Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (2 page)

I MIGHT AS well tell you right up front. I'm a hardcase, and everyone I've ever dealt with knows it. Not that I mean to be that way. I'd a lot rather coast in the slow lane. Take life as it finds me, you know. I must have a ten-foot stack of travel magazines in my living room. Buy them compulsively. Never read them. Just buy them. And there they sit. But it seems like I never do. Every street has two sides, you know. I'm always on the hard side, and it seems like I'm always moving along it.

      
Don't get the wrong slant here. Not looking for sympathy. Don't deserve any. Just want you to know who I am. I'm Joe
Copp
, a cop for hire. I have always been a cop for hire, all my adult life, and I'm closer to forty than I like to think about. Started in San Jose eighteen years ago. Graduated to San Francisco three years later, lasted five years with that force, went on to City of L.A. for another five and finished off at L.A. County. I've done it all. Traffic, patrol, vice,
narc
, robbery, homicide—even took SWAT training at L.A.

      
I never really "moved" voluntarily. But always for the same reason. I have a habit of becoming unpopular. Finally decided to go into business for myself. But I'm still unpopular. Respected, I think—or I like to think—but nobody really likes me. That's okay. I don't give a shit if they like me or not. Respect is enough.

      
I changed wives, too, every time I changed jobs. Same reason. I'm a hardcase. Or so they all think. Actually, if they only knew, I'm a pussycat. Sucker for a sob story. The problem, you see, is that I look like a hardcase. Not my fault. I was born looking like this. Don't know how to look any other way, not even when I'm feeling kindly and gentle. Guess I don't speak softly, either, but I really do try sometimes. Last wife told me I'm great in bed, every woman's savage dream, she said, but how much time could we spend there. Well ... I could have spent a lot more time there than she did, so I don't know about that savage-dream stuff. As for bringing flowers and remembering anniversaries ... who the hell has time for that on the hard side of the street? Sometimes I don't remember my own name.

      
Okay. So maybe they're all right. I'm a cowboy, a hardcase. Can't turn it off and tuck it away until the next watch. Can't turn it off for the department politicians, either, or for the media people or police critics and sob- sisters. And I guess I never really strained my eyes to read a guy his rights after a hard collar. So I'm the kind of cop that's always in trouble. That's okay, too, because while I'm being so candid here I might as well tell you—I'm more comfortable on the hard side of the street, so I guess that's why I always seem to be over there.

      
I say all this up front so you maybe will understand how I am feeling when the traffic boys come to check out this hit and run. These are traffic boys. They should be guarding school-crossings. From the looks of one of them, he should still be using a school-crossing. They are very soberly fussing with steel tapes and measuring distances, going through their routine like a classroom drill. They've roped off the area and covered my ex-client with a yellow tarp. I know the routine. They are really killing time and trying to look busy doing it, waiting for a detective to show up, waiting for the coroner's office—securing the scene until someone with some authority arrives to take over the investigation.

      
So I don't tell them a damned thing. Except I heard the screech, saw the victim flying, saw a car taking off at high speed. They are not asking the right questions, anyway.

My office is in a small business complex. I share the area with a hairdresser, a cosmetics shop, a real estate office, a dentist and a chiropractor. It's all ground level. Each business is accessed directly from the outside. The parking lot and driveways take up more ground than the building does. There's a self-service gas station on the corner, right next door, and a 7-Eleven store behind it. You can gain access to our lot from both the gas station and the 7-Eleven.

      
Way I reconstructed the hit, the guy was idling in the little access lane from the 7-Eleven, just waiting for my girl to show. He had to be on full alert and ready to jump the moment she emerged from my office. There are no sidewalks. You step out of the building directly onto the parking lot. He would not have had a shot at her if she'd been parked right up front. So he had her car spotted and knew that she'd have to walk across to the next parking aisle. He was alert. He was ready. He nailed her. And he must have accelerated from a standing start to something like fifty mph in about five seconds. Which means a high-performance engine. I was guessing a
TransAm
from the flash glimpse I'd had of it.

      
The traffic boys did not ask for my reconstruction. They did ask if I could identify the victim, which I could not since she had not given her name, but they did not ask if I knew anything about her or why she had been at that particular spot at the crucial moment. I volunteered nothing. Which is not against the law. I did do a sneaky thing, though. The victim's purse had gone flying with the body, spilling its contents over a trail about thirty feet long. I spotted a key ring peeking out from beneath a car parked near my office door. I gave it a gentle nudge with my foot while the traffic boys were comparing their sketches, then kicked it into a flower bed.

      
The detective never showed. The coroner's man did and almost immediately released the body for transport to the morgue. The traffic boys scooped up the purse and its scattered contents—all that was obvious—then took down their ropes and went away.

      
I couldn't believe it.

      
I mean, that was an outrageously sloppy operation.

      
So I did their job. I canvassed the complex for eyewitnesses and I asked questions. I found a woman who'd been waiting to see the chiropractor at the time of the incident. She eye-balled the car as "very powerful and shiny black with some kind of design along the side." A guy in the real estate office gave about the same eyeball but a bit more specific about that "design." He said the car had "flames" painted on the hood and side. An Oriental lady who manages the 7-Eleven told me that the car had been "parked" in the access lane for about five minutes. She said the driver was a man wearing dark sunglasses.

      
Then I went back to that flower bed and picked up the key ring. It had four keys on it, two of which carried a Ford logo. Six Fords were parked out there. I scored on the fourth try, an old Thunderbird; found the registration and other ID in the glove box. Her name was Juanita Valdez. She would have turned twenty in a week, and she had lived about five minutes away from where I stood.

      
I jotted down the address and returned the registration to its neat little repository, then locked the car and went to my own.

      
Apparently she'd lived very modestly, as most kids her age are required to unless they have help from affluent parents. The car was old and the apartment building was older. It was not a security building, sat right on the street in a low-rent area, had no off-street parking for the tenants.

      
I had a creepy feeling as I cruised past the entrance but I didn't know if that was caused by the building or by a glimpse I had of a dark car rounding the corner at the next intersection. I opted for the latter and got down there as quickly as I could in four o'clock traffic. Saw nothing there to induce quivers so went on around the block and found a parking place, went into Juanita's building. Main entrance was not even locked, though it was equipped for it. I tried the keys just for the hell of it and, yeah, one of them fit.

      
It was a three-story walkup. The number I was looking for was at the top, rear. This door was locked and I had the key—but, damn, I also had a return of that creepy feeling as I let myself inside.

      
Good enough reason for that.

      
The place was a wreck. Furniture turned upside down, cushions slashed, litter everywhere. I waded through that to the kitchen for more of the same, then into a small bedroom for even worse.

      
But the real booby prize was waiting for me in the bathroom.

      
She was probably roughly the same age as Juanita, almost as pretty, just as dead.

      
She wore open-crotch pantyhose and nothing else. She'd been hogtied, gagged, worked over and strangled with a G-string, probably her own.

      
And I wondered what the hell I'd stumbled into here, on the hard side.

Chapter Three

IN MY BUSINESS, you either develop a neutral stomach or it retires you early. Mine went neutral a long time ago and it had worked on nothing since breakfast, so I was hungry as hell when I headed back to the office. I'd spent most of an hour going through the mess in that demolished apartment; found and pocketed a few small interesting items but left everything else exactly as I'd encountered it and quietly got away from there.

      
But I was hungry. May sound callous, considering the moment, but a neutral stomach does not recognize such moments and mine was clamoring for me to send something down. Anything. I have no gourmet tastes. I stand six-three, as I said, and weigh two-sixty but I do not eat ritually or fancily. I just send something down when the belly demands. I also do not have much body fat. The frame is big and the bones are heavy. I try to do an hour a day on the track to stay in tune and maybe that much a week with my judo master to keep the black belt and the humility intact. Humility, yeah. My master is seventy-five and weighs about a hundred pounds. I have yet to beat his ass, or even to come close.

      
Anyway, the stomach was yelling at me so I pulled into a coffee shop two blocks from the office and had a quick dinner. I didn't get back 'til about six. Two detectives were waiting for me in an official car parked right beside my door. I knew one of them. Too well.

      
L.A. County provides police services on a contract basis to some of the smaller municipalities, like mine, that cluster about the big city. Police jurisdictions can be a nightmare in this area, with so many towns and cities jostling one another in crazy-quilt patterns and with no clear demarcation between them. I mean, you can drive along one avenue for five minutes and pass through wedges of half a dozen different municipalities. So things could be a lot worse than they are if each of those towns insisted on maintaining their own police departments. My city council did it the smart way. Turned it all over to the sheriff and let him juggle payrolls and health plans and pension plans and political infighting. We pay an annual fee for the service.

      
By and large, the service is good. But like all big government departments, "by and large" covers a lot of not so good.

      
Gil Tanner was not so good. Sloppy soft, beer belly, a guy who'd long ago lost pride in his profession and in himself; liar, cheat, manipulator, sleazebag. All in all not a character to inspire confidence in the law. Scared hell out of me, in fact, any time I thought about a jerk like this walking around with a badge and a gun.

      
So that was who was waiting for me. Along with a younger version probably already well along that same road; mean-looking little prick, the kind who'd drag a collar into an alley and beat the shit out of him with a baton just for kicks.

      
Don't tell me it's pure accident that cops like these gravitate to beats like this one. Somebody up there knows what they are and does not want ever to have to look on them. Why the hell can't these departments police themselves instead of just shoveling the shit aside until something shockingly rotten makes them look?

      
Which was what was running in my mind when I spotted those two. But it started off amiably enough. Tanner opened his door and swiveled about with his feet on the pavement as I walked up.

      
He said, "Joe, you old
shitbag
, long time no see. How's it going with private enterprise?"

      
I lit a cigarette before I met his gaze and replied to that. "I don't know where it's going," I told him. "Sure as hell isn't coming my way. You assigned to the hit-and-run?"

      
He balled his fist and made what was intended as a humorous honking noise into it; a raspberry with gesture. "Belongs with the fucking traffic detail. Run our asses up and down this pike all day long on this asshole stuff." He jerked a thumb. "Meet my partner, Ed Jones. Just came over from the reserves. I'm breaking him in."

      
I waved to the little prick and he waved back without much enthusiasm.

      
I said to Tanner, "Must be special material if they gave him to you." That has a double meaning, you know. Probably was not lost on Tanner. He's a sleaze, sure, but a smart one. I was sure, too, that he'd already filled Jones in on the kind of horse's ass I am because the guy had not yet learned to be as two-faced as Tanner; he'd been giving me a solemn inspection the whole time, probably wondering how many raps of the baton it would take to send me to my knees. I was looking straight at the kid as I added, "Looks to me like a guy who'll have no trouble at all soaking up every rotten trick in your sleazy bag."

      
Tanner decided to take that as a compliment. For the moment, anyway. He laughed nastily and told me, "Well, we make '
em
or break '
em
around here. But you know all about that, don't you, ex-Sergeant
Copp
." He put heavy stress on that ex, as though I would not get his meaning without it.

      
I said quietly, "Yeah, it's a great force, Tanner. What can I do for it this evening?"

      
"What was your business with the Valdez girl?"

      
"That her name?"

      
"Cut the shit. Tell me about
er
."

      
I showed him both palms as I replied, "You have her name. That's more than I had. I eyeballed it, yeah, or part of it. Heard the tires screeching—not braking, accelerating— heard the hit. Looked out the window in time to see her fly by. Black sedan. Gave the report to your traffic boys."

      
"You called it in, too."

      
"Sure. Wouldn't you? The kid was lying there all broken and bleeding. No ... that's an unfair question, isn't it. Maybe you wouldn't. How'd you work the call, Tanner? Write up your report from the traffic investigation?"

      
I must have been right on target. He moved too quick to cover it. "You know we can't work them all at once, and I haven't filed my report yet. You reading this as a deliberate hit?"

      
"You want to quote an ex-sergeant?"

      
"Maybe."

      
I sucked on my cigarette, dropped it, stepped on it. "It sounded that way, yeah."

      
Jones had stepped out of the vehicle and come around to join the parley. He said to me, "We'll bust your ass quicker than you can cover it if you play games with us,
Copp
. This old-soldier bullshit doesn't buy you a thing."

      
I looked from him to Tanner, and I guess that "hideous smile" I've heard others talk about joined me in the look. It sent Tanner leaning away from me; he spoke from the deep interior of the car. "Shut up, Ed," he growled; to me: "He's frisky, Joe—forget it."

      
I said to the frisky recruit, "Little unusual to come straight from reserve to detective squad, isn't it?"

      
But the prick suddenly was not looking directly at me. Probably thought I was addressing his partner, and was content with the thought. Tanner answered for him, anyway. "You know how it goes, Joe. Feast to famine. Right now it's famine. So Ed got lucky. He's doing good, really good."

      
I said, "With that mouth, he'd better do better than that."

      
It became a laugher.

      
We stood and jawed for a few minutes. Never again returned to the investigation. As soon as it was graceful to withdraw, they did.

      
But you can see, can't you, why I did not volunteer any information to those guys. I mean, there's a limit to how far you want to go with guys like those. I actually had never meant to conceal anything from the official investigation. Why would I want to do that? It just worked out that way because of the circumstances.

      
I'm sure I would have gone straight downtown and laid the whole thing on the appropriate desk before the night was over. Nobody would have faulted me if I'd done that. We're talking about a few hours here.

      
I could have been downtown by eight o'clock easy.

      
Would have been there, too.

      
But I walked into my office and found
deja
vu.

Some son of a bitch—or some sons of bitches— had gone in there and torn the whole place apart, emptied all my files onto the floor, turned out every drawer, slashed all my beautiful leather-upholstered furniture—I mean pure leather, the real stuff—even bashed into the hollow core of the door to the washroom.

      
They say I have a truly hideous smile when I am upset.

      
I must have been smiling like Long John Silver himself when I went out of there and set sail for the New Frontier.