just got a call warning me off the Harrington case or they said they’d kill Elliott.”

  “Are you home, Clay?” Dean said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Stay there, I’m on my way over,” Dean said and hung up.

  Twenty minutes later Dean was at my door. I let him in and we sat around the dining room table. I passed the newspaper printout over to Dean and he looked it over.

  “Peggy Harrington, the hooker in this story, is Wendell Harrington’s daughter,” I told Dean. “Did your department look into her death?”

  “ Not too deeply,” Dean said. “It appeared to be a typical hooker death in the downtown area. We don’t always spend as much time as we’d like on these kinds of crimes.”

  I looked at Dean and said, “The thought had occurred to me that maybe Peggy hooked up with a John who might have told her something he shouldn’t have and she could have gotten ambitious and tried to use it as leverage.”

  “Blackmail?” Dean said tonelessly.

  “Not like it’s a new concept,” I said. “The world’s oldest profession still carries the oldest sideline with it, and if pressure is put on the wrong John, heads are bound to roll. In this case, Peggy Harrington’s.”

  “And you think that whatever Peggy found and was ready to use for blackmail purposes, she might have told daddy about?” Dean said.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “He didn’t want to talk about it on the phone and he said it was urgent. And by the time he’d called me, his little Peggy was already on a slab at the morgue, so I have to assume that he thought they’d come after him next.”

  Dean held the printout in one hand. “Can I keep this?” he said. “I think it’s time we dug a little deeper into Peggy Harrington’s past and see what surfaces.”

  “I’m in on this, too, Dean,” I said.

  “Better let us handle this one, Clay,” Dean said.

  “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” I said. “They have Elliott and I’m not going to sit idly by while they decide if he lives or dies. This is not open for discussion.”

  Dean sighed. “Okay,” he said, “but you tread lightly. I don’t want you ending up on the slab, too.”

  “You have any problem with me looking through Harrington’s house?” I said.

  “A crew has already been through it,” Dean said. “But if you think you can do better, knock yourself out. I’ll get back to the office and see if I can find anything else in our files on the Harringtons. You keep me informed, you hear?”

  I agreed that I’d share my information with Dean and saw him to the door. As soon as he’d left, I hurried to my bedroom and pulled open the top drawer of my dresser. My .38 and holster rig was buried under the socks. I strapped it on and slipped a jacket over it and headed outside. I got in Elliott’s car and headed back to Harrington’s house. There was a yellow crime scene banner across the front door, which was more for show than to actually keep anyone out. I got inside without any problem and closed the door behind me. I skipped the obvious places that a police crew would have checked and started in Wendell’s bedroom. I went through each and every box on the shelf in his closet with no luck. There was a large cardboard box under the bed that yielded nothing of consequence. The space between his mattress and box spring was empty. As far as I could tell there were no secret compartments behind any of the walls, either. I decided to try another room at the end of the hall.

  This room had obviously belonged to Peggy. It had the usual array of stuffed animals on the shelves, a frilly canopy bed, a dressing table and stool with photos tucked in around the mirror and a closet full of fancy clothes. I went through the pockets of every garment in the closet and came up empty. The insides of all her shoes and boots yielded nothing, either. I lifted her mattress and it held the same nothing that her father’s mattress had. Exhausted, I sat on the edge of her bed and leaned my head back, breathing deeply.

  The ceiling was made up of two-foot by two-foot acoustic tiles separated by half-inch metal framework. Directly above my head I noticed that one of the tiles was not fully seated into the frame. It rose up a quarter inch in one corner. I stood up on the bed and could easily reach the tile with room to spare. I imagine Peggy had no trouble reaching it, either. I pushed up on the corner of the tile and it lifted straight up. I slid it to one side and swept my hand from side to side in the space. It hit some resistance and I was able to grab the object and pull it out.

  Bingo—Peggy’s diary. It had a lock on the cover, which as far as I was concerned could just as well have been replaced by a Velcro strip for as much good as it served. I flipped open the diary and paged through it to the last entry, dated last Friday, two days before Peggy Harrington was found dead. I backed up a couple of pages and began reading her entries. My eyes stopped when it saw a familiar name next to a dollar amount. The pieces were beginning to fall together now.

  The name in Peggy’s diary was one that could and would have access to the kind of influence and power that could keep his name out of any scandal. A man like this would undoubtedly have henchmen to carry out his orders as well. It made sense that if he thought either or both of the Harringtons had damaging information about him that their lives wouldn’t be worth three cents each. And if he thought Wendell Harrington had told Elliott any of what he knew, well, then Elliott would have to go, too.

  Hopefully Elliott would have b
een able to convince this guy that Harrington hadn’t had the chance to tell him anything yet. If they believed him, they wouldn’t have to dispose of him and wherever it was they took him, they’d have been sure to blindfold him and keep their identities secret from him.

  I took the diary, put the ceiling tile back where it was and stepped off the bed, smoothing out the bedding before leaving the room. I eased the front door open and peeked out. The street was silent and empty. I let myself out of the Harrington house and headed back to Elliott’s car. The car was still several yards away when the first shot rang out. A bullet ricocheted off the sidewalk near my feet and I instinctively jumped to one side, crouching behind the end of the porch. I dug my .38 out of the holster and waited, trying to determine where the shot had come from.

  I raised my head up an inch or two, trying to see if there was anyone coming at me. Another shot ripped a piece of the porch off just inches from my head. I backed up, stood up and fired three shots in rapid succession and then ran toward the back of the house. I found the back door and threw my shoulder against it. It popped open and I jumped inside, closing it quickly.

  My cell phone was in my jacket pocket and I fished it out, flipped it open and dialed Dean Hollister’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Hollister,” Dean said.

  “Dean,” I whispered, “I’m in the Harrington house. Someone took a shot at me and I think they’re still outside.”

  “Where are you now?” Dean said.

  “I got back in the house through the back door,” I said. “As far as I know they’re still out there around the back.”

  “Stay put, Clay,” Dean said. “I’ll have a patrol car there right away.”

  I flipped the phone shut, dropped it back in my pocket and listened. It was silent in the house and I couldn’t hear any noises outside, either. The longest four minutes of my life slipped by before I heard the wonderful sound of a siren coming closer. It stopped amid the squeal of tires and the pounding of footfalls. I could hear pounding at the front door.

  “Open up,” a low voice said. “This is the police.”

  A pounding began at the back door at that same moment. “Clay, open up. It’s Dean.”

  I threw the back door open and sighed a relief when I saw Dean. The front door burst open a second later. I could hear at least three officers in the living room. Their footsteps came closer until they found me and the other police officers in the back hallway.

  “Looks like whoever it was that shot at you is gone now,” Dean said. “You get a look at anyone?”

  “I’m afraid not, Dean,” I said. “It all happened so fast that I only had time to duck out of the way before they tried to part my hair with those shots.”

  “Someone must think you’re getting awfully close to react like this,” Dean said. “You find anything?”

  I showed him Peggy Harrington’s diary and flipped it open to the second to last page and pointed.

  Dean whistled. “So, that’s why the Harringtons were killed and Elliott was taken,” he said. “You know what this means?”

  I nodded. “It means he’s got enough influence to kill this whole investigation and everyone involved with it,” I said.

  “City councilman or not,” Dean said, “Grant Dixon is not going to get away with this.”

  Dean turned to two of his officers. “Bring Grant Dixon in for questioning,” he said.

  “But,” one of the officers started to say.

  “No buts,” Dean replied. “I want him brought it now. I want to see him in my office today.”

  The officer saluted, turned and left with another officer following close behind.

  One of the cops to respond to this call was a motorcycle cop named Mickey Ferguson, a nine-year veteran of the L.A.P.D. He turned to Dean and said, “If there’s nothing further for me here, I’m going to get back out on patrol.”

  Dean nodded. “Go on,” he said. “We can handle it from here.”

  I pointed to the diary and looked at Dean. “If that ever got out, Dixon’s career would be in the toilet.”

  “It will be anyway,” Dean said. “Even he can’t suppress this after it comes out in the murder investigations of Harrington and his daughter. He can kiss his councilman seat goodbye.”

  “Dean,” I said. “I want to be there when you question Dixon. He has to know where Elliott is being held.”

  “We have to tread lightly,” Dean said. “If he lawyers up right away we’ll get nothing. I have to come at him from another angle and then if he still balks, I’ll show him the Harrington diary. Even he’ll have to see the position that puts him in.”

  I followed Dean back to the station in Elliott’s car and parked beside his in the lot. We all met inside and I walked with Dean back to his office. A few minutes passed before Dean picked up the microphone on the stand that sat on his desk.

  “Car eleven, come in,” Dean said. No one answered. “Car eleven, do you copy?” Still no response. Dean pressed the talk button again and said, “Car seven, what’s your twenty?”

  The speaker in Dean’s office squawked and a voice came on. “This is car seven. We’re on Sepulveda approaching Sunset.”

  “Car seven, meet car eleven at Sunset and Beverly Glen,” Dean said. “Call in when you make contact with them.”

  “Car seven, copy that.”

  I sat opposite Dean in his office and waited as he read more of the Harrington diary. After a few minutes he laid the book down on his desk and looked at me.

  “Dixon’s not the only big shot in there,” Dean said. “I see a few other names of prominence that would be hurt if this came out.”

  “If?” I said. “It has to come out, no matter what the consequences.

  “You sure?” Dean said.

  “What are you getting at, Dean?” I asked warily.

  Dean opened the diary to a page somewhere in the middle and turned it around for me to see. “Right there,” he said.

  I looked at the page and was stunned to see Elliott’s name mentioned in several places along with monetary figures. I closed the book and pushed it away as thought it soiled me.

  “So what,” I said. “Elliott’s a big boy and he’s not married or in politics. There’s nothing there that could be used to blackmail him.”

  “Maybe not,” Dean said. “But what would the public think of Cooper Investigations if it was splashed all over the headlines with Elliott’s name attached to it? It couldn’t do the business any good and there’s been a Cooper Investigations ever since your dad was on the force back in the forties working under my dad. I don’t have to tell you what that would do to the Cooper name and reputation, do I?”

  I sighed. Dean had a point but I was sure that whatever happened as a result of all this coming to light, that we could weather the storm of bad publicity. The public had a short memory and at most, we’d be laying low for a few months until the heat died down. We’d be back in business in no time. Our priorities now lay with finding Elliott and getting him home safely.

  A few minutes later Dean picked up the microphone again and pressed the talk button. “Car seven, what’s your twenty?”

  “This is car seven. We have car eleven in sight but there’s no one near it.”

  “Car seven, hold your position,” Dean said. “We’re sending backup.”

  “Car seven, copy that.”

  “Come on, Clay,” Dean said. “You can ride with me.”

  In a few minutes we pulled up behind car seven near Sunset and Beverly Glen. We could see car eleven half a block away, both its doors open. Dean and I and the two officers from car seven approached car eleven and looked the situation over carefully. We followed a sidewalk up to a corporate looking building. When we got closer to the front door, I saw why car eleven had not responded. There were two uniformed officers each lying in a pool of blood. It looked as though someone had seen them coming and whoever it was had also known that the officers wore body armor because both these cops had
been shot in the head.

  All four of us drew our weapons and approached the front door cautiously. The two officers ran around the back of the building on Dean’s silent command. Dean and I waited thirty seconds and then stormed the front door. We could hear shots coming from the back of the building as we broke through the front. Footsteps and breaking glass echoed from somewhere out of sight.

  Dean signaled me to go around to the right while he went around the left. I got to the back door a few steps ahead of Dean. There were two men dressed in expensive gray suits lying in the hallway. Each man had been shot twice in the chest. The two officers who’d gone around to the back door stood there with their guns drawn and still pointing at the men they’d shot just seconds earlier. One of the officers motioned to Dean.

  “There’s still one more somewhere in the building,” he said, pointing to a stairway to my right. “He ran up there.”

  The four of us took the steps two at a time and when we got to the top of the stairs we split up in pairs. Dean and I padded lightly down a hall that ended in a dead end. The two officers went the opposite way down a hall of their own. We tried the doorknobs at each door as we passed. All were locked. The last door on the left was not. Dean signaled me and we each took up a position on either side of the door. On Dean’s signal we burst into the room, each of us pointing our guns in opposite directions.

  Sitting in a chair straight ahead of us I saw Elliott. His arms and legs had been bound to the chair and he had a gag in his mouth. His left eye was swelled shut and blood ran from his nose. When he saw Dean and me, his right eye opened very wide and it kept shifting from down to up and repeated this motion. I looked up into the rafters of this fancy office. There was some sort of string threaded through several metal eyes. It went straight down to the back of Elliott’s chair. Above, the string followed the beam to the west end of the room and then down. As I approached Elliott, he tried to shake his head and I immediately stopped and took a closer look at the string.

  I stepped lightly behind Elliott’s chair and saw that the string had ended in the pin of a hand grenade. I stepped over to where the other end of the string connected with the floor again. It too was connected to the pin of another grenade. But the grenade was also connected to a spring attached to the floor. I signaled Dean to stay clear and stay put. I tiptoed over to Elliott and pulled the gag out of his mouth.