The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

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The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 266

by Bernico, Bill


  “Henry Mandell said that all three of you had some reservations about some of the material in the book and movie,” Horwitz said. “Now that you’ve seen the finished product, do you still have a problem with the film?”

  Dad and Gloria and I exchanged glances and then turned to Horwitz. “No, Mr. Horwitz,” I said. “We worked all that out months ago. I hope your movie is a huge success.”

  After a brief tour of the rest of the sound stage, Horwitz led us out of the movie lot and back to Helen Hollister’s minivan. We drove back to our house, busily talking about the experience we’d all just had. It was a night I’d remember for the rest of my life and I’m sure Gloria enjoyed it as well. Dean and Helen pulled up in front of our house and we got out. They said their good nights and drove off into the night.

  Dad headed for his car at the curb and turned to me just before he got in. “You don’t think this movie could actually hurt our business, do you, Elliott?” he said.

  “What do you mean, Dad?” I said.

  “I mean a big part of our business depends on being inconspicuous when we’re tailing someone for a client,” Dad said. “What do you think this movie will do to our anonymity now that the movie is coming out?”

  “Our names may be up on the silver screen,” I said, “but those weren’t our faces up there. We can still be just as stealthy as we’ve ever been. Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, kids,” Dad said and drove off.

  Gloria locked her arm around mine as we walked into the house and turned off the porch light. I guess when it came right down to it, we Coopers never really were that private after all.

  90 - The Hollister Story

  “Morning, Dan,” Melvin Baker said as the cop picked up a newspaper from his corner stand.

  “How you doin’ this morning, Melvin?” I said.

  Melvin gestured with his chin at the paper Sergeant Dan Hollister held in his hand. “Take a look at the story on page three,” he said. “Another white guy shot in the wrong neighborhood again.”

  “I don’t have to read it,” I said, “I was there. Where are those idiots going to learn not to go into that neighborhood at night looking for black hookers? That makes three in four months, all in the same six-block area.”

  “Says there that he was sittin’ in his Cadillac,” Melvin said. “Looks like someone just walked up to the car and shot that poor slob in the face, right through the window. Is that right, Sergeant?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “He was still sitting behind the wheel with the motor running when the officers on patrol in that neighborhood found him.”

  “You know who did it yet?” Melvin said.

  “You know how it is,” I said. “Nobody saw nothin’ as usual.” I just shook my head and walked back toward my car. I usually stopped at this same corner for the paper every morning on my way in to work. When I got to my office, I closed the door and settled in behind my desk to finish the rest of the paper. I was a conscientious cop and always arrived fifteen minutes before his shift started just so I could enjoy the morning paper in peace before starting my daily routine.

  The headlines in the entertainment section that day read, “Jennifer Jones wins Oscar for ‘Song of Bernadette’. Further down it mentioned Paul Lukas taking home the statue as best actor, while the Oscar for movie of the year went to Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. 1942 was the first year, the article went on to say, that the awards event was held in Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

  I finished the entire article about last night’s Academy Awards, glanced at three of my favorite comics and folded the paper twice, sliding it into my bottom desk drawer. I pressed the button on the intercom and told my secretary, Hilda, to have officer Cooper come to my office right after roll call. She assured me that she would.

  Six minutes later Hilda buzzed Hollister. “Officer Cooper is here,” she said.

  “Send him right in,” I said.

  Officer Matthew Cooper opened the door and stepped inside, his polished visored cap tucked neatly under his arm. “You wanted to see me, Sergeant?” he said.

  I held a form in my hand, looked at it briefly and then glanced up at the officer. “Cooper,” I said, “do you know what I’m holding in my hand?”

  “I assume that’s not my commendation?” Cooper said.

  “You assume correctly,” I said, somewhat annoyed. “This is yet another complaint from yet citizen on your beat. Did you really tell this guy that you were going to come into his house and make him be quiet if he didn’t turn his radio down?”

  “That was clearly a case of non-compliance, Sergeant,” Cooper said. “He was warned and ignored the warning. Hell, he practically dared me to make him be quiet. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Cooper,” I said, “personally I don’t care if you beat him senseless and claim self-defense. But you do not yell threats at a citizen in front of eight witnesses. One of the women at that party you broke up was Meg Fletcher. Her husband is Roland Fletcher. Ring any bells?”

  Cooper cleared his throat. “That wouldn’t by any chance be the same Fletcher who owns Fletcher Petroleum, would it?” he said.

  “One and the same,” I said. “She called here late last night and the desk sergeant had to listen to ten minutes of her bitching. He only got her calmed down after he promised her that he’d take action. Well, he called me at home last night and woke me up. I was not happy about that, as you can imagine. Cooper, this is your last chance. Either you straighten up or find yourself a new line of work. Got it?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” Cooper said. “Is that all, sir?”

  Cooper saluted and I sensed that he was doing it more out of contempt than for respect.

  “Get out of here,” I said. “Get back out on the street and don’t let me see you again for the rest of the day.”

  Matt Cooper placed his cap on his head, turned and left the office, winking at Hilda on his way out. He was partnered with Officer Jerry Burns in a black and white patrol car. The two of them had worked together on several occasions in the past and got along fairly well. Their patrol included downtown Hollywood from Highland Avenue on the west to Western Avenue on the east and from Franklin Avenue on the north to Santa Monica Boulevard on the south.

  It was just after six o’clock and the two policemen had another thirty minutes until their shift ended when a call came in over the radio. The dispatcher told them to investigate a shooting on Argyle Avenue just north of Sunset. When they got to the address, they pulled up in front of the house, there was a young man standing out front at the curb, all excited, screaming, “He just shot my brother, he just shot my brother.”

  “Who shot your brother,” Officer Cooper said, his .38 already in his hand.

  “Upstairs,” the man said excitedly. “The man up there just shot my brother with a shotgun.”

  Cooper told the man to stay there at the curb and the two officers ran into the side door where the stairs led to the upstairs apartment. As they got to the bottom doorway, they looked up and there was a white-haired old man standing there with a shotgun pointed down the staircase at the two cops.

  Officer Burns jumped to one side and Cooper jumped to the other and hollered to him, “Police Department, drop the gun.”

  The man with the shotgun yelled down the stairs, “If you’re the police, come on up.”

  Cooper peeked around the corner and told the old man to lay the gun down. The old man complied and the two officers hurried up the stairs. Burns grabbed the shotgun and Cooper ran into the apartment. He hurried through the kitchen, through a dining room and living room and into the back bedroom, where a young man who had been shot in the stomach, lay bleeding. The shotgun had blasted a large hole in the victim’s stomach. His intestines spilled out of his abdominal area and onto the floor beside him. His eyes were rolling back in his head and he was gasping his last breaths.

  Cooper ran into the kitchen and found a dish towel. He soaked it with warm water a
nd ran back to the victim’s side, where he placed the wet towel over his intestines to keep them moist. Outside and won the block, Cooper could hear the wail of the ambulance as it got closer.

  A moment later, the victim’s brother, the man who had flagged the two cops down at the curb, came running up into the apartment and headed straight for the white-haired man that had shot his brother. Cooper reached out and caught him just in time with his arm around the man’s neck. Burns laid the shotgun down and helped subdue the crazed man. He was a very strong young man and the two cops had to handcuff him, arrest him, and take him down before he’d calm down enough so that they could talk to him. They also arrested the white-haired old man for the shooting and took him down to the station.

  Shortly after Cooper and Burns had brought the two men into the twelfth precinct, two plain clothes detectives took over the investigation, leaving Cooper and Burns to finish their paper work and check out for the day.

  Subsequent investigation showed that Derek Mabley, the man who had been shot, had been seeing the old man’s daughter on a regular basis. During the interrogation of the old man, one Cecil Calvert, it came out that Mabley and his brother, Dennis, would come over there all the time and they would slap the old guy around. They’d order him around, tell him what to do and slap him some more. When Calvert would try to correct his daughter and tell her when to be in, the Mabley brothers would slap him around.

  On the evening of the shooting, they had come over and more of the same happened. They took turns slapping the old man, laughing at how easy it was to get him to bend to their will. Calvert told the detectives that they came after him again and were going to slap him around and he kept backing up from them. Calvert backed all the way into his bedroom, where he kept his loaded shotgun. He told them that he had backed up far enough, that this was his bedroom, and not to come in. Derek Mobley just laughed and pulled a switchblade from somewhere behind him. He flicked the blade open and came after Calvert. Calvert picked up the shotgun and shot Mobley in the stomach, knocking him clear out of the bedroom.

  Cooper and Burns had eventually learned that the two detectives took Calvert’s story to the District Attorney, who refused to press charges against him. It was ruled a justifiable homicide and the old man was set free. Dennis Mobley was sentenced to one year in prison for his part in the assault on the old man. His brother got a pine box for his troubles.

  Four months had passed and that summer turned out to be a scorcher. Temperatures hovered in the upper nineties for eight days in a row before they dipped down to eighty-seven. Monday morning it started to drizzle but ended within thirty minutes. By noon the temperatures were back into the nineties again.

  I was riding a patrol car with Officer Jerry Burns when the call came over the radio. The dispatcher reported a holdup at a bar on Fountain Avenue near Cahuenga. The two of us sped toward the area, our red light and siren slicing effortlessly through the traffic. When we pulled up to the curb we noticed six or seven people on the sidewalk, their noses pressed to the window, looking into the bar.

  “All right,” Officer Burns said, “break it up. Come on, move on.” The crowd disbursed and the two of us walked into the bar, our service revolvers drawn. I quickly scanned the room before stepping all the way in. The bar was empty except for the bartender, who was standing behind the bar, handcuffed to a metal wall partition.

  Burns and I holstered our weapons and walked up to the bar. “What happened here?” Burns said.

  The bartender, a man named Mike Kwasnewski, who owned the bar, stood there, sweating buckets. He had a handcuff snapped onto one of his wrists while the other had been fastened to the metal wall partition in the men’s bathroom. “Two guys held me up,” Mike said. “They cuffed me to the stall in the men’s room and then came out here and cleaned out the cash register. They told me not to move or say a word until after they’d left.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  Mike held out the cuffed wrist, which was red and raw. “When I heard ‘em leave, I threw myself against the stall and ripped the screws out of the wall,” he told us. “I was able to drag this damned thing out here and get to the phone. That’s when I called you guys.”

  “What did they look like?” I said. “Can you describe them?”

  Mike looked down at his cuffed wrist and then up at the two cops. “You wanna get me out of these things,” he said, rattling the cuff’s chain against the metal partition.

  Burns reached for his handcuff key. “Oh, yeah,” he told Mike. “Sorry.” Burns removed the cuff from Mike’s wrist and left the other end dangling from the metal wall. “Don’t touch the other cuff,” Burns said. “They might have left prints.”

  “So,” I repeated, “what did they look like?”

  Mike thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, “like I said, there was two of ‘em. The bigger one was about six-one or six-two, maybe two hundred thirty pounds. The smaller guy, if you can call him that, was only an inch or two shorter than the first guy. But he was fat. I’ll bet he went two-sixty.”

  “What about their hair?” I said. “What color hair did the big guy have?”

  “Brown,” Mike said. “He had a haircut like they give you in the army. You know, shaved down to the bone. The other guy had red hair, parted in the middle, like Cagney.”

  “Did you see their eyes?” I asked.

  “Both of ‘em had blue eyes,” Mike said. “I remember that much.”

  I questioned Mike for another ten minutes and then closed my notebook. “I think we have enough to go on for now,” I told Mike.

  Burns pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to hold onto the other end of the cuff while he unlocked it from the metal wall. He wrapped the cuffs up in his handkerchief and dropped them in his pocket. Burns and I grabbed the metal wall partition and carried it back to the men’s room and leaned it against the wall.

  “Can you come down to the precinct and look at some mug books, Mike?” I said.

  “I’ve already lost too much money,” Mike said. “If I don’t open up and start selling some beer, I won’t be able to pay my rent. Can we do this another time?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “But the more time that goes by, the farther away those two could get and then you might never get your money back.”

  Mike thought about it for a moment and then checked the time on the wall clock over the bar. “I guess I could stay closed for another hour,” he said. “Let’s go and get this over with.”

  We drove Mike downtown and laid out the mug shot book and told him to see if he recognized anyone in there. Mike paged through two books without any luck. Halfway through the third book, he stopped and jabbed his finger down on one of the mug shots. “That’s one of ‘em,” he said. “I’d know that ugly puss anywhere.”

  I looked over Mike’s shoulder and then turned to Burns. “Terry Riley,” I said. “You can bet the second guy will turn out to be Elmer Rufin.”

  I turned the pages to the one with Rufin’s picture on it and laid the book open in front of Mike again. “See anyone on these two pages you recognize?” I said.

  Mike scanned the photos and stopped on Elmer Rufin’s mug shot. “That’s the other one,” he said. “The one with the red hair.”

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “Sure as anyone can be,” Mike said.

  “Thanks, Mike,” I said. “Officer Burns will drive you back to your bar. All right if we send a couple of detectives to talk to you later?”

  “Sure,” Mike said, and pointed to the still open book of mug shots. “You know those guys?”

  “We’ve had dealing with them before,” I said. “They shouldn’t be too hard to find. We’ll let you know if we recover your money.”

  Officer Burns dropped Mike at his bar and returned to the precinct. I was just finishing the paperwork and looked up at Burns. “Don’t get comfortable,” I said. “We’ve got to go out on another call.”

  “Us?” Burns said. �
�Are you telling me there’s no one already on the street who’s closer?”

  “There may be,” I said, “but the lieutenant asked me to handle this one personally.”

  “And what’s with the plain clothes?” Burns said. “Are we detectives all of a sudden?”

  I gestured toward the coat rack. “Slip into those pants and that shirt,” I told Burns. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  We cops drove south to Santa Monica Boulevard and turned east towards Gower. As we drove, I turned to Burns and said, “Of all the shit assignments, this one takes the cake.”

  “Why?” Burns said. “What’s all about?”

  “Normally, I’d just ignore this whole thing,” I said. “I mean, the guy is technically breaking the law, if you want to go strictly by the book, but come on.”

  “Who is it?” Burns said. “And what law is he breaking?”

  “He owns a bar on Santa Monica,” I said. “The guy’s a friend of mine and that’s why the lieutenant thought it would be better if I handled this one. Some other bar owner called in a complaint about seeing an ad in the paper for the bar we’re going to. He told the lieutenant that the ad says they’re giving away free chicken dinners.”

  “Yeah,” Burns said. “And are they forcing the patrons at gunpoint to accept the free dinners? I don’t get it. What law’s being broken?”

  I sighed. “It seems that it’s against the law for taverns to give away free meals,” I said. “The lieutenant says it probably goes back to the old days when taverns were the political centers and people running for office used to give away free meals to get votes. They passed a law against that and taverns were only allowed to give out crackers and cheese and other small snacks.”

  Burns pulled his service revolver out of its holster, snapped open the cylinder, spun it and snapped it closed again.

  “What are you doing, Burns?” I said.

  Burns stuck his revolver back in his holster. “Just wanted to make sure I didn’t walk into a dangerous situation like this with an empty gun. It could get nasty.”

 

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