The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The Secrets of Harry Bright

  Joseph Wambaugh

  Joseph Wambaugh

  The Secrets of Harry Bright

  For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.

  — Luke 15:24

  PROLOGUE

  THE SECRET

  The single-engine Cessna 172 was a tiny blip on the radar screen at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. Air-traffic controllers also watched another blip, PSA Flight 182 en route from Los Angeles. Suddenly the impossible: two blips merged.

  Nothing was ever heard from the Cessna. It fell like a shotgunned dove. The last official communication from the PSA pilot said: “Tower, we’re going down! This is PSA!”

  There followed a seventeen-second silence, but the voice recorder carried the pilot’s final words: “This is it, baby. Brace yourselves.”

  There was yet another message on the recorder found that Monday morning in 1978, after the country’s worst domestic air disaster to date. The message was a version of the declaration most often uttered on deathbeds as well as on all the battlefields of life. A child cries out to a parent. The final words on the voice recorder: “Ma, I love you.”

  Many North Park residents thought it was a monster quake. They waited in terror for aftershocks. Then a firestorm and a mushroom of black fuel smoke turned terror to panic. Some now thought the prediction had been fulfilled: San Diego was among the first of Russian targets!

  The explosion launched 144 human beings and parts of human beings from the airplane like rockets. The first policeman on the scene had no idea how to begin contending with fires raging, and people screaming through the streets, and smoke obliterating everything. He later said that it was like the old Warner Bros, cartoon where the walls of houses bore gaping holes in the shapes of people. The young cop ran inside a one-story stucco home struck by a human projectile. He found a man shrieking at a naked headless woman lying in his wife’s bed. When his hysteria subsided, the man suddenly cried, “Wait a minute! That’s not my wife! My wife doesn’t have tits that big!”

  He was correct. An airline passenger had been blasted through the wall of the house and landed precisely on the bed recently vacated by the wife who was one of the many people fleeing in panic.

  The only “crash survivor” to be taken to the hospital was a woman covered with gore found lying dazed by the disaster site. She was sped away by ambulance, and when they washed off the blood and mangled flesh, and treated her for shock, it was discovered that she had been a passing motorist whose car windshield was suddenly demolished by not one but three flying bodies. She had skidded to a stop and leaped from a car suddenly crammed with limbs and torsos, bursting skulls and exploding organs. The patient was found to be physically sound. She wasn’t even bruised.

  That first young cop on the scene saw quite a few things that would cause recurring nightmares and unwanted memories, but none more vivid than the kneeling man. He wore a pair of athletic shoes, baggy khakis and a San Diego Padres baseball shirt. At first the young cop thought the kneeling man was a corpse robber. Then the cop saw a police badge pinned to the shoulder of the Padres sweatshirt and believed that the kneeling man was an off-duty policeman trying to help out. The young cop was about to ask him to check the burning homes for injured victims when he saw that the kneeling man was studying something on the ground. The man just stared through eyeglasses, nodding up and down to focus through bifocals.

  When the young cop got close enough to look for himself, he yelped and turned away. Then he gathered himself and called to another smoke-blackened cop who was heading toward a burning home with a commandeered garden hose. Both policemen approached the kneeling man cautiously. The kneeling man moved a few inches as though to obstruct their view, as though he was guarding his find. Then the cops saw it clearly. First one cop, then the other started to giggle. Soon they were cackling and losing control. They were doubled up and roaring just as an outraged news photographer saw them and snapped a photo. The wire services scotched the picture when later at the command post the cops were able to explain the circumstances that provoked the seemingly ghoulish outburst.

  Afterward, they were not able to locate the kneeling man. On reflection, they weren’t even sure that the badge on his baseball shirt was a San Diego Police Department shield. Whatever the kneeling man might have learned would remain his secret in the years to come.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MACHO LIZARD

  Across the globe there are two narrow belts 25 degrees north and south of the equator where the movement of winds and oceans prevents rain clouds from penetrating the earth. The sun, without cloud cover below, is free to suck the moisture from earth, plants, animals. The night sky in such places is very clear, and it turns suddenly cool when the ground heat bounces back to the heavens. The daytime baking and night cooling of the earth’s floor creates formidable winds. Where mountains exist, the rising hot air is replaced by cool air from the mountains that funnels down the canyons and dries the land even more.

  In former times such places were thought inhospitable to ordinary human beings, but then nobody ever said that ordinary human beings lived in Hollywood. It was probably the excesses of the good life during Hollywood’s Golden Age that pushed them out there, just two hours drive from Los Angeles but a world away.

  People who lived their lives like they were hot-wired to Caddy convertibles, people who claimed to wear cocaine on their genitals to stay hot-wired, found that for the first time in years they could actually uncoil. The desert possessed magic.

  At first some of them didn’t see it. The desert looked forbidding and hostile, but pretty soon the enveloping mountains stopped seeming like slag heaps. The mountains took on noble shapes, elegant lines. The movie stars talked of subtle desert pastels and ever-changing light shows. Cloud shadow from feathery cumulus banks spangled the mountains and hills with light and dappled shade. A movie star could sit by poolside or in a natural hot spring and watch the shadows magically swirling in color, and the coral, scarlet and purple cactus blossoms and wild flowers flooding the foreground. The foothills were so covered with verbena that they were called the Purple Mountains. And then there were the nights, cool nights when movie stars would gaze at real ones. The dipper burned like a strand of diamonds on a sable cloak.

  So Palm Springs provided a refuge, a sanctuary between pictures. They all came: Gable, Lombard, Cagney, Tracy, Hepburn, the Marx Brothers, even Garbo. And no matter how fearful they might be about Time, those people who had to remain changeless, the desert had an answer even for that. The warm dry climate soothed arthritic pain, bursitis, lung disorders. Everyone started feeling more vigorous, playing tennis and golf, swimming, cavorting like Errol Flynn.

  There were endless surprises. Mount San Jacinto’s peak at dusk was backlit by the sun setting over the Pacific. It gave the thrilling impression that just west of the mountain was the city, the searchlights of Grauman’s Chinese, The Pantages and The Egyptian theaters. The drooling mobs with their pencils and notebooks and flashbulbs seemed to be just on the other side. It was all so comforting it allowed them to relax and play like children. The mountain was backlit for them by The Great Gaffer in the sky. They were safe. They could rest because reassuringly close, ever waiting in the lights, was Hollywood.

  Then of course after show biz found sand and cactus to its liking, land developers invaded the desert like Rommel’s panzers. They started in Palm Springs and eventually spread south to Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta. The Coachella Valley was blitzkrieged.

  It appeared that absolutely nothing could halt the country club and resort developers. Those big cat tractors would challenge Godzilla,
they said. But one of Godzilla’s little cousins slowed them down a bit. Apparently, certain portions of the Coachella Valley provide the last chance for a tiny endangered creature called the fringe-toed lizard. He’s an unremarkable little fellow with overlapping eyelids, fat belly and snowshoe scales for sand dwelling. Yet he has become the environmentalists’ best hope for slowing the momentum that Hollywood started so long ago. But some of the richest and most famous people on earth own real estate in the fringe-toed lizard’s bailiwick, so gamblers aren’t betting much on the little reptile.

  Today there are at least fifty golf courses in the Coachella Valley and over two hundred hotels, and the low humidity condition in the desert has been forever altered by colossal raids on the underground water table.

  But there are parts of the valley that aren’t amenable to raids by big cat tractors. One of them is the little town of Mineral Springs, about ten miles out of Palm Springs. The reason is simple: wind. Desert wind that could drive ten thousand wind turbines. The Mineral Springs Chamber of Commerce calls the winds “therapeutic breezes.” The residents call them gale force.

  There’s little sand left, the residents say. It’s been blown clear to the Salton Sea. That wind can make it rain pebbles and stones like a desert hailstorm. Cars left with windows open need to be pickaxed, they say.

  But in 1978 the good people of Mineral Springs decided that wind or no wind they wanted some of the tourist bucks from their neighbors on the other side of the valley. After all, their mineral water spouting from the ground at 180 degrees Fahrenheit was pure, and didn’t smell like rotten eggs as does most mineral water. In fact, it was so clean that they wanted a federal grant to study the phenomenon of odorless hot mineral water, until it was pointed out that the smell is probably blown away before it can reach the nose.

  The townsfolk decided that if their small city was going to be taken seriously it needed among other things its own police force, so they decided to take applications for a chief of police and eventually settled on a fourteen-year veteran of the county sheriffs office. Paco Pedroza had also been a sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department for nine years prior to that, and had moved to a desert climate hoping to arrest his daughter’s chronic bronchitis.

  The town of Mineral Springs thought it could get by with a three-man police force until its new chief pointed out a few territorial problems. Mineral Springs, being remote, yet easily accessible to the rich desert resorts, was the home of more chemists than Cal Tech, but they were all amateurs. The lonely windblown desert canyons were full of Cobras, an outlaw motorcycle gang that made its living by brewing vats of methamphetamine. If there was an ideal place for speed labs this was it. The ether smell of “crank” or “crystal” was blown halfway to Indio the second it escaped the lab. There was no danger of cops literally nosing their way into a lab as in ordinary neighborhoods. So there were a lot of Harley hogs and chopper bikes in or about the town, and they did more business than the Rotary Club.

  In addition to the crank labs, Mineral Springs, with its low-cost housing, was also an ideal spot for most of the meat eaters who flock to rich resort communities to feed on tourists. It had two halfway houses and a de-tox center for the ex-cons and “reformed” dopers and alcoholics of the Coachella Valley. The only mansion in town had been built by a pimp who ran thirteen girls into Palm Springs during the height of the season to work the hotels. An early reputation for a laissez-faire life-style also brought a nudist colony, and the nudist colony brought hordes of hang gliders, which often crashed in the treacherous winds. It was not an easy town for cops in that the ex-cons, bikers, crank dealers, Palm Springs burglars, nudists, robbers and pimps, horny kite pilots, dopers and drunks didn’t necessarily want a police force of any kind.

  Paco Pedroza needed savvy cops, and they had to be the right kind to make it in these parts, being ten miles from the closest police jurisdiction where there might be help available.

  He gave each cop he hired over the years the same admonition: “I gotta have people with street smarts and moxie but they also gotta have somethin more important: diplomacy. When you’re out there all alone and no help on the horizon you gotta be able to talk people into doing it your way. Remember one thing: out here you ain’t got no ‘or else’ at your disposal.”

  And Paco gave each cop he hired (except the lone female, Ruth Kosko) the same warning: “I won’t hassle you about the weapons you carry. We got M-fourteens in your car with a clip a thirty that you can fire in three round bursts. You can carry forty-four magnums, or forty-fives with as hot a load as they can stand. You can carry nine millimeters cocked and locked, if you need more rounds. You can wear a Whammo wrist rocket or you can stash a backup derringer up your ass if it makes you feel better. I ain’t gonna hassle you about the iron you carry even if it looks offensive. And there ain’t much of a dress code. I won’t worry about a shoeshine since the sun’ll melt it off anyway. I won’t worry if you catch a few winks sometimes on a graveyard shift if you got to. I have just a few rules for my cops: no drugs and no thieves at no time. And no booze on the job. And no aberrant sexual behavior inside the city limits with anybody under the age a forty even when you’re off duty. And that’s about it, far as rules.”

  The last one was because the 150 single-parent divorcees and widows who lived in the mobile-home park (which the citizens called Mid-Life Junction) were driving the chief bughouse. They came every month to the city-council meeting with a ten-page list of what was wrong with the town and figured that the police chief was responsible for most of it. Paco Pedroza, who admitted to being a sexist pig, figured that all those waitresses and manicurists and hairdressers who lived in Mineral Springs but commuted to jobs in the resort towns were suffering from the fact that available women greatly outnumbered men except during the height of the tourist season when the conventions hit the desert. So he encouraged his cops to do “P.R. work” at Mid-Life Junction by attending their coffee klatches. But his cops were mostly young dudes, and the burnouts at Mid-Life Junction looked to them even older than they were. After the press began calling a particularly dangerous strip of desert highway “Blood Alley,” the cops started calling Mid-Life Junction “No-Blood Alley.”

  When Paco Pedroza got the call from Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department informing him of a possible hot new lead in a cold but notorious desert murder case that had touched the town of Mineral Springs, he promised total cooperation to the boys from his old alma mater. Then he hung up and posted a notice to his eight man and one woman police force that they would be receiving guests from planet Hollywood, after which he had his secretary and clerk, Annie Paskewicz, draw a picture of a coiled desert sidewinder with a caption that said: “We don’t give a shit how they do it in L.A.,” which he attached to his incoming file basket.

  Paco Pedroza dragged his overweight body up the steps to the roof of the police station/city hall/jailhouse, stripped off his mustard-yellow aloha shirt and groaned at the sight of his gelatinous pecs which seemed to fall a quarter of an inch a year.

  “I oughtta have our Hollywood guests bring me something black and lacy and big from Frederick’s,” Paco groaned to his sergeant. Then Paco squeezed one of his hairy breasts, dropped into a battered lawn chair and said, “That’s it. I’m way past a training bra. No more burritos for this Mexican.”

  Coy Brickman, at forty-one, was ten years younger than Paco, several inches taller, and looked taller yet in his blue uniform.

  “They think a pair a big town cops can clear a no-leads seventeen-month-old case?” Coy Brickman tore disgustedly at a meatball sandwich he’d got at the town’s only deli, washing it down with a quart of orange juice.

  Paco settled back, letting the desert rays have at his bronze belly and said, “Wonder if they’ll send any a the dicks I used to know?”

  “You don’t clear a no-leads, seventeen-month-old case very often,” Coy Brickman repeated.

  “So?” Paco shrugged, closing his eyes. “They can
have a week in a Palm Springs spa getting a facial, a body wrap and a blowjob. Speakin a which, what’s the wind look like?”

  “Therapeutic breeze,” Coy Brickman said, watching the dust devils and whirlwinds forming in the valley.

  Paco Pedroza sighed and said, “A breeze in this freaking town could blow the nuts off a ground squirrel. Bring me a snack next time ya drive by Humberto’s.”

  “Three, four chicken tacos okay?”

  “Make it four,” the chief mumbled, never opening his eyes. “With frijoles. One thing about this freaking wind. You learn to fart silently and nobody ever knows.”

  And while Paco dozed and his sergeant ate an early supper of ersatz meatballs on the roof of the police station, a Mineral Springs wino named Beavertail Bigelow was 86’d from a gin mill for picking a fight. A grimy wrinkled desert rat who looked as though he’d lurched into town with his bedroll lashed to a double-parked donkey, Beavertail drank a fifth of gin, they said, every day it didn’t snow in town, and never went home when the cops told him to, and respected authority about like Sacco and Vanzetti.

  The cops wished that some night when he was sleeping it off on a table at the oasis picnic ground, a flash flood would wash the son of a bitch clear to Indio. But he was a true desert rat. He hated people, understood hostile environments and could survive fifty megatons at ground zero.

  Beavertail Bigelow was sixty years old, weighed less than 130 pounds, was chinless and watery-eyed, and was described as having shoulders like Reagan-Nancy that is. He got his sobriquet from the flat oval cactus of the same name that proliferated in the Coachella Valley, a species that looked harmless but bore minute barbed hairlike spines. The saying went, “You think the little wimp’s spineless till you press him.”