The Secrets of Harry Bright

CHAPTER 5

He’d been called Wingnut since grammar school. The reason was obvious: his ears. Willard Bates looked like a wingnut all right, or like a VW bug with the doors open. For thirteen months he was a cop in Orange County and had nothing but grief, and thought about giving up police work altogether.

Big problems for Wingnut Bates started there in Orange County two weeks after he finished police training. One afternoon he was driving his patrol car by Disneyland with his training officer riding shotgun. His partner, Ned Grogan, happened to be eyeballing a little cupcake in the crosswalk who was dressed in shorts and a “Kiss” T-shirt for her day in the magic kingdom when suddenly she almost got kissed by a Lincoln with New York plates. It failed to brake for pedestrians and blew by at forty miles an hour.

Wingnut punched it on the amber light and sailed through a six-lane intersection after the New York Lincoln. His partner tightened his seat belt and said, “Easy, kid. This is only a traffic ticket.”

Wingnut managed to catch the car since the driver was weaving from lane number one to number two and back again even though there were no cars directly in front of him.

“A deuce,” Ned Grogan griped. “I don’t wanna book a deuce right now. I wanna go get a hot pastrami.”

He was a deuce all right, so drunk he didn’t see the gumball lights behind and didn’t hear Wingnut toot his horn for a pullover. Wingnut had to blast the siren in the drunk’s ear before the Lincoln made a lurching stop against the curb.

Wingnut had never booked a drunk driver up to then. He was anxious to give his first field sobriety test and was trying to remember all the instructions without checking his notebook. But Ned Grogan preempted his act.

“Over there,” Ned Grogan said to the middle-aged tourist who staggered out of the Lincoln. “On the sidewalk before you get killed by another drunk.”

“Marvin Waterhouse,” the drunk said, trying to shake hands with Ned Grogan. “Hope I wasn’t speeding, Officer. Get a little confused on these California highways. Not like back home.”

“May I see your license, please?” Wingnut asked, and Marvin Waterhouse looked at the young cop’s freckled nose and said, “You a real cop, sonny?”

“Just give him the license, Marvin,” Ned Grogan sighed. “Let’s get on with it.”

“Sure, sure,” Marvin Waterhouse said, making Ned Grogan step back from the blast of 80-proof bourbon. “Was I speeding? I’m very sorry.”

As Wingnut was about to get into the drunk test, Ned Grogan said, “Look, Marvin, you know and we know you’re too drunk to drive or walk.”

“I don’t think I’m …”

“Don’t jive me, Marvin, I’m about to give you a break.”

“Yes, sir.” Marvin Waterhouse was no fool. “Whatever you say, Officer.”

“Where’s your hotel?”

“I’m at the Disneyland,” Marvin Waterhouse said.

“Okay, now there’s a taxi stand across the street. I want you to lock up your car and get in a cab and go back to the hotel and go to bed. Will you promise me you’ll do that, Marvin?”

“Yes, sir!” Marvin Waterhouse said. “Right this second.”

Wingnut was disappointed, but it wasn’t the first time he’d lost an arrest when Ned Grogan wanted a pastrami or an enchilada or something. Wingnut figured his partner’d eat a stray dog.

As Marvin Waterhouse was starting to stagger into the crosswalk, Wingnut grabbed his elbow and said, “I better help you.”

Ned Grogan stayed on the far side of the crowded intersection and watched across six lanes of Disneyland traffic as Wingnut Bates, looking like a gun-toting Boy Scout, steered the New York tourist toward the taxi stand.

And then Marvin Waterhouse made a mistake that lots of easterners make when they come out west for the first time. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill and tucked it inside Wingnut’s Sam Browne belt.

It happened so fast that Marvin Waterhouse was half inside the cab when Wingnut looked at the money. The street was packed with cars and pedestrians, but nobody noticed Marvin’s gesture of New York gratitude. Except that Wingnut Bates felt a thousand eyes. The guy thought he was a grafter! He’d just been fucking bribed!

“We don’t do things like this!” Wingnut Bates cried, leaping toward the cab. “You can’t …”

It was too late. The door was slammed by Marvin Waterhouse and the cabbie drove off.

“HE BRIBED ME!” Wingnut screamed across the traffic noise to Ned Grogan who was trying to figure out if his rookie partner had gone crackers in the heat.

“What?” Ned Grogan yelled.

“I BEEN BRIBED!” Wingnut Bates screamed, running after the taxi, which had crossed the intersection but was stopped by traffic trying to get into the Disneyland parking lot.

“Wingnut, come back here!” Ned Grogan hollered, but Wingnut was hotfooting across the intersection trying to remember the penal-code section for bribing a public officer. He nearly caused two collisions as cars mashed on their brakes to avoid killing a uniformed cop.

Ned Grogan was caught on the wrong side of the six-lane intersection with the light timed to accommodate the Disneyland flow. The cop jumped into the patrol unit planning to spin a U-ee and shoot through the traffic, except that the second he pulled out into the lane his patrol unit was clipped by a tourist from Duluth, giving him a whiplash that put him off duty for a week. Ned Grogan managed to drag himself out of the wrecked patrol unit and saw to his horror that a huge crowd had gathered a block north and he could guess why. He picked up the radio and asked for help.

When Wingnut caught the taxi, the driver was startled. Marvin Waterhouse was very startled.

Wingnut came puffing up and jerked open the door. “We don’t do this!” he panted. “If I thought you had criminal intent I’d book you!”

“What’s wrong with you, kid?” Marvin Waterhouse was astonished. “Take it! I want you to buy a drink after work!”

“I’m not taking your money, mister,” Wingnut cried.

“Well, I don’t want it. Give it to a cop charity!” Marvin Waterhouse said stubbornly.

“You take it!”

“I ain’t taking it!” Marvin Waterhouse said.

Wingnut tried to shove the crumpled twenty into Marvin Waterhouse’s shirt pocket, but the drunk, on his own turf more or less, got belligerent. “Keep your hands off me!” he bellowed. “I ain’t taking nothing.”

By the time the first police car arrived at the scene, Marvin Waterhouse and Wingnut Bates were rolling around in the gutter in an all-out donnybrook. A crowd of about sixty people was watching, among them a couple of tanked-up ironworkers who didn’t like seeing a young cop beating on some middle-aged guy with tattoos. The hard hats started mouthing off and one thing led to another.

When it was over, Marvin Waterhouse and the two ironworkers went to jail for battery on a police officer. The miserable taxi driver lost a day’s pay sitting at the police station dictating statements. Wingnut Bates’s patrol car had to be towed to the garage and Ned Grogan had to be towed to the hospital for X rays and a neck brace.

The last thing Ned Grogan said as he was being hauled away by paramedics was “Tell Wingnut it was a real honor to witness such a display of law-enforcement integrity. I’m so proud. And tell the little jug-eared fuck, he better be ready to draw soon as I’m on my feet cause when I see him he’s gonna have about as much chance as a Bonwit Teller in Bangladesh.”

The incident with Marvin Waterhouse made the vice sergeant notice Wingnut Bates. He noticed that Wingnut looked as coplike as Alfalfa in The Little Rascals. Therefore he’d make an excellent undercover operator during the height of the tourist season when they were getting complaints of hugger-mugger whores roiling the out-of-towners, a bad thing in a town that boasted Disneyland.

When he asked Wingnut Bates if he’d like a temporary vice assignment the rookie jumped at it, especially since Ned Grogan would be coming back to duty soon and Wingnut was feeling as secure as a U-2 flight over Kamchatka, or the U.S. Football League.

Wingnut thought he was going to like being a vice cop, but they started playing tricks on him right away as vice cops are wont to do. For his first assignment he was told by a pair of older cops that he was going to operate a notorious call girl who posed as an outcall masseuse. She advertised in underground newspapers in a classified ad that said: “If you want me, call the number in this ad and tell me what you want and how much it means to you. Be specific, darling.”

The reason for the admonition to be specific was that the girl didn’t want any calls from vice cops, and like all hookers she was better acquainted with case law on entrapment than most Orange County lawyers. Any cop who phoned got a recorded message repeating the admonition and asking for a call-back number. The hooker would only then make the call and discuss the transaction. She did most of her business with male tourists so they didn’t mind leaving the telephone numbers of hotel rooms.

Wingnut was told that they wanted the hooker to become acquainted with his telephone voice so there would be no problem when he showed up later at the rendezvous. He was told by the other cops that he was to get on the telephone and read a carefully worded script.

After reading the vice cops’ message, Wingnut Bates said, “But isn’t that entrapment, saying stuff like this to a hooker?”

“Noooo problem,” the vice cops told him. “The laws on entrapment are constantly changing. Just say exactly what’s in the script.”

So, while Wingnut rehearsed his lines in the squad room until all three vice cops agreed that he had it just right, one of them dialed the hooker’s number. Only it wasn’t the hooker’s number. It was Wingnut’s home number. The vice cop waited until Wingnut’s new bride answered and then said, “Just a second,” into the phone. Only it wasn’t Wingnut’s new bride. It was her mother, Eunice, who didn’t think much of her Penny marrying a cop when she’d had an offer from a Costa Mesa dentist with some prospects in life.

When Eunice said, “Who is this?” the phone was handed to Wingnut Bates, who delivered his lines. He said, “Hello, lover-buns. Yes, I got your message and yes, I want you to sit on my nose and yes, fifty bucks is ooo-kay! Just talking to you I got me a woody bigger’n a thirty-eight-ounce Louisville slugger!”

And then Wingnut Bates heard his mother-in-law scream, “Willard! Willard! Have you gone crazy?”

That was the kind of thing that happened to new vice cops. Once he was operating a complaint about wienie waggers inside a movie house adjoining a dirty bookstore that was disturbingly close to Disneyland. The cinema was showing Doing Debbie Dirty, which starred a surprisingly hot-looking porn star with a supporting cast of thirty-seven guys. They put Wingnut down in the front row with instructions to come running toward the back of the theater if they gave a signal. A signal meant they’d caught some guy milking the anaconda. They also told him they hoped he’d worn a jockstrap because it would be very unprofessional if he were to grow a woody watching Debbie being done dirty.

Five minutes later, one of the vice cops posing as a customer stormed huffily out to the lobby and told the manager, “That little guy in the front row with the gremlin ears, he’s low-crawling people’s crotches! He’s a pervert! I want my money back!”

And then another vice cop posing as a customer stalked out saying indignantly, “I goddamn near broke my ankle slipping on the floor down in front! There’s a little jerkoff down there going splooey all over the place! You could hydroplane on all the sapazzola in this freak show! I want my money back!”

And so forth.

While the vice cops went outside to giggle, the theater manager, who was sick and tired of dummy floggers chasing off legitimate customers, grabbed Wingnut by the scruff of the neck and dragged him right out of his seat, which resulted in a reflexive swing by Wingnut and a retaliatory punch by the theater manager, and pretty soon there was a screaming wrestling match that had all the customers pouring out of the cinema in panic.

By the time the other cops realized that another prank had backfired, and came running back into the theater, the fight had spilled over next door into the X-rated bookstore where the theater manager was doing a rain dance from having taken a swing and smacked the wall. He was jumping up and down with a busted hand, yelling and screaming, and Wingnut was sprawled between the dildos and the transvestite pinups thinking that vice wasn’t going to be much better than patrol.

His Orange County police career ended not because of any backfired pranks but on a legitimate whore operation at a high-rise hotel where he almost got shot. On this operation, Wingnut was supposed to be a young insurance adjuster who was in town to assess the damage that a winter storm had done to a piece of waterfront property in Seal Beach. That was the cover story if he was lucky enough to meet a suspected hooker who’d been working a certain hotel bar for several weeks.

Wingnut was under strict instructions not to make any overt move with the hooker until midnight, which was the earliest that the cover team could finish a surveillance they were doing across town. He was just supposed to mosey around the bar and engage the girl in conversation if he was lucky enough to make contact, and then to stall until the cover team arrived. He was to give them a prearranged signal if she made an offer of prostitution. Then they’d move in, hook her up and haul her off to the slam.

That was the plan. Except that Wingnut had three margaritas before he saw the petite young lollipop stroll in and sit at the bar two stools away. She wasn’t any older than Wingnut. She sort of reminded him of Debbie of the aborted movie review. Wingnut was feeling sorry for her but he’d already worked vice long enough to have regretted feeling sorry for hookers. He had once let one go pee during a vice raid, and when they broke down the locked bathroom door they found only the curtains blowing through an open window. That, after she’d already asked six other cops if she could go to the john and been refused, earning dipshit-of-the-month award for Wingnut.

So Wingnut, fried on tequila and salt, made friends with the girl. Her name was Sally, and she wouldn’t go far enough with her “offer” to satisfy the state penal-code requirements. She asked Wingnut if they could go to his room to continue his conversation.

“Lets wait awhile,” Wingnut said. “What’s your hurry?”

“Ain’t you in a hurry?” Sally smiled slyly. “Ain’t I something you wanna hurry for?”

“Yeah, sure,” Wingnut said. “But we haven’t talked … business yet.”

“Let’s do that in your room,” she said.

“It might not be agreeable, the terms I mean.”

“It’ll be agreeable,” she said.

“Gimme a hint,” Wingnut said, and now he was trying to be sly except that she was starting to look fuzzy. That was a lot of cactus juice for the young cop.

“Let’s go on up and I’ll talk more when we’re alone in the elevator,” she said.

“Let’s have another drink,” Wingnut said.

“Listen, honey, you’re awful cute,” Sally said, “but I ain’t got all night. If you’re not interested I’m gonna have to move on down the road.”

“Wait a minute!” Wingnut said, seeing his arrest slipping away. “Okay, we’ll talk on the elevator.” What the hell. He couldn’t have much trouble from such a frail little girl.

The hotel was very quiet at that time of night. There was a nice-looking fellow already standing at the elevator when they strolled up arm in arm like honeymooners. The young man was wearing a cardigan, pants with cuffs, and penny loafers, so it never occurred to Wingnut that he could be a hooker’s main man. They were all supposed to be bad-looking spades with silk shirts and earrings and alligator boots.

Wingnut wished the elevator was empty. He had to have the offer quick because there was no hotel room. “Which floor you want?” Wingnut said to the young man in the cardigan, hoping he’d get off on a lower floor, giving Wingnut some time with the hooker.

“All the way up,” the young fellow smiled, and when Wingnut pushed the button the young fellow said, “All the way up.”

“I pushed the top floor,” Wingnut said testily.

“I mean your hands,” the young man said, producing a chrome-plated.32-caliber revolver. “Put them all the way up.”

They took him out on the tenth floor. They were efficient and very fast. While the hooker held the elevator doors open, her partner pushed Wingnut against the wall and had his wallet, wristwatch and flash money within thirty seconds. Then the partner found Wingnut’s handcuffs in the young cop’s back pocket.

“Are you a cop?” the hooker gasped.

“Yeah, I’m vice,” Wingnut said. “You’re under arrest.”

“You’re dead,” the young man said.

“You’re not under arrest,” said Wingnut.

“Get back in the elevator,” the young man commanded, but Wingnut said, “Hey, tell you what! You let me go and I’ll let you go!”

“I ain’t as stupid as you,” the young guy said, handcuffing both Wingnut’s wrists to the handrail in the elevator.

“Please don’t do that,” Wingnut said, as the elevator descended. “Just go ahead and run. I’ll give you a head start.”

“You already did,” the young guy said, before he and the whore got out, waved bye-bye and pushed the button that sent Wingnut to the penthouse.

The handcuff chain allowed him to reach the elevator panel all right. Wingnut mashed the emergency button with his freckled little nose, and when the hotel employees found him and called the police station for a spare handcuff key, Wingnut Bates decided that Orange County was full of hard luck.

He had a feeling he might still like a career in law enforcement, but maybe in a less populated, quieter sort of place. He heard they were looking for cops at a small department near Palm Springs. Wingnut met Sergeant Harry Bright who interviewed him and said that he had potential and seemed to be a good lad.

Ironically, it was yet another prank at the Mineral Springs police station that was to lead to a tiny break in the Jack Watson murder case.

There has never been a squad of cops anywhere that didn’t have to endure at least one prankster. Since Mineral Springs had nine cops, they were lucky to have only one. His name was Frank Zamelli and they called him Prankster Frank. He’d been a cop for eight years in the Bay area, and in some other life he was the guy who ran around the throne room in size seventeen pointed bootees slapping the duchess in the ass with a pig’s bladder. He was thirty-two years old, tall and wiry, and more lizard-eyed than Geraldine Ferraro’s old man. The other cops wished vaudeville would be resurrected so maybe he’d give up police work.

For one thing, he was bonkers over mace canisters. Prankster Frank’d mace anything. In the winter he’d mace the patrol cars, just inside the grill where the vent hoses are. Then when they’d turn on the heater on a cold night they’d be crying like their dog died before they realized what happened. He’d also mace their radio mikes. They didn’t know it until they picked it up to talk and their eyes started watering from the gas residue. Or he’d mace a helmet before a big inspection. That was a gas, all right. Standing there at attention with a helmet down over the nose and the eyes on fire. Prankster Frank Zamelli made lots of death wishes surface.

A variation on the mace was the bag-and-poopsicle routine where he’d scoop up a pile of warm dog crap with a bag and popsicle stick, and stash it up under the dashboard of a patrol car if the cops were dumb enough to leave it unlocked when he was within five miles. He just loved to hide out somewhere and watch two befuddled cops leap out of their car and sniff around each other like cocker spaniels after checking shoe bottoms.

Even civilian employees weren’t safe when Frank was in a prankster frenzy. There was a very buxom married secretary at his old station who was secretly dating the captain, and who spurned all Frank’s advances.

It was rumored that she was hosed down by the captain every time her old man flew down to L.A. on business, but she affected chastity and carried herself like Princess Di. Finally, when an overheated Prankster Frank wouldn’t take yes for an answer after he asked if she’d like him to stop asking her for dates, she said, “Listen, maybe you don’t appreciate subtlety. Let’s put it this way: I’ll date you when Jeane Kirkpatrick becomes a Playboy bunny.”

Then Frank was ordered by his sergeant to stop “pestering” the boss’s secretary. The word came from the captain himself who referred to Frank as “the wop cop.” The ethnic slur did it. They got on Prankster Frank’s list. But he couldn’t very well mace the Waspy bitch or the captain. What he could do was wait until she went home one night and attack the photo cube she displayed on her desk. It was full of pictures of her preppy nineteen-year-old daughter who was vying for Miss California and whom she treated like a nun with the holy stigmata. Prankster Frank slipped a picture of his own into the side of the cube that faced toward the squad room where several passing detectives later did a take and said, “Who’s that?”

“My daughter!” the secretary answered proudly until the third detective asked the same question. It gave her pause because they all knew very well whose pictures were in the cube. Then she turned it around and screamed.

Prankster Frank had inserted a shot he found in Hustler magazine, a beaver shot, a yawning beaver shot. In color.

When she ran into the captain’s office to demand the head of Prankster Frank, her boss and not-so-secret lover tried to calm her down by pointing out that she had no proof it was the dirty dago and it might be better to make no more of it for the moment. Until she pointed to the trophy table behind him and a portrait of his wife, Rosey, and their son, Buster, who was posing cheek to cheek with his doting mother on his tenth birthday. Except that the face in the picture no longer belonged to Buster. The captain’s snotty little kid now had the kisser of a local junkie with a Zulu hairdo. Buster looked like Rupert the Hype who looked like Leon Spinks after Larry Holmes beat the living shit out of him making him uglier than ever.

The thing that finished off Prankster Frank was a reign of terror at the county jail that was almost traced to him. It started when a drunk described him to his face in twenty-seven words ending with “guinea prick.” The drunk also started screaming about suing for false arrest and police brutality until Prankster Frank got a headache from all the motor-mouthing. He was going on vacation soon and didn’t want any court subpoenas, so instead of giving his own name at the county slammer as arresting officer, he impulsively listed his name as Officer U. F. Puck along with a bogus serial number.

The reign of terror was launched. For the next couple of weeks Prankster Frank disposed of seven slime-mouths by booking them drunk at the county jail, arrested by U. F. Puck. Prankster Frank then told a few other cops how easy it was to dispose of smart-mouth pukes who were “almost” drunk enough to book legitimately. Pretty soon there were lots of borderline drunks with very bad attitudes being booked by Officer U. F. Puck.

Then the jig was up. Especially since Officer Puck never showed up for trial and was described by outraged defendants as a tall white man, a short black man, a fat Mexican.

One defendant was absolutely certain that Officer Puck was Chinese-American and he ought to know, he said, because he was Chinese and they spoke the same dialect.

There was a big internal investigation over this one, which involved three police agencies. Prankster Frank Zamelli was ordered to take a polygraph exam but said he was insulted that his word as an officer and gentleman was being challenged, and he was sick of the damp climate in the Bay area, which was making his knee joints ache, and he was going south around Palm Springs where he was told people lived longer than goat herders in Abkhazia.

Six months later, Prankster Frank was working for Chief Paco Pedroza after Sergeant Harry Bright found Frank to be a good lad who might need extra supervision. Paco actually came to appreciate Frank’s tricky ways as long as they got results. For instance, one day the county sheriff’s deputies were trying to serve a search warrant on a Mineral Springs crank dealer, and they asked Paco if any of his cops knew the dealer’s M.O. They wanted to get in the house fast with their search warrant before the crystal got flushed and other evidence got destroyed.

“Noooooo problem,” said Prankster Frank, who knew that the crystal chemist had a restored 1965 Ford Mustang he loved more than ether. Thirty minutes later, the scruffiest-looking dope cop from the sheriffs squad was being “arrested” by Officer Zamelli who, in full uniform, was dragging the undercover cop down the street with his hands cuffed behind him, yelling loud enough to wake the neighborhood, most of whom were asleep by ten o’clock.

Prankster Frank made lots of noise when he stomped up on the porch of the two-story frame house with his “suspect” by the arm. He leaned on the bell until he heard a voice from the upstairs window say, “Yeah, whaddaya want?”

“It’s the police!” Prankster Frank yelled. “Somebody in this house own a Mustang?”

“What about it?” the man’s voice asked with some alarm.

“I caught this guy lifting the car radio. I think he busted in with a tire iron. The paint’s all scratched and the window’s busted and …”

The crank dealer slid down the banister. Prankster Frank heard two bumps and in ten seconds the “chemist” in his bare feet and bathrobe threw open the door yelling, “My Mustang? This fuckface tore up my vintage Mustang?”

While the crank dealer was being restrained from attacking the “prisoner,” all the deputies swooped in. The chemist found himself changing places with the little fuckface and soon sat bellowing in the same handcuffs while the dope cops strolled leisurely through the methamphetamine smorgasbord, scooping up drugs in both hands.

Paco Pedroza admired resourceful cops like Prankster Frank, but then, Frank never played tricks on his chief. Nor on the sergeants. First of all, he liked Sergeant Harry Bright too much, and second, he was scared shitless of Sergeant Coy Brickman who was not really mean but looked mean. Prankster Frank didn’t like guys who stared at you like they hadn’t blinked since 1969. He only played pranks on the other eight members of the Mineral Springs police force. One of his favorite victims was of course Wingnut Bates.

Wingnut was a bit heavier now and had matured during the two years he’d been in Mineral Springs. He liked almost everything here better than Orange County. Of course, he didn’t like the summers when the temperature shot up past 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And he didn’t like the animals.

Prankster Frank caught a raccoon on a prowler call after the little masked burglar had torn a hole in the roof of a house and gotten inside. He surreptitiously dumped the animal in Wingnut’s patrol car, which pissed off the raccoon real bad. The raccoon ate Wingnut’s uniform jacket. Wingnut endured it.

But there was an animal he could not endure: a snake. Rattlers, sidewinders, gopher snakes, it didn’t matter. He was scared of all snakes. He was even scared of pictures of snakes. When he’d get a snake call, there’d be no air between himself and the citizen, Wingnut being the one behind. Learning that, Prankster Frank went out and bought himself a four-foot rubber snake and rigged an elaborate booby trap in Wingnut’s locker. When Wingnut opened the locker after coming in from swing shift one Sunday night, the snake fell on his shoulder, sending poor Wingnut screaming out of the locker room, down the stairs and out the door of the station, scaring the crap out of the graveyard relief who figured Wingnut had found a bomb.

Wingnut Bates was still trembling when he arrived at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club that night. Though not an aggressive or violent young fellow, Wingnut Bates was looking for Prankster Frank Zamelli who was home in bed dreaming up his next one.

It had taken about thirty minutes after the Mineral Springs Police Department was formed for an entrepreneur to buy out Cactus Mike’s Bar and Grill and have himself a hot little cop saloon. J. Edgar Gomez, a retired highway patrolman, named his bar the Eleven Ninety-nine Club after the radio code used by most California lawmen to announce that a cop needs emergency help. To “decorate” the saloon, the ex-Chippie selected several icons. One, framed in gold leaf and illuminated with a painting light, was an eight-by-ten glossy of Clint Eastwood holding a.44 magnum beside his face. Another was of General George S. Patton hefting one of his automatics with the ivory grips. And on the only wall large enough to accommodate “art” he commissioned one of the drove of local alcoholics to paint a mural designed by J. Edgar Gomez himself. It was a miniature of Michael Jackson with his hair on fire, and Prince in his Purple Rain costume. Michael Jackson’s hair was being extinguished by amber rain supplied from above by a life-sized study of John Wayne in cowboy regalia pissing on the androgyny of today.

The ex-Chip tossed in a few obligatory wall mottoes for good measure. One said: “Unemployment is degrading. Give Mr. Ellis back his job”-which referred to the name used by the Canadian public hangmen who had gone into forced retirement when that nation placed a moratorium on the death penalty.

A second motto said: “Support the eternal flame. Flick your Bic for Jan Holstrom”-which reminded bar patrons of the pledge drive that enabled the Eleven Ninety-nine Club to send a gift of 154 Bic lighters to Soledad Prison for the use of Jan Holstrom, the inmate who had set fire to Charles Manson, almost killing him.

There were other notices hastily tacked up from time to time depending on the season. One sign over the bar said: “No trash sports allowed.” This one pointed to the latest craze for midget tossing. One of the bar’s best customers was a midget named Oleg Gridley who not only condoned being tossed from one end of the bar room to the other but actually encouraged it because some of the girls would invariably get into the tossing frenzy and he could cop a feel here and there.

The women’s rest room said: “Female mammals only.” In short, you needed hip boots to wade through the testosterone overflow, making the Eleven Ninety-nine Club a fairly typical cop’s watering hole.

Seated at the bar were about twelve cops from all over the valley, two groupies from No-Blood Alley who were starting to look twenty years younger at that time of night, and a trucker who was trying in vain to argue with J. Edgar Gomez that his latest Moral Majority wall motto had things in common with babies and bath water and should possibly be rewritten. It said: “Women wanting an abortion should be summarily executed. We’re pro life.”

Involved in the debate was O. A. Jones, who was still being closely monitored by Paco Pedroza who had not found grounds to fire him. There was the stopwatch bandit. There was the discovery of the Jack Watson death car. Everything he did was questionable, but somehow he was becoming a local legend.

Paco Pedroza said there hadn’t been such potential disaster in a desert since Mussolini took Ethiopia. Paco worried about having troops like Prankster Frank and Outta Ammo Jones and Choo Choo Chester, but at least they kept him from getting bored.

Choo Choo Chester Conklin was one of the last patrol cops hired by Paco Pedroza, and the only black man. Chester had been with the Coachella Police Department for five years and might have stayed a lot longer except that he was accused of sending special delivery parcels to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

They didn’t actually prove that Chester was the one sending parcels to the White House, but a railroad stakeout team caught him wrestling with a sleeping ragpicker’s body on the bed of a freight car. Chester claimed that he was trying to pull the wino out of the boxcar to take him to jail even though it was well known that town cops didn’t go around cleaning up for the Southern Pacific.

He really had a hard time of it when the railroad cops found an envelope tied around the ragpicker’s neck addressed to then White House Counsel Edwin Meese. The letter said, “I am truly needy. There really is hunger in America. Keep me and I will vote Republican.”

Also involved in the barroom debate was Beavertail Bigelow, who had been permitted in the saloon by J. Edgar Gomez only after swearing he hadn’t voted for the Democrats on November sixth as he’d been threatening to do. J. Edgar Gomez, like most ex-cops and cops in general, was a right-wing Republican as a result of street cynicism run rampant. He wanted the Eleven Ninety-nine Club to deliver 100 percent to Ronald Reagan and his party.

Beavertail was almost up to his Beefeater limit for this twenty-four-hour period and he was getting surly and ready to pick a fight. He started to badmouth the victorious Reagan-Bush ticket until J. Edgar Gomez, who was behind the bar rolling a cigar in his mouth and trying to doze standing up, opened one bloodshot eye and gave him a glare that said, “You’re only in here on a pass.”

Beavertail was halfway boiled, but he got the message. “Okay, then,” he said. “They’re all wimps and bitches and pussies and geezers!”

It was okay to put down Reagan and Bush if you included Mondale and Ferraro in the same breath. Then Beavertail looked across the bar at the only black guy in the place, Choo Choo Chester, and said, “I suppose you voted for Reagan. After all, you sent Edwin Meese all those …”

“Don’t start that shit!” J. Edgar Gomez warned, his eyebrows all spiky. “That rumor’s dead and we’re sick of it! Now drink your gin and don’t cause no trouble tonight!”

So the old desert rat and the young black cop just drank their drinks and pretended to ignore each other, but everyone figured that Beavertail wasn’t through with Choo Choo Chester who was one up on him for maybe being the guy who sent Beavertail on that bus ride to nowhere.

Choo Choo Chester then started picking an argument with J. Edgar Gomez about the jukebox. The young cops were always beefing with the saloonkeeper about his choice of records.

“I don’t see why we can’t have one freakin song that was written in this century!” Choo Choo Chester moaned. “I’m sick a Harry Babbitt and Snooky Lanson. I’m sick a Frank Sinatra singin ‘Set em up, Joe.’ ”

“Maybe you kids ain’t even capable a understanding songs like ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,’ ” the saloonkeeper sighed. “What’s gonna be the memory a your youth? ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’?”

“We gotta play somethin new,” Choo Choo Chester persisted. “Shit, I might as well be a telephone operator, goin through life with a fuckin headset glued to my ears!”

It was true. Four out of the twelve cops in the saloon were wearing headphones with their ghetto blasters sitting beside them.

“What’s wrong with Van Halen or Duran Duran?” O. A. Jones argued.

“No hard rockers,” J. Edgar Gomez said.

“Okay then, Elton John. Shit, he’s an old guy.”

“No soft rockers,” J. Edgar Gomez said.

“How about The Police then?” Choo Choo Chester asked. “How can a guy like you, who gave thirty years to the law, object to a rock band called The Police?”

“Don’t try to be cute,” J. Edgar Gomez said.

“Damn, Edgar, at least get one Hall and Oates side! They’re mellow!”

“They’re scumbag rockers,” said J. Edgar Gomez.

“I suppose even the Beatles ain’t old enough yet?”

“They started this shit,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “Shoulda depth-charged their fucking yellow submarine.”

And so forth. It was virtually hopeless, but the young cops protested every night. It was pops of the thirties, forties and fifties, and a little country. J. Edgar Gomez allowed Willie Nelson because the saloonkeeper figured that Willie was into the hippie-cowboy trash because he couldn’t handle middle age. J. Edgar could understand mid-life eccentricities all right. Yet he allowed Willie Nelson’s music only after the singer recorded Stardust and did almost as good a job as Hoagy Carmichael himself.

“What’s wrong with you?” O. A. Jones said to Wingnut Bates when the jug-eared young cop came shuddering into the bar and threw his ten-dollar bill on the bar with a trembling hand.

“N-n-nothin,” said Wingnut Bates. “Except I’m gonna kill Frank Zamelli.”

“Oh yeah, when?”

“Tomorrow. Tonight if he comes in.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s been pretty dull around here.”

“I’m gonna kill him. G-g-g-g-gimme a double margarita, Edgar.”

“What’d Prankster Frank do this time?” O. A. Jones asked Wingnut as he eyed a sagging mid-lifer from No-Blood Alley who’d look like a $6,000 facelift by 1:00 A.M.

“A sn-sn-snake!” Wingnut cried.

“He put a snake in your car?”

“My l-l-l-locker,” Wingnut said.

“That’s going too far,” O. A. Jones said. “Even for Prankster Frank. Was it a king snake? Don’t tell me it was a rattler! I wouldn’t believe that!”

“R-r-r-rubber,” Wingnut Bates said, grabbing the margarita in both hands and gulping half of it down.

“Oooooooh, rubber! Well, that ain’t too bad, Wingnut. That ain’t so bad.”

“I b-b-believe I’m gonna kill him,” Wingnut said. “Jesus, I’m st-st-stuttering!”

“You sure are. Finish your drink, maybe you’ll calm down.”

“I believe!” Wingnut cried. “I believe I’m g-g-gonna …”

“What’s that?” O. A. Jones cried out.

“Keep it down!” J. Edgar growled. “Only freaking rest I get around here is when I doze standing up. Like a freaking parakeet.”

“I believe!” O. A. Jones said, running over to the jukebox, which was playing Green Eyes by Helen O’Connell. “I believe! Hey, Edgar, ain’t that a song from your time? Ain’t that one you used to have on this box?”

“What?”

“ ‘I Believe’! How’s it go?”

Without removing his cigar or opening his eyes, J. Edgar Gomez sang, “ ‘I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower groooooows!’ ”

“Yeah, that’s it!” O. A. Jones said.

“ ‘I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle gloooows.’ ”

“Okay, enough!” O. A. Jones said. “That’s it! Wingnut, that’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“The song I thought I heard the killer singing in the desert when I found that Watson kid fried in his car!”

“You said it was ‘Pretend.’ ”

“ ‘Pretend you’re happy when you’re bluuuuuue,’ ” J. Edgar Gomez suddenly sang. “I just loved Nat King Cole.”

“I thought it was ‘Pretend,’ ” said O. A. Jones, “but the song never did sound right when the Palm Springs dicks played it for me. I mean, I thought I heard the guy singing something about pretending. Now I think it was ‘I Believe.’ Yeah! I think that’s it!”

“That ain’t nothing like ‘Pretend,’ ” J. Edgar Gomez said, finally opening his eyes. “You been drinking too much vodka. I told you whiskey’s better for your head.”

“I know it was something about ‘believe,’ ” O. A. Jones said, wrinkling his brow.

“I can’t believe this is so important,” J. Edgar Gomez said. “And I wish you’d keep your voice quieter. Beavertail’s nodding off. Might get by without a fight tonight.”

“ ‘I Believe,’ ” O. A. Jones said. “Tomorrow I’m calling the Palm Springs dicks. I’m the only lead to the killer!”

“That don’t seem like much of a clue to me,” J. Edgar Gomez said, closing his eyes again.

“I’m calling them tomorrow,” O. A. Jones said.

“I’m killing Prankster Frank Zamelli tomorrow,” Wingnut Bates said.