Copp On Fire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp, Private Eye Series)

by Don Pendleton

  "Seems obvious. I get it a lot. Bashful clients, I mean. As for the rented limo, same logic. He didn't want to use a car that could be traced to his true identity ... I'd like to see the remains."

  "Be my guest, but even his own mother wouldn't recognize . . ."

  "So how'd you ID?"

  "Mostly medical and dental records, but there were other bits to nail it down."

  "Any chance it was not Bernie Wiseman in that car?"

  "I'm satisfied it's him," Johnson said. "He left the studio with Moore at noon yesterday and hasn't been seen since." He opened a folder, produced an eight-by-ten color photo, handed it to me. "That your man?"

  I couldn't be sure. The man pictured in that studio still seemed a bit younger and thinner than the one I'd faced in that limo outside my office. The hair and style looked the same. I tried to visualize the face in the photo with dark glasses covering the eyes, still couldn't be sure.

  "Was Wiseman physically handicapped?"

  "Paralyzed from the waist down."

  "It's him."

  "Sure?"

  "No."

  "Pretty sure?"

  "Almost."

  "What are you making, Joe?"

  "Find out what the head of United Talents would gain by staging his own death."

  "Okay. On the surface I'd say nothing. He's been riding the top of the wave around here lately. Worth much more alive than dead."

  "You sure?"

  "No, but it figures."

  I stood up, looked at Forta, told Johnson: "I'd figure it some more. You asked about the wild and woolly? I can pick my own, pal, that's how it is. I would not pick this one."

  We chatted a bit more as Johnson escorted Forta

  and me outside. I learned that the arson team was still at work in the bombed-out building and that they were saying nothing pending their final conclusions; Johnson was a bit irritated about that because he had two homicides connected with that one too—derelicts who'd been buried under the debris in the alleyway. The three of us hoo-hooed a bit about the agonies of conflicting personalities and the division of responsibilities in criminal investigations, then Forta took me back to my car and I asked him about Abe Johnson along the way.

  "You don't remember him?"

  I said I couldn't place him.

  "That's weird," Forta said.

  "Why?"

  "He's the guy."

  "What guy?"

  "The guy that Angie was . . . involved with when she divorced you. I think they're married now."

  "Well, I never met the man. That's why I didn't recognize him."

  "That all you have to say about it?"

  "What'd you expect?"

  "Well, you spoiled all my fun. I kept waiting for you to wake up and put the guy on his ass."

  "Hey, we're talking seven, eight years ago. Besides, he seemed like a nice guy."

  "I don't believe it. You're not the same guy I used to know, Joe."

  "I hope not."

  "That guy was screwing your wife."

  "She was screwing him back. The marriage was dead before that started."

  "You've really changed, pal," Forta said with a disappointed sigh.

  Not really, not all that much. Don't know how I got the reputation as a hardass. Angela tried to be a proper wife and I tried to be a proper husband, but it fell apart. I think maybe I could make marriage work now. But I don't expect to try again. No reason why Angela shouldn't. And I really did like Abe Johnson.

  The question I would have to ask myself was did Abe Johnson like me? Because I was going to be needing all the support I could get, from wherever.

  The missing Melissa Franklin was waiting outside my office when I got back, scared and looking for protective arms.

  So much for the wild and woolly jungle and picking your own fights.

  It is not a one-way world. What goes around, comes around. And sometimes the fight picks you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Melissa Franklin was one hell of a beautiful woman, and there was something even beyond beauty that reached out and touched you by her close presence, a magnetic sort of something that made you want to get even closer. A tall girl, mid to late twenties, with the new-woman fitness look, an aerobics workout look, and you knew that even her sweat would smell good.

  The car she was driving fit the image very well, and it was as memorable as its tags. Personalized plates on the red Jaguar XJ-6 proclaimed that someone had PAID DUES for the pleasure of driving it, but none of that joy was presently in evidence. Our eyes met as I pulled in beside the Jag and I could see misery and fear flare into something like relief or hopeful anticipation before she clouded the gaze and covered the emotion with a blank stare.

  She reacted immediately and unlocked her door on

  the passenger side when I rapped the window with a knuckle, but she averted the gaze when I slid onto the seat beside her. I kept one foot on the ground and the door open—as much to reassure the lady as anything else—and I gave her a chance to speak first, but she didn't seem to know how to start, so I started for her.

  "Waiting for me, Melissa?"

  She kept her attention on the steering wheel. "Yes, but I'm not sure I know why. How did you know my name?"

  "A traffic cop made you leaving the scene just before the limo exploded. They want to talk to you. You need to go in."

  She sat with shoulders hunched, hands on the steering wheel while I wondered what was going on inside her lovely head. She was dressed in a leather jumpsuit with slits up the legs. Her top had a neckline that plunged. When she turned her eyes onto me they sent electricity.

  "Promise me you'll never wear sunglasses again."

  "What?"

  "I couldn't see your eyes the other day. They're too good to hide."

  "I don't understand."

  "When you came here with Bernie."

  "I've never seen you before in my life," she said in a tone usually reserved for a statement of the obvious.

  I chewed that for a moment. "So why are you seeing me now?"

  "I'm trying to find Bernie."

  "If you've never seen me before in your life, how'd you know to start looking here—and how do you even know who I am?"

  She tossed that golden head and gave me a sidewise flash from the eyes. "I've known about you from the beginning," she told me. "I helped Bernie select you. Now I want you to help me find him. I'll retain you. Name your price. I can afford it."

  I ran a hand along the leathered interior of the Jag and replied, "I'm sure you can. But there's no need. I don't know your game, Melissa, but I know that you know that Bernie is dead. You were within sight of it when his car blew up last night. So why would you be trying to find him here? The county morgue is—"

  "Stop that. The man in that car was not Bernie Wiseman. You know that as well as I do."

  "I know nothing," I replied quietly, patiently. If it wasn't Bernie, then who?"

  She was teary. "Don't try to tell me that you weren't in on this, I know all about it—"

  "Exactly what do you think you know?"

  "I know that Bernie was coming to see you. He was setting something up, I know that. And I was supposed to meet him in Hollywood last night, afterward. I know that. But the man in the car wasn't Bernie. So where is he?"

  I took my time lighting a cigarette, then blew the smoke outside. "This is getting ridiculous, kid."

  She agreed, but with a lot less patience than I was showing. "It sure is!"

  "Let's start it again. You and Wiseman came here two days ago in a rented limo and under false colors. He posed as a man named Albert Moore and hired me to sit outside NuCal Designs and photograph the comings and goings all day yesterday. I delivered the film to his chauffeur at a few minutes past six. At about seven o'clock NuCal blew and took most of the neighborhood with it. An hour later the rented limo blew and took Wiseman and his chauffeur with it. But it didn't take you with it, because you beat it away from there moments before the blow. A traffic cop saw
you transfer to this car and he made a note of your license tags. The homicide people are interested in your close escape, they want to talk to you about that. It would look better if you found them instead of vice versa."

  It was late afternoon. I wanted to get inside and check my machine for calls while there was still some business time left in the day. It wasn't that I was indifferent to this lady's problem; I just did not see that I could add anything worthwhile to her game on her terms. So I left her sitting there in her emotional stew and I went on into my office.

  She followed quickly and joined me inside before I could get through the reception area.

  "They want to kill me too!" she announced breathlessly. You've got to help me!"

  I gave her a cold stare as I replied, "I don't have to do a damned thing, kid. But I've been known to do quite a lot when I'm properly asked."

  "I'm asking you," she said miserably.

  "Didn't hear it," I said. "What did you ask?"

  "Will you help me?" she muttered.

  I opened the inner office and invited her inside. I didn't know if I could help her or not. The lady certainly had my attention, though and I was willing to try. But then something rushed out of the office behind me and exploded against my head with a flash of pain and nausea. I grasped the significance of that feeling but I could not follow it intellectually; it felt like death, like dying and spinning into a bottomless chasm and being too sick to care. I must have gone out like a light because I do not even remember hitting the floor.

  I came out of it with Ken Forta and two uniformed deputies bending over me. I felt very sick and very weak, and my head was like ten Margarita hangovers. Someone growled, "Look out, he's going to puke," and someone helped me turn onto my side. I retched a couple of times but nothing came up. The nausea began fading, though, and I became aware of blood in my hair.

  I sat up and put a hand to the wound, couldn't feel any brain tissue spilling out, decided I'd live. Someone grabbed my hand and slapped a cuff on it.

  Forta growled, "Take that off!—take it off!"—and the cuff magically slipped away.

  I muttered, "What the hell is going down, Ken?" and tried to get to my feet but couldn't even find my feet.

  Forta said, "Sit still, Joe. For God's sake, just sit there and behave yourself until the medics get here."

  I said, "No, no, you don't understand," but then neither did I. It was all jumbled and weird, and it became even more so. I think probably I was slipping in and out of consciousness, because I don't remember seeing the paramedics until we were inside the ambulance, then I saw them again at the trauma center as I was being wheeled into the surgery.

  It all came back, in there, as the doctor and two nurses were doing things to my head. I saw Ken Forta standing just outside the door with a worried face and the two deputies leaning lazily against a wall and looking bored. I called over, "Ken! Is the girl okay?"

  He just smiled at me, and a nurse shushed me, and the doc went on doing things to my scalp.

  I yelled, "Goddammit, Ken! Is she okay?"

  The nurse again tried to intervene but the doctor told her, "It's okay, we're finished. Let the officer come in." He told Forta, "Superficial, he'll mend. He's all yours."

  I wondered what he meant by that, but I should have known by the look on Forta's face.

  The uniforms came into the room while Forta recited my rights to me.

  I said, "What the hell is this?"

  He said, "Sorry, Joe. It's a collar. Suspicion of homicide."

  "Aw no," I said. "She was alive and well when my lights went out. I had nothing to do with it."

  He told me, "I believe you, Joe, even though I don't know what you're talking about." He bent down to whisper, "Shut up, dammit, until you've got your lawyer."

  Then the uniforms pulled me off the table and cuffed me.

  It became very real, then. It was not a nightmare. It was entirely real, and I was under arrest for murder.

  The charge was conspiracy to murder. The list of victims was long, and growing hourly.

  But Bernard Wiseman and Melissa Franklin were not on that list.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Edgar's charges were several pages long. He was challenging the medical identification of Wiseman and he was trying to tie me to a criminal conspiracy.

  According to Edgar's theory of the case, Wiseman had enlisted my services in an effort to identify certain business enemies and then to eliminate them.

  Quite a few had been eliminated.

  I was surprised to learn that five had died in the NuCal bombing—the two indigents that I mentioned earlier plus another three John Does of whom bits and pieces were discovered inside the building.

  Another two John Does died in the limo.

  Four more connected persons had died during the next twenty-four hours—three women and a man, all of whose names meant nothing whatever to me. I'd just taken their pictures during my surveillance of NuCal. Each had been shot once in the head, execution style. The man was carrying one of my business cards.

  The arson investigators had determined that the bomb had detonated in a back room of NuCal. They described that back room as a "film lab." Two of the head-shot women had been employees of NuCal, which supposedly dealt only in costume design, but one of those victims also worked as a respected freelance film editor.

  Edgar's theory had me implicated right up to just short of planting the bombs and pulling the triggers. He even made mention of my past experience with explosives when I was at LAPD, suggesting I could have made the bombs.

  He also had a clincher. Supposedly he had an anonymous tip that I had been paid fifty thousand dollars in cash by Bernard Wiseman to help him fake his own death.

  The motive: a scandal brewing at United Talents and Wiseman's fear of a coming indictment on criminal charges. No substantiation but it made a good enough story to string me out and give County a focus of public interest in the case.

  It mattered not a damn that the officers dispatched to arrest me had found me unconscious and bleeding on my office floor. Edgar did not even wish to discuss it, except for a wise comment about thieves falling out. He was trying to provoke me into attacking him, and maybe I would have if I'd been myself. I was just too sick to rise to his bait. I think I had a mild concussion, the man at the trauma center apparently didn't bother to check it out. He put a butterfly on my lacerated scalp and sent me, he thought, off to jail.

  Well, I really wasn't willing to go to jail, nor sick

  enough to let Edgar have his way with me. And I did have some resources. I have never liked to think of friends in just those terms, but sometimes you're reminded. Mark Shapiro is a friend. He is also one of the best criminal lawyers in the area and he isn't in it for the money. Mark is about forty years old, a displaced New Yorker who came West for his bar exams after flunking twice back East. He says that the New York bar was rigged against him and that he would never have been admitted to it. I don't know why. I do know that "passing the bar"—any bar—is not necessarily a matter of simply passing the tests. Mark says it's no more than a method for controlling the numbers in the club. That may be true in some areas. Anyone who can survive the rigors of a decent law school shouldn't have that much trouble passing the bar, with appropriate cramming.

  Whatever, Mark Shapiro is one smart fellow. He is also a friend and sometime employer. He has hired me to help him on several criminal cases. Law and hockey were his only passions that I'd ever discovered. You might think that the fellow is something of a nerd, unless you'd seen him in a courtroom or at a hockey game. He has a warrior's heart in both arenas, and I'd quickly learned to respect him in any arena.

  He was waiting for me downtown. Nobody said so but I suspected that Forta had tipped him. I do know that I was glad to see him there when they brought me in. He hand-held me through all the ignominious formalities, and we walked out the door at nine o'clock on the dot. I was free on my own "recognizance pending an arraignment not yet scheduled." Better y
et, my license was intact "pending further developments." All of which was a tribute to Shapiro's aggressive skills and warrior heart. Even though the whole case against me, to that point, was purely circumstantial, without a good, combative lawyer at my side, Edgar would have locked me up and hidden the keys at least until an arraignment hearing.

  When I was released, we went outside and stood on the steps to talk for a moment. "I can't believe those guys, trying to pull that kind of crap on you, Joe. Who the hell do they think we are?"

  I caught that "we" and appreciated it.

  "I mean, with your exemplary police record, to come up with cockamamie charges like those."

  "Save it for the judge, pal, we'll probably need it. Speaking of which—you must know that for all practical purposes you're defending an indigent. You'll probably have to take it out in trade, so you'd better do it quick while I still have a license."

  "They'll play hell getting your license, Joe."

  A man's friends are his greatest treasures, especially for a man like me. I told him that and it embarrassed him. He covered it by telling me, "Be very careful, Joe. This matter is drawing a lot of press. A lot of press automatically translates to heavy politics, and that translates to pressure on everyone to look their best. That includes you, my friend, so be forewarned. I know you like to cut corners here and there. I'm saying you can't do that now, at least until we've disposed of these cockamamie charges. Don't give them any new ammunition."

  I promised to behave myself, we set up a meeting for the next afternoon, he went his way and I mine, back inside. Forta was skulking about the lobby, waiting for me. We went to the snack bar and got some coffee, found a table in an empty corner and he told me even before we sat down: "I'm not going to compromise my position, Joe, so be careful what you tell me. There's a lot of heat on. We're friends, but let's not test that friendship in this kind of heat."