Copp In Deep, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (3 page)

Chapter Four

I here was
no search warrant that I could find | and nothing appeared out of place in the apartment. The credentials found on the body identified the dead man as Walter
Mathison
and if the address on the driver's license was current he lived in Burbank and he was 38 years old. So,
dammit
, that probably meant a widow and kids left behind and it all seemed too damned pointless at the moment.

I heard sounds of voices in the hall as I was examining the scene, stepped out quickly because I knew what it was—two big guns had been fired in that building and it is not the sort of thing that goes unnoticed in the middle of the night. A man and a woman were standing in front of the next apartment, both dressed for the bedroom and talking excitedly until they saw me. Then both clammed up real quick and were giving me the scared look, so I yelled down, "Did you hear it?"

The man nervously yelled back, "Sounded like a gun, didn't it."

I said, "There were some kids on the street just outside when I came up,
dorking
around. Probably them. Fireworks or something."

"Sounded like an M-80," the guy agreed.

"I'll call the police just to be sure," I volunteered.

The woman smiled at me and went back into her apartment. The guy waved and hurried back to his. He encountered another couple in an open doorway along the way and paused to reassure them.

Didn't do much for me, though.

Nor for the Israeli Kid.

She was white and
trembly
and fighting tears when I went back inside. "He was waiting here to kill me," she declared in a shaky voice.

"Why would he want to do that?" I asked her.

"I do not know why. But it is obvious, is it not?"

"Doesn't sound like the FBI way," I told her, "but these days we never know, so . . ."

Look, I was scared as hell, make no mistake. Even if the guy had gone renegade and had been playing some personal game of his own, not a fed alive would buy into a self-defense plea unless there was overwhelming evidence to support it. I had no evidence at all, of anything. And yeah, I was plenty scared. And maybe the kid was right, he'd come there to kill her. If so, were there others just like him? Tom Chase apparently thought so. So where the hell did that leave anything? What kind of crazy weave was I caught in?

Maybe Tom himself was kinky, this kid was kinky, and they'd been caught playing footsies with "Nicky"

and the KGB. So maybe I'd been sucked in to interfere in a legitimate federal investigation and I'd just killed one of the investigators. Apparently I had even been turned to LAPD, maybe they'd known all along about the plan to heist the consulate, maybe they'd been watching me even before . . .

See, that's where my head was at and that is where my guts were at. Not exactly panic but cold clawing fear, to be sure. I have a clean record, understand, and I have friends in the police establishments of this area— even know a couple of feds on friendly terms—but there has been a cloud over my head all the time I've been a cop, followed me from job to job and even into the private sector, and the cloud says that Joe
Copp
is trouble looking for a place to happen. Don't know how I ever got such a rep because that really is not me. What I am really is a pussy cat and always a soft touch for a sob story—well, to a point—and I never believed that a policeman's job should be fully defined in any book. If you're a cop,
dammit
, then you're a cop all the time, in every circumstance, with every person. The cop is there to make a society work. Society is made up of people. A cop is part of that people, like white blood cells in a living body, and a good cop always responds appropriately to any attack upon that body. So sometimes there is no time to sit down with a textbook to find a proper response. You just have to do it—quickly, decisively, always with the best intentions, and with a little heart sometimes.

That's the way I cop.

Sometimes it gets me in trouble.

But I had never been in trouble like this before. And yeah, I was really scared.

      
On top of everything else, it seems that I had taken on the care and feeding of a homeless waif, one evicted by practical necessity and totally vulnerable to whatever may be coming down the pike toward her. She had no family in this country that she knew of, no friends whom she could trust under the circumstances, and she was scared out of her skull. So we rounded up some of her things and tossed them into a small bag and I took her the hell out of there with me. I knew a place near the high desert where one could hibernate for a while in comfort and safety; what the hell, I couldn't just walk away and leave the kid with a stiff on her hands.

I stopped along the way and called a homicide cop I know at LAPD, reported the shooting. Told him I'd done it, told him who the guy was, and as much of the circumstances as I felt ready to divulge. Of course he immediately wanted me to come in and make a full statement and I immediately told him to go to hell. "Just put it in the record that I called it in," I requested. "I'm not coming in until I get the thing unraveled."

I hung up while he was still trying to argue me in; for all I knew, someone had been expecting me to call and was already tracing it. In these days of computerized switching, a trace can be fearfully swift if you are already set up to run it. And, see, I was already totally paranoid.

I made another stop, at an all-night supermarket in the East Valley for vital groceries, then took my charge straight from there to the hideout. Place belongs to a friend who now lives in Mexico, it's away up in the boo-
nies
in San Bernardino County about 75 minutes from the L.A. Civic Center, and I've had a key for a long time. Good spot for fishing and philosophizing, sits on the bank of a little mountain stream that runs strong and steady during the snow and melt, reduces to a step- across trickle during the summer but is always pretty and even fishable at trickle state.

It was nearing onto four o'clock when we got up there, and my frightened nymphet had calmed enough to fall asleep on my shoulder. She'd been curled up there for at least twenty minutes and awoke with a disoriented start when I killed the engine. Guess it isn't proper to refer to her as a "nymphet" although she sure looked like one, especially sleeping. See, I'm six-three and weighed two-sixty last time I looked. I'm just a bit on the down side of forty, too, and though I make this "kid" at twenty-eight at a minimum, considering her history, she has the slender undeveloped look of an undersized teenager—and the face doesn't help you that much, either, because it looks an old-soul fourteen. You know what I mean—that sweet-sober look of super intelligence that some kids have and never lose no matter how old they get. This one looked very frail and vulnerable on top of it, but I was to discover the illusion of that before the night was over.

The place is built sort of like a ski chalet, you know, all woodsy and
fireplacey
, very snug and comfortable but not a hell of a lot of room. Two rooms, in fact, one up and one down—and the one "up" is merely an open loft that sleeps ten communally, twenty if the mood is right and the inhibitions are down. I guess that loft has seen a few twenty-
somes
in its time but never with me. I'd been invited to a few of those group-gropes but guess my inhibitions were never that far down. Come to think of it, maybe I am more the old-fashioned kind of guy. Not shy—not when it's one on one, guy and gal, right time and place—no, I'm not shy but I am a bit choosey.

I would not have chosen the nymphet.

Not that she wasn't appealing as hell and all that, she was just not the kind to usually get my juices stirring and I wasn't even thinking along those lines when I took her there. I mean, this was community service on my part . . . period.

She loved the place.

I carried the groceries in and built a fire while she wandered around and explored the facilities. The "down" room was an all-in-one living room, dining room, kitchen, game alcove, bar—all of it dominated by a massive fireplace that covered an entire outside wall. Had the usual couches and chairs, tables and all the gracious trimmings, big furry rug across the hearth. The kitchen was modern and well-equipped with all the amenities, so was the bathroom, so was all of it. This

was designed as a party pad, see. The "game alcove" featured a Jacuzzi and sauna, had a compact fold-down ping-pong table for when you weren't spa-
ing
, a shelf loaded with board games and other quiet diversions.

No television.

My friend hated television. The opiate of the masses, she called it, paraphrasing Karl Marx. My friend loved to party, but now she was doing it all in Mexico and this place was mine any time I needed it.

So now I needed it and I figured we might as well get comfortable.

I put on coffee for me, hot water for tea for the nymphet, and she went delightedly to the shower. The fire was leaping and crackling, warming the chill night air and lighting the room with a rosy glow when she came out of there.

She came out stark naked, I swear.

And I immediately had to revise my assessment of her womanly charms. Funny, isn't it, how clothing can so confuse the eye. What looked frail and girlish in skirt and blouse had bloomed out entirely womanly in the naked truth, perfectly proportioned and downright voluptuous with perfectly sculpted breasts and softly flowing lines in total harmony all the way.

She walked past me as though I were not there and went to the kitchen to make her tea, brought it back to the hearth and knelt there on one knee to gaze into the flames while she sipped the tea—turned once to give me a sweet smile as though saying "thanks"—and I was damn near thunderstruck through all of it, I mean this

was a rare vision of absolute beauty—you know, the dance of flames in the fireplace, that glowing skin reflecting the firelight—that pose, damn, that pose, like something you would see on display at the
Louvre
as a masterwork, and it just simply wiped me out.

Presently I got up and poured my coffee, took it with me to the bathroom, sipped it as I shaved and showered and wondered.

Wondered, yeah.

It came as a surprise to realize that I wasn't scared anymore, I was breathing all the way without pain or stricture, and the raw scratches along the whole length of my body were not smarting under the soapy scrub- down.

She was still there beside the fire just as I had left her when I came out, the same way she'd come out. She looked at me with a smile, that same sweet "thank you" smile, and spoke her first words in the naked truth. "Does your body hurt?"

"Not anymore," I told her. "How 'bout yours?"

I guess she'd refilled her teacup. I could see the steam rising from it as she delicately sipped the brew. "I will massage it if you would like."

"Sounds nice," I said, and went to both knees at the other side of the fireplace.

"When I was a little girl . . ."

"Yeah?"

"I would awaken sometimes in the night, frightened. My father would come into my bedroom and lie down beside me. He would touch me lovingly and rub my tummy until I was no longer frightened."

"Sounds like dangerous stuff to me," I told her.

"Yes, and so my mother felt. It is why she divorced my father. But I have missed my father ever since."

"Especially when you wake up frightened."

"Yes. And there is no one to rub my tummy."

She set the teacup down and stretched out on her back in front of the fire, that beautiful head touching my knees, looking up at me with those Siamese eyes. They had gone sort of smoky, mysterious, inviting.

"I'm not your father, kid," I warned her.

"Believe me you are not," she warned me back.