The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  “Good point,” I said. “Would you prefer ‘Honey’?”

  “Food group,” Gloria said. “Besides, that’s nothing more than bee poop. I don’t find that especially endearing, do you?”

  I shook my head. “What would you suggest?” I said. “Dear?”

  “Nope,” Gloria said. “That’s from the animal group, and don’t even think about anything from the mineral group.”

  “That doesn’t leave much, does it?” I said. “Give me a hint, will you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gloria said, staring at the ceiling and scratching the back of her head. “How about something like ‘Gloria’? Yeah, I like the sound of that one. Has a certain ring of respectability to it, don’t you think?”

  “Then Gloria it is,” I said. “Here, let me try it out. ‘Hey Gloria, would you bring me a Pepsi?’ Yeah, that’ll work just fine. Now that you got me way off the subject, I forgot where I was going with all this.”

  “Clay’s writing,” Gloria said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Dad started out banging away on his old typewriter but I brought over my old computer from college and set it up for him with a word processor on it. That’s just a word processor—no other programs on it to conflict with what he needs to do. The only other thing I added was a printer.”

  “And how’s he coming along with it?” Gloria said.

  “Great,” I said. “He got the hang of the word processor right off the bat and he’s loving it. When I left there he was nearly halfway through the first chapter of his book.”

  “Is he really writing about some of his old cases?” Gloria said.

  “That he is,” I said. “And he’s even found some of Grandpa Matt’s old files and he’s getting ideas from those as well. Should be a great book when he’s finished with it.”

  “Does he have a title yet?” Gloria said.

  “He’s had several working titles,” I explained, but nothing set in stone yet. I think his last working title was something like, Blasts From The Past, referring to gun blasts, I think.”

  “He can do better,” Gloria said. “Is he writing it in chronological order or is he mixing it up?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Does it matter?”

  “I only asked because if he’s just randomly adding stories, we could both give him a few ideas to use for his book,” Gloria said.

  “I’ll ask him when I see him tonight,” I said. “We’re having dinner in Burbank. Would you like to join us?”

  “Thanks,” Gloria said, “but I’d feel like an intruder on boy’s night,” Gloria said.

  The ringing of my desk phone interrupted our conversation. I grabbed the handset and said, “Cooper Investigations, Elliott Cooper speaking.”

  “Elliott,” Dad said. “I need to come up there and talk to you both. Will you be available for a while?”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said. “Sounds like some kind of trouble. Are you all right?”

  “Never felt better,” Clay Cooper said. “I’d just like to run something by you two. Twenty minutes okay?”

  “We’ll be here,” I said. “I think you know the way.”

  “Thanks, Elliott,” Dad said and hung up.

  “What is it?” Gloria said. “Is Clay all right?”

  “Says he is,” I told her. “He’s coming up to see us in twenty minutes or so. I guess we’d better be on our best behavior.”

  “Have you told him about us yet?” Gloria said.

  “I, uh, I meant to,” I said. “I was just looking for the right moment to break it to him.”

  “Don’t you think you owe it to him?” Gloria said.

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, and thought about it again for a moment. “How about if we both tell him when he gets here?”

  “It’s not that difficult,” Gloria said. “He doesn’t bite, does he?”

  Gloria could tell by my stare that she shouldn’t pursue this line of questioning and let it go. Twenty minutes later Dad walked into the office, his face showing signs of concern. He shook my hand and gave Gloria a brief hug.

  When he let go, Gloria looked up at him. “What is it Clay?” she said. “You look like you’ve lost your last friend.”

  “How about if we all sit on the sofa?” Dad said.

  Dad sat on the leather sofa against the wall. Gloria and I sat on either side of him. Dad hesitated briefly and then said, “As you both know, I’ve started writing again and you probably also know that what I was writing were memoirs and fictionalized accounts of some of my old cases.”

  “Yes,” Gloria said. “Elliott was telling me about your project. How are you doing with that?”

  “Oh, it’s coming along,” Clay said. “In fact, I took a little break from it to send some feelers out to literary agents and publishers.”

  “Any bites?” I said.

  “One,” Clay said. “A small publisher in Connecticut has asked to see three chapters.”

  “That’s great,” Gloria said. “It looks like you’re on your way.”

  “Not so great,” Clay said. “First off, I only have part of one chapter done.”

  “If you stick with it,” I said, “you can pound out another two and a half chapters in a couple of days. You just have to stick with it and don’t let anything distract you.” I could tell by the look on Dad’s face that there was more. “But that’s not why you wanted to talk to us, is it?”

  Dad shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “Let me ask you both something. Have either of you mentioned my book project to anyone?”

  I knew I hadn’t and said so without hesitation. Dad and I both looked at Gloria.

  “Well, don’t look at me,” she said. “I first heard about it this morning.

  “Why do you ask, Dad?” I said.

  “Well,” Dad said, “because shortly after my contact with that publisher I got a strange phone call. I don’t know who it was and he nearly whispered when he spoke. I guess he wasn’t taking any chances with voice prints.”

  “Voice prints?” Gloria said. “I don’t like where this is going, Clay. What did he say?”

  “Dad, what’s going on here?” I said.

  “Some anonymous caller told me to scrap my book project or he’d make sure I never wrote another word of anything,” Dad said.

  “That’s it?” I said. “Didn’t he say anything else?”

  “Not that first time,” Dad said. “That first call came Friday afternoon while I was writing. I got another call this morning.”

  “Was it the same guy?” I said.

  “Who knows?” Dad said. “It could have been. It’s impossible to tell when they whisper. But this time he said something about never writing anything at all or I’d be dead before the week was up.”

  I stood, my rage coming to a boil. I paced the room, clenching and unclenching my fists. I stopped in front of Dad again and said, “We’ve got to get a tap on your phone, and a trace. If this sick bastard calls again, I want to have some way of finding him.”

  “How do you expect to find him?” Dad said. “We don’t even know who he is. But if he’s worried about what I’m writing, chances are he’s somewhere in my case files, or he’s a friend or relative of someone else who is. I can’t imagine what’s so sensitive that someone’s afraid it could come out in a book.”

  “That’s where we’ll start then,” Gloria said. “The publisher can wait. We have to go through those files and see if anything jumps out at us.”

  “That sounds like a big job,” Dad said. “Do you have any idea how many case files I’ve collected since I joined Dad in 1971? And I even have some of my father’s files in the mix as well. We’re talking thousands of folders here.”

  “Divided by three,” I said. “Gloria and I will help you go through them all. If there’s a whacko with a grudge out there, we have to get to him before he gets to you. We don’t have anything going at the moment, so the sooner we start in on those files, the better I’ll feel about this whole thing. You say you ha
ve them at your house? Well, let’s get moving.”

  Gloria was standing now, too. She and I each grabbed one of Dad’s hands and pulled him to a standing position. Gloria and I grabbed our jackets, locked the office and followed Dad back to his house.

  Dad put his car in the garage and closed the door. I left my car in his driveway. When I got inside, I saw that Dad had set everything up on his dining room table. The computer and screen sat in the middle of the table. On either side of the computer sat piles of file folders. Dad explained that the ones on the left were files he hadn’t looked through yet, while the pile on the right consisted of files from which he’d taken case histories and inserted parts of them into his story.

  After I’d looked over his setup, I turned to Dad and said, “All right, from what I can see, you’ve gone through approximately thirty or thirty-five files, correct?”

  “Thirty-eight,” Dad said.

  “Then it would follow that whatever someone is worried about getting out should be in the files you’ve already gone through and used information from, correct? I mean, if you first started getting the calls after you contacted a publisher, then someone knows how far along you are. Does that make any sense?”

  “In some ways,” Dad said. “But you would have to assume that the caller would also know what’s in those files and I don’t see how that’s possible. Besides, I haven’t sent the publisher anything yet, so even if the caller had a way of bugging my house or tapping my phone, he wouldn’t find out anything about what I’ve written so far.”

  “Dad,” I said, “we’ve already told you that neither of us has mentioned anything to anybody about your book. Have you told anyone?”

  “Of course not,” Dad said. “Except…”

  “Except?” I said. “Dad, think. Who else would know what you’re writing?”

  “The only other person I mentioned anything to about this book was Dean Hollister,” Dad said. “He and I were having lunch a few weeks ago and I mentioned something about this project and all he said was that it sounded like it could be an interesting book when I finished it. And I told him that I’d been in contact with a publisher. That’s it.”

  “And where were you two when this lunchtime conversation took place?” I said.

  I could see Dad’s mind working overtime, trying to remember the facts surrounding his lunch with Dean. “If I remember,” he said, “we were sitting in a booth at the Copper Penny in Glendale. Yeah, that was it, the one over on Colorado Boulevard.”

  “A booth,” Gloria said. “I don’t suppose you remember if anyone was sitting in the booth behind you, do you?”

  “I see what you mean,” Dad said. “You think someone could have overheard us?”

  “It would only take one pair of ears,” I said. “And if that’s the case, that person could have told another and another and pretty soon a dozen people know about it. One of those people could be the caller. Had you mentioned anything about the files you’ve already taken material from?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember,” Dad said. “Ask me about what happened in 1971 and I can fill you in down to the last detail, but ask me about yesterday, and I draw a blank. I guess my short-term memory isn’t what it used to be. You could ask Dean. He might remember what we talked about.”

  I made myself a mental note to see Dean when we’d finished here and then turned back to the piles of folders on Dad’s dining room table. I picked up the thirty-eight files and divided them between Gloria and me and Dad. We took them into the living room and found a comfortable place to sit.

  “Would either of you like something to drink?” Dad said.

  “Pepsi?” I said.

  Dad pointed at me and then turned to Gloria.

  “Johnny Walker on the rocks?” Gloria said and then added, “Why don’t you sit down? I’ll bring the drinks in. You having the usual?”

  Dad nodded and said, “Make it a double.”

  I watched as Gloria walked to the kitchen and pulled a can of Pepsi from the refrigerator and set it on the counter. Then she made herself a Johnny Walker on the rocks and set that next to the Pepsi. What surprised me, though, was when she made Dad a double White Russian and carried all three drinks back into the living room. I wondered how she would know what Dad’s ‘usual’ drink was or where he kept his liquor.

  “Thanks,” Dad and I both said when Gloria handed us our drinks.

  We started in on our respective folders in silence, only speaking if any of us found something to share with the others. Partway into the third folder in my pile I held up a form and showed it to Dad. “What about him?” I said. “Looks like he ended up doing a six-year stretch in San Quentin.”

  Dad took the form from my hands and studied it. He handed it back to me. “Nope,” he said. “He got out after four years and became a minister. I guess he found Jesus in jail.”

  “And what was he in for?” Gloria said.

  “The guy or Jesus?” Dad said and then chuckled.

  Gloria gave him a playful tap on the shoulder and said, “The guy, of course, silly.”

  Dad smiled at Gloria and something passed between them that I couldn’t put my finger on, so I let it go.

  “He went in for grand theft auto,” Dad said. “Normally he’d have drawn a sentence of a year, maybe two, but the grand auto that he thefted belonged to a city alderman with no sense of humor.”

  “Thefted?” Gloria said. “Did you make that up?”

  “Guilty,” Dad said, raising one finger in the air.

  I was starting to get an uneasy feeling and I wasn’t even sure why. I tucked the form back in the folder and moved on.

  Gloria stopped mid-way though one of the folders on her lap and held a paper in front of Dad’s eyes. “Anything here?” she said.

  Dad took the paper from her, looked at the front and back and then handed it back. “Nope,” he said. “He’s dead. Been dead for a dozen years at least.” He turned his attention back to his own stack of folders and I noticed that his eyebrows furrowed when he stopped on a certain page.

  “What is it, Dad?” I said. “Did you find something?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dad said. “But this guy ended up losing his business after I’d finished my investigation on him. I even sat through his trial and if looks could kill, I’d have been pushing up daisies long ago. But if I recall, he moved out of town and started over in Denver a few months after he was fired from the company. I can’t imagine him still holding a grudge after, what is it, sixteen years?”

  “What about this company he had?” I said. “What kind of company was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “I think they had something to do with making instrument clusters for airplanes or something along those lines.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “I remember now. This guy was in line for a huge government contract. I guess they wanted him to provide the Air Force and the Navy with instrument clusters for all their planes. That was supposed to be a multi-million dollar contract.”

  “What happened?” Gloria said.

  “His partner hired me to tail this guy,” Dad said, flipping through the rest of that particular file. “Here we are. His name was John Phelps and his partner’s name was Edgar Root. Root is the one who hired me to find out what I could about Phelps. Root suspected that Phelps was embezzling funds from the company account but couldn’t prove it. I followed Phelps for three weeks before I could get the goods on him. Apparently he was channeling funds from the company to a personal account in another name. Root got most of the money back in exchange for immunity for Phelps, with the stipulation that Phelps resign and take nothing from the company with him. In other words, in order to stay out of jail, Root got everything and Phelps got nothing. Talk about bitter.”

  “But he brought it on himself,” I said. “What did he expect?”

  “Well,” Dad continued, “Phelps agreed to Root’s proposal but demanded that the details of the case remain sealed. He didn’t want details like that gettin
g in the way of his starting another business. You know how banks are when it comes to financing business deals.”

  “And you think Phelps got wind that you were writing this alleged tell-all book and panicked?” Gloria said.

  “Makes sense,” Dad said. “He’d have a lot to lose if the book ever came out.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but he wouldn’t be mentioned by name, would he?”

  “Of course not,” Dad said. “But I wouldn’t have to fictionalize what kind of company I was writing about. I wouldn’t have to name the company, either, but it is kind of a specialty item that they make. It wouldn’t take an Einstein to figure out who I was talking about. All they’d have to do is put in a little time researching public records or talking to other parties who were involved. And when the truth got out, Phelps could kiss another business goodbye.”

  “So it looks like we’ll be starting this investigation with Phelps,” I said. “Does this mean we’re going to Denver?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dad said. “Chances are he’s back in town and that he’s watching me from someplace safe. How about if we start asking around town first? Gloria, would you check with some of the local banks to see if he has inquired about securing a loan for working capital? Elliott, I’d like you to check with the phone and utility companies. See if there are any new accounts in his name or any new company names. I’m going to have a talk with Dean Hollister over at the twelfth precinct. You kids go on ahead. I’m taking my own car.”

  I grabbed the Phelps folder and looked at Dad. “I’m taking the file,” I said. “I’ll make copies and get the originals back to you later today.” I turned to Gloria. “Let’s go find this bastard.”

  We left Dad sitting there in his living room and I drove Gloria back to the parking lot behind our office. On the way back I turned to her and said, “Gloria, how did you know what Dad’s usual drink was?”

  “Huh?” Gloria said.

  “Back at Dad’s house, you offered to get our drinks,” I said. “And you asked Dad if he wanted his usual. How would you know what his usual was?”