The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Let’s make this short,” Otto said.

  “Okay,” said Coy Brickman. “Well, you could say there’s this old cop who’s pretty close to his pension and he’s up there in the canyon doing what he does. Getting drunk and playing a uke and singing songs like ‘Make Believe’ or other oldies. He hears a crashing noise. And then he sees a flash of fire. It shoots up in the air and then settles down when the wind blows it against the rocks.

  “Maybe he thinks it’s a prospector, or a camper with a blown butane stove. He drops the uke and runs to the trunk of his patrol unit and grabs a fire extinguisher and heads toward that flame back behind the canyon wall, hoping nobody got hurt. Of course, a forty-nine-year-old cop with a skin full of hooch and only months away from a stroke and a heart attack wouldn’t be in very good shape to begin with. And by the time he picks his way through the rocks with his flashlight, he’s all worn out. Then he comes on it. The wrecked car. It’s burning.

  “He thought it was only the wind howling at first but he gets close as he can, which is pretty close because the wind’s blowing the flames away from him and into the rocky wall. He hears it and knows it’s not the wind. Someone’s screaming.

  “He runs up to the car but it’s almost engulfed, and his little fire extinguisher is useless and he sees a young guy pinned underneath. The kid’s enveloped in gasoline fire from his waist down and the fire’s licking up and the kid sees him and throws out his arms and starts screaming like a child for his daddy. But the wind shifts and the fire keeps licking around and the car’s all consumed but the kid won’t stop screaming and maybe the face in the fire looks like a face he once found on the ground … but that’s another story. Anyway, the old drunk, the sick crazy drunk cop, he pulls out his piece and …”

  Otto Stringer became aware he wasn’t breathing when his chest heaved. He looked at his partner who only stared. “Go on, Brickman,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “Well, for a fifty-grand fairy tale let’s say he fired one, two, three rounds at that doomed boy. Let’s say he didn’t even know if a slug hit the kid or if the kid passed out. But at least the boy slumped down into the flames and stopped screaming. Then let’s say the sick crazy drunk old cop ran back to his unit and tossed the fire extinguisher in and drove off without thinking of his ukulele and went straight to another cop’s house and got him out of bed and told him more or less what happened.

  “Let’s say the other cop thought about it very calmly and made a few decisions. Let’s say he took the old drunk home and put him to bed and covered for him with a story that he got sick and had to go home. Let’s say the friend thought a whole lot about the old drunk only having a short way to go for his pension. And thought about how then the drunk could live whatever years he had left with a little peace and dignity. Let’s say when the friend put the old drunk to bed he even took a look around a room like this. At all the pictures. At a make-believe house.

  Maybe after enough booze and memories and sickness it did become an enchanted cottage for the old drunk. Maybe the friend just said, fuck it, this guy’s had enough.”

  “So there never was a murder in your fifty-grand story!” Otto said, looking at his partner. “That’s why you couldn’t work it out, Sidney. There never was a murder!”

  “Not in my story,” Coy Brickman said. “I don’t know how Watson’d like that, but I can’t come up with anything more believable for you. Yet even without a murder there was a crime of sorts: voluntary manslaughter? Maybe involuntary manslaughter, given all the circumstances. Well, since mercy killing isn’t even legal for doctors, the old drunk cop in my story would be in some serious trouble. They just don’t give pensions for mercy killing, far as I know. In fact, you can bet the D.A.’d say that if he wasn’t drunk, there were other courses of action open to him. So if he didn’t get jail time he’d get fired and lose his pension and spend the rest of his life living on handouts and eating dog food. That’s why his buddy stepped in.

  “Anyway, that’s how I’d tell it. So the friend cleaned and reloaded the drunk’s gun and went back to the canyon the next day as soon as he realized the uke was lost. A uke that could maybe be traced. And he took a peek at the burned car and found two bullet holes in the windshield where the old drunk’d missed. So he knocked the glass out and hoped the drunk hadn’t even hit the kid who was torched like a matchstick. The buddy hoped the kid had burned to death. But then the buddy never had the compassion for his fellowman that the drunk had.

  “But the old drunk didn’t have compassion for himself, and after he got sober he wanted to step right up and tell what happened. Only now the tables were turned. His friend had already covered for him and obliterated evidence of the gunshots. In fact, his friend had aided and abetted, and might be called an accessory if there was a manslaughter rap to face. So the friend persuaded the old drunk that they had to keep mum now, for the buddy’s sake if not for the drunk’s. And that’s the way it ended.

  “In a way, something happened to their friendship after that. The old drunk, who had more than enough heartbreak in his miserable life, now had a big load of guilt to carry every time he thought of the parents not knowing what really happened to their dead boy. He was always thinking of how the burned corpse was out there in the canyon for two days with the animals.

  “So maybe the drunk’s buddy, with all those good intentions that lead people straight to hell, had actually increased the load the old drunk was already carrying in life. And which was leading straight to a monster headache and a limp right arm and a bed where he ended up diapered and drooling like a baby.”

  And now Coy Brickman was no longer looking at them with unblinking eyes. He was blinking quite a bit because his eyes were damp.

  “That’s the story I’d tell for fifty grand. If I wanted fifty grand as bad as you guys must want it. But of course this is all a make-believe story so maybe Watson wouldn’t think it was worth fifty cents. Maybe you shouldn’t ever tell such a silly story to anyone because you’d sure look dumb trying to prove a single bit of it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t imagine Harry Bright’s missing gun is ever gonna turn up anywhere, is it?” Otto asked, handing his borrowed gun to Coy Brickman.

  “The desert wind doesn’t uncover a gun as easy as a ukulele,” Coy Brickman said, looking at Sidney Blackpool.

  Then the tall sergeant got up and walked to the videocassette recorder. He punched the button and turned on the television. “Watch the end of the movie. I’ll be at the station with Paco. I can repeat this fifty-grand make-believe story for him if you want, but why not just tell Paco that you’re saying good-bye. Better yet, don’t even say good-bye. Just go back to Hollywood where you belong.”

  “How’s this make-believe story come out?” Otto asked. “The Enchanted Cottage, I mean.”

  “It comes out real happy,” Coy Brickman said. “The young couple get married and probably even have a son, if you like to imagine past the movie ending. Maybe he’s just like Danny Bright. The three of them probably live happy ever after. I guess that’s the way you’d imagine the story if you started to live a make-believe life.”

  “Okay, Brickman,” Sidney Blackpool said. “You’ve made a lot a make-believe points here tonight. Now I’ve just about had enough a you and Patsy Bright and Harry Bright and whatever fantasy he created in this house trailer. I’ve had enough sad stories about lost kids and lost fathers and everything else. Now there’s gonna be no more make-believe. Now I wanna see Harry Bright. With my own eyes.”

  “Let’s go. I won’t even phone Paco. He’ll understand.”

  “We’ll follow you,” Sidney Blackpool said. “In case you got lost it’s …”

  “We know exactly where it is,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  There was no fear of losing Coy Brickman’s patrol car. He never exceeded the speed limit on the drive toward Indio. Sidney Blackpool chain-smoked. Otto Stringer was getting sick to his stomach but he knew it wasn’t the cigarette smoke.

  They
were on Highway 10 when Otto said, “This is a garbage case, Sidney. You can’t turn garbage into gold no matter how you try. I’ve learned that here. Have you learned that?”

  “I think Harry Bright can talk,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Or maybe he can at least communicate. That’s all it’ll take.”

  “Even if he can, even if he does, I don’t wanna be the one to charge him with manslaughter. And I don’t wanna throw Coy Brickman in jail.”

  “I want a way out,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I want out the way Watson said it could be. Is it so wrong to want something like that for yourself?”

  “It’s a garbage case,” Otto said. “That’s all I know for sure.”

  There were only a few visitors’ cars at the nursing home that time of night. Coy Brickman got out of the patrol car and went in first, saying a few words to the nurse on duty. She nodded and he waved to the two detectives. The nursing home wasn’t so bad on the inside. It was seedy but clean, and had one doctor in attendance. The rooms could easily have been tiny motel rooms except that remodeling had joined two rows of rooms with a connecting corridor.

  The room was near the far end of the corridor. It was a private room with one bed. There was a lamp on a table beside the bed. Also on the bedside table was a radio with a built-in cassette player. There were I.V.’s nourishing him and oxygen available. Otto looked at the cadaverous old man. Only the feet bulged under the sheet.

  “Where’s Harry Bright?” Otto asked.

  “Take a closer look,” Coy Brickman said.

  Otto crept closer to the bed to inspect. The face was yellow, with a burst of spidery veins on the nose and cheeks and under the eyes. The eye pouches were yellow-brown like nicotine stains. His hair was wispy and sparse and gray. His fingernails were fungus yellow. Stretched from head to toe he looked to be about six feet three inches. Otto guessed he weighed one hundred pounds, only because of the size of his large bones. The eyes were yellow except for the irises, which were beautiful and blue.

  The man stared at the ceiling with his jaw hanging open. There was saliva forming at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were tearing slightly. He stared as unblinking as Coy Brickman. Otto leaned over the bed to look in those blue eyes for response and saw just the faint twitching of his tongue. He had a strong cleft chin.

  The bedsheet fluttered every few seconds with his heartbeats. “That man should be in an intensive-care unit,” Otto said.

  “I believe he’d rather do his dying here,” Coy Brickman said. “I think Harry likes it here.”

  Sidney Blackpool wouldn’t approach the bed. “Is it, Otto?” he said. “Is it him?”

  “It’s Harry Bright,” Otto said. “After life got all through fucking with him.”

  And then Sidney Blackpool said something that astonished Otto more than anything he’d heard this day. Sidney Blackpool took three steps closer to the bed of the dying man and said, “Brickman, why not tell me where his gun is? If it matches ballistics, that’s it. We can write up this investigation to leave you completely out of it, can’t we, Otto? I give you my solemn word we can write it up so it looks like you never knew that Harry Bright got drunk and shot the kid after the car crashed. We can tell it just the way it happened and we can prove it, if the ballistics test is positive. Then I’d tell Victor Watson that you deserve the reward for figuring out how the shooting went down and for helping us. Fifty thousand could be yours.”

  Coy Brickman didn’t take his eyes from Sidney Blackpool’s face when he walked around the bed. He looked below the side rail, then he looked back at the detective and said, “Damn, it’s empty.”

  “What’s empty?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

  “The catheter bag. I wanted to throw it in your face. From Harry and me.” Then he turned to the breathing corpse and said, “Damnit, Harry, why can’t you take a pee when I need it?”

  “Let’s go, Sidney,” Otto said. “Let’s go home.”

  “Before you go, I got something you wanted,” Coy Brickman said. Then he punched the button on the cassette player and slipped in a cassette he took from the pocket of his uniform pants. He looked at Harry Bright as he pressed the play button. They heard a few off-key chords from the uke and then it was in tune, Harry Bright introduced a song again.

  Harry Bright’s voice said, “This is happy Harry Bright coming to you from the Mineral Springs Palladium out on Jackrabbit Road where I’d like to introduce a tasty tune, a sizzling side, a heavenly hit! It’s called ‘Make Believe.’ And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to dedicate this number to Patsy.”

  Otto Stringer turned away and absolutely could not look at the cadaverous figure in the bed as Harry Bright sang:

  “We could make believe I love you,

  “Only make believe that you love me.

  “Others find peace of mind in pretending.

  “Couldn’t you, couldn’t I, couldn’t we?”

  Sidney Blackpool looked like a sleepwalker. He forced himself to lean over the bed. He studied the corpse that breathed. He leaned over the bed on one side while Coy Brickman stood on the other side watching him. The color drained from Sidney Blackpool’s face. He stared into Harry Bright’s beautiful blue eyes. Looking for what?

  “Make believe our lips are blending

  “In a phantom kiss or two or three.

  “Might as well make believe I love you

  “For to tell the truth, I dooooooooo!”

  When it was over, Coy Brickman took the cassette out and reached across the bed, jamming it into Sidney Blackpool’s shirt pocket. “There,” he said. “You wanted it so bad. Take it.”

  “Let’s go, Sidney,” Otto said. “Now. Let’s go, now!”

  As they were walking away, they heard Coy Brickman turning the radio to the Palm Springs station where Fred Astaire was singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

  “Hey, it’s Fred,” they heard Coy Brickman say to Harry Bright. “Pipes aren’t quite as good as old Harry Bright’s, but not so bad for a hoofer.”

  Otto Stringer took one last glance and saw the tall cop leaning over Harry Bright, gently dabbing the saliva from the strong cleft chin of the dying man.

  “The world won’t be the same when old Fred’s gone, will it, Harry?” Coy Brickman asked Harry Bright, while Fred Astaire sang it as only he could.

  CHAPTER 18

  DESIGNS AND DRIFTS

  There was no conversation on the ride back to the hotel. When they got to their suite, Otto went into his bedroom and came back with the expense money, throwing it on the coffee table. “Are you going home with me tomorrow?” he asked.

  Sidney Blackpool picked up the telephone and said, “I’m calling Victor Watson. I’ll do what he wants me to do.”

  When he reached Victor Watson’s Bel-Air residence the call was answered by a housekeeper and then Victor Watson came on the line and said, “Sidney? Have you discovered something?”

  “Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, “I know how your boy died. But I can never prove anything in a court of law.”

  Victor Watson merely said, “I’ll meet you at my Palm Springs home at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Thank you, Sidney. Thank you!”

  After Sidney Blackpool hung up, Otto said, “Give him my President McKinleys. Or keep them yourself. I’m catching a bus to L.A. first thing in the morning. I’ll pick up my golf clubs when I see you at work on Monday.”

  “Why don’t you stay, Otto? Why go home? What’s the point? What’re you trying to prove?”

  “There’s nothing to prove,” Otto said. “I don’t wanna be there when you tell him about Harry Bright. It might make me feel more putrid than I do now.”

  “I want that job, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I want a new life. If you can’t understand that, I’m sorry.”

  “I hope you get what you want,” Otto Stringer said.

  Otto went straight to bed without eating. Sidney Blackpool had no thought of food. He spent the evening planning the best way possible to tell Victor Wa
tson how his son was shot by a drunken cop named Harry Bright in an act of mercy. He hoped he could leave Coy Brickman totally out of the story.

  Harry Bright’s taped voice was haunting him. There was a time after Tommy Blackpool’s death when he craved to hear his son’s voice once more. But their home movies were without sound. Once he had tried watching a home movie. He never got past the first reel.

  At one time in his life he’d foolishly yearned for his son to be more like him. Now, if he had a soul he’d give it just for his son to be.

  It took him two hours and a lot of Johnnie Walker Black before he could fall asleep. Before he did, it came more fiercely than it had in a very long time: the memory of Tommy Blackpool. The last time his father saw him alive.

  Sidney Blackpool held his hands over his eyes as he lay in the dark but that wouldn’t stop the memory. Nothing would stop it once it started to come. Someday, if he were ever to smoke his.38, it would be to stop it, that memory.

  Lorie had come to Sidney Blackpool’s house to pick up both children. Tommy was into drugs heavily by then and Sidney Blackpool had found hash in his room and was confronting the boy in front of his ex-wife. During the argument Tommy had cursed both parents, and Sidney Blackpool had exploded. The father grabbed the son by the shirt and said, “You miserable little son of a bitch! You little bastard. I’ll kill you!” And he’d punched Tommy twice and knocked the boy over the kitchen table, causing Lorie to start screaming when glass shattered and blood from Tommy’s nose spattered on the white vinyl floor.

  The boy’s mother threw herself between father and son and Tommy cried obscenities and ran through the house, his blood dripping on the carpet before he was out the door and gone.

  They discovered later that he’d spent the night with a neighborhood friend. The next morning he was truant from school. He was drowned that day by the huge swells while surfing in the cold winter twilight.