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

by Don Pendleton

  I said, "Hadn't planned to tell you a damned thing, friend. Hoping you'd have something to tell me. What about Melissa Franklin?"

  "What about her?"

  "You took my statement. What were the signs when you got to my office?"

  "No signs at all. Your car was parked outside, the engine was still warm, your office was open and you were lying on the floor in your own blood. No signs of forced entry or other disturbance of any kind. I think the woman set you up, Joe, from what you gave us. Must have had someone waiting for you inside."

  "Or possibly she was posted as a lookout and I surprised, as you say, a burglary in progress."

  "Possibly. What would they be looking for?"

  "Something connected to my job for Wiseman. Why did Edgar hand me over?"

  "You know Edgar. He'd give up his mother to break this case. Enough to get some headlines, anyway. Wait'll you see the morning papers. He had the reporters in before I got you booked."

  "What do you have on Melissa Franklin?"

  "Some mystery there. The DMV record is confused. She's had two name changes since the original driver's license was issued six years ago." He got out a small spiral notebook, flipped it open, consulted it. "Originally surrendered a Wisconsin permit and was licensed in California as Melissa Ann Nordstrom. Married less than a year later, name changed to Moore. Two years ago . . ."

  He took a short breath. "Well, well . . ."

  I said, "Moore, huh?"

  He repeated, "Well, well."

  "Albert and Melissa . . ."

  "Don't rub it in."

  "Which means you haven't cross-checked the vital statistics."

  "Too busy," he said, "making a lame collar on a friend of mine."

  "Level with me, then, how lame is that collar?"

  "You should know."

  "I know how easy it is to stretch the facts into a noose," I said. "I'd just like to know how much stretch there is."

  "Enough so that you shouldn't get cocky about it," was all he would tell me.

  "Run the make on Albert and Melissa," I suggested. "Zero in on that guy and learn all you can about past and present ties to Melissa Franklin. Get it to me as quick as you can, please. If you can't run me down leave the message on my machine."

  "Okay, I guess I can do that."

  "It'll make up for the collar."

  "Or draw it tighter."

  "I'll run that risk. Just feed me what you can feed me, Ken. I swear on whoever's grave you want I'm clean."

  "If you're holding out on me, Joe . . ."

  I copied the information on Melissa Franklin from Forta's notebook while he looked around the room, then I got up and walked away.

  He called after me, "Watch it, asshole."

  Between us I think he meant it as a term of affection.

  Later it wouldn't matter. I would never see him alive again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was adrift in town at night without a car. I looked like a derelict and felt like one. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself too, like a kicked dog. I called a friend, Nancy Parker—she has a place up near Griffith Park—and requested sanctuary. She came and got me and took me to her place, fed and bathed me and put me to bed with a massage. I fell asleep while she was working on me and woke up alone in the house next morning.

  There's nothing romantic between us—nothing serious—we're friends and sometimes one provides extra comfort for the other when the need is there. Nancy is an independent casting director and lives the busy life. She's pretty, smart, a woman who likes to take care of herself. We respect each other. I guess that's our big suit.

  She'd washed my shirt and underwear, sponged and pressed my suit, had coffee waiting to be plugged in and breakfast in the microwave ready for a quick warming. She'd also left me a note of one word: Fear.

  I didn't connect it right away but it came to me over breakfast. I had been feeling pretty lousy the night before and I guess a little down on everything, and I'd asked her a purely rhetorical question: "What the hell's going on with the human race, anyway?"

  Sometimes you can get the feeling nothing good is going down—like dog eat dog, survival of the fittest, to hell with you, hooray for me. You get a lot of that in police work. Fear apparently was Nancy's answer to the question without an answer. Fear of what? Dying? Pain? Not being loved? What?

  Okay, what fear was driving this case?

  One strong enough to kill and maim and destroy, for sure.

  I guess that's what life is all about, after all. For sure it is what the human race is all about. We left the only real sanctuary behind at Eden. Now we are driven by the two great opposites, fear and love.

  It was fear of the unknown that was driving me when I left Nancy's place that morning and returned to the war zone. The rubble that had once been NuCal Designs was roped off and secured as a "crime scene." An arson team was at work back near the alleyway and a uniformed cop stood vigil up-front. "Anything new?" I asked the sentry.

  He gave me a look, nothing more, so I handed him my ID wallet. He looked it over and gave it back, unimpressed. "It's still secured. If you're working for the insurance companies you'll have to route through Lieutenant Johnson of the homicide division."

  "Thanks, but I'm not. I was involved in an investigation before the bombing and I've been cooperating with Johnson's investigation. Just wanted to see it for myself. Pretty grim scene, isn't it?"

  "Sure is." He shuffled about for a moment, then told me, "I never met a private detective. It's not like on television, huh. What kind of investigation?"

  I shrugged. "Nothing is like on television, pal."

  "Right," he said. "What kind of . . . ?"

  "Routine surveillance," I told him. "Had a video eye on the place the whole day of the bombing, right up until about an hour before."

  "Yeah? Front and back?"

  I made a sad face and told him, "Front only. That's all the client wanted."

  "Always the way, isn't it. With all the action maybe going the other way."

  "Yeah," I said, in my best television imitation, and went on my way.

  You get these blind spots, you know, even as a cop and sometimes especially as a cop. I had known all along that there was a rear entrance to that building—that is, from the moment I began preparing the actual surveillance. First thing I noted. But then I was looking at the job through the eyes of my client, and it had been clear to me that his eyes were interested in the customer-entrance at the front of the building. So that's where I had fixed my interest, hadn't given another thought to that alleyway entrance, not even after the talk about a "film lab" in the back room.

  So now I was thinking about it, and the wide-eyed cop's reference to it. I went to a sidewalk phone booth, tried to contact Abe Johnson, was told he was in a meeting and would probably be tied up there all morning. A guy panhandled me for a quarter while I was standing there at the telephone, and I idly watched him disappear into a liquor store at the corner. Two of his world had died recently and nearby...I followed him into the liquor store, a scudsy hole whose specialties were half-pint liquors and cheap wine.

  My subject was at the counter and going through a handful of coins to pay for a bottle of Ripple when I got in there. I grabbed a bottle of the same and stood behind him to pay for it, then I followed him outside with my identical brown bag and let him lead me on a beeline toward his own idea of sanctuary.

  These are the non-people of out society, you know, most of the time totally invisible to the rest of us until they display themselves in a way that disturbs our own sense of comfort. But I discovered a long time ago that the street people have their own community and values. Some can wax quite philosophical on their views, if you're willing to listen, and some of those can sometimes make a lot of sense.

  I really was not looking for any of that. I cultivated the guy because I know the ways of these people and understand their community. Two of that local community had died recently and very close by. I was just wondering if
anything useful could be learned in that connection.

  We ended up in a cardboard crate beside a trash bin in an alley just one block over from the blast zone, and we clinked our bottles together as we settled down to a serious contemplation of life and its incomprehensible vicissitudes. His name was George, he was about fifty, and he'd found the truth about all of it.

  "We're not s'posed to know," he gravely informed me. "That's what it all means. Not s'posed to know."

  "Right," I agreed.

  "Soon as you know, you die."

  I said, "Oh."

  "Sure. Bein' alive is not knowin' why you're alive. Soon's you find out, you die. S'what death is, knowin' it all. See? You ready for that?"

  I said, "Not me."

  He said, "Me neither. So here's to not knowin'." We clinked bottles again. "Celebrate, celebrate. That's the secret."

  I said, "Right. How 'bout your buddies, though? I mean the fire the other night. Let's celebrate for them."

  Again we brought the bottles together.

  George said, "You just never know, anymore."

  I reminded him, " 'Til we die."

  "That, too. But you don't even know what's safe anymore. I told 'em."

  "What'd you tell 'em, George?"

  "Told 'em that place was too busy. You know. Too much out the back door. You know what that means."

  I said, "Sure. The front is the back and back is the front. How do you know which is which?"

  "Exactly," George replied, and we drank a toast to that. "All hours of the day and night," he added. "I told Willie. I told 'im. 'You're gonna catch a bullet out there some night, Willie. You better find another place to live.' He wouldn't listen."

  We clinked and drank to Willie and his sudden gift of knowledge.

  I put my bottle down between George's legs and asked him to watch it for me, then I walked away from that cardboard sanctuary without looking back, but I thought about it for a long time afterward. We look at the street people and feel superior, and in that superiority we pity them and their screwloose approach to life. Are there larger beings somewhere who occasionally pierce our veils of invisibility and then feel the same way about us and all of our proud postures?

  I had not actually drunk any of the Ripple but I was sure that it would not go to waste.

  The bottle was the real sanctuary for people like George, the only one worth pursuing. I hoped he would find comfort there. Because he'd really helped me a lot. I was finally beginning to develop my own theory of the case.

  A theory about myself, too, and my own postures.

  And I think I'd decided that there are no real sanctuaries, not anywhere or for anybody...this side of the grave. I was thinking that George had not been too far off the mark, at that—especially for those of us who think of knowledge and position as some sort of sanctuary from growth, which is just another word for life.

  That was my Ripple revelation.

  Only the dead find sanctuary.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I had lunch with a tense and fidgety Abe Johnson and found him a bit cool, almost distant with me, especially early on. That was understandable. He did not give me much over lunch, but he did know that I'd been charged at County and seemed to want my version of it, which I gave him.

  I told him I thought Edgar was shooting from the hip and hoping for a lucky strike.

  "Don't count on that," Abe said. "They've got good cops over there. You should know. Don't sell them short. Matter of fact, we're reevaluating all the evidence ourselves. Taking a fresh look at all of it, including your input—and frankly, Joe, none of it seems to hang together. This is a messy case. None of the pieces seem to fit together, especially not with your pieces."

  I had to wonder what Abe knew that he was not sharing with me. "If it's all that messy, then I'd guess

  someone set it up that way. You should be wondering why, and while you're doing that you should keep remembering who the patsy is. If I was a criminal part of it, don't you think I'd know how to cover myself better than that?"

  "That's the way I've been trying to look at it."

  "I'm getting the strong feeling I was set up coming in. Why? For what? Why make me a fall guy to a conspiracy? What would that buy anybody?"

  "That's part of what we're wondering—"

  "Well, please keep on wondering. And while you're at it, wonder about Melissa Franklin too. I'm not sure that she's the one I saw in the limo. I'm not sure that Wiseman is the Albert Moore who hired me. I'm not sure that the real Albert Moore was driving that limo, and I'm not sure that the real Melissa Franklin was in that limo moments before it destructed or that she was in my office yesterday when I got sapped from behind. I'm not sure, period."

  Johnson said, "So you see our problem. Very messy, too many possibilities. And what's frying the whole thing now—"

  "The executions?"

  "Right. You took pictures of fourteen people outside NuCal before the bombing, ostensibly to identify a disloyal employee at United Talents. From one point of view that set the whole chain of events in motion—beginning with the bombing of the building and continuing on to the execution-style slaying of four of the people you photographed. We're trying to identify and warn the others, just in case any more have been marked, but there's been no luck there. Not yet. We're probably going to have to put it on the air and request those people to come forward and identify themselves."

  "Sounds reasonable."

  "Unless some are criminally tainted. There's evidence to suggest that NuCal Designs was a front for illegal activities in the back room."

  "The film lab?"

  "Yeah. More than that, looks like they were manufacturing video cassettes back there too. We're figuring it as a possible pirate operation. With Wiseman in the picture—and in light of what he told you when he hired you—we're thinking it could have involved a ripoff of UT's big hits using the film from their own vaults. If Wiseman had tumbled to something like that . . ."

  By the look on his face, his stops and starts, it was clear that Johnson was having trouble buying his theories. "Doesn't ring, though, does it. Why would a man in Wiseman's position, and stuck in a wheelchair, want to play it that way? These big studios have their own security setups. Why didn't he just turn it over to his security honcho or to the cops?"

  Johnson sighed. "Yeah. Unless the rumors are true."

  "What rumors?"

  "That Wiseman was very kinky himself and that a faction at UT has been trying to expose him."

  "You want to tell me more about that?"

  "Not 'til I know more about it myself."

  Over coffee, I reminded him: "Wiseman or Moore, or whoever paid me the thirteen hundred, hinted that he was trying to set up a disinformation game. Maybe that was the one true thing he said to me."

  "So what does that buy?"

  "A confusion of the circumstances," I said. "If the guy was not being straight with me, then the whole setup could have been for the purpose of disinformation—confusion. That would be the only reason I'm in it. Just because it made no sense. Helter-skelter. The only other reasoning that makes sense to me is to take it back to square one and say that an honest man came to me with an honest problem and I was trying to help him solve it."

  Abe provided a sour smile. "That would solve your problem, wouldn't it. But as I've said, the pieces don't match. In that scenario how do we account for the four murders since the bombings?"

  "Two games in play? Wiseman, or whoever, came to me to help set up the one game. But he was too late. While he was trying to get his play going, the other game overtook him and knocked him out of play."

  "Wiseman or whoever . . ."

  "Yes. Someone came to me and said that he was being ripped off. He wanted information that would help him to fight back. Before he could use the information I provided he was taken out of play. The others would have been killed whether or not I'd been out there taking pictures. Which leaves me clean. I performed a proper service for a proper client. I just
happened to get caught in the crossfire."

  "Makes some sense," Johnson said. "And that's the way I've been trying to read it."

  "So why isn't County reading it that way?"

  "It's more intriguing the other way," he said. "I had a meeting this morning with the department brass and two councilmen. Everyone's upset by the press attention. No one, surprise, surprise, wants to come out with egg on the face. The political implications...well, you know, there are a lot of aspirations in various quarters that reach a way beyond this city. Nobody wants to look like a fool, Joe. And this case already has caught the attention of the whole country. This might have to be the last friendly meeting between you and me, so—"

  "Don't you dump on me, Abe."

  "You must realize why I've bent so far backward to avoid that very thing, Joe."

  I tried to read that bland cop-face. So okay, he'd brought it up. "How is she?" I asked him.

  "She's fine," he said quietly. "No hard feelings toward you, for what it's worth."

  "That's nice. But there was no reason for hard feelings either way. We made a mistake. We corrected it. It was never a happy marriage, Abe. I hope she's happy now."

  "She is, we are. Two kids. One black and one white."

  "Fair enough," I said. "Police colors."

  He turned serious. "I'll do what I can for you, Joe, but you should know that there are limits. If I see you going down, you have to know that I intend to stand clear. Too much to lose. I'm not like you, I've got—"

  "I know." I put down ten bucks to cover my part of the check, stood up. "You're already too close, Abe." I stuck out my hand. "Thanks for trying."

  I received an envelope instead of a handshake—an envelope and a wink. I put the envelope in a pocket and sent the wink back to him as I stepped away.

  He said, "Take care."

  I waved without looking back and went on out.

  Nice guy, and that was my opinion even before I opened the envelope.