The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Speak up, goddamnit,” Hiram Murphy said, feeling very grumpy about going to jail without his mama.

  It was dark enough now to turn on headlights, and O. A. Jones switched his on, turned toward Hiram Murphy in the backseat and said it again.

  This time, Hiram Murphy got very testy. He leaned forward and said, “Speak up, asshole! What’s a matter with you anyways?”

  And then: WHANG! Hiram Murphy’s face was flattened against the heavy steel-mesh screen as O. A. Jones stood on his brakes going into four-wheel lock.

  After Hiram Murphy stopped cussing and yelling, O. A. Jones said, “I was just trying to tell you that a poodle ran out in front of us. I had to hit my brakes to save the poor little thing! I’m soooory.” Hiram Murphy had his screen test.

  They were only three blocks from the station when a sheriffs unit went into pursuit on Highway 111 and announced that he had been fired on. Within ten seconds O. A. Jones’s pink ears were leaking adrenaline and he was roaring toward the pursuit car, which was having trouble keeping up with a stolen 1983 BMW sedan.

  Thirty minutes after dark, twelve other police units from Palm Springs, CHP, Riverside sheriffs, Indio P.D. and even Mineral Springs P.D. had joined the chase on Interstate 10, first toward Indio and then back, as the pursued car kept doing sliding U-turns, wheeling off and on the freeway.

  The BMW, it turned out, contained a pretty good catch. It was the stopwatch bandit, so called because during the robbery of four valley banks, he checked his watch before and after vaulting the tellers’ counters and was long gone before the cops could respond to a silent alarm. On this night, the stopwatcher had been on his way home from robbing a bank in Indian Wells when a sheriff’s car tried to stop him for being a bit late on a traffic light. The chase was on.

  The stopwatcher was careening down Monterey Avenue in Palm Desert when O. A. Jones, listening to the radio pursuit, intercepted him coming the other way. The young cop played chicken with the approaching headlights, veering at the last second, but was a little late. With Hiram Murphy screaming in his ear, O. A. Jones got clipped on the right front by the speeding BMW and was spun in a terrifying 360, crunching against a forty-foot telephone pole, which bent the police car in half. The rocketing BMW went airborne, crashing against a date palm and throwing the stopwatcher into the street alongside a handcuffed and very dead Hiram Murphy, who was himself blown from the backseat of the police car at the second of impact.

  O. A. Jones remained belted in the front seat with only a bloody nose and a mild concussion, realizing foggily that he was in trouble. That was the best he could manage with his head feeling mushy and his brain slogging around in there, but within minutes, while a dozen sirens converged on the crash site, O. A. Jones was understanding that by going into that suicidal pursuit with a prisoner helplessly handcuffed in the backseat, he could be charged with manslaughter. He could see quite clearly in the headlight beams that Hiram Murphy looked like a speed bump in the asphalt.

  O. A. Jones began pulling himself out of his totaled patrol unit, trying desperately to put together a “Gee, Sarge!” story that was remotely plausible, when a CHP officer came running into the headlight beam and said, “You okay?”

  “For the moment,” O. A. Jones mumbled, hoping that he would get put in the cops’ tank at the county jail, because a twenty-four-year-old former surfer, who was also a former cop, would be Sadie Thompson’d in the regular tank within three minutes.

  Then the Chip said, “You didn’t have to handcuff that pukus delicti. He’s deader’n gramma’s clit. So’s the other one!”

  O. A. Jones was trying to make sense of that when two more units skidded to a stop. More were coming, the sirens whooping from three directions.

  The second cop on the scene, a sheriff’s deputy, said, “Damn, I thought there was only one in the BMW! The second one musta been hiding in the backseat. May as well take your cuffs off him, he’s deader’n John De Lorean’s MasterCard.”

  And so they did. They gave the handcuffs to O. A. Jones who was starting to be able to add two digits, and who wisely kept his mouth shut.

  The newspapers announced the death of the stopwatch bandits, both of them, one of whom was a member of a Gypsy-like pack of desert confidence men who screamed to no end that their kin, Hiram, was only a crank dealer and a burglar and a pursepick, but had never robbed a bank in his life. But pretty soon Moms Murphy had second thoughts. Maybe her boy Hiram wasn’t the slimy little fuck they’d always thought. He led a secret life! Hiram was wheelman for the famous stopwatch bandit! Moms Murphy was actually kind of proud.

  But a Palm Springs sergeant who checked the crashed cars felt some confusion. How did the blood, which O. A. Jones said was his, get on the back window of the patrol car? There were some strange questions about that smashup.

  He took a sly look at O. A. Jones and said, “I’d like to retrieve the black box from this crash and see what really happened.”

  And since his sergeant didn’t like O. A. Jones any better than his lieutenant who didn’t like him at all, O. A. Jones said, “Gee, Sarge! You know, Chief Pedroza at Mineral Springs is looking for an experienced man. I been thinking about going up there and talking to him. Maybe tonight?”

  “You can wait till tomorrow,” the sergeant said. “He should be glad to hire the cop who brought down the stopwatch bandit. And his crime partner.”

  So O. A. Jones decided to trade his Palm Springs tan for Mineral Springs blue. He met Sergeant Harry Bright who convinced Paco that O. A. Jones was a “good lad” and deserved to stay in law enforcement. And O. A. Jones happened to be on duty when the call came in to the Mineral Springs police station concerning the ransom demand for Jack Watson.

  The Mineral Springs P.D. had been notified in the first place only because Victor Watson thought, in addition to the whine of speeding cars in the background, he might’ve heard the blast of air brakes. The F.B.I. concluded that the call might have come from a truck stop or diner. All jurisdictions were being given that information with instructions not to go near a likely truck stop, but to give the F.B.I. and Palm Springs P.D. its whereabouts if they had one in their area.

  That was all it took for O. A. Jones, who was anxious to make an impression on his new boss, Paco Pedroza. He vaulted the counter at the police station like the late stopwatch bandit and jumped in his patrol car, scorching off toward the truck stop on the highway to Twentynine Palms. He discovered belatedly that he was driving the out-of-service patrol car with the bum radio.

  O. A. Jones spent the rest of the night blowing up dust clouds on every road or trail within ten miles of the truck stop, almost getting his rear wheels sand-locked on two occasions. The desert night, being quite cool even during a hot season, would have provided him with a decently comfortable trek to the highway, except that O. A. Jones waited until his graveyard shift was just about ended and the dawning fireball was visible over the mountains before he managed to lock his patrol unit into three feet of the softest desert powder. After which he turned his ankle trying to dig out.

  There were soon two searches going on in the desert. One for the son of Victor Watson, one for Officer O. A. Jones of the Mineral Springs Police Department.

  The F.B.I. agent riding shotgun with the sheriffs chopper pilot was enjoying some very spectacular scenery late that afternoon. The pilot was a hotdog Vietnam vet called “Skypork” by the street people but preferring the nom de guerre of “Pigasus.” They had already refueled and had flown to the Salton Sea, a lake 228 feet below sea level, occupying the site of a prehistoric lake whose water-line was etched in white travertine along the granite hillside.

  They then powered north over the Painted Canyon and northwest toward Thousand Palms. They flew back into Palm Springs and up the sheer rock face over Andreas Falls where Frank Capra filmed part of Lost Horizon, and into local canyons on the theory that the kidnappers were being truthful about being “close by.” Pigasus soared west to the Palm Springs tram, showing off for the tourists on
the tram car, then veered north toward the Little San Bernardino Mountains with their canyons and hiding places and desert accessible only to four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  The air show was mostly cosmetic for the benefit of Victor Watson, and because Pigasus enjoyed scaring the living shit out of the F.B.I. agent who was turning green from the mini-aerobatics. There were lots of red pickup trucks in a valley this large and even more that appeared to be red from the sky, and lots of others that were not quite red but could appear to be so when seen at ground level by an overheated seventy-eight-year-old Las Palmas gentleman with trifocals.

  In the desert you don’t get very much mileage from your fuel. When you’re walking, that is. You can get about ten good miles out of your body if you fill your body tank with a gallon of water. You get lots less if you’re wearing a navy-blue police uniform and Sam Browne, lugging a 9mm pistol and a hideout gun in a leg holster. Especially if you have a severely sprained ankle and don’t know diddly about the desert in the first place.

  When O. A. Jones got so hot and tired he was about to drop, he plopped down prone and breathed through his mouth on the desert floor, which was about 25 degrees hotter than it would be one foot off the ground. When he could gather up the strength to continue, O. A. Jones ignored the many desert birds that would give a rat like Beavertail Bigelow a clue to water holes. He knew nothing of quail flying toward water in the late afternoon, and had never noticed all the times he shot at doves that they also flock toward water holes in the late afternoon and evening. He didn’t know of indicator plants-sycamore, willow, cattail, cottonwood-where he might dig. He staggered right past a limestone cave that contained a large pool of cool clean water. He made a painful detour because he was scared of encountering a mountain lion, though one hadn’t been seen in those parts for thirty years.

  O. A. Jones was having some very troubling thoughts: If only summer hadn’t come so early this year. If only he’d stayed in Laguna Beach where he grew up. If only he hadn’t got all hyped about the kidnapping of the rich guy’s kid. If only he hadn’t taken that trail off into the canyon because he thought he saw a campfire. If only everything would speed up so he wasn’t seeing birds fly in slow motion. If only his arms and legs weren’t tingly. If only he weren’t turning bluer than his uniform.

  Then O. A. Jones heard it: the music. And he thought, This is it! Fucking harps and angels! Then he heard it again. It was a banjo! Somebody was playing the banjo and singing!

  O. A. Jones lurched to a stop and listened. He didn’t know how confusing sound can be out there as it bounces off canyon walls and ricochets like a rifle shot, especially if your body temperature is up four degrees and climbing. O. A. Jones heard what sounded like a car engine starting up. O. A. Jones started hobbling in slow motion on his swollen ankle. The wrong way.

  Meanwhile, Victor Watson, with an F.B.I. agent monitoring, had received his second telephone call from the woman, who this time was calling from a place that offered no sound clues. She instructed Victor Watson to obtain $250,000 in tens and twenties and pack it inside a large suitcase. He was told to drive his white Mercedes on a circuitous route that made no sense whatever to the Palm Springs police who were playing second banana to the feds. He was to head out Whitewater Canyon, then to double back on Highway 10, then up Route 62 toward Devil’s Garden, then back toward North Palm Springs. It was apparent that if the kidnappers were watching the drop car they’d need an aircraft to do it, and the only aircraft in the skies that day were commercial flights out of Palm Springs and choppers belonging to law-enforcement agencies. Victor Watson was ordered to call home at precise twenty-minute intervals, which was impossible given the desolate stretches up toward Little San Bernardino Mountains and back again.

  After a third call the kidnappers stopped dicking around. Mrs. Watson received it while her husband was gone. She was ordered by the woman to tell Victor Watson when he called to drive out Highway 10 to the Thousand Palms turnoff, then to proceed north to the oasis by Dillon Road.

  As it turned out, the kidnappers weren’t kidnappers at all. They were a pair of drifters named Abner and Maybelle Sneed, who usually made their living growing pot in Oregon but had migrated south after the law started applying so much heat to the Oregon plantationers. They had stopped in Palm Springs for a three-day holiday, heard on the news about the disappearance of Jack Watson, and gone to the library to look through a copy of the “Gold Book,” Palm Springs’s Who’s Who. Then they’d stopped at the pharmacy nearest to the Watson residence, and while Maybelle Sneed kept the pharmacist busy, Abner grabbed the Rolodex from behind the register and found customer Victor Watson’s phone number. It was all done in about 120 seconds by people with 75 I.Q.’s, this after Victor Watson had spent more than $15,000 for intruder alarms and sophisticated protection.

  The only surprising move made that day by the would-be extortionists was that Abner rented a motorcycle and was lying in wait near Pushawalla Palms for the Watson Mercedes to pass north. The plan was to scan the skies for cops, and if it looked okay, to whip on out the highway, overtaking Victor Watson and holding up a sign that said: “Toss out the money and you will be told where your boy is.”

  Abner and Maybelle were very fine pot farmers, diligent and fair to customers. They took pride in their product and refined it carefully, putting it up like grandma’s peaches, with jars, rubber gaskets and labels. But they were not kidnappers and were lousy extortionists. Abner scanned the skies for aircraft with a pair of brand-new binoculars, but never even thought about a radio transmitter in the Mercedes that was signaling the feds hovering far beyond his line of sight.

  Just after Abner roared up on the Honda and made contact with the Mercedes, a signal from Victor Watson brought Pigasus driving in. Moments after Victor Watson threw the suitcase from the car window, the F.B.I. agent had Abner, the failed extortionist, in his scope sight.

  Meanwhile, Maybelle was waiting at a date bar on Dillon Road. It was one of those roadside shacks that sell Coachella Valley dates and date candy and date milk shakes. Maybelle was on her third date milk shake when she spotted Abner roaring up on the Honda, all dust and teeth and giggles, the suitcase balanced across the handlebars. While Maybelle fired up the family sedan, Abner scooted west to the side trail and ditched the rented Honda behind a tamarisk tree where he tried to open the locked suitcase.

  “Abner, git in the fuckin car!” Maybelle hollered with her squeaky little voice. “We’ll open er later!”

  But Abner couldn’t wait to see what $250,000 looked like and he started cussing at Maybelle as though it were her fault that the bag was locked.

  “We gotta git!” Maybelle squeaked, jumping out of the car and running toward the tamarisk tree where Abner was banging on the suitcase like the gorilla in the Samsonite luggage commercial.

  Maybelle was first to sight the helicopter in the distance. She pointed and screamed and when the spotter knew they’d blown their cover, Pigasus closed in on Abner and Maybelle. Abner was like a monkey with his closed fist in a jar trap. He just couldn’t let go even after they jumped in the car. He was still fussing with the suitcase lock when Maybelle pulled a bogus carbine from the backseat and aimed it at the bubble of the chopper.

  “To scare them off,” she later said.

  While Maybelle was speeding northwest on Dillon Road, Abner took a peek out the window at the trailing chopper. A muzzle flash was the last thing he ever saw.

  Abner didn’t die right away and Maybelle didn’t die at all even though she had a bullet in her leg and another lodged near her collarbone when the chase ended.

  It was a typical police chase. Before it was over, six different law-enforcement agencies were in on it, which is very common. Everybody did sliding U-turns, which is very common. Shots were fired by several units, which is very common. This one nearly turned into an intramural fire fight with cops shooting each other during the thirty-five-minute high-speed chase, and this too is fairly common.

  It was a semispectacu
lar chase, as desert chases go. In open country they often last a very long time. It was fortunate for O. A. Jones that this one lasted all the way to a remote canyon not far from Mineral Springs where he had decided to hole up and rest because he thought he was hearing banjos and car engines and singing voices in the middle of nowhere.

  By the end, there was fear and pandemonium and adrenaline leaking everywhere. When Maybelle did her last sliding U-ee and crashed near a canyon road leading to O. A. Jones, the result was exactly the same as it always is in high-speed pursuits. The first thirteen cops to jump out of their cars, or point guns out the car windows, yelled thirteen conflicting orders to the suspects.

  All of the conflicting orders had one thing in common: they all ended with the word “motherfuckers.”

  While all the yelling and motherfucking and gun waving was going on, a car skidded in driven by Chief Paco Pedroza. He jumped out and ran toward the lead cops hiding behind the first chase unit with handguns and shotguns pointed toward the steaming wreck.

  The loudest uniformed cop outyelled everyone. He bellowed: “You motherfucking sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your fucking face off!””

  And Paco Pedroza with his badge pinned to his aloha shirt ran up yelling, “Everybody shut up! I’m in charge!”

  But the big loud cop was operating in another zone. His eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and his shotgun was shaking, and he bellowed: “You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your face off!”

  So Paco screamed: “SHUT UP! I’LL DO THE TALKING!” which got everybody’s attention.

  Then Paco, finally in command, turned his own face toward the suspects’ car and his eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and Paco yelled: “You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your face off!”