Copp In Shock, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (8 page)

      
Our dinner arrived. I thanked the bartender with a friendly pat on the shoulder and he made a quick retreat.

      
It was a stand-up dinner. The steak was great and reminded me how little I had eaten over the past several days. We finished the meal in silence, probably both of us lost in our own introspections. Nice thing about being in the company of a guy like this one, there was no need to pad the mind with small talk.

We passed on the dessert and were working on the bill when Eddie, the bartender, returned with an air of excitement and with a proud declaration: "I just thought of something, Chief. Mr.
Copp
told me to let him know if I remembered anything else."

I asked, "What have you got, Eddie?"

He was beaming when he reported, "Somebody came in this afternoon not long after Mr. Sanford left. I thought you'd want to know."

The Chief was sounding a bit impatient as he said, "Let's have it, Eddie."

"It was Mrs. Sanford. She came looking for her husband. I think I told her I hadn't seen him. I mean, you know, it was a delicate situation."

I replied, "You're saying that she came into The Chart House after the shooting at the police department?"

He said, "Yes, sir, that's what I'm saying. Several customers came in after Douglas was shot and they were talking about it. That's why I'm sure of the timing."

So maybe this was putting a new slant on the story.

Why had Janice Sanford come all the way back into town looking for her husband shortly after the Chief and I had left her, when supposedly she was preparing for her flight to Los Angeles? Was it because she knew that her husband was meeting his lover at such a time? Could that have been too much for this woman to swallow, with her daughter lying dead in the county morgue?

Had she never intended to meet the Chief at the airport?—or had she been delayed by more pressing matters? Could Janice Sanford have been capable of murder?

      
Of course; any women could be driven to murder by a cruelly insensitive husband. Every cop knew that because every cop had seen this particular form of brutalization many times.

Evidently she had known precisely where to come looking for her husband. Had she found him? Is there a limit to what a woman could put up with, even a woman like Janice Sanford?

Did either of us actually know for sure that she had left for Los Angeles as her message to the Chief indicated—or had she still been in the Mammoth area when Cindy Morgan was killed?

I had to keep reminding myself that the
Sanfords
were my in-laws, and also that they were virtual strangers to me. There could be many surprising revelations about those two before this case was finished.

I had to be on the alert for anything that might come my way. The way things had been developing, there were nothing but bombshells ahead.

CHAPTER TWELVE

arthur Douglas had
a small bachelor apartment in Old Mammoth, site of the original village. Miners once panned for gold nearby. The U.S. Forest Service had been instrumental in developing Mammoth as a summer resort area during the 1920s, hoping to attract more visitors to the region. In later years the commercial development of "white gold" attracted thousands to the winter ski slopes.

We did not have a formal search warrant in hand, but Chief Terry figured we had the next best thing. A judge had okayed the entry of the officer's home and promised that the paperwork would follow.

But someone had beaten us to it.

The place had been trashed. Whatever had been the object of the search, it had been a furious one. Everything had been pulled from all the kitchen cabinets, the refrigerator had been emptied, all the contents—even milk and ice cream—had been dumped onto the floor, and a small dining table had been upended. A VCR had been overturned, racks of videotapes systematically inspected, tapes pulled from their cases and discarded in a pile. Couch cushions had been slashed.

They had not spared the bedroom either. The mattresses had been pulled off the bed and slashed, the contents of dresser drawers scattered about. Clothing had been pulled from the closet and ransacked.

These people had done a total demolition job. They had methodically gone through the apartment with a fine-toothed comb. It was not for fun and games. They obviously had been searching for something small enough to have been concealed within a milk carton or videotape case. The two who invaded Martha's condo earlier had been total gentlemen compared to the ones who did this.

The Chief said, "Bastards!"

I replied, "Evidently they knew what they were looking for."

The Chief gingerly knelt alongside the mess from the refrigerator and poked at the debris. He retrieved a small, broken, electric clock that had been torn from the wall above the kitchen stove. "Take a look at this."

The clock had stopped at 3:17.

I said, "Our friends were busy before they invaded the hospital. Any doubt that it wasn't the same two guys?"

"No, I guess not. I've never seen anyone work a place this thoroughly. What the hell could they have been looking for?"

I replied, "Maybe the same thing Sanford was looking for at Martha's apartment."

The Chief said, "That's possible. I can't believe that these are unrelated events."

I told him, "You are buying into a very sticky wicket here, pal. If we go with that thesis, then all of these problems—including the death of Martha—are linked. Are you ready to go for that?"

"Hell, I guess we're already there. It is all linked."

I said, "Then Martha was linked. I was linked. Everyone who has been affected by Martha's death is linked. Is that too stiff for you?"

"Not for me, no. It just seems to be the only thing that makes sense."

"Sooner or later we have to come to the obvious implications of all this. This stuff has organized crime written all over it. You've hinted at that yourself, Chief."

"Don't give me credit for an original idea. If there had been any illusions about that earlier, our 'Gunfight at the O.K. Corral' certainly locked it in. They were 'mob' okay." The Chief looked at his watch and said, "Speaking of which, I should have had a line on those guys by now."

I said, "We're not going to find anything worthwhile here." I picked up the remains of a picture frame from the living room carpet. It had suffered the same treatment that everything else in this apartment had been subjected to. The glass frame was in pieces and even the photograph itself had been torn. It was a picture of two men and two women, all wearing bathing suits, inscribed "Lazy days at Lake Tahoe." The photo had been taken at a marina with a power cruiser in the immediate foreground showing Martha and Cindy Morgan in a smiling pose with two men. Very congenial group—it was hugs and smiles all around.

I passed the photo to the Chief and asked him, "Anyone here you recognize?"

He showed me a stiff smile as he replied, "Sure, but it must be a couple of years old. The men are Art Douglas

and George Kaufman, Martha's first husband. I'm sure you have already identified the women."

I said, "Yeah. All but one of these are now dead. The fourth came damn close to joining the others a few hours ago. He's probably not out of the woods yet."

"I'm ready to get out of here," the Chief said. "It's giving me the willies."

I said, "Me too. Let's go."

We returned to the Chief's police car, where he ordered a unit dispatched to secure the crime scene. The dispatcher than reported, "We got a hit from CAL-ID on the hospital incident. Do you want the particulars now or are you on the way in?"

Terry gave me a pleased smile as he responded. "Feed me, Betty."

"First suspect identified as Rudolph Earl
Marshan
, D.O.B. August 4, 1948. Rap sheets in Florida, New York, Illinois, and California. Several arrests, attempted murder, no convictions. Two weapons violations, both reduced to misdemeanor offenses. Second suspect identified as Edward Charles
Boschey
, D.O.B. January 11, 1950. No criminal record. Honorable Discharge, U.S. Army, 1971. The car they were driving was stolen from a rental lot in South Lake Tahoe. That's the gist of it from CAL-ID, nothing yet from Washington, Chief."

"Ten-four. Good work, Betty. I'll be coming in as soon as the other unit arrives."

A few years ago it may have taken us weeks or months to obtain information like this, but modern police detection technology has become so advanced that local authorities can often access such information almost instantaneously. The California Identification Remote Access Network (CAL-ID) allows latent fingerprints to be injected into the system from virtually anywhere in the state and a list of potential matches can turn up within minutes. The use of police computer data-base systems has so revolutionized the identification and histories of suspects that often the officer on the beat, using a dashboard computer, can obtain a complete file on the suspect without even leaving his vehicle.

Terry left me alone for a moment while he stepped outside to confer with his arriving officer. Minutes later we were rolling toward the police department, a brief run from Old Mammoth. I asked about George Kaufman, reminding him of an earlier conversation that had touched briefly on the man.

I said, "The Tahoe connection keeps bothering me. First we had these two guys harassing Martha in the gallery and who probably should be considered the prime suspects for the torching of the gallery, then I find the same two searching Martha's condo. The two shooters at the hospital obviously came down from the same area. You told me that Sanford had a piece of the action at Tahoe and it appears that he is knee-deep in all of these recent events. How big a bite does he have?"

Terry replied, without actually looking at me, "Big enough to finance a number of his property development deals. He was a partner in one of the smaller casinos. Martha met Kaufman through her Dad, actually. Kaufman was his controller, the one who kept Harley's interests protected among the partnership. He had degrees in law and accounting. When you swim with sharks, it is wise to have a guy like Kaufman on top of the situation. That was his function."

"So Martha and Kaufman lived in Tahoe?"

"For a while. He was working for Harley when Martha met him. I had the feeling that it was not a particularly happy marriage."

"It looked happy enough in that photograph we found at Douglas's place."

"There had been a couple of separations before she moved back to Mammoth for good. She had lived here alone for some time before he was killed."

I said, "I know you're a good cop and this is a very small town, but I have to feel that you've had more than a casual interest in Martha's personal life."

The Chief said, "Yeah. Screw you too, bud. I've known Martha from way back. If you were trying to suggest something between Martha and me..."

I said, "Well, that got a rise. So what nerve did I touch there, pal?"

It had dawned on me for the first time that this guy was younger than I might have imagined and was probably something more than a mere police machine. I did not even know if the guy was married or had ever been— nothing personal about him. He did not rise to my bait so I punched him again. "Were you dating Martha before her marriage to Kaufman or after she moved back to Mammoth?"

He gave me a startled look. "God damn! You shoot from the hip, don't you, bud. Where did you get the idea I had dated Martha?"

I said, "Well, shit, you just confirmed it. Hey, I'm not

into the jealous-husband routine and I am not idiot enough to suppose that a beautiful and intelligent woman would not be attracted by the opposite sex. So get off it."

We were entering the parking lot at the police department when he chuckled and told me, "I've had a couple flings at the marriage game myself, so you're not talking to a choirboy here. Sure, I'd known Martha since before her first marriage and we'd had dinner a few times after she left Kaufman. We never got it on, if that's what you're wondering about, but not because I wouldn't have liked to. I guess we just sort of lost our moment. She was dealing with her divorce at the time and I knew that she was not ready to leap into another relationship right away. As a matter of fact, neither was I."

I asked, "So this was shortly before Kaufman was killed?"

"Yeah. The divorce wasn't final when he died."

"How did the trouble between Martha and her husband affect the relationship between Kaufman and Sanford?"

"Hell, I don't know. He was still working for Harley when he died. It would be characteristic of Harley to insist that those two work out their own problems without embroiling him. With Harley it has always been business first."

I said, "Even above his family, huh?"

"Oh, yeah. Harley's business deals have always been sacrosanct. You may have noticed that even his wife plays second fiddle to that."

"Yes, I had that feeling immediately. You hinted this morning that there may have been something fishy

about the automobile accident that killed Kaufman."

"Yeah. It was on the Nevada side. I had no input there. The Nevada authorities were satisfied that it was a drunk-driving case. I never bought that. Kaufman was practically a teetotaler. Martha herself never bought it."

"Did Sanford buy it?"

He said, "You never know what a guy like Harley Sanford is buying and not buying. If you are asking if he seemed upset about his son-in-law's death—he never showed it."

It was growing more and more obvious that a trip to Lake Tahoe was shaping up for me, which would entail a three-hour drive north by car. But I was still a bit fuzzy behind the ears and I knew that my stamina was beginning to fade so I did not want to undertake a long trip by car before a bit of rest.

I mentioned this to the Chief as we got out of the car. He said, "Well, bud, I think we've both earned some rest. Myself, I'm bushed. You must be, too."

I knew it was true. I went on to my van and showed him a fond wave as he stepped inside the station.

I had really grown to like this guy.

I was thinking, as I moved into my van, that it would hurt like hell if this guy turned out dirty. It is not that I always look for the worst in people but that I have one of these sticky minds that is always affected by truths half spoken. Not that this guy had shown me any reason to distrust him—and I would love to believe that I could not have been affected by the possibility that he had been intimate with Martha—but only that something simply was not right here.