The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  I didn’t notice any trace of a broken window and there were no workmen in the area. Saul’s must have been the first window that got shattered and had already been replaced. On the other side of the window, however, a man in his stocking feet, with a white shirt and tie was dressing a mannequin on a stand. He had just straightened the dummy’s tie and had stepped back to get the full effect. He briefly glanced out the window and saw me watching him. He smiled and nodded politely. I turned and walked inside and turned to the man, who was just stepping out of the window display.

  “Hello. Are you Saul Green?” I said

  The man shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m Lyle Hathaway, the manager. Is there something I can help you with today, Mr….”

  “Cooper,” I said. “Elliott Cooper. I have an office just two blocks away on the other side of the street. I just wanted to talk to Mr. Green about the trouble he recently had with his display window.”

  “Terrible,” Lyle said. “Just terrible.”

  I wondered if he and the clerk at the deli had rehearsed their reactions.

  “I had no sooner finished dressing that window when someone broke it,” Lyle said. “There was glass everywhere, especially in the clothing on display. And window dressing is a two day job.”

  “So, is Mr. Green in?” I said.

  “He’s at one of the other stores,” Lyle said. “He owns four altogether and today he’s overseeing the operation at his Beverly Hills shop.”

  I gave Lyle one of my business cards. “Would you please give this to Mr. Green and tell him I was here asking about his broken window.”

  Lyle tucked my card in his shirt pocket and extended his hand. “I certainly will, Mr. Cooper.”

  I shook his hand and exited to the street. I crossed at the corner again and walked a block and a half back to my building. Gloria was still busy entering records into her computer when I walked in. Apparently it was all the excuse she needed to take a break.

  “What did you find out?” Gloria said.

  I sat behind my desk, bent down and slipped out of my shoes. I guess I wasn’t used to walking that much. I rubbed my foot through the sock and said, “It was pretty much the same story at all three stores. A chrome nut was found just inside each broken window but no one saw who did it.”

  “What about the nuts themselves?” Gloria said. “Did the police find any fingerprints on them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think to ask, but thanks for the suggestion.”

  I picked up my phone and dialed Lieutenant Eric Anderson at the twelfth precinct. I got through to him right away.

  “Anderson,” he said when he answered.

  “Eric,” I said. “It’s Elliott. How’s everything at the one-two?”

  “The one-two?” Eric said. “Now you’re even picking up the lingo around here. What’s next? Are you going to ask about the perps we brought in?

  “Only if they were the ones responsible for three broken display windows on Hollywood Boulevard.,” I said. “Speaking of which, did your department collect the chrome nuts that were used to break those windows?”

  “”Let me check,” Eric said. “Murder, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, burglary and jaywalking. Nope, I don’t see any reports of broken windows. It wouldn’t exactly have top priority around here, Cooper,” Eric said. “Jaywalking?” I said.

  “I just threw that one in to see if you were even paying attention,” Eric said. “Now, what’s all this about broken windows?”

  I explained about the newspaper article and how I’d gone to visit each of the three shops that had been hit. “Just wondering if word of these crimes made it back to your desk and whether or not you found any fingerprints on the nuts.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Eric said, “the minute those sheets came across my desk, we dropped everything and I put a dozen men on it. I expect to hear something in, oh, six months.”

  “No need to get sarcastic,” I said. “But someone there must have looked into these cases. All I want to know is if your department ended up with the nuts.”

  “Including you,” Eric said, “that would be four, wouldn’t it?”

  “So that would be a ‘no’ I take it,” I said.

  “That would be a ‘no’,” Eric said. “Anything else I can do for you today, Cooper?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “I’ll try calling back when you’re in a better mood.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Gloria. “Too much else going on,” I said. “It looks like the broken window squad is on vacation.”

  “Why do you care about this so much?” Gloria said.

  “I probably wouldn’t even have given it a second thought,” I said, “if we were on some other case, but when it gets slow like this, I tent to grasp at straws, hoping they’ll turn into cases.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for something to do,” Gloria said, “I could use some help with entering all these old cases into the database.”

  “Wouldn’t that be kind of crowded with four hands all trying to type on that same keyboard at the same time?” I said.

  “And that’s another thing,” Gloria said. “Why don’t we get a network hookup in this office? Then all three of these computers could be linked and all three of us could help with this project. It wouldn’t be very expensive, either. You could just get that computer geek that worked for us a while back. What was his name? Jerry, Perry, Sherry?”

  “Terry Belmont,” I said, refreshing her memory. “The kid knows his stuff, all right, but I don’t even know if he’s still at that same computer store.” Gloria stood with both hands on her hips and pursed her lips. “But I could check, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like,” Gloria said. “In fact, why don’t you just finish your paper and I’ll take a walk down to the computer store and talk to him myself?”

  Before I could respond, Gloria grabbed her purse and was out of the office.

  The computer store was right down the street and Gloria welcomed the chance to stretch her legs after sitting behind her laptop all morning. She walked into the store, looked around for a moment and then grabbed the first clerk that happened by.

  “Is Terry Belmont here?” Gloria said.

  The kid, a pimple-faced scrawny kid of no more than eighteen looked at Gloria. “He’s in the back,” the kid said, his voice cracking. “I’ll go get him for you.”

  The kid disappeared and returned in under a minute with Terry in tow. Terry recognized me and smiled. “It’s Gloria, isn’t it?” Terry said.

  Gloria nodded. “Terry,” she said politely. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Almost a year,” Terry said. “What’s up in the P.I. business?”

  “Terry,” Gloria said. “Could you hook up a wireless network in our office so that all three of our computers could…”

  Gloria hadn’t even finished her sentence when Terry broke in. “Sure can,” he said. “How soon do you want it done?”

  “You can do that?” Gloria said.

  “In my sleep,” Terry said.

  “Great,” Gloria said. “What do I all need?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Terry said. “I’ll bring everything with me and I’ll have you up and running inside an hour.”

  “And what will all this cost me?” Gloria said.

  “Well,” Terry said, “that all depends on if the store gets involved or if I do it on my own. The store would want to be paid, naturally, but if I do this on the side, you can cut out the middle man and just pay me.”

  “Works for me,” Gloria said. “When are you free?”

  Terry looked at his wristwatch and noticed it was almost lunchtime. “Will you be in the office over the lunch hour?” he said.

  Gloria nodded.

  “I’ll see you there in twenty minutes,” Terry said. “Not a word to my boss.”

  Gloria stuck an invisible key in her lips and turned it, miming the act of tossing the key over her shoulder. She left the
store and had to pass the shoe store on her way back. She noted the plywood tacked up where the glass had been, but kept walking.

  Back in the office she set her purse next to her desk, sat down and smiled at Elliott. “We’ll be connected in a hour,” she said.

  “I take it you found Terry,” I said.

  “He’s going to do this on the QT without his boss knowing it,” Gloria said. “Should save us a bundle and now we can ALL contribute to the data entry chores around here.”

  “Like I’ve always said,” Elliott remarked, “if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.”

  Fifteen minutes later we heard our outer office door open and a second after that Terry Belmont stepped into the inner office carrying a small cardboard box full of computer goodies. We set the box on my desk and held his hand out. I shook it and glanced over at Gloria.

  “Good to see you again, Mr. Cooper,” Terry said. “It’s been a while. I thought I’d have heard from you long before this.”

  “Yeah, well, things have been a bit slow around here, Terry,” I told him and then looked down into his box. “So, what did you bring us?”

  Terry pulled a flat white box out of the cardboard box and opened it. He held it up for my inspection and approval. “First,” he said, “we need to start with this wireless router and then we need to…”

  “Don’t sell me the watch, Terry,” I said. “Just tell me the time. I don’t really need to know what you’re doing or how it all works. Most of it would go right over my head anyway, so how about if you just hook it all up and tell me what we owe you?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Cooper,” Terry said and got immediately to work on the network installation. It was almost quarter to one when Terry packed up his tools and sighed. He gestured toward the laptop on my desk and said, “There you go. All done. Now you can access any computer in this room from any other computer and all you have to do is…”

  I stopped him. “Is this going to be more techno-talk that I won’t get?” I said.

  “Not at all,” Terry assured me. “I just wanted to point to this reset button in case the network freezes up or stops responding for any reason. Just hit the reset button, wait for the reboot and you’d good to go again.”

  Gloria spent five more minutes with Terry learning how to access the other two computers from her laptop. She thanked Terry and paid what he’d asked for shortly before he left the office. “Handy kid to have around,” she said.

  “I suppose,” I said. “But he’d drive me crazy in no time with all that techno-babble he spouts out at every opportunity. No, he’s just a little too hyper for me.” I gestured toward Gloria’s laptop. “So, you know how this whole network thing works now?”

  “Sure,” Gloria said. “Now, while I’m entering our records from last month, you can start with the earliest records and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle, at least theoretically, anyway. And with Clay helping out, we can be current in a month or less.”

  I flipped my laptop open and powered it up. While it took itself through the startup procedure, I stepped over to the small tabletop refrigerator I’d recently bought and retrieved a can of soda. I looked at Gloria. “You want one?” I said.

  “No thanks,” Gloria said.

  As I headed back to my desk, a smashing sound filled the room and the window behind my desk shattered. Whatever came through it just kept on going and hit my laptop screen, shattering that as well. I crouched behind my desk and gestured to Gloria to do the same behind hers. We waited for a moment and nothing else happened. I duck-walked past my window and stood up, trying to peek around the window sill to the outside. My .38 jumped into my hand and I held it up, pointing at the ceiling. Another projectile took out another large piece of glass from my window. It whizzed past the laptop this time and left a dent in the tabletop refrigerator door. It bounced onto the floor and I could see it now. It was a chrome nut, and from all appearances, looked to be a half-inch nut.

  Gloria spotted it, too, and looked at me. “I bet I know what you’re thinking,” Gloria said.

  “And you’d be right,” I told her. “Has to be the same guy who vandalized those three stores. Stay down, I’m going to try to get out there and up to the roof of the building across the street.”

  “Like hell,” Gloria said, pulling her own handgun out and crouching all the way to the office door. “I’m going with you. You can check the roof and I’ll go around the back of the building.”

  We walked bent over out of the office and then ran down the hall to the elevator. When we got to the lobby, we ran to the Hollywood Boulevard exit and paused before hurrying outside and across the street. Gloria went around to the back of the building and I went inside and found the elevator, riding it to the top floor. I got out and found the stairs to the roof. By the time I got out there, the roof was empty. I rushed over to the edge that faced our building and looked down. This building was just one floor taller than ours and I could see into my office from here.

  A few moments later Gloria came out of the stairway and onto the roof. I waved to her and she hurried over to where I stood looking across at our building. “Nobody in back of the building,” Gloria said. “Did you find anything up here?”

  “I just got here myself,” I said. “Whoever it was had to have stood right about where you’re standing now to make those shots.” I looked down at Gloria’s feet and pointed. “Look.”

  Gloria bent over and reached for the two chrome nuts. “Don’t touch ‘em,” I said. “There may be fingerprints on these.”

  “They look like they could do some real damage in the right hands,” Gloria said.

  “My laptop screen is proof of that,” I said. “And the refrigerator door. What the hell is going on in this neighborhood?”

  “You can bet it’s the same kid who broke those other windows,” Gloria said.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Lieutenant Anderson’s number. His secretary put me though right away.

  “I hope you’re not calling to say I told you so, Cooper?” Eric said.

  “What are you talking about, Eric,” I said. “The same guy I was telling you about earlier just hit our office—twice. He broke our window and my laptop and dented my fridge.”

  “Anybody hurt?” Eric said.

  “No, thank goodness,” I said. “But it has to be the same guy. We found two chrome nuts in my office and two more on the roof of the building across the street. Now, are you going to do something about this or not?”

  “Keep your shirt on, Elliott,” Eric said. “We’re already looking into it. That is, not your case in particular, but we got another call a little better than an hour ago from a store owner in your neighborhood. He had his display window smashed, too. And they found a half-inch chrome nut among the broken glass. Hang on, Elliott, I’m coming over there myself to take a look. And those two nuts on the roof, no, I’m not talking about you, just leave them where you found them. I’ll have a photog with me. Same with the ones in your office. Just leave everything the way it happened.”

  “We’re heading back there right now,” I told Eric and closed my phone. I turned to Gloria. “Eric’s on his way over,” I said. “One of us should stay here and one of us should meet him at the office, if that’s where he stops first.”

  “I’ll go back over to the office,” Gloria said.

  “All right,” I told her, “but don’t clean anything up. He’s bringing a photographer with him and he’ll want to take all four of these nuts back to the lab. Maybe we’ll get lucky with these.”

  Gloria hurried back to the stairway and a minute later, as I looked down onto the boulevard, I could see her racing across the street. Two minutes later she was looking back at me from our office. She waved and stepped away from the window. I waited for fifteen minutes and heard the stairway door open again. Eric and another cop were followed by a man carrying a camera. I waved them over and pointed down to the two chrome nuts. The man with the camera took several pict
ures of the nuts lying on the roof and then turned his camera toward my building and snapped a couple more. He left again, presumably to take a few shots from inside my office.

  Eric pulled a slim pen from his pocket and bent over to retrieve the nuts with the end of his pen. He dropped both nuts into a mini brown envelope, made some notes on the front of the paper and sealed the envelope, dropping it in his pocket. He looked over at my office window and then back at me.

  “It’s a good thing you weren’t sitting at that window,” Eric said.

  “I was just a few seconds before he did that,” I said, gesturing with my chin toward my window. “If I hadn’t gotten out of my chair to get a soda, one of those nuts could have gone through the back of my skull.”

  “Seems to me,” Eric said, “that so far in all these cases, no one has been hurt. If this is the same guy, he’s probably following the same M.O. and watched until you got out of your chair. My guess is that he’s shooting to intimidate and not to hurt anyone.”

  “I certainly hope you’re right, Eric,” I said. “Come on, we’ll head back over to my office and see how much all this is going to cost me.”

  Eric and I walked back down the stairs from the roof and got into the fourth floor elevator. On the way to the lobby Eric turned to me. “There’s one other thing I should probably mention,” Eric said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I’ve already been over to see that fourth store owner,” Eric said. “He told me that shortly before his window was smashed, some kid came into his store and started talking about the first three stores and about their damaged windows. He told the owner that he could prevent the same thing from happening to him, but that it would cost him seventy-five dollars. The owner told him to beat it and didn’t think anything more about it. Inside of an hour, someone broke his window and we found another chrome nut among the broken glass.”

  “And there you have your motive,” I said. “But a shakedown from a kid? Who’d take him seriously?”

  “I can think of at least one guy who should have,” Eric said. “Right now he’s sweeping up glass.”