The Secrets of Harry Bright

CHAPTER 9

“Another fun-filled evening in the desert resort,” Otto moaned during the ride back from Mineral Springs. “This is about as much fun as a month in Gdansk.”

“That sergeant, that Coy Brickman’s a strange guy, isn’t he?”

“Strange, yeah. I don’t like guys that only blink their eyes every other Tuesday. He looks as warm as the ace of spades. Goddamn, this desert’s black at night!”

“But look at the stars. Baskets of them. When was the last time you saw that in L.A.?”

“When those Samoan stevedores played Ping-Pong with my head. Let’s go to the hotel and meet some women. That broad in the Eleven Ninety-nine scared me to death. She had veins on her veins. She looked like the monster that ate Akron. She even had pimples on her teeth. And she was talking to the midget about AIDS! Do you know they’re gonna put in a resort hotel for AIDS victims in Palm Springs?”

“That’s a last resort,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I’d like to stop by the Watson house one more time. I got a question about Jack Watson’s Porsche and I can’t find the answer in the Palm Springs police report.”

“After hearing about AIDS, we gotta go see Harlan Penrod? Keerist, I don’t even wanna think about AIDS. Straight people can get it too, ya know. I used to worry about crabs when I’d meet a broad in a gin mill. The thought a AIDS makes the hair on my crabs stand on end! But if we gotta see him I’d rather do it tonight and get it over with. So what about the Porsche?”

“The Watson kid’s Porsche was at the house when they found him missing.”

“Of course.”

“Did you peek in that garage? Big house, small garage. There were three rooms of old furniture and a dune buggy and Oriental rugs and their new Mercedes in there.”

“So?”

“So, after they parked the Rolls in the garage, there’d be no room for a Porsche.”

“So?”

“That driveway turns. If you park a Porsche or anything else in the driveway, you’d have to back it up and get it out a the way to get at the Rolls.”

“so?”

“So nothing, except if there was a kidnapper, did he move the Porsche out? If so, where’d he put it? Or was it maybe parked in the street by Jack Watson that night?”

“Since there’s no mention in the reports I imagine it was parked in the street by the Watson kid before he went to bed.”

“Remember what Harlan Penrod said about the Las Palmas area? About how dark it is?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard a couple a Palm Springs cops in the bar saying that when local folks hear a splash in the swimming pool at night, it’s either a raccoon, or a cop falling in chasing a prowler.”

“What’s that got to do with the Porsche?”

“Would you park a Porsche Nine-eleven on a street that dark and secluded?”

“Not if I wanted to keep the car stereo. Not to mention what it’s attached to.”

“That’s what I wanna talk to Harlan Penrod about. The more I think about it, I wonder if Jack Watson drove the Rolls out to Mineral Springs of his own free will.”

“And if he did, what would that prove?”

“Not a thing, maybe.”

“Has ten grand made you this diligent?”

“We’ll have plenty a time for golf, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“Wake me when we get there.” Otto scooted down in the seat and adjusted the radio volume. “Rolls-Royces, Porsches, how do I know what rich people do with their wheels? I just wish I could buy a Camaro Z-twenty-eight like a twenty-two-year-old cop. Trouble with working homicide is these whodunits. Least when I worked narcotics we usually knew whodunit, it was just how do we catch him with it. Whodunits make me sleepy.”

While Otto dozed during the ride back to Palm Springs under a glittering desert sky, Sidney Blackpool thought of how ten thousand dollars did not make him so diligent. But one hundred thousand dollars a year, and a clean job with Watson Industries with all privileges and perks attached thereto, that made him more diligent than he thought he could still be. He didn’t believe there was a chance of an outsider clearing this homicide, but if he went through the motions with sufficient zeal Watson might be impressed.

Victor Watson would need a new director of security whether or not he ever learned who killed his boy. So what if the detective came back from Palm Springs with little more than a golfer’s tan? After twenty-one years of blowing bureaucratic smoke as a Los Angeles civil servant he ought to be able to compile a report to make a neurotic millionaire think that he’d made a run at it. Watson was no fool, but overwhelming grief softens up the brain’s left hemisphere, oh yes, it does.

Suddenly he noticed that Hildegarde was singing, “ ‘I’ll always be near you, wherever you are. Each night in every prayer …’ ”

That lets me out, Sidney Blackpool thought. He used to pray as a reflex action. Those millions of little incantations they drill into you in Catholic grammar schools. A prayer for every occasion. He stopped that long before he lost Tommy, but he still went to mass in those days just to have something to do together with his children. He wondered if that ritual made them closer or drove them farther apart during those last few years when Tommy and Barb lived with their mother and Sidney Blackpool got them only on weekends. Of course adolescents want to be in their own homes, in their own neighborhoods, with their friends and not with their old man on weekends.

What was it Watson said about the bad times? You only remember the bad times. Sidney Blackpool had a thousand bad times to remember after the boy started cutting classes and doing pot and hash and ludes with the other surfers. Like the time he went to the beach in Santa Monica on a winter day and caught Tommy riding four-foot swells, so loaded he’d left his new wet suit on the beach and didn’t even know he was blue from the cold. That one had ended with Tommy shoving his father and running off while a bunch of beach bums threw beer cans and forced the detective to retreat to his car. Tommy was missing for ten days.

Why does a father of a dead son think only of those times? The night dreams were never like that. The night dreams were sometimes wonderful, so wonderful he would awake sobbing into a damp pillow. Too many of those wonderful dreams could kill a man, he was convinced.

The recurring dream hardly varied at all. His former wife, Lorie, and his daughter, Barb, would be playing Scrabble on the floor of the living room, and Tommy, at age twelve, would be watching a football game on television in the den, showing his special sort of chuckling grin whenever the U.S.C. band struck up their “Conquest” theme after scoring a touchdown.

In the dream Sidney Blackpool would take his wife aside privately and make her promise not to tell the secret. The secret was that they had re-created Tommy at the most wonderful time, before the rebellion and the misery of adolescence and drugs. The dream was strange in that it was understood that somehow they had willed him back to them, but the dream was unclear as to whether he was alive as far as anyone else was concerned, or even if Barb was aware.

The dream was so incredibly joyous he never wanted it to end, but of course it always did and he was powerless to change the ending. The dream was over when his wife would say, “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!”

It was so contradictory and irrational that it made perfect sense to Sidney Blackpool. And in the dream he’d always say to her, “Oh, no! I’ll never tell him that. Because he loves me. And … and now he forgives me. My boy forgives me!”

And then he would wake up sobbing and smothering in the pillow. It was always the same and he dealt with it the same. He would take four aspirins and half a tumbler of Johnnie Walker, which would be hard to hold with both trembling hands.

“ ‘Just close your eyes … and I’ll be there,’ ” Hildegarde sang. “ ‘If you call I’ll hear you, no matter how far. Just close your eyes and I’ll be theeeere.’ ”

“Damn! Goddamn!” Sidney Blackpool said.

“What happened?” Otto bolted upright.

“We, uh, almost hit a … jackrabbit,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“This is one dark neighborhood,” Otto said, as his partner parked in front of the huge wall of oleander and cut the engine.

And while the detectives were locking the doors of Sidney Blackpool’s Toyota, a tipsy Harlan Penrod was mad as hell because a British telephone operator was trying to explain that it was too early in London to be connecting him with anyone at Buckingham Palace.

“Well, aren’t they up with the baby?” he demanded. “What kind of parents are they?”

“I’m very sorry, madam,” the operator said, making Harlan drop his voice an octave or two.

“I’m not a madam, nor do I live in a place where madams reside,” he said.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” the operator said. “Will that be all then?”

“I’ll call later,” Harlan warned. And then he added, “Do you by chance know if Vera Lynn is listed in the London directory?”

“Lynn? How is it spelled?”

“Vera Lynn! Vera Lynn!” Harlan cried. “She’s only the greatest singer England ever produced! She’s a personal friend of the Queen Mother, for crying out loud! How old are you, anyway?”

“Would you care to speak to my superior, sir?” the operator asked.

“Oh, what’s the use!” Harlan said, draining his martini. “If you don’t know who Vera Lynn is, England’s finished. You might as well tell me Margaret Thatcher’s gonna mud-wrestle in Soho.”

“Will that be all, sir?”

“Yes, good night, or good morning, as the case may be.”

Harlan hung up and mixed himself another Bombay bomber.

He was surprised to hear the gate buzzer. Probably that bitch, Freddie. He said he’d never see Freddie again but … Harlan went to the intercom and pushed the button.

“Yes, may I help you?” he said sweetly.

“It’s Blackpool and Stringer,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Can we talk for a few minutes?”

“Can we talk? Can we talk?” Harlan cried, sounding like Joan Rivers. “Just walk in the gate when you hear the buzzer, gentlemen.”

Harlan Penrod was framed dramatically in the doorway when the detectives approached the house through the cactus garden. He was wearing a white guayabera shirt, a blue-silk ascot, white slacks and white deck shoes.

“Sorry to bother you,” Sidney Blackpool said as Harlan stepped back and welcomed them with a flourish and his palm-down handshake.

“Not at all,” Harlan said. “I was just calling London and the fools frustrated me no end.”

“London, huh,” Otto said. “England?”

“Oh, yes. I often call England, I’ve tried several times to get a message to Vera Lynn. They’re very nice, the people at Buckingham Palace who take the messages. I forgot how early it is there. It’s tomorrow actually. I should call later. I’ve called President Nixon in Peking. I called President Ford in Korea and, let’s see, I also called President Reagan in Peking. I wish he’d go to Moscow. I’d love to call him there.”

“And they talk to you?”

“Would you like a drink?” Harlan asked. “No, they don’t talk to me, but do you know how impressed the aides are to get overseas calls from Palm Springs? I’ve talked to Secret Service men lots and lots of times. They’ve always taken my messages for the presidents. I never called President Carter. I don’t like Democrats in general. Is either of you a Democrat? I apologize if you are.”

“Cops’re all Republicans,” Otto said. “Capital-punishment buffs. Pro death, remember?”

“Can’t I get you a drink? I’m so glad you dropped by!”

“Mister Penrod,” Sidney Blackpool began.

“Harlan.”

“Harlan.”

“How do you like Palm Springs so far?” Harlan interrupted. “Bet you haven’t seen any movie stars, but they’re here, I promise you. James Caan, Sonny Bono, George Peppard, Mitzi Gaynor, the Gabors. They all live fairly close to here. Gosh, we used to have Elvis Presley and Red Skelton and William Holden, and right close by, the chairperson of the board.”

“Who’s that?” Otto asked.

“Liberace. And of course everyone knows about old ski nose and blue eyes. We’ve named streets after them.”

Otto’s stomach growled fiercely and Harlan said, “That reminds me, Rin Tin Tin visited Palm Springs in the old days. Are you hungry?”

“So hungry I can’t think,” Otto said. “I just tried to eat a bowl a chili but there was a pair a spiders doing synchronized swimming in it.”

“Let me fix you some sandwiches and we’ll have a nice talk.”

“Tell you what, Harlan,” said Sidney Blackpool impulsively, “this is turning into an all-work no-play vacation. How about coming to our hotel? We’ll have a meal in the dining room and send you home in a taxi afterward.”

“Oh, what a wonderful idea!” Harlan cried, fussing with his ascot and putting the martini on a cocktail table next to a love seat. “All work and no play makes …”

“For a bent putter,” Otto said. “Tomorrow we play golf, Sidney.”

“Just let me freshen up,” Harlan said. “I’ll be with you in a jiff!”

“It’ll turn into a vacation tomorrow,” Sidney Blackpool said.

After Harlan was gone, Otto said, “He’s probably in there putting sheep cells on his skin or giving himself an egg-white facial. You know, I could be back in L.A. watching the news. This is about as exciting as seeing the greengrocer cleaning his pomegranates seed by fucking seed.”

“We’ll play golf tomorrow,” Sidney Blackpool promised.

“Let us make haste, gentlemen!” Harlan Penrod whisked into the room, resplendent in a red ascot.

After setting the alarm and locking the front door they were off.

The hotel was bustling by ten o’clock when they were seated in the dining room.

“A light supper, gentlemen?” the captain asked, handing the wine list to Otto Stringer.

“A complete dinner,” Otto said. After the three had placed their cocktail order, he said, “Sidney, if you didn’t feed me tonight, you’d wake up in the morning and find a dead jackrabbit in my bed. I was getting wild.”

“Really?” Harlan batted his eyes in delight, causing Otto to roll his in exasperation.

“We wanted to talk to you about Jack Watson’s car,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“Sure,” said Harlan. “By the way, Barry Manilow lives here, and of course Gene Autry, and …”

“Where was the car parked when Jack disappeared? The Porsche, I mean.”

“Let’s see, the police found it parked and locked in front.”

“Outside the gates? In the street?”

“Yes. Do you see that man over there? The guy in the tacky silk suit with the big cigar and flashy diamonds?”

“What about him?”

“He bought a nightclub in town. Claims to be an East Indian prince. Sure. He just reeks of olive oil and goat cheese. A Syrian from Vegas. Lives in Tuscany Canyon with ten huge watchdogs that eat third-world gardeners. I heard they found a skeleton in his yard with nothing left but a few tacos hanging from a rib cage.”

“Some mixed appetizers,” Otto said to the waiter. “And I want rare prime rib, the King Henry the Eighth cut or whatever you call it here. And a bottle of, let’s see, number twenty-seven looks like a vintage French red.”

“That’s French white, sir,” the waiter said.

“Aw, screw it. You pick it. Make sure it’s at least fifty bucks a bottle.”

“Very good,” the waiter said.

Sidney Blackpool ordered a Cobb salad and Harlan had a bowl of leek soup and a veal chop.

“I’ve been trying to lose a few pounds,” he said to Otto.

“You’re in pretty good shape for your age,” Otto said, and Harlan looked as though he could slap Otto’s face.

“Harlan, did Jack Watson ever park his car in the street at night?” Sidney Blackpool asked.

“Once in a while.”

“Really? A car worth forty grand on those dark streets? Must have a few auto thefts around there.”

“A Porsche Nine-eleven’s worth more than that,” Harlan said. “And this is a transient town. He didn’t do it very often.”

“How often?”

“Maybe only a few times. When he came home very late.”

“What’s very late?”

“When it wasn’t dark anymore.”

“He came home at dawn? Where would he go all night? This isn’t a late town.”

“This is an early town,” Harlan said, draining the Bombay martini and smiling demurely when Otto signaled for another round. “Maybe two hundred and fifty thousand people come to this valley in season, but in the summer it’s a very small town with a small-town mentality. Have you listened to the commercials on radio and T.V.? I heard a girl today announce the bill at the multiple cinema. ‘In TheATER One,’ she says, ‘is I’m a douche.’ I thought it was a porn flick till I realized the poor thing was trying to say Amadeus. Oh, I miss the big city sometimes, but I’d never go back to L.A. When Mister Watson asked me if I’d accept the wages he offered, I countered by dropping on my knees. You can keep Hollywood.”

“About the car,” Sidney Blackpool said, as the second round of drinks arrived.

“Cheers, dears!” Harlan cried, lifting his martini.

“He’d come home at dawn sometimes? Where would he spend the night?”

“Sergeant, he was a gorgeous young rich boy. He could spend the night anywhere he wanted. I’m sure he loved his fiancée but he was young.”

“How long had he been engaged to his girlfriend?”

“Not long. Three, four months, I think. Her family and his were very good friends, but I’m sure he loved her. He wouldn’t do everything his father wished.”

“Okay, so sometimes he came home at dawn or close to it, and he wouldn’t bother to pull in and block the driveway with the Porsche. He’d park outside and come in through the walk-in gate, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, if his car was parked in front of the house and locked, were the keys to his Porsche found on his body?”

“No. As I recall, his keys were in his bedroom where he always kept them.”

“Okay, Harlan, then it’s very unlikely that he was forced to drive the Rolls from the house, or forced to leave the house in any fashion. An intruder wouldn’t pull the Porsche out of the garage, park it in front, lock it up and return the keys to Jack’s bedroom, now would he?”

“I guess not,” Harlan said.

“Didn’t you think the same thing on the day Jack was discovered missing? I mean, didn’t you tell the F.B.I. and the Palm Springs police that it was likely that Jack parked in front that night so he could drive the Rolls out later? And wouldn’t that just about rule out any notion that he was snatched from the house?”

“I was so confused back then! Mister Watson just sort of took over from everybody. Do you know how forceful a man he is? He was running around with one of those cordless phones his company makes, and, I don’t know, it was like the red-phone syndrome: Get me Washington! He told the F.B.I. men right in front of me that his boy was kidnapped out of the house and I still can’t say he wasn’t. Like I said, Jack hated to drive the Rolls-Royce.”

“Is it that Victor Watson wouldn’t even consider the possibility that his son might drive the Rolls up to a canyon in Mineral Springs of his own volition?”

“Maybe that’s it. And I still don’t know that he would. What would Jack be doing in a place like that?”

“What’s your opinion?”

“Gosh, I don’t know what to think.” Harlan dabbed his eyes with a dinner napkin. “He was like my son, that boy. He and his dad argued sometimes, and he’d talk to me about it later. I think he hated it, being dependent on his dad all the time. He used to call him da-da, but not to his face. And he used to say things to me like ‘Well, guess I’ll go ask Daddy Warbucks for my allowance.’ My impression is that when he finished his education he was never again going to take money from his father.”

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 maître 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 out there 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-year-olds 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 am being 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 Blackpool said.

“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 maître 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 hell 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.”