Fugitive Nights (1992)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  He stuck his hand out the car window and waved when she was still thirty feet from the right rear fender of his Mazda. Breda opened the passenger door and got in just as the first low rays were washing over the valley from above the Santa Rosa Mountains.

  It wasn't like getting into Lynn Cutter's messy Rambler. Jack Graves' Mazda was disturbingly clean and tidy. He had a thermos of coffee waiting, and two mugs inside a vinyl gym bag. Along with a plastic container of real cream and another of sugar, there were two plastic spoons in a folded paper napkin; everything ready for her, including three pieces of Danish to choose from.

  "I thought you might not have time for breakfast," he said, as Breda put the binoculars, video camera and the Clive Devon file folder on the rear seat.

  "What, no espresso?" She tore off a piece of Danish to be polite, poured herself some coffee and added a few drops of cream, no sugar. "What time did you get up?"

  "I always get up at five-thirty," Jack Graves said, and Breda was sure that it would be at 5:30 a. M. exactly. Not 5:20, not 5:40.

  "When this case is wrapped up I'm gonna sleep till noon," Breda said.

  "Then you'd miss the sunrise. Sunrise and sunset are a part of it. That's when the desert tells you that no matter what, everything's gonna be burned up and blown clean. That's a big part of it, living in the desert, I mean."

  Breda sipped her coffee and studied the gaunt, sorrowful face. Then she said, "Know how to work the video camera?"

  "Sure. We used them all the time when we worked the Peruvian smugglers. That a Panasonic?"

  "Uh huh," Breda said, taking another nibble of Danish though she knew she shouldn't.

  "I doubt that I'll be able to tape anything you'd recognize, even with the zoom. The open desert doesn't let any hunter get very close."

  "Do the best you can," she said. "Who knows, he might go straight to the Soltero house down in Indio. Far as I'm concerned, if he's swimming and picnicking and visiting that young woman at her house, his wife can start to draw a few conclusions."

  "I'd sure hate to tape any hanky-panky through somebody's bedroom window, but I said I'd do the job and I will."

  "I don't think it'll come to that," Breda said. "I don't know why, but I don't." She noticed that he couldn't use the word shoot. It was tape any hanky-panky, not shoot.

  "I considered getting in the P. I. business," he said, "but I didn't think I'd like it."

  "I don't think I like it, but my only skill and training involves dealing with the worst of people, and ordinary people at their worst."

  "A lotta the police in this town work the security jobs at the big hotels when they're suspended or on medical leave. I thought about trying to get a security job like that. Trouble is, after you do real police work for a long time you feel over-qualified for the other stuff. I wish I could work with my hands, but I'm not so good with my hands."

  Breda looked at the long bony hands of Jack Graves. The first three fingers of his right hand were bruised and swollen. She was almost certain that last night his hands were okay.

  She was afraid to ask what happened. "You make good coffee," was all she said.

  "That I do," Jack Graves said, smiling. "I guess I could get a job as a short-order cook, couldn't I?"

  Breda finished the coffee and the last bite of Danish, and said, "You're set then? You can read the profile I've done on him. It's not very helpful, but if he heads into the barrio down in Indio and loses you, you can figure he'll go to the Soltero house. How about meeting me at The Furnace Room at seven o'clock if he's safely tucked in at home."

  "The Furnace Room?"

  "Yeah, it's Lynn's home, office and refuge. I've learned to go with the flow, far as he's concerned."

  "Okay, see you at seven unless I'm involved with something worthwhile. If I am you won't see me, but I'll call when I can."

  "I hope these goodies weren't made with saturated fat," said Breda, enjoying the last crumb.

  He liked the blue Buick very much indeed. He would love to have a car like this at home. He believed they wouldn't look for him in a car like this. Besides, he liked big American cars.

  The used car had been far easier to buy than his comrades told him it would be. He had a forged California driver's license, obtained in Mexicali. And he had a Mexican license, also counterfeit, in case he needed it. He was simply a Mexican national, in California to do a bit of business with a Los Angeles firm that was trying to set up a maquiladora factory south of the international border, using cheap Mexican labor for the assembly of circuit boards.

  The Palm Springs men's shop had been expensive beyond belief. His shoes alone-white loafers with little tassels-had cost him $185 U. S. He'd never even bought a suit of clothes that cost that much, not in his whole life. But the clothes made him feel more confident.

  The salesman in the shop had chosen a maroon blazer for him, cream-colored trousers and three casual shirts. He'd told the salesman he wanted to be well dressed for Palm Springs evenings. He decided that when he returned home he'd give the coat and trousers to his brother-in-law, who would be only too happy to wear a wine-red coat with gold buttons. He would keep the shirts though; they were cotton, the finest cotton he'd ever seen. The pink one lay softly against his skin. He looked in the rearview mirror as he drove and was relieved to see that his upper lip was healing nicely. The shaving rash was all but gone, and the only evidence of absent facial hair was that his upper lip was not as tan as the rest of his face.

  He'd bought two hats, one a Panama, which the salesman in the shop had insisted was "your type of hat." And he'd bought a gray straw snap-brim like the ones he'd seen some of the Palm Springs tourists wearing. There were many bald men in this city, what with so many older people walking about; still he thought he should keep a hat on his head at all times.

  He had refined his cover story for two weeks and had no fear in that regard; the only real fear he had was that somehow he'd left a trail after he'd panicked at the airport. He just had to continue reminding himself what he knew to be true, that they were not superdetectives, the U. S. police. It was so easy to feel inferior. In fact, that's what most people in his country did best: feel inferior to Americans.

  Real life wasn't like the television shows where the U. S. police could solve any crime with the most sophisticated technology imaginable. The one thing his comrades kept telling him in preparation for this mission was that the U. S. police were no better than he. They were just ordinary police who failed to detect the vast majority of their serious crimes. And he spoke English probably better than any one of them could speak his language. So who was inferior to whom?

  He made a right turn on a street in Desert Hot Springs, a street whose name he'd committed to memory. He was in a commercial district with a great deal of light industry, but even in an industrial area there were beautiful trees and plants. On each side of the building there were fan palms, nearly thirty meters high. A heavy thatch of dead palm fronds hung down around their trunks like a young girl's petticoat. It was reassuring to see the fan palms. They were very prevalent in his country. Perhaps it was a good omen. He put on the jacket with the gold buttons and entered the office.

  One woman was working at a desk and another was answering a telephone by a filing cabinet. There was a half-door with the top open leading into a small warehouse where he could hear people talking.

  "Can I help you, sir?" the woman asked.

  She was about his wife's age, but blonde and fair, not half as pretty as his wife, and she wore makeup like the Mexicali whores who'd kept propositioning him when he was trying to secure the forged documents.

  "I would like to see about a gravestone, please," he said, in his slightly accented, singsong cadence.

  "Would you like something in imperial black?" She opened some brochures stacked on the desk. "You can have a plaque sixteen by twenty-eight for a little over four hundred dollars. I think you'll find our prices competitive. But if you'd like the best, I'd suggest blue pearl granite. It's fro
m Norway, and it's about one thousand dollars. Two hundred more for a custom job."

  He leafed through a few pages and said, "You see, I was talking to a man who buried his mother in the Palm Springs area last year in September. He described her monument to me. It was so very lovely, he said. The monument may have been made here. I must have one just like it."

  "We don't make our plaques here. We order them. What was the name of the client?"

  "That is the problem. I do not know."

  "What was the name of the deceased?"

  "I am afraid I do not know that either."

  "How can I tell you then?" She was one of those American women who had chewing gum in her mouth when she talked. She didn't chew it, but it was there, and she had to move it from side to side in order to speak. He had never found women in the U. S. to be particularly attractive.

  "I know the exact date when he called to arrange for the monument," he said. "It was on day thirteen of September."

  "Was the deceased buried at the memorial park in Cathedral City?"

  "I do not know. I am sorry. I know very little, except that he ordered a tombstone for an old woman on that date. With orchids carved on it."

  "Orchids? It was a custom job then."

  "Yes, I believe that is so."

  "We can do an orchid or any other flower for you. We can order red stone, or green. Green can be quite lovely."

  "No, no, please," he said. "I need a monument precisely the same as the one that was arranged on day thirteen of September of last year."

  "Just a minute," she said, and picked up the telephone.

  It frightened him, the sudden move to a telephone, but this time he didn't panic. He said to himself: What could she be doing? Only calling her boss, nothing more.

  "Sam, come in here a minute, will ya?" she said into the telephone.

  He pretended to be perusing the brochures until a man in coveralls entered through the Dutch door and said, "Yeah?"

  He was a hard-working man. The fugitive had already learned that it was more comfortable to be around working people here than the other kind. This man had hands like those boys he'd met in the stand of tamarisk trees, those boys who had disobeyed him when he told them not to drive the stolen car. He'd read in the newspaper what had happened to them, but it was not his fault, they should have obeyed him. This man had hands like those hard-working boys.

  "Sam," the young woman said, "did you deliver a custom order last September for a . . ." She turned to the fugitive and said, "Was it imperial black or what?"

  "I am sorry," he said, with an apologetic shrug.

  "Okay, coulda been marble, granite, bronze. Did you take any sort of custom job where the client wanted orchids on the plaque?"

  "For an old woman," the fugitive said.

  "Lots of roses," the man said.

  "Orchids," the fugitive said. "For an old woman."

  "What was her name?"

  "We already been through that," the young woman sighed. "He doesn't know."

  "Orchids? No, we didn't deliver no orchids." Then he said, "A daisy. We delivered a daisy plaque for a little girl's funeral."

  The mansion was an elephantine dead-white stack of rectangles-a Frank Lloyd Wright ripoff that didn't work-but it was a short walk to downtown so the location was okay.

  "You don't look so good," Nelson said, when he arrived and Lynn answered the door in pajamas.

  "I was gonna go home early but I ran into a manicurist I met once before in Breda's office. This time she didn't look at me like I was something that'd go tits-up if you found it in your underwear and covered it with blue ointment."

  "Did you do her?" Nelson asked, and the leer looked particularly silly on him.

  "I hope not," Lynn said. "Cause anyone that'd ball me'd ball anybody, and that's scary. But I'm prob'ly safe. In Zimbabwe when a chameleon crosses your path you become impotent. I think it's also true of Palm Springs lizards."

  "Come on, Lynn, take a cold shower and let's jam," Nelson said. "I got some new ideas."

  When Lynn lurched past a huge gold-leafed mirror in the foyer of the massive house, he looked at his reflection and said, "I'm puffing up like a pigeon. I got MFB."

  "What's that?" Nelson asked.

  "Massive fluid buildup. I'm horny enough to do the tailpipe of a Studebaker, but it's no use. My sex life's history!"

  When they were out on the road in Nelson's Wrangler, with the desert wind in their faces and Lynn nursing a sick head, Nelson put in a tape. "I know you don't like country, but wait'll you hear this guy. It's Clint Black. Listen for the cryin harmonica."

  Lynn groaned and said, "Got any Furnace Room music? You know, Snookie Lanson's greatest hits?"

  "That house you're livin in is the most fantastic place I ever seen," Nelson said as he downshifted, causing Lynn to lurch forward painfully.

  "Yeah, it's cozy, like the Kremlin, except the owner has the taste of a Manila pimp. I gotta line up another house-sitting job real soon or I'll be begging a bed from a rich Indian I did a favor for one time. He might take me in. He lets his horse sleep on the patio. I could maybe do his gardening, trade in my gun for a weed-eater. Except his goats do it better. They live on his tennis court."

  "How do ya get house-sittin jobs, anyways?"

  "Used to be, it was easy. There was always some millionaire looking for a Palm Springs cop to sit his house for a few weeks or a few months. We provided very cheap security for rich guys. But like always, some cop screwed up the deal. One a the house-sitting gigs turned into Animal House Revisited-a party for about twenty cops and two thousand and twelve beauticians, cocktail waitresses and masseuses. The rich guy's dune buggy ended up in the swimming pool. When he got back from Aspen he had to be real careful with his swan dives and back flips. The word got out that cops're unreliable house-sitters."

  "You're right," Nelson said with disgust, "there's always a cop that'll screw up the good things for all the others. Some stupid selfish moron"

  "That's what everybody called me all right," Lynn said. "For the longest time."

  Breda opened her office very early and used the quiet time to write checks, both personal and business. She looked through the local paper to see if there was any appropriate office space for rent that she hadn't already called. There wasn't. She started to make coffee but decided she'd had her morning limit. The fact was, it was too damn early to be in the lonely office. Early birds and worms had nothing to do with her business. She was wondering if there were enough clients in Palm Springs for the number of P. I.'s.

  Breda looked at her watch. Most physicians opened up at 9:00 a. M. In that Clive Devon's urologist was either stonewalling or knew nothing, she decided to take a shot at his G. P.

  The medical building wasn't far from Desert Hospital. In the days of Gable, Tracy, the Marx brothers, Garbo-in Palm Springs' golden age-the hospital had been the city's finest resort hotel, El Mirador.

  The receptionist in the G. P.'s office wore a nameplate with only a first name, much like those worn by cocktail waitresses. And indeed she looked like a drink-wrangler. The nameplate read "Candy."

  "Good morning." Breda was pleased that there was only one patient in the waiting area, an elderly man who had more than urinary problems; his face was alive with skin cancer.

  "Yes?"

  "I'd like to talk to Doctor Gladden. It's about my husband."

  "He's not with you?"

  "No, he's not willing to come in yet," Breda said quietly, glancing at the old man, who was busy reading Palm Springs Life.

  "Do you wanna make an appointment for him?"

  "No . . . yes. I mean, I'd like to talk to the doctor. You see, I'd like him to take a semen sample."

  "A fertility check?"

  "We're pretty sure he's okay in that regard," Breda said. "Actually, we're considering in vitro fertilization with a surrogate. For now, we'd like to have my husband's sperm stored at whatever sperm bank you use."

  "Doctor Gladden's seventy-three years
old," Candy said. "He's semiretired and almost never takes a new patient. He's never done anything involving sperm banks in the two years that I been here."

  "Really? We have a friend, Clive Devon, who's a patient of Doctor Gladden. I thought he had it done here, the taking of the sample, the storage, all of it."

  "We haven't seen Mister Devon in over a year," Candy said. "Doctor has very few patients these days. If Mister Devon's done something like that it musta been with another physician." Then the young woman said doubtfully, "Are we talking about the same Mister Devon? He's getting on in years, the one we know. A sperm bank?"

  The Range Rover cruised south on Palm Canyon Drive and just kept going, to the Indian canyons. Clive Devon was going into the reservation, he and the young woman's big brown dog.

  Jack Graves wondered what he was doing with the woman's animal. She'd have to come back to get it, or maybe Clive Devon and she were going to meet up for a desert picnic like the one Lynn had described. Jack Graves hoped there'd be other cars by the Indians' toll booth, but there was only one vehicle on that narrow road. He decided to hang back and allow the Pace Arrow RV to pass, separating him from the black Range Rover. He paid $3.25 admission fee to a huge Indian woman sitting inside a wooden shack.

  When the Range Rover got to the fork and turned right into Murray Canyon, Jack Graves stopped his Mazda and waited, letting a station wagon pass him. Then he too made the turn, staying behind the wagon. There were mostly four-wheel drives and station wagons in Murray Canyon that day, and Jack Graves counted at least fifteen hikers already up on the rocks and trails, so he felt safe when he pulled into the unpaved parking area with the other cars.

  Jack Graves was wearing his hiking boots and a floppy hat. He'd brought a small canteen and a day-pack. He was ready to cover some ground but he didn't believe that Clive Devon would attempt a strenuous hike. Certainly not to Upper Palm Canyon Falls.

  Jack hadn't seen those falls in several years, not since the drought. White water used to drop straight down in a serpentine, between gashes in the granite, and when the light hit the falls just right, the chunky rock glinted like quartz. Cactus and wild-flowers shot out wherever the gashes were wide enough to trap sand and seed. Clumps of leaning yucca lined the granite rock face, lending the oasis effect that made it one of the most photographed sites in the valley. But that was before the five-year drought.