The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  “But he wasn’t?” Helen said.

  “No,” Dean said, shaking his head and looking down at his feet. “He asked me to stay with the department for a while longer.”

  Helen’s face showed some surprise. “But I thought you were looking forward to your retirement, dear,” she said. “How long is he talking about?”

  “Well, you know this is my thirty-eighth year with the department,” Dean said. “And I know I could have opted out after twenty, but I’ve loved the job for so long and that’s why I kept putting it off. Anyway, the captain said that if I could just stay with it until I’d put in forty, well, my pension would be half again as much as I’d be getting now.”

  “But we don’t need the money that badly,” Helen said. “I thought we’d agreed to sell the house and take an apartment. We don’t need to live some lavish lifestyle. In fact I’d prefer a simpler life these days.”

  “Okay,” Dean said. “Here’s the bottom line. I wouldn’t have to put in a full two years. I started in July of ’74 and would only have to go to July of ’14 to get my forty-year pension. That’s only eighteen months away. I could do eighteen months standing on my head. Besides, it would eat at me for the rest of my life if I left before bringing in that couple’s killer. I’d never be able to let it rest.”

  Helen shook her head softly and then looked at her husband. “I don’t like it, but I know you and you’ll never be able to enjoy your retirement with that one big loose end. I guess I can wait another year and a half. I just want you to be happy.”

  “And look at it this way,” Dean said. “I’m only sixty-one now. I couldn’t collect my Social Security checks until I’m at least sixty-two anyway. And that won’t be until September of next year. Hell, by then I’ll only have ten months left with the force. It’ll be a piece of cake, you’ll see. The captain’s not even expecting me in for the rest of the weekend. I don’t have to be back in until Monday morning.”

  Helen sighed. “Okay,” she agreed, “but just so we’re in agreement, you will leave the day you’ve put in your forty, correct?”

  Dean smiled broadly. “Agreed,” he said and kissed Helen and then held her tightly in his arms. “Come on, let’s go join the party.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell everyone?” she said.

  “And spoil a perfectly good party?” he said, pulling her up and back into the rented hall.

  The rest of the night was perfect. By midnight most of the guests had gone home and now there were just three people left to say good night to. Clay, Elliott and Gloria were the last ones to leave.

  “Better get some rest, old man,” Clay said. “I know a sweet fishing spot that’s just aching to be fished tomorrow morning.”

  Dean waved him off. “Not tomorrow,” he said. “I plan on sleeping in for the first time in a long time. But I’ll certainly take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” Clay said. “You just enjoy your weekend. I’ll talk to you on Monday. Good night.”

  Dean shook Clay’s hand and thanked him for the surprise party. Gloria and Elliott each said good night and followed Clay out the door.

  Dean looked at Helen and sighed. “Well, the easy part is done,” he said. “The hard part will be explaining it all to these nice people and giving them back their generous gifts.”

  “I’m sure they’ll all understand,” Helen said. “Besides, this’ll give them all an excuse for another retirement party eighteen months from now. Come on, let’s go home.”

  Monday morning came around and Dean dressed in his blues again and drove to work. Over the weekend, Captain Blake had let everyone in the department know about Lieutenant’s Hollister decision to stay for another year and a half. A bulletin had been posted to this effect and almost everyone was happy about Dean’s decision. The only person not as happy was Sergeant Eric Anderson, who would have been in line for Dean’s job upon his retirement. But when he met Dean coming in to work that morning, he congratulated him just the same.

  “I know how much you were looking forward to taking over,” Dean said, “but this is just how things worked out. I’m sure in another year and a half, you’ll still be able to step in as lieutenant and I’m also sure you’ll do a great job.”

  “Thanks you, sir,” Anderson said. “I’ll look forward to that day, and welcome back.”

  “Sergeant,” Dean said, “Would you call a special roll call with the morning shift? I’d like to speak to the men before they head out on their assignments today.”

  “Right away, sir,” Anderson said and walked away.

  A few minutes later Dean stood before the morning shift in the squad room. As soon as the buzz quieted down, Dean spoke up. “Men,” he began, “as most of you are already aware, I’ve postponed my retirement until July of next year, so I’d like to make sure that these next eighteen months will be productive. First and foremost on my agenda is finding the killer of that couple from the ravine area near Burbank. I want you all to lean hard on your informants and find out what you can. Let’s leave no stone unturned and follow up on any lead you may get. That’s all men, and I just want to thank all of you for your dedicated service under me. Dismissed.”

  The room cleared out and the officers all walked to their squad cars with their assigned partners. Dean walked back to his office and phoned Elliott Cooper’s office. Gloria picked up the phone.

  “Cooper Investigations,” she said. “Gloria speaking.”

  “Good morning, Gloria,” Dean said. “It’s Dean. Could I speak to Elliott, please?”

  “So how are you enjoying your retirement so far?” Gloria said.

  “So far?” Dean said. “It’s not too much different than before. Is Elliott there?”

  “Sure,” Gloria said. “Hold on.” She put Dean on hold and stepped over to the office bathroom door and rapped on it. “Elliott, Dean’s on the phone for you.”

  “Tell him I’ll call him right back,” Elliott said.

  Gloria thought she heard the sound of magazine pages being flipped. She rolled her eyes and returned to her desk and picked up the phone. “He’ll have to call you right back, Dean,” Gloria said. “He’s indisposed at the moment.”

  “With a magazine, no doubt,” Dean said. “No hurry. Just have him call me when he’s finished.”

  “Will do, Dean,” Gloria said and hung up.

  A few minutes later the toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened. Elliott walked over to the sink that should have been installed inside the bathroom, but was instead up against one of the walls next to his desk. Elliott finished washing his hands and drying them and then turned to Gloria.

  “Was he calling from home?” Elliott asked.

  “I guess he was,” Gloria said. “I didn’t ask him, but where else could he be calling from?”

  Elliott picked up his phone, pressed the history button on his caller I.D. and noted that the last call had come six minutes ago from Dean’s old office number.

  “Hmmmp,” he said, looking at the number.

  “What is it?” Gloria said.

  “Looks like he was calling from his old office number,” Elliott said. “Maybe he stopped in to clear out his desk or something.”

  Elliott dialed the number and a familiar voice identified himself as Lieutenant Hollister. “Hard habit to break, isn’t it?” Elliott said.

  “What’s that?” Dean said,

  “Still answering the phone as Lieutenant Hollister,” Elliott said. “I guess it just slipped out.”

  “Actually it didn’t,” Dean said. “I’m back on the job.”

  “What?” Elliott said. “How’d that happen?”

  “It’s a long story,” Dean said. “We can talk about it some other time, but for now I’d like to find out if you and Gloria are available for some real work. And this would be on the clock. That is, unless you’re both too busy to take on any more work at the moment.”

  “Not at all,” Elliott said. “We’re at your disposal. What do you need?” />
  “Can both of you meet me in my office in say, fifteen minutes?” Dean said.

  “That’s us you hear knocking now,” Elliott said and hung up. He stood and turned to Gloria. “Let’s go, kid. We’re on a case. I’ll explain in the car.”

  The two of them drove to the twelfth precinct, parked in the parking lot and hurried down the hall to place they knew very well by now—Lieutenant Dean Hollister’s office. Elliott rapped on the door and heard Dean invite them inside. They booth stood there, waiting for Dean’s explanation.

  “Please, have a seat,” Dean said and then proceeded to fill them both in on the latest developments concerning his retirement plans.

  “Well, there’s a first,” Elliott said. “I’ve never heard of anyone un-retiring before. Oh, sure, you hear about old guys taking jobs as bag boys at the supermarket when they find themselves with too much free time on their hands. But I don’t know anyone who went right back to the job they just retired from.”

  “I think it’s great,” Gloria said. “Besides, Dean is the only one who’ll really know when he’s ready to pull the plug for good.”

  “Thank you for those words of support, Gloria,” Dean said. “Suppose we move on to the reason I called you both in this morning? As you may have heard by now, we found the owner of that vehicle from the ravine. He and his wife were found in a shallow grave not far from there. The crime lab has identified the make and model of the tires on the car that apparently drove the couple to their final destination. I have every available man working on leads for that case. What I’d like the two of you to work on is a similar case that Clay original had worked on even before the two of you were born.”

  Elliott and Gloria exchanged glances. “What case is that?” Elliott said.

  Dean turned to Gloria. “Do you remember last week when Clay called and asked you to get an old file out for us to look over? Well, that’s what I’d like you two to check out. See if you can find any connection at all between that case and this one. So far the only connection is one of proximity. The missing woman in that case turned up pretty close to where we found the car in the ravine. I know it’s not much and it’s probably a long shot, but see what you can dig up and let me know. I’d appreciate it very much.”

  “We’ll start right away,” Elliott said, rising from his chair.

  Dean grabbed a file folder from the ledge behind his desk and handed it to Elliott. “These are copies of the original contents of our file. You might find them handy when you look into your file.”

  Elliott took the file, excused himself and led Gloria back out of Dean’s office. As they walked back down the hallway toward the parking lot, Gloria turned to Elliott.

  “Are we telling Clay about this?” she said.

  “Dean’s probably already told him,” he said. “If he hasn’t yet, he will. It was Dad’s case after all.”

  Back in the office, Gloria pulled that original file out and returned to her desk with it. Elliott pulled up an extra chair and slid in next to Gloria, opening Dean’s file alongside Gloria’s folder. They paged through Dean’s documents, writing down the pertinent information on a yellow legal pad. Elliott read aloud, while Gloria made the notes for them.

  “First,” Elliott said. “List the two victims’ names on top. That’s, let’s see, George and Ellen Armitage.” He read their address to Gloria and then read their stats, such as height, weight, hair and eye colors and names of immediate family. Elliott picked up Clay’s original file dated August, 1979. He read off the name of the missing woman, her husband’s name and the name of their only child, a son. “In the middle of the page, draw a line across and write down ‘Conrad and Kate Archer’. She was the missing woman and he was the husband. Okay, now under his name write, ‘died in a car crash in 2009 in the same ravine area.’ Under her name write, ‘found dead, September, 1979 in ravine.”

  “What should I write under the son’s name?” Gloria said.

  “Nothing for now,” Elliott explained. “Since he was too young to be of any help, we’ll just let his name sit there on the page for now. How about if we check the Internet for any further information on this case of the people involved? The more we know, the more we can narrow down our search.”

  Gloria clicked on the Internet icon on her desktop computer and typed the husband’s name into the search engine. The screen filled with links to newspaper articles about the disappearance and later the discovery of Kate Archer’s body in the ravine near Burbank. Gloria clicked one of the links and read the article. It was from three years ago and it told of how Conrad Archer’s body was discovered in his wrecked Toyota Camry in a ravine off a mountain road near where his wife’s body had been discovered more than thirty years earlier.

  Elliott wrote down as much information as they could gather from all the links they tried. When he figured they’d collected enough data to work with, Elliott ripped two yellow sheets from the pad, secured them on a clipboard and pushed the extra chair away from Gloria’s desk. “We have enough to start with for now,” Elliott said. “What do you say we go and talk to a few people?”

  *****

  The weather had changed of late and the temperature during the day had dropped to a bone-chilling seventy-five degrees. I’m sure the folks in Chicago would settle for half that right about now. They were probably stomping through a foot of snow by this time of year. And that’s probably why a good many of them had migrated to sunny California over the years. The result of all this migration was an overabundance to unstable people. Easterners like to say that California is the land of fruits and nuts, intimating that we had more than our fair share of homosexuals and psychopaths, and who’s to say that there wasn’t some validity in all of that?

  It was almost noon on Saturday, with the sun high in the sky. Hal Jackson had taken his family to spend the day at the beach. He and Mrs. Jackson had set up two beach chairs under a large umbrella with a short fold-up table between them. They had a plastic cooler at their side and sat back enjoying a couple of ice cold lemonades.

  Their two children, Rosie, age five and Billy, age seven sat thirty feet from the ocean’s waves with their little shovels digging in the sand and filling their little pails. When they had them full, they’d pack them tight and turn them upside down, letting the lump of sand settle on the beach. They repeated this until they had seven or eight conical shapes in a circle.

  Billy stuck his shovel in the sand and before he could empty the contents into his pail, he noticed something shiny winking at him from the sand. He plucked it off his shovel and examined it. It was a ring with a bright stone glistening in the sunlight. He dropped the shovel and ran back to where his parents were relaxing.

  “Dad, Dad,” Billy said, holding out the ring. “Look what I dug up. Looks like pirate’s treasure. It’s probably worth a million dollars. Is it, huh, Dad?”

  Hal Jackson took the ring from his son, blew off a little more of the sand from around the setting and then poured a little lemonade over the stone. He held it up to the light, examining it from several angles before passing it over to his wife. “What do you think, Lois?”

  She didn’t have to look at it as long as her husband had to realize what she was holding. She nodded. “It looks real to me.”

  “Hal,” she said. “This is someone’s diamond ring. Some woman somewhere must be frantic over losing this.” She turned to Billy. “Where did you find this?”

  Billy turned, held his arm straight out and pointed to where Rosie still sat shoveling sand into her pail. “Right over there,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.” Billy ran back to the spot where he’d been digging and pointed down into the shallow hole.

  Hal dropped to his knees, grabbed Billy’s little shovel and began removing more dirt from the hole. After six more scoops he met with some resistance in the sand. Hal dropped the shovel and began digging with his hands. He pulled out a few more handfuls of sand and then recoiled when he made out the shapes of several human fingers. He stood back
up, pulled his two children away from the hole and told his wife to take them back to the umbrella.

  Hal pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911 and waited. He told the operator what he’d discovered and she instructed him to stay on the line while she summoned the authorities. Hal was still on the phone to the 911 operator when the first police car pulled up to the edge of the beach. Two officers got out and hurried over to where Hal stood with the phone to his ear. He told the operator that the police had arrived and then hung up the phone, dropping it back in his pocket.

  He pointed to the hole in the sand and led officers over to the spot where he’d been digging. “Right there,” he told the first cop.

  The cop dropped to his knees and spread some more sand away from the fingers to determine if there was any more to the find. When he had the entire hand exposed, he got to his feet again, brushed off his knees and grabbed the shoulder mic to his radio.

  “Dispatch,” he said, “This is car seven. We’re at the Venice Beach Park, just off the Rose Avenue entrance. We’re going to need the coroner, the crime scene unit, a photographer and some backup units to meet us at this location. We have at least one DB in the sand.”

  “Roger, car seven,” the dispatcher replied. “Units are on their way.” She broke the connection.

  The officer remained next to the crime scene, keeping curiosity seekers away until backup arrived for crowd control. He stood there for twenty minutes.

  Andy Reynolds, the county medical examiner arrived first, carrying his little black bag and was followed by two ambulance attendants. He looked at the officer and then down into the hole. “This it?” he said.

  “So far,” the officer said. “I stopped digging at this point and called it in.”

  By the time the backup units had arrived, the photographer was already there snapping shots of the scene at various stages during the unearthing procedure. Andy had already removed enough sand to reveal the victim’s arm and shoulder. The photographer kept snapping pictures as Andy dug. Once he had the head and face uncovered, he instructed the photographer to get several good shots and then wait.