The Secrets of Harry Bright Read online

  Five minutes later, one of the vice cops posing as a customer stormed huffily out to the lobby and told the manager, “That little guy in the front row with the gremlin ears, he’s low-crawling people’s crotches! He’s a pervert! I want my money back!”

  And then another vice cop posing as a customer stalked out saying indignantly, “I goddamn near broke my ankle slipping on the floor down in front! There’s a little jerkoff down there going splooey all over the place! You could hydroplane on all the sapazzola in this freak show! I want my money back!”

  And so forth.

  While the vice cops went outside to giggle, the theater manager, who was sick and tired of dummy floggers chasing off legitimate customers, grabbed Wingnut by the scruff of the neck and dragged him right out of his seat, which resulted in a reflexive swing by Wingnut and a retaliatory punch by the theater manager, and pretty soon there was a screaming wrestling match that had all the customers pouring out of the cinema in panic.

  By the time the other cops realized that another prank had backfired, and came running back into the theater, the fight had spilled over next door into the X-rated bookstore where the theater manager was doing a rain dance from having taken a swing and smacked the wall. He was jumping up and down with a busted hand, yelling and screaming, and Wingnut was sprawled between the dildos and the transvestite pinups thinking that vice wasn’t going to be much better than patrol.

  His Orange County police career ended not because of any backfired pranks but on a legitimate whore operation at a high-rise hotel where he almost got shot. On this operation, Wingnut was supposed to be a young insurance adjuster who was in town to assess the damage that a winter storm had done to a piece of waterfront property in Seal Beach. That was the cover story if he was lucky enough to meet a suspected hooker who’d been working a certain hotel bar for several weeks.

  Wingnut was under strict instructions not to make any overt move with the hooker until midnight, which was the earliest that the cover team could finish a surveillance they were doing across town. He was just supposed to mosey around the bar and engage the girl in conversation if he was lucky enough to make contact, and then to stall until the cover team arrived. He was to give them a prearranged signal if she made an offer of prostitution. Then they’d move in, hook her up and haul her off to the slam.

  That was the plan. Except that Wingnut had three margaritas before he saw the petite young lollipop stroll in and sit at the bar two stools away. She wasn’t any older than Wingnut. She sort of reminded him of Debbie of the aborted movie review. Wingnut was feeling sorry for her but he’d already worked vice long enough to have regretted feeling sorry for hookers. He had once let one go pee during a vice raid, and when they broke down the locked bathroom door they found only the curtains blowing through an open window. That, after she’d already asked six other cops if she could go to the john and been refused, earning dipshit-of-the-month award for Wingnut.

  So Wingnut, fried on tequila and salt, made friends with the girl. Her name was Sally, and she wouldn’t go far enough with her “offer” to satisfy the state penal-code requirements. She asked Wingnut if they could go to his room to continue his conversation.

  “Lets wait awhile,” Wingnut said. “What’s your hurry?”

  “Ain’t you in a hurry?” Sally smiled slyly. “Ain’t I something you wanna hurry for?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Wingnut said. “But we haven’t talked … business yet.”

  “Let’s do that in your room,” she said.

  “It might not be agreeable, the terms I mean.”

  “It’ll be agreeable,” she said.

  “Gimme a hint,” Wingnut said, and now he was trying to be sly except that she was starting to look fuzzy. That was a lot of cactus juice for the young cop.

  “Let’s go on up and I’ll talk more when we’re alone in the elevator,” she said.

  “Let’s have another drink,” Wingnut said.

  “Listen, honey, you’re awful cute,” Sally said, “but I ain’t got all night. If you’re not interested I’m gonna have to move on down the road.”

  “Wait a minute!” Wingnut said, seeing his arrest slipping away. “Okay, we’ll talk on the elevator.” What the hell. He couldn’t have much trouble from such a frail little girl.

  The hotel was very quiet at that time of night. There was a nice-looking fellow already standing at the elevator when they strolled up arm in arm like honeymooners. The young man was wearing a cardigan, pants with cuffs, and penny loafers, so it never occurred to Wingnut that he could be a hooker’s main man. They were all supposed to be bad-looking spades with silk shirts and earrings and alligator boots.

  Wingnut wished the elevator was empty. He had to have the offer quick because there was no hotel room. “Which floor you want?” Wingnut said to the young man in the cardigan, hoping he’d get off on a lower floor, giving Wingnut some time with the hooker.

  “All the way up,” the young fellow smiled, and when Wingnut pushed the button the young fellow said, “All the way up.”

  “I pushed the top floor,” Wingnut said testily.

  “I mean your hands,” the young man said, producing a chrome-plated.32-caliber revolver. “Put them all the way up.”

  They took him out on the tenth floor. They were efficient and very fast. While the hooker held the elevator doors open, her partner pushed Wingnut against the wall and had his wallet, wristwatch and flash money within thirty seconds. Then the partner found Wingnut’s handcuffs in the young cop’s back pocket.

  “Are you a cop?” the hooker gasped.

  “Yeah, I’m vice,” Wingnut said. “You’re under arrest.”

  “You’re dead,” the young man said.

  “You’re not under arrest,” said Wingnut.

  “Get back in the elevator,” the young man commanded, but Wingnut said, “Hey, tell you what! You let me go and I’ll let you go!”

  “I ain’t as stupid as you,” the young guy said, handcuffing both Wingnut’s wrists to the handrail in the elevator.

  “Please don’t do that,” Wingnut said, as the elevator descended. “Just go ahead and run. I’ll give you a head start.”

  “You already did,” the young guy said, before he and the whore got out, waved bye-bye and pushed the button that sent Wingnut to the penthouse.

  The handcuff chain allowed him to reach the elevator panel all right. Wingnut mashed the emergency button with his freckled little nose, and when the hotel employees found him and called the police station for a spare handcuff key, Wingnut Bates decided that Orange County was full of hard luck.

  He had a feeling he might still like a career in law enforcement, but maybe in a less populated, quieter sort of place. He heard they were looking for cops at a small department near Palm Springs. Wingnut met Sergeant Harry Bright who interviewed him and said that he had potential and seemed to be a good lad.

  Ironically, it was yet another prank at the Mineral Springs police station that was to lead to a tiny break in the Jack Watson murder case.

  There has never been a squad of cops anywhere that didn’t have to endure at least one prankster. Since Mineral Springs had nine cops, they were lucky to have only one. His name was Frank Zamelli and they called him Prankster Frank. He’d been a cop for eight years in the Bay area, and in some other life he was the guy who ran around the throne room in size seventeen pointed bootees slapping the duchess in the ass with a pig’s bladder. He was thirty-two years old, tall and wiry, and more lizard-eyed than Geraldine Ferraro’s old man. The other cops wished vaudeville would be resurrected so maybe he’d give up police work.

  For one thing, he was bonkers over mace canisters. Prankster Frank’d mace anything. In the winter he’d mace the patrol cars, just inside the grill where the vent hoses are. Then when they’d turn on the heater on a cold night they’d be crying like their dog died before they realized what happened. He’d also mace their radio mikes. They didn’t know it until they picked it up to talk and their eyes start
ed watering from the gas residue. Or he’d mace a helmet before a big inspection. That was a gas, all right. Standing there at attention with a helmet down over the nose and the eyes on fire. Prankster Frank Zamelli made lots of death wishes surface.

  A variation on the mace was the bag-and-poopsicle routine where he’d scoop up a pile of warm dog crap with a bag and popsicle stick, and stash it up under the dashboard of a patrol car if the cops were dumb enough to leave it unlocked when he was within five miles. He just loved to hide out somewhere and watch two befuddled cops leap out of their car and sniff around each other like cocker spaniels after checking shoe bottoms.

  Even civilian employees weren’t safe when Frank was in a prankster frenzy. There was a very buxom married secretary at his old station who was secretly dating the captain, and who spurned all Frank’s advances.

  It was rumored that she was hosed down by the captain every time her old man flew down to L.A. on business, but she affected chastity and carried herself like Princess Di. Finally, when an overheated Prankster Frank wouldn’t take yes for an answer after he asked if she’d like him to stop asking her for dates, she said, “Listen, maybe you don’t appreciate subtlety. Let’s put it this way: I’ll date you when Jeane Kirkpatrick becomes a Playboy bunny.”

  Then Frank was ordered by his sergeant to stop “pestering” the boss’s secretary. The word came from the captain himself who referred to Frank as “the wop cop.” The ethnic slur did it. They got on Prankster Frank’s list. But he couldn’t very well mace the Waspy bitch or the captain. What he could do was wait until she went home one night and attack the photo cube she displayed on her desk. It was full of pictures of her preppy nineteen-year-old daughter who was vying for Miss California and whom she treated like a nun with the holy stigmata. Prankster Frank slipped a picture of his own into the side of the cube that faced toward the squad room where several passing detectives later did a take and said, “Who’s that?”

  “My daughter!” the secretary answered proudly until the third detective asked the same question. It gave her pause because they all knew very well whose pictures were in the cube. Then she turned it around and screamed.

  Prankster Frank had inserted a shot he found in Hustler magazine, a beaver shot, a yawning beaver shot. In color.

  When she ran into the captain’s office to demand the head of Prankster Frank, her boss and not-so-secret lover tried to calm her down by pointing out that she had no proof it was the dirty dago and it might be better to make no more of it for the moment. Until she pointed to the trophy table behind him and a portrait of his wife, Rosey, and their son, Buster, who was posing cheek to cheek with his doting mother on his tenth birthday. Except that the face in the picture no longer belonged to Buster. The captain’s snotty little kid now had the kisser of a local junkie with a Zulu hairdo. Buster looked like Rupert the Hype who looked like Leon Spinks after Larry Holmes beat the living shit out of him making him uglier than ever.

  The thing that finished off Prankster Frank was a reign of terror at the county jail that was almost traced to him. It started when a drunk described him to his face in twenty-seven words ending with “guinea prick.” The drunk also started screaming about suing for false arrest and police brutality until Prankster Frank got a headache from all the motor-mouthing. He was going on vacation soon and didn’t want any court subpoenas, so instead of giving his own name at the county slammer as arresting officer, he impulsively listed his name as Officer U. F. Puck along with a bogus serial number.

  The reign of terror was launched. For the next couple of weeks Prankster Frank disposed of seven slime-mouths by booking them drunk at the county jail, arrested by U. F. Puck. Prankster Frank then told a few other cops how easy it was to dispose of smart-mouth pukes who were “almost” drunk enough to book legitimately. Pretty soon there were lots of borderline drunks with very bad attitudes being booked by Officer U. F. Puck.

  Then the jig was up. Especially since Officer Puck never showed up for trial and was described by outraged defendants as a tall white man, a short black man, a fat Mexican.

  One defendant was absolutely certain that Officer Puck was Chinese-American and he ought to know, he said, because he was Chinese and they spoke the same dialect.

  There was a big internal investigation over this one, which involved three police agencies. Prankster Frank Zamelli was ordered to take a polygraph exam but said he was insulted that his word as an officer and gentleman was being challenged, and he was sick of the damp climate in the Bay area, which was making his knee joints ache, and he was going south around Palm Springs where he was told people lived longer than goat herders in Abkhazia.

  Six months later, Prankster Frank was working for Chief Paco Pedroza after Sergeant Harry Bright found Frank to be a good lad who might need extra supervision. Paco actually came to appreciate Frank’s tricky ways as long as they got results. For instance, one day the county sheriff’s deputies were trying to serve a search warrant on a Mineral Springs crank dealer, and they asked Paco if any of his cops knew the dealer’s M.O. They wanted to get in the house fast with their search warrant before the crystal got flushed and other evidence got destroyed.

  “Noooooo problem,” said Prankster Frank, who knew that the crystal chemist had a restored 1965 Ford Mustang he loved more than ether. Thirty minutes later, the scruffiest-looking dope cop from the sheriffs squad was being “arrested” by Officer Zamelli who, in full uniform, was dragging the undercover cop down the street with his hands cuffed behind him, yelling loud enough to wake the neighborhood, most of whom were asleep by ten o’clock.

  Prankster Frank made lots of noise when he stomped up on the porch of the two-story frame house with his “suspect” by the arm. He leaned on the bell until he heard a voice from the upstairs window say, “Yeah, whaddaya want?”

  “It’s the police!” Prankster Frank yelled. “Somebody in this house own a Mustang?”

  “What about it?” the man’s voice asked with some alarm.

  “I caught this guy lifting the car radio. I think he busted in with a tire iron. The paint’s all scratched and the window’s busted and …”

  The crank dealer slid down the banister. Prankster Frank heard two bumps and in ten seconds the “chemist” in his bare feet and bathrobe threw open the door yelling, “My Mustang? This fuckface tore up my vintage Mustang?”

  While the crank dealer was being restrained from attacking the “prisoner,” all the deputies swooped in. The chemist found himself changing places with the little fuckface and soon sat bellowing in the same handcuffs while the dope cops strolled leisurely through the methamphetamine smorgasbord, scooping up drugs in both hands.

  Paco Pedroza admired resourceful cops like Prankster Frank, but then, Frank never played tricks on his chief. Nor on the sergeants. First of all, he liked Sergeant Harry Bright too much, and second, he was scared shitless of Sergeant Coy Brickman who was not really mean but looked mean. Prankster Frank didn’t like guys who stared at you like they hadn’t blinked since 1969. He only played pranks on the other eight members of the Mineral Springs police force. One of his favorite victims was of course Wingnut Bates.

  Wingnut was a bit heavier now and had matured during the two years he’d been in Mineral Springs. He liked almost everything here better than Orange County. Of course, he didn’t like the summers when the temperature shot up past 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And he didn’t like the animals.

  Prankster Frank caught a raccoon on a prowler call after the little masked burglar had torn a hole in the roof of a house and gotten inside. He surreptitiously dumped the animal in Wingnut’s patrol car, which pissed off the raccoon real bad. The raccoon ate Wingnut’s uniform jacket. Wingnut endured it.

  But there was an animal he could not endure: a snake. Rattlers, sidewinders, gopher snakes, it didn’t matter. He was scared of all snakes. He was even scared of pictures of snakes. When he’d get a snake call, there’d be no air between himself and the citizen, Wingnut being the one behind. Learni
ng that, Prankster Frank went out and bought himself a four-foot rubber snake and rigged an elaborate booby trap in Wingnut’s locker. When Wingnut opened the locker after coming in from swing shift one Sunday night, the snake fell on his shoulder, sending poor Wingnut screaming out of the locker room, down the stairs and out the door of the station, scaring the crap out of the graveyard relief who figured Wingnut had found a bomb.

  Wingnut Bates was still trembling when he arrived at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club that night. Though not an aggressive or violent young fellow, Wingnut Bates was looking for Prankster Frank Zamelli who was home in bed dreaming up his next one.

  It had taken about thirty minutes after the Mineral Springs Police Department was formed for an entrepreneur to buy out Cactus Mike’s Bar and Grill and have himself a hot little cop saloon. J. Edgar Gomez, a retired highway patrolman, named his bar the Eleven Ninety-nine Club after the radio code used by most California lawmen to announce that a cop needs emergency help. To “decorate” the saloon, the ex-Chippie selected several icons. One, framed in gold leaf and illuminated with a painting light, was an eight-by-ten glossy of Clint Eastwood holding a.44 magnum beside his face. Another was of General George S. Patton hefting one of his automatics with the ivory grips. And on the only wall large enough to accommodate “art” he commissioned one of the drove of local alcoholics to paint a mural designed by J. Edgar Gomez himself. It was a miniature of Michael Jackson with his hair on fire, and Prince in his Purple Rain costume. Michael Jackson’s hair was being extinguished by amber rain supplied from above by a life-sized study of John Wayne in cowboy regalia pissing on the androgyny of today.

  The ex-Chip tossed in a few obligatory wall mottoes for good measure. One said: “Unemployment is degrading. Give Mr. Ellis back his job”-which referred to the name used by the Canadian public hangmen who had gone into forced retirement when that nation placed a moratorium on the death penalty.

  A second motto said: “Support the eternal flame. Flick your Bic for Jan Holstrom”-which reminded bar patrons of the pledge drive that enabled the Eleven Ninety-nine Club to send a gift of 154 Bic lighters to Soledad Prison for the use of Jan Holstrom, the inmate who had set fire to Charles Manson, almost killing him.