After sending his cops back to work he was dozing with his feet up when the Hollywood detectives announced themselves to Anemic Annie, the pale, birdlike civilian at the front desk.
"In here, fellas," Paco said. "Siddown. Want some coffee?"
"No, thanks, Chief," Sidney Blackpool said, as the three men shook hands. "He's Stringer. I'm Blackpool."
"Call me Paco. I used to work Hollywood. You mightta heard?"
"We did," Otto said. "We were both at Newton Street at that time."
"Pinkford was captain then," Paco said. "He still on the department?"
"Yep," Otto nodded, "and will be till Ronald Reagan goes gray.
"Pinkford never wanted much outta life," Paco said. "Just enough glue to stick his face on Mount Rushmore. I woulda walked a beat in Sri Lanka to get away from him. Anyways, I'm glad to see you boys're wearing your golf rags. Most L. A. cops come out this way in suits and neckties even if it's a hundred and twenty degrees.
"Actually, Chief, this is sort of a vacation," Sidney Blackpool said. "Paco. -
"Paco. We're just here for some golf. Our boss said we might do a little follow-up since Victor Watson recently learned that his kid visited Hollywood on the day he disappeared from Palm Springs. Apparently the kid made a quick trip into town and back to the desert."
"Mean anything?" Paco asked.
"Not yet," Otto said. "Reason we came to your department is to talk to Officer O. A. Jones. He called Palm Springs P. D. today with some new information about the song he heard the suspect singing."
"O. A. Jones," Paco grunted. "That little fucker's gonna get me indicted some day. Does a job all right, but everything he does looks like it mighta happened a little different than he says. In fact, no desert's seen so much single-handed swashbuckling since Lawrence of Arabia. I don't know if you can rely on everything that surfer says."
"Surfer?" Sidney Blackpool said. "Where would he surf out here?"
"Ex-surfer," Paco said. "Used to be with Laguna Beach P. D. and then Palm Springs P. D. I took a chance on him and so far he ain't got in any traffic accidents where there might be one body too many. But that's another story. He's on duty today. Want Annie to call him for ya?"
"If you would," Otto said.
The three men walked from the chiefs office into the main room of the police station. "Want a tour?" Paco asked.
"Sure," Otto said.
"Okay, turn around," said Paco. "There, that's it. You got the tour. Except there's a john down the hall and ten wall lockers upstairs and a holding tank for two prisoners, long as they're little or awful friendly. The adjoining door goes to another room which is City Hall so we gotta keep our arrestees quiet till we get them down to the county jail."
"How do you keep them quiet?" Otto asked.
"Shoot the fuckers with a tranquilizer dart," Paco said. "What would you do with the animals we got around here?"
Anemic Annie tried without success to get O. A. Jones on the radio.
"He's probly got his ghetto blaster going full on,"
Paco said. "Why dontcha go on over to the Eleven Ninety-nine across the street. Get a cold one. I'll send O. A. Jones to ya in exactly forty-five minutes."
,Exactly forty-five minutes?"
"That's when his shift ends and he'll suddenly be all through with whatever sleuthing he's doing. He likes to get to the Eleven Ninety-nine before the first wave a secretaries and manicurists arrive from their jobs in Palm Springs. Among his many other faults he's got a permanent erection."
"So much for hitting the links," Otto sighed.
"By the way," Paco said, "when I got word where you boys're staying I figured things've changed at L. A. P. D. since I worked there. When we'd go out a town on a case they'd put us up at the Nighty Nite Motel with enough expense money for two hamburgers and a soda pop."
The detectives were saved from Paco's curiosity when the door swung open and Sergeant Coy Brickman entered. He was a tall man, taller than Sidney Blackpool, with furrowed cheeks and a mean-looking build. He was slightly older than Sidney Blackpool but looked lots older. His auburn hair was parted on the side and was receding. He stared at the two detectives without blinking and without speaking.
"Coy, this's Blackpool and Stringer," Paco said. "My sergeant, Coy Brickman."
They shook hands, and still without having blinked his eyes, Coy Brickman said, "Welcome to Mineral Springs. Hear you're gonna crack the Watson murder case.
"Not in my lifetime," Otto said. "We're just doing a semi-official follow-up to keep our boss happy.
"New leads?" Coy Brickman asked.
"Just bullshit," Otto said. "Some crap about the Watson kid visiting Hollywood the day he disappeared from the Palm Springs house. It's nothing.
"Well, anything we can do," Coy Brickman said. "You the only field supervisor?" Sidney Blackpool asked.
"I got one other sergeant," Paco said. "Harry Bright., He was one good cop. Gonna have trouble replacing him.
"Was?"
"Harry had a stroke several months ago," Paco said. "Then a heart attack. He won't be coming back. Maybe not to this world even. Just lays in the hospital like petrified wood."
"He's holding his own," Coy Brickman said.
"Anyway, go get yourselves a cold one," Paco said. "I'll send O. A. Jones over soon as he blows in from his latest crime-crushing adventure."
J. Edgar Gomez was washing dishes behind the bar of the Eleven Ninety-nine Club when he saw the two strangers stop in their tracks to gape at the mural of John Wayne pissing on the miniature of Michael Jackson and Prince.
"I shoulda put Boy George between those two gender benders," J. Edgar Gomez said. "Maybe I'll do that one a these days when my artist is sober."
"Couple a beers," Sidney Blackpool said, checking his watch and seeing that it was still too early for Johnnie Walker Black.
"Kind you want?"
"Drafts," said Otto, thinking that if they were back in Palm Springs he'd order a beautiful exotic drink to put him in a holiday mood. It was depressing being in a cop saloon.
There were ten men and one woman sitting at the bar or at wooden tables scattered around the little dance floor. One look and the detectives knew they were all cops except for a desert rat in a brand-new cowboy hat who was sitting alone next to the jukebox glaring at everybody who stepped up to drop a quarter in. Beavertail Bigelow was not in a party mood that afternoon.
Six of the cops were from other desert police agencies. Representing Mineral Springs were Choo Choo Chester Conklin, Wingnut Bates and Nathan Hale Wilson, who was pretty well bagged for so early in the day.
The cops were moaning about what working in the desert was doing to them.
"Chapped lips. Jock rot to the knees," Wingnut moaned. "Sometimes I think I never shoulda left Orange County."
"How about what this freaking desert air does to your hair and fingernails?" Nathan Hale Wilson griped. "I can't keep them trimmed, they grow so fast. I was here a month and I looked like Howard Hughes!"
"You should work Indian territory," an off-duty Palm Springs cop complained. "I got a drunk call on two Agua Calientes yesterday and there's me all by myself and I got these two Indian brothers fighting each other cause they didn't have nobody else to fight, and they're so big they look like dueling refrigerators, and one throws a punch from the vicinity of Arizona and knocks the other one clear over my car. And I'm standing there thinking, he's a three-hundred-pounder. He thinks he's Crazy Horse. He's into a total uprising at this moment. He's got two broken beer bottles in his mitts. And he's rich!"
"Yeah, well you should see Cat City now," said a Cathedral City cop who was almost as drunk. "Sodom and Gomorrah East is what it is. AIDS and palimony is what it's all about.-
J. Edgar Gomez eyed the two strangers and said, "What department you guys work?"
"L. A. P. D. , " Otto answered, wincing. The beer was so cold he put the glass down and grabbed his skull.
"Drink it slow," J. Edgar Gomez said. "Keep our beer i
cy. Come outta the heat and drink too fast it's like a buck knife stuck in your skull. Here." He gave Otto a glass of warm water. "Sip it."
"Wow!" Otto said after the pain subsided. "That is cold beer."
, "Customers like it that way. How come you guys re way out here?"
"We're in Palm Springs on vacation," Sidney Blackpool said. "Have to talk to O. A. Jones. Know him?'
"Sure," the saloonkeeper said, scratching his belly, which was covered by an apron and a wet T-shirt. "He'll be in pretty soon."
The door banged open just then and three policemen from Palm Springs P. D. swaggered in. J. Edgar Gomez shook his head and said, "Young cops these days, nobody can open a door without knocking holes in your plaster."
"Fred Astaire?" Sidney Blackpool said, pointing toward the jukebox. "I haven't heard Fred Astaire, or even a jukebox, in I don't know how long."
" 'Puffin' on the Ritz,' " J. Edgar Gomez grinned. "Far as I'm concerned, the world is divided between two groups a people: those that think Fred Astaire's 'Puffin' on the Ritz' is the greatest side ever cut, and scumbags that don't."
"My name's Stringer," Otto said, shaking hands with the saloonkeeper. "This is Sidney Blackpool."
"J. Edgar Gomez," the saloonkeeper said, and then added, "Oh, shit!"
They followed his eye line and saw that J. Edgar was looking about three feet above the floor at a midget in a tennis hat and tennis whites and a desert tan darker than any unemployed actor's.
"Oleg Gridley," the saloonkeeper said. Then he glared at the cops at the other end of the bar and pointed at the "No trash sports" sign over the bar, causing Otto and Sidney Blackpool to shrug at each other.
Oleg Gridley looked around the gloomy barroom, spotted the lone busty woman at the far end of the bar and hopped on the stool next to her by chinning up with both hands. He sat at eye level with her tits.
"Hi, Portia," the suntanned midget leered.
"I knew this day was going too good," she said, tipping up her glass of beer, looking like she'd had lots of them.
"Portia Cassidy," the saloonkeeper whispered to the detectives. "Not much of a face, but the best body in Mineral Springs. Everybody wants her, especially Oleg. We call them Bitch Cassidy and the Sunstroke Kid."
Just then Bitch Cassidy said to the midget, "No, Oleg. It's just that I don't like perverts. Even big perverts."
Then after the midget whispered in her ear again, she said, "Oleg, I wouldn't care it was big as King Kong's. Size don't impress me and I do not want a chiffon body wrap and a whipped-cream rubdown!"
"I'd be good to you, Portia," the passionate midget murmured. "I'm slow but thorough."
"Yeah, like a tarantula. I ain't interested. And I don't wanna do those filthy midget things, and if you don't leave me alone I'm calling a cop!"
"Maybe the things only sound filthy to nonmidgets," J. Edgar Gomez offered.
c, "I don't understand you anymore!" Oleg said testily.
J. Edgar, gimme a double bourbon on the rocks. And give the lady another beer."
"It's a living soap opera," J. Edgar Gomez said to the detectives, as he poured the midget's whiskey. "I'm starting to wonder how it's gonna come out."
And then they began to arrive. First a pair of hairdressers from the ladies' spa at the biggest downtown Palm Springs hotel. Then five tellers from a Palm Desert bank. Then four waitresses from a Rancho Mirage country club. Then the day-shift boys from eight police agencies, and by 5:30 in the afternoon the saloon was packed with drinkers, dancers, lechers, drunks, midgets and desert rats. Sidney Blackpool wondered how in hell they were going to find Officer O. A. Jones even if he did show up, and he should have arrived by now.
The conversations raged around them as the saloon got hotter and smokier. Both detectives switched to hard booze in self-defense. The only difference from any cop saloon in L. A. was that the talk was often weather-oriented.
"It's so hot in summer," Prankster Frank said to a new desert cop, "that I've started thinking in Celsius. It sounds cooler that way."
It was not essentially different in that most conversations were about women.
"Look at her!" Nathan Hale Wilson said of Portia Cassidy who was dancing with a Palm Springs detective and trying to avoid the "accidental" touches of Oleg Gridley every time he waddled to the jukebox. "She's the Lucretia Borgia of this valley but she could suck the Goodyear blimp through a garden hose.
got two planned parenthoods and one drunken mistake!" a drunken Maynard Rivas suddenly whined to a tipsy waitress from an Indian Wells country club who couldn't care less.
After the dance, Portia Cassidy tried to move down the bar, hoping Oleg Gridley would get trampled if he tried to make open-field moves among three layers of legs. But the midget was relentless.
The detectives heard him whisper, "I gotta go to the little boys' room, Portia. I'll be right back and we'll talk."
"I can't wait," Bitch Cassidy sighed. "Like I can't wait for an acid rainstorm or world war three."
Oleg Gridley did not go to the little boys' room. The little boys' room was too big for Oleg Gridley. When the toilet stall was occupied, Oleg Gridley was out of luck because he couldn't possibly reach the urinal. Oleg grumbled and stormed out the back door to pee on the eucalyptus, which formed windbreakers to keep the Eleven Ninety-nine Club from doing business in Indio, minus its foundation. He saw Ruben, the bartender from the Mirage Saloon, walking by and singing "Pennies from Heaven" at the top of his lungs as he strummed on a stringed instrument he couldn't play at all. Suddenly he thought of Portia Cassidy getting stolen away and he ran back inside.
A lachrymose Maynard Rivas on Bitch Cassidy's left said to Nathan Hale Wilson, "It ain't that my wife's fifty pounds overweight. It's just that she's got inverted nipples. They look funny. I'm so unhappy!"
By now, J. Edgar Gomez was really hustling. His nighttime waitresses had arrived and one was washing glasses behind the bar while the other served Edgar's "chili" from a huge pot simmering in the kitchen.
"Goddamn, this chili's greasy!" Choo Choo Chester yelled. "Can I just have the grease mainlined straight into my arm, J. Edgar? Sure would save my stomach."
"You don't like it, don't buy it," J. Edgar Gomez muttered, puffing on a cigar as he poured a line of seven drinks with a phenomenal memory for the orders being screamed out by patrons over the din.
"Hey, Edgar," Wingnut yelled, "you got a wine list?" "You want the wine from K mart or the stuff from Gemco?" the saloonkeeper hollered back.
"K mart."
"Three ninety-nine a bottle!" the saloonkeeper bellowed.
"Got any cheaper?"
"Gemco s three
"I'll take it. What color is it?"
"Off-white I think, with little dark freckles."
"Make it two bottles!" the young cop yelled, happy for a bargain.
"Jesus Christ!" Prankster Frank cried. "A spider just did a Greg Louganis in my chili!"
"That's a dirty lie!" J. Edgar Gomez said, but someone had turned up the jukebox and Ethel Merman was screaming about show business louder than any live voice in the saloon.
"Knock that off or I'll eighty-six ya!" J. Edgar Gomez suddenly warned Prankster Frank, Nathan Hale Wilson and the Palm Springs fingerprinter, Dustin Hoffman, who were all holding up cocktail napkins with scores of "9.9, 9.8, and 9.8" written in lipstick at the diving spider who was swimming for his life.
Just as Otto was about to suggest that O. A. Jones wasn't going to make it, a young cop with fluffy blond hair tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Sergeant Blackpool?"
"I'm Stringer," Otto said. "He's Blackpool."
"I'm O. A. Jones," the kid said.
Sidney Blackpool stared at him. He did look like a surfer.
"Sorry I'm so late," he said. "Sergeant Brickman sent me out to Solitaire Canyon, out to where I found the Watson car. Told me to go over the area one more time to see if there was anything we missed. He said since you guys from Hollywood were coming we oughtta take one last look."<
br />
"For what?"
"That's what I asked. For what? He said he'd just like me to go over the area one last time for anything that didn't belong. He was out there with me for a while, and when he went to the station he told me to give it a try for an hour."
"Funny he didn't mention it," Sidney Blackpool said to Otto. "He never said you were gonna be late because you were out there."
"Sometimes us small-town boys don't like to look like we're intimidated by you big-city guys." O. A. Jones grinned. "He probably didn't wanna say that we'd be real embarrassed if you lucked onto something the wind uncovered after all these months."
"Let's go somewhere we can talk," Sidney Blackpool said. "Got your drink?"
The young cop hoisted a beer bottle and they gave up their bar seats to the delight of Oleg Gridley. The midget darted around the legs of two women and crawled up on the vacant stool before Portia Cassidy could escape.
"You hold that beer bottle like an Olympic torch!" Oleg said passionately.
"E. T., go home," she said.
When the detectives finally found a semi-quiet corner in the saloon, Sidney Blackpool said, "Tell us about your call to Palm Springs P. D. today. We're checking out a possible Hollywood connection to the death of Jack Watson."
"Okay," O. A. Jones said. "I was in here last night with a couple a guys and one a them said something about `I believe.' Not even sure now what he was talking about. He just said 'I believe.' And it clicked something in my head."
"What's that?" Otto asked.
"Well, when I was lost out there in the desert and heard that guy singing and playing the banjo, I really couldn't say at first what the song was. It seemed like something with 'pretend' in it. The Palm Springs detectives played this old record for me. Nat King Cole. I'd never heard him before."
"You never heard Nat Cole?" said Otto.
mighta, I'm not sure," the young cop said.
Otto rolled his eyes and felt old. As old as murder. "Now you've changed your mind?"
"Well, it's bothered me a lot for several months. See, I started tuning in these hokey Palm Springs stations to listen for old songs. I started doubting that it was 'Pretend.' The voice was . . . well, I tried to tell them. It was like a thin quivery voice. Like you'd hear in old movies about the nineteen-thirties or something."
The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985) Page 12
