High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

slowly.
    “Well talk business a little later,” Cooper said to me with a slight raising of his right eyebrow, meant, I assumed, to tell me that his mother was to know nothing of what was going on.
    “How about a drink?” Cooper said. “I suggest the Missionary’s Downfall or the Pearl Diver.” He kept on eating his double order of lobster as he talked. “The recipes for drinks here are kept secret. The bottles have numbers instead of labels so rivals can’t copy them. Even the bartenders know the recipes by numbers. You know, half a jigger of 12, a little 7.”
    “Fascinating,” I smiled, wanting to get on with business instead of watching Cooper eat.
    “He got his appetite when he was sixteen,” explained Alice Cooper proudly without taking her eyes from her son, who smiled with a cheekful. “My older boy Arthur joined the army in 1917, and my husband was busy at the capitol. All the Indian workers at the ranch went to war. Frank and I had to take care of five hundred head of cattle.”
    “Frank?”
    Cooper raised his fork to indicate that he was Frank.
    “My older brother went to war in 1917 too and left me with my father in a grocery store,” I said, but Alice Cooper cared nothing for my war stories. She went on.
    “We’re from Montana, you know,” she said. I nodded, accepting a cup of coffee from the waiter to keep my hands busy.
    “I remember you that year, swinging an ax in twenty-below weather to break frozen hay bales,” Cooper said with a grin, “and the two of us working our way through six-foot snow drifts to feed the cattle.”
    “When the year was over and Arthur came back,” Alice Cooper went on, “Frank had grown thirteen inches and was six-foot-four.”
    “Six-three,” corrected Cooper. “Paramount added that inch.”
    “Anyway, he came out of that year with a healthy appetite.”
    It was clear that she had long ago finished whatever her lunch had been and was sitting around admiring her son. Then she stood.
    “It’s almost one,” she said as if an important decision had been made. “I’ve got to get back to the Judge.”
    “Tell Dad I’ll see him before I leave,” Cooper said, pausing in his consumption of the food reserves of the West Coast “I told the driver where to take you.”
    Son dutifully kissed mother on the cheek, and mother shook my hand, saying it was nice to meet me and asking me to let her know what I thought could be done. I said I would and sat down as she left.
    “Quite a woman,” Cooper said, his sappy smile leaving him. He pointed at her and then himself. “She still thinks of me as a kid.”
    “What am I supposed to report to her about?” I said, looking around to see if Cornel Wilde was still there. He wasn’t.
    “I told her you were a surgeon,” Cooper explained, buttering a roll and consuming it in polite pieces. “When I was in college, I had a pal named Harvey Markham. Harvey had polio as a kid and couldn’t move his legs. His old man had altered a Model T for Harve. We drove around together. On one of our trips, Harve’s hand brake failed at the top of a hill. I remember as if it were yesterday. The impact, the rolling over.” Cooper’s massive right hand rolled over to demonstrate.
    “I got up and walked to the curb,” he went on, looking around for something else to eat. “I wasn’t dizzy or weak. My senses were sharpened. And then my left side failed me. It hung like a heavy dead thing and everything went blue. Harve was fine, but I woke up in a hospital. They said I had a broken leg and complications. I had to spend two years at Sunnyside—our ranch—where I did a lot of drawing and a lot of riding. I found out years later that the riding was the worst thing I could have done. I had a pelvic separation, and the riding made it worse. It’s caused me misery ever since, and my mother keeps thinking she should have caught it back then. Every once in a while I tell her I’m seeing a new doctor to take care of it. So,