The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  As darkness fell so did Beavertail Bigelow, onto his favorite table at the oasis picnic ground. He was ten fathoms deep in a Beefeater slumber when a tall dark figure hoisted him up and hauled his carcass toward a waiting car, which roared toward the highway to Twentynine Palms.

  There was a diner on that highway where a bus driver made regular rest stops and lots of passes at a counter waitress. The unattended bus was parked in the light by the road sign, but no one saw the dark-clad figure carrying his shabby bundle. Beavertail Bigelow was found thirty minutes later on the back seat of the bus when his snoring woke two marines on their way to their base. He got kicked off the bus, minus his cowboy hat, and had to hitchhike back to Mineral Springs, therefore adding bus drivers to the list of things he hated.

  By the time Beavertail reached the outskirts of Mineral Springs the rising sun was smacking him in the eyes. His cerebellum was fogged by gin fumes and his soggy cortex was giving conflicting orders to his ravaged little body. All those millions of marinated brain cells were firing aimlessly. Beavertail Bigelow was parched and confused.

  He decided to cut across a mile of desert directly to the oasis picnic ground where there was a water fountain piped from a natural spring. He kept his mouth clamped shut and breathed through his nose to keep the mucous membranes moist, but his narrow skull was already heating up. The sun was just above the horizon but soaring fast, and throwing purples and pinks and crimsons and blues across the Santa Rosa Mountains.

  Beavertail realized that the gin was accelerating dehydration like crazy. The marrow in his bones was sizzling. Might as well stick a blow dryer in his mouth as drink a fifth of gin and start trucking across the desert, he thought. Then he decided that if he had lots of money like Johnny Cash and Liz Taylor and Liza Minnelli and all the other rich cocksuckers that came to the desert to get cured at the Eisenhower de-tox clinic, he wouldn’t be out here at the crack of dawn staggering around. He was only in this goddamn pickle because he was poor.

  Beavertail was now about tired enough to accept help even from a cop if he spotted one, but he figured they were all sleeping in their patrol cars somewhere, the lazy pricks. He had to pull himself together and take a breather, so he wobbled toward a honeypod mesquite, the shade tree of the desert. It was about thirty feet tall, a dramatic species with rounded crown and rough-textured bark.

  He scared a roadrunner who leaped from behind a spray of desert lavender and zoomed off, his topknot fluttering. The scented flowers and strong mint aroma attracted swarms of bees, but this one was beeless at the moment so Beavertail squatted beside it, careful not to disturb a large jumping cholla. The slightest touch of the cactus’ joints will shoot you full of barbs, yet birds nest in it. Another desert mystery.

  As Beavertail squatted like a Morongo Indian, getting crankier by the minute, he spotted a banded gecko lizard doing a few pushups on a little sand drift. The gecko shot Beavertail Bigelow a mean little glare and tossed off about five more pushups for effect. The “pushup” movement is thought to be a display of territorial dominance, and this four-inch reptile was so full of anxiety he was into his third set.

  Suddenly, the lizard took a bluff step toward Beavertail Bigelow and squeezed out three more pushups, though by now his little tongue was lolling from exhaustion and his eyes were sliding back in his skull.

  Beavertail got very curious. The desert rat creaked to his feet and braced the lizard like a gunslinger. “You ain’t no fringe-toed, you little cocksucker,” Beavertail told the gecko. “I can kick your ass and who cares?”

  With that, Beavertail Bigelow tried to give the gecko a swift kick, but since his brain cells were firing at random he only kicked desert air. Beavertail sailed over the sand drift, landing flat on his bony spine. He let out a yelp and was answered by a musical plink. He thought at first that the sound was a spinal disk blowing, so he gingerly pulled himself to a sitting position.

  He figured the little cocksucker lizard had jammed on home until he saw what the lizard had been guarding. The asshole was home! He’d been living inside his treasure, which was now the property of Beavertail Bigelow by virtue of superior size. It was a funny-looking ukulele.

  Beavertail picked it up, dusted it off and saw that it was in one piece. How the hell did it get here? Fell off a passing truck probably. He could clean it up and take it to a pawnshop he knew in Cathedral City, where there were no cathedrals but lots of secondhand joints and so many gay bars that desert barflies would say, “Are you married, fella, or do you live in Cathedral City?”

  When at a later time, lawmen would reflect upon how a notorious Palm Springs murder case was methodically deciphered by seemingly random discoveries, they would find undeniable that a growing evidence chain was forged by a very macho lizard.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE PAYOFF

  President Ronald Reagan had not yet arrived at the Century Plaza Hotel to await election results, but half a block away on Avenue of the Stars, Sidney Blackpool was making a call at an office suite when he saw two men standing beside a limousine. They wore three-piece suits and button-down shirts and striped neckties and shiny wingtips, but despite the duds they didn’t have the gee-whiz look of a George Bush preppie. For one thing their arms hung funny and they both looked about as light-hearted as Jack Nicklaus lining up a putt on the eighteenth.

  Sidney Blackpool was never comfortable walking past Secret Service agents, but had had several occasions to do so in the past twenty-one years when bigshot politicians came to town. Like most policemen he didn’t think that Secret Service agents were real cops, so he wasn’t altogether relaxed when he had to stroll by with a Smith amp; Wesson under his coat. Regular cops could spot a plainclothes dick in a minute, but he always feared that one of these guys might eyeball the gun bulge and give him a John Hinckley brain massage with the butt of an Uzi before he could identify himself.

  They didn’t call him Black Sid for any reason related to his appearance. In fact, his hair was sandy brown and gray mottled, and his eyes were pale green, and he had the kind of freckled flesh that seemed to invite a keratosis every time he played a round of golf without sunscreen lotion.

  “A skin-doctors dream,” his dermatologist told him. “Keep it up, and by the time you’re forty-five you’ll progress from something that sounds ugly, like keratosis, to something that sounds pretty, like melanoma.”

  People always asked if he got his nickname from being a Dirty Harry, black-glove cop, and he’d explain that policemen love monickers and when your name is Sidney Blackpool you just naturally become Black Sid. What he didn’t tell them was that “Black Sid” reflected his cynical demeanor, a look that said doomsday couldn’t come soon enough. Nor did he say that he drank lots more than his share of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch-ergo, Black Sid.

  Sidney Blackpool was not kept waiting by the foxy secretary at an art nouveau desk shaped like an oil spill. She certainly had no trouble spotting him for a cop, and asked, “Sergeant Blackpool?” the second he entered the office.

  The detective was about to make himself comfortable and maybe see if she was as friendly as she looked when she said, “Oh, you don’t have to wait. Mister Watson’s expecting you.”

  Victor Watson’s office was not quite as overdone as the palace at Versailles but it did have a Louis XV parquet floor. And there were terra-cotta urns and Chinese pots on that floor, and Italian rococo mirrors, and a J.M.W. Turner oil painting on the wall, and polished granite tabletops, and a lacquered desk, if it was a desk, that looked like one of those ten-thousand-dollar numbers that’re supposed to combine form and function but look like an organ pulled from the belly of a dinosaur.

  Sidney Blackpool was looking for Victor Watson in all this loopy art mix when a voice from the adjoining salon said, “In here, Sergeant Blackpool.”

  The smaller room was a sudden relief. It was orderly with nubby upholstery and wood, real wood, and rough tactile accents. It was a man’s room, and the desk top of polished granite reflected t
he pupils and irises of the suntanned smiling man behind it.

  “Doesn’t that office make you want to puke?” Victor Watson said.

  “Who designed it, Busby Berkeley?” the detective said dryly.

  “My wife did, I’m afraid.”

  “She only forgot a singing waterfall,” Sidney Blackpool said, shaking hands with the older man and being beckoned toward the camel sofa.

  Everyone knew who the “wife” was even if they’d never heard of Victor Watson. She was at one time a top star of feature films and was now experiencing a comeback as a nighttime soap opera killer-bitch.

  There were two crystal tumblers and an ice bucket on the simple oak cocktail table, but there was nothing simple about the Ming-dynasty figural group resting beside a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

  Victor Watson looked at his wristwatch, Patek Phillipe of course, and said, “Late enough for a drink, Sergeant? You’re almost off duty.”

  “I don’t worry about duty,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Only about my liver. Four o’clock’s late enough.”

  Victor Watson sat beside the detective and poured three fingers of Scotch into each tumbler, then added two ice cubes to both drinks. He was so tanned that his crow’s-feet crinkled dead white when he smiled, as chalky white as his hair. His hands were delicate and they too were covered with white hairs.

  “Tell me,” he said, “do you resent being sent over here to humor some millionaire about a seventeen-month-old murder case?”

  “Not as long as he buys the drinks, Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, eyeing the older man over the edge of the glass.

  Victor Watson shifted his weight on the sofa, adjusting the crease in his Nino Cerruti pleated pants as he did so. His outfit included a brocade vest, which was back in style (at least in Beverly Hills and its environs) after a fifty-year absence, and kiltie Italian slip-on loafers.

  Then he saw the detective’s cynical green eyes looking him over and said, “When I’m in my downtown offices in the financial district, I don’t wear clothes from a Paris boutique.”

  Sidney Blackpool managed a halfhearted smile and continued to drink without comment. So far the guy had apologized for his wife’s goofy taste and his frog clothes designer. Still, he was paying for the drinks.

  As though he read the detective’s mind, Victor Watson freshened the drink and said, “You’re not about to ask me how I knew you drink Johnnie Walker Black, are you?”

  Victor Watson chuckled and those polished granite eyes got a bit less riveting. “A childish trick I know, but things like that impress the idiots around this town. I asked your lieutenant when I called your office, and he asked your partner.”

  “My partner’s on vacation. Won’t be back for a couple a weeks.”

  “Of course, I was told that. He must’ve asked somebody in your office.”

  “It’s okay with me,” Sidney Blackpool said, and the Scotch was warming his belly and throat and if this kept up he might start to tolerate this guy.

  “How old’re you, Sergeant?” Victor Watson asked.

  “Forty-two.”

  “I’m only fifty-nine years old and you thought I was sixty-nine.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s okay; I know how I look. Life hasn’t always been so nice to me. When I was nineteen I spent two days as a guest of your department. I was selling sandwiches from the back of a truck to the garment workers downtown and I got a few tickets for being parked in a red zone. I couldn’t afford to pay them and one day one of your motor cops ran a make on me and put me in jail. The judge told me fifty dollars or three days. I didn’t have fifty dollars. That Lincoln Heights was one shitty jail. I got in three fights to save my virtue.”

  “Did you save it?”

  “For a while,” he said. “Then I married my present wife and backed one of her movies and got myself gang-banged every day by the studio goniffs.”

  Sidney Blackpool caught himself guzzling, which was what he had promised himself he wouldn’t do the last time he failed to quit drinking. Well, shit, if you have to listen to some industrialist’s life story …

  “Help yourself,” Victor Watson said, and the detective poured generously.

  “People think I made my money in land development,” Victor Watson continued, sipping with restraint. “High tech is where I hit it big. I have a tenth-grade education but I can sell anything: rags, cars, junk, land. You name it, I can sell it.”

  By now, Sidney Blackpool was drifting. The sun was filtering in the windows from the west, and twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker was making fifty-nine-year-old Victor Watson seem like an old pal.

  “Fame is what works around these parts,” Victor Watson continued. “Lots of guys who make Forbes magazine get snubbed by every snotty maître d’ in town. If you want to be where it’s at you have two choices: buy a sports franchise, which is the second crappiest business in the world, or get into movies, which is the most crappy. I discovered a third way and married a famous movie star. We get the tables in her name. My picture gets taken when I’m with her. I go to parties because of her. Now I can go anywhere I want and eat cold potato soup and everyone knows me. Do you play golf?”

  “As a matter a fact,” Sidney Blackpool nodded.

  “We’ll play sometime. I like the Bel-Air course. I belong to half a dozen clubs but I don’t get a chance to play much. What do you know about my son’s murder?”

  The guy could shift gears without a clutch, and before the detective could answer, Victor Watson said, “You may have read that my boy disappeared from our Palm Springs home last year and was found murdered out in the desert near a blister of a town called Mineral Springs.”

  “I never read whether they caught the …”

  “They didn’t,” Victor Watson said, and just for a second those irises flickered. Then he stood and walked to the window, gazing at the sun falling toward Santa Monica.

  “I’m wondering what I can do for you,” Sidney Blackpool said.

  “Your department’s got to get involved, Sid,” Victor Watson announced, with just a touch of fervor. “I’m not bad-mouthing Palm Springs P.D. or anybody else. But it’s been seventeen months and …”

  Victor Watson was not a man to lose control and he didn’t. He smiled and returned to the sofa, sitting down beside the detective. “It’s come to my attention that my boy may have been in Hollywood the day he died. It could be that the events leading up to the murder in the desert emanated from Hollywood. In that case, Hollywood Division of the L. A. Police Department becomes the proper agency to join this investigation, right?”

  “Hold on, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool didn’t like this a bit. He had enough cases without being drawn into a cold Palm Springs homicide with a guy like this applying the torque.

  “Listen to me, Sidney,” Victor Watson said, leaning toward the detective. “I know it’s stretching matters a bit to draw you in, but I need to keep this investigation going. I don’t know where to turn. All the goddamn money I gave the Republicans the last four years, yet the F.B.I. dropped out within three days. And the Palm Springs P.D. was finished in six months. Oh, they still call me but they don’t have leads. And my son, my boy, he …”

  “I suppose I can maybe make a few calls, Mister Watson,” the detective offered. “After you tell me about the new information that makes you think Hollywood’s involved.”

  “I was thirty-six years old when Jack was born,” Victor Watson said. “My daughters were already in high school when he came along. My first wife was probably too old for child-bearing, but it worked. Did it ever. He had an I.Q. of a hundred and forty. And he was a talented piano player. And he had the sweetest golf swing you have ever seen.… Tell me, do you know about depression and despair?” Without waiting for an answer Victor Watson said, “I can tell you that despair is not merely acute depression. Despair is more than the sum of many terrible parts. Depression is purgatory. Despair is hell.”

  The detective almos
t sent the Ming-dynasty figurine spinning off the cocktail table, he snatched at the Johnnie Walker so quickly.

  Victor Watson didn’t notice. He just kept talking in a monotone that was getting spooky. “Do you know how a man feels when he loses his son? He feels … incomplete. Nothing in the whole world looks the same or is the same. He goes around looking for pieces of himself. Incomplete. And … and then all his daydreams and fantasies go back to June of last year. Whatever he’s thinking about, it’s got to precede the time he got the phone call about his son. You see, he just keeps trying to turn the clock back. He wants just one more chance. For what? He can’t even say for sure. He wants to communicate. What? He isn’t sure.” And then Victor Watson breathed a sigh and said: “The ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.”

  “I’d like to help you, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool was getting unaccountably warm. He unbuttoned his collar, removed his necktie and shoved it into his coat pocket.

  “Hear me out, Sid,” Victor Watson said quietly. “It’s important that I lay things out … well … methodically. It’s how I am. He isn’t able to answer his phone at first, the father of a dead boy. Especially since so many people think they have to call to express condolences. One friend calls four times and finally you speak to him and he says, ‘Why didn’t you return my calls? I want to share your grief.’ And you say to him, ‘You dumb son of a bitch. If you could share any part of it, I’d give it to you! I’d give it all to you, you stupid bastard!’ And then of course I lost that friend.”

  Sidney Blackpool made a mental note, as though it were a crime confession, that Victor Watson had switched persons three times before he was ready or maybe able to start telling it in the first person.

  “Then for several weeks, all I could think about were the bad moments. I couldn’t remember the good times, the good things we had together, Jack and me. Only the problems. Only the bad times. You know something? Booze used to make me silly and happy. Now I hardly touch it because it makes me morose and mean. Can I freshen that?”