The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Could be,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “But we doubt it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “In those canyons there’s no such thing. Everybody that lives there’s a not so innocent bystander. The Mineral Springs cop probably heard the killer all right.”

  “Returning to sing a requiem?”

  “Maybe to look for something he lost.”

  Sidney Blackpool gave the Palm Springs lieutenant his telephone number and said good-bye, took two aspirins, rinsed his face and lit a cigarette. He was entering the dining room where Otto was still working on his brunch when the bell captain came in.

  “Mister Blackpool?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The front desk just took a call for you from the Palm Springs police.”

  “I just hung up.” Sidney Blackpool shrugged to Otto who was leering at a huge wedge of coconut-cream pie.

  “Have a bite first,” Otto said.

  “Lemme go see what it is.”

  While Sidney Blackpool was gone, Otto not only ate the pie but asked the waiter if he thought a piña colada would be too rich as an after-brunch drink. When his partner returned, Otto was leaning back in the chair, his belly pressing the table, sucking a tall coconut and vodka special with a little parasol stuck in a wedge of orange.

  “This is the life, Sidney,” he said with three rapid-fire belches.

  “Guess what?” Sidney Blackpool said. “That was the Palm Springs lieutenant. They got a call earlier this morning that he just learned about. The Mineral Springs cop who found the body called to say he’s decided the song the suspect sang wasn’t ‘Pretend.’ It was ‘I Believe.’ ”

  “Not sure I know that one.”

  “You’d know it if you heard it. A Frankie Laine hit. You’re old enough.”

  “Thank you very much, Sidney. You’re so kind to remind me.”

  “Anyway, whaddaya think a that? The very day we get on the case, they receive the first piece a new information they’ve gotten in over a year.”

  “Sidney, it can’t make any possible difference what the lunatic was singing. If in fact that was the killer returning to the scene a the crime like in Agatha Christie.”

  “I know, but it’s the coincidence of it. It seems like more than a coincidence. We come here and something happens. After all this time.”

  “What’s more than a coincidence mean?” Otto asked, looking sorry that he’d had the piña colada.

  And then Sidney Blackpool thought of the tortured face of Victor Watson, an old man’s hollow face under those track lights. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe an omen.”

  Instead of playing nine holes they were off to Mineral Springs to talk to Officer O. A. Jones about his musical revelation.

  “Jesus, how we gonna find out if every radio station in two hundred miles didn’t play ‘I Believe’ on that day last year?” Otto asked. “We gotta get in some golf. All I’m doing is eating and drinking!”

  “ ‘I Believe’ with a banjo? I think someone was there that day. Maybe Jones heard a live voice.”

  “All we gotta find is a banjo man with a taste for old songs. Let’s see, Steve Martin plays one, I think. Maybe Roy Clark or Glen Campbell? Jesus.”

  “Shaggy clouds and shaggy trees,” Sidney Blackpool said. “It’s got a threatening look sometimes, this desert.”

  “Know what I noticed, Sidney? It changes. I mean, it never looks the same one minute to the next.”

  “The cloud shadow,” Sidney Blackpool said, looking up from under his sunglasses as he drove. “It throws shadow and light and color everywhere. And the colors change. This is a strange place. I don’t know if I like it or not.”

  “I’m gonna love it,” Otto said. “If we ever get on the freaking golf links. I ain’t hit a ball in over a month.”

  “Three weeks,” his partner reminded. “At Griffith Park. I bet these courses won’t look like Griffith Park.”

  “You mean no tank tops? No beer cans or tattooed arms? No sound of thongs slapping the feet when your playing partner steps outta his Ford pickup? Hey, what’s that?” Otto pointed three miles off in the distance toward the base of the mountains.

  “That’s where six thousand souls survive in this desert because a the golf and tennis and piña colada we just left,” said Sidney Blackpool. “That’s Mineral Springs.”

  “Kinda windy around here,” Otto said, watching a dozen whirlwinds dancing across the desert in the shimmering rising heat. “Bad place to die out in those lonely canyons.”

  “Doesn’t much matter where,” Sidney Blackpool said, lighting a cigarette, looking at the shacks that dotted the trails high in the hills. “Have to be real important to drive up there at night.”

  “I’d have to he forced to make the drive.”

  “Possibly,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  When they arrived, Chief Paco Pedroza had a case of heartburn from yelling at Wingnut Bates and Prankster Frank. He had forbidden any more threats to shoot Prankster Frank on sight, explaining that he needed every cop he had. And he prohibited snakes-real, rubber or photographic-from being brought into the station. In that spirit, Paco even removed the picture of the sidewinder on the sign that said “We don’t give a shit how they do it in L.A.”

  After sending his cops back to work he was dozing with his feet up when the Hollywood detectives announced themselves to Anemic Annie, the pale, birdlike civilian at the front desk.

  “In here, fellas,” Paco said. “Siddown. Want some coffee?”

  “No, thanks, Chief,” Sidney Blackpool said, as the three men shook hands. “He’s Stringer. I’m Blackpool.”

  “Call me Paco. I used to work Hollywood. You mightta heard?”

  “We did,” Otto said. “We were both at Newton Street at that time.”

  “Pinkford was captain then,” Paco said. “He still on the department?”

  “Yep,” Otto nodded, “and will be till Ronald Reagan goes gray.”

  “Pinkford never wanted much outta life,” Paco said. “Just enough glue to stick his face on Mount Rushmore. I woulda walked a beat in Sri Lanka to get away from him. Anyways, I’m glad to see you boys’re wearing your golf rags. Most L.A. cops come out this way in suits and neckties even if it’s a hundred and twenty degrees.”

  “Actually, Chief, this is sort of a vacation,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “Paco.”

  “Paco. We’re just here for some golf. Our boss said we might do a little follow-up since Victor Watson recently learned that his kid visited Hollywood on the day he disappeared from Palm Springs. Apparently the kid made a quick trip into town and back to the desert.”

  “Mean anything?” Paco asked.

  “Not yet,” Otto said. “Reason we came to your department is to talk to Officer O. A. Jones. He called Palm Springs P.D. today with some new information about the song he heard the suspect singing.”

  “O. A. Jones,” Paco grunted. “That little fucker’s gonna get me indicted some day. Does a job all right, but everything he does looks like it mighta happened a little different than he says. In fact, no desert’s seen so much single-handed swashbuckling since Lawrence of Arabia. I don’t know if you can rely on everything that surfer says.”

  “Surfer?” Sidney Blackpool said. “Where would he surf out here?”

  “Ex-surfer,” Paco said. “Used to be with Laguna Beach P.D. and then Palm Springs P.D. I took a chance on him and so far he ain’t got in any traffic accidents where there might be one body too many. But that’s another story. He’s on duty today. Want Annie to call him for ya?”

  “If you would,” Otto said.

  The three men walked from the chief’s office into the main room of the police station. “Want a tour?” Paco asked.

  “Sure,” Otto said.

  “Okay, turn around,” said Paco. “There, that’s it. You got the tour. Except there’s a John down the hall and ten wall lockers upstairs and a holding tank for two prisoners, long as they’re little
or awful friendly. The adjoining door goes to another room which is City Hall so we gotta keep our arrestees quiet till we get them down to the county jail.”

  “How do you keep them quiet?” Otto asked.

  “Shoot the fuckers with a tranquilizer dart,” Paco said. “What would you do with the animals we got around here?”

  Anemic Annie tried without success to get O. A. Jones on the radio.

  “He’s probly got his ghetto blaster going full on,” Paco said. “Why dontcha go on over to the Eleven Ninety-nine across the street. Get a cold one. Ill send O. A. Jones to ya in exactly forty-five minutes.”

  “Exactly forty-five minutes?”

  “That’s when his shift ends and he’ll suddenly be all through with whatever sleuthing he’s doing. He likes to get to the Eleven Ninety-nine before the first wave a secretaries and manicurists arrive from their jobs in Palm Springs. Among his many other faults he’s got a permanent erection.”

  “So much for hitting the links,” Otto sighed.

  “By the way,” Paco said, “when I got word where you boys’re staying I figured things’ve changed at L.A.P.D. since I worked there. When we’d go out a town on a case they’d put us up at the Nighty Nite Motel with enough expense money for two hamburgers and a soda pop.”

  The detectives were saved from Paco’s curiosity when the door swung open and Sergeant Coy Brickman entered. He was a tall man, taller than Sidney Blackpool, with furrowed cheeks and a mean-looking build. He was slightly older than Sidney Blackpool but looked lots older. His auburn hair was parted on the side and was receding. He stared at the two detectives without blinking and without speaking.

  “Coy, this’s Blackpool and Stringer,” Paco said. “My sergeant, Coy Brickman.”

  They shook hands, and still without having blinked his eyes, Coy Brickman said, “Welcome to Mineral Springs. Hear you’re gonna crack the Watson murder case.”

  “Not in my lifetime,” Otto said. “We’re just doing a semi-official follow-up to keep our boss happy.”

  “New leads?” Coy Brickman asked.

  “Just bullshit,” Otto said. “Some crap about the Watson kid visiting Hollywood the day he disappeared from the Palm Springs house. It’s nothing.”

  “Well, anything we can do,” Coy Brickman said.

  “You the only field supervisor?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

  “I got one other sergeant,” Paco said. “Harry Bright. He was one good cop. Gonna have trouble replacing him.”

  “Was?”

  “Harry had a stroke several months ago,” Paco said. “Then a heart attack. He won’t be coming back. Maybe not to this world even. Just lays in the hospital like petrified wood.”

  “He’s holding his own,” Coy Brickman said.

  “Anyway, go get yourselves a cold one,” Paco said. “I’ll send O. A. Jones over soon as he blows in from his latest crime-crushing adventure.”

  J. Edgar Gomez was washing dishes behind the bar of the Eleven Ninety-nine Club when he saw the two strangers stop in their tracks to gape at the mural of John Wayne pissing on the miniature of Michael Jackson and Prince.

  “I shoulda put Boy George between those two gender benders,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “Maybe I’ll do that one a these days when my artist is sober.”

  “Couple a beers,” Sidney Blackpool said, checking his watch and seeing that it was still too early for Johnnie Walker Black.

  “Kind you want?”

  “Drafts,” said Otto, thinking that if they were back in Palm Springs he’d order a beautiful exotic drink to put him in a holiday mood. It was depressing being in a cop saloon.

  There were ten men and one woman sitting at the bar or at wooden tables scattered around the little dance floor. One look and the detectives knew they were all cops except for a desert rat in a brand-new cowboy hat who was sitting alone next to the jukebox glaring at everybody who stepped up to drop a quarter in. Beavertail Bigelow was not in a party mood that afternoon.

  Six of the cops were from other desert police agencies. Representing Mineral Springs were Choo Choo Chester Conklin, Wingnut Bates and Nathan Hale Wilson, who was pretty well bagged for so early in the day.

  The cops were moaning about what working in the desert was doing to them.

  “Chapped lips. Jock rot to the knees,” Wingnut moaned. “Sometimes I think I never shoulda left Orange County.”

  “How about what this freaking desert air does to your hair and fingernails?” Nathan Hale Wilson griped. “I can’t keep them trimmed, they grow so fast. I was here a month and I looked like Howard Hughes!”

  “You should work Indian territory,” an off-duty Palm Springs cop complained. “I got a drunk call on two Agua Calientes yesterday and there’s me all by myself and I got these two Indian brothers fighting each other cause they didn’t have nobody else to fight, and they’re so big they look like dueling refrigerators, and one throws a punch from the vicinity of Arizona and knocks the other one clear over my car. And I’m standing there thinking, he’s a three-hundred-pounder. He thinks he’s Crazy Horse. He’s into a total uprising at this moment. He’s got two broken beer bottles in his mitts. And he’s rich!”

  “Yeah, well you should see Cat City now,” said a Cathedral City cop who was almost as drunk. “Sodom and Gomorrah East is what it is. AIDS and palimony is what it’s all about.”

  J. Edgar Gomez eyed the two strangers and said, “What department you guys work?”

  “L.A.P.D.,” Otto answered, wincing. The beer was so cold he put the glass down and grabbed his skull.

  “Drink it slow,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “Keep our beer icy. Come outta the heat and drink too fast it’s like a buck knife stuck in your skull. Here.” He gave Otto a glass of warm water. “Sip it.”

  “Wow!” Otto said after the pain subsided. “That is cold beer.”

  “Customers like it that way. How come you guys’re way out here?”

  “We’re in Palm Springs on vacation,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Have to talk to O. A. Jones. Know him?”

  “Sure,” the saloonkeeper said, scratching his belly, which was covered by an apron and a wet T-shirt. “He’ll be in pretty soon.”

  The door banged open just then and three policemen from Palm Springs P.D. swaggered in. J. Edgar Gomez shook his head and said, “Young cops these days, nobody can open a door without knocking holes in your plaster.”

  “Fred Astaire?” Sidney Blackpool said, pointing toward the jukebox. “I haven’t heard Fred Astaire, or even a jukebox, in I don’t know how long.”

  “ ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ ” J. Edgar Gomez grinned. “Far as I’m concerned, the world is divided between two groups a people: those that think Fred Astaire’s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ is the greatest side ever cut, and scumbags that don’t.”

  “My name’s Stringer,” Otto said, shaking hands with the saloonkeeper. “This is Sidney Blackpool.”

  “J. Edgar Gomez,” the saloonkeeper said, and then added, “Oh, shit!”

  They followed his eye line and saw that J. Edgar was looking about three feet above the floor at a midget in a tennis hat and tennis whites and a desert tan darker than any unemployed actor’s.

  “Oleg Gridley,” the saloonkeeper said. Then he glared at the cops at the other end of the bar and pointed at the “No trash sports” sign over the bar, causing Otto and Sidney Blackpool to shrug at each other.

  Oleg Gridley looked around the gloomy barroom, spotted the lone busty woman at the far end of the bar and hopped on the stool next to her by chinning up with both hands. He sat at eye level with her tits.

  “Hi, Portia,” the suntanned midget leered.

  “I knew this day was going too good,” she said, tipping up her glass of beer, looking like she’d had lots of them.

  “Portia Cassidy,” the saloonkeeper whispered to the detectives. “Not much of a face, but the best body in Mineral Springs. Everybody wants her, especially Oleg. We call them Bitch Cassidy and the Sunstroke Kid.”

  Jus
t then Bitch Cassidy said to the midget, “No, Oleg. It’s just that I don’t like perverts. Even big perverts.”

  Then after the midget whispered in her ear again, she said, “Oleg, I wouldn’t care it was big as King Kong’s. Size don’t impress me and I do not want a chiffon body wrap and a whipped-cream rubdown!”

  “I’d be good to you, Portia,” the passionate midget murmured. “I’m slow but thorough.”

  “Yeah, like a tarantula. I ain’t interested. And I don’t wanna do those filthy midget things, and if you don’t leave me alone I’m calling a cop!”

  “Maybe the things only sound filthy to nonmidgets,” J. Edgar Gomez offered.

  “I don’t understand you anymore!” Oleg said testily. “J. Edgar, gimme a double bourbon on the rocks. And give the lady another beer.”

  “It’s a living soap opera,” J. Edgar Gomez said to the detectives, as he poured the midget’s whiskey. “I’m starting to wonder how it’s gonna come out.”

  And then they began to arrive. First a pair of hairdressers from the ladies’ spa at the biggest downtown Palm Springs hotel. Then five tellers from a Palm Desert bank. Then four waitresses from a Rancho Mirage country club. Then the day-shift boys from eight police agencies, and by 5:30 in the afternoon the saloon was packed with drinkers, dancers, lechers, drunks, midgets and desert rats. Sidney Blackpool wondered how in hell they were going to find Officer O. A. Jones even if he did show up, and he should have arrived by now.

  The conversations raged around them as the saloon got hotter and smokier. Both detectives switched to hard booze in self-defense. The only difference from any cop saloon in L.A. was that the talk was often weather-oriented.

  “It’s so hot in summer,” Prankster Frank said to a new desert cop, “that I’ve started thinking in Celsius. It sounds cooler that way.”

  It was not essentially different in that most conversations were about women.

  “Look at her!” Nathan Hale Wilson said of Portia Cassidy who was dancing with a Palm Springs detective and trying to avoid the “accidental” touches of Oleg Gridley every time he waddled to the jukebox. “She’s the Lucretia Borgia of this valley but she could suck the Goodyear blimp through a garden hose.”