The Secrets of Harry Bright (20 page)

The waiter arrived with samples of mozzarella marinara, coquilles St. Jacques and lox with capers. Sidney Blackpool tried the mozzarella, Harlan tasted the scallops, Otto ate what was left.

They had three bottles of wine during the meal and
Otto insisted on champagne and cherries jubilee for dessert because, as Otto put it, "Who ever heard of eating cherries jubilee without champagne?"

Harlan was bagged by then, but was still regaling them with Palm Springs lore. "And Steve McQueen lived up on Southridge by William Holden and Bob Hope. And Truman Capote lived in Las Palmas, and Kirk Douglas, and there're so many more!"

By now, Otto was nearly as bombed as Harlan who was weaving in his chair. The dining room maitre d' kept looking at them and at his wristwatch. Two other tables were occupied by quieter drunks who looked like they might be leaving soon.

"Tell me, Harlan, how'd you get to know so much about this town?" Otto asked.

"Small-town gossip. You just hang around the bars and pretty soon you know everything. In Palm Springs there's only a population of thirty thousand who own homes and pay taxes and lots of them're rich people who aren't around much. You should see these bars. They're nothing like Hollywood." Reconsidering that, he said, "Well, they're something like Hollywood. We have lots of wanna-be cowboys driving around in Datsun pickups looking very butch but just reeking of Pierre Cardin. Do you know this is the only place where you can go into a bar that's frequented by the cowboy and hard-hat set along with wetbacks from Sonora? And they get along okay. When it's one hundred and twenty degrees outside I think people start to tolerate each other. It's us against the desert. But we also have our slums. Only town in the valley without a slum is Rancho Mirage. Do you know how many celebrities live in the country clubs in Rancho Mirage?"

"I'm getting sleepy," Otto said. "My lips're getting numb."

"Where do you suppose Jack Watson would go on his nights out, Harlan?" Sidney Blackpool asked.

"We have half a dozen discos in town now. Lots of airline stews and girls from Newport Beach come in for the weekends. Jack'd probably go to a disco. I never saw him dance but I know he'd be good. He'd never be ou
t t
here on the street at two A
. M
. suffering from disco heartbreak, I can tell you. Jack could have any girl he wanted. You know why I say that?"

"Why?" Sidney Blackpool asked, while Otto tried to catch the eye of the cocktail waitress who was still working the busy cocktail lounge as well as serving the drunks left in the dining room.

"There're other kids with curly black hair and eyes like Paul Newman, but he had more."

Something troubled Sidney Blackpool suddenly. He felt a shadow, then a shiver. He wasn't sober enough to put it all together just now.

"Jack had a quality that very few twenty-two-yearolds can match. Jack was nice. He was a nice human being. Yes, I think he dearly wanted to be independent of his father someday. He was special."

"I hear that young people hang around Palm Springs all hours a the night,." Sidney Blackpool said. "Did Jack do that?"

"Do you know who hang around? Teens and marines from Twentynine Palms. These macho boys who spend all day learning how to drop napalm on rice paddies and kill with their bare hands come to Palm Springs for the weekend. No hair, no money, in their jacked-up Camaros with rebel flags on them, and a can of Skoal in their back pocket. They've got nothing to do but get in fights. Do you think Jack would be roaming the streets with those people?"

"How much did he drink?"

"Like any college kid."

"Did he do drugs?"

"I'm sure he smoked a number once in a while. I don't think he did coke, but I have to tell you it is the most abused substance in Palm Springs. I see waiters and waitresses running in and out of the rest room all night, stuffing it up their noses at a hundred and twenty dollars a gram.

Just then the cocktail waitress came by with the check for Otto. He leered at her cleavage, signed the check and wrote on a cocktail napkin: "Please help me escape! I a
m b
eing held hostage by terminally boring people! I am a wealthy man!"

She giggled and thanked Otto for writing in a 30 percent tip, after which she sashayed back to the cocktail lounge.

"It's hard to believe I'm almost old enough to be her daddy," Otto sighed. "I may not survive this birthday."

"Well, I guess it's time to go to bed," Sidney Blackpoo
l s
aid.

"So soon?" Harlan said. "I could talk for hours."

"I want you to call me here if you think of anything else about the Watson case," Sidney Blackpool said. "Try to remember if he ever talked about any girl he may've met here. Did he ever bring a local friend to the house?"

"Not while I worked for the family."

"I guess that's it then. We'll see . . ." Suddenly it clicked, the reference to Paul Newman's blue eyes. Newman had a son with whom he no doubt had a turbulent relationship. He'd lost that son. Paul Newman knew what Victor Watson and Sidney Blackpool knew, about fathers and sons.

"Something wrong?" Harlan asked.

"I just thought of a guy . . . It's nothing. Now I'm gonna put you in a cab."

"Gosh, I wish we didn't have to go so early. I was just . . . oh, my Lord!"

"What is it?"

"Look at that!"

Three men had walked into the dining room and were having a short conversation with the maitre d' whose grin registered about $200 on the gratuity scale as he led them to a table in the corner.

The man in the lead could've been thirty years old or sixty. His hair was done in a henna perm, and his transparent flesh was stretched so tight across his cheeks and mouth that he could barely smile. He had Jean Harlow eyebrows, and dressed like Oscar Wilde complete with carnation. He was followed closely by two handsome young Japanese in matching double-breasted red blazers, white pants and red loafers without socks.

"Do you know who that is?" Harlan whispered. "My Lord, ever since Betty Ford got her face-lift everybody's coming to Palm Springs for a cut and stitch. Look at that job! I mean, last time I saw him he could pack his rainbow undies in his eye bags. I mean, you talk about eyes by Louis Vuitton!"

"Who is he?" Otto was getting interested.

"And those little pals, calls them his aides-de-camp. Sure. I know a massage-parlor duo when I see one. Some day he'll be giving palimony to those little harbor bombers."

Who is he?" Otto wanted to know.

"That man," Harlan said, "is the last of a famous German family who kept Hitler's war machine going. In his father's factories slaves were hanged from the rafters when their output wasn't sufficient. In nineteen thirty-nine his family was as powerful as the Rothschilds. Now he spends his life in a bikini with a tan line that touches.-

"He looks like a Vincent Price movie," Otto said.

"Palm Springs is a larger version of Harry's Bar," Harlan declared proudly. "You can watch the whole world pass by. Gentlemen, he is living proof of a design in the universe. From the battleship Bismarck to the good ship Lollipop in a single generation. That's the way a dynasty ends--not with a bang, but a giggle."

Chapter
10

ONCE AGAIN, SIDNEY BLACKPOOL SLEPT RIGHT THROUGH
the drinker's hour and knew he didn't deserve it afte
r w
hat they'd consumed at the marathon dinner. He decided it must be the desert air. It was miraculous t
o e
scape the drinker's dreadlies, the hours when reality an
d f
antasy were harder than usual to sort out. The adjoinin
g b
edroom door was closed but he could hear Otto snoring.

He had a shower and shave and decided to take a drive t
o s
ee what the desert looked like at dawn.

He brought his tourist map and headed away from the big mountain. In fifteen minutes he found himself circling the desert's only private golf course, which surrounds the home of Walter Annenberg, publishing mogul, friend of presidents, and former ambassador to Great Britain. In a valley that boasted more golf courses per square mile than any other place on earth, he thought it appropriate that at least one local millionaire had a backyard large enough to accommodate his own.

Then he saw something so startling that he had to pull over on Bob Hope Drive, careful to keep his wheels on the asphalt and off the powdery sand. He got out of the car and ran to the top of a dune. At 6:30 A
. M
. on thi
s s
plendid November day, the desert was putting on a show for him. Behind him were the Shadow Mountains whose low peaks of pink and copper and purple were shattered by cloud shadow. There was an amazing slash of color over the Santa Rosas, as though a heavenly house painter had dipped a wide brush in fire and painted a stroke across a silver canvas. The sweep of fire had a beginning and end, and all the bristle streaks. But what astonished him even more was that the sun was rising behind the Santa Rosa Mountains at the same time that the full moon, pale and translucent, was setting behind Mount San Jacinto.

At precisely 6:32 A
. M
., the rising sun rested for several seconds on the Santa Rosas and the setting moon did the same on San Jacinto Peak. Sunrise and moonset on the mountaintops within the span of his outstretched arms. There he stood on the dune, shoes buried in white powder, among patches of verbena and sand drops, which would blanket this desert in the spring.

He held the sunrise and moonset as long as he could between his hands, though the rising fireball was blinding in the crystal air. Time stopped for an instant. Then the moon was gone and the sun was soaring over the peaks and he realized how he must look out there in the desert to the working stiffs driving by on Bob Hope Drive to Palm Springs.

Still, he couldn't leave just yet. He took off his shoes and socks and walked barefoot through the dunes, the cool sand sucking at his ankles. He sat on a large dune and thought of how, by tomorrow, this hill of sand might vanish in the wind. But it might reappear ten yards away. Or ten miles away. Maybe it didn't really vanish at all. And then he thought that he was getting a bit too close to the self-help nonsense that had never worked for him after Tommy died.

Victor Watson said he'd tried God and Zen and they didn't work any better than psychotherapy which didn't work at all. When the sand dune vanished, that sand dune would never return. Maybe they'd use it for cement. He snuffed out his cigarette and put the butt in his pocket. The desert could burn anything clean given time, but h
e w
ouldn't leave his trash in this beautiful place, not today. Not after the sun and moon and light show that the desert had given him free of charge.

While Sidney Blackpool was standing ankle deep in sand looking like a desert crucifixion, Otto Stringer was having his breakfast in bed and finding it hard to concentrate on the Today Show movie reviewer who looked and sounded dumber than usual. The reason he was having so much trouble concentrating was that he was feeling disturbed that they had not played golf and were working harder than the police task force at the recent Olympic games. Otto finished his coffee and decided to bypass the croissants. He picked up the telephone and dialed Hollywood information. Three minutes later he was talking with a Rolls-Royce dealer.

"This is Detective Stringer, L
. A. P
. D.," he said. "I'm calling about Mister Victor Watson's homicide investigation. I believe you're a friend of Mister Watson's?"

"He's an old client," the car dealer said. "And yes, we're friends."

"We're having some problems with this case," Otto said. "Mister Watson said you informed him that his car showed up in your store on the day his son was murdered."

"Yes, that's right. My service manager, he uh, he identified a picture of Jack that Victor . . . that Mister Victor Watson showed him."

"I wanna talk to that service manager."

"He, uh, he's . . . I don't think he's available. He may be off today. I'll have to check and call you back."

"Listen," Otto said, "this is a very serious investigation. There's been lots and lots a man-hours expended and lots and lots a blind-alley chases. I wanna know something, and be absolutely sure when you answer me. Could you be . . . mistaken? That is, could your service manage
r b
e mistaken?"

"Uh, how do you mean that?"

"What if it was some other Rolls that came in that day? What if some other young guy was driving? Is it possible he's confused? It would be a serious matter if
a p
olice investigation was geared around a . . . mistake . Someone could even get in trouble."

There were several seconds of silence and then the car dealer said, "Well, anything's possible."

I know anything's possible. Is it maybe more than possible that your service manager is mistaken?"

It's . . . at least very possible," the car dealer said shakily. "I would . . . I'd have to talk with him."

"Thanks very much," Otto said. "If we have any more questions, we'll call you."