The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  “After sixty-six years, I don’t suppose it matters anymore,” I said. “Go ahead and read it.”

  Gloria sat on the edge of my desk, cleared her throat and said, “It’s dated September 20, 1946 and starts out:

  Dear Mr. Cooper,

  You don’t know me, but my name is Nicholas Sawyer and I’m fourteen years old. My mother’s name was Dorothy Sawyer. She told me that she knew you from when we used to live in Chicago. She said you lived down the street from her and that you used to date her. I wonder if you remember her. The reason I’m writing is to let you know that mom passed away three weeks ago. She had been sick for a long time. I never knew my father. Mom said he died before I was born, but before she died she told me that she made that up to spare my feelings. The fact is that it looks like my real father did not die. Mom said he moved to Los Angeles when I was just a little kid. Mr. Cooper, what I’m trying to say is that it looks like you are my real father, at least that what mom told me the day before she died. I don’t have any other living relatives and wondered if I could at least meet you just once before I have to go away. I live in Los Angeles now. I understand if you would rather not see me. I’ll just wait for your letter. If I don’t get an answer I’ll know that you were not interested and I won’t bother you again.

  Your son,

  Nick

  Gloria laid the letter on my desk and looked up at me. “Gees,” she said. “It looks like you have an uncle you never knew about.” Then she thought of Clay. “Oh no, Clay has a brother.”

  “Half-brother, actually,” I said. “Different mothers, but yeah, this is big news. Do you think we should tell Dad?”

  “Hell yes,” Gloria said. “If anyone has a right to know, it’s Clay.” Gloria held one hand to her mouth and then said, “Do you suppose Nick is still alive?”

  “If he is,” I said, “he’d be around eighty years old by now. Christ, he’d be old enough to be Clay’s father. You know Grandpa Matt didn’t even marry my grandma until he was thirty-eight years old and they didn’t have Dad until he was thirty-nine. By then this Nick kid would have already been eighteen years old.”

  Gloria picked up the letter and glanced at it again. “It says here that he lived in L.A. when he wrote the letter in ‘46,” she said. “Is it possible he could still be out here somewhere?”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said. “But what if he was sent to a foster home after his mother died? What if he was adopted and took a different last name? What if…what are you doing?”

  Gloria had picked up the greater Los Angeles telephone directory and was paging through it. She stopped in the S section and began running her finger down the pages. Her finger stopped on a Nicholas Sawyer who lived in Inglewood, which was twelve or thirteen miles south of Hollywood. Gloria grabbed a pencil and jotted down the address and phone number. “Well,” she said. “Are you curious enough to take a drive to Inglewood?”

  “What about Dad?” I said.

  “No sense getting him all worked up if this doesn’t pan out, does it?” she said. “If this is the same guy we can always tell Clay about him after we confirm his identity. Come on, what do you say we at least go take a look? You know this thing will just gnaw at you if you don’t, and just think what it could mean to Clay to know he has a big brother.”

  I took a quick look at my appointment calendar and noticed, to my dismay, that we had only one client who wanted to see us later today and no active cases. I slapped my palms down on the desk and pushed my body out of my chair. “You wanna drive?” I said.

  I took along the sixty-six year-old letter in the original Post Office plastic bag and we exited to the parking lot behind our building. Gloria slid in behind the wheel, and I slid in next to her and found her L.A. street map book. I told her the best route to take and in no time at all we were on our way to see a step uncle I’d never knew existed.

  We drove south to Santa Monica Boulevard and took that west to LaCienega, which ran south all the way to Inglewood. We exited east on Manchester Boulevard and drove three blocks to South Cedar Ave. Nicholas Sawyer’s house sat on the corner of Cedar and Elm. It was a light blue stucco house sitting on a dried out brown and green yard, mostly brown. Gloria parked on Elm, directly in front of the house and then just sat there.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Gloria said. “The man’s gone sixty-six years accepting the fact that Matt didn’t want to see him. Do you think our little visit is going to be a life-changing event for him?”

  I thought about it momentarily. “Let me put it this way,” I said. “My dad told me a story of the first date he ever had when he was fifteen. He took this girl out to a movie. They had to take the city bus because he wasn’t even old enough to drive yet. Anyway, when they got off the bus after the movie, the girl stood looking at Dad and even stood on her toes, like she was waiting for that good night kiss. Dad told me he was so nervous that he just said good night and walked away.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” Gloria said.

  “Grandpa Matt moved the family shortly after and Dad never got to date that girl again. It gnawed away at Dad that he never got that good night kiss from the girl. Well, forty-three years later he met her at a fortieth class reunion and told her about him being too shy to kiss her back then and asked if he could finally get that good night kiss after forty-three years. She gladly obliged and Dad left there feeling like a giant loose end had finally been tied up.”

  “Let’s see,” Gloria said. “Forty-three years ago when he was fifteen. He’d have been fifty-eight at the time. He’s sixty-two now. This story took place just four years ago?”

  I nodded. “See, for Dad it was a forty-three year loose end that he was glad to have finally resolved. It has to be a similar situation for Nicholas. Only he’s been waiting sixty-six years for his resolution. I think it’s time we gave it to him, don’t you?”

  Gloria laid her hand on my forearm and smiled. “I do. Let’s go see the man, shall we?”

  We walked up the white sidewalk and up three steps to the porch and rang the bell. I could hear shuffling sounds inside before the front door opened and we stood looking at a white-haired man in baggy pants and suspenders.

  “Yes?” the man said. “May I help you?”

  “Are you Nicholas Sawyer?” I said.

  He looked us over and said, “I already get the paper, I have enough magazines, I have no interest in hearing anyone spout the scriptures and I don’t need anyone to cut my lawn.” He began to close the door.

  I quickly said, “Mr. Sawyer, my name is Elliott Cooper. Matt Cooper was my grandfather.”

  The door stopped closing and the man gave me a second look. Sixty-six years melted away and I thought I saw a glimmer in his eyes.

  He opened the door all the way. “Please,” he said, “won’t you come in?”

  Gloria and I entered the man’s home and he closed the door behind us. The man shook my hand and invited us to sit in his living room. Gloria and I sat on the sofa and the man sat across from us in a brown overstuffed recliner with an electrical cord running out of the back. It was one of those electric lift chairs.

  “You are Nicholas Sawyer, aren’t you?” I said.

  Sawyer nodded.

  “Mr. Sawyer,” I said. “This may sound strange, but this morning I got a notice from the Post Office to come down and pick something up that they were holding for me. When I got there, the clerk gave me this.” I handed him the envelope addressed to Grandpa, still in the plastic bag. “Apparently it ended up in the dead letter office and has been there since a few days after you mailed it. The clerk told me that they had recently remodeled the Post Office and when they moved a giant one-ton floor safe, they found your letter lying behind it.”

  Nicholas Sawyer looked down at the letter and then back at me.

  I nodded and smiled. “Go on,” I said. “Open it.”

  Nicholas slid the envelope out of the plastic bag. He set the plastic bag on the coffee table and sat
staring at the envelope. In his fourteen-year-old handwriting he looked at his name in the return address corner and then saw Grandpa Matt’s name in the front. His hands shook as he lifted the flap and withdrew the single sheet of folded paper. He looked up at me again and then down at the letter. He unfolded it and read the contents again for the first time in more than six decades. When he finished reading, he folded it again and slipped it into the envelope, handing it back to me.

  “You see, Mr. Sawyer,” I said. “Grandpa never got the letter so he had no way of knowing about you.”

  Nicholas did the math in his head and realized he’d never get to meet his father. “When did he die?” Nicholas said.

  “Ten years ago,” I told him. “He was ninety-one and died peacefully at home.” I could almost see the thoughts and questions swirling around in Nicholas’s head. I imagined it was hard for him to know what to ask next.

  “Mr. Sawyer,” Gloria said. “Matt had a son named Clay. You have a brother.”

  Sawyer’s eyes misted up and he pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Is he still alive?” Nicholas asked.

  “Very much alive,” Gloria said. “Clay is Elliott’s father and he lives in Hollywood.”

  “That would make you, what, my half-nephew?” Nicholas said.

  I nodded. “Something like that,” I said.

  “You dad,” Nicholas said, “How old is he?”

  “Dad’s sixty-two years old and in pretty good health,” I told him.

  “Sixty-two?” Nicholas said. “I just turned eighty. He’s young enough to be my son.”

  “Grandpa Matt and Grandma Amy didn’t have Dad until Grandpa was nearly forty,” I explained. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to tell Dad what we’ve learned and ask if he’d like to meet you. That is, if that’s all right with you.” I found that I was just as nervous as Nicholas and hadn’t realized that I’d been repeating myself.

  “Oh, yes,” Nicholas said.

  “Nicholas,” I said.

  “Yes?” Nicholas said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, waving my hand in front of me, “I was just thinking out loud. “Nicholas was Grandpa Matt’s father’s name. Could it be just a coincidence or did your mother perhaps know Grandpa’s dad?”

  “It’s no coincidence,” Nicholas said. “Mom knew your family very well. She’d had dinner at Matt’s house many times. She told me how much she liked Matt’s mother. She never got to meet Matt’s father, though. I had heard that Nicholas Cooper died just a few years before Mom met your grandfather.”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “Great Grandpa Nick was killed when Grandpa Matt was just a teenager. Someone shot Nick after he witnessed the murder of a geologist who was looking into the possibility that there was oil beneath one of Nick’s neighbor’s houses. They never found his murderer.”

  “I wish I could have known him,” Nicholas said. “Your great-grandfather, that is, not the murderer.”

  “Well, it sounds like you were named after Great Grandpa Nick, all right,” I said.

  Nicholas pressed a button on a small box connected by a cable to the chair. It slowly rose, lifting him to a standing position. Gloria and I started to get up but Nicholas held a hand up. “Please, stay seated,” he said. “I just want to get something to show you.” He slowly shuffled to a door on the other side of the living room. When he came out again he was carrying a small box with a lid on it. He set the box on the coffee table and returned his chair to a sitting position.

  Nicholas leaned over the coffee table, removed the cover from his box and pulled it onto his lap. He shuffled through a few items before he found what he was looking for. He pulled an old photo from the box, looked at it nostalgically and passed it over to me.

  I stared down at the photo of a young man, perhaps twenty or so, and then back at Nicholas. “Is that you?” I said. Gloria leaned over my shoulder to get a look at the photo.

  Nicholas shook his head. “That’s my dad, Matt Cooper,” he said.

  I took another close look at the photo, which looked to be from the Prohibition Era. I saw an old, square-looking car in the background of this slightly faded black and white photo. Standing in front of the car, one foot up on the running board, was a young man who looked genuinely happy. That was my grandfather, Matt. There was no mistaking that face, once I knew who it was. He was the spitting image of my own father, Clay Cooper.

  Nicholas leaned toward me, pointing at the picture. “Mother told me that was taken the day she met Dad.”

  I was still having trouble following the train of thought whenever Nicholas spoke of his dad. I took a second or two for me to realize that he was also talking about my grandfather.

  “That was dad’s first car,” Nicholas said. “A three-year-old 1928 Ford Model A. Mom told me that Dad was so proud of that car. It was the car that he took mother to her first dance in. Apparently I was conceived in the back seat.” Nicholas took another look at the photo and smiled warmly before he tucked it back into the box and put the lid back on it.

  “Didn’t Grandpa Matt ever know about you?” I said.

  Nicholas shook his head. “Mom never told him,” Nicholas said. “She was too ashamed and embarrassed. Back in those days, good girls didn’t have babies without a husband. As soon as her mother found out she was pregnant, she sent mom out of town to live with her aunt. Later on, when mom brought me home again, grandma just told everyone who asked that mom’s husband had been run over by a bakery truck and no one ever questioned it. Mom even wore grandma’s wedding ring for the rest of her life.”

  “So your mother never married?” Gloria said.

  Nicholas shook his head. “No she didn’t,” he said. “It was just her and me until I left for the Korean War when I was eighteen.”

  “Didn’t she ever want to contact Matt?” Gloria said.

  “Oh, she had the phone in her hand many times,” Nicholas said, “but never could bring herself to make the call. Then when I was about four she’d learned that Dad had left Chicago and had moved out here somewhere. She was depressed for a week after that.”

  I stood and Gloria followed my lead. I looked down at Nicholas. “Please, don’t get up, Mr. Sawyer,” I said. “Gloria and I have to get back to Hollywood. If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep in touch with you. I want to tell my father about all of this and maybe you two can get together for a talk or something.”

  “I’d like that,” Nicholas said, shaking the hand that I’d extended to him.

  Gloria bent over and gave Nicholas a kiss on the cheek. “It was really nice to meet you, sir,” she said. “I hope we can do this again real soon.”

  Nicholas smiled and rubbed his cheek. “Me, too,” he said. “Thank you both for coming to see me.”

  Before we left, I picked up the letter and the plastic bag and inserted the letter into it. “Would it be all right if I gave Dad your phone number?” I said.

  Nicholas nodded, wrote his number on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me. “Tell him he can call any time at all,” Nicholas said.

  Gloria and I got back into her car and as if on cue, we both let out a deep sigh and then looked at each other. She leaned into me.

  “How cool was that?” Gloria said.

  “Seems like a nice old man,” I said. “It’s too bad Grandpa Matt never got to meet him.”

  “What about Clay?” Gloria said. “How do you suppose he’ll take the news of finding out he has a half-brother?”

  “There only one way to find out,” I said. “Drive.”

  While Gloria drove back toward Hollywood, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Dad’s home number. No one answered and the call went to Dad’s voice mail. “Dad, it’s Elliott,” I said and then glanced at my watch and remembered. “Never mind, I just remembered that you’re at your doctor’s appointment. I’ll try again in an hour.” I closed my phone and slipped it back into my shirt pocket.

  “Sounds like the good news will have to wait,”
Gloria said. “Let me run an idea by you.”

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “While we’re waiting for Clay to get home again,” Gloria said, “How about if we drop by the office and look Nicholas Sawyer up on the court records site just to see what comes up? I mean, up until twenty minutes ago we didn’t know anything about the guy. It couldn’t hurt.”

  I shrugged. “Why not?” I said.

  Back in our office I hung up my jacket and Gloria went directly to her desk, clicking on the desktop icon for the court records site. When their home page came up she entered Nicholas Sawyer into the name fields and hit Enter. An hourglass icon tumbled over and over until the screen filled with case information regarding Nicholas Sawyer.

  “I got some hits,” Gloria said.

  I stepped over to her desk and looked over her shoulder at the computer screen. Gloria scanned the third column that contained information about the person’s date of birth. We knew from talking to Sawyer that he was born in 1932. Several of the entries had dates from the sixties and seventies. Obviously Nicholas Sawyer was a common name that was shared by at least seven other Nicholas Sawyers. After eliminating all those entries with the wrong birth date, it left us with just one entry. Gloria clicked on the link and a new screen opened. There at the top of the screen it identified the person as our Nicholas Sawyer. The entry noted that Nicholas Sawyer was the executor for the will of the late Mrs. Nicholas (Marie) Sawyer. It showed her date of birth as 1935 and her date of death as 2011.

  “Nicholas is a widower,” Gloria said. “How sad.” She closed the screen and turned off her monitor.

  “Well,” I said, “Maybe we came along at the right time. Maybe we can be his family now so he won’t have to be alone anymore.”

  Twenty-five minutes later I tried Dad’s home phone again. This time he picked up on the second ring. I asked if I could stop by and talk to him and he said I didn’t even have to ask.

  I asked Gloria if she wanted to come along but she waved me off. “Might be better if it was just you and Clay,” she said. “I’m not really family and he might not open up with his feelings if I’m sitting there listening. Why don’t you just go? I’ll hold down the office.”