The Secrets of Harry Bright

CHAPTER 2

President Ronald Reagan had not yet arrived at the Century Plaza Hotel to await election results, but half a block away on Avenue of the Stars, Sidney Blackpool was making a call at an office suite when he saw two men standing beside a limousine. They wore three-piece suits and button-down shirts and striped neckties and shiny wingtips, but despite the duds they didn’t have the gee-whiz look of a George Bush preppie. For one thing their arms 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 amp; 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 related to 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-doctors 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.”

Victor Watson’s office was not quite as overdone as the palace at Versailles but it did have a Louis XV parquet floor. And there were terra-cotta urns and Chinese pots on that floor, and Italian rococo mirrors, and a J.M.W. Turner oil painting on the wall, and polished granite tabletops, and a lacquered desk, if it was a desk, that looked like one of those ten-thousand-dollar numbers that’re supposed to combine form and function but look like an organ pulled from the belly of a dinosaur.

Sidney Blackpool was looking for Victor Watson in all this loopy art mix when a voice from the adjoining salon said, “In here, Sergeant Blackpool.”

The smaller room was a sudden relief. It was orderly with nubby upholstery and wood, real wood, and rough tactile accents. It was a man’s room, and the desk top of polished granite reflected the pupils and irises of the suntanned smiling man behind it.

“Doesn’t that office make you want to puke?” Victor Watson said.

“Who designed it, Busby Berkeley?” the detective said dryly.

“My wife did, I’m afraid.”

“She only forgot a singing waterfall,” Sidney Blackpool said, shaking hands with the older man and being beckoned toward the camel sofa.

Everyone knew who the “wife” was even if they’d never heard of Victor Watson. She was at one time a top star of feature films and was now experiencing a comeback as a nighttime soap opera killer-bitch.

There were two crystal tumblers and an ice bucket on the simple oak cocktail table, but there was nothing simple about the Ming-dynasty figural group resting beside a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

Victor Watson looked at his wristwatch, Patek Phillipe of course, and said, “Late enough for a drink, Sergeant? You’re almost off duty.”

“I don’t worry about duty,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Only about my liver. Four o’clock’s late enough.”

Victor Watson sat beside the detective and poured three fingers of Scotch into each tumbler, then added two ice cubes to both drinks. He was so tanned that his crow’s-feet crinkled dead white when he smiled, as chalky white as his hair. His hands were delicate and they too were covered with white hairs.

“Tell me,” he said, “do you resent being sent over here to humor some millionaire about a seventeen-month-old murder case?”

“Not as long as he buys the drinks, Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, eyeing the older man over the edge of the glass.

Victor Watson shifted his weight on the sofa, adjusting the crease in his Nino Cerruti pleated pants as he did so. His outfit included a brocade vest, which was back in style (at least in Beverly Hills and its environs) after a fifty-year absence, and kiltie Italian slip-on loafers.

Then he saw the detective’s cynical green eyes looking him over and said, “When I’m in my downtown offices in the financial district, I don’t wear clothes from a Paris boutique.”

Sidney Blackpool managed a halfhearted smile and continued to drink without comment. So far the guy had apologized for his wife’s goofy taste and his frog clothes designer. Still, he was paying for the drinks.

As though he read the detective’s mind, Victor Watson freshened the drink and said, “You’re not about to ask me how I knew you drink Johnnie Walker Black, are you?”

Victor Watson chuckled and those polished granite eyes got a bit less riveting. “A childish trick I know, but things like that impress the idiots around this town. I asked your lieutenant when I called your office, and he asked your partner.”

“My partner’s on vacation. Won’t be back for a couple a weeks.”

“Of course, I was told that. He must’ve asked somebody in your office.”

“It’s okay with me,” Sidney Blackpool said, and the Scotch was warming his belly and throat and if this kept up he might start to tolerate this guy.

“How old’re you, Sergeant?” Victor Watson asked.

“Forty-two.”

“I’m only fifty-nine years old and you thought I was sixty-nine.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s okay; I know how I look. Life hasn’t always been so nice to me. When I was nineteen I spent two days as a guest of your department. I was selling sandwiches from the back of a truck to the garment workers downtown and I got a few tickets for being parked in a red zone. I couldn’t afford to pay them and one day one of your motor cops ran a make on me and put me in jail. The judge told me fifty dollars or three days. I didn’t have fifty dollars. That Lincoln Heights was one shitty jail. I got in three fights to save my virtue.”

“Did you save it?”

“For a while,” he said. “Then I married my present wife and backed one of her movies and got myself gang-banged every day by the studio goniffs.”

Sidney Blackpool caught himself guzzling, which was what he had promised himself he wouldn’t do the last time he failed to quit drinking. Well, shit, if you have to listen to some industrialist’s life story …

“Help yourself,” Victor Watson said, and the detective poured generously.

“People think I made my money in land development,” Victor Watson continued, sipping with restraint. “High tech is where I hit it big. I have a tenth-grade education but I can sell anything: rags, cars, junk, land. You name it, I can sell it.”

By now, Sidney Blackpool was drifting. The sun was filtering in the windows from the west, and twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker was making fifty-nine-year-old Victor Watson seem like an old pal.

“Fame is what works around these parts,” Victor Watson continued. “Lots of guys who make Forbes magazine get snubbed by every snotty maître d’ in town. If you want to be where it’s at you have two choices: buy a sports franchise, which is the second crappiest business in the world, or get into movies, which is the most crappy. I discovered a third way and married a famous movie star. We get the tables in her name. My picture gets taken when I’m with her. I go to parties because of her. Now I can go anywhere I want and eat cold potato soup and everyone knows me. Do you play golf?”

“As a matter a fact,” Sidney Blackpool nodded.

“We’ll play sometime. I like the Bel-Air course. I belong to half a dozen clubs but I don’t get a chance to play much. What do you know about my son’s murder?”

The guy could shift gears without a clutch, and before the detective could answer, Victor Watson said, “You may have read that my boy disappeared from our Palm Springs home last year and was found murdered out in the desert near a blister of a town called Mineral Springs.”

“I never read whether they caught the …”

“They didn’t,” Victor Watson said, and just for a second those irises flickered. Then he stood and walked to the window, gazing at the sun falling toward Santa Monica.

“I’m wondering what I can do for you,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“Your department’s got to get involved, Sid,” Victor Watson announced, with just a touch of fervor. “I’m not bad-mouthing Palm Springs P.D. or anybody else. But it’s been seventeen months and …”

Victor Watson was not a man to lose control and he didn’t. He smiled and returned to the sofa, sitting down beside the detective. “It’s come to my attention that my boy may have been in Hollywood the day he died. It could be that the events leading up to the murder in the desert emanated from Hollywood. In that case, Hollywood Division of the L. A. Police Department becomes the proper agency to join this investigation, right?”

“Hold on, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool didn’t like this a bit. He had enough cases without being drawn into a cold Palm Springs homicide with a guy like this applying the torque.

“Listen to me, Sidney,” Victor Watson said, leaning toward the detective. “I know it’s stretching matters a bit to draw you in, but I need to keep this investigation going. I don’t know where to turn. All the goddamn money I gave the Republicans the last four years, yet the F.B.I. dropped out within three days. And the Palm Springs P.D. was finished in six months. Oh, they still call me but they don’t have leads. And my son, my boy, he …”

“I suppose I can maybe make a few calls, Mister Watson,” the detective offered. “After you tell me about the new information that makes you think Hollywood’s involved.”

“I was thirty-six years old when Jack was born,” Victor Watson said. “My daughters were already in high school when he came along. My first wife was probably too old for child-bearing, but it worked. Did it ever. He had an I.Q. of a hundred and forty. And he was a talented piano player. And he had the sweetest golf swing you have ever seen.… Tell me, do you know about depression and despair?” Without waiting for an answer Victor Watson said, “I can tell you that despair is not merely acute depression. Despair is more than the sum of many terrible parts. Depression is purgatory. Despair is hell.”

The detective almost sent the Ming-dynasty figurine spinning off the cocktail table, he snatched at the Johnnie Walker so quickly.

Victor Watson didn’t notice. He just kept talking in a monotone that was getting spooky. “Do you know how a man feels when he loses his son? He feels … incomplete. Nothing in the whole world looks the same or is the same. He goes around looking for pieces of himself. Incomplete. And … and then all his daydreams and fantasies go back to June of last year. Whatever he’s thinking about, it’s got to precede the time he got the phone call about his son. You see, he just keeps trying to turn the clock back. He wants just one more chance. For what? He can’t even say for sure. He wants to communicate. What? He isn’t sure.” And then Victor Watson breathed a sigh and said: “The ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.”

“I’d like to help you, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool was getting unaccountably warm. He unbuttoned his collar, removed his necktie and shoved it into his coat pocket.

“Hear me out, Sid,” Victor Watson said quietly. “It’s important that I lay things out … well … methodically. It’s how I am. He isn’t able to answer his phone at first, the father of a dead boy. Especially since so many people think they have to call to express condolences. One friend calls four times and finally you speak to him and he says, ‘Why didn’t you return my calls? I want to share your grief.’ And you say to him, ‘You dumb son of a bitch. If you could share any part of it, I’d give it to you! I’d give it all to you, you stupid bastard!’ And then of course I lost that friend.”

Sidney Blackpool made a mental note, as though it were a crime confession, that Victor Watson had switched persons three times before he was ready or maybe able to start telling it in the first person.

“Then for several weeks, all I could think about were the bad moments. I couldn’t remember the good times, the good things we had together, Jack and me. Only the problems. Only the bad times. You know something? Booze used to make me silly and happy. Now I hardly touch it because it makes me morose and mean. Can I freshen that?”

“Yeah.” The detective began massaging the back of his neck. He was starting to get a headache at the base of his skull. It was more than warm. It was stifling, yet he could see the papers on the polished granite desk top fluttering from an overhead air register.

“On June twenty-first of last year, my twenty-two-year-old son Jack went to Palm Springs after his last term at U.S.C. He went alone but was going to be joined by his fiancée who was a senior at U.C.L.A. He was there two days and two nights and then he was gone. So was my car. I keep a Rolls-Royce there because I sometimes fly to Palm Springs from LAX instead of driving. Our Palm Springs houseboy found the car missing and by the second night he got worried and called us. Jack was found two days later in the desert, in some godforsaken canyon near Mineral Springs. He was shot through the head and the car was burned with his body inside.”

“Was he … uh, was he …”

“Yes, he was already dead when they torched the car.”

“They?”

“He, she, they. Whoever. At first the police thought there was some sort of accident where he ran off a dirt road down into a canyon and the car caught fire. But at the autopsy they found that though he was totally burned, the inside of his lungs was hardly scorched. And there was very little carbon monoxide in his blood. And then they found a thirty-eight-caliber bullet in his head. I brought in another pathologist and he concurred. Jack was shot and was dead or dying before somebody burned him.

“The F.B.I. called it a straightforward murder, maybe a kidnapping and murder, but not within their investigative jurisdiction. The Palm Springs police’ve pretty well given up. I thought about hiring private investigators but I know the difference between movie private eyes and real ones. Even if I could find a good one, no police agency gives the time of day to private investigators.”

“So how does the L.A.P.D. get brought into this?”

“It’s the best thing that’s happened to me for a while,” Victor Watson said. “On Monday I got a notice from my Hollywood Rolls-Royce dealership that it’s time to bring the car in for service. There was a note attached saying they’d neglected to bill me for a tire purchased on June twenty-first of last year. That’s the day Jack disappeared! Of course I ran straight to the Rolls-Royce dealer, and the service manager identified a picture of Jack. My boy was there that afternoon in the Rolls and ordered a tire because his was going flat.”

“You notify Palm Springs P.D. about this?”

“Yesterday. They thanked me, of course. They said they’d make a follow-up call to the Rolls-Royce dealer. That means they’ll be told the same thing I was told and they’ll file it. But look, the crime may have originated in Hollywood. Jack may have met someone here or been kidnapped here or picked up a hitchhiker here or …”

“This is a lotta supposition, Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, restraining himself from going for old Johnnie Walker yet another time. “This case belongs to Palm Springs P.D.”

“But they’re out of ideas. And I’ve already publicly offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for any relevant information. You have a big department, Sid. More facilities.”

“Look, most murders and most crimes in general are solved by the art of conversation, not the science of forensics. It’s their town. They know who to talk to. I can’t walk in there and make a case outta nothing.”

“There’s an answer there. I know it! In the desert cities there’re lots of unsolved murders. Maybe you can add something fresh.”

“Resort cities’re transient places,” the detective argued. “There could well be lots a uncleared murders. That doesn’t mean the police aren’t competent.”

“A fresh look at it, that’s all I want from the L.A.P.D. Somebody shot my boy and burned his body. Somebody left him there for … Animals had gotten to him. Coyotes, skunks, buzzards, I don’t know. Desert animals.”

“You really can’t hope for justice after this much time’s passed, Mister Watson.” Sidney Blackpool succumbed and went for the Johnnie Walker Black, but he only poured two ounces this time.

“I know, Sid. I don’t want justice.”

“Well, whadda you want?”

“Revenge, of course. A sliver of revenge.”

“Revenge. And what from me?”

“Identify the killer or killers even if you can never make an arrest. Even if there isn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt to satisfy a district attorney.”

“And what’re you gonna do?”

Victor Watson got up again and paced back and forth in front of the window. Now the sun was nearly gone and his tanned face took on the color of a bruise. He said, “I recently watched a documentary where Jane Goodall got herself in a tizzy because one of her mother apes had et one of the neighbor ape’s babies. She didn’t know after all her years of research that they were capable of human cruelty. Hell, that’s no discovery. The real discovery’d be if the neighbor mother’d waited for the killer to go to sleep and then bashed in her skull. That’s what sets man apart from other primates. Not the crap about us being aware of our own mortality. What sets us apart is our capacity and need for revenge.”

“You wanna have the killer smoked, is that it? This is a job for Charles Bronson, not me.”

Victor Watson turned toward the detective, and now under the track light he looked like an old man. His eyes and cheeks were hollow in the shadow. He said, “Don’t be silly. I’m not a criminal, but I have enough money to punish people in lots of ways. I can get my own kind of revenge without physically harming anyone.”

Suddenly a bolt of headache pain hit Sidney Blackpool like a slap shot.

“It wouldn’t make you feel better, Mister Watson,” the detective said, feeling clammy. His armpits were soaked.

“It won’t help his mother. She’s accommodated the grief. Mothers can do it. I’ve tried everything: psychotherapy, religion, Zen. Nothing diminishes my rage. I just know you can help me. Intuition’s made me what I am.”

“Me? I’m one a several guys working homicide at Hollywood Station. I happened to be sent over to talk to you because nobody else was handy.”

“I asked for you,” Victor Watson said.

“You asked for me?”

“I made a few inquiries about the homicide teams. If it’d turned out Jack could be traced to our home in Bel-Air that day I would’ve done the same at West L.A. Station. Or Beverly Hills if he’d been seen there. I would’ve tried to pick the man I needed from whichever agency that could justify getting into the case.”

“And what’d your few inquiries reveal about me?”

“You’re a very good investigator and you drink Johnnie Walker Black and you play golf. I thought the golf was an omen. I belong to a country club in the desert and I can get you onto any other course you want to play. Take your clubs.”

“You think my department’s gonna let me drop my workload and run to Palm Springs, just like that?”

“Take one week from your accumulated overtime, Sid. Take your partner. I’ve learned that his vacation isn’t up for ten more days. The two of you’ll have a suite at a first-class hotel. You’ll like it. I have copies of every police report here.” Victor Watson tapped his desk drawer. “You can read them at your leisure and do some investigating during a hell of a nice vacation. Your lieutenant said it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“This isn’t sensible.”

“You’re the best man available to me at this time and that is the God’s truth.”

“How’d you meet my lieutenant?”

“I help sponsor the police Olympics and the police-celebrity golf tournament, and I intend to back your chief if he decides to retire and run for mayor. I was given an introduction by an assistant chief.”

“What else do you know about me?”

“I know about your boy.”

“Goddamn!” Sidney Blackpool said, shocked to see how much he was sweating from the swell time he was having with all the free drinks and the promise of a golf vacation.

“While we were talking about my boy your lieutenant said you’d lost your boy too, in a surfing accident.”

“My lieutenant’s got a big mouth.”

“It’s another omen! It’s more than that. Helping me might help you. Father to father. My justice might in some small way …”

“You already said you don’t want justice. Look, Mister Watson, my kid’s been dead fourteen months. I’m nearly past the crazies. I don’t need this father to father bullshit.”

“If I could buy the right kind of help I would. For the first time in years I need something desperately and it’s not for sale. I feel totally helpless. It’s an awful thing for a man like me to be helpless. Listen, you’ve got your twenty years in, right?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You could retire from police work if you could afford it, but you can’t live on the pension, right? You probably have an ex-wife to pay?”

“No, the bitch did me a good turn. She remarried a few years ago.”

“Other kids?”

“A daughter seventeen. Lives with her mother.”

“I’m just winging it, Sid. You see, I don’t know much about you, only what I need to. So I figure you’d probably love to leave the street garbage but you can’t live on the pension without working, right? Do you know Deputy Chief Phil Jenks?”

“He retired a few years back. I knew of him.”

“He’s head of security for Watson Industries. He’s also a security adviser to three cellular-mobile-phone companies I’m associated with in San Francisco and San Diego and Denver. I pay him ninety thousand a year.”

“That’s very nice for him.”

“I was getting ready to raise his salary to an even hundred when he had a serious heart attack last month. Seems like we’ll have to replace him. We’re looking for a younger man this time. A retired law officer, of course. We prefer a single man who doesn’t mind traveling to some pretty nice cities.”

“I don’t know a goddamn thing about computer hardware, Mister Watson.”

“You know about thieves, don’t you? A thief’s a thief. What else’s to know? Sid, if you bring me what I need from the desert, you’ll have all the qualifications I could ever want. With Phil Jenks I signed a play or pay deal, as they say in my wife’s business. If he didn’t like the job, he could quit and I had to pay a year’s salary. Call Phil Jenks. I’ll give you his number. Ask him how he liked the job. He’s a golfer too. We’ve got corporate memberships in country clubs in San Diego, San Francisco and Denver. We’ve got season’s tickets to Lakers games and …”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Sidney Blackpool said. “And right now I got a Kareem Abdul Jabbar migraine.”

“Call me tomorrow, Sid,” Victor Watson said, opening the door for the detective. “Remember, if nothing ever comes of it you still got yourself a nice golf vacation in Palm Springs, all expenses paid. And I mean all.”

“Nothing could ever come a something like this,” the detective said.

“Omens, Sid.” Victor Watson’s voice was as hollow as his eyes under the track lights. “Maybe we’re linked, you and me. Because we understand it.”

“It?”

“The ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons. Now we understand it. I got to have a payoff, Sid. Some kind of payoff for all … this … fucking … rage.”

“I’ll call you either way.”

“Call me,” Victor Watson said, closing the door to the salon while the detective wove his way through the vases and urns and pots, vaguely realizing that all this designer crockery was probably worth ten times more than the play or pay deal he was just offered. Which made him feel like he had a mouse waterskiing in his stomach. He hoped he could find a men’s room pronto.