The Secrets of Harry Bright Read online

  Maybelle complied, but Abner was lapsing into a coma from which he would not recover.

  It was over. And then, since nobody wants to admit that he was doing some very dangerous shooting, especially in case some bullets landed where they shouldn’t, all the chase cars started to find reasons to leave the scene almost as fast as they came in. This is also very common at the scene of high-speed chases. It’s like lifting a rug in a wino hotel: they scatter like cockroaches.

  No one ever found out for sure who put all the slugs in Maybelle and Abner. Not that it mattered. Everyone agreed they deserved getting ventilated, and the cops only wished they could’ve dipped their ammo in cyanide since Maybelle didn’t croak.

  Before the chopper pilot turned back toward Palm Springs police station where Victor Watson was now waiting with the F.B.I., he spotted what looked like a large animal scrambling up a hillside. It was a strange animal, white on top and dark on the hindquarters. Pigasus soared in a little closer and saw that the white on top was the sunburned flesh of O. A. Jones who had foolishly removed his shirt in his delirium.

  They picked him up on the side of a little ridge. On the other side of the ridge was a trail leading into the canyon. Off the trail, down in the canyon where it had plunged sixty feet, was a burned Rolls-Royce containing the remains of Jack Watson.

  The first cop into the canyon almost gagged when he saw the charred corpse, which had been dined on by turkey vultures and coyotes. The coyotes had almost destroyed the skull with their gnawing. If they had, a bullet hole would have been impossible for the pathologists to locate. The case might have been classified as a car accident and closed.

  Paco Pedroza was absolutely ready to fire his surfer cop for driving out there in the first place, except that O. A. Jones provided the only possible clue to the murder. After the F.B.I. pulled out of the case, Palm Springs P.D. was left with a whodunit homicide, and all they had was O. A. Jones who convinced everybody that he was not delirious when he heard the guy playing the banjo and singing, followed by the sound of a vehicle racing away. It was theorized that the killer of Jack Watson had returned to the burned car two days after the murder. Perhaps to retrieve something. Officer O. A. Jones had heard a music man.

  O. A. Jones persuaded a local reporter to write a story calling him “the key to the riddle.” The reporter also dubbed him a “courageous officer” who took it upon himself to scour the desert canyons for the missing Palm Springs lad.

  Paco Pedroza would still have liked to send his freaking hero back to fighting kelp in Laguna Beach on his potato-chip surfboard. Only he couldn’t because the Mineral Springs City Council was giving O. A. Jones a citation for extraordinary police service.

  CHAPTER 4

  PRESIDENT McKINLEY

  Otto Stringer looked like the winning ticket in a state lottery. He was waiting on his front porch with two suitcases and a set of golf clubs. He saluted his neighbors like Ronald Reagan at the door of Air Force One. He was wearing a brand-new pink polyester golf shirt that matched his plump cheeks, an acrylic sleeveless sweater with a pink-and-green argyle pattern, and a green Ben Hogan golf cap. He’d considered investing in plus fours but figured a guy should maybe break a hundred one time before blowing into Palm Springs all gussied up like a quarter-ton Byron Nelson.

  When he got Sidney Blackpool’s phone call about the Palm Springs holiday he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe any of the good things that had happened to him since he’d gotten out of a crazy narc job and into a crazy homicide job at Hollywood dicks where at least he felt safe. During his last months at narcotics he’d been getting a whole bunch of obvious messages from The Man Himself. Otto wasn’t a very religious person-a lapsed agnostic, he called himself-who reverted to his early Presbyterian ways only in dangerous situations. The hints he figured The Big Boss was giving him weren’t those “for your eyes only” messages he used to fear Jimmy Carter would think he got while sitting by the nuke hot line. No, these were plain enough for everyone to see. And they were ominous.

  For example, there was the time near the end when he let himself get talked into going in on a coke buy with an undercover snitch, and why a sixteen-year cop nearly forty years old didn’t know better was in itself a mystery and a portent. The snitch was one of those hepatitis hypes who bragged to every cop who busted him that he worked for the F.B.I. or the Drug Enforcement Agency. Otto Stringer told him that as far as he was concerned anybody who’d pal around with feds was about as welcome as a crotch full of herpes since the DEA was always trying to steal the city narcs’ credit when they weren’t stealing their informants.

  After they understood each other, the snitch talked Otto into going in with him on the coke buy so Otto could bear the brunt of the later court testimony. The snitch convinced Otto’s lieutenant that none of the other narcs in the squad looked less like a cop in that Otto was built like something you slam-dunk at the sports arena.

  Problems popped up the second they walked into the motel room where the buy was to go down with “a very nice Hawaiian dude.” The biggest problem was that there was no snort. Nor any other drugs. Nor any Hawaiian dude, nice or otherwise. It was a straight rip-off. They were met by three Samoans, the smallest of whom couldn’t have squeezed into a phone booth and who had a one-track mind.

  The Samoans patted them down for weapons but missed the body wire buried under Otto’s tummy fat. But the transmitter had gone bad. The wire was not sending the action to the narc who sat on the bug in the panel truck just beyond the motel parking lot. The questions were very simple and to the point.

  “Where’s da money, bro?” a Samoan asked.

  “I wanna talk to Sammy,” the snitch said. “Where’s Sammy?”

  SMACK. “Where’s da money, bro?”

  “So this ain’t no business deal!” the snitch bellowed for the benefit of the bug monitor. “This is a straight rip, huh?”

  SMACK. “Where’s da money, bro?”

  “I shoulda knew this was a rip,” the terrified junkie screamed for the wire. “A fuckin rip!”

  SMACK. “Where’s da money, bro?”

  “Look, I can git the bread for ya!” the snitch shrieked. “Jist lemme take ya to it! Jist open the door and let’s …”

  SMACK. “You tell me,” said the Samoan with the one-track mind. “I go get it.”

  By now, Otto Stringer, unarmed and helpless, was holding paws with the second Samoan. The third had him by the back of the neck with a longshoreman’s hook that turned out to be his hand.

  The blood from the snitch’s mouth and nose was spattering the wall and Otto figured that the action was not being transmitted by the wire so he decided to take matters in hand and make an announcement. He said: “This’s gone far enough! I’m a police officer! I order you to get away from that man and open the door!”

  SMACK. Otto’s skull bounced off the wall, leaving a crack in the plasterboard.

  “Okay, then, I ain’t a cop,” said Otto.

  SMACK. It didn’t seem to matter either way to the Samoans.

  “No more bullshit, bro. Where’s da money?” the first Samoan said to Otto Stringer.

  Just then the wire inside Otto’s pants started to function. The cop monitoring the bug gave an emergency signal, but by the time six narcs smashed down the motel door, Otto had been spreadeagled across the kitchen table by all three Samoans who were only hitting him with open hands. Which had only dislodged one tooth and loosened two others and given him eyes by Picasso. They were taking turns. Before Otto passed out he thought of the ice-cream store. Pick a number! Next? Who’s next?

  Of course the rescuers played catch-up for Otto, in that all the Samoans “resisted handcuffing” and had to have buckets of water poured on them so they could wake up and resist some more. But it was small consolation to Otto Stringer. The thumping he got from the Samoans put him off duty for five days. And it wasn’t even the last straw.

  That occurred on “federal Friday,” which was what the cops call Frida
y afternoon when the federal building looks like it received a bomb scare. All the civil servants and bureaucrats get an early start on the weekend rush-hour traffic, especially after getting their paychecks.

  That afternoon the narcs were waiting at L. A. International Airport for a Colombian coke connection, and because of a sudden starburst of romantic passion, Otto Stringer and several other cops almost lost their lives.

  Officer Heidi was a narc. She was a sleek beautiful leggy athletic ninety-pounder, and, bitch or not, she was the most aggressive that Otto had ever seen. No one had ever known a Doberman as strong as Heidi. In fact, on one narcotics raid she had grabbed the handle of a locked dresser drawer and pulled the entire piece of furniture across the room. Heidi was very good at her job and she knew it. She would never miss an ounce of flake or crystal or pot when she was sniffing luggage, and she was in fine fettle that day at the airport. Heidi went at the Colombian’s luggage with a will. Her handler was so proud. The other narcs were so proud. Officer Desmond was so aroused.

  Desmond was a bomb dog. He had never seen Heidi before. He had never seen any narcotics dog. Desmond wasn’t sleek or beautiful or athletic. Desmond was a seedy half-bloodhound with a bad case of dandruff, halitosis, and eyes like Walter Mondale. Desmond, like Otto Stringer, was a law-enforcement burnout.

  The L.A. cops were working a routine bomb check that afternoon. Some overzealous security cop had a hunch about a goofy-looking student who’d just asked the employee at the ticket counter some odd questions about luggage. Desmond was called in to do a little sniffing to satisfy the airport people who were still overwrought from a recent bomb scare involving a terrorist. Desmond was sitting there in the customs office doing his thing, which was dozing by the air conditioning, when Heidi came prancing in looking good. Looking for action.

  Heidi was so stoked by her job that she cried in anticipation, she whimpered with impatience, she uttered little growls of ecstasy when she made a hit on a bag of dope. Desmond watched Heidi’s heaving chest, her swelling hocks, the rippling of her neck as her black coat glistened in the light, and his bloodshot Mondale eyes popped round as Orphan Annie’s.

  His handler said later that he never guessed old Desmond was getting funny feelings in his tummy. His handler too was busy admiring Heidi, the way she’d rip into each piece of luggage and try to tear it to pieces before they could pull her away and seize the dope. But for certain, saliva was seeping over Desmond’s floppy lips onto the floor. And the handler got the picture after he noticed what was hanging down all pink and shiny below Desmond’s belly. Old Desmond had sprouted a woody!

  Of course, bomb dogs are supposed to be the opposite of dope dogs. Bomb dogs are supposed to be docile, very docile. They’re supposed to sniff the explosives and then calmly saunter away and sit right down, content to let the bomb experts do their thing.

  It was on Heidi’s fourth hit that it happened. Maybe Desmond just heard one too many of those incredibly sexy little growls, nobody knew for sure. Desmond went madly shockingly passionately bonkers. While the loony student was repeating his “who me that’s not my suitcase why are you treating me like this?” routine, Desmond let out a terrible howl.

  They later realized it was his statement to Heidi: “You like real clangers? I’ll show you a pair that gong like Big Ben!”

  Desmond hit that suspicious suitcase like the Raiders blitz a quarterback.

  The student didn’t have to confess. They never had to advise him of his constitutional rights. The student shrieked, “NOOOOOOOOO!” and dropped like he was head-shot. So did Otto Stringer. So did all the narcs. So did the airport security cops, U.S. Customs officers, Desmond’s handler, and everybody else with an I.Q. higher than Desmond’s. Everybody except Heidi who stopped her work and started admiring old Desmond, thinking he was looking pretty damn hot tossing that suitcase all over the room like that.

  The contents as it turned out could have leveled that corner of the building. It didn’t. And Desmond the hound was through checking luggage at the airport. And so was Otto Stringer, who said, “Thank you, but I already know about the power of pussy so I didn’t have to see Desmond go ga-ga over Heidi. And I don’t think I need any more scenes with jungle guys that oughtta be back home in coconut-shell jockstraps knocking down palm trees instead of cops. So I think I’ll just go ahead and accept that transfer to Hollywood dicks. Scratch one dope cop.”

  Sidney Blackpool pulled up in Otto Stringer’s driveway at 10:00 A.M. as promised. He was driving his Toyota Celica and wasn’t nearly as sartorially splendid as Otto. Sidney Blackpool wore a navy-blue cotton golf shirt and tan cotton pants and loafers.

  “You look devastating,” he said to Otto, “but any more luggage and we rent a U-haul. We’re loaded to the gunwales.”

  “I’d like to remind you we’re going to Palm Springs, dah-ling!” Otto said, trying to cram his clubs into the backseat of the Toyota. “You got to arrive looking three under par. You really oughtta gussy up a bit, Sidney. I don’t wanna be embarrassed.”

  “I bet a hundred baby argyles died in agony for that sweater,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Wanna drive?”

  “I’m too stoked,” Otto said. “I didn’t sleep three hours last night. Whaddaya think our hotel room’s gonna be like? Room my ass. Suite! Sooooo-weeeeet!”

  Sidney Blackpool headed toward the Hollywood Freeway and they were on their way. As they cruised past the downtown interchange, Otto glanced toward the police building at Parker Center, got a shudder thinking of the tour at narcotics just ended, and found it impossible to straighten out the holiday grin. He was starting to believe that he might just survive to collect his pension now that he was ensconced at Hollywood Station and teamed up with Black Sid whom he’d known twelve years ago when they both worked patrol at Newton Street. He just wished Sid wasn’t so gloomy all the time.

  “Wait’ll the Dragon Lady hears about this,” Otto said dreamily.

  “That your ex? When’d you see her last?”

  “I never see her or her little dragonettes. I never got a kind word from either a those adolescent brats the whole two years we were married. My ex-ex had three cubs and they all were mean.”

  “A policeman’s lot is not so hot,” said Sidney Blackpool.

  “Maybe in Palm Springs I’ll meet a new ex-wife,” Otto said. “A nice one. A rich one. Both a my exs only closed their eyes during sex cause they hated to see me have a good time. Most fun I ever got in bed was when they moved, which happened twice, once on each honeymoon. They put me into bankruptcy. My creditors finally said they’d clear my debts for ten cents on the dollar and I said, are you crazy? Who has that kind a money! If they could see me now!”

  “Maybe we better turn around and visit your old squad room downtown,” Sidney Blackpool said. “You could use a dozen downers. Save a little rocket fuel for reentry, will ya? Our vacation might turn out to be a drag.”

  “Never happen!” Otto said. “I already heard about our hotel, and this guy Watson, you know who his old lady is. He does nothing on the cheap. He wants results.”

  “Not gonna be any results, Otto.”

  “Yeah, but we can make it look good. When we’re not on the links, that is. Hey, remember that putter I was gonna buy last time we played Griffith Park? I shoulda bought it. I bet they jack up the prices in Palm Springs. Think maybe we should stop on the way and buy some golf balls?”

  “Great golfers like us only need one each.”

  “You know, Sidney, maybe we can both find a rich broad in Palm Springs. I mean, how many chances like this we ever gonna get? Living in a hotel suite, just signing our names for drinks and meals and …”

  “One wife was enough for me,” Sidney Blackpool said. “More than enough.”

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t marry good-looking broads. I bet your ex is a looker.”

  “A looker. Yeah, she is.”

  “I want an ugly one next time,” Otto said. “They’re more appreciative. And it’s okay if she’s old. Shi
t, I’m old.”

  “Younger than me.”

  “Yeah, but I’m facing the big one, Sidney. Number four-oh. In two freaking weeks I’ll be middle-aged!”

  “Forty isn’t middle-aged. Not exactly.”

  “Do you know Paul McCartney is exactly your age? Ain’t that amazing. Seems like a year ago the Beatles were kids, don’t it? I can’t get my head off my fortieth. I’m taking it real hard. Thank God for this vacation, take my mind off middle age. First thing goes is your memory.”

  “That’s the second thing.”

  “I know, I know! Think that doesn’t scare me?”

  “Settle, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Don’t jettison your parachute. The vacation may bum out.”

  “Black Sid,” Otto said, shaking his head. “You don’t just see the glass half empty, you don’t even see the glass. Must get a parched throat being you. By the way, I saw a piece in the Times the other morning about anhedonia. Ever heard of it?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well, I think you got anhedonia. It affects maybe one out of a hundred. It means you can’t have fun. No kind of fun. Just like you on a golf course. You look like Torquemada’s got the hot pliers on your nuts instead a just enjoying the game.”

  “Nobody enjoys golf,” Sidney Blackpool said. “And what makes you think it’s a game?”

  “Anyway, people with anhedonia never get turned on by anything. They just go through the motions.”

  “Like me.”

  “They don’t know if it’s congenital or not. People just go around, don’t give a shit. I thought a old Black Sid with the blank stare.”

  “Maybe it’s not always congenital,” Sidney Blackpool said, and Otto Stringer’s rosy jowls flushed, and Sidney Blackpool knew that Otto had suddenly thought about Tommy Blackpool although they’d never discussed his boy.