The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “And that reminds me,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I’m not ruling out Harry Bright. I wanna see him with my own eyes. Maybe he’s made a startling recovery.”

  “Corpse cops,” Otto said, shaking his head. “I wonder when you’re gonna add me to the suspect list.”

  “You’re right about having to trust somebody,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Let’s find that young cop, O. A. Jones. Somehow I trust that surfer.”

  They didn’t want anyone in the police department to know they were in town so they parked off the main drag half a block from the station house. They had to wait only twenty minutes before O. A. Jones came cruising by, drinking a soda pop and listening to the ghetto blaster in his patrol car. Sidney Blackpool tooted and waved the young cop over.

  “Follow me,” he said and made a right turn and another, before pulling to the curb.

  O. A. Jones drove up behind and got out. “What’s up, Sarge?” he asked, approaching on Sidney Blackpool’s side.

  “If I asked you for your help and requested you not to tell a living soul, would you do it?”

  “I’m a policeman. Why not?”

  “What if it was concerning another policeman? Would it make a difference?”

  “You mean on my department?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does Chief Pedroza know about it, whatever it is?”

  “No.”

  “Why’re you telling me then, and not the chief?”

  “Because you already know a piece of it and nobody else does.”

  “About the uke?”

  “Yeah. And also because I trust you in general.”

  The young cop chewed on that one for a moment and said, “Chief Pedroza gave me a job when I wasn’t welcome in Palm Springs anymore. I don’t wanna get him mad at me.”

  “I promise that in a couple a days I’ll talk to the chief one way or the other. I just want you to keep this confidence. For a couple a days.”

  The young cop hesitated but said, “Okay.”

  “Good. Now all we really want you to do is tell us about Sergeant Brickman and Sergeant Bright. That’s all. You see, that uke belonged to Sergeant Brickman. He bought it from a pawnshop two years ago.”

  “Wow!” the young cop whispered. “You don’t think he … that ain’t possible!”

  “Probably not. But tell us what you know about them. Start with Sergeant Brickman.”

  “Well, he used to be on San Diego P.D. So was Sergeant Bright. Harry Bright was the one recommended Coy Brickman to the chief long before I came. In fact, Sergeant Bright recommended everybody. Chief Pedroza won’t hire anyone without Harry Bright’s okay.” Then the young cop scratched his neck nervously and said, “Sarge, Coy Brickman couldn’t kidnap and kill somebody! He’s a little quiet and standoffish, but he’s a good sergeant. And Sergeant Bright? Harry Bright’s like …”

  “Everyone’s daddy,” Otto said.

  “Yeah, that’s right. He couldn’t be involved in any kind a crime, let alone kidnap. Let alone murder!”

  “I get the feeling most people on your department were in trouble or unhappy somewhere else before coming to Mineral Springs,” Otto said.

  “We all worked other departments, that’s true,” O. A. Jones said, leaning in the window now, looking furtively up and down the street.

  “Did Sergeant Bright and Sergeant Brickman get in trouble in San Diego?”

  “Not that I know of,” O. A. Jones said. “Sergeant Brickman once told me he got a low placement on the sergeant’s list because some deputy chief hated him. He figured he’d spend his whole career as a patrolman so he called Harry Bright who was already here. And he made the move. Far as Sergeant Bright, well, he mighta got in trouble drinking down there, I don’t know. He was way over forty years old when Chief Pedroza hired him, so our city musta waived the age requirement to get an experienced sergeant from a big city. Harry Bright’s been a heavy drinker for a long time, I think.”

  “He’s a drunk, you mean,” Otto said.

  “Well, you know how it is in police work. There’s a guy or two at every station. Whiskey face, whiskey voice, whiskey eyes, but they always show up to work on time. Always have a shoeshine and a pressed uniform. Always do a job. That was Sergeant Bright.” The kid wrinkled his brow, saying, “I don’t like this at all, Sarge. Harry Bright’s the best supervisor I ever met.”

  “We’ve heard sometimes he’d get drunk on the graveyard shift,” Otto said. “Maybe sleep it off parked on a trail over in Solitaire Canyon. He wasn’t a saint, for chrissake.”

  “Look, son,” Sidney Blackpool said. “We’re not Internal Affairs headhunters trying to nail a cop for boozing on the job. We’re investigating a homicide. We need a feel for these two sergeants. You’re not being asked to be a snitch.”

  “Everybody hits the hole over in Solitaire Canyon,” O. A. Jones said. “That’s where the cops around here catch a few z’s on a quiet graveyard shift. You know what it’s like trying to stay awake in a town like this when there ain’t a call for six hours? Far as him being drunk on graveyard, sure, I seen him looking awful bad at eight o’clock in the morning just before he went home. But he was always there if you called him. Harry Bright’d never let you down.”

  “Know where they live?” Sidney Blackpool asked. “Bright and Brickman?”

  “Here in town,” O. A. Jones said. “Harry Bright lives in the last mobile home on Jackrabbit Road. A residential cul-de-sac with about eight little mobile homes on it. There’s no one there now that he’s had his stroke. We check it a couple times every night to make sure the place is secure.”

  “Who has a key?”

  “Sergeant Brickman waters the plants and such. He’s keeping the place up till Harry Bright gets well, but from what I hear he ain’t never gonna get well.”

  “Where’s Sergeant Brickman live?” Otto asked.

  “Smoke Tree Lane. First house on your left off of Rattlesnake Road. Two-story wood frame, with blue shutters. Lives with his wife and two daughters.”

  “Are they best friends?” Otto asked. “Bright and Brickman?”

  “I’ll tell you how good,” O. A. Jones said. “When Sergeant Brickman’s oldest girl had a kidney disease and was on dialysis, Sergeant Bright went into the hospital and tried to give up one of his kidneys for a transplant. We heard about it from the doctor who gives us our annual physicals. Everybody got a big laugh over that one. The croakers looked at Harry and explained how he wasn’t quite a suitable donor. For one thing, Harry looked like he needed a couple organs. Like a new liver and maybe a heart, they told him. Turns out they were right about the heart. I don’t think the liver’s failed yet but it probably will. Anyway, that’s the kind a man he is. I’m telling you, Sarge, you’re following a false trail here. If that uke’s the music box I heard, there has to be an explanation.”

  “Does Coy Brickman sing?” Sidney Blackpool asked. “Or play a stringed instrument? Or Harry Bright, maybe?”

  “I don’t know,” O. A. Jones said. “Not around the station anyway. Maybe in the shower.”

  “By the way,” Sidney Blackpool said. “You said Sergeant Brickman takes care of Harry Bright’s mobile home. Where’s Harry Bright’s relatives?”

  “His ex-wife lives in one a the country clubs down in Rancho Mirage. Married to a rich guy. Chief Pedroza told me Harry had one kid, but the kid was killed. Bought it in that San Diego jet crash several years ago. A boy.”

  Sidney Blackpool didn’t hear another word. His mind was racing but it had nothing to do with whatever O. A. Jones was saying. He was trying to ward off a panic attack.

  “I said, is that all, Sarge? Can I go now? I better get back on the air.”

  “What is it, Sidney?” Otto said. “You look like you just got a mouthful a J. Edgar’s chili.”

  “It’s uh … it’s … I just had an idea. Nothing. It’s uh, nothing.”

  “Well, if that’s it, then,” O. A. Jones said. “Lemme know how this goes. It’s bothering me a lot. I f
eel a little sick to my stomach.”

  “Sure, uh … sure,” Sidney Blackpool said, feeling the sweat beading on his forehead and lip and armpits. “Yeah … uh, wait. One more thing …” He was stalling, trying to pull himself together. The cold fire was leaving his temples and neck. The panic was now just a chunk of lead in the pit of his stomach.

  “What’s wrong, Sidney?” Otto was starting to look alarmed.

  “It’s a … an idea. An … uh, elusive thought. You know how that happens sometimes.”

  “Happens to me sometimes,” O. A. Jones said. “Déjà vu.”

  “Something like that,” Sidney Blackpool said, wiping his upper lip. “One more thing comes to me now. Where’s Harry Bright being treated?”

  “He was in a regular hospital for a long time,” O. A. Jones said. “Now he’s in a nursing home, a semi-hospital kind a place. Down near Indio. I drove Sergeant Brickman down there one night when we were the only two on graveyard. He visited Sergeant Bright for maybe ten minutes. I waited in the unit listening for calls. That was maybe three months ago. It’s called Desert Star Nursing Home, on Highway One eleven this side a the Indio city limit.”

  “Has anyone actually seen Harry Bright lately?” Sidney Blackpool asked. “Besides Sergeant Brickman?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s the representative of our department. Chief Pedroza said it’s too depressing. Harry just laying there like that, wasting away.”

  “Okay, son, you can go now,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Stay in touch.”

  “Did you think a what gave you the feeling?”

  “what?”

  “That déjà vu feeling. Did the thought come to you?”

  “It will,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Be seeing you.”

  Otto had to settle for two Big Macs, fries, and a milk shake. And he had to eat them on the run. Sidney Blackpool was determined to see Harry Bright with his own eyes. Neither man spoke, Otto because he was trying to eat the hamburgers while his partner pushed the Toyota seventy miles an hour down the desert highways, and Sidney Blackpool because he hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of hearing that Harry Bright had lost a son.

  Sidney Blackpool knew he’d have to deal with it soon. He wanted to hold off until later when he could afford to let the fear and despair run rampant. Three A.M. would be the perfect time for such an exercise. He could even make it doubly frightening by drinking lots of booze. But he’d have to deal with it tonight: Victor Watson, Sidney Blackpool and now Harry Bright! All victims of the most outrageous of nature’s reversals. Wanderers looking for pieces of themselves. It couldn’t be just a perverse bit of chance. An omen, Victor Watson had said. But detectives don’t believe in omens, not detectives like Black Sid. He hadn’t believed in omens even when he still believed in something.

  It looked more like a motel than a nursing home or hospital. It was a one-story complex of flat-roofed buildings scattered around two acres. The sign in front was neon lit. But it was tidy and probably as acceptable as a middle-income nursing home ever gets. Which is to say it looked like the kind of place that would precipitate a self-inflicted gunshot wound should Sidney Blackpool ever find himself so helplessly in need.

  The detective was pulling into the nursing-home parking lot when he saw it: a Mineral Springs patrol car.

  “Goddamn!” He cranked the wheel to the left and punched the accelerator.

  “Coy Brickman?” Otto said.

  “Must be.”

  Sidney Blackpool parallel-parked the Toyota half a block down the street, hidden from view by a Salvation Army truck. Both detectives got out, walked toward the far side of the nursing home’s parking lot, stood behind a smoke tree and watched.

  There were a few people coming and going in the parking lot. They saw two elderly women in wheelchairs being taken for an outing by Latino orderlies. Then they saw a blue Mercedes 450 SL pull into the lot and park beside the patrol car. A slender suntanned blonde got out. She wore a blue, yellow and gray graphic-silk chemise with blue pumps.

  She was the kind who made it tough for a policeman to guess her age. Designer clothes, winter tans, hundred-dollar haircuts and tints, Mercedeses, face-lifts. Sidney Blackpool always supposed that such women were ten years older than they looked: the Alfred Hitchcock lady. She leaned against the Mercedes and smoked. She didn’t walk toward the door of the nursing home.

  The detectives watched her because she didn’t fit. There weren’t any other visitors driving a Mercedes to this seedy nursing home. They watched for fifteen minutes. Then the door opened and Coy Brickman, in uniform, emerged from the building. The woman walked up to him and they shook hands.

  “I’d give the rest a the ten grand to hear this little conversation,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “I’d give a couple bucks myself,” said Otto.

  When Coy Brickman turned as though he were about to say good-bye, the blonde shrugged her shoulders and extended her hand again to Coy Brickman who took it for a second. Then he turned and got into the patrol unit.

  “Damn!” Sidney Blackpool said. “Can you make out her license number, Otto?”

  “You kidding? My eyes’re forty years old.”

  “Come on, Brickman, get your ass out of that parking lot!” Sidney Blackpool muttered.

  But the woman in the Mercedes drove out first and turned back on the highway toward Palm Springs. The detectives jumped in the Toyota and Sidney Blackpool started the engine and watched through the rearview mirror.

  “Come on, come on!” he said.

  Finally Coy Brickman drove out, turned left on the highway and cruised in the same direction as the Mercedes. “We gotta risk it, you wanna get her number,” Otto said.

  Sidney Blackpool nodded. The blonde wouldn’t be the type to spot a tail, but Coy Brickman might. And she was already a quarter of a mile ahead of them. Sidney Blackpool was hanging back in the number-two lane behind a pickup truck when they got a break. Coy Brickman turned the patrol car right on Cook Street in Indian Wells, heading toward Highway 10 and Mineral Springs.

  Sidney Blackpool stepped on it, blowing through a red light when there was no cross traffic coming, and caught her three signals later.

  “Hope you got this Toyota well insured,” Otto said.

  They got close enough for Otto to jot down her license number, then they backed off and followed the car through Indian Wells, Palm Desert, and into Rancho Mirage where she turned right.

  The detectives quickly found themselves looking at a guarded kiosk and a funny-looking Indian totem bird and a sign that said THUNDERBIRD COUNTRY CLUB.

  “It’s on our list!” Otto said. “Tamarisk, Thunderbird, Mission Hills. Let’s see, what the hell was the name a the member at Thunderbird we were supposed to ask for? Shit. I left all the notes in the room.”

  “Think, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “Let’s see. Penbroke? No. Pennypacker? No. Pennington! That’s it. Pennington at Thunderbird!”

  “Good boy!” Sidney Blackpool said.

  The detective pulled up to the gate and Sidney Blackpool said, “We’re Blackpool and Stringer. Mister Pennington’s arranged for a game of golf for us. I believe he left our names with the club pro.”

  It took the security office a couple of minutes to make the call, then he said, “Drive right in, gentlemen. The doorman can direct you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sidney!” Otto Stringer cried as they were driving toward the clubhouse.

  “What is it?”

  “A former president of the United States lives here! What if we have to play a game to make our investigation look kosher? What if I’m playing golf with a freaking ex-president of the whole freaking United States?”

  CHAPTER 14

  CHARADE

  Otto Stringer was directed by the doorman to the pro shop where he introduced himself and got a starting time for a game he knew might not be played. Sidney Blackpool headed straight for the bar, looking for a telephone so he could run the license number to get a name
and address that he hoped would belong to a Thunderbird member. Of course, they both believed that the blonde had to be the former Mrs. Harry Bright.

  The clubhouse was not as stylish as the one at Tamarisk. It was done in rugged flagstone and featured lots of Indian art, the staple of desert designers, along with a mix of Chinese artifacts. It had the comfortable look of a clubhouse that had been there awhile, to which the pictures in the lobby attested.

  There were photos of Bob Hope who is at least an honorary member of nearly every club in the desert, along with those of the other man who shares that distinction, former president Gerald Ford. Sidney Blackpool recognized one of Thunderbird’s first members, the late Hoagy Carmichael, and Bing Crosby.

  He found a pay phone and ran the license number through his office at Hollywood detectives. It was registered to Herbert T. Decker with a Rancho Mirage address, which Sidney Blackpool figured to be a street right here at Thunderbird Country Club.

  He walked into the luncheon room looking for the blonde. A fiftyish waitress said, “Help you, sir?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m a first-time guest. Just moseying.”

  “Have a look around,” she said, as friendly as they’d been at Tamarisk. She was clearing the luncheon tables.

  “Have you seen Mrs. Decker?” he asked. “I believe that’s her name. A very attractive blond lady.”

  “Yes, that’d be Mrs. Decker. No, I haven’t seen her today, sir. Have you checked the Copper Room? There was a private party in there today.”

  Sidney Blackpool strolled back into the foyer and through the main dining room, which wasn’t in use during the day. He noticed some people in a mirrored room off to the left. He got closer and saw where it got its name. All of the service was copper, or appeared to be: platters, plates, goblets, knives, forks. Then he saw her.

  She was talking to a dowager in a wool crepe jacket studded with rhinestones, worn over ballooning tuxedo trouser pants. The older woman was overdressed for this time of day but would be ready for action six hours later. The blonde was obviously apologizing for missing whatever had been going on there. She shook hands with several people, kissing the cheek of one woman and two men before she left. Instead of going back toward the foyer, she turned and walked out onto the patio beside the pool. It was a contemporary U-shaped pool with a small bandstand behind it. Sidney Blackpool could imagine parties and luaus on this patio. He might attend parties in places like this as an executive for Watson Industries.