The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “There’s not a cause for every effect,” Otto said. “Life’s a crap game.”

  “Partner,” said Sidney Blackpool, “you have to make believe there’s cause and effect at work or you’ll never solve a whodunit.”

  “Sidney, I realize an old corpse cop like you has instincts about dead bodies. Just like the buzzards and coyotes and scavengers around these parts. But if you don’t get me fed soon, I’ll be the second cadaver they pull outta Solitaire Canyon.”

  “Let’s go get some grease,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  At about the time that Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer were in the desert getting faked out of their loafers by a foxy owl, Prankster Frank Zamelli was patrolling the outskirts of Mineral Springs so bored he could spit. He was teamed up with Maynard Rivas but couldn’t get the big Indian cop to go along with anything.

  “I’m depressed, Maynard,” he said. “What say we drive by the exterminator’s store, steal the big statue of the Terminix bug and sneak it into the Mineral Water Hotel. Then we could call the maid and say, ‘Come quick! We got a big roach in our room!’ ”

  “Paco said no more pranks. You’re starting to wear him down a little bit.”

  “But I’m depressed!” Prankster Frank griped as the Indian cruised the main drag watching Beavertail Bigelow staggering against the red light, heading for the Eleven Ninety-nine.

  “Good thing Beavertail don’t drive no more,” Maynard Rivas said.

  Just then O. A. Jones came blasting by on his way to the station after having booked a drunk driver down at the county slam in Indio. He was trying to get to the Eleven Ninety-nine before the first gaggle of manicurists went home to dinner.

  “There he goes,” the Indian said, “taking his end-of-shift O. A. Jones Memorial Roller Coaster Ride. Only thing can stop that guy is a high curb.”

  “I’m depressed,” Prankster Frank said again. “You wouldn’t wanna borrow J. Edgar’s catamaran, would ya? We could raise the sails and haul it to the hotel swimming pool. Then we could call J. Edgar and …”

  “The possum gag was enough for one night,” Maynard Rivas said. “We’ll be lucky we don’t get beefed over that one.”

  “It was worth it,” Prankster Frank said.

  He was referring to a call earlier in the evening at No-Blood Alley where one of the old dolls was in a tizzy because an opossum had gotten into her mobile home. Upon spotting the animal she immediately went flying out the door but her cat didn’t make it. When the cops got there the terrible yowling of the cat and hissing of the opossum had died to a dreadful silence.

  “Officers,” the old dame wept. “Millie’s inside. The possum probably killed her!”

  “Who’s Millie?” Prankster Frank asked.

  “My cat!”

  Prankster Frank and Maynard Rivas drew their sticks knowing that an opossum can have a nasty temper when riled. Both had worked the desert long enough not to be fooled by any possum-playing either. The little bastards would lie there belly up with tongue lolling and eyes staring as unblinking as Sergeant Coy Brickman’s, and the second you got close they’d come up like a furry knuckleball. Both cops had their clubs cocked and ready.

  Prankster Frank crept into the bedroom of the mobile home and heard the soft mewing behind the bed. He’d never heard of an opossum killing a cat but you never knew. The mewing got rhythmic and louder. He crept in after waving Maynard Rivas to stand still. He peeked behind the bed and caught them in the flashlight beam. It was the same as many other sneaks and peeks in his police career, exactly the same.

  The opossum had that spotted tabby pressed against the wall and was humping for all he was worth. In fact, Prankster Frank hadn’t seen such a hosing since Johnny Holmes stopped doing porn flicks. He switched off the light, turned and walked back outside with Maynard Rivas.

  “Just leave the door open and wait a while,” he told the distraught old dame. “He’ll be through in a few minutes. Of course they might want a cigarette after.”

  When the cop told her what was going on in her bedroom, she got mad and said she didn’t like the way he was making light of a tragedy, and she was calling Paco Pedroza about his unprofessional demeanor first thing in the morning.

  Afterward, Maynard Rivas asked Prankster Frank if he had to make the crack about the cigarette.

  “Maynard, when you get a chance for a line you gotta deliver the line,” said Prankster Frank.

  “If you’re Johnny Carson,” the big Indian said. “I don’t want another lecture from Paco. He already said he didn’t appreciate you getting Choo Choo Chester to do his Stevie Wonder smile-and-head-roll when he was jerkin off that rubber dildo in the locker room.”

  “I thought it was a panic,” Prankster Frank said. “Old Chester going ‘Ain’t it wooooonderful’ while he’s loping that old rubber donkey!”

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t a sent Anemic Annie in there on a phony errand. Poor old broad.”

  “I’m soooorry,” Prankster Frank said. “Hey, tell you what! Let’s drive by Shaky Jim’s just one time! Just one lightweight prank and I’ll call it a night and go to sleep or something.”

  “Okay,” Maynard Rivas sighed, pressing the accelerator and heading for the outskirts of Mineral Springs.

  There were a few houses scattered in the path of the wind funnel, houses unprotected by eucalyptus. The residents, who got in there for very low rent, usually called it a wrap after one winter of living in the gales. Not so Shaky Jim. He wanted to be out of town but he was afraid of the crank dealers in the canyons. He settled for the wind, but he always had nightmares of being blown, like Dorothy and Toto, clear into another county.

  Shaky Jim had lots of fears. He feared that if he got arrested one more time for dealing pot, the cops might contact the welfare people and try to cut off his monthly checks. Knowing this, Prankster Frank liked to cruise down the highway and suddenly whip into Shaky Jim’s driveway. He’d jump on the brakes so hard he’d go into a locked skid, and start yelling and slamming all four doors of the police car like it was the biggest dope raid since the French Connection. After which, Shaky Jim would invariably run to his stash and flush it all-maybe $500 worth of grass, which was all he could afford to deal at one time-thereby clogging his pipes. The local Roto-Rooter man just loved Prankster Frank who had brought him lots of business since joining the Mineral Springs P.D.

  Prankster Frank and Maynard Rivas were out there on the highway terrorizing Shaky Jim when Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer came driving by. The detectives looked curiously at the Mineral Springs patrol car, which did a wheelie in the driveway of a lonely house, after which two uniformed cops started slamming car doors and yelling commands in different voices and languages.

  “Hands up!” Prankster Frank yelled.

  “Más arriba!” Maynard hollered.

  “Dung lai!” Frank bellowed, calling on his memories of Vietnam.

  And so forth. They yelled nonsense and any gibberish that came to mind and then jumped back in the car ready to do a U-ee and scorch back toward Mineral Springs, except that Sidney Blackpool got out of his Toyota and waved them down.

  “Were on a hot call!” Prankster Frank said, figuring a lost tourist needed directions. “We gotta go!”

  “Were Blackpool and Stringer from L.A.P.D.” The detective showed them his badge.

  “Oh, yeah,” Prankster Frank said, and Maynard cut the engine. “You were in the Eleven Ninety-nine the other night. Heard all about you.”

  As he was satisfying the curiosity of the detectives as to what the hell the performance they’d witnessed was all about, Shaky Jim came shaking out of the house in his undershirt and bare feet with his hands high in the air, hands all green from processing pot.

  He was younger than Harlan Penrod but not by much. He was smoking a cigarette, or rather, one dangled from his trembling lips.

  “I can’t take it no more!” he cried. “I’m moving away. I can’t take it no more!”

  “ ‘Shoot if you must t
his old gray head!’ ” Prankster Frank said. “He gets real dramatic sometimes.”

  “I quit! I had enough!” Shaky Jim cried. “I’m moving to Sun City. You can just go wreck Billy Hightower’s business. You ain’t gonna have me to kick around no more.”

  Shaky Jim stood like that in the beam of the headlights while the detectives looked on in amazement.

  “I think maybe you guys went a little too far,” Otto said. “He’s quoting Richard Nixon.”

  “Who’s Billy Hightower?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

  “A biker lives up in Solitaire Canyon. President of the local chapter of an outlaw motorcycle gang that does nothing but cook methamphetamine and ride their choppers and hogs all over the desert.”

  “Why don’t ya never bust Billy Hightower?” Shaky Jim wailed. “He deals more in a week than I made all year. You let the spook slide just cause he was one a you.”

  “What’s he babbling about?” Otto asked.

  “Billy Hightower’s an ex-cop,” Maynard Rivas explained. “San Bernardino sheriffs, I think. He was fired for knocking his captain into a punch bowl or something at some kind a cop party. He’s a Nam vet like most a the bikers in the gang. A crank dealer. I never heard a any those lowlifes having the class to deal real big. Crystal’s their thing. A lowlife drug.”

  “Yes, he does!” Shaky Jim said, approaching the patrol car with his arms still in the air. “Billy Hightower deals big to kids from down Palm Springs. You never bust Billy cause he’s one a your own!”

  “Go back to bed, Jim,” Prankster Frank said. “You’re spoiling my prank with all this hollering.”

  While Shaky Jim trembled back toward the house, Sidney Blackpool looked up the canyon to the lights twinkling by the dirt roads on the plateau. “Think he’s smoking it or what? I mean, about Hightower dealing to Palm Springs kids?”

  “I never heard it,” Maynard Rivas said. “But you never know about Billy. He’s got a little more class than the rednecks he runs with.”

  “A brother running with redneck bikers?” Otto said. “An ex-cop to boot?”

  “That’s why they like him,” Prankster Frank said. “He knows police work. Also, he can beat the living shit outta any two of them at once. He’s got more redneck admirers than any spade this side a Charlie Pride.”

  “He ever come into town?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

  “Every night just about,” Maynard Rivas said. “Remember the other night at the Eleven Ninety-nine? That dude sporting his colors?”

  “Colors?”

  “His bike jacket with the Cobras logo on the back. That big mean-looking motherfucker in the corner was Billy Hightower.”

  “He drinks in a cop bar?”

  “Guess he still likes to pretend,” Maynard Rivas said. “Maybe he’s snooping. Anyway, he behaves himself and don’t bother nobody and nobody bothers him. Course none a us ever sit with him or talk with him or anything. Except Sergeant Harry Bright. He used to always buy Billy a drink. Harry Bright’d see some good in a sidewinder if it had him by the nuts. Harry Bright had a stroke. Ain’t around no more.”

  “So we heard,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Back in Solitaire Canyon over to the right there’s a bunch a shaggy trees. Just past the fork in the road, I mean. Was the Watson car found there?”

  “Those’re tamarisk trees,” Maynard Rivas said. “Big ol dirty things. They shoot em on sight down the other end a the valley. Yeah, that’s where they found the car all right.”

  “We saw a biker out there tonight nosing around,” Otto Stringer said.

  “Could be he was dumping a load a drug garbage,” Maynard Rivas said. “There’s always a lot a syringes laying around below those shacks and I don’t think there’s a diabetic up there.”

  “Awful dark in the desert at night,” Prankster Frank warned. “I knew a local cop shot his own car to death chasing a burglar. That’s almost suicide, I guess.”

  “We gotta go now,” Maynard Rivas said. “Better stay out a the desert at night or that Toyota’s gonna have more dimples than Kirk Douglas.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE OUTLAW

  There were two women employed by the Mineral Springs Police Department, but only one was a sworn law officer. Ruth Kosko, the department’s sole detective, was known of course as Ruth the Sleuth. The other woman was Paco’s secretary, record clerk and radio operator, Annie Paskewicz, called Anemic Annie from the days when she worked for the crime lab in San Diego, drawing blood from arrestees suspected of being under the influence of drugs.

  There seemed to be someone like Anemic Annie in crime labs and county morgues everywhere. She was pallid in winter and summer, not albino white but close, and she’d formerly spent her days drawing and analyzing blood while seeming to have none of her own. Anemic Annie always wore sensible shoes that made clunky footsteps like Boris Karloff, and she was yet another law-enforcement burnout, biding her time for a pension. It was because of her ravaged nerves that she’d left her job in San Diego and come to Mineral Springs. She’d gotten so nervous in mid-life that she couldn’t make a clean hit anymore.

  Once when they brought in a junkie for a blood sample, Annie broke the Guinness world record for misses with a syringe. She made twenty-six straight attempts to hit a vein without success. The horsed-out junkie started yelling and screaming about Annie poking more holes than the Three Musketeers, and the narcs who’d arrested the hype decided that Annie’s antics would be deemed cruel and unusual punishment so they had to let the guy go.

  People started spreading rumors that poor Annie carried her syringe at port arms. They claimed she had pulled out bone marrow during that world-record performance. Cops said that she had to work nights, and never ate garlic, and slept in a box of dirt with a lid. People warned if you owned her favorite flavor, type AB, not to get your neck too close or you’d be sporting the world’s biggest hickey.

  Finally she got sick of it and telephoned a cop she used to know in San Diego who was working as a sergeant at a little police department in the Coachella Valley. An interview was arranged during which Sergeant Harry Bright said, “Paco, you’ll never find a harder-working woman than Annie here.”

  Anemic Annie gave up orchids in San Diego for a cactus garden in Mineral Springs, and found that if she wore a big straw hat and long skirts, her pale skin did okay in the dry heat. She was generally much happier than when she was bloodletting down south.

  On the evening that Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer were getting the crap scared out of them in the desert, Anemic Annie and Ruth the Sleuth were commiserating at the Mirage Saloon, neither wanting to drink at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club because of all the chauvinist pigs that hung around there. But both knew if they wanted to score with some young hunking cop they had little choice in Mineral Springs other than to boogie over there in the shank of the night.

  Ruth the Sleuth was in a snit because she’d worked Mineral Springs for over two years and despite all her sleuthing hadn’t solved a single whodunit homicide. Of course there hadn’t been a whodunit homicide in Mineral Springs during the two years, but Ruth couldn’t hold her bourbon and wouldn’t be mollified.

  She said to Anemic Annie, “I bet I could’ve done something by now with the Watson case. They found the body in our town and Palm Springs P.D. never even asked me to come in on the investigation. And now two dicks from Hollywood show up and they don’t ask me either.”

  “I wish Gerry Ferraro had got elected,” Anemic Annie griped. “Then they’d treat us different, the bastards.”

  They both knew that they’d better leave that kind of talk outside if they eventually sauntered over to the Eleven Ninety-nine to search for a big hunk.

  Ruth the Sleuth was a burly young woman, and thus had some appeal to the midget Oleg Gridley who was sitting morosely at the end of the bar, his chin just above bar level where he cried in his beer over Bitch Cassidy, but despaired of winning her heart.

  “Harry Bright was the only human being in this sexist organizat
ion,” Ruth the Sleuth griped. “Probably replace poor old Harry with another Prankster Frank or something.”

  “I’d like to stick a needle in Prankster Frank’s frigging arm and suck him dry,” Anemic Annie said to her fourth Tom Collins, making Ruth the Sleuth wonder if the vampire rumors had some substance.

  “I’d like to stick Portia Cassidy’s little pink rose with anything that’d make her love me!” Oleg Gridley cried boozily from his end of the bar.

  “You got awful big ears for a teeny guy,” Ruth said. “Whadda we gotta do for some privacy around here?”

  “You think men treat you bad?” Oleg wailed, nearly drunk enough for a crying jag. “That’s cause they’re bigger’n you. Everybody’s bigger’n me. Your left tit’s bigger’n my ass!”

  “You oughtta clean up your act, Oleg,” Ruth advised, as boozy as the midget. “You get drunk’n you always start talking like a disgusting scum-sucking little creep. That’s why Portia Cassidy hates your disgusting little guts.”

  “I just don’t understand the female sex,” Oleg moaned. “I do everything for women and I can’t get love!”

  “So get rid of your collection of revolting sex aids you’re always bragging about,” said Anemic Annie.

  “I’d do almost anything,” said Oleg Gridley. “I wouldn’t give up my genuine oak chastity belt with the glory hole drilled in it. That’s an antique!”

  “Lemme think about your problem,” Ruth the Sleuth said, tapping on the glass with her pencil. Then she looked behind the bar, made a sleuthlike note or two, and grinned at the midget.

  “Elementary, my dear Oleg,” she said. “I can help you score with Portia Cassidy.”

  “You can, Ruth?” the midget cried. “Oh, I’d be so happy! I’d do anything for you! I’d even put you in the Wamsutta wonderland of my little trundle bed! I’d show you my blow-up donkey with the life-size …”