The Secrets of Harry Bright

CHAPTER 8

The detectives couldn’t get away from Harlan Penrod until they’d had a complete tour of the Watson property, which meant a dissertation on Coachella cacti and desert flora in general. And while Otto Stringer was learning about how such spiny plants could produce such lovely blossoms, Sidney Blackpool was satisfying himself that, just as the Palm Springs detectives had concluded in their reports, nobody who wasn’t played by Sean Connery or Roger Moore could defeat the infrared on the top of the fence with the old mirror trick. And if the system was armed, nobody could have silently forced open the electric gate as he and Otto had done. Harlan Penrod was adamant that Jack Watson was as careful as he about setting the inside and outside alarm systems before retiring for the night. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t snatched from the house, but if he was, it probably wasn’t by an unknown intruder.

Instead of going to Palm Springs P.D., they went back to the hotel. Otto wanted to “take” brunch.

“Is this going to be part a your life now, Otto? Taking brunch?” Sidney Blackpool asked, as they left his car with the valet-parking boy.

“I’m hungry from all the good police work, Sidney,” Otto said. “I think we should go to Palm Springs P.D. tomorrow. Maybe we oughtta play a few holes today after brunch.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to eat. Ill go up to the room and give the P.D. a call.”

“You’re getting too skinny, Sidney,” Otto said. “Come and join me.”

“I’ll have dessert later,” Sidney Blackpool said, leaving his partner in the hotel lobby.

When Sidney Blackpool got to their suite, he found a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and a card saying: “Hit em long and straight. Victor Watson.”

He lit a cigarette and flopped down on the bed, trying not to think of Victor Watson. He hadn’t felt sorry for anyone except himself in a long time. He didn’t want to start feeling sorry for some guy who probably owned his own jet and didn’t bother to play golf in places Sidney Blackpool dreamed about because Watson probably enjoyed himself even more in other places. But then the detective had to admit that the man he’d met in the Century City office wasn’t enjoying himself anywhere. That was an incomplete human being looking for missing pieces.

He realized that the radio was on. The housekeeper had made the beds and tidied up the suite but let the radio play. It was a Palm Springs station with music that wasn’t so easy to find on the Los Angeles scene. Marlene Dietrich was singing “La Vie en Rose” and “Lili Marlene.” Sidney Blackpool’s parents and his older brothers listened to music like that when he was a boy. There was something about the desert. You did feel that time had regressed thirty years or more. There was something in the air, and not just the dry heat. Those mountains surrounding? Like Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman clawing his way toward the hidden valley, toward peace and longevity. But you didn’t live forever in Palm Springs either, as Jack Watson discovered.

Then his heart missed a regular beat, and another, and he felt an emptiness in his chest and swelling in his throat that made it hard to swallow. He had an indescribable longing. For what? He used to think the dreams came because he kept family pictures beside the bed, but after he put them away he still dreamed. That was something else that Victor Watson had probably learned: you’re afraid to be reminded and afraid not to be reminded.

Victor Watson probably learned that the first weeks after his son’s death were nothing compared to what would come. The shock and horror and grief is impossible to accommodate those first weeks, as you gradually come to grasp what forever means. There is nonsense which your mind seizes upon. Should Tommy be put in the ground or cremated? As though a decision to keep Tommy’s fingernails and teeth and bones intact was a meaningful one.

Yet all that was nothing like the despair that peaked eight months after Tommy was gone. When, for the first time in forty-one years of life, Sidney Blackpool had to confront this outrage, a son preceding his father to the grave. This perversion of the natural order.

He came close to the end at a police department retirement party in Chinatown. He heard a morose retired cop crying in his whiskey because he no longer had camaraderie and purpose. The cop said he couldn’t enjoy things any longer and talked about looking for pieces of himself. Sidney Blackpool could’ve told him a thing or two about that, about being incomplete.

But he listened and started to despise the cop. He despised him so much he found himself starting to cry. The first time ever in a public place. Of course, he had also been drinking that night. He rushed outside to the parking lot and looked not up to the smog-shrouded sky but at the lights of downtown Los Angeles.

He thought of that maudlin cop, and he cried out: “Why are you alive then? Why you and not Tommy?”

Then he saw another cop stagger out of the party heading for a car he shouldn’t have been driving, and he scared the man by yelling: “Why you? Why you, you son of a bitch? And why me?”

Then Sidney Blackpool for the first time did look up (childhood training perhaps) and he shouted, “Okay, that’s enough. I’ve had enough now. That’s it. I’ve had enough!”

He knew he was very close then. He used to sit alone in the night, cold sober sometimes, and indulge dangerous fantasies. The setting of all fantasies preceded the day in 1983 when Tommy died. He could somehow stop the event from happening, in the fantasies.

And sometimes he indulged in daydreams set in the present. He’d receive an urgent call from his ex-wife saying, “Sid! Sid! It’s a miracle! Tommy’s alive! It wasn’t his body they pulled from the surf! It was a mistake and Tommy’s been in Mexico all this time and …”

It was so absurd and pathetic and shameful that he was never able to indulge that one to the end. He didn’t will it, but the fantasy came. After the night in Chinatown he knew that if he let this continue he would die. He read that it most often happened on a Monday, on the fifth day of the month, and in the spring. He decided that since something had ruthlessly reversed the natural order of things in his life, he would perversely defy statistical probability. He came very very close one Saturday night in September, the twenty-second day of the month. Only thinking of his daughter, Barb, at the last moment saved him from smoking it.

Sidney Blackpool sat up in the hotel bed, cursed himself, hated himself, and dialed the Palm Springs P.D. asking for the homicide investigator named on the reports.

“Finney’s not here,” the telephone voice said. “This is Lieutenant Sanders. Can I help you?”

“Sid Blackpool, Lieutenant. I think your boss was told we were coming?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry about Finney. His mother’s real sick and he took off yesterday for Minnesota.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Depends on her.”

“Can anybody else talk about the Watson case?”

“I guess I can. You have copies of the reports, I understand. Not too much to add.”

“The reports said you checked out all the radio stations in the desert about that singing voice.”

“Finney even checked stations in L.A., Vegas and San Diego in case it was some high-powered radio heard by the Mineral Springs cop. Nobody played ‘Pretend’ at that time of day. And no singer ever recorded ‘Pretend’ with only a banjo behind him, far as we know. So Jones either heard a live voice or a tape. He was damn near into heat stroke so we can’t be sure.”

“If it was a live voice it’s kinda bizarre.”

“Kinda morbid. If it was live it means the guy that killed the kid came back and sang a little requiem over the corpse.”

“Are you sure the car was actually torched? I mean, it did crash down a canyon.”

“No, we’re not positive. The gas tank was ruptured by the crash. That car could a caught fire on its own. In fact, if it wasn’t for that thirty-eight hollow-point slug in the skull, we had nothing but a fatal traffic accident. The kid drove off a dark canyon trail where he never shoulda been without a four-wheel-drive vehicle. His car caught fire and he died a crispy critter. Period.”

“Too bad there wasn’t a gun found at the scene,” Sidney Blackpool said. “You coulda maybe figured it to be a suicide where the car rolled off the hill after the kid shot himself.”

“No gun,” the lieutenant said. “And a very bad angle for a right-handed suicide.”

“About how many people live in those canyons?”

“No people. About sixty dirtbag methamphetamine dealers. No Homo sapiens allowed in Solitaire Canyon. They cook up speed in those shacks, but it’s almost impossible to get probable cause to bust them. Even if you have a warrant, they can see you coming for two miles and bury the evidence in holes they dig. Lots a those bikers are Vietnam vets. They’re a chapter of the Cobras motorcycle gang.”

“Any chance he drove up there because he wanted to?”

“Not much chance,” the lieutenant said. “He seldom drove the Rolls. In fact, I was surprised to get the call from Watson saying the kid drove the Rolls to Hollywood. He wasn’t a speed user. And not that it was productive, but we did question every crank dealer and desert rat living around that particular canyon. All negative. We have this crime-stoppers program where citizens donate reward money. Better known on the streets as dial-a-snitch or burn-a-buddy. And after Victor Watson offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward I think lots a cranked-out bikers’d roll over on each other if they knew anything. We got nothing. All we know is Watsons car went over the canyon and caught fire. He was pinned in the wreckage. Turns out he was shot in the head before he got cooked, lucky for him.”

“Of course no chance to dust for prints in a burned wreck.”

“We got a very diligent fingerprint man. Name is Hoffman. He dusts everything. He even dusted the dust. Once he dusted an assault victim’s tits, which bought him a three-day suspension. We call him Dustin Hoffman. He got nothing.”

“And then a freak came back a few days after the murder and sang ‘Pretend.’ ”

“That’s about it. The singer mighta been some prospector or nature lover. Or even a speed head who was just out for a stroll in the canyons after shooting his arms full a crystal. Officer Jones mighta just heard an innocent bystander.”

“Could be,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“But we doubt it.”

“Why’s that?”

“In those canyons there’s no such thing. Everybody that lives there’s a not so innocent bystander. The Mineral Springs cop probably heard the killer all right.”

“Returning to sing a requiem?”

“Maybe to look for something he lost.”

Sidney Blackpool gave the Palm Springs lieutenant his telephone number and said good-bye, took two aspirins, rinsed his face and lit a cigarette. He was entering the dining room where Otto was still working on his brunch when the bell captain came in.

“Mister Blackpool?”

“Yeah.”

“The front desk just took a call for you from the Palm Springs police.”

“I just hung up.” Sidney Blackpool shrugged to Otto who was leering at a huge wedge of coconut-cream pie.

“Have a bite first,” Otto said.

“Lemme go see what it is.”

While Sidney Blackpool was gone, Otto not only ate the pie but asked the waiter if he thought a piña colada would be too rich as an after-brunch drink. When his partner returned, Otto was leaning back in the chair, his belly pressing the table, sucking a tall coconut and vodka special with a little parasol stuck in a wedge of orange.

“This is the life, Sidney,” he said with three rapid-fire belches.

“Guess what?” Sidney Blackpool said. “That was the Palm Springs lieutenant. They got a call earlier this morning that he just learned about. The Mineral Springs cop who found the body called to say he’s decided the song the suspect sang wasn’t ‘Pretend.’ It was ‘I Believe.’ ”

“Not sure I know that one.”

“You’d know it if you heard it. A Frankie Laine hit. You’re old enough.”

“Thank you very much, Sidney. You’re so kind to remind me.”

“Anyway, whaddaya think a that? The very day we get on the case, they receive the first piece a new information they’ve gotten in over a year.”

“Sidney, it can’t make any possible difference what the lunatic was singing. If in fact that was the killer returning to the scene a the crime like in Agatha Christie.”

“I know, but it’s the coincidence of it. It seems like more than a coincidence. We come here and something happens. After all this time.”

“What’s more than a coincidence mean?” Otto asked, looking sorry that he’d had the piña colada.

And then Sidney Blackpool thought of the tortured face of Victor Watson, an old man’s hollow face under those track lights. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe an omen.”

Instead of playing nine holes they were off to Mineral Springs to talk to Officer O. A. Jones about his musical revelation.

“Jesus, how we gonna find out if every radio station in two hundred miles didn’t play ‘I Believe’ on that day last year?” Otto asked. “We gotta get in some golf. All I’m doing is eating and drinking!”

“ ‘I Believe’ with a banjo? I think someone was there that day. Maybe Jones heard a live voice.”

“All we gotta find is a banjo man with a taste for old songs. Let’s see, Steve Martin plays one, I think. Maybe Roy Clark or Glen Campbell? Jesus.”

“Shaggy clouds and shaggy trees,” Sidney Blackpool said. “It’s got a threatening look sometimes, this desert.”

“Know what I noticed, Sidney? It changes. I mean, it never looks the same one minute to the next.”

“The cloud shadow,” Sidney Blackpool said, looking up from under his sunglasses as he drove. “It throws shadow and light and color everywhere. And the colors change. This is a strange place. I don’t know if I like it or not.”

“I’m gonna love it,” Otto said. “If we ever get on the freaking golf links. I ain’t hit a ball in over a month.”

“Three weeks,” his partner reminded. “At Griffith Park. I bet these courses won’t look like Griffith Park.”

“You mean no tank tops? No beer cans or tattooed arms? No sound of thongs slapping the feet when your playing partner steps outta his Ford pickup? Hey, what’s that?” Otto pointed three miles off in the distance toward the base of the mountains.

“That’s where six thousand souls survive in this desert because a the golf and tennis and piña colada we just left,” said Sidney Blackpool. “That’s Mineral Springs.”

“Kinda windy around here,” Otto said, watching a dozen whirlwinds dancing across the desert in the shimmering rising heat. “Bad place to die out in those lonely canyons.”

“Doesn’t much matter where,” Sidney Blackpool said, lighting a cigarette, looking at the shacks that dotted the trails high in the hills. “Have to be real important to drive up there at night.”

“I’d have to he forced to make the drive.”

“Possibly,” Sidney Blackpool said.

When they arrived, Chief Paco Pedroza had a case of heartburn from yelling at Wingnut Bates and Prankster Frank. He had forbidden any more threats to shoot Prankster Frank on sight, explaining that he needed every cop he had. And he prohibited snakes-real, rubber or photographic-from being brought into the station. In that spirit, Paco even removed the picture of the sidewinder on the sign that said “We don’t give a shit how they do it in L.A.”

After sending his cops back to work he was dozing with his feet up when the Hollywood detectives announced themselves to Anemic Annie, the pale, birdlike civilian at the front desk.

“In here, fellas,” Paco said. “Siddown. Want some coffee?”

“No, thanks, Chief,” Sidney Blackpool said, as the three men shook hands. “He’s Stringer. I’m Blackpool.”

“Call me Paco. I used to work Hollywood. You mightta heard?”

“We did,” Otto said. “We were both at Newton Street at that time.”

“Pinkford was captain then,” Paco said. “He still on the department?”

“Yep,” Otto nodded, “and will be till Ronald Reagan goes gray.”

“Pinkford never wanted much outta life,” Paco said. “Just enough glue to stick his face on Mount Rushmore. I woulda walked a beat in Sri Lanka to get away from him. Anyways, I’m glad to see you boys’re wearing your golf rags. Most L.A. cops come out this way in suits and neckties even if it’s a hundred and twenty degrees.”

“Actually, Chief, this is sort of a vacation,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“Paco.”

“Paco. We’re just here for some golf. Our boss said we might do a little follow-up since Victor Watson recently learned that his kid visited Hollywood on the day he disappeared from Palm Springs. Apparently the kid made a quick trip into town and back to the desert.”

“Mean anything?” Paco asked.

“Not yet,” Otto said. “Reason we came to your department is to talk to Officer O. A. Jones. He called Palm Springs P.D. today with some new information about the song he heard the suspect singing.”

“O. A. Jones,” Paco grunted. “That little fucker’s gonna get me indicted some day. Does a job all right, but everything he does looks like it mighta happened a little different than he says. In fact, no desert’s seen so much single-handed swashbuckling since Lawrence of Arabia. I don’t know if you can rely on everything that surfer says.”

“Surfer?” Sidney Blackpool said. “Where would he surf out here?”

“Ex-surfer,” Paco said. “Used to be with Laguna Beach P.D. and then Palm Springs P.D. I took a chance on him and so far he ain’t got in any traffic accidents where there might be one body too many. But that’s another story. He’s on duty today. Want Annie to call him for ya?”

“If you would,” Otto said.

The three men walked from the chief’s office into the main room of the police station. “Want a tour?” Paco asked.

“Sure,” Otto said.

“Okay, turn around,” said Paco. “There, that’s it. You got the tour. Except there’s a John down the hall and ten wall lockers upstairs and a holding tank for two prisoners, long as they’re little or awful friendly. The adjoining door goes to another room which is City Hall so we gotta keep our arrestees quiet till we get them down to the county jail.”

“How do you keep them quiet?” Otto asked.

“Shoot the fuckers with a tranquilizer dart,” Paco said. “What would you do with the animals we got around here?”

Anemic Annie tried without success to get O. A. Jones on the radio.

“He’s probly got his ghetto blaster going full on,” Paco said. “Why dontcha go on over to the Eleven Ninety-nine across the street. Get a cold one. Ill send O. A. Jones to ya in exactly forty-five minutes.”

“Exactly forty-five minutes?”

“That’s when his shift ends and he’ll suddenly be all through with whatever sleuthing he’s doing. He likes to get to the Eleven Ninety-nine before the first wave a secretaries and manicurists arrive from their jobs in Palm Springs. Among his many other faults he’s got a permanent erection.”

“So much for hitting the links,” Otto sighed.

“By the way,” Paco said, “when I got word where you boys’re staying I figured things’ve changed at L.A.P.D. since I worked there. When we’d go out a town on a case they’d put us up at the Nighty Nite Motel with enough expense money for two hamburgers and a soda pop.”

The detectives were saved from Paco’s curiosity when the door swung open and Sergeant Coy Brickman entered. He was a tall man, taller than Sidney Blackpool, with furrowed cheeks and a mean-looking build. He was slightly older than Sidney Blackpool but looked lots older. His auburn hair was parted on the side and was receding. He stared at the two detectives without blinking and without speaking.

“Coy, this’s Blackpool and Stringer,” Paco said. “My sergeant, Coy Brickman.”

They shook hands, and still without having blinked his eyes, Coy Brickman said, “Welcome to Mineral Springs. Hear you’re gonna crack the Watson murder case.”

“Not in my lifetime,” Otto said. “We’re just doing a semi-official follow-up to keep our boss happy.”

“New leads?” Coy Brickman asked.

“Just bullshit,” Otto said. “Some crap about the Watson kid visiting Hollywood the day he disappeared from the Palm Springs house. It’s nothing.”

“Well, anything we can do,” Coy Brickman said.

“You the only field supervisor?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

“I got one other sergeant,” Paco said. “Harry Bright. He was one good cop. Gonna have trouble replacing him.”

“Was?”

“Harry had a stroke several months ago,” Paco said. “Then a heart attack. He won’t be coming back. Maybe not to this world even. Just lays in the hospital like petrified wood.”

“He’s holding his own,” Coy Brickman said.

“Anyway, go get yourselves a cold one,” Paco said. “I’ll send O. A. Jones over soon as he blows in from his latest crime-crushing adventure.”

J. Edgar Gomez was washing dishes behind the bar of the Eleven Ninety-nine Club when he saw the two strangers stop in their tracks to gape at the mural of John Wayne pissing on the miniature of Michael Jackson and Prince.

“I shoulda put Boy George between those two gender benders,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “Maybe I’ll do that one a these days when my artist is sober.”

“Couple a beers,” Sidney Blackpool said, checking his watch and seeing that it was still too early for Johnnie Walker Black.

“Kind you want?”

“Drafts,” said Otto, thinking that if they were back in Palm Springs he’d order a beautiful exotic drink to put him in a holiday mood. It was depressing being in a cop saloon.

There were ten men and one woman sitting at the bar or at wooden tables scattered around the little dance floor. One look and the detectives knew they were all cops except for a desert rat in a brand-new cowboy hat who was sitting alone next to the jukebox glaring at everybody who stepped up to drop a quarter in. Beavertail Bigelow was not in a party mood that afternoon.

Six of the cops were from other desert police agencies. Representing Mineral Springs were Choo Choo Chester Conklin, Wingnut Bates and Nathan Hale Wilson, who was pretty well bagged for so early in the day.

The cops were moaning about what working in the desert was doing to them.

“Chapped lips. Jock rot to the knees,” Wingnut moaned. “Sometimes I think I never shoulda left Orange County.”

“How about what this freaking desert air does to your hair and fingernails?” Nathan Hale Wilson griped. “I can’t keep them trimmed, they grow so fast. I was here a month and I looked like Howard Hughes!”

“You should work Indian territory,” an off-duty Palm Springs cop complained. “I got a drunk call on two Agua Calientes yesterday and there’s me all by myself and I got these two Indian brothers fighting each other cause they didn’t have nobody else to fight, and they’re so big they look like dueling refrigerators, and one throws a punch from the vicinity of Arizona and knocks the other one clear over my car. And I’m standing there thinking, he’s a three-hundred-pounder. He thinks he’s Crazy Horse. He’s into a total uprising at this moment. He’s got two broken beer bottles in his mitts. And he’s rich!”

“Yeah, well you should see Cat City now,” said a Cathedral City cop who was almost as drunk. “Sodom and Gomorrah East is what it is. AIDS and palimony is what it’s all about.”

J. Edgar Gomez eyed the two strangers and said, “What department you guys work?”

“L.A.P.D.,” Otto answered, wincing. The beer was so cold he put the glass down and grabbed his skull.

“Drink it slow,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “Keep our beer icy. Come outta the heat and drink too fast it’s like a buck knife stuck in your skull. Here.” He gave Otto a glass of warm water. “Sip it.”

“Wow!” Otto said after the pain subsided. “That is cold beer.”

“Customers like it that way. How come you guys’re way out here?”

“We’re in Palm Springs on vacation,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Have to talk to O. A. Jones. Know him?”

“Sure,” the saloonkeeper said, scratching his belly, which was covered by an apron and a wet T-shirt. “He’ll be in pretty soon.”

The door banged open just then and three policemen from Palm Springs P.D. swaggered in. J. Edgar Gomez shook his head and said, “Young cops these days, nobody can open a door without knocking holes in your plaster.”

“Fred Astaire?” Sidney Blackpool said, pointing toward the jukebox. “I haven’t heard Fred Astaire, or even a jukebox, in I don’t know how long.”

“ ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ ” J. Edgar Gomez grinned. “Far as I’m concerned, the world is divided between two groups a people: those that think Fred Astaire’s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ is the greatest side ever cut, and scumbags that don’t.”

“My name’s Stringer,” Otto said, shaking hands with the saloonkeeper. “This is Sidney Blackpool.”

“J. Edgar Gomez,” the saloonkeeper said, and then added, “Oh, shit!”

They followed his eye line and saw that J. Edgar was looking about three feet above the floor at a midget in a tennis hat and tennis whites and a desert tan darker than any unemployed actor’s.

“Oleg Gridley,” the saloonkeeper said. Then he glared at the cops at the other end of the bar and pointed at the “No trash sports” sign over the bar, causing Otto and Sidney Blackpool to shrug at each other.

Oleg Gridley looked around the gloomy barroom, spotted the lone busty woman at the far end of the bar and hopped on the stool next to her by chinning up with both hands. He sat at eye level with her tits.

“Hi, Portia,” the suntanned midget leered.

“I knew this day was going too good,” she said, tipping up her glass of beer, looking like she’d had lots of them.

“Portia Cassidy,” the saloonkeeper whispered to the detectives. “Not much of a face, but the best body in Mineral Springs. Everybody wants her, especially Oleg. We call them Bitch Cassidy and the Sunstroke Kid.”

Just then Bitch Cassidy said to the midget, “No, Oleg. It’s just that I don’t like perverts. Even big perverts.”

Then after the midget whispered in her ear again, she said, “Oleg, I wouldn’t care it was big as King Kong’s. Size don’t impress me and I do not want a chiffon body wrap and a whipped-cream rubdown!”

“I’d be good to you, Portia,” the passionate midget murmured. “I’m slow but thorough.”

“Yeah, like a tarantula. I ain’t interested. And I don’t wanna do those filthy midget things, and if you don’t leave me alone I’m calling a cop!”

“Maybe the things only sound filthy to nonmidgets,” J. Edgar Gomez offered.

“I don’t understand you anymore!” Oleg said testily. “J. Edgar, gimme a double bourbon on the rocks. And give the lady another beer.”

“It’s a living soap opera,” J. Edgar Gomez said to the detectives, as he poured the midget’s whiskey. “I’m starting to wonder how it’s gonna come out.”

And then they began to arrive. First a pair of hairdressers from the ladies’ spa at the biggest downtown Palm Springs hotel. Then five tellers from a Palm Desert bank. Then four waitresses from a Rancho Mirage country club. Then the day-shift boys from eight police agencies, and by 5:30 in the afternoon the saloon was packed with drinkers, dancers, lechers, drunks, midgets and desert rats. Sidney Blackpool wondered how in hell they were going to find Officer O. A. Jones even if he did show up, and he should have arrived by now.

The conversations raged around them as the saloon got hotter and smokier. Both detectives switched to hard booze in self-defense. The only difference from any cop saloon in L.A. was that the talk was often weather-oriented.

“It’s so hot in summer,” Prankster Frank said to a new desert cop, “that I’ve started thinking in Celsius. It sounds cooler that way.”

It was not essentially different in that most conversations were about women.

“Look at her!” Nathan Hale Wilson said of Portia Cassidy who was dancing with a Palm Springs detective and trying to avoid the “accidental” touches of Oleg Gridley every time he waddled to the jukebox. “She’s the Lucretia Borgia of this valley but she could suck the Goodyear blimp through a garden hose.”

“I got two planned parenthoods and one drunken mistake!” a drunken Maynard Rivas suddenly whined to a tipsy waitress from an Indian Wells country club who couldn’t care less.

After the dance, Portia Cassidy tried to move down the bar, hoping Oleg Gridley would get trampled if he tried to make open-field moves among three layers of legs. But the midget was relentless.

The detectives heard him whisper, “I gotta go to the little boys’ room, Portia. I’ll be right back and we’ll talk.”

“I can’t wait,” Bitch Cassidy sighed. “Like I can’t wait for an acid rainstorm or world war three.”

Oleg Gridley did not go to the little boys’ room. The little boys’ room was too big for Oleg Gridley. When the toilet stall was occupied, Oleg Gridley was out of luck because he couldn’t possibly reach the urinal. Oleg grumbled and stormed out the back door to pee on the eucalyptus, which formed windbreakers to keep the Eleven Ninety-nine Club from doing business in Indio, minus its foundation. He saw Ruben, the bartender from the Mirage Saloon, walking by and singing “Pennies from Heaven” at the top of his lungs as he strummed on a stringed instrument he couldn’t play at all. Suddenly he thought of Portia Cassidy getting stolen away and he ran back inside.

A lachrymose Maynard Rivas on Bitch Cassidy’s left said to Nathan Hale Wilson, “It ain’t that my wife’s fifty pounds overweight. It’s just that she’s got inverted nipples. They look funny. I’m so unhappy!”

By now, J. Edgar Gomez was really hustling. His nighttime waitresses had arrived and one was washing glasses behind the bar while the other served Edgar’s “chili” from a huge pot simmering in the kitchen.

“Goddamn, this chili’s greasy!” Choo Choo Chester yelled. “Can I just have the grease mainlined straight into my arm, J. Edgar? Sure would save my stomach.”

“You don’t like it, don’t buy it,” J. Edgar Gomez muttered, puffing on a cigar as he poured a line of seven drinks with a phenomenal memory for the orders being screamed out by patrons over the din.

“Hey, Edgar,” Wingnut yelled, “you got a wine list?”

“You want the wine from K mart or the stuff from Gemco?” the saloonkeeper hollered back.

“K mart.”

“Three ninety-nine a bottle!” the saloonkeeper bellowed.

“Got any cheaper?”

“Gemco’s three fifty.”

“I’ll take it. What color is it?”

“Off-white I think, with little dark freckles.”

“Make it two bottles!” the young cop yelled, happy for a bargain.

“Jesus Christ!” Prankster Frank cried. “A spider just did a Greg Louganis in my chili!”

“That’s a dirty lie!” J. Edgar Gomez said, but someone had turned up the jukebox and Ethel Merman was screaming about show business louder than any live voice in the saloon.

“Knock that off or I’ll eighty-six ya!” J. Edgar Gomez suddenly warned Prankster Frank, Nathan Hale Wilson and the Palm Springs fingerprinter, Dustin Hoffman, who were all holding up cocktail napkins with scores of “9.9, 9.8, and 9.8” written in lipstick at the diving spider who was swimming for his life.

Just as Otto was about to suggest that O. A. Jones wasn’t going to make it, a young cop with fluffy blond hair tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Sergeant Blackpool?”

“I’m Stringer,” Otto said. “He’s Blackpool.”

“I’m O. A. Jones,” the kid said.

Sidney Blackpool stared at him. He did look like a surfer.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he said. “Sergeant Brickman sent me out to Solitaire Canyon, out to where I found the Watson car. Told me to go over the area one more time to see if there was anything we missed. He said since you guys from Hollywood were coming we oughtta take one last look.”

“For what?”

“That’s what I asked. For what? He said he’d just like me to go over the area one last time for anything that didn’t belong. He was out there with me for a while, and when he went to the station he told me to give it a try for an hour.”

“Funny he didn’t mention it,” Sidney Blackpool said to Otto. “He never said you were gonna be late because you were out there.”

“Sometimes us small-town boys don’t like to look like we’re intimidated by you big-city guys.” O. A. Jones grinned. “He probably didn’t wanna say that we’d be real embarrassed if you lucked onto something the wind uncovered after all these months.”

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Got your drink?”

The young cop hoisted a beer bottle and they gave up their bar seats to the delight of Oleg Gridley. The midget darted around the legs of two women and crawled up on the vacant stool before Portia Cassidy could escape.

“You hold that beer bottle like an Olympic torch!” Oleg said passionately.

“E.T., go home,” she said.

When the detectives finally found a semi-quiet corner in the saloon, Sidney Blackpool said, “Tell us about your call to Palm Springs P.D. today. We’re checking out a possible Hollywood connection to the death of Jack Watson.”

“Okay,” O. A. Jones said. “I was in here last night with a couple a guys and one a them said something about ‘I believe.’ Not even sure now what he was talking about. He just said ‘I believe.’ And it clicked something in my head.”

“What’s that?” Otto asked.

“Well, when I was lost out there in the desert and heard that guy singing and playing the banjo, I really couldn’t say at first what the song was. It seemed like something with ‘pretend’ in it. The Palm Springs detectives played this old record for me. Nat King Cole. I’d never heard him before.”

“You never heard Nat Cole?” said Otto.

“I mighta, I’m not sure,” the young cop said.

Otto rolled his eyes and felt old. As old as murder.

“Now you’ve changed your mind?”

“Well, it’s bothered me a lot for several months. See, I started tuning in these hokey Palm Springs stations to listen for old songs. I started doubting that it was ‘Pretend.’ The voice was … well, I tried to tell them. It was like a thin quivery voice. Like you’d hear in old movies about the nineteen-thirties or something.”

“You were uncertain if it was a live voice or a radio voice or a taped voice?”

“I still can’t say for sure. Like, I can’t even say if it was a car engine or a truck engine or a bike engine. I was in real bad shape that day in the desert.”

“Okay, about last night,” Otto said. “Have you ever heard the song ‘I Believe’?”

“Today,” the cop nodded. “I went to a record store in Palm Springs and found it. Frankie Laine. I bought it and played it. He’s pretty good.”

“And?”

“And … well, I think it’s the song but not the voice. At least it was something about believing. Somebody ‘believes.’ Something like that. I don’t know why I ever thought it was ‘Pretend.’ It’s very mixed up in my mind. Well, that’s it. I guess it won’t help but I wanted the dicks in Palm Springs to know. Now they know. Now you know.”

“It’s good you’re so diligent,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Can we buy you a drink?”

“Like to, but I got this girl over there by the dance floor. She promised me a dance.”

“Got it,” Sidney Blackpool nodded. “You still surf?”

“Heard I was a surfer, huh?” The young cop grinned. “I must be famous. The Desert Surfer they call me.”

“Ever surf the Wedge at Newport?”

“Yeah! How’d you know about the Wedge?”

“I used to watch surfers at one time.”

“Maybe I shoulda stayed in Laguna.” O. A. Jones shrugged. “Well, I’ll call you if anything jells in my head about the music. Know what? I’m starting to like old songs. Hanging around here and all, and listening for that kind a voice I heard.” Then he added, “An old kind a voice, you know?”

“An old man’s voice?”

“No, I don’t mean that. An old style a voice. I’ll listen to the Palm Springs stations and try to get you a singer’s name who had that kind a style. If I do I’ll tell Chief Pedroza and he can give you a ring.”

“Take care, son,” Sidney Blackpool said.

As they were leaving the Eleven Ninety-nine Club for the boozy ride back to their hotel suite, they heard Bitch Cassidy tell Oleg Gridley that she’d like to stuff him in her microwave, causing the lovesick midget to cry out desperately: “Why do you do this to me, Portia? Why do you treat me like I butt-fucked Bambi?”