The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  When Maynard Rivas and Nathan Hale Wilson arrived, the domestic violence was still in a semi-explosive state though both combatants were now wheezing and blowing and too exhausted to do more than slap at each other with wimpy blows. She was bigger and he was two years older so it wasn’t a mismatch, In fact, Clyde was in pretty bad shape because his tracheostomy tube nearly jumped out of his throat every time she popped him a good one.

  The little guy was still trying gamely to give as good as he got, and his dirty white undershirt was dripping sweat when Maynard Rivas slipped into the living room and lifted him off his feet, while Nathan Hale Wilson carried Bernice over by her rocker where their tomcat, Jasper, sat inspecting his ass, not even remotely concerned by all this human drama.

  “Break it up, Clyde!” Maynard Rivas commanded.

  “Lemme go, you big asshole!” Clyde said. “This is my house!” Because of the tracheostomy he sounded like a cross between Wolfman Jack and the demon from The Exorcist.

  “Not till you stop fighting,” Maynard said.

  “I’ll sue you!” Clyde croaked.

  “Injuns got immunity,” Maynard lied.

  “The only good Indian is a …”

  “Yeah, yeah, I saw all the cowboy movies,” Maynard said. “Now relax and quit squirming!”

  “Make her promise first! She’ll blind-side me, the sneaky bitch!”

  “Promise you won’t hit him, Bernice,” Nathan Hale Wilson ordered the old woman.

  “I ain’t promising nothing!” Bernice Suggs said, still kicking. “Let him fight like a man!”

  It was no use telling them they were going to jail. They knew very well that the cops wouldn’t risk the bad press Mineral Springs would get if they booked these miserable old geezers. Even though every cop in town would dearly love to toss them in the slam. They’d all been spit at, cursed, and reviled by Clyde and Bernice Suggs.

  “Okay, you’ll go to the station and sit in the holding tank till you promise to behave!” Maynard said, heading for the door with Clyde tucked under his arm.

  “Wait a minute, you big prick!” Clyde croaked. “Lemme go! I won’t fight no more!”

  Maynard reluctantly released Clyde who hobbled stoop-shouldered over to the rocker where he punched at the tomcat who hissed but gave up the chair. Clyde sat for a spell, fussing with his trachea tube, trying to get sufficient air to make one of his long croaky speeches about the mentality of cops, especially big Indian cops and scrawny paleface cops that’re probably dumber than big Indians.

  Nathan Hale Wilson made the mistake of letting Bernice go just because she stopped fighting. The old woman mumbled a few cuss words and looked as though she was going to surrender, but while the two cops were giving the tipplers their standard warning about not tolerating this disgusting behavior anymore, Bernice grabbed something from the sideboard where it rested next to the Mineral Springs penny saver.

  Just as Clyde was getting ready to deliver his monologue about police mentality, Bernice swung. Clyde caught the leading edge smack behind the skull and his upper plate shot through the air, bouncing off the ample belly of Maynard Rivas. Then the fight was really on. Bernice jumped on Clyde and jerked the trachea tube out of his throat and wouldn’t let go even when the big Indian pounced on her and Nathan Hale Wilson grabbed at her crooked fingers.

  “Uuuuuuuhhhhh!” Clyde croaked, while Bernice clamped onto that tube and with her one remaining eye-tooth glinting wolfishly said, “Now let’s you and me do the turkey trot, you old son of a bitch!”

  Since Bernice was a touch arthritic and not as tough as she used to be, Nathan Hale Wilson got the tube out of her claws while all four wrestled on the floor.

  “Let go the tube!” Maynard yelled. “He can’t breathe!”

  “I’ll stuff it with cat shit!” Bernice screamed back at him until Maynard gave her such a shove she did a backward whoop-de-doo and bumped her head on the coffee table, out of action temporarily.

  Twenty minutes later the two cops, uniforms dusty and torn, were at the police station with Clyde and Bernice Suggs and the weapon.

  “I can’t book these people!” Paco Pedroza whispered after Clyde and Bernice were cooling their heels in the holding tank. “They’re nearly eighty years old!”

  “That’s an ADW,” Nathan Hale Wilson said. “A felony. I’m sick a these old fuckers, Chief.”

  “A ukulele ain’t exactly a deadly weapon,” Paco said.

  “No, but jerking out his trachea tube is a pretty goddamn aggravated assault, you ask me!”

  “Oh, so you wanna book Bernice and let Clyde go home, huh? He’s more acceptable?”

  “He’s as acceptable as a lesion on my dick,” Nathan Hale Wilson said, with the conviction of a man who’s had a few. “But at least one a them oughtta get something outta this.”

  “If they both apologize will you be satisfied?” Paco argued. “And if they promise never to do it again? Jesus, can you imagine the picture in the newspaper if we take these two down to the Indio Hilton and lock them up?”

  “Okay, okay,” Nathan Hale Wilson said finally. “But don’t make us drive em back home. That’s degrading!”

  “The walk’ll do em good,” Paco said. “Let em out five minutes apart. Okay with you, Maynard?”

  “Okay,” the Indian said. “Which one gets the weapon?”

  “Lemme see that,” Paco said. “Funny-looking ukulele. One, two, three … this one’s got eight strings. Never saw a uke with eight strings.” Then he strummed it a few times. “Wish I could play music.”

  Clyde Suggs made an announcement from the holding cell: “This is the Foreign Legion for misfit cops, but Paco Pedroza sure ain’t no Beau Geste!”

  “See, that’s part a the problem here,” Paco said to Maynard. “Clyde’s read a couple books in his time and thinks he married beneath him.”

  Five minutes later, when Maynard Rivas was leading Clyde to the door, Paco was sitting with his feet up on his desk singing his heart out. “ ‘Ain’t she sweet!’ ” he sang, strumming away discordantly.

  Maynard interrupted him. “Uh, Chief, time to give Clyde back the deadly weapon.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Paco said. “Here you go, Clyde. Nice uke.”

  “I bought it to serenade Bernice,” the old man croaked. “Now I’d like to stick it in her …”

  “Okay, enough violence!” Paco warned.

  The old man was still mighty pissed off as he trudged down the Mineral Springs main drag. He started toward the back door of the Eleven Ninety-nine Club but stopped when he thought about all the goddamn cops that hung around there. He cut through the eucalyptus trees toward the Mirage Saloon.

  “I’ll have a beer,” Clyde said, when he hobbled up to the bar. “A pitcher. Will you take this for a pitcher a beer? Make it two pitchers.”

  “A uke?” Ruben the bartender said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Paid fifteen bucks for it from Beavertail Bigelow,” Clyde said. “You can have it for two pitchers.”

  “Okay,” the bartender said. “Looks like it’s in pretty good shape except for this dent.”

  “That’s from my skull,” Clyde croaked. “I was gonna serenade Bernice with it. Now she can just watch Love Boat and go suck her tooth.”

  CHAPTER 8

  REQUIEM

  The detectives couldn’t get away from Harlan Penrod until they’d had a complete tour of the Watson property, which meant a dissertation on Coachella cacti and desert flora in general. And while Otto Stringer was learning about how such spiny plants could produce such lovely blossoms, Sidney Blackpool was satisfying himself that, just as the Palm Springs detectives had concluded in their reports, nobody who wasn’t played by Sean Connery or Roger Moore could defeat the infrared on the top of the fence with the old mirror trick. And if the system was armed, nobody could have silently forced open the electric gate as he and Otto had done. Harlan Penrod was adamant that Jack Watson was as careful as he about setting the inside and outside alarm systems before ret
iring for the night. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t snatched from the house, but if he was, it probably wasn’t by an unknown intruder.

  Instead of going to Palm Springs P.D., they went back to the hotel. Otto wanted to “take” brunch.

  “Is this going to be part a your life now, Otto? Taking brunch?” Sidney Blackpool asked, as they left his car with the valet-parking boy.

  “I’m hungry from all the good police work, Sidney,” Otto said. “I think we should go to Palm Springs P.D. tomorrow. Maybe we oughtta play a few holes today after brunch.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to eat. Ill go up to the room and give the P.D. a call.”

  “You’re getting too skinny, Sidney,” Otto said. “Come and join me.”

  “I’ll have dessert later,” Sidney Blackpool said, leaving his partner in the hotel lobby.

  When Sidney Blackpool got to their suite, he found a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and a card saying: “Hit em long and straight. Victor Watson.”

  He lit a cigarette and flopped down on the bed, trying not to think of Victor Watson. He hadn’t felt sorry for anyone except himself in a long time. He didn’t want to start feeling sorry for some guy who probably owned his own jet and didn’t bother to play golf in places Sidney Blackpool dreamed about because Watson probably enjoyed himself even more in other places. But then the detective had to admit that the man he’d met in the Century City office wasn’t enjoying himself anywhere. That was an incomplete human being looking for missing pieces.

  He realized that the radio was on. The housekeeper had made the beds and tidied up the suite but let the radio play. It was a Palm Springs station with music that wasn’t so easy to find on the Los Angeles scene. Marlene Dietrich was singing “La Vie en Rose” and “Lili Marlene.” Sidney Blackpool’s parents and his older brothers listened to music like that when he was a boy. There was something about the desert. You did feel that time had regressed thirty years or more. There was something in the air, and not just the dry heat. Those mountains surrounding? Like Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman clawing his way toward the hidden valley, toward peace and longevity. But you didn’t live forever in Palm Springs either, as Jack Watson discovered.

  Then his heart missed a regular beat, and another, and he felt an emptiness in his chest and swelling in his throat that made it hard to swallow. He had an indescribable longing. For what? He used to think the dreams came because he kept family pictures beside the bed, but after he put them away he still dreamed. That was something else that Victor Watson had probably learned: you’re afraid to be reminded and afraid not to be reminded.

  Victor Watson probably learned that the first weeks after his son’s death were nothing compared to what would come. The shock and horror and grief is impossible to accommodate those first weeks, as you gradually come to grasp what forever means. There is nonsense which your mind seizes upon. Should Tommy be put in the ground or cremated? As though a decision to keep Tommy’s fingernails and teeth and bones intact was a meaningful one.

  Yet all that was nothing like the despair that peaked eight months after Tommy was gone. When, for the first time in forty-one years of life, Sidney Blackpool had to confront this outrage, a son preceding his father to the grave. This perversion of the natural order.

  He came close to the end at a police department retirement party in Chinatown. He heard a morose retired cop crying in his whiskey because he no longer had camaraderie and purpose. The cop said he couldn’t enjoy things any longer and talked about looking for pieces of himself. Sidney Blackpool could’ve told him a thing or two about that, about being incomplete.

  But he listened and started to despise the cop. He despised him so much he found himself starting to cry. The first time ever in a public place. Of course, he had also been drinking that night. He rushed outside to the parking lot and looked not up to the smog-shrouded sky but at the lights of downtown Los Angeles.

  He thought of that maudlin cop, and he cried out: “Why are you alive then? Why you and not Tommy?”

  Then he saw another cop stagger out of the party heading for a car he shouldn’t have been driving, and he scared the man by yelling: “Why you? Why you, you son of a bitch? And why me?”

  Then Sidney Blackpool for the first time did look up (childhood training perhaps) and he shouted, “Okay, that’s enough. I’ve had enough now. That’s it. I’ve had enough!”

  He knew he was very close then. He used to sit alone in the night, cold sober sometimes, and indulge dangerous fantasies. The setting of all fantasies preceded the day in 1983 when Tommy died. He could somehow stop the event from happening, in the fantasies.

  And sometimes he indulged in daydreams set in the present. He’d receive an urgent call from his ex-wife saying, “Sid! Sid! It’s a miracle! Tommy’s alive! It wasn’t his body they pulled from the surf! It was a mistake and Tommy’s been in Mexico all this time and …”

  It was so absurd and pathetic and shameful that he was never able to indulge that one to the end. He didn’t will it, but the fantasy came. After the night in Chinatown he knew that if he let this continue he would die. He read that it most often happened on a Monday, on the fifth day of the month, and in the spring. He decided that since something had ruthlessly reversed the natural order of things in his life, he would perversely defy statistical probability. He came very very close one Saturday night in September, the twenty-second day of the month. Only thinking of his daughter, Barb, at the last moment saved him from smoking it.

  Sidney Blackpool sat up in the hotel bed, cursed himself, hated himself, and dialed the Palm Springs P.D. asking for the homicide investigator named on the reports.

  “Finney’s not here,” the telephone voice said. “This is Lieutenant Sanders. Can I help you?”

  “Sid Blackpool, Lieutenant. I think your boss was told we were coming?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry about Finney. His mother’s real sick and he took off yesterday for Minnesota.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “Depends on her.”

  “Can anybody else talk about the Watson case?”

  “I guess I can. You have copies of the reports, I understand. Not too much to add.”

  “The reports said you checked out all the radio stations in the desert about that singing voice.”

  “Finney even checked stations in L.A., Vegas and San Diego in case it was some high-powered radio heard by the Mineral Springs cop. Nobody played ‘Pretend’ at that time of day. And no singer ever recorded ‘Pretend’ with only a banjo behind him, far as we know. So Jones either heard a live voice or a tape. He was damn near into heat stroke so we can’t be sure.”

  “If it was a live voice it’s kinda bizarre.”

  “Kinda morbid. If it was live it means the guy that killed the kid came back and sang a little requiem over the corpse.”

  “Are you sure the car was actually torched? I mean, it did crash down a canyon.”

  “No, we’re not positive. The gas tank was ruptured by the crash. That car could a caught fire on its own. In fact, if it wasn’t for that thirty-eight hollow-point slug in the skull, we had nothing but a fatal traffic accident. The kid drove off a dark canyon trail where he never shoulda been without a four-wheel-drive vehicle. His car caught fire and he died a crispy critter. Period.”

  “Too bad there wasn’t a gun found at the scene,” Sidney Blackpool said. “You coulda maybe figured it to be a suicide where the car rolled off the hill after the kid shot himself.”

  “No gun,” the lieutenant said. “And a very bad angle for a right-handed suicide.”

  “About how many people live in those canyons?”

  “No people. About sixty dirtbag methamphetamine dealers. No Homo sapiens allowed in Solitaire Canyon. They cook up speed in those shacks, but it’s almost impossible to get probable cause to bust them. Even if you have a warrant, they can see you coming for two miles and bury the evidence in holes they dig. Lots a those bikers are Vietnam vets. They’re a chapter o
f the Cobras motorcycle gang.”

  “Any chance he drove up there because he wanted to?”

  “Not much chance,” the lieutenant said. “He seldom drove the Rolls. In fact, I was surprised to get the call from Watson saying the kid drove the Rolls to Hollywood. He wasn’t a speed user. And not that it was productive, but we did question every crank dealer and desert rat living around that particular canyon. All negative. We have this crime-stoppers program where citizens donate reward money. Better known on the streets as dial-a-snitch or burn-a-buddy. And after Victor Watson offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward I think lots a cranked-out bikers’d roll over on each other if they knew anything. We got nothing. All we know is Watsons car went over the canyon and caught fire. He was pinned in the wreckage. Turns out he was shot in the head before he got cooked, lucky for him.”

  “Of course no chance to dust for prints in a burned wreck.”

  “We got a very diligent fingerprint man. Name is Hoffman. He dusts everything. He even dusted the dust. Once he dusted an assault victim’s tits, which bought him a three-day suspension. We call him Dustin Hoffman. He got nothing.”

  “And then a freak came back a few days after the murder and sang ‘Pretend.’ ”

  “That’s about it. The singer mighta been some prospector or nature lover. Or even a speed head who was just out for a stroll in the canyons after shooting his arms full a crystal. Officer Jones mighta just heard an innocent bystander.”