The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Yeah.” The detective began massaging the back of his neck. He was starting to get a headache at the base of his skull. It was more than warm. It was stifling, yet he could see the papers on the polished granite desk top fluttering from an overhead air register.

  “On June twenty-first of last year, my twenty-two-year-old son Jack went to Palm Springs after his last term at U.S.C. He went alone but was going to be joined by his fiancée who was a senior at U.C.L.A. He was there two days and two nights and then he was gone. So was my car. I keep a Rolls-Royce there because I sometimes fly to Palm Springs from LAX instead of driving. Our Palm Springs houseboy found the car missing and by the second night he got worried and called us. Jack was found two days later in the desert, in some godforsaken canyon near Mineral Springs. He was shot through the head and the car was burned with his body inside.”

  “Was he … uh, was he …”

  “Yes, he was already dead when they torched the car.”

  “They?”

  “He, she, they. Whoever. At first the police thought there was some sort of accident where he ran off a dirt road down into a canyon and the car caught fire. But at the autopsy they found that though he was totally burned, the inside of his lungs was hardly scorched. And there was very little carbon monoxide in his blood. And then they found a thirty-eight-caliber bullet in his head. I brought in another pathologist and he concurred. Jack was shot and was dead or dying before somebody burned him.

  “The F.B.I. called it a straightforward murder, maybe a kidnapping and murder, but not within their investigative jurisdiction. The Palm Springs police’ve pretty well given up. I thought about hiring private investigators but I know the difference between movie private eyes and real ones. Even if I could find a good one, no police agency gives the time of day to private investigators.”

  “So how does the L.A.P.D. get brought into this?”

  “It’s the best thing that’s happened to me for a while,” Victor Watson said. “On Monday I got a notice from my Hollywood Rolls-Royce dealership that it’s time to bring the car in for service. There was a note attached saying they’d neglected to bill me for a tire purchased on June twenty-first of last year. That’s the day Jack disappeared! Of course I ran straight to the Rolls-Royce dealer, and the service manager identified a picture of Jack. My boy was there that afternoon in the Rolls and ordered a tire because his was going flat.”

  “You notify Palm Springs P.D. about this?”

  “Yesterday. They thanked me, of course. They said they’d make a follow-up call to the Rolls-Royce dealer. That means they’ll be told the same thing I was told and they’ll file it. But look, the crime may have originated in Hollywood. Jack may have met someone here or been kidnapped here or picked up a hitchhiker here or …”

  “This is a lotta supposition, Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, restraining himself from going for old Johnnie Walker yet another time. “This case belongs to Palm Springs P.D.”

  “But they’re out of ideas. And I’ve already publicly offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for any relevant information. You have a big department, Sid. More facilities.”

  “Look, most murders and most crimes in general are solved by the art of conversation, not the science of forensics. It’s their town. They know who to talk to. I can’t walk in there and make a case outta nothing.”

  “There’s an answer there. I know it! In the desert cities there’re lots of unsolved murders. Maybe you can add something fresh.”

  “Resort cities’re transient places,” the detective argued. “There could well be lots a uncleared murders. That doesn’t mean the police aren’t competent.”

  “A fresh look at it, that’s all I want from the L.A.P.D. Somebody shot my boy and burned his body. Somebody left him there for … Animals had gotten to him. Coyotes, skunks, buzzards, I don’t know. Desert animals.”

  “You really can’t hope for justice after this much time’s passed, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool succumbed and went for the Johnnie Walker Black, but he only poured two ounces this time.

  “I know, Sid. I don’t want justice.”

  “Well, whadda you want?”

  “Revenge, of course. A sliver of revenge.”

  “Revenge. And what from me?”

  “Identify the killer or killers even if you can never make an arrest. Even if there isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt to satisfy a district attorney.”

  “And what’re you gonna do?”

  Victor Watson got up again and paced back and forth in front of the window. Now the sun was nearly gone and his tanned face took on the color of a bruise. He said, “I recently watched a documentary where Jane Goodall got herself in a tizzy because one of her mother apes had et one of the neighbor ape’s babies. She didn’t know after all her years of research that they were capable of human cruelty. Hell, that’s no discovery. The real discovery’d be if the neighbor mother’d waited for the killer to go to sleep and then bashed in her skull. That’s what sets man apart from other primates. Not the crap about us being aware of our own mortality. What sets us apart is our capacity and need for revenge.”

  “You wanna have the killer smoked, is that it? This is a job for Charles Bronson, not me.”

  Victor Watson turned toward the detective, and now under the track light he looked like an old man. His eyes and cheeks were hollow in the shadow. He said, “Don’t be silly. I’m not a criminal, but I have enough money to punish people in lots of ways. I can get my own kind of revenge without physically harming anyone.”

  Suddenly a bolt of headache pain hit Sidney Blackpool like a slap shot.

  “It wouldn’t make you feel better, Mister Watson,” the detective said, feeling clammy. His armpits were soaked.

  “It won’t help his mother. She’s accommodated the grief. Mothers can do it. I’ve tried everything: psychotherapy, religion, Zen. Nothing diminishes my rage. I just know you can help me. Intuition’s made me what I am.”

  “Me? I’m one a several guys working homicide at Hollywood Station. I happened to be sent over to talk to you because nobody else was handy.”

  “I asked for you,” Victor Watson said.

  “You asked for me?”

  “I made a few inquiries about the homicide teams. If it’d turned out Jack could be traced to our home in Bel-Air that day I would’ve done the same at West L.A. Station. Or Beverly Hills if he’d been seen there. I would’ve tried to pick the man I needed from whichever agency that could justify getting into the case.”

  “And what’d your few inquiries reveal about me?”

  “You’re a very good investigator and you drink Johnnie Walker Black and you play golf. I thought the golf was an omen. I belong to a country club in the desert and I can get you onto any other course you want to play. Take your clubs.”

  “You think my department’s gonna let me drop my workload and run to Palm Springs, just like that?”

  “Take one week from your accumulated overtime, Sid. Take your partner. I’ve learned that his vacation isn’t up for ten more days. The two of you’ll have a suite at a first-class hotel. You’ll like it. I have copies of every police report here.” Victor Watson tapped his desk drawer. “You can read them at your leisure and do some investigating during a hell of a nice vacation. Your lieutenant said it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “This isn’t sensible.”

  “You’re the best man available to me at this time and that is the God’s truth.”

  “How’d you meet my lieutenant?”

  “I help sponsor the police Olympics and the police-celebrity golf tournament, and I intend to back your chief if he decides to retire and run for mayor. I was given an introduction by an assistant chief.”

  “What else do you know about me?”

  “I know about your boy.”

  “Goddamn!” Sidney Blackpool said, shocked to see how much he was sweating from the swell time he was having with all the free drinks and the promise of a golf vacation.
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br />   “While we were talking about my boy your lieutenant said you’d lost your boy too, in a surfing accident.”

  “My lieutenant’s got a big mouth.”

  “It’s another omen! It’s more than that. Helping me might help you. Father to father. My justice might in some small way …”

  “You already said you don’t want justice. Look, Mister Watson, my kid’s been dead fourteen months. I’m nearly past the crazies. I don’t need this father to father bullshit.”

  “If I could buy the right kind of help I would. For the first time in years I need something desperately and it’s not for sale. I feel totally helpless. It’s an awful thing for a man like me to be helpless. Listen, you’ve got your twenty years in, right?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You could retire from police work if you could afford it, but you can’t live on the pension, right? You probably have an ex-wife to pay?”

  “No, the bitch did me a good turn. She remarried a few years ago.”

  “Other kids?”

  “A daughter seventeen. Lives with her mother.”

  “I’m just winging it, Sid. You see, I don’t know much about you, only what I need to. So I figure you’d probably love to leave the street garbage but you can’t live on the pension without working, right? Do you know Deputy Chief Phil Jenks?”

  “He retired a few years back. I knew of him.”

  “He’s head of security for Watson Industries. He’s also a security adviser to three cellular-mobile-phone companies I’m associated with in San Francisco and San Diego and Denver. I pay him ninety thousand a year.”

  “That’s very nice for him.”

  “I was getting ready to raise his salary to an even hundred when he had a serious heart attack last month. Seems like we’ll have to replace him. We’re looking for a younger man this time. A retired law officer, of course. We prefer a single man who doesn’t mind traveling to some pretty nice cities.”

  “I don’t know a goddamn thing about computer hardware, Mister Watson.”

  “You know about thieves, don’t you? A thief’s a thief. What else’s to know? Sid, if you bring me what I need from the desert, you’ll have all the qualifications I could ever want. With Phil Jenks I signed a play or pay deal, as they say in my wife’s business. If he didn’t like the job, he could quit and I had to pay a year’s salary. Call Phil Jenks. I’ll give you his number. Ask him how he liked the job. He’s a golfer too. We’ve got corporate memberships in country clubs in San Diego, San Francisco and Denver. We’ve got season’s tickets to Lakers games and …”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Sidney Blackpool said. “And right now I got a Kareem Abdul Jabbar migraine.”

  “Call me tomorrow, Sid,” Victor Watson said, opening the door for the detective. “Remember, if nothing ever comes of it you still got yourself a nice golf vacation in Palm Springs, all expenses paid. And I mean all.”

  “Nothing could ever come a something like this,” the detective said.

  “Omens, Sid.” Victor Watson’s voice was as hollow as his eyes under the track lights. “Maybe we’re linked, you and me. Because we understand it.”

  “It?”

  “The ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons. Now we understand it. I got to have a payoff, Sid. Some kind of payoff for all … this … fucking … rage.”

  “I’ll call you either way.”

  “Call me,” Victor Watson said, closing the door to the salon while the detective wove his way through the vases and urns and pots, vaguely realizing that all this designer crockery was probably worth ten times more than the play or pay deal he was just offered. Which made him feel like he had a mouse waterskiing in his stomach. He hoped he could find a men’s room pronto.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MUSIC MAN

  “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” Chief Paco Pedroza once said to a gathering of all the heads of law enforcement in the Coachella Valley. “We’ll take some a the third-round draft picks you can’t use but don’t give us your whodunits! I got one detective, and far as crime labs go, the only labs around Mineral Springs cause crime. I mean the speed labs operated by the outlaw bikers. So if your whodunits leech on into Mineral Springs, just be ready to handle them without too much help from my nine-person work force.”

  Paco Pedroza never had any trouble with whodunits from Palm Springs or anywhere else until the disappearance of Jack Watson back in 1983. Victor Watson’s residence was in the old Las Palmas section of Palm Springs, not far from homes formerly owned by Hollywood legends. Now the desert’s best addresses are moving down the valley, but in the old days Las Palmas was the center of a posh bedroom community. The homes are large and old, concealed by walls and nearly impenetrable oleander. Most of the streets circle mazelike, and many a new cop in town has gotten lost chasing wily local kids around the Las Palmas neighborhoods.

  The residents of Las Palmas, particularly the older residents, seldom go shopping. Groceries and other essentials are brought in by delivery vans. In fact, after Jack Watson’s disappearance, a delivery boy with a burglary record was questioned for three hours at the Palm Springs Police Department.

  On the second day of Jack Watson’s disappearance, even before the victim’s terrified parents flew into the Palm Springs airport from Los Angeles by private jet, the police had given the Las Palmas residence a pretty good going over. In the beginning they thought the young man might’ve been kidnapped from his bedroom while sleeping. The bed was unmade, the burglar alarm was not set and a sliding door in the guest bedroom wasn’t entirely closed.

  Victor Watson’s home was so well alarmed that he even had a dozen point-to-point infrareds on the outside. They cost $1,000 a pair and were mounted high up on the fence that enclosed the property. They were designed to detect climbers, but they were not wired into recording channels like the inside alarm. The outside infrared system would ring only at the residence, alerting the Watsons or neighbors or passing patrol cars. The reason they could not transmit by radio wave or telephone is that there were too many false alarms. Birds, animals, a falling leaf could trigger the system.

  The infrared had a transmitter and receiver on one end of an invisible beam that traveled a straight line, hitting a mirror and bouncing back, striking the receiver precisely. It was remotely possible that someone with a great deal of training and practice could interrupt the beam with another mirror if it could be so finely and instantly adjusted that the beam came back precisely to the receiver. James Bond could do it, they decided, but probably no thug in Palm Springs.

  There were lots of false trails taken by the police and F.B.I. during those first days, while Victor Watson hovered over the scene, cordless phone in hand, experiencing for the first time the impotence of the crime victim. He received the telephone call at 6:00 P.M. of the second day. It was from a woman who said that Jack Watson was being held “close by in the desert” and to await instructions. Of course “close by” in open desert could mean anywhere within five hundred square miles. Victor Watson thought he heard the sound of air brakes in the background and cars whizzing by at high speed. It was the only clue except that an elderly neighbor had seen a red pickup truck turn around in the Watson driveway the day before. It may have meant nothing, but it was all they had.

  A telephone call from Palm Springs P.D. to Mineral Springs P.D. was made at 7:00 P.M. when Chief Paco Pedroza was home mopping up five thousand calories and neither of his sergeants was in the station. Unfortunately for Paco, the cop who was in the station that night was Officer Oscar Albert Jones, a twenty-four-year-old former surfer who’d worked a year for the Laguna Beach P.D. and a year for the Palm Springs P.D. before he felt it was wise to move on. While still with the Palm Springs police, O. A. Jones spent most of his time in Whitewater dove country blazing away with his 9mm automatic at doves and jackrabbits who were perfectly safe in that O. A. Jones couldn’t have hit them with a shotgun. Still, he’d shoot up a box of reloads nearly every night. Onc
e he’d gotten so carried away he shot up every silver-tipped hollow point he had and was caught bulletless by a sergeant, after which O. A. Jones became known as Outta Ammo Jones.

  On the night that encouraged O. A. Jones to resign from Palm Springs P.D. and get picked up on waivers by Mineral Springs, he was patrolling Indian Avenue and happened to spot a drunk staggering across the street against the red light. O. A. Jones followed the drunk, who wore shorts and a tank top and was shuffling north on the sidewalk.

  When O. A. Jones got abreast of the guy, he saw that it wasn’t a drunk at all. It was Hiram Murphy, eldest son of Moms Murphy, boss of a clan that, Gypsy-style, traveled all over the desert valley pulling pigeon drops on the many retirees, stealing their life savings in confidence scams and using the money to buy speed to slam in their arms. In fact, the narcs had found fresh tracks on the arms of Moms’ youngest son, Rudolph. He was nineteen but had the mind of a six-year-old, and his brothers shot him up not with crank but heroin since it kept him quieter. That was the kind of family Moms Murphy shepherded, so O. A. Jones was delighted to see Moms’ oldest boy, Hiram, in a state of stagger from an overload of crystal and bar whiskey.

  Hiram had been in a gay bar trying to expand the family business to include fruit-rolling. Except that he was so ugly he couldn’t score. He had eyes and ears like a bat and he smelled like a ruptured appendix.

  “Hello, cretin,” O. A. Jones said, rolling up beside Hiram Murphy in his patrol car. “You’re too loaded to walk. Let’s ride.”

  Hiram Murphy was as surly and mean as usual, but he was also a coward. He wouldn’t pick a fight with anybody, let alone a strapping young cop like O. A. Jones, unless he had at least one brother lying in wait with a claw hammer. He mumbled a few “pricks” and “motherfuckers” under his breath, but got in the backseat of the police car, his hands cuffed behind him.

  While driving to the station, the blond cop gave Hiram Murphy a “screen test” which Hiram didn’t like at all. The former surfer whispered something that Hiram didn’t hear, and when Hiram said, “What’s that?” the young cop turned in profile as he drove and whispered it in a slightly louder voice. But it was still unintelligible to the cranked-out thug.