“Mr. Crawford,” Gloria said, “this is my husband, Elliott Cooper. Elliott, this is Kevin Crawford.”
I set the food tray down on the table and extended my hand to the man. “Mr. Crawford,” I said. “Is there something we can do for you today?”
Gloria followed my eyes as I slid into the booth across from her. “Mr. Crawford saw us come in here and recognized us,” Gloria said. “He’d like to hire us.”
I slid all the way in, against the wall and invited Crawford to sit next to me. “Pardon us if we eat while you explain,” I said, “but the food’ll get cold if we don’t.”
“Oh, please,” Crawford said, “by all means, go ahead and eat. It could take me that long to explain what I need anyway.”
“Go ahead,” I said, biting into my cheeseburger and sipping from my chocolate shake.
“I’m being sued,” Crawford said. “Some guy came to my door three weeks ago trying to sell me some kitchen utensils. I told him I wasn’t interested and closed the door on him. A couple seconds later I heard some yelling and moaning outside and when I opened the door again, this so-called salesman was lying on the sidewalk that comes up to my door from the street. He was lying on his back, moaning and saying something about tripping on a piece of uneven cement on my walk. I offered to help him up, but he insisted that I call an ambulance to take him to the hospital.”
I swallowed, cleared my throat and said, “Sounds to me like a civil case that your insurance company should handle. Why would you need us?”
“That’s just it,” Crawford said. “I’d just moved in earlier that day and hadn’t seen an insurance agent yet. I was planning on doing that the very next day and then this had to happen.”
“And just what was it you wanted us to do for you, Mr. Crawford?” I said, taking another bite of my sandwich.
“Here’s the thing,” Crawford said. “This idiot is suing me for a hundred grand for negligence and for pain and suffering.”
“And?” I said.
“And the other day I saw him out and about,” Crawford explained. “Not only is he not hurt, he seems to be in perfect health. He’s not walking with a limp or stooped over. He doesn’t even wear a back brace. I think I’m being set up, Mr. Cooper. I need you to get the evidence I need to have his case thrown out of court. I can’t afford a hundred grand.”
“Do you have the guy’s name?” I said.
Crawford pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and laid it down in front of me. I read the contents of the note. “Kenny Fulton,” I said. “Fulton, that name rings a bell for some reason.”
Gloria took the slip of paper from me. “Fulton,” she said. “And he lives in Glendale. It sounds familiar to me, too, but I don’t know why. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.”
“So,” Crawford said, “will you look into it for me?”
I glanced at Gloria, who gave me a quick nod. I turned back to Crawford. “We’ll take the case, Mr. Crawford. If Fulton is faking his injuries, we’ll get the goods on him. When is your court case coming up?”
Crawford sighed. “Two weeks from tomorrow,” he said. “I know it’s not much notice, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Crawford,” I said. “How did you come to choose Cooper Investigations to handle your case? Did you see our ad in the Yellow Pages?”
Crawford’s eyes narrowed and his forehead wrinkled. “You have a Yellow Pages ad?”
I waved him off. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s not important.
Gloria quickly grabbed a napkin and held it over her mouth. Streams of chocolate malt leaked through it and once she could swallow again, she broke out in a giggle. She looked at Crawford. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Did I say something funny?” Crawford said.
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “That’s just Gloria’s way of letting me know she’s thinking about me, isn’t it, Gloria?” I gave her a stern look and she stopped giggling. I turned back to Crawford. “We’ll be in touch.” I gave him two of my business cards. “Keep one of these for yourself and write your name, address and phone number on the back of the other one.”
“Thanks, Mr. Cooper,” Crawford said before he slipped out of the booth and left the restaurant.
Gloria finished wiping her chin and the front of her shirt and then looked at me, but said nothing.
“I get it,” I said. “We’ll look into updating the business image just as soon as we finish with Crawford’s case, okay?”
“Whatever you say,” Gloria said.
Back in the van I turned to Gloria. “Why do you suppose we both thought Fulton’s name seemed familiar?” I said. “We’ve handled injury fraud cases before, but Fulton wasn’t anyone we’d investigated.”
“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “It might come to either of us sooner or later. Let’s just see if we can locate Kenny Fulton and see what he’s up to. Do you still have your mini spy helicopters in the back of this van?”
“I’m never without them,” I said. “Read me that address, will you?”
“Ten-eleven Ogden Drive,” Gloria said, grabbing the Los Angeles Street Map book. She thumbed through it and folded the page back. “That’s two blocks east of Fairfax and a block and a half south of Santa Monica. Take a right at the corner. Ten-eleven would put it on the west side of the street.”
The house was very small. It couldn’t have had more than five hundred square feet of total floor space. A narrow paved driveway led to a garage at the back of the house. The driveway and the steps leading to the front porch had both been painted pink. The house itself had been painted barn red with white trim. I drove right past the house and parked up the block. Gloria and I got out and started walking back toward the house, arm in arm, just a couple out for a leisurely walk. We pretended to be talking to each other as we walked past the front of the house. At the corner, we crossed the street and walked back the way we’d come, viewing the house from another angle.
When we got back to the van I crawled into the back compartment and Gloria slid beneath the wheel. In the back compartment, where I kept the attached bench full of monitors, I also had a rack attached to the ceiling that held several changes of clothes that I often used as disguises. I selected one that looked like something a utility worker might wear. It consisted of a navy blue shirt with the name, ‘Chester’ stitched above the pocket. There were matching blue slacks to go with it. The ensemble was topped off with a navy blue cap that said, ‘Public Works’ across the front of it. I pulled a clipboard from one of the racks, attached a few papers to it and retrieved a pen from my glove box.
“How do I look?” I said.
“Like you belong in the neighborhood,” Gloria said. “Where are you going to start?”
“Drive around the block and pull up to the curb three houses south of Fulton’s,” I said. “I’ll start asking some of the neighbors if they’ve noticed Fulton hanging around outside lately. We’ll see where it goes from there.”
Gloria circled the block and pulled up to the curb. I looked both ways out the van window before emerging and walking up the path to the house two houses south of Fulton’s. It was a peach-colored adobe-style house with a red tiled roof. I stepped up onto the porch and rang the doorbell. After a moment a middle-aged woman answered the door in a full-length frilly apron. I smiled when I saw her.
“Good afternoon,” I said. “Could you tell me where your electric meter is, please? I’m new on this route and I haven’t been here before.”
The woman pointed to her right without opening the screen door. “It’s around the back,” she said. “Just go through that gate and I’ll meet you back there.”
Without waiting for a response, she closed the door and I hurried around to the back of her house. The woman was waiting just outside her back door. When she saw me, she pointed to a place between two bushes. I crouched down, wrote something on my clipboard and got to my feet again. I turned to the woman. “Thank you,” I said.
“Say, I don’t suppose you would know anything about your neighbor two doors north. I didn’t see anyone around earlier and just wondered if you knew when...” I looked at my clipboard and said, “Mr. Fulton would be home.”
“Isn’t he there now?” the woman said. “He’s almost always there.”
“I thought he might be at work this time of day,” I said.
“Him? Work?” she said. “If he works, it would have to be from home. I’ve never seen him leave and I don’t know about any regular job. I wonder how he supports himself, you know? You wonder about guys like that.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “This is my first day on this route.”
“Yes, so you mentioned,” the woman said.
“Well, thanks again for your cooperation,” I said. “Good day, ma’am.”
I walked back around the side of the house, through the gate and back to the street, continuing north to the next house. It looked like a carbon copy of the first house, only in white. I rang the bell and waited. A man answered this time.
“Yes?” he said bluntly.
“Can you tell me where to find the electric meter for this house?” I said. “This is my first day on this route and I haven’t been here before.”
Without answering me, the man turned and called over his shoulder. “Rosie,” he said. “There’s a guy here who wants to read your meter. Should I send him around to the back?”
A woman’s voice from somewhere else in the house called back, “Yes, tell him I’ll meet him in the back yard.”
“She’ll meet you...” the man started to say.
“I heard,” I said. “In the back yard. Thanks.”
Once in the back yard I found the woman who had called out to the man. She stood still on a patch of grass behind her house. She was already pointing as I approached. I nodded and crouched down, writing some figures on my clipboard. I stood up again. “Thank you,” I said. “By the way, would you know when your neighbor will be home? I need to read that meter as well and there’s no one there.”
Without answering me, the woman opened her back door and yelled, “Kenny, this guy wants to read your meter, too. You want me to just send him over or did you want to go with him?”
“Wait a minute,” Kenny answered. “I’ll walk over there with him.”
The man I’d spoken to a minute earlier came out the back door and didn’t really look at my face. He walked right by me, muttering something about following him next door. He was carrying a rocks glass with some amber liquid in it. I didn’t think it was tea. When we got to his back yard, he stood near a spot next to his back stoop. “Right here,” he said, pointing down at the ground.
This was my chance, I thought. After I wrote some figures on my clipboard, I started to get up and purposely lost my balance, falling onto my back near his stoop. I moaned and winced and finally looked up at the man standing over me.
“Are you all right?” Kenny said, reaching down to help me to my feet.
“I think so,” I said. “Can you help me up?”
“Hold on a second,” Kenny said, setting his rocks glass down and bending over to grab my hand.
I didn’t help him much, letting him pull my dead weight up off the ground until I was standing again. I brushed myself off, picked up my clipboard and looked at Kenny. “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I got tangled up in my own feet.”
Without expression, Kenny said, “Are you done here? I have to get back to Rosie’s place.”
“Yes,” I said. “I got what I came for. Thanks again.” I walked around to the front of the house, down the pink driveway and up the street to the corner. I waved back at the van and Gloria drove ahead to pick me up.
“Well?” she said when I got back into the van.
“He’s faking it,” I said, and told her about my phony fall behind Fulton’s house.
“So, now all we have to do is prove it,” Gloria said. “Any idea how we’re going to do that?”
“I’ve got a wild idea,” I said. “I’m not sure how practical it is or if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try.”
“What have you got in mind?” Gloria said.
“Suppose we drive over to the appliance store and get us an empty refrigerator box,” I said. “Then we can stop by the second hand store for a refrigerator to put in it. Can’t be more than five or ten bucks for some clunker.”
“I don’t get it,” Gloria said. “So you put some piece of junk refrigerator in a new box. Once he opens it, he’ll see that it’s junk.”
“Right,” I said, “but by then he’ll have moved it, most likely to his garage and we’ll be able to get a video of him obviously not incapacitated.”
“Where are you going to leave the box?” Gloria said.
“We can just drop it in his driveway,” I said. “He’ll have to somehow get it from there to the garage or the house.”
“And what’ll be your excuse for leaving it with him?” Gloria said.
“We’ll just have to wing it,” I said. “We’ll think of something between then and now.”
We drove to the appliance store and the manager was happy to let us take one of the boxes. It was one less box that he had to dispose of. The second hand shop on Melrose had just what we needed in a used refrigerator. I pulled my van around to the back of the store and moved the refrigerator out into the alley. We slipped the new box over the top and taped it shut. Gloria helped me lay the box down on the floor of the van and we lifted it up and slid it in just far enough to tape the bottom of the box shut and then slid it all the way in.
“That should do it,” I said. “Put on your thinking cap and come up with some good ruse that Fulton will swallow.”
We rode in silence for the next few blocks before Gloria offered her suggestion. “We tell him his name was drawn at the mall and he won the refrigerator,” she said.
“We?” I said. “He’s already seen me. I can help drop it off, but you’ll have to talk to him while I wait in the truck. I’m sure all it would take is a smile from you to convince him. Hell, when I got to the second house he was already inside with the woman who lives there. If he doesn’t answer the door, try the house next to his.”
Gloria and I pulled up to the curb just beyond Fulton’s driveway and quickly unloaded the huge box. I told Gloria I was going to pull the van around the block and come in from the other direction so I could take the video of Fulton moving the refrigerator. Once we had the box standing in the driveway, I drove off and left Gloria to work her magic.
I circled the block, turning around in the driveway of a gas station. I parked half a block from Fulton’s house and sat poised with my video camera. It had a twelve times zoom on it and I could capture the entire driveway from where I sat.
Gloria walked up the walk to Fulton’s house and rang the doorbell. No one answered. She tried again with the same results. She walked over to the neighbor’s house and tried her doorbell. When the woman came to the door Gloria went into her act. “Excuse me,” she told the woman. “I’m looking for your neighbor, Mr. Fulton,” she said. “Would you know when he might be home?”
The woman had no better manners that Fulton and simply called over her shoulder, “Kenny, there’s someone here looking for you.”
“Who is it?” Kenny yelled back.
“I don’t know,” the woman called back. “Come and see for yourself.” She walked away, leaving Gloria standing on the stoop.
Fulton appeared at the door and looked at Gloria suspiciously. “Now what do you want?” he said.
Gloria looked down at her clipboard. “Are you Kenny Fulton?” she said.
“Who wants to know?” Fulton said.
“I have a delivery for you,” Gloria said. “It’s in your driveway. I just need you to sign for it.”
“A delivery?” Fulton said. “I didn’t order anything. What is it?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Gloria said. “I’m only supposed to get a signature, but from the looks of the box, I’d say it�
�s a refrigerator.”
“A refrigerator?” Fulton said. “I know I sure as hell didn’t buy any refrigerator. Take it back where you got it.”
Gloria glanced at the clipboard again. “You’re right,” she told Fulton. “You didn’t buy it. You won it in a drawing at the mall. It’s free.”
Fulton looked Gloria over, trying to decide if she was pulling some kind of scam. “I didn’t enter any drawing at the mall,” he said.
“Well, somebody put your name in the drawing,” Gloria said. “I guess I could take it back and give it to someone else if you don’t want it. You could always sell it and keep the money, but if you really don’t want it, I could...”
“Where do you want me to sign?” Fulton said.
Gloria turned the clipboard around and presented some phony form for Fulton to sign. Once he had signed, Gloria turned and walked away. Fulton closed the door and that was all the time Gloria needed to make it up the block and around the corner. When she was sure he wasn’t following her, she made her way across the street and into the van.
“Did he go for it?” I said as Gloria took her seat next to me.
“I guess so,” she said. “I got his signature and he’s got the box. It shouldn’t be long now before he comes out to get it.”
Gloria was right. Less than a minute after Gloria got into the van, Fulton came out of his neighbor’s house and hurried over to his driveway. He walked around the box, looking at all four sides and patting the side of the box. I could easily capture his wide grin as he realized his recent windfall.
I kept the video camera aimed on Fulton and waited for him to make his move. He rushed to his back yard, returned with a coaster wagon and left it sitting alongside the refrigerator box. Then he walked back over to his neighbor’s house and returned with the woman at his side.
“This is it,” I told Gloria. “Watch.”
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 287