Fugitive Nights

by Joseph Wambaugh

  That same afternoon a single-engine Cessna encountered mechanical trouble over the Anza Borrego mountain range, and the pilot of the plane decided to make an unscheduled stop at a small desert airport. It was one of the hottest spots in the nation, over a hundred feet below sea level. The airport had very little traffic, and absolutely nothing resembling a control tower. Pilots had to see and be seen. But the California Highway Patrol and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department kept a chopper and a fixed-wing aircraft at the airport. Often there’d be a cop, wearing an aviation jumpsuit with police insignia, hanging around the pilot’s lounge.

  The Cessna sputtered once on approach, but landed perfectly and taxied toward the hangar. A mechanic at the airport later told police that the pilot was a nice-looking blond guy in a designer bomber jacket, and that his passenger had spoken a few words of accented English.

  The passenger, described as a “bald Latino in a khaki shirt,” had looked at a large map on the wall in the hangar while the pilot and mechanic talked briefly. The mechanic later said that the bald man had pointed to some nearby towns on the map, said something to the pilot, and laughed. Then the bald man, clutching a red flight bag, headed toward the airport’s public rest room.

  Meanwhile, a sheriff’s department pilot who was sick of drinking soda pop and reading a three-month-old Playboy draped his Sam Browne over his shoulder and headed for the John. He never knew what hit him.

  The bald man with the flight bag hadn’t locked the rest room door because it was broken. He’d been rooting around in the bag when the uniformed cop barged in on him. The bald man automatically threw a punch that George Bush would’ve envied. It bounced the cop headfirst off the edge of the door and when he slumped down, the bald guy booted him once in the solar plexus, then jerked the semiautomatic from the cop’s Sam Browne.

  The bald man, cradling the flight bag to his chest, jumped over the semiconscious cop, ran from the john, looked toward the plane on the tarmac, turned the other way and scooted toward the parking lot. Waving the cop’s 9 mm Sig Sauer, he headed straight to a parked truck occupied by a plumber who’d been called to check leaking pipes. The bald guy jerked open the door, pointed the 9 mm at the plumber’s bulging eyeballs, snatched the guy out of the seat and careened out of the parking lot in the stolen truck.

  While several people scrambled toward the ruckus in the parking lot, the revived deputy hollered for help. The bald guy’s pilot must have figured that something very bad had happened because he jumped back in his Cessna and took off, mechanical gremlins and all, causing detectives to later theorize that whatever the deal was, it was worth his risking his life. Naturally, nobody had gotten his plane’s number during all that excitement.

  Everyone figured it had to have been aborted drug smuggling. There was always a “load plane,” carrying pot or Mexican heroin, landing on one of the little desert airstrips, usually at night. In fact, there was one county-owned emergency landing strip that was only that, a strip with a wind sock, and nothing more. You could bring in enough Mexican tar on any given night to goon out half the valley, not to mention a cocaine shipment bound for Palm Springs or L.A.

  The plumbing truck was eventually found sand-locked up to the axle in a date grove near the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation, a collection of mobile homes, guns, satellite dishes, and clotheslines fluttering in the hot wind. The land belonged to a tribe that had had the misfortune to settle too far south, unlike their luckier cousins, the Agua Calientes, who’d stayed on a chunk of sand now called Palm Springs.

  Just as on other Indian reservations, county ordinances were unenforceable on Torres Martinez land, but beating the crap out of a cop and stealing a truck at gunpoint was more than a county ordinance. So pretty soon dozens of cops from various jurisdictions were swarming all over the reservation searching for the bald guy with a flight bag, who’d been spotted by a curious Indian kid after scuttling the truck.

  The Indian kid had watched the bald guy with the flight bag do something strange. Before abandoning the plumbing truck, the guy found a can of grease and smeared it on his mouth and in his nose. Then he took some coins from his pocket and put them in his mouth before walking toward Devil Canyon and the Santa Rosa wilderness on that extremely hot winter afternoon.

  An old Indian who’d been whiling away the time by watching the futile search talked to the shy Indian kid after he’d bicycled home. The old Indian explained the grease trick to a few of the cops: The guy had lubricated his mucous membranes, and the coins in the mouth were to diminish thirst. According to the Indian, this proved that the guy with the flight bag had to be a “man of the desert.”

  Meanwhile, Nelson Hareem, glued to the police radio, was going bonkers because he couldn’t get out of town and head for Devil Canyon. He’d been ordered by his sergeant to stay on his beat in his own town.

  It was later learned that the bald man had doubled back in the vicinity of Lake Cahuilla, climbed over a grape-stake fence, and kicked in the door of a modest two-bedroom stucco house. The bald guy apparently hid there for a bit, then hot-wired a ten-year-old Ford sedan parked in the open carport. He was long gone while the search for him went on.

  Not being a boozer herself, Breda mistakenly thought that coffee would help Lynn. She drove to a coffee shop on Palm Canyon Drive where they sat by a window, and she ordered cherry pie and coffee for two.

  He hardly touched his pie, but squinted through the window at aging white-legged tourists, their figures squirming in the waves of heat rising from the pavement. Most of them wore dark socks and stretch pants.

  Then he said, “Elastic’s done more for Palm Springs tourism than sunshine and movie stars.”

  When the waitress refilled their cups, Breda Burrows, who’d never been in the eatery in her life, said, “Thanks, Dot.”

  The waitress said, “My name’s Bonnie.”

  “Really?” Breda said. “Not Dot?”

  “Dot works nights,” the waitress said.

  “That’s a relief,” said Breda.

  After the waitress left, Lynn asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Private joke.”

  “Between you and yourself? I guess you’re glad you’re here, or you’d be bored as hell.”

  Breda showed him that irritating grin and took another bite of pie. On the drive over, she’d explained everything she’d learned from Rhonda Devon about her husband, Clive. She didn’t tell Lynn about the five-thousand-dollar bonus. He was already too nosey about fees.

  Then he asked, “So how much we charging this Devon woman?”

  “We?”

  “I’ve heard P.I.’s say they get maybe forty-five bucks an hour for surveillance. And how much a mile? Forty-five cents?”

  “Look, I’m offering you a flat fee of a thousand bucks if you get the results I want. That’s pretty generous.”

  Lynn Cutter liked the way she handled a knife and fork. Too many of the babes he dated talked during dinner with food hanging out their mouths. He hated that more than gum chewing, but when he complained, they always implied that he was awfully prissy for a cop.

  He absolutely loved the very dark freckle just below Breda’s lower lip, near the corner of her mouth. He had a crazy impulse to lick a tiny drop of cherry syrup off that bittersweet chocolate freckle.

  Still probing, he said, “I’ll bet you demanded a hefty fee up front. If I was doing a garbage domestic case like this I’d ask for two grand.”

  Breda Burrows quietly ate her cherry pie, chewing with her mouth closed.

  Lynn Cutter sipped his coffee, looked into those electric blues, and said, “In this town I bet you can make good bucks for domestic crap. Like when some a these fifty-million-dollar marriages break up they’ll fight over a used Maytag washer and hire P.I.’s to tail each other out of spite. Big bucks, right?”

  “I try to avoid domestic cases. Like you said, they’re garbage. And yeah, a P.I. better take a retainer up front and bill against it because you can never make a cl
ient happy in a domestic case.”

  “So how much’re we … you getting an hour for this one?”

  She sighed and said, “I asked for sixty an hour. I usually ask for forty-five.”

  “Beverly Hills broad, Beverly Hills prices,” Lynn said, smiling.

  “There’s a lotta competition,” she said, irked by the happy face. “There’s at least a dozen P.I.’s in the local phone book. Gotta get it when I can.”

  “So what’re we gonna do about Clive Devon?” he asked. “I hope you don’t expect me to hang around in the urologist’s alley and go through his trash for clues.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind,” she said, squinting when the last of the afternoon sun slanted through the window of the coffee shop.

  “Why don’t you call his doctor’s office and tell his receptionist you’re from the Beverly Hills Fertility Institute? That you got some problem with the care and storage of his little tadpoles.”

  “I tried that the moment I left Mrs. Devon’s home,” she said. “Only I said there was a billing problem at the institute and I needed to verify the client’s address.”

  “What’d the receptionist say?”

  “That Mister Clive Devon hadn’t seen Doctor Blanchard in over twelve months. That there must be some mistake.”

  “Maybe he went to some other doctor.”

  “Mrs. Devon said that Doctor Blanchard’s been her husband’s urologist for years. Maybe he’s lying.”

  “Hell, most a them lie. My doctor lies every time he sends me a bill for shooting my knee with a needle like a railroad spike. And he tells me he has to charge me a hundred ’n fifty bucks for asking, ‘Does it hurt?’ Far as I’m concerned, my doctor’s just a lawyer with a stethoscope.”

  “She thinks maybe Doctor Blanchard was ordered by Clive Devon to keep mum about the semen sample.”

  “So whaddaya want me to do?”

  “I was thinking you might go there as a patient and say that you and your wife’re considering in vitro fertilization and you need to have your sperm checked out. You could consult with him and casually mention that an acquaintance of yours is a patient. You could go with the flow and see where the conversation leads.”

  “What if he wants the sample?”

  “You give it to him. That’s one of the reasons I need a man helping me with this one.”

  “Forget it! I’m not gonna lay there and give up my little pollywogs to some stranger! Besides, it’s humiliating!”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “It wouldn’t work anyway. My second and last-ever wife insisted I get a vasectomy. My little swimmers’re in dry dock. One look under a microscope and he’d wonder what’s up.”

  “Okay, I guess I can still use you on a surveillance. I’ve got a couple other cases going or I’d do it myself. How are you at surveillance?”

  “I can cope.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Mrs. Devon said her husband leaves the house at seven A.M. and doesn’t come back till four-thirty. He wears hiking boots and takes a canteen. When she goes to L.A. he doesn’t seem to go on these hikes. So maybe he can’t stand his wife and gets the hell out when she’s at the Palm Springs house.”

  “Seven A.M.!”

  “Hey, you don’t make a thousand bucks tax-free by staying in bed unless you’re working at one of those chicken ranches in Nevada.”

  “What if he really goes hiking? You don’t expect me to tail him out on the open desert without being spotted?”

  “Just stay with his car and wait,” she said. “I’ve got some good binoculars I’ll let you use. Never let the car get out of sight till he goes home.”

  “How about after momma goes back to L.A.?”

  “Same thing. We’ll tail him in the daylight hours and in the evening if he goes out. When he goes nighty-night we go home.”

  “What if he goes out later in the night?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe to a hot little sperm receptacle for another donation. How do you know he can’t get it up? Maybe with his wife he’s limp, but with his private squeeze he’s Rasputin.”

  “Why the need for a sperm bank then?”

  “Why not? Maybe his friend can’t conceive in the normal way. Maybe they decided that test-tubing’s the only way to go.”

  “Let’s try it for a few days and see how it goes, okay?”

  “If I wasn’t totally bankrupt I wouldn’t touch this crap,” he said. “That’ll teach me to let Charles Keating do my income tax.”

  “Do you go around just pissing off people on purpose? Are you tough enough for that?”

  “Yeah, I’m a tough guy,” he said. “Except on Tuesdays when I have to get my legs waxed. Is this Tuesday, by the way?”

  Breda Burrows’ office consisted of a pair of rooms on the second floor of a commercial building just off Indian Avenue. The other tenants included a children’s photographer, a C.P.A., an optometrist, and an office for the landlord, who used the digs as a place to clip coupons and get away from his wife, who’d become as touchy as cholla cactus after turning seventy.

  The anteroom of Breda’s office was really a cubbyhole with a couple of chairs, a small table, and a lamp, all bought at a second-hand store. Her inner office wasn’t much more posh. She had an inexpensive computer, a typewriter and a phone with two lines. On the wall behind a desk of oak veneer were several framed law enforcement certificates-of-training from her police days, as well as her B.S. degree in police science from Cal State Los Angeles. It had taken her eight years of part-time study to get the degree.

  Lynn slumped on one of the two chairs in front of the desk, and when Breda sat, she put on Yuppie eyeglasses with strawberry frames.

  “I been thinking,” he said. “Clive Devon oughtta get a splint for his member. I hear they got electronic implants. Only trouble is, if your neighbor hits his garage door-opener you might get a bulge in your shorts.”

  While Breda was rummaging in her desk drawers for her binoculars and the file on Clive Devon, a shapely young woman entered the outer office and tapped on the open door. She wore jeans and a white cotton turtleneck with a gold Rolex worn over the cuff. She had a raging auburn dye-job.

  “May I help you?” Breda asked, and to her astonishment, Lynn Cutter actually stood up. Maybe he wasn’t quite as crude as a Hell’s Angels’ picnic.

  But then he reassured her by leering at the young woman’s tits, saying, “Dazzled to meet you. May I be of service?”

  “I’m looking for … Ms. Burrows. Is the first name Bretta?” She had a little voice that Lynn Cutter thought went well with big bazooms.

  “I’m Breda Burrows. It’s pronounced Bree-da. An Irish name.”

  “I got referred by a friend of a friend. I have … a problem I’d like to discuss.”

  Lynn took his cue and said, “I’ll wait in the outer office.”

  Breda knew he’d scope out the woman’s booty before closing the door, and he did. After which, Breda peeked at his booty and hated to admit that it wasn’t bad.

  When they were alone, the woman said, “Before I tell you any names I wanna know how much a certain job’ll cost me.”

  “Let’s hear your problem,” Breda said.

  The young woman said, “I got this boyfriend who’s married, see. Met him over at a hotel where I used to do nails. We been going together for three years and he promised he’d divorce his wife and marry me but he keeps making excuses. Now I know he’s a cheat and a liar.”

  “If you know all that what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to take a picture of him having sex with the other woman.”

  “Another other woman?”

  “No,” she said, and Lynn Cutter would’ve been disappointed to see that she chewed gum with her mouth open. “The only other woman. Me.”

  “You want a photo of you two having sex?”

  “Yes. A secret photo. Real explicit. Without him knowing.”

  “What for?”
>
  “So I can send it to his wife and show her what a bastard he is.”

  “You wanna punish him, that it?”

  “No. I wanna marry him. I wanna make her dump him. He broke up my engagement to another guy by making me fall in love with him. I’ll tell him my old boyfriend musta hired somebody to take the secret picture.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t do that kind of work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too complicated.”

  “Okay, if you did it what would you charge?”

  “I wouldn’t do it for any amount of money.”

  Suddenly, the young woman dropped her demure little voice. “Well, no shit! A keyhole-peeper with scruples!”

  Lynn could hear Breda raise her voice then, and he heard the shapely young woman raise hers right back.

  When the young woman came storming out, she said to Breda, “I got two words for you, a verb and a noun: Fuck you!” Then she was gone.

  Lynn looked at Breda, who stared at him through her Yuppie strawberry eyeglasses with that irritating grin.

  “It’s a pronoun,” Breda said.

  “What is?”

  “You. As in … fuck … you.”

  “Your lenses’re fogging,” Lynn said. “My musk glands must be overactive.”

  Until she was driving home that afternoon Breda Burrows hadn’t realized how stressful the day had been. It wasn’t the Clive Devon case; she’d work that out or she wouldn’t, and either way the money was too good to pass up. Her stress was caused by having to work with a man for the first time since she’d retired from police work.

  A few of her old police academy classmates had warned her that after she retired she might spend months remembering nothing but the good times and then months remembering all the bad times. Maybe meeting that smart-mouth Lynn Cutter had started the bad-time memories.

  Breda had been one of the female officers chosen to work uniform patrol when the LAPD first started putting women out on the street in radio cars. By the time she’d retired in June of 1990 things were a lot better for female officers, even though the younger women complained that not much had changed. Breda knew better. When she was a young officer on patrol, women couldn’t complain.