Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Page 11

"I guess I just wanted to keep things tight for the moment."

  "Because you thought that Murray was still running the department by remote control?"

  "I thought it was very possible. It has been a very weird situation these past weeks. The captains have been working twelve-hour rotations, putting in a lot of hours. They've been the acting chiefs, Joe, unofficially of course. I don't believe anyone wanted an acting chief, not for real."

  "What have they been covering, Lila?"

  "God, I wish I knew."

  "But you think that Schwartzman is the key?"

  "Don't you?"

  I had begun thinking that way, yeah.

  And I had another key in mind, too. I asked Lila to show me the passkey to the mansion. It's about the size of a credit card, hard plastic with tiny holes designed into it. I asked her, "Mind if I keep this for awhile?"

  "Keep it forever," she replied breezily. "I'll certainly never use it again."

  Maybe I would. And I could not get back down that mountain fast enough.

  Maybe I did feel a bit like Moses, after all. But only for a little while.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I stopped off in San Bernardino at the coroner's office, found two young women holding down the Saturday night fort in there. Both were pleasant and nice, seemed impressed by my ID, made me feel very welcome. One was a technician, gal named Sue, and the other was a records clerk. They gave me coffee and complete access to the files, dug things out for me, discussed things with me.

  I looked over the reports on Saturday's Brighton- centered carnage and compared the official findings. Franklin Jones, the guy who'd been killed on the mansion grounds, had caught three explosive rounds in the chest and had died instantly.

  Both Manning and Peterson, the cops who'd rousted me earlier that day before I was even on the case, had each died of a single gunshot wound to the head. Two thirty- eight slugs had been recovered during the autopsies, but apparently not from the same gun.

  The narcotics officers, Hanson and Rodriguez, had died

  from numerous gunshot wounds. Their corpses had yielded a number of thirty-eight slugs also, fired from at least three different guns, as well as shotgun pellets.

  Tim Murray had been shot once in the head with a heavy, powerful weapon—probably .44 Magnum or .45 ACP, determined by measurement of the entry wound. The slug had passed on through the skull, exiting at the rear, and it had not been recovered.

  Then I got to Mayor Harvey Katz, who had died six weeks earlier. Odd.

  Katz had been shot once in the back of the head and the slug had exited through an eye socket, also passing through the throat of the woman who had died with him in the bed of a cheap motel in Helltown. But the woman had been shot in the head, as well, and with the same weapon. Two .45 ACP slugs had been recovered, dug from the mattress upon which the victims had died.

  Both Murray and Katz had died of contact wounds, and so had the woman who died with Katz, meaning that the muzzle of the weapon was placed against the head before the trigger was pulled. This is usually indicative of a cold, execution-style killing.

  The two detectives Manning and Peterson got it a bit differently. In the technical reconstruction by the coroner's men, each man had been shot at close range but not by contact, each had been looking directly at his killer, and they had not been shot by the same weapon. One or more assailants had approached each side of the idling vehicle to fire through the open side windows from a distance of no more than eighteen inches. This had been determined by the positions of the bodies, the angle of entry of the bullets, the absence of damage to the car, and the characteristics of the recovered bullets.

  I thanked the women for their help and went on to Brighton, reached the PD about ten-thirty. There was a morgue-like atmosphere there too, much too quiet for a Saturday night. Several patrolmen were writing reports, two detectives at a file cabinet looked up and nodded as I passed. One was Zarraza, the homicide dick who'd befriended me earlier. He dropped whatever was occupying him and hastened to catch up with me so I stopped and waited for him.

  "You're working long hours," I observed.

  "Well, we're a little short," he told me. "And I need the overtime so I don't mind."

  "What're you working?"

  "All of 'em. This very moment, I'm pulling the total history on Frank Jones. He's the dog expert, worked for us for awhile."

  I said, "Yeah, I remember. While you're at it, do something else. See if you can determine how many Dobermans they have up at the mansion. I saw two. I think maybe there ought to be three, but that's just a hunch."

  "I'll check it out, sure. I wanted to tell you about the ammo. The explosive rounds. There's an outfit called Whammo that has been sending around free samples to the police departments in the area. The use of these rounds is supposed to reduce the danger of ricochet and innocent victims. They're designed to disintegrate on contact."

  I said, "Yeah, I've seen them."

  "But that's not their real effect. There's a tiny delay built into the explosive mechanism, so that it explodes not immediately upon contact but upon penetration. It's like inserting a small bomb inside a body cavity then detonating it. This department nixed them."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Mostly for political reasons, I guess. I tried a

  few on the pistol range a few months ago, firing into a block of paraffin. You wouldn't believe what one of those rounds does to a block of paraffin. Anyway, two hundred rounds of those little bombs were left here as samples three months ago. I thought you should know that. Fifty rounds were used for official testing. Nobody knows what became of the rest of them."

  "Pull a survey," I suggested. "Try to account for them, officer by officer."

  "We're doing that."

  "Any word on Murray?"

  He shook his head, grim-lipped. "County has the jurisdiction. We're supporting, of course."

  "Get all the details you can from county. They handled the Katz killing too?"

  "Yes. That's odd, I hadn't thought of it that way, Katz and Murray were killed within a block of each other."

  "There are some interesting parallels," I told Zarraza. "You might check into that."

  There was a new look in his eye as he strode away.

  The watch captain must have heard us talking. He came to his doorway, leaned against the jamb with his hands in his pockets, said, "I was wondering if you had abandoned us."

  It was Roger Williamson. He must have come on duty at eight o'clock, relieving Ralston. I remembered what Lila Turner had told me about the twelve-hour rotating shifts. McGuire had been on duty when I came aboard about twenty-four hours earlier and apparently he'd worked until eight a.m. when Ralston came on. Which meant that Williamson had just come off a twenty-four-hour stand-down, coming on at eight o'clock.

  "Isn't this routine starting to wear on you?" I asked him.

  "What routine?"

  "The twelve-hour rotation routine."

  He shrugged. "Someone has to do it."

  "I'm doing it now," I reminded him.

  "Sure, but for how long? We'll go back to the normal routine when the city council gives us a good reason for doing that."

  "Suit yourself," I told him, and went on toward my office.

  The captain called after me, "Boyd got in touch."

  I turned back to say, "Okay."

  "That won't change anything, you know. I still won't know what those fucking guys are doing until they've done it."

  "So fry them," I called back.

  "Oh, sure."

  I went on into my office and straight to the message board. I had given my computer pal in L. A. a contact code: "Mr. Harper has the file." His name wasn't Harper but I did not want anyone reading over my shoulder, so I'd set it up that way.

  The message was there, yes, poked into my personal little electronic file from the switchboard. There was another one, too, from Carl Garcia, as cryptic as the other. "Saw your notices. Regrets. A-OK here. Will call again at mi
dnight. Don Carlo."

  It was a pet name I had for the guy up in San Francisco. He was an alumnus of San Francisco State, their football team was called the Dons, he was a football freak like me and I used to kid him when things were not going well for the Dons.

  Those were my only two messages, and I'd been gone for more than eight hours. But what the hell... this was all a charade anyway. Nobody thought of me as really being in charge—probably not even Carl Garcia. These cops were all just going along with the gag, humoring me. I suddenly felt like an ass. Almost turned around and walked back out the door, but then I caught myself, sat myself down and gave myself a talking to.

  Didn't matter what these guys thought. I was involved now, like it or not. I had to ride it through, see it to a proper conclusion. Then the fuckers could fire me as quickly as they wanted to. But not these cops... not these cops. Maybe I'd never been more than a sergeant but I'd sure as hell been more cop than any of these people here who had gone beyond that. It's not the rank that qualifies you, and the qualifications themselves may not mean a damned thing when it comes to getting a job done.

  I sure as hell would not curtsy to a Roger Williamson.

  I went back to his office with a snarl, told him, "Get your God damned feet off the desk, you asshole. Put them on the floor and let them move your fat ass outside and into the night."

  His eyes bugged at me and the feet came down but not to take him anywhere. "Are you crazy?" he growled.

  "Yeah, I'm crazy," I growled back. "Crazy enough to be involved in this mess. If this really was my department I'd have fired you when I walked in the door a minute ago. Where the hell have you been all day? Someone has killed your mayor, someone has killed your chief, someone has killed four of your detectives and a former officer. What the hell are you doing about it?"

  His face had gone beet red but the voice was under control as he replied, "Well, Jesus, Joe, we're doing everything we can."

  "No, hell no, you're not doing anything but sitting around and waiting for something to drop in your lap. Why the hell aren't you out there kicking butts up and down the street and making something happen? Dammit, Roger, this isn't even my department but I can't bear to put my feet on the desk with all this shit going down around me. How can you?"

  He stood up, stretched, sat back down, replied in a surly voice, "You're right. I guess we've all been shellshocked for the past month." He took his gun from a drawer of the desk, stood up and put it on. "I need to catch some air."

  It hit me then. The guy was scared. He was scared out of his skull. I blocked the doorway as I told him, "We can fix this. Level with me. What the hell is going on around here?"

  He said, "Please, Joe, stand aside."

  I said, "Hell no, I won't stand aside until you talk to me. What's going on? Is it Schwartzman?"

  He blinked and said, "Is it what?"

  "Is it that God damned mansion up there?"

  He said, "I... don't follow you."

  "Sure you do! Who's running the death squad?"

  Williamson sat back down, ran a hand through his hair, looked at the desk instead of me as he said, "You're crazy."

  "I'm crazy." I laughed at that. "You're the guy that's scared out of his skull but I'm crazy."

  "You're talking crazy, yes."

  "Crazy is as crazy does," I told him. "Just watch my smoke."

  I went back to my office. I heard footsteps along the corridor moments later and looked out my door in time to see Williamson standing at the door of the dispatch office. He said something to someone there then went on outside.

  I scooped up my phone and asked the dispatcher, "Where's the captain headed?"

  "He said he was getting some air."

  "Right," I said, and hung it up.

  I felt a bit smug about that.

  But I'd hardly settled back into my chair when the smugness vanished. The floor beneath my feet rolled as though by earthquake and the walls vibrated to the ear-splitting roar of a huge explosion. I lurched to the door and saw people running. Someone fell through the front door of the building with his clothing flaming; a patrolman leapt onto the burning figure, trying to beat down the flames. Someone up there yelled, "Oh shit!"

  I don't remember moving from my office to the front of the building, I just remember colliding with Detective Zarraza as he danced back inside with a stricken face.

  "Captain Williamson," he croaked.

  The smugness was gone, yeah.

  So was Williamson. Someone had wired a bomb to the ignition of his official car, and he'd caught more air than he'd bargained for.

  Another Brighton cop was dead, and a civilian employee who'd been standing thirty feet away from the doomed vehicle had been severely injured.

  It was about time, yeah, to call out the national guard.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I took personal charge of this one and it took the rest of Saturday to clean it up. The word got around fast and the scene was choked with off-duty cops within minutes. It looked as though the entire fire department had responded, as well, so there was a lot of confusion and churning around. I declared the entire police department "on duty" in an effort to secure the scene and establish a workable perimeter, put all those guys to work and gave them something useful to do.

  There was much to be done.

  Adding to the confusion, I'd considered it wise to call in bomb squads from the county and from two neighboring cities. I wanted every official vehicle in the yard checked for explosives. Damned good thing, too, because they found another bomb. They found it in my car, my official car, which had been left behind in its reserved space when I took my personal car up the mountain. After that find, we sent the dogs throughout the building and into adjacent areas within the compound, also sniffed down city hall and all the vehicles parked over there. Found nothing else, but the sergeant in charge of the sheriff's bomb squad seemed very pleased with the one they did find. They were able to disarm it and take it to their lab for study. He told me, with a sober wink, "Someone's got a real hard-on for your department. This thing would blow up a tank."

  They took it away with my blessing. It could represent valuable evidence and I wanted nobody but the best to mess with it.

  Both Ralston and O'Brien were on the scene early and they'd been busy working with the evidence teams. The shattered body of Captain Williamson was transported to the morgue at about midnight, the shattered remnants of the car were hauled away, the visiting bomb squads departed, the fire department had withdrawn, and a crew of workers were neatly boarding up a number of the building's windows that had been broken by the explosion. There was not much more to be done, at the moment. I collared the two captains and we went in separate cars to a bar on Foothill for a drink and some quiet conversation.

  The drinks notwithstanding, it was a sober group who huddled in a quiet booth at the rear of the bar at a few strokes past midnight on that Sunday morning.

  Ralston muttered, "It's gone totally crazy."

  O'Brien seemed to agree with that assessment. "Where's it going to end?"

  I told them, "To get to that, we should decide first where it started."

  "It started with you," Ralston glumly observed, meaning me.

  "No. It started before me. I was called in here to stop something already started. What was that?"

  Neither captain seemed to have a response to that so I suggested, "It started three years ago. It started with Harold Schwartzman. Would you agree?"

  The two locked eyes with each other for a moment then Ralston said, "The man has been a disturbing influence, I'll say that, but I don't see..."

  O'Brien added, "He started with Tim first. Then I think it spread to the mayor and some council members. But I never saw anything kinky. Okay, sure, you start flashing money and broads around a bunch like we have here, it can get a little out of hand sometimes. But Schwartzman had no reason that I could see to want to buy this department. The only local business interests he has are down in Helltown, and
that's county jurisdiction, so..."

  "Maybe he has political ambitions," I suggested.

  "I've seen no evidence of it," O'Brien replied.

  Ralston: "No, I think it's all been totally innocent. I think he just enjoys being a big fish in a small pond."

  "Tell me about this guy," I requested.

  "Schwartzman?" It was Ralston. "Not much to tell, other than...well, he cuts a low profile. Very important man—very busy—in and out of town a lot, I gather. He—" "Old or young?"

  Ralston: "I couldn't say."

  "You never met him?"

  O'Brien: "I don't think I did."

  Ralston: "Well, now wait a minute... I think once, maybe a couple of years ago ..."

  I said, "Get off it, you guys. You've both been up to that mansion probably fifty times. What is this? What are you covering?"

  "I'm not covering anything," Ralston replied, miffed. "Schwartzman is not in town a lot."

  "He throws parties in absentia?"

  The guy glowered back at me. "That's right."

  "You guys are nuts," I declared. "You get what you deserve."

  I got up and walked out, totally disgusted with the both of them. They were covering something, for sure. Meanwhile their department was being decimated, and probably from within. Maybe they were next in line for a morgue tag on the toe, and they probably knew that too because both were shaken and obviously demoralized. But they were frozen in place. By something. What?

  The answer came as simple and uncomplicated as most truths are, and it came from the blue.

  They were frozen in place by their own personal involvement in whatever had been going down within that department.

  And they did not know where to turn.

  i went straight to the mansion, got there at about a quarter to one. Lights were on inside, but just here and there, not like the night before when the whole place had been ablaze.

  The key worked the gate, I drove in, parked beneath the portico. Lights were on out there but the grounds were in darkness. I unholstered my gun and stood with the car door open for a moment, wondering about the dogs. Heard nothing, saw nothing, no other cars were in evidence.