The Secrets of Harry Bright (2 page)

He gave each cop he hired over the years the same admonition: "I gotta have people with street smarts and ramie but they also gotta have somethin more important: diplomacy. When you're out there all alone and no help on the horizon you gotta be able to talk people into doing it your way. Remember one thing: out here you ain't got no 'or else' at your disposal."

And Paco gave each cop he hired (except the lone female, Ruth Kosko) the same warning: "I won't hassle you about the weapons you carry. We got M-fourteens in your car with a clip a thirty that you can fire in three round bursts. You can carry forty-four magnums, or forty-fives with as hot a load as they can stand. You can carry nine millimeters cocked and locked, if you need more rounds. You can wear a Whammo wrist rocket or you can stash a backup derringer up your ass if it makes you feel better. I ain't gonna hassle you about the iron you carry even if it looks offensive. And there ain't much of a dress code. I won't worry about a shoeshine since the sun'll melt it off anyway. I won't worry if you catch a few winks sometimes on a graveyard shift if you got to. I have just a few rules for my cops: no drugs and no thieves at no time. And no booze on the job. And no aberrant sexual behavior inside the city limits with anybody under the age a forty even when you're off duty. And that's about it, far as rules."

The last one was because the 150 single-parent divorcees and widows who lived in the mobile-home park (which the citizens called Mid-Life Junction) were driving the chief bughouse. They came every month to the city-council meeting with a ten-page list of what was wrong with the town and figured that the police chief was responsible for most of it. Paco Pedroza, who admitted to being a sexist pig, figured that all those waitresses and manicurists an
d h
airdressers who lived in Mineral Springs but commuted to jobs in the resort towns were suffering from the fact that available women greatly outnumbered men except during the height of the tourist season when the conventions hit the desert. So he encouraged his cops to do P
. R
." work" at Mid-Life Junction by attending their coffee klatches. But his cops were mostly young dudes, and the burnouts at Mid-Life Junction looked to them even older than they were. After the press began calling a particularly dangerous strip of desert highway "Blood Alley," the cops started calling Mid-Life Junction "No-Blood Alley."

When Paco Pedroza got the call from Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department informing him of a possible hot new lead in a cold but notorious desert murder case that had touched the town of Mineral Springs, he promised total cooperation to the boys from his old alma mater. Then he hung up and posted a notice to his eight man and one woman police force that they would be receiving guests from planet Hollywood, after which he had his secretary and clerk, Annie Paskewicz, draw a picture of a coiled desert sidewinder with a caption that said: "We don't give a shit how they do it in L
. A
.," which he attached to his incoming file basket.

Paco Pedroza dragged his overweight body up the steps to the roof of the police station/city hall/jailhouse, stripped off his mustard-yellow aloha shirt and groaned at the sight of his gelatinous pees which seemed to fall a quarter of an inch a year.

"I oughtta have our Hollywood guests bring me something black and lacy and big from Frederick's," Paco groaned to his sergeant. Then Paco squeezed one of his hairy breasts, dropped into a battered lawn chair and said, "That's it. I'm way past a training bra. No more burritos for this Mexican."

Coy Brickman, at forty-one, was ten years younger than Paco, several inches taller, and looked taller yet in his blue uniform.

"They think a pair a big town cops can clear a no-leads seventeen-month-old case?" Coy Brickman tore disgustedl
y a
t a meatball sandwich he'd got at the town's only deli, washing it down with a quart of orange juice.

Paco settled back, letting the desert rays have at his bronze belly and said, "Wonder if they'll send any a the dicks I used to know?"

"You don't clear a no-leads, seventeen-month-old case very often," Coy Brickman repeated.

"So?" Paco shrugged, closing his eyes. "They can have a week in a Palm Springs spa getting a facial, a body wrap and a blowjob. Speakin a which, what's the wind look like?"

"Therapeutic breeze," Coy Brickman said, watching the dust devils and whirlwinds forming in the valley.

Paco Pedroza sighed and said, "A breeze in this freaking town could blow the nuts off a ground squirrel. Bring me a snack next time ya drive by Humberto's."

"Three, four chicken tacos okay?"

"Make it four," the chief mumbled, never opening his eyes. "With frijoles. One thing about this freaking wind. You learn to fart silently and nobody ever knows."

And while Paco dozed and his sergeant ate an early supper of ersatz meatballs on the roof of the police station, a Mineral Springs wino named Beavertail Bigelow was 86'd from a gin mill for picking a fight. A grimy wrinkled desert rat who looked as though he'd lurched into town with his bedroll lashed to a double-parked donkey, Beavertail drank a fifth of gin, they said, every day it didn't snow in town, and never went home when the cops told him to, and respected authority about like Sacco and Vanzetti.

The cops wished that some night when he was sleeping it off on a table at the oasis picnic ground, a flash flood would wash the son of a bitch clear to Indio. But he was a true desert rat. He hated people, understood hostile environments and could survive fifty megatons at ground zero.

Beavertail Bigelow was sixty years old, weighed less than 130 pounds, was chinless and watery-eyed, and was described as having shoulders like Reagan--Nancy that is. He got his sobriquet from the flat oval cactus of the same name that proliferated in the Coachella Valley, a specie
s t
hat looked harmless but bore minute barbed hairlike spines. The saying went, "You think the little wimp's spineless till you press him."

As darkness fell so did Beavertail Bigelow, onto his favorite table at the oasis picnic ground. He was ten fathoms deep in a Beefeater slumber when a tall dark figure hoisted him up and hauled his carcass toward a waiting car, which roared toward the highway to Twentynine Palms.

There was a diner on that highway where a bus driver made regular rest stops and lots of passes at a counter waitress. The unattended bus was parked in the light by the road sign, but no one saw the dark-clad figure carrying his shabby bundle. Beavertail Bigelow was found thirty minutes later on the back seat of the bus when his snoring woke two marines on their way to their base. He got kicked off the bus, minus his cowboy hat, and had to hitchhike back to Mineral Springs, therefore adding bus drivers to the list of things he hated.

By the time Beavertail reached the outskirts of Mineral Springs the rising sun was smacking him in the eyes. His cerebellum was fogged by gin fumes and his soggy cortex was giving conflicting orders to his ravaged little body. All those millions of marinated brain cells were firing aimlessly. Beavertail Bigelow was parched and confused.

He decided to cut across a mile of desert directly to the oasis picnic ground where there was a water fountain piped from a natural spring. He kept his mouth clamped shut and breathed through his nose to keep the mucous membranes moist, but his narrow skull was already heating up. The sun was just above the horizon but soaring fast, and throwing purples and pinks and crimsons and blues across the Santa Rosa Mountains.

Beavertail realized that the gin was accelerating dehydration like crazy. The marrow in his bones was sizzling. Might as well stick a blow dryer in his mouth as drink a fifth of gin and start trucking across the desert, he thought. Then he decided that if he had lots of money like Johnny Cash and Liz Taylor and Liza Minnelli and all the othe
r r
ich cocksuckers that came to the desert to get cured at the Eisenhower de-tox clinic, he wouldn't be out here at the crack of dawn staggering around. He was only in this goddamn pickle because he was poor.

Beavertail was now about tired enough to accept help even from a cop if he spotted one, but he figured they were all sleeping in their patrol cars somewhere, the lazy pricks. He had to pull himself together and take a breather, so he wobbled toward a honeypod mesquite, the shade tree of the desert. It was about thirty feet tall, a dramatic species with rounded crown and rough-textured bark.

He scared a roadrunner who leaped from behind a spray of desert lavender and zoomed off, his topknot fluttering. The scented flowers and strong mint aroma attracted swarms of bees, but this one was beeless at the moment so Beavertail squatted beside it, careful not to disturb a large jumping cholla. The slightest touch of the cactus' joints will shoot you full of barbs, yet birds nest in it. Another desert mystery.

As Beavertail squatted like a Morongo Indian, getting crankier by the minute, he spotted a banded gecko lizard doing a few pushups on a little sand drift. The gecko shot Beavertail Bigelow a mean little glare and tossed off about five more pushups for effect. The "pushup" movement is thought to be a display of territorial dominance, and this four-inch reptile was so full of anxiety he was into his third set.

Suddenly, the lizard took a bluff step toward Beavertail Bigelow and squeezed out three more pushups, though by now his little tongue was lolling from exhaustion and his eyes were sliding back in his skull.

Beavertail got very curious. The desert rat creaked to his feet and braced the lizard like a gunslinger. "You ain't no fringe-toed, you little cocksucker," Beavertail told the gecko. "I can kick your ass and who cares?"

With that, Beavertail Bigelow tried to give the gecko a swift kick, but since his brain cells were firing at random he only kicked desert air. Beavertail sailed over the sand drift, landing flat on his bony spine. He let out a yelp and was answered by a musical plink. He thought at first tha
t t
he sound was a spinal disk blowing, so he gingerly pulled himself to a sitting position.

He figured the little cocksucker lizard had jammed on home until he saw what the lizard had been guarding. The asshole was home! He'd been living inside his treasure, which was now the property of Beavertail Bigelow by virtue of superior size. It was a funny-looking ukulele.

Beavertail picked it up, dusted it off and saw that it was in one piece. How the hell did it get here? Fell off a passing truck probably. He could clean it up and take it to a pawnshop he knew in Cathedral City, where there were no cathedrals but lots of secondhand joints and so many gay bars that desert barflies would say, "Are you married, fella, or do you live in Cathedral City?"

When at a later time, lawmen would reflect upon how a notorious Palm Springs murder case was methodically deciphered by seemingly random discoveries, they would find undeniable that a growing evidence chain was forged by a very macho lizard.

Chapter
2

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN HAD NOT YET ARRIVED AT
the Century Plaza Hotel to await election results, but hal
f a
block away on Avenue of the Stars, Sidney Blackpoo
l w
as making a call at an office suite when he saw two me
n s
tanding beside a limousine. They wore three-piece suit
s a
nd button-down shirts and striped neckties and shin
y w
ingtips, but despite the duds they didn't have the gee-whiz look of a George Bush preppie. For one thing thei
r a
rms hung funny and they both looked about as light-hearted as Jack Nicklaus lining up a putt on the eighteenth.

Sidney Blackpool was never comfortable walking past Secret Service agents, but had had several occasions to do so in the past twenty-one years when bigshot politicians came to town. Like most policemen he didn't think that Secret Service agents were real cops, so he wasn't altogether relaxed when he had to stroll by with a Smith & Wesson under his coat. Regular cops could spot a plainclothes dick in a minute, but he always feared that one of these guys might eyeball the gun bulge and give him a John Hinckley brain massage with the butt of an Uzi before he could identify himself.

They didn't call him Black Sid for any reason relate
d t
o his appearance. In fact, his hair was sandy brown and gray mottled, and his eyes were pale green, and he had the kind of freckled flesh that seemed to invite a keratosis every time he played a round of golf without sunscreen lotion.

"A skin-doctor's dream," his dermatologist told him. "Keep it up, and by the time you're forty-five you'll progress from something that sounds ugly, like keratosis, to something that sounds pretty, like melanoma."

People always asked if he got his nickname from being a Dirty Harry, black-glove cop, and he'd explain that policemen love monickers and when your name is Sidney Blackpool you just naturally become Black Sid. What he didn't tell them was that "Black Sid" reflected his cynical demeanor, a look that said doomsday couldn't come soon enough. Nor did he say that he drank lots more than his share of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch--ergo, Black Sid.

Sidney Blackpool was not kept waiting by the foxy secretary at an art nouveau desk shaped like an oil spill. She certainly had no trouble spotting him for a cop, and asked, "Sergeant Blackpool?" the second he entered the office.

The detective was about to make himself comfortable and maybe see if she was as friendly as she looked when she said, "Oh, you don't have to wait. Mister Watson's expecting you."