The Secrets of Harry Bright (42 page)

And then Sidney Blackpool said something that astonished Otto more than anything he'd heard this day. Sidney Blackpool took three steps closer to the bed of the dyin
g m
an and said, "Brickman, why not tell me where his gun is? If it matches ballistics, that's it. We can write up this investigation to leave you completely out of it, can't we, Otto? I give you my solemn word we can write it up so it looks like you never knew that Harry Bright got drunk and shot the kid after the car crashed. We can tell it just the way it happened and we can prove it, if the ballistics test is positive. Then I'd tell Victor Watson that you deserve the reward for figuring out how the shooting went down and for helping us. Fifty thousand could be yours."

Coy Brickman didn't take his eyes from Sidney Blackpool's face when he walked around the bed. He looked below the side rail, then he looked back at the detective and said, "Damn, it's empty."

"What's empty?" Sidney Blackpool asked.

"The catheter bag. I wanted to throw it in your face. From Harry and me." Then he turned to the breathing corpse and said, "Damnit, Harry, why can't you take a pee when I need it?"

"Let's go, Sidney," Otto said. "Let's go home."

"Before you go, I got something you wanted," Coy Brickman said. Then he punched the button on the cassette player and slipped in a cassette he took from the pocket of his uniform pants. He looked at Harry Bright as he pressed the play button. They heard a few off-key chords from the uke and then it was in tune. Harry Bright introduced a song again.

Harry Bright's voice said, "This is happy Harry Bright coming to you from the Mineral Springs Palladium out on Jackrabbit Road where I'd like to introduce a tasty tune, a sizzling side, a heavenly hit! It's called 'Make Believe. And ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to dedicate this number to Patsy."

Otto Stringer turned away and absolutely could not look at the cadaverous figure in the bed as Harry Bright sang:

"We could make believe I love you, "Only make believe that you love me.

-Others find peace of mind in pretending. -Couldn t you, couldn't I, couldn't we?"

Sidney Blackpool looked like a sleepwalker. He forced himself to lean over the bed. He studied the corpse that breathed. He leaned over the bed on one side while Coy Brickman stood on the other side watching him. The color drained from Sidney Blackpool's face. He stared into Harry Bright's beautiful blue eyes. Looking for what?

"Make believe our lips are blending -In a phantom kiss or two or three. "Might as well make believe I love you "For to tell the truth, I d000000000!"

When it was over, Coy Brickman took the cassette out and reached across the bed, jamming it into Sidney Blackpool's shirt pocket. "There," he said. "You wanted it so bad. Take it."

"Let's go, Sidney," Otto said. "Now. Let's go, now!"

As they were walking away, they heard Coy Brickman turning the radio to the Palm Springs station where Fred Astaire was singing "Puttin' on the Ritz."

"Hey, it's Fred," they heard Coy Brickman say to Harry Bright. "Pipes aren't quite as good as old Harry Bright's, but not so bad for a hoofer."

Otto Stringer took one last glance and saw the tall cop leaning over Harry Bright, gently dabbing the saliva from the strong cleft chin of the dying man.

"The world won't be the same when old Fred's gone, will it, Harry?" Coy Brickman asked Harry Bright, while Fred Astaire sang it as only he could.

Chapter
18

DESIGNS AND
DRIFTS

THERE WAS NO CONVERSATION ON THE RIDE BACK TO THE hotel. When they got to their suite, Otto went into his bedroom and came back with the expense money, throwing it on the coffee table. "Are you going home with me tomorrow?" he asked.

Sidney Blackpool picked up the telephone and said, "I'm calling Victor Watson. I'll do what he wants me to do."

When he reached Victor Watson's Bel-Air residence the call was answered by a housekeeper and then Victor Watson came on the line and said, "Sidney? Have you discovered something?"

"Mister Watson," Sidney Blackpool said, "I know how your boy died. But I can never prove anything in a court of law."

Victor Watson merely said, "I'll meet you at my Palm Springs home at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Thank you, Sidney. Thank you!"

After Sidney Blackpool hung up, Otto said, "Give him my President McKinleys. Or keep them yourself. I'm catching a bus to L
. A
. first thing in the morning. I'll pick up my golf clubs when I see you at work on Monday.

"Why don't you stay, Otto? Why go home? What's the point? What're you trying to prove?"

"There's nothing to prove, Otto said. "I don't wanna be there when you tell him about Harry Bright. It might make me feel more putrid than I do now."

"1 want that job, Otto," Sidney Blackpool said. "I want a new life. If you can't understand that, I'm sorry." "I hope you get what you want," Otto Stringer said.

Otto went straight to bed without eating. Sidney Blackpool had no thought of food. He spent the evening planning the best way possible to tell Victor Watson how his son was shot by a drunken cop named Harry Bright in an act of mercy. He hoped he could leave Coy Brickman totally out of the story.

Harry Bright's taped voice was haunting him. There was a time after Tommy Blackpool's death when he craved to hear his son's voice once more. But their home movies were without sound. Once he had tried watching a home movie. He never got past the first reel.

At one time in his life he'd foolishly yearned for his son to be more like him. Now, if he had a soul he'd give it just for his son to be.

It took him two hours and a lot of Johnnie Walker Black before he could fall asleep. Before he did, it came more fiercely than it had in a very long time: the memory of Tommy Blackpool. The last time his father saw him alive.

Sidney Blackpool held his hands over his eyes as he lay in the dark but that wouldn't stop the memory. Nothing would stop it once it started to come. Someday, if he were ever to smoke his .38, it would be to stop it, that memory.

Lorie had come to Sidney Blackpool's house to pick up both children. Tommy was into drugs heavily by then and Sidney Blackpool had found hash in his room and was confronting the boy in front of his ex-wife. During the argument Tommy had cursed both parents, and Sidney Blackpool had exploded. The father grabbed the son by the shirt and said, "You miserable little son of a bitch! Yo
u l
ittle bastard. I'll kill you!" And he'd punched Tommy twice and knocked the boy over the kitchen table, causing Lone to start screaming when glass shattered and blood from Tommy's nose spattered on the white vinyl floor.

The boy s mother threw herself between father and son and Tommy cried obscenities and ran through the house, his blood dripping on the carpet before he was out the door and gone.

They discovered later that he'd spent the night with a neighborhood friend. The next morning he was truant from school. He was drowned that day by the huge swells while surfing in the cold winter twilight.

After the image of Tommy running bloody through the house finally faded, Sidney Blackpool said, "Oh, Tommy!" It was all he could say. This was his secret. Victor Watson had his and Harry Bright had his.

He had the dream that night. In the dream Tommy Blackpool at the age of twelve was watching a football game on television, displaying that special sort of chuckling grin of his. In the dream Sidney Blackpool was still with his wife, Lurie, and he took her aside and made her promise not to tell the wondrous new secret: that he had willed Tommy back! At least his essence. But only for them to know.

As always, the dream ended when she said, "Sid, we can enjoy him forever now! But you mustn't tell him he's going to die when he's eighteen! You mustn't tell him!"

"Oh, no! I'll never tell him that!" he said to his wife in the dream. "Because now he loves me. And . . . and now he forgives me. My boy forgives me!"

As always, he woke up sobbing, and smothering in his pillow.

For once, his partner was up first. In fact, when Sidney Blackpool dragged himself out of bed with a headache almost bad enough to make him fear a stroke, he was surprised to see that Otto Stringer had gone. He looked at his watch and saw it was after nine, the latest he'd slept since arriving. He showered, shaved and stared at his swollen jaw. His face was done in desert pastels. He ate
a l
ight breakfast in the suite and vomited it back up almost immediately.

He checked out of the hotel at 1:00 P
. M
. and walked the boulevards of Palm Springs until 2:30 P
. M
. Then he drove to the Watson home.

When Harlan Penrod admitted him and saw his damaged face he said, "My gosh! What happened to you? Mister Watson called and said he was coming to meet you. Did you get Terry Kinsale? Is he the one who . .

"No, he's not, Harlan," Sidney Blackpool said. "How about getting me some coffee."

"Sure, but tell me who . .

"Don't ask me any questions, Harlan. I'll tell it to Mister Watson. Jack was his kid. Ask him

-But . .

"Don't ask me a single question."

"Okay. Except how do you like your coffee?"

Victor Watson arrived from Palm Springs Airport by taxi. He wasn't even in the house long enough to shake hands with Sidney Blackpool before he said, "Harlan, take the car down and gas it up, will you?"

"It's full, Mister Watson." Harlan said, "Can I get . . "Go to a movie, Harlan. Come back at six o'clock. Please."

"Sure, Mister Watson," the houseboy said, looking at the grim set of Sidney Blackpool's mouth.

"Look at you, Sidney!" Victor Watson said. "What happened?"

"Cactus," Sidney Blackpool said. "The desert's full a dangers for guys like me."

"Tell all of it, Sid. All of it."

They went into the study and Victor Watson sat behind his desk while the detective sat across the room on a sofa.

Sidney Blackpool told almost all of it. There was nothing to gain by naming Coy Brickman. He told Victor Watson about Terry Kinsale, and about his driving Jack Watson's Porsche, and about the gun that was missing and which no doubt was the weapon used to kill Jack during a misguided act of mercy by a sick drunken cop. He protested Coy Brickman by implying that Harry Bright probably disposed of the gun himself.

It was nearly dark when he finished. Victor Watson had asked very few questions during the narrative. He sat staring at Sidney Blackpool and missed not a word. His eye sockets became progressively more hollow in the shadow from desert twilight. He looked even older than Sidney Blackpool remembered him. The detective consumed three glasses of water during the dissertation. He'd never felt more parched. He was slightly dizzy and a bit nauseated, like a diabetic. His jaw ached but he did not want a Johnnie Walker Black. He wanted to end this thing cold sober.

By the time the detective had finished, Victor Watson's eyes were invisible. Sidney Blackpool was staring at empty sockets and could only imagine the granite irises.

Harry Bright had unforgettable eyes. When he'd crept close to his bed he could see them staring in their sockets: beautiful blue eyes. Victor Watson had no eyes at all. Sidney Blackpool looked at his water glass and waited.

When Victor Watson spoke, he said, "I accept full responsibility for the tragic event."

Sidney Blackpool was about to console, to tell him that Jack's death was not his father's fault.

But Victor Watson said, "I should never've brought you into this case. Not you, Sidney. I believed we might have a kind of bonding, you and me. I felt, upon hearing about you, that it was . . ."

"An omen!" 'Sidney Blackpool said.

"Yes. Now I see it was just a mistake. A foolish tragic mistake."

"Whadda you mean, Mister Watson? What mistake?"

"Perhaps my time in psychotherapy is worth something after all," Victor Watson said. "I see myself in you.

The way I was. The rage. The confusion. The guilt." "I don't understand, Mister Watson."

"I know you don't, Sidney. I know. Call it a form of transference, but labels aren't important. You've projected feelings from your life, feelings about your own lost son into this investigation. Can't you see that?"

"But Mister Watson . . ."

"It's my fault. It's all my fault. I saw in you a lost father of a lost boy who might succeed where others .. . well, I was right, and being right I was terribly wrong. I'm sorry to have done this to you."

"Please, Mister Watson, I don't understand!" Sidney Blackpool moved to the edge of the sofa but still could not see eyes in the hollow sockets. If only he could read the eyes. An investigator had to see the eyes!

"My son Jack," Victor Watson said, "was the finest, brightest, most loving young man you would ever meet." "I believe that, Mister Watson."

"Our relationship had the normal stresses of fathers and sons, but I think we handled it."

"I believe that," Sidney Blackpool said, and knocked over the empty water glass reaching for a cigarette.

"No one, but no one who had ever known Jack Watson could ever under any circumstances believe he was homosexual."