The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

Helen looked at my card and studied the contract and then looked up at me. “That would be John Marshall,” she said. “Let me see if he’s available.” She picked up her desk phone and pressed one of the dozen buttons that ran up the side of her phone console. “Mr. Marshall,” she said into the phone, “I have a Mr. Cooper and a Miss Campbell here to see you. Are you free?” She listened for a second and then hung up, keeping my card, but handing the contract back to me. She said, “Have a seat. Mr. Marshall will be with you shortly.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “By the way, are you by any chance related to Clayton?”

  “Clayton?” she said.

  I pointed to her wooden name plaque. “Clayton Moore,” I said.

  Helen’s face didn’t register any recognition.

  “Clayton Moore,” I repeated. “The Lone Ranger. Television, back in the fifties? Never mind.” I could see she was not a movie or television buff.

  Three or four minutes later I heard a door open and looked up to see a man dressed in a suit that looked like it cost more than my car. Gloria and I stood up to greet him. I extended my hand. “Elliott Cooper,” I said. “And this is Gloria Campbell. We’d like to talk to you about Samuel Shapiro if we may.”

  “Follow me,” Marshall said, and led us into an office that put the plush hallway to shame. A large mahogany desk sat in front of a large corner window that afforded a view down Hollywood Boulevard all the way to the horizon. On the wall were several awards and diplomas from prestigious schools. There was also a framed photo of this same man shaking hands with Bill Clinton. Next to that was a framed photo of John Marshall standing next to a huge marlin that was hanging by its tail. He caught me looking at it.

  “That was one huge fish,” he said, proudly. “Took me an hour and a half to reel him in.”

  “Very nice,” I said.

  Marshall gestured toward two wood and leather chairs across from his desk and invited us to sit. “Now,” he said, “what was it you wanted to know about Mr. Shapiro?”

  “Were you aware that Samuel Shapiro was dead?” I said.

  “No, I wasn’t” Marshall said. “When did this happen?”

  “Just a couple of days ago,” I said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Marshall said. “What exactly is your interest in this matter?”

  Gloria sat up straight and said, “We’ve been hired by Mr. Shapiro’s sister to look into the circumstances surrounding his death and to check on the contents of his will.”

  I passed a business card and the contract over to him and he inspected them briefly before handing the contract back to me.

  Marshall pressed his intercom button and asked his receptionist to bring in Shapiro’s file. A minute later she appeared in the doorway holding a manila file. She gave it to Marshall and excused herself again before leaving the room. Marshall opened the file and paged through the forms before stopping on Sammy’s will. He looked up from the papers and said, “What was it you wanted to know about the will?”

  “I checked,” I said, “and found out that Mr. Shapiro’s daughter is the sole beneficiary. I understand that he left her a hundred shares of some unnamed stock and a two point seven acre parcel. I’d like to know which stocks they were and where the parcel is located.”

  “That will become public record as soon as I receive notice of Mr. Shapiro’s death,” Marshall said.

  “I’m sure it will,” Gloria said. “But perhaps you could aid our investigation into Mr. Shapiro’s death by giving us that information today. If you need confirmation, you could call Lieutenant Dean Hollister of the L.A.P.D. or perhaps you’d like to speak to the county medical examiner. His name is Andy Reynolds. They’ll both verify Mr. Shapiro’s death if you need proof.”

  Marshall studied us for a moment before pressing his intercom button again. “Helen,” he said, “would you ring Andy Reynolds in the medical examiner’s office for me, please?” He hung up the phone and thirty seconds later it rang. “Thanks, Helen,” he said. “Mr. Reynolds,” Marshall started to say and then amended it to, “Is it Mr. or Dr. Reynolds? Very well, Dr. Reynolds, this is John Marshall at the offices of Marshall, Marshall and Liebowitz. I have a Mr. Cooper sitting across from me and all I need to do is verify the status of one Samuel Shapiro. Uh huh. Two days ago? Thank you, Doctor.” Marshall hung up the phone and turned back to me.

  “Well?” I said. “Is that enough proof for you?”

  “That will do,” Marshall said. “I’d still have to get the official notice before releasing any copies to you, but for now, I could at least give you the information you’re looking for.”

  “That’s all I need for now,” I said, and waited.

  Marshall picked up the will and skipped down to the part about disbursements. He read aloud from the page. “I, Samuel Shapiro, being of sound mind and body, leave one hundred shares of MSFT stock to my sister, Gail Grimes. I hereby donate my two point seven acre parcel to the City of Los Angeles.” Marshall read off the coordinates of the land parcel, giving me the longitude and latitude along with the legal description.

  I wrote all this down in my notepad, closed it and tucked it into my coat pocket. Gloria and I stood. I extended my hand and said,” Thank you, Mr. Marshall. That’s all we’re looking for at this time.” We left the office and had to walk past the receptionist to get back out to the hall. I thanked her before we left and said, “What about Roger?”

  “Roger?” Helen said.

  “Roger Moore,” I said. “You know, James Bond, 007? Live and Let Die? Any relation to him?”

  I could tell by the look on her face that she was in no mood to play the game and I didn’t press the issue. We caught the elevator back to the lobby and began walking west on Hollywood Boulevard back toward our office.

  “Aren’t you curious to know where that tract of land is?” Gloria said. “What if it’s sitting on top of an oil field or right where some clever businessman wants to build a mall?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. “I know someone in the land office who can put an address to these coordinates. What I’m more curious about is the hundred shares of stock. That could be worth a small fortune. He gave the land away to the city. There’d be nothing in that for the daughter.”

  “How would you know that the stock could be worth a small fortune?” Gloria said. “We don’t even know what that stock symbol means.”

  “I do,” I said. “MSFT is the stock symbol for Microsoft and depending on when he bought it, well, that would determine how much it’s worth.”

  “Now how do you know this?” Gloria said.

  “I’ve been following Microsoft’s stock for a few years now,” I said. “If only I’d have liquidated everything I had back then and bought all I could, hell, I’d be retired right now.”

  “How do you figure that?” Gloria said.

  I thought about it for a moment and remembered something I’d read about it recently. “When they first offered Microsoft stock to the public, I believe it was sometime in March or April of 1986, it was selling for right around twenty-one dollars a share.”

  “And today?” Gloria said. “What’s it worth today?”

  “Give or take,” I said, “it’s right around twenty-eight dollars a share.”

  “A whole seven dollars?” Gloria said. “Is that your idea of growth?”

  “But you have to remember,” I said. “The stock has gone up a lot higher during those past twenty-six years and has split several times. So, for example, if you’d bought a thousand shares back in ‘86, you’d have two thousand shares the first time it split and went down again. Okay, so now it’s going up again and it splits again. Your two thousand shares are now four thousand shares, and so on.”

  “Just how many times has Microsoft stock split since 1986?” Gloria said.

  “The last time I checked,” I said, “Microsoft stock has already split nine times. Do you know how many shares you’d have now if you started with a thousand shares?”

  “I may h
ave a lot of talents,” Gloria said, “but math on the fly was never one of them. Suppose you tell me.”

  “For starters, a thousand doubled is two thousand. Two thousand doubled is four thousand. Just think of it like computer memory,” I said. “That went in similar increments. My first computer had four thousand bits of memory. That doubled to sixteen and then doubled to thirty-two. Double that and you get sixty-four. That’s how much memory I had in one of my first computers. And that was about all the memory they had on the Apollo rocket that went to the moon—just 64K of memory. Anyway, double that to get a hundred twenty-eight thousand. Double it again and you have two hundred fifty-six thousand. Once more and you now have five hundred twelve thousand bits of memory, or half a meg.”

  Gloria sighed. “And you say women are long-winded,” she said. “So what’s the answer to my original question? How many shares would you have today if you had bought a thousand shares back in 1986?”

  “Well,” I said, “in that example I just gave you, I doubled the computer’s memory nine times. Think of those as stock splits and you get the same answer. Your one thousand shares would now be five hundred twelve thousand shares. So your initial investment in those thousand shares would have been twenty-one thousand dollars. Today, your half million plus shares would be worth a little more than fourteen million dollars, give or take.”

  “So Sammy Shapiro’s hundred shares could be worth as much as a million four,” Gloria said.

  “That’s if he bought them in early ‘86,” I said. “Hell, even if he only got in on five of those splits, he’d still have stock worth somewhere around ninety thousand dollars. And even that’s enough to tempt someone into murdering him.”

  “If it was murder,” Gloria said. “We don’t know yet that it is.”

  “How about if we look a little further into that later?” I said. “Right now I’m more curious about where those two point seven acres are located. Come on, let’s get my car and pay a visit to the register of deeds.”

  I learned that the register of deeds job was held by a man named Stuart Polk. When we got to his office, we learned that Polk still hadn’t returned from lunch and decided to wait for him, since it was already ten minutes to one. Gloria and I found a bench in the lobby and planted ourselves there.

  Gloria turned to me. “If Sammy Shapiro had the stock and the land, I wonder why he needed to stay with his sister and live off his social security checks. All he had to do was cash in the stocks and sell the land and he could have lived like a king.”

  “Who knows why people do the things they do?” I said. “Maybe it had been a while since he’d looked into their values or maybe he got senile and forgot that he even owned them. Hell, we don’t even know if his sister or brother-in-law even knew of their existence.”

  “If they didn’t before,” Gloria said, “they will now, once the will is read.”

  Stuart Polk was punctual and returned to his office at precisely one o’clock. He unlocked the door and let us in, taking his place behind the counter. He turned to us and said, “Yes, may I help you?”

  I gave him a card, introduced myself and Gloria and pulled out my notepad. “If I give you the co-ordinates of a parcel of land, could you provide us with the physical address?”

  “Certainly,” Polk said. “What are those co-ordinates?”

  I turned my pad around so that he could read my writing. He pulled up a screen on his computer and punched those numbers in. Once he had the location on the screen, he wrote down the physical address along with simple directions to the area. We thanked him and took his printout with us.

  “Would you drive?” I said to Gloria. “I’d rather navigate this time.”

  “Sure,” Gloria said, sliding in behind the wheel. She started the car and I told her where to make the turns. Within half an hour we found ourselves on the outskirts of the city limits. There were no house numbers, only street signs, so we had to approximate the location of Shapiro’s parcel. I got out of the car, printout in hand, and walked around, looking at the surrounding area.

  “You sure you have the right place?” Gloria said, looking up at a four-story building.

  I took another look at the printout and said, “That’s it, right there. No two ways about it.”

  Gloria scanned the immediate area. “What do you suppose two point seven acres is worth in this neighborhood?” she said.

  “Possibly a hundred fifty thousand, maybe more,” I said. “But that is sitting right smack dab in the middle of it.” I pointed to the four-story building, which had long since been abandoned. The windows on the first two floors had all been broken, probably by kids with rocks. The sixty-foot smokestack next to the building looked as though a stiff wind might send it toppling at any time. The doors had all been boarded up with warning signs telling trespassers to keep out. The sign directly over the main door read, ‘Condemned.’

  “This is some prize,” Gloria said.

  “If there was any money to be made with the sale of the land,” I said, “it would all be eaten up by the cost of demolishing the building and hauling away the rubble. Whoever took on a job like that to get the land would end up in the red. I’ll bet that’s why the original owners just walked away from it or let the bank take it.”

  “Then what would Shapiro be doing with it?” Gloria said.

  “Back when the company first left it,” I said, “the property was probably offered for sale for some ridiculous price, like a dollar. They probably figured someone would snap it up and resell it for a quick profit. Shapiro no doubt got a hard lesson in economics when he bought it and found out no one else wanted it. Oh, he might have gone through the building and stripped it of the copper pipes and anything else worth selling, unless the sellers already did that before they left.”

  “So what does that leave Shapiro with?” Gloria said.

  “A money pit,” I said. “He was stuck with it.”

  “I guess that just leaves the stock,” Gloria said.

  “And we’re going to find out what that’s worth right now,” I said. “Come on.”

  We drove back to the office and rode the elevator to the third floor. Back at my desk, I picked up the phone and dialed the number of Marshall, Marshall and Liebowitz. I got Helen the receptionist again and told her who I was and asked to be connected to John Marshall. She put me on hold and a moment later Marshall came on the line.

  “Yes, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “What can I do for you now?”

  “Mr. Marshall,” I said. “All I need to know is the purchase date of the stock Mr. Shapiro purchased, if you would be so kind.”

  “Hold the line,” Marshall said and put me on hold. He came back on a short time later and said, “Mr. Shapiro bought those hundred shares on April the twenty-third.”

  “Of 1986?” I said, holding my breath.

  “Heavens no,” Marshall said. “I’m talking about April of this year. Can you imagine what those shares would be worth today if he had purchases them in 1986?”

  “One million, four hundred twenty-eight thousand, six hundred seventy-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents,” I said, reading the figure from my notepad. “Yeah, too bad. Thanks again, Mr. Marshall. I shouldn’t have to be bothering you anymore. Goodbye.”

  I hung up and turned to Gloria. “Strike two,” I said. “Shapiro bought the Microsoft stock in April of this year. And if I recall, Microsoft stock was selling for just over thirty dollars a share last April. That means that Shapiro would have shelled out a little more than three thousand dollars.”

  “Is that good?” Gloria said.

  “Not so much,” I said. “Today the stock is trading for around twenty-eight dollars a share. That means if Shapiro was still alive and wanted to cash in his stocks, he’d take a two hundred dollar hit, plus the cost of the commission for selling it.”

  “So we’re back to square one as far as motive goes,” Gloria said. “No one’s going to kill a guy for twenty-five hundred bucks, are they?”

 
“But what if they thought like we initially did and counted on the stock being worth over a million?” I said. “What if they didn’t know the location of the land parcel and didn’t know it created a negative cash flow? Then they’d still figure they had enough reasons to kill him.”

  “When are they going to read the will?” Gloria said.

  “Monday morning,” I said. “John Marshall will be reading the contents of the will in his office. As far as I can tell, Shapiro’s only living relatives are his sister, Sylvia his daughter, Gail and one grandson.”

  “Oh, to be a fly on the wall during that reading,” Gloria said.

  “I’m sure Sylvia will tell us once she finds out,” I said. “She’ll probably want to end the investigation unless we give her something she can use.”

  “Like what?” Gloria said.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “We still have the rest of the weekend to keep snooping. Something’s bound to turn up.”

  “Don’t you think it’s about time we talked to Shapiro’s daughter and son-in-law?” Gloria said.

  “It’s like you can read my mind,” I said, and gestured toward the door. “After you, my dear.”

  We made the drive to the east end of town, just inside the Pasadena city limits and pulled up in front of the Grimes’ house. Gloria didn’t get out of the car immediately, but instead turned to me. “How about if I handle this one?” she said. “I think I can get through to the wife.”

  “And I can’t?” I said.

  “Elliott,” she said, “you’re good at what you do, but sometimes you have a tendency to come on a little strong and that puts people on their guard. Let me give it a try and if I don’t seem to be making any progress with her, then you can badger, er, I mean question the woman. Okay?”

  “I’ll just observe,” I said looking sideways at her. “I won’t interfere. Let’s see what you got.”

  I rang the bell and Gail Grimes answered the door. She looked out at the two of us standing there and said, “Can I help you?”

  Right away I knew she wasn’t nearly as classy as Helen Moore, the receptionist at Marshall, Marshall and Liebowitz.