Fugitive Nights

by Joseph Wambaugh

  For a cynical boozer, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, Breda thought. She didn’t like his mustache and he was at least twenty pounds overweight, but he still had most of his hair: sandy gray and curly. He wasn’t big but he had good shoulders and big wrists and hands. His brown eyes were intelligent when he bothered to look at her. She suspected he was competent, and she felt like punching him in the mouth.

  “Okay, I’ll get to the point, Lynn,” she said. “I need a consultant.”

  “Why didn’t you say so,” he said, finishing his fourth drink, grateful he didn’t have to work the next day. Or ever again! “There’s a gypsy in Cathedral City that does Tarot cards, palms and even tea leaves if you bring the tea. Me, I got a job flocking Christmas trees. It’s not real steady work, of course, but I still don’t have enough hours to consult even though I gotta admit I’m way ahead a my time in business matters. I went broke two years before the recession. My old man was the same way. Went broke in nineteen-twenny-eight.”

  With a grin only half as wide as her pimp-killer grin, she said to this world-class wiseass, “Look, Lynn, I know you don’t feel well today and you don’t know me and don’t have any reason to trust me, but I haven’t come here to ask you to compromise your pension and get in trouble. I’ve learned that Palm Springs and this whole desert valley is a different sorta place, and I’m the new kid on the block. I just need help and guidance from somebody in local law enforcement, and I was told you might be that somebody.”

  He peered into her eyes then—the electric blue was giving off sparks. Despite his hangover, that irritating grin of hers somehow turned him on a little bit. But he said, “Yeah, I’m full a talent all right. I could probably blow smoke rings if I smoked. I did smoke till last May when the doc said the arteries around my heart’re like the L.A. interchange at rush hour, so I quit smoking. It was easy to quit, except I got this need to kill six or seven cats a day. I gotta say so long for now and head for the Humane Society to pick up a few. I tried ground squirrels but they don’t work.”

  And to her utter astonishment, Lynn Cutter suddenly stood up, waved bye-bye, and wobbled toward the front door of the saloon! But he was stopped by a large blond woman who was on her way in.

  “Lynn,” the blonde said, backlit by the brilliant Palm Springs sunlight, which penetrated his skull like hot nails.

  “Have we met?” he croaked.

  “You better remember me. Phyllis!”

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” he said, vaguely recognizing the mustache. She was wearing what she thought was a drop-dead, midthigh leather skirt that would’ve turned off Ted Bundy.

  “Such a kidder,” she giggled. “You said we’d have lunch today.”

  Lynn was frozen in the doorway, trapped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot about lunch, Phyllis.”

  “Well I didn’t!” she said. “And I don’t appreciate being made a fool out of!”

  She was taller than Breda Burrows. With heels she was taller than Lynn, and almost as heavy! Her ’stash was heavier, in fact. “Phyllis,” he said. “That woman over there glaring at me? That’s my wife! I can’t be seen with you!”

  “Goddamnit, you said you were single!” Her voice was like cymbals clashing. “You sang to me: ‘I got that lovin feeling!’ You sonofabitch!”

  God, he hated that song! “Well, I’m not exactly married,” he whined. “I mean, I’m getting a divorce and we’re talking settlement now. And we agreed not to see other people till it’s over. Get it?”

  Breda Burrows was paying her bill during all this, and was striding indignantly toward the door when Lynn turned a blood-red eye in her direction.

  “Breda,” he called out. “Breda!” But the P.I. brushed past and was gone.

  “She acts like she really cares,” Phyllis said, with a hideous smirk.

  “Yeah, well, she pretends like she couldn’t care less if I starred in a snuff film or went to Disneyland, but really, she loves me. She’s a great little mother too.”

  “You got kids? You asshole! You told me you were single and childless!”

  “I gotta go now,” he said. “I gotta catch up with my wife. The settlement. The final decree. The property. Our four little ankle-biters!”

  Phyllis followed him into the merciless glare and watched as he put on his sunglasses and caught up with Breda, who was unlocking the door of her white Datsun 280ZX. Phyllis gave up when Lynn climbed in beside the P.I.

  “Who invited you?” Breda said.

  He attempted to smile. “I know I’ve been a pain in the ass today.”

  “Any more of a pain and you’d break through my Valium,” she said, not asking him to get out, but not starting the car either.

  She put on sunglasses with taffy-colored plastic rims, and looked him over. He wore a shabby golf shirt with a frayed collar, tattered cotton trousers, cheap loafers.

  “I guess I should at least listen to your offer,” he said. “I suppose you heard I got burned for allegedly giving information to a lawyer, and you figured I’m your man, right?” Lynn saw that she wasn’t wearing stockings. Her legs were so tan that in The Furnace Room they’d fooled him.

  “See, the lawyer was working on a deal for a guy I know, a cop facing prosecution for a bad shooting. He killed a kid.”

  “How old was the kid?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve years old!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lynn said. “Jack Graves is the cop’s name. Worked dope down in Orange County. I knew him when he used to work here. Anyway, his department was helping out the DEA with a raid. Supposed to be a dealer’s house, wrong house. One a those things where the snitch burned them and everything went wrong. A twelve-year-old that lived there was terrified by all the commotion and picked up a toilet plunger for protection. And he ran right out and into Jack Graves. Jack’s eyes saw: Guy-with-Gun. It was dark. Jack reacted, squeezed one off, didn’t mean to.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “The D.A. was considering a prosecution for manslaughter. There was a so-called witness, a brother-in-law to the righteous drug dealer that lived next door to the victim. I did the investigation for Jack’s lawyer and proved that the dealer’s brother-in-law was a lying, cop-hating gob a slime. In the end, Jack got pensioned off on stress. I don’t generally go around helping lawyers and P.I.’s, okay?”

  “Look, Lynn,” Breda said, “I’ve heard you’re just waiting for your disability pension to be approved. And I’ve heard you might wanna be a P.I. yourself after you get the pension. And I’ve heard you might need money even though you make it a practice to house-sit for Palm Springs millionaires and exercise their Rolls-Royces when they’re not in residence. And I’ve also heard that these days you don’t have enough money to put gas in those cars. That’s what I’ve heard about you, Lynn. Is it wrong?”

  “Well, it’s true that my last marriage gave me a bigger deficit than Nicaragua, but you don’t have it quite right.”

  “What am I missing?”

  “That I do get my paycheck even though I ain’t got the disability pension locked up. I mean, I got a pair a knees with all the flexibility of Margaret Thatcher, but the pension ain’t official yet, so I don’t wanna screw things up by selling myself to some P.I. They call that double-dipping, and I believe it’s even against the law, is it not?”

  “I got a couple easy jobs where there’d be no written reports of any kind with your name on them. No testifying, nothing illegal or immoral. Just a few little jobs for somebody like you. Somebody male as it turns out.”

  “You were right about the empty tank in the Rolls,” he said. “The house I’m sitting has nine bedrooms and eleven bathrooms and two Rolls-Royces in the garage with the gas gauges on empty. I’d walk home except I ain’t feeling good. Will you drive me? It’s still my home for three more weeks, then I hope to house-sit at Tamarisk Country Club for two months.”

  Breda, deciding it was over, disgustedly started up the 280ZX. After she drove for a few minutes, Lynn said,
“How much could I make?”

  Breda kept her eyes on the street, saying, “Up until yesterday I couldn’t have paid much, but I just got the best client I’ve ever had. I could pay you as much as a thousand bucks, if you can get the results I want. Cash. Nobody’d ever know about it.”

  “What would I have to do?”

  Breda Burrows turned toward Lynn Cutter and said, “I’ve been thinking about this. One reason I’m going to need a man helping me on this case is because of some special undercover work. The job might call for a sperm sample.”

  Lynn Cutter removed the shades, gawked sideways at Breda Burrows with eyes like bags of plasma, and said, “Lady, you can’t be that lonely!”

  On the same afternoon that Breda Burrows was learning how easy it would be to hate a world-class cynic like Lynn Cutter, Officer Nelson Hareem was doing what he did best: plotting, scheming and fantasizing about how to secure a lateral transfer from his police department to Palm Springs P.D.

  Officer Hareem had worked a total of five years at two police departments, one in San Bernardino County and another in Los Angeles County, before ending up on the wrong end of the Coachella Valley, thirty minutes and millions of bucks away from Glamour. A captain at Palm Springs P.D. told the carrot-top cop he’d consider letting Nelson apply after he “proved himself” for a year or two at one more police department, hinting that it was Nelson’s last chance.

  The paternal grandfather of Nelson Hareem had been a rug peddler from Beirut, but his three other grandparents were pure Okie from Bakersfield and Barstow. Nevertheless, because of his grandfather and his surname, he bore the brunt of every Arab or Iranian joke in vogue. And of course, because of his reputation, everyone began to call him Dirty Hareem.

  Some cops thought that at the root of Nelson Hareem’s aggressiveness was a little-man’s complex, and because he was only five foot seven, they’d dubbed him Half-Nelson. He’d been given his walking papers by both of his previous police chiefs for being unacceptably “eager.” Once, when he’d choked out a San Bernardino County deputy D.A. who’d stopped at a minimarket to buy some nonprescription sleeping pills after a long and arduous trial in which he was prosecuting two outlaw bikers for beating the crap out of a cop.

  Young Nelson had been cruising by the minimarket and spotted a bulge under the prosecutor’s jacket as the lawyer was leaving the store with his Sominex. And Nelson was sure he was looking at the armed bandit who’d robbed six liquor stores in the area. How was he to know (he later pleaded) that this prosecutor had received a death threat from the biker gang and so carried a concealed firearm even when he went to his daughter’s first Cotillion dance, which was where he was headed that evening.

  After the prosecutor revived from five minutes of convulsive twitching brought on by Nelson’s carotid chokehold—with his wife, daughter and three other little girls in Cotillion chiffon screaming hysterically in his Volvo station wagon—the lawyer became a tad less diligent in prosecuting those bikers for breaking the bones of a cop. In fact, the prosecutor offered to drop the felony charge and let them cop a plea to malicious mischief. That caper put an end to Nelson Hareem’s career in San Bernardino County.

  In Los Angeles County he was even more eager. While patrolling an alley with his car lights out just after midnight, Nelson had spotted a prowler lurking around the side window of a very fancy house in a silk-stocking residential district. Nelson got out of his patrol car and crept quietly into a neighbor’s yard, climbed a six-foot wall that divided the properties, and was shocked and outraged to see that the prowler was watching an unsuspecting woman undress in her bathroom. Nelson was even more shocked and outraged when the guy started whacking his willy. When the woman turned and uttered a plaintive little scream at the prowler, Nelson launched himself into space, down on the guy’s head, who, it turned out, was the owner of the house, and the biggest commercial real estate developer in town. He also was president of the local Kiwanis, as well as a contributor to the political coffers of a state senator, a U.S. Congressman, and Nelson’s boss, the Mayor.

  Until that night no one knew that the real estate developer and his wife had an arrangement where once every other week or so, she’d undress very provocatively in front of the window and then scream when she saw him milking the mamba. For which she’d get to overdraw her Neiman Marcus charge card with total impunity. It was a good deal for both of them, until their local policeman, Officer Nelson Hareem, went ballistic and put the hog flogger in a neck brace for three weeks.

  Nelson capped it off two weeks later by accidentally firing a shotgun inside his patrol car. When he dashed inside the station to inform his long-suffering lieutenant of an “accidental discharge,” the older cop said it was okay, he had them all the time. But when Nelson showed him how he’d put a sunroof in his patrol car, the lieutenant told him to resign at once or face a firing squad.

  So, Nelson Hareem was at his last stop in the godforsaken south end of the Coachella Valley. Another massive attack of eagerness would take him to the French Foreign Legion, his new chief had warned when he’d hired Nelson during the previous summer.

  Sometimes, Nelson Hareem could convince himself, for a microsecond, that his present job wasn’t so bad. Then he’d look around at “downtown,” which was terrific if you were into 1952 nostalgia. The way the town looked to twenty-seven-year-old Nelson Hareem, Michael J. Fox should come whizzing by on a skateboard on his way back to the future. Low one-story storefronts, a few with corrugated tin roofs, lined the main street where nothing much had changed since the locals helped elect Dwight Eisenhower. There was a hardware store, a bar, a pool hall, a tiny food market, a barber shop run by a cross-eyed barber who scared the crap out of Nelson every time he picked up a straight razor, and of course, a video store. People had to have something to watch on their stolen VCRs.

  When Nelson got real bored he’d drive over to a neighboring town, population nine hundred, and watch the street melt. He wasn’t on the job a week before he’d abandoned the flak vest he’d never gone without in the other two police departments.

  “Let them shoot me and put me out of my misery,” he said to his sergeant when he hung up the vest. “I’d rather die once than every day from the heat.”

  From May until October life on patrol was a constant search for shade, and there wasn’t much of it. A uniform would turn salt-white after four hours, and he’d be soaked from his armpits to his knees. He’d developed incurable jock itch, and to his astonishment, his leather gear had independent sweat rings. Well, if his leather was still alive and sweating, maybe he could survive too, Nelson thought, but he doubted it. The boredom would kill him if nothing else did.

  When he’d first arrived at that south-end police department he’d whiled away the hours cruising out onto the desert trying to spot guys stripping hot cars. That was when he’d found a bleached human skull that prompted a big police search in dune buggies. Nelson had hoped for headlines, except that the FBI spoiled his chance for glory when their lab report said that even though there’s no statute of limitations on murder, a three-hundred-year-old skull made the case a tough one to solve.

  About seventy thousand acres of the southern Coachella Valley—the irrigable parts—were used for crops. Palm trees were grown for landscaping the wealthy country clubs at the other end, but big money in the south end came from asparagus, lettuce, oranges, lemons, grapes, and ninety-five percent of America’s dates. And from heroin.

  Heroin was the drug of choice in the south end. The DEA estimated that seventy percent of California’s cocaine came in through Mexico, and all of the “tar” heroin came from Mexico, a lot of it right there, only a few hours from Mexicali by car. Nelson Hareem’s new backyard was an important distribution point for tar.

  The tar, or goma, as the Mexicans called it, looked like brown window putty and smelled like vinegar. During recessionary times it cost about two hundred dollars a gram, which resembled a smashed raisin. Twenty dollars would buy one tenth of a gram wrap
ped in cellophane, covered with aluminum foil. The addict might get four hours of tolerable existence for twenty bucks, but then would need to slam more tar under his “trapdoor” scabs, so called because a convenient place to shoot was under the scab. The trapdoor hid the fresh needle marks from the cops.

  Mexican brown and China white were almost never seen in the south end, only the tar, but there was lots and lots of tar. Hence, the south end was a dumping ground for dead human beings.

  It was estimated that in those local desert towns there lived the highest concentration of parolees in the United States. Some had a need for speed, and did methamphetamine at a hundred bucks a gram, but heroin was king. The addicts were the kind who moved their lips when they read, but not when they talked. You couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but outside of science institutes they were the only class of people in the continental U.S. who could think in grams and kilos.

  The population always exploded down there during picking season and not just because of undocumented migrant workers from Mexico. Also in those fields were boat people from the Pacific rim, Laotians and Vietnamese mostly. Gambling squabbles were sometimes settled by machete and generally went unreported.

  Local humor: Why does a migrant worker have a nose? So he has something to pick, off season.

  The residents in Nelson Hareem’s part of the world had to get by with swamp-coolers in summer, but one of the local drug dealers had proper air-conditioning. In fact, his house was fenced and gated, and he even had a swimming pool and spa. Nelson fantasized that he’d catch the guy doing a deal, and the young cop often tailed him when the dealer went to the saloon for a game of snooker, mingling with dogs and men who squatted out front by barred windows; their feet were white from the alkali that rose from the earth and produced a layer of crusty powder in that little bit of purgatory.

  Nelson was dreaming of Palm Springs on the afternoon that Lynn Cutter was learning about Clive Devon from his new temporary boss, Breda Burrows.