The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

“That’s almost twenty-six grand in an hour,” Hollister said, comparing his notes with the earlier holdup. “It sure beat’s minimum wage.”

  “This guy’s sleigh must really be able to fly,” Anderson said. He knew how silly that sounded as soon as the words left his mouth.

  Hollister’s face had the same question on it. “There’s no way he could have made it here in twenty minutes, unless…”

  “Unless there are two of them,” Anderson said, finishing Hollister’s sentence. “Gotta be. There’s no other way.”

  Hollister scratched the back of his neck. “Let’s get back to the precinct and see if we can get lucky with the files.”

  As Dean Hollister and Eric Anderson walked toward the records room, Dean friend, private detective Clay Cooper approached from the opposite direction.

  “Dean,” Clay said, stopping in the hallway and extending his hand. “I was just coming to see you. Are you in the middle of something?”

  “Actually,” Dean said, “Eric and I are trying to track down a couple of Santa Claus bank robbers. Can this wait?”

  “I guess it could,” Clay said. “Is there anything I can do to help? Elliott and Gloria are back at the office trying to straighten our own files out. Gloria pulled the top drawer out too far and the cabinet tipped over. I decided to get out of there for a while.”

  “Don’t offer you help unless you want me to put you to work,” Dean said.

  Clay smiled at the prospect of having something to occupy his morning. “Lay it on me,” he told Dean.

  Dean and Eric continued walking down the hallway toward the records room. Clay followed close behind. When they got into the room, Dean opened a drawer to one of the many file cabinets in there and pulled out a handful of file folders and handed them to Clay.

  “Here you go, Clay,” Dean said. “You can start with these. Eric and I will grab a stack of our own. We can all sit here at this conference table.”

  “And just what are we looking for?” Clay said.

  Dean and Eric sat across from Clay, each with a sizeable stack of file folders open in front of them. “We’re looking for bank robbers with the same M.O. as the ones who are working the city today. They’re dressed like Santa Clause when enter the bank and hold it up.”

  The three men scanned their respective piles of file folders, looking for any with a similar mode of operation. It took just eight minutes before Eric Anderson said, “I think this might be one of them,” he said, handing his file to Hollister. The file contained a long rap sheet for a known bank robber named Frank Sullivan, 45, brown, brown, six-one, one-ninety-five with a scar across his nose.

  A few minutes later Clay pulled a record from his stack and held it up. “This looks like another possible,” Clay said, handing the file to Hollister.

  Hollister looked at the file and then over at Eric. “Didn’t you just hand me this one?”

  Eric looked at the name on the folder and then looked at the folder he’d pulled from his pile. “Two Frank Sullivans?” he said.

  Hollister took a closer look at the second file. “This second one is for a guy named Frank L. Sullivan,” Hollister said. “The first guy didn’t have a middle initial. Here, look at the photos. Different age, different height and weight, different color eyes. Looks like all they have in common is the name.”

  Hollister finished his own stack but came up empty. He looked at Eric and Clay and said, “That’s all of ‘em. I’ll take these two and run off several copies and pass them out to the day watch commander. These two clowns are bound to slip up sooner or later.” He looked at Eric. “We’d better get back out there and try to locate these two.”

  Clay looked at Dean and said, “What about me? I want to be there when you catch them. Do you have any problem with me riding along with you this morning?”

  Dean exchanged looks with Eric, who nodded. Dean turned back to Clay and said, “Sure, you can ride with us this morning. Let’s get going.”

  At the Midtown Savings and Loan near Pico and Crenshaw, Santa’s sleigh, a rusty 1977 Plymouth Volare’ sedan, that may at one time have been the pride of the Plymouth dealer’s showroom two decades earlier, pulled into the parking space marked ‘reserved.’ Santa shut off the ignition and emerged, kicking at the car whose engine continued running several seconds longer. He pulled up his sagging red pants and stuffed a revolver into the belt of his inner jeans before pulling his red coat down over the pearl grip and walking briskly into the building.

  Behind the last window, a teller smiled and said, “May I help you, Santa?”

  Santa sidled up to the window and shoved a small cloth bag at the clerk. Under his breath he softly said, “Put the money in the bag and be quick about it.”

  The clerk laughed. “Christmas Club account, eh?” she said. “Where are your elves, Santa?” She laughed. “Are your reindeer waiting outside with the sleigh?”

  Santa pulled the pistol from his belt and let the clerk see it. He repeated, “Put the money in the bag or I’ll blow your damned head off. Ho, ho, ho.”

  The smile quickly left the clerk’s face as she rifled through her cash drawer, grabbing stacks of wrapped money. She stepped on the silent alarm as Santa nervously looked around, waiting for the bag of cash to be passed back to him.

  “Come on, come on,” Santa said impatiently.

  Outside, in the space next to Santa’s Volare, a turquoise blue and primer gray station wagon came to a stop. A second man, also dressed as Santa, stepped out onto the sidewalk, adjusting the revolver in his belt. His right boot had mud on it. He entered the Savings and Loan and quickly took up his position at the first window.

  The clerk at the first window took one look at the second Santa and whispered to him, “I hope the kids don’t see you both at the same time.”

  “Huh?” The second Santa grumbled.

  “You know, two Santas,” she said. “It could get confusing.”

  The second Santa’s head turned toward the last window where the first Santa was completing his withdrawal transaction. The first Santa, moneybag in his left hand, turned toward the second Santa with a snarl. Both Santas pulled their pistols and took reckless aim at each other before pulling their triggers several times each.

  Both clerks and several customers screamed as the two Santas fell in their prospective pools of blood. The first Santa died instantly from a carelessly placed .38 slug that hit him between his left eye and left ear. It exited near his right temple. Red streams ran down his face and into his beard, matting it against his chin. The second Santa had taken two slugs in the chest and the streaming blood was barely noticeable against the red suit until it ran down onto the white fur-trimmed cuff. He was still laboriously breathing when the front door opened and detectives Hollister and Anderson entered, their own guns drawn. Clay Cooper had his own .38 in hand as he followed the two detectives into the bank.

  Clerks and customers were crouched on the floor, some cowering, and some sobbing uncontrollably. Hollister and Anderson held their badges up for the clerks and customers to see. “Police,” Hollister shouted. “Everyone please stay right where you are.”

  Sergeant Anderson holstered his .38 and stepped over to the teller’s cage. Hollister carefully stepped over to the first Santa while Clay approached the second. Both men kicked the two Santas’ guns clear before kneeling down to get a closer look. Hollister knelt next to the Santa with the third eye. “This one’s had it.” He said, pressing two fingers into the man’s neck. He pulled the hat and beard off the first Santa and said to Blake, “It’s Jimmy Pullman, dead as a mackerel. Who do you have there?”

  Clay Cooper pulled the hat and beard off his dying Santa, the one with the muddy boot. It was another familiar face—Frank L. Sullivan. At least that’s who it looked like. There were two Frank Sullivans in Hollister’s files. One used a middle initial and the other did not. It was hard to tell them apart at first glance and even Hollister often got them confused. Clay called back to Hollister, “It’s your old buddy,
Frank L. Sullivan.”

  Santa lifted his head and licked his lips. If he was going to leave this world, he was determined to leave with the correct identity. He looked up at Clay and used his dying breath to utter, “No L.” Santa laid his head down and breathed his last.

  Clay looked back down at the dead Santa. “And a Merry Christmas to you, too, dirt bag.”

  63 - Classified Information

  I had another ten minutes before I had to leave for work and still beat Gloria to the office. I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of having anything to hold over me, as she liked to do. Not that we had any kind of competition going on, it’s just that being her boss, I liked to set a good example for her to follow. Then, if I need to, I can reprimand her for coming in late, if the occasion arose.

  I finished my last sip of coffee and swallowed my last morsel of toast and was headed for the front door when my laptop signaled me that I had just received a new email. There was still plenty of time to check it so I took a seat at my desk and hit a key to wake up the monitor screen. I clicked on the email icon and opened my inbox. There was a new email from someone who had identified themselves as Mr. Jordan. I had been talking to Bentley Jordan two days ago regarding a possible job that he wanted Cooper Investigations to look into.

  I clicked the heading of the email only to find out that this Mr. Jordan was a man from The Netherlands who wanted me, specifically, to help him get fifty million dollars out of his country by allowing him to transfer said money into my personal bank account. And all I had to do to earn my ten percent was to give him my bank routing number along with my account number, birth date, social security number, home address and phone number. Then he asked that I return forty-five million dollars to him when he arrived in this country and that I could keep the remaining five million dollars for my troubles.

  Yeah, that’s going to work out just fine. How stupid did these people think we Americans were? I was almost tempted to fill his request with bogus numbers and other information just to see what he’d do next, but it would be a total waste of my time. I shook my head and mumbled something about how much simpler life was before the World Wide Web. When I looked at my watch again, I realized that I was now running five minutes behind schedule. I closed the cover on my laptop and hurried out to my car.

  I rode the elevator to the third floor and walked to the end of the hall. I tried the doorknob to my office and it was locked. Good, I had still managed to beat Gloria to work and wouldn’t have to sit through a lecture on promptness from her this morning.

  I slipped my key in the lock and twisted the doorknob. I stepped inside and turned around to find Gloria sitting on the leather sofa against the wall. She had her bare left wrist raised to eye level, pretending to look at her imaginary wrist watch. She tapped the top of her wrist and held it to her ear. She lowered it again and repeated the tapping motion.

  “My watch must have stopped,” she said in mock sincerity. “What time do you have, Elliott?”

  “What did you do?” I said. “Lock the door behind you when you came in this morning?”

  Gloria didn’t answer. Instead she just smiled. “And now you can see firsthand that try as you may and with all the best of intentions, sometimes you just can’t get to work on time. Know what I mean?”

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. “I won’t even waste your time with a story about being stuck in traffic,” I said. “Truth of the matter is that my laptop dinged and a new email came in for me this morning. It said it was from Mr. Jordan. You remember Bentley Jordan? He’s the guy who wanted to hire us to find his missing uncle.”

  “That reminds me,” Gloria said.

  I held up one finger. “Hold that thought until I finish my story,” I said. “Anyway, the email was from some other Mr. Jordan.” I explained the content of the email I had received.

  “Are those things still circulating?” Gloria said. “I get two or three of those a week. How stupid do these people think we Americans are?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I said. “But that’s what delayed me this morning. I thought I was dealing with a work-related email and it just didn’t turn out to be the case. So, now what was it you were trying to tell me a minute ago?”

  “You mean when you told me to hold my thought until you finished your story?” Gloria said. “Oh yeah, Bentley Jordan called to say that he’s sorry, but he went with another private investigation company to look into his uncle’s disappearance. You just missed the call.” Gloria snapped her fingers. “Hey, you might have been able to talk to him if you hadn’t been busy with that other Mr. Jordan. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  I ignored her sarcasm and took a seat behind my desk. The morning’s mail was sitting in a pile on the corner of my desk. Gloria had that morning’s paper on her desk, obviously open to the comics. I gestured toward the paper. “Are you about finished with Beetle Bailey?” I said. “Can I have my paper now?”

  Gloria hastily folded the paper up again and dropped it on my desk. She knew how it bothered me when the paper wasn’t folded up the way it was when it had first arrived here. She purposely liked to fold it messy like this just to get a rise out of me. I wasn’t about to give her that satisfaction.

  “Thank you,” I said politely. “Do we have any other work prospects on the horizon this morning, Miss Campbell?” Gloria knew that when I referred to her as Miss Campbell, that I was not totally happy with her, so she would always respond in kind.

  “No sir, Mr. Cooper,” she said, in a businesslike tone. She locked eyes with me and held them like that.

  I held my eyes on her as well, and now it was a game to see who blinked first. We were forty seconds into the contest when the inner office door opened behind Gloria and she blinked. I snapped my fingers and pointed at her. “You blinked,” I said, smiling. Score one for me, I thought.

  As the office door closed again I could see the woman who’d come into our office. Gloria was the first to greet her.

  “Good morning,” Gloria said. “Welcome to Cooper Investigations. How may we assist you?” Gloria gestured to the client chair across from her desk and the woman sat.

  I watched from my desk but said nothing, staying out of the transaction until I was needed.

  Gloria extended her hand and said, “My name is Gloria Campbell and my partner there is Elliott Cooper.” She gestured toward me and the woman turned in her seat to wave. I waved back but remained silent.

  “Doreen Shacklock,” the woman said in a heavy British accent. She shook Gloria’s hand briefly. “I need a private detective.”

  “Well,” Gloria said. “That’s certainly to the point, isn’t it? What is it you need a detective to do for you, Miss Shacklock?”

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Doreen.”

  “And you can call me Gloria,” Gloria told her. “Now suppose you tell me all about what brought you to us, Doreen.”

  Doreen sighed. “I was fleeced out of three thousand dollars and I’d like you to help me recover it. Is that something you do here?”

  “That would depend,” Gloria said. “Just how were you fleeced?”

  Doreen hesitated for a moment and then said, “I answered one of those ads on the web that offered work at home jobs. We emailed back and forth several times and they assured me that they could hook me up with a reputable company that was looking for people to process invoices from their home. They said I could expect to make somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two thousand dollars a year, part time.”

  “Sounds too good to be true,” Gloria said, writing down Doreen’s name and a brief outline of her problem.

  “It was,” Doreen said. “They had me so convinced that I could make that kind of fantastic money from home. The person I was corresponding with said he could guarantee me a solid three year contract at that salary and all I had to do was pay their one-time registration fee for finding the job for me.”

  “Three thousand dollars,” Gloria said.

  “Yes,” Doreen said.
“Everything looked legitimate and I figured I’d make that back within the first five weeks so I gave them what they asked for.”

  “Let me guess,” I said from over the woman’s shoulder. “You sent them the money in the mail and the next time you tried to contact them, your email bounced back undeliverable. Am I even close?” I walked over to the woman and sat on the edge of Gloria’s desk.

  Doreen turned in her seat to face me. “Exactly,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “You’re not the first person to be scammed by that come-on,” I said. “Ever since computers became a household gadget, crooks have been coming up with more ways to take people’s money than there are to spend it.”

  Doreen turned back to Gloria. “Isn’t there something you can do for me?” she said, almost pleading.

  Gloria looked at me and I shook my head ever so slightly. She looked back at Doreen. “I’m afraid these kinds of people don’t leave a trail once they pull up stakes and move on. I’m sorry.”

  Doreen turned to look at me, hoping I’d have better news for her. I shook my head and said, “Gloria’s right, Doreen. It’s not like the old days when crooks placed these kinds of ads in the newspaper. At least then there was some physical evidence to follow. With computers, there’s nothing left to follow. Even the ISP could be a phony.”

  “ISP?” Doreen said. “What’s that?”

  “The Internet Service Provider,” I said. “The company who furnishes the internet service to the people who originally placed the ad. They could have bounced that between several different sites before it got to the ISP of record. Those guys are clever. It’s just too bad that they couldn’t focus their criminal effort toward something good.”

  Doreen’s face fell apart. “So I’m just out the three thousand dollars?” she said.

  Gloria looked at Doreen and said, “Maybe if you just think of it as a three thousand dollar lesson. You know, something you’ll never do again.”

  “So that’s it?” Doreen said.

  I placed my hand on Doreen’s shoulder. “It could have been worse,” I said. “You could have gone to a disreputable detective agency who might have promised you they could recover your money. You’d have paid their retainer and gotten nothing for it in return. At least you came to us first and this little session we’re having with you isn’t going to cost you a dime.”