Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (6 page)

      
Jerk, yeah. I'd damned near got the lady killed. It was time to stop being a jerk. It was time, maybe, to start giving back.

Chapter Eight

I GUESS MORE than anything else I was fuming over the loose way I'd been playing the thing, like it was some kind of game and I was having fun with it, in spite of the deaths of three people in a matter of hours. In defense of my stupidity, though, let me point out that I'd gotten into the thing sort of edgewise. If I'd been a public cop I'd still be working on my reports. A lot had gone down in a very short time. There had not even been time enough for me to start having a good theory about the case.

      
With Juanita in the early going, I had been sort of halfway inclining toward spurned lover or fruitcake. I figured she hadn't come entirely clean with me and that the hidden facts would emerge on their own with even a shallow investigation. If she'd been stalked, raped and killed in a sex crime, that would have been a case with a familiar color.
 
To be run down by a car, though, moments after consulting a private investigator for help, suggested a totally different sort of motive for murder. Also, early on there, I could not even entirely rule out a purely accidental death. After all, the girl had not come to me asking that I save her life. A guy was bugging her—or that was the story—and she wanted him bugged-off; no big deal.

      
Before I could even begin to assimilate those ideas, I go and find her roommate murdered beyond any doubt. This could have been a sex crime, though, with no relation to the first death; all the marks were there. Even the torture angle. But a sex killer does not usually tear the scene apart in a search of the premises. Looking at the whole picture there, it would seem that the murder was almost incidental to something else. The torture and the frantic search of the premises pointed to that "something else." But that was all I really had, at this point.

      
Then I have my little run-in with Tanner and Jones; they both seem more interested in what I know about Juanita than in what happened to Juanita. During the two hours I have been away someone has ransacked my office in a way strongly similar to the scene at Juanita's apartment. Is it coincidence that I find Tanner and Jones waiting for me there? Is it also coincidence that Tanner logged himself onto the case before he was even officially on duty? And wasn't it just a bit too sloppy, even for Tanner, to let the traffic detail conduct the only official investigation at the scene? Sure it was; but again and still, all I had were deep rumbles and a what-the-hell.

      
So I go to talk to George the bartender for a bit of insight. He gives me a "could-be" ID of Juanita's pest as a reserve cop but the situation is a bit too tense at this point to question George in fine detail. He has given me further reason to wonder about Ed Jones, though, and while I am off trying to learn more about Jones I learn also that Jones' partner and mentor apparently has some private police arrangement with the management at the New Frontier, which joint appears to be at the eye of this storm. Tanner and Jones have apparently responded privately to a trouble call brought on by my visit to that establishment; while there, then, George the bartender becomes the third fatality in this rapidly developing case—I'm still cop enough to fall into such bullshit jargon—which began so innocuously several hours earlier. Then a girl who I'd seen earlier as the bewitching and bare- ass Belinda on the stage at New Frontier enters my vehicle—cops have "vehicles," never "cars"—and urgently requests that I get her the hell out and gone from there. Ed Jones has apparently "found" in her car the gun that killed George the bartender.

      
Now I am already in violation of my license. I have failed to report a capital crime; I have withheld information concerning another one; I have destroyed private property and improperly intimidated citizens during the course of an investigation.

      
So I figure what the hell and take it a step farther; I directly interfere with a murder investigation by spiriting away the prime suspect of the moment.

      
Which is about where I was at, in the spa with Linda before the gunplay began. In the case, that is where I was at. In my head, I was nowhere in the case. Linda had fingered Ed Jones as definitely the guy who had been bugging Juanita Valdez. That did not necessarily mean that Jones had anything to do with the death of Juanita, or any of the other stuff. I had no ID whatever linking Jones to the death car. But at that moment when gunfire shattered the window of my bedroom, none of that was at the surface of my mind.

      
I'd had only one thing on my mind at the time, and that was why I felt such a jerk.

      
I had damn near got the girl killed ... over my hankering for a piece of tail.

      
And, yeah, that rankled; it really burned, deep down. So I guess that feeling had a lot to do with the way I reacted to the incident.

      
Linda was still sputtering and gasping in the spa when I came back from the yard and hauled her out of there. I toweled her down and commanded her to get dressed while I did the same for myself. This time I installed the hardware in a shoulder holster; I am licensed to carry, of course, and I would have been an idiot to do otherwise, even without the license. I was finally starting to think, and the thoughts were not pleasant.

      
So we were out of there within five minutes of the attack. I wanted to drop the lady into a safe stash and then I wanted to invade this case in at least a semi-intelligent fashion.

      
I have a scanner in the car. I turned it on and punched up the local police channels just to keep an ear on my world, then told my passenger, who had uttered not a word since the shooting, "I need a live client. Tell me I'm hired."

      
She stirred beside me; muttered, "Hired for what?"

      
"Hired to keep you alive. It's a technicality.
 
Don't worry about the fee. I'll make it a dollar a day. Just tell me I'm hired."

      
She asked in a muffled voice, "Why would anyone want to kill me?"

      
"Funny, I was about to ask you the same question."

      
She shook her head. "I figured they were after you."

      
"Maybe," I said, "and maybe not. And maybe both of us. Do you own a gun?"

      
She made a face. "Absolutely not. And don't even suggest to me that I should carry one."

      
"Not suggesting that," I told her. "Just wondering how good the frame."

      
"What frame?"

      
I said, "The cop claims to have found the death weapon in your car. You claim that George was shot by someone as he walked away from your car. So—"

      
"What do you mean, I claim."

      
"Just telling it like it seems, kid. It's your word against the cop's, and that could get very sticky. Especially if the gun turns out to be directly connected to you before the fact."

      
"That's ridiculous. I have never so much as
touched
a gun in my whole life.
Hate
the damned things."

      
"Simmer down," I said. "Just trying to cover the bases here. Why were you and George sitting outside in your car?"

      
"Well, we for sure weren't necking."

      
"So why outside instead of inside?"

      
"He followed me out. I left early. You tore the place up—remember? Then those cops came, and I guess most of the customers had already decided it was not a good night to hang around. The place was nearly empty. So I left. George came out to see if I was okay. That's all."

      
"So you sat there talking about how okay you were."

      
"No, we sat there talking about Juanita and what kind of trouble she'd been in."

      
"So what kind of trouble was it?"

      
"Well, it got her killed, didn't it?"

      
"Looks that way, yeah. Got George killed too, maybe. And almost you. So what kind of trouble?"

      
"God, Joe, I don't know. I just know that George was very upset. He wanted to talk about Juanita. Wanted to talk about you and your interest in all this."

      
"So what was the verdict on all that?"

      
"I don't know what you mean! There was no verdict. We just knew that Juanita was in some sort of trouble and we'd been trying to help her, that's all. Now it was too late to help her, and we were wondering what it was all about."

      
"George was wondering that?"

      
"Yes. Me, too. George told me he'd figured it out, he thought—that she was into something heavy and the cops were watching her. He was puzzled by your interest in the thing. I told him I'd recommended you to Juanita. I hadn't known about this police angle. I just knew—or I was told by Juanita—that some creep was following her around and she didn't want to go to the police with it."

      
"So how'd you know about me?"

      
She moved to the far side of the seat. I felt her eyes on me for a long moment but I was busy driving so couldn't try to read anything there. Finally she told me, "I've started work on my doctoral thesis."

      
"That's nice," I said "Good luck with it. Hope you live to see it through."

      
She said, "Don't do that to me, Joe."

      
"Do what?"

      
"You're pulling away from me. Please don't. I'm scared to death. Please help me."

      
I said, "Tell me I'm hired."

      
"You're
hired
, damn it."

      
"And stop evading my questions. How the hell can I help blindfolded?"

      
"I wasn't evading. I was explaining. My thesis, among other things, investigates the influence of names on personality. One particularly intriguing influence has to do with the selection of careers. Is it pure coincidence that a

man with a name like Shears is a hair stylist? Or that Dr.
Yankum
is a dentist, Dr. Corona is an eye surgeon, Jack Hammer is a construction worker and Bill Drains is a plumber?"

      
"I knew a hooker once," I said, "named, for real, Harriet Ball."

      
"Great. I'll add her to my list. That's how I found you. Someone told me about this hard-boiled cop with the, to him, I guessed, highly suggestive name of Joe
Copp
. By the time I tracked you down, you were
Copp
for Hire
. There's a doubling here, too. You see,
Joe
is a strength name. Men named Joe are usually very assertive and commanding. Team that with
Copp
and I figured a good combination for Juanita's problem."

      
"You read tea leaves and cast horoscopes too?"

      
"That's easy. You're a Leo. Enough said."

      
I could not just leave it at that. "Suppose you're a Pisces. Swim both ways at once. What does Linda versus Belinda tell me?"

      
She moved back close. "Belinda is the root name. It's Germanic, not Spanish as you would think. The Spanish Linda means pretty."

      
"What does Belinda mean?"

      
"Originally, a serpent."