“The kid wasn’t missing,” Gloria said. “He’d crawled under the front porch, trying to hide from his angry father. The kid fell asleep under there. He came out on his own when he got hungry. Easiest two hundred bucks I’ve ever earned.”
“Then you’d be free to help me?” Elliott said.
“How soon did you need me?” Gloria said. “I was going to stop at home and look in on Mrs. Chandler and Matt for a minute.”
“Go ahead,” Elliott said. “Just call me when you’re done. I have a few places that need to be checked and we could finish in half the time if you help me with it.”
“I’ll call you after I’ve stopped home,” Gloria said. “Figure thirty-five or forty minutes, tops.” The both closed their phones and went their own ways.
Elliott drove to Gunther’s former office and garage simply because he wanted to get a feel for the man he was looking for. There was a space above the garage door where it looked like an eight-foot sign had been removed. The garage door was closed, but not locked. Elliott stepped inside to have a look around. It had been cleaned out except for a small pile of scrap two-by-fours and a broom. Elliott left the garage and tried the door to the office. That was locked so he stepped up to the front window, shielded his eyes with his cupped hands and peered in through the glass.
An old desk still sat against the far wall, most of its drawers pulled out. There was a calendar hanging from the wall in front of the desk and to the right Elliott could see a small pedestal sink. This could very well have been Elliott’s office in another life. He stepped away from the window and returned to his car. He wasn’t sure where he’d look next so he called Lieutenant Anderson at the twelfth precinct. Eric picked up on the second ring.
“Anderson,” Eric said.
“Eric,” Elliott said. “It’s Elliott Cooper. I just came from Gunther’s house and then checked out his old office and garage. I’ve got zip. I’m going to stop over at the courthouse and check the bankruptcy records. I’ll let you know what I find.”
Elliott folded his phone and dropped it in his pocket. The courthouse was a fifteen minute drive and Elliott filled the time humming some of his favorite oldies from the sixties. By the time he’d finished mentally singing three of The Turtles’ top ten hits, he was sitting in front of the courthouse. Elliott left his car at the curb, dropped a quarter in the meter and walked inside.
He found a guy, maybe ten years younger than himself working the counter. Elliott introduced himself and asked to see the public record of Gunther’s bankruptcy hearing. The young man excused himself and returned in a few minutes with a printout of the proceedings and a list of the people and businesses that Gunther had left holding the bag for money he owed them.
The list included two lumber yards, a tool supply house, several smaller businesses where he had apparently done some handy work and a list of six individuals who had tried to sue Gunther for shoddy workmanship. None of the people of businesses on the list got a dime once the paper had been filed. Elliott ruled out the lumber yards, tool supply house and the smaller businesses, since they could all write off the loss on their taxes. That left six individuals who had been left holding the bag and who probably also had extensive attorney and court costs that they’d never get to recover.
“Can you make me a photocopy of that last list of names?” Elliott asked the young man behind the counter.
“All copies are three dollars,” the man said. “I know, it seems high, but that’s the amount the county set. I guess it’s to keep people from asking for a hundred copies of something just for the hell of it.”
Elliott handed over the three dollars and got a list of six people, along with their addresses, phone numbers and amounts each was suing Christopher Gunther for. “Thanks,” Elliott said, folding the printout twice and slipping it in his pocket.
He had just made it back to his car when he noticed a meter maid slipping a ticket under the windshield wiped of the car behind him. Elliott Slid behind the wheel and was gone before the meter maid could write another ticket. At the first red light, Elliott glanced at the printout and selected the name whose address was closest to where he was now. He turned left at the light and headed south towards Wilshire Boulevard. He followed Wilshire to Normandie and took a left at Maplewood Avenue. The address he was looking for turned out to be situated above a one-car garage with a set of stairs alongside it.
Elliott parked across the street, climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. A woman in a flowered house dress answered the door.
“Yes?” she said, looking at Elliott with some suspicion.
“Mabel Francis?” Elliott said, glancing at the photocopied list in his hand.
The woman nodded but said nothing.
Elliott pulled the leather case containing his badge and I.D. out and held it up for the woman to inspect. “My name is Elliott Cooper,” he said “and I’m looking into Christopher’s Gunther’s bankruptcy case. I wonder if I could speak with you for a moment.”
“What do you want to know?” she said, still not opening the door for Elliott.
“Mrs. Francis,” Elliott said, “I noticed that you had filed a lawsuit against Mr. Gunther in the amount of eight hundred seventy dollars.”
“That’s Miss Francis,” Mabel said, “and yes, I did sue that no good son-of-a-bitch. I hired him to put in just three small cabinets in my kitchen. He screwed that up so bad that I had to have another contractor come in and tear them out again and put in different cabinets.”
“And he wouldn’t stand behind his work?” Elliott said.
Mabel shook her head. “He offered me a settlement of two hundred dollars and I was asking for the full eight hundred. When I finally agreed to settle for four hundred fifty dollars, I figured it was better than nothing and that I could finally but that bastard behind me once and for all. Then three weeks ago I get a notice from my lawyer that the idiot filed for bankruptcy and that I’d be getting nothing. So now I’m not only out the eight hundred dollars I paid him, but I’m also out three hundred seventy-five dollars that I paid my lawyer.”
“Do you have any idea where I might find Mr. Gunther?” Elliott said.
“Hopefully in a some ditch, bleeding,” Mabel said and closed the door.
Elliott crossed Mabel Francis off his list. Sure, she was mad as a wet hen, but he didn’t see her as someone who’d try and exact revenge on her own. He checked the next closest name on the list and drove to the address listed.
After talking to the next three people on the list, Elliott determined that none of them had what it took to try and get revenge for a botched job and an unpaid settlement. One of the names on the list belonged to an elderly couple, one was a young school teacher and the other had actually gotten a settlement right before the bankruptcy papers had been filed. That left just two more names to check.
Elliott moved on to the fifth name on the list, a man named Norman Hyde, who lived in Hollywood just south of the freeway on Fountain Avenue. The house was nestled between a four-apartment complex and a duplex, separated by a double garage. The house looked like one of those cottage-type places that were popular during the post war years. There was a small white pickup truck parked in the driveway.
Elliott walked across the street and up onto the porch. He rang the doorbell and waited.
*****
Norman squeezed the trigger on his electric drill and inched toward Gunther. Gunther tried to scream, but his throat closed up on him. As Norman moved the spinning drill bit into position beneath Gunther’s nostril, the doorbell chimed upstairs. Norman stopped the drill, laid it on the bench and quickly wrapped a blue bandana around Gunther’s mouth.
“Don’t go away, Mr. Gunther,” Norman said. “I’ll be right back.”
Norman climbed the stairs as the second doorbell chime sounded. He smoother his hair back and then grabbed the doorknob, twisting it and pulling the door open. “Yes?” he said. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want any.” He started to close the
door and then stopped when the intruder called out his name.
“Mr. Hyde?” Elliott said.
“Yeah, so what?” Norman said.
Elliott held his badge and I.D. in front of him and introduced himself. “Mr. Hyde,” Elliott said, “I’m looking into the people who had filed lawsuits against Christopher Gunther, the contractor and handyman.”
“Handy?” Norman said. “The only thing handy about that asshole was the way he made sure to collect for the entire job up front. If you’re looking into him, you also know that he went bankrupt before I could collect my settlement. So, did you come here just to aggravate me by reminding me of what I’m not going to collect?”
“Actually,” Elliott said, “I’m looking into his disappearance and I was wondering if you knew where he might be.”
“How the hell would I know that?” Norman said. “After the hearing, he disappeared like a fart in the wind and left me holding the bag for twenty-eight hundred dollars.”
Elliott took a close look at the irate man now, and wondered why he hadn’t notice this before. The man standing just inside the door had one small speck of blood alongside his nose, just below his left eye. Elliott couldn’t see any cut or scrape where the blood might have come from and an alarm went off in his head. He quickly looked down, pretending to study his list.
“Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Hyde,” Elliott said. “Good day, sir.”
Norman closed the door without bothering to respond.
Elliott walked back toward his car and turned back for one more look at the house. He noticed some curtains at the side of the door drop back into place. He ignored it and slid behind the wheel of his car. Elliott drove away and pulled around to the other side of the block, parking his car and getting out again. He soft-footed through a driveway and yard before he found himself behind Norman Hyde’s house. All he could see from where he crouched were two metal trash cans, a clothesline with two shirts hanging from it and a twenty-six inch bicycle leaning up against the house.
Just above the sidewalk, Elliott spotted a small basement window and quickly made his way over to it. He dropped down onto his stomach and inched over to the edge of the window. What he saw in the basement made him flinch and slide back on his stomach. His foot hit the trash can and sent it tumbling. Elliott quickly got to his feet and flattened himself up against the side of the house around to the side with the driveway. He could hear the back door opening and the sound of the trashcan being set back into place. Elliott held his breath and grabbed his .38 from the holster under his arm.
A moment later a figure rounded the corner and Elliott extended his gun had straight out. Norman Hyde stopped less than an inch from the gun’s barrel, his eyes crossing as they stared down at the gun in Elliott’s hand. He quickly stepped back.
“What are you doing sneaking around out here?” Norman said.
Elliott held the gun in Norman’s face. “Shut up and turn around,” he said. “Put your hands on the side of the house and spread your legs. Norman made an attempt to step forward instead and stopped when Elliott pulled the hammer back on the .38 and repeated his instructions. “Do it, now.”
Norman turned around and laid his palms on the side of his house. Elliott pulled a pair of cuffs from his coat pocket and slapped one end on Norman’s right wrist, pulling it around to his back. He holstered his gun and pulled Norman’s other wrist behind the man’s back and connected the other cuff. He spun Norman around and pushed him up against the building.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” Elliott said, “that man strapped to the chair in your basement is Christopher Gunther. Come on. Let’s go see how Mr. Gunther is doing, shall we?” Elliott pushed Norman ahead of him in through the back door and followed him down the basement steps. When he saw the man strapped to the chair, Elliott turned to Norman and pushed him down onto another chair. “Move and I’ll kill you,” Elliott said, and turned his attention to Gunther.
Elliott’s stomach started to turn when he got a look at the damage to Gunther’s forearm and chin. Only after a few moments did he notice the packed nostril on one side and the drilled hole up the other side. Elliott turned toward the workbench and found a pair of wire cutters. He clipped the plastic ties off Gunther’s wrists and ankles. Gunther tried to stand up, but Elliott set him back down again.
“Don’t try to move, Mr. Gunther,” Elliott said. “I’ll get an ambulance here right away.”
“Thank you,” Gunther said, in a weak voice. Tears ran down his face.
Elliott turned back toward Norman to make sure he hadn’t moved and then pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Lieutenant Eric Anderson’s number.
“Anderson,” Eric said.
“Found him,” Elliott said. “You’d better get over here and bring an ambulance and the crime lab with you. You’re not going to believe this shit.” Elliott gave him the address, closed his phone again and turned his attentions back to Gunther.
“Just sit still,” Elliott told him. “You’re going to be all right.”
Christopher Gunther might have survived the physical ordeal, but Elliott doubted that the man would be mentally all right ever again.
*****
“Why didn’t you call?” Elliott said to Gloria when he got home that night.
Gloria sighed. “To tell you the truth, I forgot all about it,” she said. “I got involved with Matt and started talking to Mrs. Chandler and time just slipped away from me. I’m sorry. Did you need me to help with your case?”
Elliott shook his head. “You know,” he said, “It’s probably just as well that we didn’t connect. You wouldn’t have wanted to see what I saw.” He explained the job Lieutenant Anderson had hired him to do, leaving out the grizzly details of how he’d found Christopher Gunther in Norman Hyde’s basement. “That guy’s lucky to be alive.” Elliott told Gloria about the first two victims and how they were no doubt also victims of the deranged Norman Hyde.
“My dad had a favorite saying to cover almost anything that ruined his day,” Elliott said.
“And what was that?” Gloria said.
“He used to tell me that ‘hell is other people’ and now I understand what he meant,” Elliott said. “And I’ll bet you wouldn’t have to explain that one to Christopher Gunther after the hell he’d been put through.”
“And how’s he doing?” Gloria said.
“The doctor in the emergency room said he’d never see anything like the damage Gunther had done to him,” Elliott explained. “Eric and I had a chance to talk to Gunther after the doctor finished patching him up again. It looks like some good came out of all this carnage after all.”
“Good?” Gloria said. “How could any good come out of all that?”
“Gunther told me that bankruptcy or not, he’s going to repay every person and business on that list if it takes him the rest of his life,” Elliott said. “It might just take him the rest of his life, too. But he says he done with the handyman business. He says he’s going to get a regular job doing whatever he can to earn what he needs to repay everyone on that list.”
“Hell is other people, eh?” Gloria said. “Do you feel that way, too?”
“Huh?” Elliott said.
“Matt and Clay and I are other people,” Gloria said. “Are we hell?”
Elliott smiled and wrapped his arms around his wife. “If this is hell,” he said, “I can’t wait to see what heaven is.”
92 - By Hooker By Crook
I was in my surveillance van on my way back to the office and it was almost noon. Traffic on Hollywood Boulevard was congested, making me wonder if there wasn’t some show business ballyhoo going on somewhere up the block. One of my favorite songs came on the radio and my mind wandered for just a second. But I guess one second was all it took for me to lose my concentration. The car ahead of me stopped suddenly, its taillights blaring in my face. I hit my brakes, but apparently I was half a second late and my front bumper hit the trunk lid of the car ahead of me. The trunk lid
popped open just a second before the other driver leapt out of his car and rushed back to where I was sitting.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” the man yelled. “Can’t you see I had to stop?”
I leaned my head out of my window. “Sorry,” I said, making up an excuse. “My foot slipped off the brake pedal.” I got out to take a closer look at the damage to his car. The man was trying to close his trunk lid and not having any luck making it stay down. It popped up again and that’s when I saw the body lying in the trunk, partially wrapped in a blanket, its blonde hair curling out from under the edge of the blanket.
Purely out of instinct, I drew my .38 from under my arm and trained it on the other driver. “Keep your hands where I can see them,” I barked. Ahead at the next corner I could see the blue uniform of a traffic cop. I whistled a high-pitched, shrill whistle and motioned for the cop to come over. Before he got here, I dug my badge and I.D. out of my jacket pocket and by the time he made it to where I was holding the other driver at bay, I had it held up for him to see.
“What’s going on here?” the cop said.
The man with his hands raised, gestured with one of those hands toward me. “I was stopped in traffic,” the man said. “I felt this bump from behind and when I got out to look at the damage, ol’ Nutsy here pulls a gun on me.”
I motioned toward the trunk. “Take a look in the trunk,” I said. “There’s a body in there.”
“Is that what this is all about?” the irate driver said.
“You just shut up and stand still,” I said, keeping my gun trained on him.
Just then the traffic cop turned around. He was holding the body in his hands. “Is this what you saw?” he said to me. He was holding a store mannequin in his hands.
I looked at the mannequin and then at the other driver, who had now lowered his hands. He spread them and shrugged at me. “Are you going to tell me I’m under arrest for transporting a mannequin?” he said sarcastically. He took the mannequin from the cop’s hands and dropped it back into his trunk.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 273