The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  ,, I 11 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 retiring 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.

  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 Perignon 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. Ile hdn't felt sorry for anyone except himself in a long time. I e didn't wall, 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 Tomm
y?"

  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 saving, "Sid! Sid! It's a miracle! Tommy's alive' It wasn't his body they pulled from the surfl 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 of 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-asnitch 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 Watson's 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."

  "Could be," Sidney Blackpool said.

  "But we doubt it."

  "Why's that?"

  "In those canyons there's no such thing. Everybody that lives there's a not so innocent bystander. The Mineral Springs cop probably heard the killer all right."

  "Returning to sing a requiem?"

  "Maybe to look for something he lost."

  Sidney Blackpool gave the Palm Springs lieutenant his telephone number and said good-bye, took two aspirins, rinsed his face and lit a cigarette. He was entering the dining room where Otto was still working on his brunch when the bell captain came in.

  "Mister Blackpool?"

  "Yeah."

  "The front desk just took a call for you from the Palm Springs police."

  "I just hung up." Sidney Blackpool shrugged to Otto who was leering at a huge wedge of coconut-cream pie. Have a bite first," Otto said.

  "Lemme go see what it is."

  While Sidney Blackpool was gone, Otto not only ate the pie but asked the waiter if he thought a pina colada would be too rich as an after-brunch drink. When his partner returned, Otto was leaning back in the chair, his belly pressing the table, sucking a tall coconut and vodka special with a little parasol stuck in a wedge of orange.

  "This is the life, Sidney," he said with three rapid-fire belches.

  "Guess what?" Sidney Blackpool said. "That was the Palm Springs lieutenant. They got a call earlier this morning that he just learned about. The Mineral Springs cop who found the body called to say he's decided the song the suspect sang wasn't 'Pretend. It was 'I Believe.'

  "Not sure I know that one."

  "You'd know it if you heard it. A Frankie Laine hit. You're old enough.-

  "Thank you very much, Sidney. You're so kind to remind me."

  "Anyway, whaddaya think a that? The very day we get on the case, they receive the first piece a new information they've gotten in over a year."

  "Sidney, it can't make any possible difference what the lunatic was singing. If in fact that was the killer returning to the scene a the crime like in Agatha Christie."

  "I know, but it's the coincidence of it. It seems like more than a coincidence. We come here and something happens. After all this time."

  "What's more than a coincidence mean? Otto asked, looking sorry that he'd had the pina colada.

  And then Sidney Blackpool thought of the tortured face of Victor Watson, an old man's hollow face under those track lights. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe an***

  Instead of playing nine holes they were off to Mineral Springs to talk to Officer O. A. Jones about his musical revelation.

  "Jesus, how we gonna find out if every radio station in two hundred miles didn't play 'I Believe' on that day la
st year?" Otto asked. "We gotta get in some golf. All I'm doing is eating and drinking("

  ' 'I Believe' with a banjo? I think someone was there that day. Maybe Jones heard a live voice."

  "All we gotta find is a banjo man with a taste for old songs. Let's see, Steve Martin plays one, I think. Maybe Roy Clark or Glen Campbell? Jesus."

  "Shaggy clouds and shaggy trees," Sidney Blackpool said. "It's got a threatening look sometimes, this desert."

  "Know what I noticed, Sidney? It changes. I mean, it never looks the same one minute to the next."

  "The cloud shadow," Sidney Blackpool said, looking up from under his sunglasses as he drove. "It throws shadow and light and color everywhere. And the colors change. This is a strange place. I don't know if I like it or not."

  "I'm gonna love it," Otto said. "If we ever get on the freaking golf links. I ain't hit a ball in over a month."

  "Three weeks," his partner reminded. "At Griffith Park. I bet these courses won't look like Griffith Park."

  "You mean no tank tops? No beer cans or tattooed arms? No sound of thongs slapping the feet when your playing partner steps outta his Ford pickup? Hey, what's that?" Otto pointed three miles off in the distance toward the base of the mountains.

  "That's where six thousand souls survive in this desert because a the golf and tennis and pina colada we just left," said Sidney Blackpool. "That's Mineral Springs."

  "Kinda windy around here," Otto said, watching a dozen whirlwinds dancing across the desert in the shimmering rising heat. "Bad place to die out in those lonely canyons.

  "Doesn't much matter where," Sidney Blackpool said, lighting a cigarette, looking at the shacks that dotted the trails high in the hills. "Have to be real important to drive up there at night."

  "I'd have to be forced to make the drive."

  "Possibly," Sidney Blackpool said.

  When they arrived, Chief Paco Pedroza had a case of heartburn from yelling at Wingnut Bates and Prankster Frank. He had forbidden any more threats to shoot Prankster Frank on sight, explaining that he needed every cop he had. And he prohibited snakes--real, rubber or photographic--from being brought into the station. In that spirit, Paco even removed the picture of the sidewinder on the sign that said "We don't give a shit how they do it in L. A."