“I heard the shot from the office,” I said. “Are you two all right?”
“Missed us,” Clay said. “And he might still be out there, so stay in here. The police are on their way.”
“If it is Phelps,” I said, “he just upped the ante in this game of his, and I want his ass more than ever now.”
“Just don’t let this cloud your judgment,” Clay said. “We all need to be thinking clearly when we all go after him.”
Outside I heard the squeal of tires and the whine of a police siren. A moment later several other black and whites converged on the spot where a gunman had taken a shot at Dad. I could see out the front door. Most of the officers ran towards the front doors of the neighborhood businesses, looking for a possible perch for the shooter. Two uniforms came into the building and found the three of us crouching in defensive postures. They both held their guns on us and told us to lay ours down on the floor and to identify ourselves. I pulled my I.D. folder from my pocket and held it up for them to see. Once they knew who we were, they allowed us to retrieve our weapons and then began asking their usual questions.
Amid the chaos, Dean came through the front door and the two officers straightened up noticeably. “Clay,” Dean said when he saw Dad, “Are you okay?”
“Not even a scratch,” Dad said.
Dean turned to Gloria and she waved him off before he could ask.
When Dean turned to me, I stopped him before he could ask. “I was upstairs,” I explained.
From somewhere outside, I heard the unmistakable crack of a high-powered rifle, followed by a volley of rounds from several police .38s returning fire. Dean hurried to the front door and peered out. After a moment he opened the front door and left the three of us standing in the lobby. Dad and Gloria and I exited to the street and saw a group of five or six officers standing in a semi-circle half a block to the west. We saw Dean running toward them.
By the time we got to that spot in the street, the semi-circle had broken up and I could see Dean standing over the body of a man lying in a pool of bright red blood. Next to the man I saw a rifle laying in the street, its stock broken and the barrel scuffed up. Dean turned around when he saw us approaching. He held his arms out from his sides when Gloria tried to get a closer look at the man lying in the street.
“Is that Phelps?” Dad said, looking to Dean for answers.
“I don’t know yet,” Dean said. “I’m waiting for Andy Reynolds and the police photographer to do their jobs before I move the body.”
I looked down at the body and remarked, “That’s an awful lot of blood for a shooting victim.”
“He was only hit twice,” Dean explained and then pointed at a third floor balcony. “But he fell from there when he got hit. When a skull meets concrete, the concrete always wins.”
A few minutes later a white ambulance pulled up to that spot in the street and two white-garbed attendants got out and pulled a gurney from the back of their vehicle and stood waiting for further orders. Andy Reynolds, the country medical examiner, followed close behind with his little black bag. We all knew he was just going through the motions when he pressed his stethoscope to the victim’s heart and stood up again, announcing the official time of death, which he wrote on his clipboard.
Another black and white cruiser pulled into the area and a uniformed officer emerged along with a man in a tan suit jacket and blue jeans. He was carrying a large, expensive-looking camera. It took him only a few minutes to take a dozen photos of the body and the surrounding area. When he had what he needed, he nodded to Dean, who bent over and retrieved a wallet from the victim’s inside jacket pocket. He opened the wallet and found the driver’s license.
Dean turned to Dad. “It’s Russell Pearson,” Dean said, “or Phelps, if you prefer.” He tucked the wallet into his own pocket and then gave the go ahead to the ambulance attendants. They picked up the body, deposited it onto the gurney and loaded it into the ambulance in an almost robotic manner that let any onlooker know that they’d done this many times before and that they weren’t affected by the bloody mess they’d just cleaned up. They drove away, their red lights and siren off.
Dean turned to Dad and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Hopefully there aren’t any more like him out there who don’t want to see your book make it to the book stores.”
“Not likely,” Dad said. “I’ve sort of scrapped that idea.”
“Why?” Dean said. “You’re not going to let some kook like that stop you, are you?”
Dad held up one hand. “Dean,” he said, “can we talk about this some other time? I’d just like to go home now, if you don’t mind.”
“You go ahead,” Dean said. “I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. You gonna be around in the morning?”
“Sure,” Dad said. “Stop over whenever you can.”
“I’ll drive you home,” I said.
Dad waved me off. “I can drive,” he said. “Besides, I’ll need my car there for tomorrow. But if you and Gloria would like to come over, I have something I’d like to tell you both.”
“We’ll be right behind you,” I told Dad.
On the drive to Dad’s house, Gloria turned to me and said, “Elliott, I don’t think your dad should give up on his writing, do you?”
“Not really,” I said, “But he’s going to do what he’s going to do, no matter what either of us say to him, so go easy on him, will you? This couldn’t have been easy for him.”
Gloria nodded and straightened up in her seat again, choosing to remain silent for the rest of the drive. Dad pulled his car up into his driveway and got out, walking around his car and up to his steps. I parked at the curb and the two of us got out and followed Dad up the steps and onto his porch. Once we were inside, Dad hung up his coat and gestured toward his couch. We sat and waited.
“Elliott,” Dad said. “Remember when I told you I was writing somewhat of a memoir centering around some of my old cases?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“Well,” Dad said, “That was almost three months ago and I think I also mentioned something about sending inquiries to several agents and publishers, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “Did you get any responses to them?”
“Not exactly,” Dad said. “I sent out nearly three hundred inquires that described the project I was working on. Most of the publishers just sent back a form letter stating that they only deal with agents. And most of the agents sent back form letters saying that either they weren’t taking on new clients at this time or that the project was not for them, but wished me luck placing it elsewhere. I have to tell you, it was a very discouraging experience.”
“If the whole process was easy,” I said, “then everybody would be an author. You just have to hang in there and keep trying. One day someone will want it.”
“One of them does want it,” Dad said.
“That’s great, Clay,” Gloria said. “Which one?”
“It was a smaller publisher from New Jersey,” Dad told her. “Only…”
“Only what?” I said. “You got a publisher interested. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well,” Dad said, “after I got nearly three hundred rejections, I started to wonder if it was my material or my writing style that they were all rejecting, so I switched horses in mid stream and tried another approach.” He smiled. “And it worked.” Dad held up a check in the amount of one thousand dollars. “They sent me an advance of a grand.”
“Fantastic,” Gloria said. “I wonder what this publisher saw in your work that the others didn’t.”
“Well, uh,” Dad said, “I sort of scrapped the whole memoir idea and took the book in another direction entirely.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I thought you had a lot of interesting P.I. stories of your own as well as some great ideas from Grandpa Matt’s old files.”
Clay reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out an inch-thick sheaf of papers and handed
them to me. I took them, read the title page and then looked up at Dad. “What’s this?” I said.
“It’s my book,” Clay said. “The one that is going to be published.”
“But…” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” Clay said. “Ironic, isn’t it? Phelps went through all that effort of trying to stop me from writing my book. He needn’t have bothered. He got himself killed for nothing.”
“What does it say?” Gloria asked, tilting her head sideways and straining to see the cover. “The cover, I mean.”
I held the title page up for her to see and read it aloud. “The Hollywood P.I. Cookbook.” I passed the title sheet to Gloria and thumbed through the next few sheet in the pile. I thumbed past the index page and the dedication page and found the first real page. It read as follows:
Gumshoe Gumbo
1/4 cup chopped onions
16 oz. whole milk
3 chopped carrots
1 cup diced potatoes
I skipped past the rest of the ingredients and the cooking instructions and thumbed through a few more pages and stopped when I saw another title that read:
Private Eye Pie
2 eggs
1/4 cup whole milk
2 cups flour
1 tsp. vanilla extract
I read enough of the rest of that page to get the idea. Dad was writing a cookbook. I put the pages back in order and picked up the index page. Even though I was disappointed that the book was not the memoir I had hoped that Dad would write, I had to admit that some of the recipe titles were interesting enough for me to take a closer look. That’s probably the same way it hit the publisher when he first looked at Dad’s submission. In among the index entries I found:
Gumshoe Gumbo
Private Eye Pie
Sleuth Stew
Mystery Mutton Chops
.38 Caliber Peas
Detective Danish
Evidence Egg Salad
Felony Fried Chicken
Robbery Rhubarb Pie
B & E (Bacon and Eggs)
Spy Pie
Undercover Cookies
I looked at Dad.
Dad shrugged and spread his hands. “Whatever works,” he said. “Would either of you care for a slice of Grand Theft Apple Cobbler?”
71 - Dead Letter
“Cooper,” Gloria said from behind her desk.
I looked up from my desk. “What do you want?” I said.
Gloria looked up from her book. “Huh?” she said.
“Didn’t you just call me?” I said.
“Oh, no,” Gloria said. “I was just reading and Cooper came up.”
“How did Cooper come up and what are you reading?” I said.
Gloria held up the book she had in her hands. “The dictionary,” she said. “I just looked up Cooper and it said that it originated in England. Apparently a Cooper is a barrel maker by trade. Isn’t that interesting?”
“Define interesting,” I said. “Are you talking about ‘call Ripley’ interesting, or ‘is that so’ interesting?”
“Probably somewhere in between,” Gloria said. “I just find that kind of trivia fascinating, don’t you?”
“Never gave it much thought, actually,” I said.
Gloria turned the pages and stopped in the S section. “For instance,” she said, “Were you aware that Smith also originated in England and described someone who made horseshoes and other iron gadgets? It’s true. That’s where Smith comes from—a shortened version of blacksmith.”
I didn’t have a reply for this latest tidbit. Instead I cradled my chin in my hands, rested my elbows on my desk and simply smiled.
“And Taylor was a clothes maker, obviously,” Gloria added.
“What sort of business do you suppose Amanda Plummer’s ancestors were involved in?” I said. “Or Mary Tyler Moore’s ex-husband, Grant Tinker? What exactly does a tinker do?”
“Beats me,” Gloria said. “I think it had something to do with mending pots and pans. I only brought this whole thing up because of the origin of Cooper.”
“Really?” I said. “And where did the Campbell name originate?”
“It originated in Scotland,” Gloria explained, “and was derived from two words, ‘Cam’ and ‘Beal’ which meant ‘Crooked mouth’ or ‘wry-mouthed’. I guess that pretty much describes me in a nutshell, wouldn’t you say?”
“Whodda thunk?” I said.
“This kind of stuff is almost as interesting as those two guys from that drapery store downtown,” Gloria said. “I mean, they couldn’t have picked two other guys more suited to installing drapes if they tried.”
I shook my head. “You lost me now,” I said. “What two guys are we talking about here?”
“Curtis Hanes and Rodney Talbot,” Gloria said.
I shrugged and spread my hands. “You’ve still lost me,” I said.
“Curtis and Rodney?” Gloria said. “Curt and Rod? Get it? They install drapes and...”
“And curtain rods,” I said. “I get it. Not often enough, but yeah, I get it. Funny. If this business ever goes belly up I can always start my new business of making barrels. I’d have to get one of those panel trucks or cargo vans with my name painted on the side. ‘Cooper the Cooper’ it could say in big bold letters. Of course I’d have to paint them backwards on the hood so you could read them in your rear view mirror.”
Gloria closed the dictionary and stuck it back on the shelf behind her desk. I got back to the file I’d been reading when this whole name game came up. I set the file aside and walked to the door. “I’m going downstairs and check our mailbox,” I said. “The mail should be here by now. Don’t go away now.”
Gloria spread her hands and twisted her body in her chair. “Where am I going to go?” she said.
I walked to the end of the hallway and rode the elevator down three floors to the lobby. Several rows of mailboxes filled one wall just inside the main set of doors. I retrieved my keys and opened the box marked 312, Cooper Investigations. I pulled out a handful of business sized envelopes and closed the door again, locking it with my key. As I walked back toward the elevator, I shuffled through the envelopes. Tucked inside the stack I found a green form, about half the size of the envelopes. It was a notice from the Post Office telling me that they were holding something for me at the counter and that I could pick it up any time after nine A.M. I checked my watch. It was ten-thirty. Rather than take the elevator back up to the third floor only to tell Gloria that I was going to the Post Office, I just flipped open my cell phone and dialed the office. Gloria answered on the first ring.
“Cooper Investigations,” she said in her professional voice. “Gloria Campbell speaking.”
“It’s me,” I said. “I got a notice in the mail that the Post Office is holding something for me at the downtown branch. I’m going down there and see what it is. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be here,” Gloria said and hung up.
I made it to the Post Office in twelve minutes and found a parking space right in front of the building. I almost hated to give it up when I finished my business inside. I walked up to the first available postal clerk and handed him my green slip. He looked at the identifying number in the upper corner and then looked back at me. “Just a moment please,” he said, and turned and walked into a back room. He returned in less than a minute holding a sealed plastic bag. Inside the bag I could make out an envelope with a strange-looking stamp in the upper right hand corner. It was a five-cent pink air mail stamp, and it had a picture of a DC-4 Skymaster plane on it. The clerk handed me the plastic bag and asked me to sign the receipt. I signed it and handed it back to the clerk. He handed me the bag and looked over my shoulder at the next person in line. “Next,” he said.
I took the bag and walked out of the Post Office and back to my car. I sat there behind the wheel and pried open the plastic bag, dumping the envelope out onto my lap. It was addressed to my office address but the name on the front said Matt Coope
r. I turned the envelope over and found nothing on the back. I turned it over again and glanced at the post mark in the upper middle of the space. It was postmarked from Los Angeles with the date of September 23, 1946 inside the circle.
I’ve heard that the Post Office was slow, but this was ridiculous. A trip that should have taken a day or two had taken sixty-six years, two months and five days. A baby could have crawled it here in that time. I couldn’t bring myself to open the envelope just yet. I wanted Gloria to be there when I did, so I drove back to the office, letters in hand.
When I got back to the office Gloria was entering information into her desktop computer from some of our older files. She looked up when I entered. “That was quick,” she said. “Anything interesting in the mail?”
“More of the same old crap,” I said, tossing the envelopes onto her desk as I read the return addresses. “Utility bill, phone bill, tax bill, client payment and oh yeah, Grandpa got a letter.” I held onto that one and took it back to my desk.
“Grandpa?” Gloria said. “Are you talking about Clay? I know he’s old, but he doesn’t have any grandchildren yet.”
“No,” I said. “I mean Grandpa, as in Matt Cooper.” I showed her the envelope and she leaned over my shoulder, eager to get a look at its contents.
“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” she said.
I took a deep breath and turned the envelope over, slipping a letter opener under the flap and running it across the length of the envelope. The flap popped open and I could see a single sheet inside, folded twice. I pulled the sheet out and unfolded it. It was a handwritten letter by the looks of it. I looked up at Gloria and saw the Christmas-morning-little-kid look on her face. I knew she was dying to read it. To tell the truth, so was I. I handed Gloria the letter and asked her to read it to me.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather read this yourself privately?” Gloria said. “It could have private family information in it.”
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 206