“My name is Gloria Campbell,” Gloria said. “And this is Elliott Cooper. We’re looking into the death of your father, Samuel Shapiro. Could we talk to you for a few minutes?”
Gail Grimes looked us over the way a woman looks over her blind date when she first lays eyes on him. She must have decided that we looked all right, because she opened her door wide, stepped aside and let us in. She invited us to sit on the sofa in the living room and asked if we wanted anything to drink. We both waved off the drink request. Gloria pulled out a notepad and a pen and looked at Gail Grimes.
“Mrs. Grimes,” Gloria said. “I think I should start out by saying that Elliott and I have been hired by Mr. Shapiro’s sister to look into her brother’s death.”
Gail looked surprised by this revelation. “Aunt Sylvia hired the two of you?” she said. “You mean you two aren’t with the police department?”
“No,” Gloria said. “We’re private investigators and at this point, all we’re doing is gathering information about what happened. We haven’t formed any opinions or taken any sides in this matter yet. We’re waiting until we’ve spoken to everyone involved.”
“Does Aunt Sylvia think that Dad’s death was anything other than suicide?” Gail said, her voice a little on edge.
“She doesn’t know,” Gloria said. “She just wants to know all the facts leading up to her brother’s death. It’s been a traumatic couple of days, as I’m sure you are aware from your own experience.” Gloria could see suspicion playing on Gail’s face and decided to change the subject. She glanced at the playpen and asked, “Where’s your son this morning?”
“His father took him to the park,” Gail said. “I told him I needed a little time to myself. I just needed some room to think.”
“How old is your son, Mrs. Grimes?” Gloria said.
“He just turned three,” Gail said, “last month.”
“What’s his name?” Gloria said.
“Lloyd, junior,” Gail said. “He’s the spitting image of his daddy.”
“I’ll bet he’s a handful at that age,” Gloria said.
I wondered where she was going with all this, but kept my word and remained silent.
“He can be,” Gail said. “That’s why it was so nice to have Dad here to babysit when we needed it.”
Gloria looked around the room and pointed with her chin to several stuffed toys lying on the living room floor. “Aren’t those adorable?” she said. “Does Junior have a favorite?”
“He loves that brown Teddy Bear with the red ribbon around his neck,” Gail said.
Now I really thought Gloria was getting way off track and thought it might be time for me to step in with questions of my own. Before I could open my mouth, however, Gloria thought of some more questions.
“What about that one?” Gloria said, pointing to another stuffed bear up on the mantle that was sitting there looking like it was overseeing the rest of the toys on the floor.
“Oh, that’s not one of Junior’s toys,” Gail said. “That’s our nanny cam.”
“Nanny cam?” Gloria said. “What do you mean?”
Gail stood and walked over to the mantle and picked up the stuffed animal. She lifted it high enough off the mantle to expose a wire that ran out of its back and down the left edge of the mantle. Gail set the bear down again and pointed to a spot around the corner from the mantle and said, “The recorder is back there.”
“The recorder?” Gloria said. “I don’t understand.”
Gail pointed to the bear on the mantle again. “There’s a tiny camera behind the bear’s nose, see?” She pointed to the round opening in the end of the bear’s black nose. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d miss it completely.
“Why do you have a camera on this room?” Gloria said.
“It was Lloyd’s idea,” Gail said. “He didn’t trust Dad to babysit Junior. He was always afraid that Dad would fall asleep and wouldn’t be watching Junior so he installed the nanny cam to find out.”
“And what did you find out?” Gloria said.
“Lloyd set it to record after we’d left the house,” Gail explained. “He’d check the tape when we got home again. So far he hadn’t found any video of Dad falling asleep while he was supposed to be babysitting, but he wasn’t going to give up on it.”
I couldn’t remain silent any longer. I looked at Gail and held up one finger. “Mrs. Grimes,” I said, “was the bear recording the day your father died?”
It was as if I’d turned a light on in her head. Apparently I’d said something that she hadn’t even thought of up to this point. Her eyes got a glimmer of hope in them for the first time since we’d sat down. She got up and walked back over to the recorder around the corner from the fireplace. She pressed the Eject button and a three-hour tape popped out. She grabbed it and brought it over to me. I looked at it and noticed that the entire contents of the tape were wound onto the take-up reel. That’s just where it would have stopped after it had recorded three hours.
I looked beneath Gail’s television set and saw a VCR connected to the set. I turned to Gail. “May I?” I said, gesturing toward the VCR.
Gail nodded. “Go ahead,” she said. “I would like to know what’s on there, too.”
I found the remote control for the unit and ejected the tape that was in there and slipped in the tape from the nanny cam setup. I pressed Play and sat back down with the remote. The tape began playing, showing nothing but an empty room at first. A few minutes later Gail came into the shot carrying Lloyd, Junior. She set him down inside the playpen and gave him one of his toys.
A moment later Sammy Shapiro came into the room carrying a glass of what looked like soda and set it on the table next to the overstuffed chair. A minute or two later Gail and Lloyd headed for their front door. Lloyd looked right into the camera once and then he and Gail left the house, closing the door behind them.
Gail watched the tape and recognized something in it and announced, “That had to have been last Sunday. Lloyd and I were only gone half an hour. I guess Lloyd wanted to do a trial run with Dad.”
The picture on the screen went snowy for a second and then jumped to another similar setup. Again, before they left the house, Lloyd, Senior looked directly into the camera again. Gail pointed at the television. “That was the day,” she started to say and then trailed off, absorbed with what was happening on the television screen.
Lloyd, Junior was sitting in the playpen, playing with his favorite stuffed bear. Gail and Lloyd had just left the house when Shapiro got up out of the chair and walked out of the shot to the left, toward the kitchen. He came back into view a moment later and pulled the top off some sort of tube. He hesitated for a few seconds and then tilted the tube up to his mouth and drank. He immediately dropped the tube and fell to his knees, his hands around his throat. He dropped over onto his side and began convulsing, his feet kicking wildly.
A few seconds later the front door opened again and Gail walked into the room. Her scream came through the television set loud and clear when she saw her father lying on the floor, white foam spewing from his open mouth.
At this point, Gail held her hand up to shield herself from the television screen. “Turn it off,” she screamed. “Turn it off, please.” She broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.
I hit the Stop button on the remote and the screen went snowy again. Gloria wrapped an arm around Gail’s shoulder and pulled her close. “I’m so sorry you had to see that,” Gloria told Gail. Gail turned toward Gloria and buried her head in Gloria’s shoulder.
The front door opened again and Lloyd came in carrying his son. He looked at me, his face showing alarm. Then he turned to his wife and saw her crying into some strange woman’s shoulder.
“What’s going on here?” Lloyd said.
Gail broke away from Gloria and ran to her husband. She threw her arms around him and their son and cried some more. When she was able to control herself again, Gail looked at her husband and said, “Oh Lloyd, it’s
Dad, there on the TV. The nanny cam recorded his death.” Her lip trembled and she tried to go on. “These folks are private investigators looking into Dad’s death.”
Lloyd looked at me again, his suspicion fading. I introduced myself and Gloria and told him about his wife’s aunt hiring us. I also told him about the contents of the nanny cam tape and how it proved beyond any doubt that Shapiro’s death was, indeed, a suicide. I thanked Lloyd and Gail for their time and patience and told them to keep that tape in a safe place and that Lieutenant Hollister might just be asking to see it. He agreed he’d do that and showed me to the door.
Before we left, Gloria turned back to Gail and said, “Again, let me just say how sorry I am for your loss and if there’s anything we can do for you, please don’t hesitate to call on us.”
Gail thanked her and we walked back to my car and just sat there at the curb for a few minutes, absorbing this new information.
“So that’s it?” Gloria said.
“All except for reporting our findings to Sylvia Nash,” I said. “It’ll be a relief to her to find out that no one killed her brother. She may not be so happy to learn that he’d killed himself, but that’s something else out of our control. It is what it is.”
We stopped at Sylvia Nash’s house on our way back to the office and told her all that we’d discovered. She thanked us for our services and wrote out a check to Cooper Investigations. I reminded her about the reading of the will Monday morning at the offices of Marshall, Marshall and Liebowitz. She assured us that she’d be there and showed us to the door.
As far as Gloria and I were concerned, this case was closed. I made a note to myself to follow up with Gail and Lloyd Grimes on Tuesday, after they’d heard the reading of the will and had had time to take it all in. I wanted to tell them her about her father’s reason for leaving the land and the building to the city. The last good deed he did was not to saddle his daughter with that problem. I was sure she’d appreciate knowing that.
Monday came and went and Gail Grimes had the Microsoft stock signed over to her. She and her husband weren’t the type to play the stock market and sold it immediately, pocketing nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. The City of Los Angeles became the new owners of Shapiro’s two point seven acres and one abandoned building. I heard much later that the city had had the building demolished and the rubble removed. The acreage had been listed for sale in the real estate section of the L.A. Times. The asking price was a cool quarter million and it stayed on the market for just three days before it was sold.
Gloria and I continued seeing each other socially, which was a polite way of saying that we were running each other ragged in bed. The past three months had proved too much for me to handle and at the ripe old age of thirty-two and a half, I did something I never thought I’d do—I asked Gloria to marry me.
She said yes.
70 - All The Write Moves
Two weeks ago, after completing our last case, and after an intense whirlwind relationship, I finally asked Gloria to marry me. To my surprise, and with no hesitation, she said yes. After the initial excitement of the moment wore off and after we’d had time to talk about our future life together, Gloria and I had to have one more talk about how an arrangement like that would affect our working relationship.
I was concerned about second-guessing myself as far as assignments would go. If I had to worry about any aspect of a future case that Gloria might go out on, it could affect my own concentration if I ever got into a situation where my reaction time could affect whether I lived or died.
Gloria’s concerns tended to center more on whether or not her job would interfere with her lifetime plans, which included having children and being a good wife and mother. We had discussed the possibility of her leaving Cooper Investigations if and when it came to that point. I told her I could always hire another employee to take her place. She agreed up to a point.
“But the new employee would be a man, right?” she said.
I looked at her. “What if I’d taken that attitude just before you came in to apply for the position?” I said.
“But things are different now, aren’t they?” she reminded me. “Now what sense would it make for me to sit home while you’re off on some stakeout or on a cross-country train trip with her?” She emphasized her to drive her point home.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not saying that I’d hire another woman. Hell, what are the odds that any other woman would apply who had your qualifications? You’re a skilled sharpshooter, master of disguise and makeup, Tae-Kwon-Do expert and all-round experienced private investigator. Those would be some tough shoes to fill even by a man.”
Gloria breathed on her fingernails and rubbed them on her jacket. “I guess it would be at that,” she said. “But how about if we hold off any discussion along those lines until after we’re married and I have that perfect baby I’d always dreamed about.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed. “But let me say this much upfront, so there’ll be no arguments about it when the time comes.”
Gloria’s face showed a hint of concern. “What is it, Sweetie?” she said.
“When the time comes, and by the way, this is not negotiable, but when the times comes to name the baby, I will NOT agree to any goofy, trendy, stupid or otherwise embarrassing names for my child.”
“And what names would you consider to be goofy, trendy, stupid or otherwise embarrassing?” she said. “Tell me now so I don’t get hooked on a name I might hear between now and then that I’d consider perfect for our child. Give me some examples of what you’re talking about, please.”
“All right,” I said. “You want examples? I’ll give you a few examples. For instance, no kid of mine will ever be named after a city, state or country. There will be no Dakota, no Madison, no Austin and no Brooklyn.”
“I totally agree,” Gloria said. “Do you have any other restrictions you’d like to share with me?”
“No kid of mine will ever be stuck with any goofy biblical name, like Ezekiel, Methuselah, Hezekiah or Gideon, or anything else along those lines.”
“You’ll get no argument from me on those, either,” Gloria said. “What else you got? Bring it on.”
“I won’t consider any names that will automatically label my boy as a target for some bully,” I said.
“And just what kinds of names would fall into that category?” Gloria said.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll have to think about that category for a moment, but a few that immediately come to mind are Poindexter, Bartholomew, Heywood and Chauncey.”
Now Gloria was laughing so hard that she was holding her sides. “Poindexter?” she said. “Does anybody in this world think Poindexter is a good choice? I don’t think you have to worry about that category. Is that it, or do you have more?”
“Even if you think a name is cute now,” I said, “think a few years down the road and try to imagine our daughter applying for a job when her name is Samantha, Brittney, Tabitha, Hailey, Brianna or Kaitlyn. God, I can’t stand those names. How can you take anyone with one of those names serious? Think about it. Would you want to keep a business card from anyone named Bela? There are only two people in the world that I’ve ever heard with that name and they were both creepy—Bela Lugosi and Bela Abzug. I don’t know which one was creepier. And that’s just if we have a daughter.”
“No doubt you have a list of boy’s names that are also off limits, as well,” Gloria said. “Am I correct?”
“You bet your birth certificate there is,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but personally I’d never hire a private detective named Dylan or Connor or Taylor or Tanner. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“I think so,” Gloria said. “You are a traditionalist, no doubt, from the sound of this discussion. Suppose you tell me what you consider to be acceptable, normal, everyday, regular names.”
“All right,” I said. “Of course there are the standard, traditional names that almost command respect, like J
ohn or William or Robert or George. Now there are some names any boy could wear proudly without fear of getting beat up in grade school. Nobody beats up a Tom or a Jim or a Frank or an Ed. I don’t care if fifty million other babies already have or have had a particular name in the past, no kid of mine is ever going to have to pick a nickname to hide their embarrassing real name.”
“Okay,” Gloria said. “I get it—no experimenting.”
“To put it in a nutshell,” I said. “If no one in the history of the world has ever had that name before, I don’t want it, either, just because it’s unique. Unique is just another word for weird. Just look at all those celebrities and what they’re naming their babies. Can you say ‘attention starved’? I mean, who else names their kid after a piece of fruit?”
“Who did that?” Gloria said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “One of those trendy movie stars named their kid Apple or Cumquat or Avocado or something as equally stupid. And let’s not forget River Phoenix’s parents with their other kids, Rain, Leaf, Twig and Al. And Al was considered the oddball in that family.”
“Now you’re making that up,” Gloria said. “And I’m getting a headache with all this talk about naming a baby we don’t even have yet. How about if we put this on the back burner until that day comes?”
“Just so you don’t say you didn’t know when that day does come,” I said.
“Fine,” Gloria said, hoping to change the subject. “And how’s Clay coming along with his writing?”
“Funny you should mention that,” I said. “I just saw Dad yesterday and when I stopped in he was pecking away at that old portable typewriter that he kept from back in his high school days.”
“He has heard about that new-fangled invention out there called the personal computer, hasn’t he?” Gloria said. “I hear tell that they even have special programs now called word processors. You might want to suggest that to him next time you see him.”
“I’m way ahead of you there, Peanut,” I said.
“Peanut?” Gloria said. “Did I suddenly acquire a nickname from the same guy who thought Apple, Cumquat and Avocado were strange names? I would think your rule would apply to all of the food groups.”
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 203