Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Read online

  I briefly considered my options and decided on a soft entry, used my gadget to defeat the locks on the front door and let myself inside.

  The entry foyer was softly lighted and I could hear the murmuring of a television somewhere to the rear, toward the kitchen area. I went back there to check that out, almost walked into the arms of a guy who was emerging from another small room back there. He wore a pistol in open leather about the waist, carried a flashlight, didn't look terribly surprised to see me. I asked him, "Where's Lydia?"

  "Think she went to bed," he replied. "I was just coming to let you in. What's up?"

  "We need to talk," I told him. "Let's go back inside."

  He said, "Okay," and I followed him into the room. Maybe it had been originally designed as a pantry. Now it was obviously a security station. Three CCTV monitors were mounted into a console that covered a wall. There was room left for a swivel chair, a small table, and a filing cabinet. One of the monitors was displaying the gate approach, another was showing an automatic scan of the grounds in surrealistic infrared, the other covered the entrance to the house. I noted a stack of videocassettes on the table and a small portable TV off to one side. Some old movie was on. The guy turned off the portable and turned to me with an expectant look.

  I had not seen this room during my first visit and none of the investigating cops had mentioned it to me.

  "I'm Joe," I told the security guard.

  He said, "Yeah, I think I saw you here before."

  "Probably not," I said. "I've taken Tim Murray's place."

  He said, as though he should have known, "Oh! Sorry. With all the excitement..."

  "Yeah, we've had plenty of that," I agreed. "Who was in here last night when it went down?"

  "Well that was Frank, Frank Jones. Or at least he had the watch. I guess he got called out. And that's when it happened."

  I said, "Seems that way, doesn't it? How often do you patrol outside?"

  "Well, I just walk the wall maybe once or twice a shift, or when I see something doesn't look right. We don't get bothered much up here."

  "You got bothered last night."

  "Sure did. Glad it wasn't on my watch."

  "What do you think happened?" I decided to cultivate the guy. "As a pro, I mean, your professional opinion. What really happened?"

  "Well, I been looking at the tapes," he replied, almost eagerly. "They don't show much. But I have my own idea of what went down."

  "That's what I'd like to hear, uh—what'd you say your name is?"

  "I'm Norm Tomkins." We shook hands. The guy seemed very nervous. He pointed toward the stack of video cassettes. "Shows a loose dog. Frank really loved those damned dogs. I think he took one out just to walk it, give it some exercise, and I think it picked up something at the wall. Now we're supposed to keep the dogs kenneled during onboard activities. They're really dangerous as hell, you know. Me, I don't like them. I think that was all a terrible mistake last night." He pointed to the tapes again. "I see some guys running down the drive off the portico, a couple more breaking across the lawn. This is before the shots are recorded. I think those guys heard the dog raising hell and I think they went to investigate. The shooting itself doesn't show up on the tapes. But the sound of the gun does, with all those guys running around in the dark. I think that's what happened."

  "What is what happened?"

  "I think it was an accident."

  "You think someone shot Frank, mistaking him as an intruder?"

  "I think so, yeah. Friendly fire, as they say. Why else would he get shot?"

  "What was the onboard activity last night, Norm?"

  "Oh well, you know, it was the board meeting."

  "Uh huh."

  "Very important business."

  "Uh huh."

  "Those guys would be a little uptight. You know."

  I said, "I know, yeah," but I didn't.

  "I think someone just got trigger happy. Have they arrested anyone?"

  "Nobody came forward, Norm," I told him with a cryptic smile.

  He smiled back and said, "Yeah, I getcha."

  "Guess I'd better take a look at those tapes."

  "Well, suit yourself. But they don't show nothing." He went to the stack, scooped off the top three cassettes, handed them to me.

  I said, "Thanks. Lydia went to bed, huh?"

  "I think so."

  "Anybody upstairs?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Maybe I'll go see."

  He showed me a crafty smile. "If you find some, send some down for me."

  I showed him a crafty smile in return, told him, "If you don't mind sloppy seconds."

  He laughed, and I laughed, then I took my tapes and went upstairs.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The lights were on in Schwartzman's master suite and it looked pretty much as I'd noted earlier except that the litter had been cleaned from the top of the desk and the videocassettes had been removed, all of them. The cabinet was still there, beside the bed, but it now stood empty where earlier it must have held fifty or more of the hand- labeled cassettes. Bed looked a bit rumpled, as though someone had maybe sat on it, but the linens were still clean and crisp, unused.

  A sliding mirrored door on the huge walk-in closet stood slightly open. I went in there and looked about, was impressed again by the number of suits hanging in rows like in a men's store, the shoes all in a row placed neatly beneath each suit. The image of that jarred something in the brain, made me take a closer look. Those shoes were not all the same size. Neither, I discovered a moment later, were the suits.

  Well, well.

  Wondered what it meant.

  The suits, I supposed, could mean that Schwartzman had a weight problem—kept gaining and dieting, gaining and dieting. I knew what a problem that could be for a guy of average means. But if you're a millionaire...

  That did not compute, though, because the size range was just too wide. You could not study the man's clothing and come up with a picture of him in the mind.

  The shoes did not compute either. One's foot may swell a bit wider and fatter with obesity, but I could not understand changes in shoe size from a seven to a thirteen.

  I filed all that away for later cogitation and went to the desk. It had three drawers on each side and a slim one in the middle. All were totally empty. There was not even a piece of lint in those drawers, not a pencil, not a scrap of note paper. The drawers even had that new wood smell to them.

  I was getting disturbed.

  There was no personal signature to this room. Not that it felt unoccupied, but that it had that air of occupancy you get from a hotel room. No photographs, no odds or ends of keys or coins, no individual imprint.

  The bathroom was no better. But now, this was one hell of a bathroom; don't misunderstand. Had twin, built-in vanities, two private toilets plus a bidet, giant bathtub with a Jacuzzi and a double shower, a long ell with exercise mat and massage table. But it had that same impersonal stamp to it, not because there was nothing personal there but because too much personal was there.

  Both vanities were stocked with masculine accessories, the usual stuff like shaving cream and aftershave lotion, deodorants and colognes, hairspray and toothpaste and all that stuff, even a couple of grooming kits for a mustache. But there were four different brands of shaving cream.

  three different aftershaves, maybe a dozen different deodorants and five or six colognes, four different brands of hairspray... you get the picture.

  But there was no way to draw a picture of the occupant. So was that by design or... ?

  It's no big deal, you might say—a guy with all those bucks probably doesn't do his own shopping anyway, maybe he isn't habituated to any one particular brand of aftershave, maybe he likes to smell differently every day, maybe.. .

  Sure, you can run the list of maybes, and I did, but still I was left with a feeling of discomfort. I was going for a sensing of the guy, and you can usually get that from personal effects, from surrou
ndings and decor, from the intimate items of bath and bedroom, if not anywhere else. Sometimes you can get it just from a car, from a profession, from a pattern of friends or colleagues. Most people put a stamp on who they are, and the stamp is made up of things they do or like or use or wear.

  So maybe the stamp I was looking at had been built by a multi-faceted personality, and maybe that in itself was the stamp—but that did not account for the clothes closet.

  The police mind often defeats itself by its own sensitivity. Sometimes we see patterns that exist only in our own minds, but it is our job to look for patterns because we are so often removed once or twice or thrice from the facts and events that produce or have been produced by the patterns we see—and sometimes those patterns are no more than phantom structures thrown up by the mind in a search for understanding.

  So I was wondering, as I stood there in the center of that multi-personalized bedroom, if I was seeing a real pattern or merely creating one from my need to know. Either way it was bizarre, pal—really bizarre, and I did not wish to give it much credulity at the moment, so I squelched it, thinking maybe I was reaching for straws, and turned the mind to other things.

  I sat on the bed and called my computer pal in L. A. The hour never mattered to him, he always told me—call any time—but I woke him up and he sounded a bit surly at first.

  Yes, he had the package on Schwartzman but he'd have to go downstairs to get it, so would I mind calling back at about eight o'clock, he'd just been having a terrific dream in which he was cracking the access codes to the Kremlin and he'd love to get right back to that.

  "Can you do that?" I asked him.

  "Do what?"

  "Go back and resume a dream?"

  He said, "Sure. Can't you?"

  I said, "Well, I guess I never tried it."

  "I do it all the time," he said. "Sometimes from one night to the next. It's just a matter of focus."

  I said, "Sure. So how 'bout focusing on my package for a minute, first. You don't have to get up. Just give me the gist."

  I heard the click of a cigarette lighter, knew that was what it was because this guy lives in a cloud of smoke. He coughed and said, "The gist is this. Many, many me- gabucks scattered around the world under many flags and too many corporate covers to penetrate in a casual sweep. I could do that if you wanted to give me a week. Knowing you, you can't afford it—so this is the budget tour, my friend. Panama, Nassau, Zurich, Frankfurt—and maybe that's just the tip of the iceberg—all coded accounts with only very wispy links, but take my budget gut hunch, they're all Schwartzman and they are all with no visible means of support."

  "What do you mean, no visible—?"

  "It's a laundry route, Joe."

  I said, "Okay. What's the source?"

  "Your guess is as good as mine but I think maybe

  Panama's the base."

  "Drug money," I guessed.

  "Well, there's a suggestion of arms too. The Frankfurt link. I think maybe Mideast connections but I haven't followed that."

  I said, "This is getting wild."

  "Well, you asked me for it."

  "Yeah, but—I don't give a damn about—I've got a local problem here, pal. I'm thinking saloons and whore houses and porn shops, you're giving me international empires."

  "Don't fault me, I started with your local problem. I only had what you gave me. He arrived in Brighton with a letter of credit good for two million dollars from this bank in Nassau. The rest fell out of that."

  "Well, bring it back home for me."

  "Can't do that. The man doesn't exist back home, only his influence. Doesn't have a social security account, no driver's license, no car registrations or loans or mortgages, no—"

  "Hold it," I yelled, "You're making me dizzy. You're giving me the little man who isn't there."

  "Exactly," he replied. "He's a fucking phantom, Joe. But he exists in the electronic networks. I suspect that he is not an American national."

  "What would you guess, then?"

  "I'd guess German, or maybe German by way of South or Central America. That's what I mean, though, when I say you can't afford it. It would take me a week to bust through all the protective layers. That house he built there in Brighton, for example..."

  "Yeah?"

  "Uh, yeah, the escrow shows...uh, I need to get the file."

  I said, "Forget the damned file. Just give me the facts."

  "The facts," he replied tiredly, "is that I need the file to read the facts. It's sort of squirrely. You know how these escrow things can get. Uh... he paid cash for the land and hired this outfit in Riverside to build the house... it's uh ... I can't remember the name of the builder but you should be able to get that locally and it probably isn't important except that he bought the land as Harold Schwartzman and paid the builder as Brighton Holding, Inc. But now Brighton Holding, Inc. does not appear as a California corporation so I'd have to search other states to get that. Meanwhile there is an account right now in the Brighton City Bank under Brighton Holding and there is close to a million bucks in that account. I got uh, I got electronic transfers out but none in, and those transfers are all to Frankfurt, another corporation. It seems that the Brighton account is being fed from local sources and then siphoned off to Europe. So—"

  "Where does Panama come into it?"

  "Well, that comes from the original letter of credit from Nassau. The Nassau account is electronically fed from Panama."

  I said, "Shit."

  He said, "Yeah, it's a regular spiderweb. I gotta go back to sleep, Joe, I'm getting too far from the dream. Call me back about eight o'clock."

  "Screw the dream," I told him. "I'm in a God damned nightmare here. Give me a quick profile on Schwartzman."

  "I just did," he said, and hung up.

  He just did, eh?

  I sat there on Harold Schwartzman's bed and gazed

  around Harold Schwartzman's bedroom, drew up a mental picture of his clothes closet and his bathroom—and I realized that, yeah, he just did.

  He'd gotten about as close to the guy as I had.

  Patterns?

  Sure. A spiderweb is a pattern, isn't it?

  A wardrobe of suits and shoes in eight sizes is a pattern, isn't it?

  A supermarket of colognes and sprays and lodons overflowing two vanities is a pattern, isn't it?

  I went back into the closet and yanked two suits off their hangers, smelled them, turned the coats inside out and smelled them again—picked up a shoe and smelled it too.

  Shit. None of that stuff had been worn much, if ever. The coats did not smell of sweat or cleaning fluid; the leather of the shoes had never been wrinkled, the soles never soiled or scraped.

  Then I looked at a label inside a coat. The label was from Paris. Another was from Buenos Aires. One from Rome.

  Okay. Okay.

  What was the pattern? Courier? Many identities, many personalities, many disguises?

  Was that a pattern?

  Did it fit anything in Brighton?

  It did not, no, fit anything in Brighton that I could see.

  But, hell... I hadn't seen anything yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lydia Whiteside's studio apartment was on the ground floor at the rear, near the kitchen but on the opposite side from the guard station. There was an entry there but also she had a private entrance from the outside and a small private yard/patio, and I later noted a parking pad for a car back there and a narrow drive leading to it off the main drive.

  It was an ordinary studio apartment, nothing special, all contained within one room, alcove for the bed, small sitting area divided from the kitchen by a counter with two stools, small kitchen table for two by a window, whole thing furnished in Scandinavian Modern and ultra-personal in contrast to Schwartzman's suite—looked very much lived in.

  In fact, the place was a mess.

  Dirty dishes in the sink, clothing scattered around, at least a week's collection of newspapers stacked beside an


  easy chair, stacks of magazines and catalogs and opened mail filling the kitchen counter.

  I found her in the alcove sprawled across the bed face down in a nightgown, one knee drawn up toward the chest as though she were about to crawl away.

  But she wouldn't do that, couldn't do that.

  She was cold to the touch and I could not detect a pulse. A powdery substance was spilled across the nightstand from a small plastic envelope, a little pile of pills beside an open bottle, an empty water glass—the picture was clear enough.

  I went quickly to the guard station, told the guy in there to call the paramedics. "It's Lydia," I explained. "Tell them it looks like an O.D."

  He cried, "Oh my God!" and dove for the telephone.

  I went back and checked her more closely, satisfied myself that there was nothing to be done for the woman— she was gone—found what appeared to be a suicide note in a typewriter near the bed. A Colt .45 autoloading pistol was propped alongside the typewriter. I touched none of that stuff. The note wasn't signed and it had been typed on the back of a used envelope; read like this:

  I killed Harve and Tim. No regrets. They were bastards.

  I growled out loud, "Sure you did," left everything undisturbed and returned to the guard station.

  Almost collided with the guy again; we met in the doorway. He looked a little wild in the eyes, announced in a tremulous voice, "They're on the way. Is she okay?"

  I sighed and said, "No, Norm, she'll never be okay again. When did you last see her?"

  He backed into his room and fell into the chair, raised a hand to his face, chewed a knuckle for a moment—

  collecting himself—finally replied, "I guess it was when the woman came."

  "What woman?"

  "I don't know what woman. Lydia told me she was expecting company, I should let her in when she rang."

  "What time was that?"

  "Must have been close to eleven. Because her friend was at the gate at eleven sharp, I noted it and logged it."

  "Have her on tape?"

  "Yeah, but it probably won't show much because I didn't see much myself on the monitor. She left her car down front with the headlights on high beam while she walked up to the gate and announced herself. All I saw was the glare of the lights, they faked out the camera and that's all I could see."