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

  "Yeah, but I thought it best not to hang around."

  "You know about Forta?"

  "Yes. I'm trying to run it down, Abe, so don't game me. And forget about trying to trace the call, because I'm out of here in seconds."

  He sighed and told me, "I'm not tracing it, and you're not suspected of gunning down Forta and his partner. It was the same gun used in the other shootings. But Edgar put out a pickup on you. Wants to talk to you in the worst way. Figures you know more than you've let on. Maybe are even partly responsible ... Anyway this has to be our last conversation until you've talked to Edgar."

  I said, "It's a weird case. Involves a lot of weird people. I guess you've talked to the same ones I've talked to. How does it rate on your nut-meter?"

  "Pretty high."

  "Have you spoken with a guy named Cassidy at UT?"

  "One of my officers did."

  "Give you anything?"

  "Not especially. Seems to think that Wiseman is still alive. We know better."

  I said, "Give it to me again, please. Just how positive is that identification?"

  "As good as it can get. The forensics people are dead certain, you should pardon the expression. Wiseman had been under constant medical care since an accident in Mexico a couple years ago, confined to a wheelchair ever since. His doctors handed over the full medical file, X rays and all. It's a solid make, Joe, no matter how tantalizing other possibilities might sound."

  "Then how come Edgar is still holding out for a ringer? What could he know that you don't know?"

  "Beats me. He'll have to take his case to the D.A. tomorrow, so I guess we'll know soon enough."

  "Have you heard anything about a missing fifty million dollars?"

  "No. Have you?"

  "Just a few minutes ago. It's got the ring of truth, it's the first thing I've met up with in this case that could account for all the killing. Tell me, Abe, was Wiseman counterfeiting his own movies and selling them on the black market?"

  "An interesting idea, but I have no evidence of anything like that. The underground film lab, sure, but so far nothing to tie it to Wiseman."

  "Who owns NuCal Designs?"

  "Two of the victims owned it—the business, not the building."

  "Who owns the building?"

  "An outfit back East, a bank holding-company."

  "Have you checked them out?"

  "We've made some inquiries."

  "Take a direct look at that angle, Abe. Look especially for connections between UT and that holding company. At the highest levels. There seems to be a possibility that UT was funded with mob money."

  "Okay, thanks, we'll look at that. What's this about fifty million . . . ?"

  "Somebody back East maybe thinks that Wiseman was skimming on them."

  "Where'd you get this?"

  "From Cassidy, the security honcho. He tells me he was sent out here by the UT chairman himself, fellow named Klein, to put an eye on Wiseman. Or words to that effect. Cassidy is an ex-New York cop. He's sharp and could be mean. You might want to run a make on him, too, just for the hell of it."

  "We're doing that," Johnson told me.

  "Good . . . Where's Melissa Franklin?"

  "Beats me," Abe said. "Where do you figure her in this?"

  "Don't have that yet, but I think she could be in

  some danger. She told me yesterday just before I was conked that someone wants her dead. She also told me that the man in the limousine just before it blew up was not Bernie Wiseman. And here's another. Wiseman's widow hinted at some unusual personal tie between Wiseman and the chauffeur, Albert Moore."

  "Who was once married to Melissa," Johnson picked it up. "Did she mention Moore?—Melissa, I mean, when she said Wiseman wasn't in the car."

  "Not that I recall. She acted kind of jangled, Abe, and I'm not sure that the whole thing wasn't rigged. I think I know who conked me, and it now appears Melissa knows, too, and that she was there with the guy—who knows why?—when I walked in on them."

  "Who do you think conked you?"

  "A guy named Walter Guilder, works for Cassidy ... Oh, something else, didn't think of it until a while ago, where is Wiseman's wheelchair?"

  "What d'you mean?"

  "I mean, where is it now? Was it in the wreckage of the bombed limo?"

  "I don't know, Joe. We'll check that out . . ."

  "That could be important if—"

  Abe's voice had sounded flat and sort of remote throughout our conversation. Now it leaped at me with urgency and regret. "I lied to you, Joe. Beat it quick, they've got you traced . . ."

  Well, I knew what that cost Abe. If I heard it, everyone else on the line heard it too—and it figured that there were quite a few of those.

  I'd left my car on the other side of a public lot a block away. Every police car in the area would have it on their hotlist and I knew that there would be police cars in the area right soon.

  So I went the other way, through an alley and a shopping center and into a bowling alley two blocks farther along as cops converged on that phone booth from every direction. I could hear them tearing around the neighborhood in a search, and I knew how close it had been.

  I bowled a couple of lines to wait it out inconspicuously, had a hamburger and a beer and then walked back to my car.

  It was ten o'clock. I had two hours to kill until my date with Guilder at the Hollywood Bowl, just over the hill.

  But all I could think of was Abe Johnson and the price he must have paid to help his wife's ex-husband avoid arrest.

  It took some special kind of person to lay it all out that way.

  I still couldn't put it all together yet but it was sure gnawing at me. I had a man claiming to be Albert Moore but by all appearances Bernie Wiseman, a flamboyant Hollywood figure and just possibly the most successful figure in a town where success is everything, traveling all the way out to the San Gabriel Valley in a rented limo to hire a small-time private cop for a routine nickel-and-dime job that made no sense at all on the face of it—unless he was staging his own death all along and either succeeded, or failed, spectacularly.

  I had an interlude with a smashing lady once a porno star and once married to the real Albert Moore, now frequent companion to the ersatz Moore—who in earlier days had made a killing with cheapie sexploitation pictures—not making pictures for the man but apparently content to star in his private fantasies, accompanying him on the San Gabriel trek but later denying it, claiming to be in danger herself but also denying that her lover had been killed.

  I had a nonbereaved widow who might not actually be a widow but would consider it only an inconvenience either way, who denounced one woman as a whore while hip-deep in wicked pleasures herself and accused by her husband of contracting his murder in Mexico two years earlier.

  I had a couple of security cops who didn't act the role and seemed more disturbed by missing money than by, let's see, fifteen murders—and who, in the final accounting, would be directly responsible for all the killings.

  Then there was the self-professed gay celibate screenwriter who had married a porno star but neither slept nor lived with her and . . .

  Gnawing, yes, all of it was gnawing at me and I just could not get the full handle on it. Hints of mob money and mob justice in a boardroom atmosphere, treachery and thievery and sleaze of every stripe, murder and mayhem and cop-killing, and it could be all over a couple of lousy bucks—okay, fifty million is not a couple and bucks are not of themselves lousy. But great numbers of them are usually accompanied by anger and cynicism and mindless violence.

  Enough to turn your stomach. Which was the state of my gut. Turned. Turning.

  I bowled a 210 and a 218 minutes after I probably wrecked the fine police career of my second wife's black husband. The highest two games of my life, at the lowest of its moments.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It seemed a party was in progress. The circular drive was stuffed with expensive cars and the whole place was ablaze with light
s. I didn't want to be a distraction so I kicked the door open and went in unannounced, startling the attractive maid who looked even more attractive this time. She wore a fluffy black lace outfit with too-high heels. Like those Playboy bunnies, she had to smile in her ridiculous outfit. Right now, though, I didn't have time for more than passing compassion as I told her to take off, which she did with pleasure toward the rear of the house.

  I could hear party sounds from that direction and went the other way, up the stairs and through six bedrooms, uncovered a pair of lesbian lovers so involved they didn't notice me. Nothing else up there.

  I met Justine Wiseman on the stairway as I was going back down. She was customed for an S-M film of her own—garter belt, black fishnet stockings, high-heeled kneeboots, black silver-studded leather bra with nipple cutouts, brandishing a riding crop. She swung at me with the crop. I took it on the arm and pinned her to the railing. "Try it again and I'll put that thing where it'll do you the most good." I meant every word of that.

  "What are you doing here, where's your search warrant? I'll have your job—"

  "Someone beat you to it," I told her, and went on down the stairs and toward the sounds of party.

  Justine ran along behind me, cussing and threatening me with every manner of vile punishment. She no doubt meant every word too. I shook down a couple of rooms along the way, again found nothing except a man's electric shaver in a hallway bathroom, and arrived at the gym with Justine now half-hanging on my back.

  There were a couple dozen people in there—mostly female—and all dressed for Sodom-and-Gomorrah motif. The guests were having a shriekingly good time at the expense of a stud being led about on hands and knees with a dog collar around his neck and no clothing on his body.

  I felt a little sick as I looked at that guy, partly because I recognized him, partly because it was just a scene to be made sick by. The guy was trying to mount the women but was being jerked away and "punished" at the crucial moment, much to the delight of the assembled.

  Another scenario was being acted out on top of the massage table, where two nude young women glistening with oil were snaking around each other to a disco beat while a naked stud tried to insert himself between them.

  I guess if any of the guests noticed Justine and me, we were just another part of the bizarre festivities. I did not see anyone else in there I knew or recognized until the Viking warrior lady made her entrance via the bathroom, accompanied by the maid. She made a lunge for me. I handed her Justine instead and invaded the doggy circle, intent on snaring the leash and leading that doggy away to my own idea of party—

  Something exploded against the small of my back, I found myself on my knees on the mat. Another explosion to the rib cage put me on my back. I caught a bare foot in the hand just before it would have found its way to my face.

  The Viking warrior was pretty good with her feet, good enough with everything else, I figured, to be disqualified for weaker-sex considerations, so I tossed that foot and its attachments as far as I could, and two hundred pounds, give or take, of naked Viking took a header into the squealing crowd.

  She bounced right back, though, began circling me like a Sumo wrestler. I thought, who needed this, but I was stuck with it, and suddenly Viking and Copp were the star act. I set her down one more time with a simple one-two to the chin, down onto her iron ass, where she stayed in dulled surprise. I guess it surprised the guests, too, because it became very quiet as realization dawned that the party was over.

  I turned back to the doggy but he was gone. I looked for him throughout the house and grounds and all the cars, twice, but he was definitely gone.

  Which was very disappointing to me.

  Because that doggy, I was pretty sure, was the chauffeur, Albert Moore.

  It just didn't figure that he would show himself at a party only days after supposedly being blown to bits by a car-bomb.

  Justine stonewalled it, of course, insisting that I'd not seen what I knew I had seen. The guy on the leash was definitely the same one who had stepped into my office wearing a chauffeur's uniform, the same one who had taken my delivery of exposed film at the corner of Melrose and La Brea—the same whose supposed remains had been found and forensically identified as those of Albert Moore.

  There had been a wild exodus from that San Marino mansion following my little bout with the Viking, even a couple of fender-crunchers in the excitement, the sort of panic often displayed at the scene of a police raid. It figured that many of the guests led double-lives and had too much to lose by public disclosure of their presence at a sex party with perverse overtones—I understate, of course. My first impression had been accurate: only two men had been present, and both had been acting out group fantasies of male degradation. Both also had disappeared while I was diverted by the attack of the warrior woman.

  I stood outside and jotted down license tags during that panicky exodus, then went back inside to confront Justine again. She was appropriately furious with me, alternately cussing and crying, but the Viking was strangely subdued. She had put on a terry-cloth robe and was sitting on the massage table glumly watching me as I tried to settle Justine down. I kept her in the corner of an eye, though. My back still hurt from her attack and it pained to take a deep breath.

  Justine finally flounced into her bedroom and locked the door. Okay, I figured I wasn't going to get anything more there anyway, but the VW came back to life as I was leaving.

  "You could be an interesting man," she told me in, I swear, seductive tones.

  I said smartly, "Thanks, so could you."

  "No, I'm serious."

  "More interesting than the two you had in here a while ago?"

  "I didn't notice them."

  Sure she didn't.

  "You noticed me, why not them? Looked to me like the other girls were having a great time with them."

  She made a face. "You get past that after a while, doesn't turn me on anymore."

  I said, "Does Albert come often?"

  She said, "Albert who?"

  "Albert Doggy."

  "Oh," she said, "that's not an Albert, that's an Algernon."

  "What's an Algernon?"

  "An Algernon," she explained to her stupid pupil, "is just the opposite of a Beowulf."

  "And what," I asked, playing the game, "is a Beowulf?"

  "You are a Beowulf. Will you teach me to box?"

  "Not tonight, Josephine. Unless you'd like to teach me about Albert."

  "Algernon."

  "Okay, that'll do for starters—" But she had dropped the robe, clearly looking for another go-round.

  She crouched and pivoted on her left foot, came whirling out of the crouch with a high kick toward the head. I sidestepped it, considered and discarded the notion of a more physical defense, and got the hell out of there before I became another damned doggy in the window.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Hollywood Bowl is nestled into the hills off Cahuenga Boulevard. Before they built the freeways, Cahuenga was the major route through the Hollywood hills and into the San Fernando Valley, following a natural canyon just west of Griffith Park. You can take Cahuenga all the way to Studio City, where it becomes Ventura Boulevard, the old Highway 101 and still the main street for many of the valley communities such as Sherman Oaks, Encino, Tarzana and Woodland Hills.

  Most of the through traffic these days is along the freeway routes. Cahuenga at midnight can be virtually deserted, especially in the Bowl area when nothing is happening at the amphitheatre. Nothing was happening that night. It's a parklike setting with lots of grass and picnic tables. For summer concerts many people like to come early with a picnic basket and make an evening of it. But it was very quiet around there when I rolled in for my midnight rendezvous with Guilder and, one hoped, Melissa Franklin. There's a parking lot below the Bowl in the picnic and snack bar area—now deserted and not too well lit in the vapory mists of the night. I had figured it to be that way when I set up the meet, and I had come in along t
he back side via Cahuenga from Universal City, assuming that my car was still hot and hoping to avoid contact with the law-enforcement community.

  I was ten minutes early, the way I like it for this sort of thing. I put the Cad at the top of the lot, where the mists were heaviest, nose-out and free to travel with minimum restriction, then got into my gun harness and found comfort in the darkness about fifty feet away.

  Had the whole place to myself for fifteen minutes. Nothing moved or showed until midnight plus five, when a police car cruised through the turnaround and went on back without stopping. Ten minutes later I was wondering if I'd come for nothing. The evening chill was settling into me and I was thinking about taking off when the Jaguar pulled in down below. It stopped just inside and sat there for a few moments, then pulled on around in a jerky, hesitant manner and stopped again on the far side.

  I went to the Cad and flashed the headlights, had to do it twice before the Jaguar started moving and headed toward me. I retreated again and did not expose myself until I could see the whites of the lady's eyes. Fifteen people were dead and I had no desire to join the tally. Where was Guilder?

  She pulled in beside the Cad, alone in the car and clearly nervous. I came down and rapped on the passenger side. Melissa unlocked the door and I slid in

  beside her, door open and one foot outside, as before. Even scared she was delicious-looking.

  "Keep your hands on the wheel," I told her. "I'm going to pat you down."

  "You're going to what?"

  But I was already doing it. She was wearing a suede jacket with jeans and T-shirt, nowhere much to conceal a weapon but I'd have been a fool to take chances. As I poked around under her and beneath the seat we said nothing and she was just sitting there woodenly. Pretty much the same as before when we sat together in her car.

  "Okay, where's Guilder?"

  Those large eyes didn't blink. "Where is he supposed to be?"

  "I thought he'd want to come along and play cop like he did last time."

  She looked away. "Sorry, he panicked."