The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Trish Decker had sad eyes all right, but she’d never live in a tent, not that girl. He vaguely realized that he was starting to feel sorry for a suspect in a murder case. He was about to examine that bit of silliness when there was a knock at the door and a voice said, “Room service.”

  The Johnnie Walker Black and a hot bath made him forget just about everything for two hours. He dozed without dreaming and was startled to see that the sun was already behind the mountain when he awoke.

  Otto Stringer was starting to see two tees, two balls and two Fionas and that was a whole lot of flesh. They were nearly on the back nine. It was so late in the afternoon that nobody pushed them. They’d already let five foursomes and another twosome play through and they’d stopped keeping score when each of them figured to top 160. Which Otto said he couldn’t face, but which Fiona said was her average round.

  After a quart and a half of mai tais, Fiona’s blouse was sticky with brown rum and fruit juice. The more she drank, the harder she’d whack Otto’s right shoulder when he said something funny. And by now everything was funny.

  It was clear to Otto that this incipient romance might go somewhere and he decided that when he finally got the fat old doll in bed, he was going to show her his freaking shoulder, which was turning purple from all the slugging, and explain that he couldn’t go around feeling like he’d spent fifteen rounds trying to slip punches with Marvelous Marvin Hagler. But he’d cross that bridge when he came to it, as now he crossed the actual bridge over the fairway to the ninth tee where Lucille Ball lived. He sniffed the grapefruit and tangerine trees and Fiona promised to introduce him to Lucy and to Ginger Rogers.

  “Lots a bucks around here,” Fiona said, as he pumped her for information that would permit him to estimate her wealth. “A house in Thunderbird Cove sold in only four months for one million bucks profit. The owner of the San Diego Padres lives there.”

  “That’s a tidy sum.” Otto Stringer was exceedingly blasé.

  “Not excessive considering the property,” Fiona said, belching wetly.

  “I wouldn’t say so, no,” Otto agreed, hoping he didn’t run over a Mexican gardener. He’d almost hit two already. If they gave sobriety tests for golf-cart driving, he’d be in the slam before Fiona could think it was a caution.

  “Fiona,” Otto said, as she was putting on number eight, a pretty three par protected by a lake with a tiny island containing three palms surrounded by red azaleas. “Is your house rather … sumptuous? Or do you prefer a more simple arrangement?”

  “I got a big one, Otto,” Fiona said, doing better than she had on the seventh green where she six-putted. One of the earpieces on her glasses was now hanging loose and she was squinting at him through only one lens. “Look at my blouse!” she cried. “I seen tablecloths at an Irish wake cleaner’n this!”

  The second batch of her homemade mai tais was stronger than the first. Otto hit a ball off the toe toward a home near the thirteenth green, causing a nice young fellow in shorts and a golf shirt to jump up from his patio chair and rush toward Otto as the detective staggered out of the cart to chase the shot. The young man kicked the ball out onto the fairway saying, “There you go, sir.”

  “Thanks,” Otto said, and shanked it the other way with his three wood.

  “You get a free drop,” Fiona belched. “Anytime you get near that house you get a free drop.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t go too close. That kid’s a Secret Service agent.”

  “Is that where he lives?”

  “Yup,” Fiona said, looking like she might fall asleep before they got back.

  “I can’t believe it!” Otto cried, and he stopped the cart on the fairway to watch some people come out the back door of the unimpressive fairway home.

  “Fiona!” Otto whispered, and now he was whacking her on the arm, jarring her out of a stupor. “It’s him! No, it ain’t! Yes, it is!”

  “Does he look like Herman Munster?” Fiona Grout mumbled, her glasses once again askew on her face.

  “Yeah. He just tripped over the garden hose. It’s him!”

  Otto was not so drunk that he could forget a thousand past mistakes he’d made in this condition. He didn’t want to risk losing his chance with Fiona. He was just sober enough to know that in this lifetime he was never going to have another shot at the sweepstakes.

  Otto was plotting his strategy as well as he could, and trying to keep from smacking his fairway shot into ball-grabbing palm trees when, near number fifteen, Fiona said, “We got bass in these little lakes, Otto. You like to fish?”

  “Oh, yes, Fiona,” Otto said ardently. “I’m quite a fisherman.”

  “I got the bait for those suckers on my wall,” she said. “I bought a Peruvian tapestry from one of our bigtime desert interior decorators, and you know what? It was full of moths!”

  “I had a tapestry like that once,” Otto said. He remembered buying it for thirteen bucks in Tijuana. It was black velvet with a naked redhead in a sombrero painted across it. “I never had no luck with tapestries.”

  “Well, my moths turned to worms before I knew they were there. Now I got maggots!”

  “Ugh!” Otto belched. “You should not have maggots on a tapestry, Fiona.”

  “If my husband was alive he’d deal with that little pansy decorator,” she said. “He’d have two black eyes.”

  “Mauve or puce,” Otto said. “Not black. It ain’t becoming.”

  Then it occurred to him. He had it: an opening. “You need a husband, Fiona.” Otto fondled his driver preparatory to destroying the tee on number fifteen.

  “I know, Otto,” she sighed, opening the ice chest to demolish the last of the mai tais. “It gets lonely.”

  “Yes!” He sighed even deeper. “We shouldn’t be alone at this time a life!”

  “Otto!” she said. “You shouldn’t talk like that. You’re just a kid.”

  Otto Stringer had an inspiration. Though he’d never been a smoker in his life, he took two from her pack, put both of them in his mouth just like Paul Henreid did for Bette Davis in his mother’s favorite movie. Then he lit both and took one from his lips, gently inserting it in hers. He said, “I’m not young anymore, Fiona. I’m middle-aged outside but I’m elderly inside. I’m bald and I’m so fat I could breast-feed six Ethiopians. Yet I believe the right woman could light my old embers!”

  “Otto, you lit the filter end,” she said. “Boy, do these things stink when you light the wrong end.”

  “Here, smoke mine, Fiona,” Otto said, quickly jerking the smelly one from her droopy lips and sticking the other one in. “Anyways, Fiona, we shouldn’t be alone, us two.”

  “You’re up, Otto,” Fiona said, adjusting the radio volume. “We don’t finish pretty soon, we’ll need coal-miner hats.”

  Otto stalled for time by improvising with Duke Ellington. “ ‘It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing! Doo-ah doo-ah doo-ah doo-ah …’ ” Otto sang it as he staggered around the tee, trying to pull it all together for the 513-yard five par.

  Fiona said, “I almost forgot, Otto. Behind you across the water is where Billie Dove lives.”

  “Who’s Billie Dove?”

  “Oh, Otto!” Fiona cried. “See, you are just a kid. She was a great actress of the silent screen. She starred with Douglas Fairbanks!”

  “I’m old, Fiona!” he cried. “Please don’t talk to me like I still gotta sweat out chicken pox!”

  He sensed he was losing her. All week he’d felt like his arteries were about to atrophy and now all of a sudden he felt like a snot-nose kid! And thinking of anything but his golf shot, he took a half swing and belted it right on the screws, 230 yards on the fly with a slight draw that took it twenty yards farther.

  “I told you you’re young, Otto,” Fiona said. “You think an old guy can hit a ball like that?”

  “Aw shit!” Otto Stringer said, having smacked the greatest golf shot of his life. “Aw shit, Fiona!”

  When they fi
nally played number eighteen, with the sun well behind Mount San Jacinto and the fairway in shadows, they lost five balls between them before reaching the green. A record for a day in which they lost twenty-six balls.

  Otto gazed with melancholy at the rows of lacy, cone-shaped trees. He’d even started to love the shingled date palms, and all the other ball-grabbing bastards he’d faced that day, now that he realized this might be it. He had minutes to turn a lifetime of shit into sunshine. The thought of years still to come on the streets of Hollywood made him want to weep.

  He turned up the radio when at last he parked beside the green. Fiona lurched unsteadily toward her ninth shot, which was twenty yards left. Otto began to sing along with a George Gershwin classic coming from the radio. He composed his own lyrics as he went, looking wistfully at Fiona who whacked a chip shot over everything, saying, “Aw screw it!” as her ball hit the concrete and took off in the general direction of Malibu, causing her to say, “Good-bye and godspeed, you lil sumbitch.”

  “The way you wear your haaaat!” Otto sang it from the heart, and Fiona adjusted her lid, which was now resting across her nose from the force of that monster swing.

  Then he sang, “The way you wreck that teeeeeeee!” And that was true enough. The eighteenth tee, after Fiona was through with all her mulligans, looked like it was nuked.

  “Oh, Otto!” Fiona cried. “I don’t think I ever enjoyed a round of golf more. You gonna putt Out?”

  Otto stopped singing and said, “I can’t, Fiona. That out a bounds approach shot did it. I ain’t got no balls left.”

  “I don’t know about that, Otto.” She winked and his heart leaped! He still had a chance!

  “You little dickens!” he said. “Hey, let’s have a drink in the bar! You can’t go home yet.”

  “Okay, one for the fairway,” she said. “I just live across the golf course.”

  “I’d love to see your home!” Otto said. “I ain’t scared to deal with a wall full a worms. You need a man around the house, is what you need.”

  It was nearly dark when they got back to the pro shop where Otto was handed the phone message from Sidney Blackpool. He decided that in the event he could keep this romance aflame it would probably be on a golf course. He had a vague plan of playing again tomorrow so he said to the pro, “Gimme another dozen balls, will ya? I don’t care what brand. Make them orange. Easier to spot in the water.”

  He was the same pro who’d sold Otto a dozen before starting this round. The pro put the balls on the counter, saying, “Would you like these to go, or would you like to lose them here?”

  On their way to the bar, Otto said, “I don’t think that guy was so funny, Fiona.”

  “They just don’t understand how hurtful this game can be to people like us,” Fiona said soothingly. “Forget it, Otto.”

  There was some barroom music coming from the oldies radio station. Carmen Miranda was singing, “Chica chica chic! Chica chica chic!” and Fiona Grout paused in the foyer and did as frisky a samba as could be expected from someone so fat, old, and drunk.

  “You and me’re ages apart, Otto,” she said sadly.

  “I know that singer!” Otto cried. “Lemme think. She’s the one with all the fruit salad! Apples and bananas and coconuts used to sprout outta her skull! I know all that old stuff, Fiona!”

  They both ordered mai tais and were eyed by a dubious barman who would never have served this pair of de-tox candidates in a public bar outside the club.

  Fiona was sucking noisily on her drink even before Otto got his. There were three men sitting farther down the bar telling jokes that were interfering with Otto’s game plan. He couldn’t understand why the three men sounded so irritating, but they did. In fact, they were making him so mad that he’d forgotten three brilliantly conceived double entendres that he was going to use on Fiona to get her hot.

  All he could think of to say was, “Fiona, let’s have a date tonight, just you’n me.”

  “A date? Otto, I can’t possibly!”

  “Let’s play golf tomorrow then,” he said in desperation.

  “Tomorrow?” She put her mai tai down on the bar, but forgot to take the straw out of her mouth as she said, “I’m playing with another couple tomorrow. And with my fiancé.”

  “Your fiancé!” They couldn’t have heard him in Mineral Springs, but only because of a windstorm.

  “Yes, Otto, I’m engaged. I’m getting married in December and we’re honeymooning in the Bahamas at his son’s home. I’ll meet his grandchildren for Christmas.”

  “Fiona!” Otto couldn’t believe it.

  “Otherwise I’d be glad to date you tonight, Otto. You’re lotsa fun! I’d like you to play golf with my fiancé and me. His name’s Wilbur. You’d like him.”

  Otto Stringer could only stare at his mai tai while Fiona resumed her slurping, blissfully unaware that a ship passing in the night had just gotten torpedoed, leaving nothing but an oil slick.

  The jokesters were still at it. One of them was Otto’s age and the other two were in their fifties. They’d just told a Jew joke about the difference between a Jewish princess and Jell-O is that Jell-O moves when you eat it. Then they told the one about crossing a Mexican and a Mormon and getting a garage full of stolen groceries, and were into the second spook joke about the black sky divers in Texas being called skeet.

  And that reminded one of them that something funny had recently occurred.

  “Wait’ll you hear this,” he said. “We had an African gentleman try to apply for membership in the club. Because he was quite well known he actually thought he could make it.”

  “Who was it,” Otto said boozily. “Gary Player?”

  “What?” the jokester said, looking toward Otto.

  “They mean a colored applicant,” Fiona whispered to Otto.

  “Oh, is that what they mean?” Otto said, looking about as surly as Beavertail Bigelow always looked.

  “You mean somebody that uses a chicken bone for a teething ring? One a those, Fiona?”

  “Sorry if we offended you,” the man said. “I thought we were among friends here.”

  “Offend me?” Otto said belligerently. “I ain’t a kike or a beaner or a nigger. I sure ain’t a member.” Then he was feeling so unaccountably mad that he lied and said, “Tell you what I am though. I’m a Democrat. And I think Ronald Reagan’s so old he thought Alzheimer was a secretary of state. And during the Mondale debate he almost reminisced about old Jane Wyman movies. And he’ll balance the budget when Jesse Jackson goes squirrel shooting with the National Rifle Association and Jane Fonda joins the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

  The three jokesters mumbled something to each other, finished their drinks and were preparing to leave, when Fiona turned to Otto and said, “What’s wrong with you? Why’d you say that?”

  “I don’t know, Fiona,” he said truthfully. “It was the worst thing I could think of to say around here. I ain’t even a Democrat! I think I was trying to pick a fight!”

  “Rum makes people crazy,” Fiona said, slurping on the empty glass with the straw. “You better go home, Otto. It was nice meeting you though. I had fun.”

  “I am acting crazy!” he said. “I tell those same jokes all the time but they sound so different in a place like this!”

  “Lots a people here earned their own money,” Fiona informed him. “People got a right to play golf with who they want.”

  “They got a right, but their right ain’t right,” Otto said.

  “You’re drunk, Otto. You don’t make sense.”

  “Maybe I oughtta go home,” he said. “You got that right,” she said, sounding like a cop. “Well, I sure enjoyed my day,” Otto said, kissing the old doll on the cheek. “You are a caution, Fiona.”

  Sidney Blackpool was already waiting in front of the clubhouse by the time Otto emerged, trudging dejectedly to the bag drop.

  “You look like Arnold Palmer when he took the eleven in the L.A. Open,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“What happened besides you getting blitzed? Jesus, what’ve you been drinking? Your sweater’s a brown argyle. It was solid yellow when you started the day.”

  “You ever try to drive a golf cart and drink two quarts a mai tais with somebody that throws more jabs than Larry Holmes?”

  “Why so glum? You sick from the booze?”

  “I dunno, Sidney. Back in Hollywood I’m too old. Here I’m too young. There I’m a Republican. Here I’m a Democrat. There I dream a all the things you can buy with money. Here we find out some guys in our squad room couldn’t buy in if they did have money.”

  “You okay?”

  “Soon as you get that job with Watson maybe you’n me can play sometime on his corporate membership. But you ain’t gonna get certain members of our Griffith Park Saturday morning boys’ club on the course.”

  “How bombed are you?” Sidney Blackpool asked. “What happened in there?”

  “And they’re all cops. So they are my kind!”

  “I guess you’ll tell me what’s wrong in your own good time.”

  “All I can say is, I wanna go home to Hollywood where life don’t make no sense at all, but at least you expect it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  PATSY

  They walked into Poppa’s Place only ten minutes before Terry Kinsale was to have been there at 6:00 P.M. It was already very dark in the desert.

  The happy-hour-well drinks were about the cheapest in this part of the valley and were poured by three bartenders who hardly had time to scoop up the tips. It was the noisy, intensely raucous crowd often found in busy gay bars. Sidney Blackpool made a quick head count and guessed there were two hundred men drinking. It was standing room only.

  “We’ll have to split up, Otto,” he said. “No point even trying to get a drink in this mob.”

  “I had enough,” Otto said morosely.

  “Think you can recognize him from the picture?”

  “I don’t know if I could recognize my ex-wife,” Otto said. “The second one. I know I couldn’t recognize the first one.”

  “Wish we could get you some coffee.”