“How do you know he’s going to Palm Springs?”
Nelson didn’t want the boss to know he’d been out of town interrogating the injured campesino, so he said, “Well, I’m jist guessin. He’s not some lettuce picker. And he’s prob’ly packin a bag full a dope and waitin out the daylight so he can take his drugs to Palm Springs.”
“That’s pure speculation, Nelson,” his sergeant said.
“Sarge, I been thinkin, maybe if it’s quiet this afternoon you might let me go back down around Box Canyon and …”
“Stay in your own backyard, Nelson,” the sergeant said warily. “You could fuck up a one-car funeral. Several years ago a guy like you brought down a president. It was called Watergate. The guy was a hotdog of a loose cannon named G. Gordon Liddy, ever heard of him?”
“Sure!” Nelson said. “My hero. He went to the joint but still he didn’t rat off nobody. I named one a my goldfish Liddy. The other one I named Ollie after Colonel Oliver North.”
“Why doesn’t his choice of role models surprise me?” the sergeant said to nobody.
After a pause, Nelson said, “I guess you’re right. He’s back in Mexico by now. I’ll forget all about it and go back out on patrol.”
The sergeant made a note to check up on the carrot-top cop who the lieutenant said was more dangerous than body fluid in a whorehouse, and about as controllable as a feral cat. But the sergeant got totally distracted when his wife called to announce that her Tupperware hostess had gotten the flu and the shindig was being moved to their own house.
The sergeant had to run to the store and buy some onion dip and Fritos while Nelson Hareem went rocketing down the highway toward the vicinity of Painted Canyon.
Lynn Cutter had left all the fancy stuff in the trunk of his car: Breda Burrows’ commercial-grade video camera with the twelve-to-one zoom and her 35 mm for still photos. It was all useless on this caper. He’d draped the binocular strap around his neck because it was about all he could manage if he was going to tail Clive Devon and a woman and a dog into the desert.
The Range Rover had kicked up dust on the road leading into Painted Canyon, helping to obscure Lynn’s Rambler, but he thought he was going to have to abandon the tail when they got close to the canyon itself. He was lucky. There happened to be a van full of kids also driving into the canyon, so he was able to drop in behind them. Also, there were some nature lovers in a big Winnebago RV, setting up day camp farther down on the road that penetrated the twisting canyon walls.
A few other nature lovers had found a few early specimens of dune primrose and were photographing the delicate white blossoms. Three kids of college age were hiking alongside the mouth of the canyon, gingerly examining the joints of a jumping cholla cactus whose nearly invisible barbs can penetrate flesh like sewing needles, and yet provide a nesting place for cactus wrens. The Range Rover stopped two hundred yards ahead, and Lynn parked beside the larger group of ecos who’d fanned out near the canyon mouth. His car didn’t look particularly conspicuous next to theirs.
The Painted Canyon cliff face looked as though a huge can of watercolor paint had spilled over it. Burgundy hill formations abutted persimmon hills, next to chocolate hills, next to sandalwood hills. There were clumps of puffy blue-gray smoke trees on the desert floor, and the clean dry desert was in his nostrils and in his mouth as he panted to keep up with the hikers. His goddamn knees were killing him! He stopped, unlaced his shoes, and dumped sand.
Lynn was startled by a roadrunner scampering past with topknot trailing. The bird seemed to be slowed by a full tummy, perhaps from attacking and consuming a sidewinder. Lynn could never make much of a case for the rattlers.
Once when he’d been part of a team of cops looking for the remains of a dope dealer who’d welshed on a deal with the wrong buyer, he had occasion to roam the canyons of south Palm Springs where he’d encountered a gunnysack hanging from a green-barked paloverde tree. Lynn had been about to open the sack when an old desert rat appeared from nowhere yelling at Lynn to keep his damn hands off his goods. The sack, Lynn later discovered, contained a dozen speckled rattlers! The desert rat told him that he expected to get pretty nice bucks when he sold the snakes to makers of antivenin.
In twenty minutes, Clive Devon, along with the young woman and the dog, hiked into a narrow canyon where ancient earthquakes, followed by centuries of erosion, had honeycombed the Cenozoic cliffs into tormented ghostly shapes. Furrows and chiseled gashes in the rock added ominous shade. Even the early spring flora contributed to the spookiness of that shadow-shrouded canyon. The crooked fingers of the ocotillo plant writhed spidery in the wind that moaned ceaselessly, echoing off the canyon walls.
Lynn crouched behind a dune, next to a beaver tail cactus that would soon have a lovely magenta blossom guarded by punishing spines. The sand was blowing in Lynn’s face and his sunglasses weren’t keeping all of it out of his eyes. He wiped his face on his shoulder.
When he looked up through the binoculars, he saw that the picnickers were standing beside an ironwood tree. The dog wagged its tail but didn’t approach a man who stood on the other side of the tree. The girl stayed a few steps back with the dog, but Clive Devon advanced and spoke to the man for several minutes. They all turned then and began moseying back the way they’d come, back in the direction of Lynn Cutter.
And the man came with them, back to the Range Rover, while Lynn had to retreat to his Rambler. The man wore a baseball cap and a dark windbreaker, so Lynn thought he might be the same man he’d seen at the café buying a newspaper. The man was now carrying a red bag.
By the time the Range Rover was returning to the café by the Salton Sea, the wrecked Ford was long gone, and the half-hearted search for a bald hitchhiker had petered out. Because the bald man had asked directions to Palm Springs the detectives had alerted the other police agencies in the valley, even though they figured the guy was headed home to Mexico.
Detectives at the sheriff’s department had little or nothing to go on as far as the bald man was concerned, except for a bit supplied by the injured campesinos, who said that the man did indeed have a drooping Zapata mustache and was younger than the cops had first assumed from his hairless pate.
Both injured farm workers said that the man had only spoken a few words in Spanish and could’ve been from anywhere. But the words he had spoken were “well said,” by which they meant articulate and authoritative. And that he’d looked like a man who, unlike themselves, was used to giving orders.
At the café by the Salton Sea was the rusty Plymouth belonging to the young woman with long hair. Lynn Cutter was afraid to try driving past to get her license number. He decided to park his Rambler on the Mecca end of the highway, and watch them through binoculars. The smell of red tide was blowing in his direction, and from a distance the polluted water looked like it had a crust you could walk on.
He couldn’t understand about the guy with the baseball cap. Lynn had assumed that he must have a disabled car on the canyon road and had simply needed a lift to a telephone, yet he hadn’t left the Range Rover.
Before saying goodbye to the woman, Clive Devon knelt down beside the rusty Plymouth and hugged the brown dog. Then he said something to the young woman and she put the reluctant dog into the backseat of her Plymouth. Lynn wondered if Clive Devon and the young woman would’ve shown more affection if they’d been alone. And he wished he could’ve gotten the young woman’s license number.
Then, to his surprise, the guy with the baseball cap climbed into the passenger seat of the Range Rover. In a moment, they’d be coming his way on the open road, and Lynn found himself in the position that every one-car surveillance driver hates: He was being followed by his quarry. The Rambler groaned when he stepped on the gas and made a fast U-turn.
Lynn stayed a hundred yards in front, driving by rearview mirror. He didn’t get to drop behind Clive Devon until he was in the town of Thermal, finding a safe place to make a turn and parallel the Range Rover. Once the Range Rover had
passed through the city of Coachella and was entering Indio, there was plenty of traffic and the surveillance got easy again.
Lynn kept expecting Clive Devon to pull over and drop off his passenger, but he did not. He drove at a leisurely speed out of Indio, past Indian Wells Country Club, where part of the Bob Hope Classic was being played, and through Rancho Mirage, which called itself the “home of presidents.” That meant home of Gerald Ford, who was a member of every country club in the desert for free, because of a freak accident of history, without which he’d be beaning folks at the Grand Rapids muni-course. They never called the place “home of vice-presidents,” though Spiro Agnew lived in exile there.
Then the Range Rover was out of Rancho Mirage, cruising through Cathedral City, finally entering Palm Springs, and Lynn still couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Why hadn’t he dropped his passenger long before now? Clive Devon didn’t unload the guy until he neared downtown.
Lynn saw the guy with the red bag go to a GTE phone stand at a gas station across from the Alan Ladd hardware store, and Lynn figured maybe he was just a tourist hoping to buy an old movie poster from Shane or The Great Gatsby at the Alan Ladd store. But what the hell had he been doing on foot out there in the canyon?
For a second or two, Lynn was almost curious enough to turn around and tail that guy. But he stayed with Clive Devon, per instructions of his temporary boss, Breda Burrows.
His heart was crashing against his breastbone. He was suddenly very frightened, now that he was standing alone on a busy street in Palm Springs, California. He was dripping sweat, and was about to remove his baseball cap to wipe it off when he caught himself just in time. They were looking for a bald man, so he had to wear a hat for the rest of his time in this city.
He ran across Indian Avenue, realizing halfway that he should have gone to the intersection, to a crosswalk. He wasn’t at home now. He’d have to be very much aware of traffic laws. Having come this far it would be a tragedy to be caught because he’d failed to cross a street at the right spot.
He went to the phone stand, keeping his red flight bag pressed against his chest, wanting to get rid of it as soon as possible. He wished he had any color other than high-visibility red, but he couldn’t have anticipated the policeman bursting into the rest room like that.
He’d read the morning news account, in which the policeman said he’d only entered the rest room to relieve himself, that he probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to the other man inside. Easy to say now, but what does a policeman in the States do when he sees a man of the Third World get off a private plane and carry a bag to a rest room? Except that the policeman claimed he wasn’t even aware of the private plane having landed with engine trouble on its way to who-knew-where.
He leafed through the yellow pages at the telephone stand while the unplanned events of the previous day blazed through his mind. It was almost impossible to read in English and think in his own language, so he put the phone book on the tray, telling himself to be calm. He’d simply panicked yesterday, and now he had to deal with the unexpected turn. He was a fugitive and that was a fact.
The fugitive found what he wanted on page 571 of the Palm Springs yellow pages. He tore the page from the phone book, folded it, and put it into his jacket pocket. Then he leafed through more pages until he found the listing for used car sales. He took change from his pocket, then cursed. They were the coins he’d been given in the cantina in Mexicali, after he’d received his forged documents. Useless. He had to get some U.S. coins to make calls.
The fugitive left the coins on the tray and walked toward the gas station just as a Palm Springs police car cruised by. The fugitive ducked behind the gas station until the car had passed, then thought he’d better get into a shop immediately and buy some clothes. He removed a package of one thousand U.S. dollars from the red flight bag. He wished he’d brought a change of clothes for an emergency such as this, but it had been decided by the others that he’d buy his clothing in Palm Springs. They had wanted him to look as much as possible like a tourist.
He chose to head toward the mountain, and walked north on Belardo Road in the direction of downtown, avoiding both Indian Avenue and Palm Canyon Drive, which he knew from his map and briefing to be busy thoroughfares. He was ready to leap from the pavement at the first sign of a police car.
Thinking of the police made him regret kicking the policeman so hard. As to the blow that put the man down, reflexes did that. Danger was there, the adversary was identified, and he had put down the adversary just the way he’d been taught. The only deliberate thing was the stomach kick to keep him down long enough to escape. The fugitive was glad that the policeman had not been badly hurt. There was no point in hurting anyone, except for the one he had come here to find.
When he saw Clive Devon turn into his street in Las Palmas, Lynn Cutter broke off the surveillance and sped back toward the Alan Ladd building, his curiosity killing him. But the guy with the baseball cap was no longer at the phone stand. Lynn got out of his car and went to the phone, looking for what, he didn’t know, perhaps a phone number scribbled on the writing tray.
There were no numbers and no scraps of paper on the tray, but there were four coins that somebody had left. Three were Mexican, the fourth a ten-peseta Spanish coin. Lynn examined that one just to be sure it was Spanish.
Not knowing why, Lynn put the coins into his pocket and walked toward the Alan Ladd hardware store. He looked inside but the man was not among the customers wandering around. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time, so he returned to his Rambler, sped to Clive Devon’s house in Las Palmas and parked on the next block. Then he strolled past the Devon house, stopping to peer through the oleander. He was relieved to see that the Range Rover was in the driveway next to Rhonda Devon’s silver Mercedes 560SEC.
When Lynn was finally back in his own car, massaging his aching knees, he began truly regretting that he hadn’t broken off the surveillance at the Salton Sea and followed the young woman. He was even sorrier he hadn’t indulged his whim and stayed with the guy in the baseball cap.
The sun was still high, white as bone, and hot, but the sky was streaked with a pearly hint of sunset. Lynn leaned back and closed his eyes. At six o’clock he was startled by a familiar voice. It was Breda Burrows, who had parked behind and walked up on him.
“Damn!” he said, disoriented. “You scared me!”
“Next time I’ll wear a cowbell,” she said with that mean little smile. “What happened today? And don’t bother with a description of your wet dream.”
She got in his car on the passenger side.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Okay, you always snore on stakeouts. So what happened today?”
God, the woman had such an irritating grin! Lynn said, “This guy Devon’s gonna be harder to trace than the Basque language. How much did you say you were making for this job?”
“Never mind that,” Breda said. “What happened today?”
Lynn was stalling while he pulled himself together, trying to sneak a peek at his watch, stunned to see it was nearly 6:00 P.M.! All that running and skulking like a goddamn coyote had obviously drained him, except that coyotes had sense enough to hole up in the daytime.
“The guy has a friend,” Lynn finally began.
“What kind of friend?”
“A young woman.”
“I’ll be damned. Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” Lynn said. Then, “Can we drive somewhere and talk? Clive Devon’s not going anywhere.” He couldn’t admit to Breda that he’d been so out cold he didn’t know if Clive Devon was at home or surfing in Malibu.
“We better hang around here this evening,” Breda said. “Mrs. Devon said she might go home to L.A. today. If she’s gone he might not stay home.”
“Wait here,” Lynn said.
He jumped out of the car and did a very painful jog on water-filled knees to the Devon property. Peeking through the oleander he saw both the s
ilver Mercedes and the black Range Rover. Pausing a moment, he also saw a slender woman in lounging pajamas walk past a window with a drink in her hand. Then he jogged even more slowly back to his Rambler.
“She’s there having a drink,” he told Breda. “And she’s wearing her Frederick’s of Hollywood silkies for beddy-bye. With that drink in her hand she ain’t going to L.A. till tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Breda said. “Let’s go back to the office. I want to hear all about today.”
“The Furnace Room?” he said hopefully. “You can buy me a drink.”
“Not The Furnace Room,” she said. “I sat in chicken gravy last time. Do they ever clean that dump?”
“Couldn’t a been chicken,” Lynn said. “Wilfred doesn’t serve it. Was it sorta sweatsocks gray? I think I know what Wilfred calls it but I dunno what’s in it.”
In ten minutes they were seated in the bar of a French restaurant with huge tapestries on the walls, where sauces were identifiable by name and ingredients, not by color. It was a very expensive, quite lovely restaurant that Lynn had never entered in the twelve years he’d lived in Palm Springs. When the valet had taken their cars Breda had to assure Lynn that she’d take care of the tips.
They sat at the bar and were served by a Belgian in formal attire. One wall of the barroom was lined with low plush banquettes, and the place was bustling with well-heeled drinkers. Lynn doubted that the management needed to reduce prices at happy hour. He figured that when people drank from crystal tumblers and goblets they weren’t worrying about price.
Most of the chic older women were drinking white wine, of course, and Lynn was surprised when, after he ordered Chivas, Breda said, “Two.”
“I’m trying to learn to drink like a P.I.,” she explained. “I never did learn to drink like a cop, and all my male partners were so disappointed in me.”
Lynn took a couple of big hits of Scotch, showed her a yum-yum smile, then said, “Okay, here’s how my day went. First I followed him down to the Salton Sea. Ever been there?”
Fugitive Nights Page 7
