Joseph Wambaugh: The Secrets of Harry Bright

It appeared that absolutely nothing could halt the country club and resort developers. Those big cat tractors would challenge Godzilla, they said. But one of Godzilla’s little cousins slowed them down a bit. Apparently, certain portions of the Coachella Valley provide the last chance for a tiny endangered creature called the fringe-toed lizard. He’s an unremarkable little fellow with overlapping eyelids, fat belly and snowshoe scales for sand dwelling. Yet he has become the environmentalists’ best hope for slowing the momentum that Hollywood started so long ago. But some of the richest and most famous people on earth own real estate in the fringe-toed lizard’s bailiwick, so gamblers aren’t betting much on the little reptile.

Today there are at least fifty golf courses in the Coachella Valley and over two hundred hotels, and the low humidity condition in the desert has been forever altered by colossal raids on the underground water table.

But there are parts of the valley that aren’t amenable to raids by big cat tractors. One of them is the little town of Mineral Springs, about ten miles out of Palm Springs. The reason is simple: wind. Desert wind that could drive ten thousand wind turbines. The Mineral Springs Chamber of Commerce calls the winds “therapeutic breezes.” The residents call them gale force.

There’s little sand left, the residents say. It’s been blown clear to the Salton Sea. That wind can make it rain pebbles and stones like a desert hailstorm. Cars left with windows open need to be pickaxed, they say.

But in 1978 the good people of Mineral Springs decided that wind or no wind they wanted some of the tourist bucks from their neighbors on the other side of the valley. After all, their mineral water spouting from the ground at 180 degrees Fahrenheit was pure, and didn’t smell like rotten eggs as does most mineral water. In fact, it was so clean that they wanted a federal grant to study the phenomenon of odorless hot mineral water, until it was pointed out that the smell is probably blown away before it can reach the nose.

The townsfolk decided that if their small city was going to be taken seriously it needed among other things its own police force, so they decided to take applications for a chief of police and eventually settled on a fourteen-year veteran of the county sheriffs office. Paco Pedroza had also been a sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department for nine years prior to that, and had moved to a desert climate hoping to arrest his daughter’s chronic bronchitis.

The town of Mineral Springs thought it could get by with a three-man police force until its new chief pointed out a few territorial problems. Mineral Springs, being remote, yet easily accessible to the rich desert resorts, was the home of more chemists than Cal Tech, but they were all amateurs. The lonely windblown desert canyons were full of Cobras, an outlaw motorcycle gang that made its living by brewing vats of methamphetamine. If there was an ideal place for speed labs this was it. The ether smell of “crank” or “crystal” was blown halfway to Indio the second it escaped the lab. There was no danger of cops literally nosing their way into a lab as in ordinary neighborhoods. So there were a lot of Harley hogs and chopper bikes in or about the town, and they did more business than the Rotary Club.

In addition to the crank labs, Mineral Springs, with its low-cost housing, was also an ideal spot for most of the meat eaters who flock to rich resort communities to feed on tourists. It had two halfway houses and a de-tox center for the ex-cons and “reformed” dopers and alcoholics of the Coachella Valley. The only mansion in town had been built by a pimp who ran thirteen girls into Palm Springs during the height of the season to work the hotels. An early reputation for a laissez-faire life-style also brought a nudist colony, and the nudist colony brought hordes of hang gliders, which often crashed in the treacherous winds. It was not an easy town for cops in that the ex-cons, bikers, crank dealers, Palm Springs burglars, nudists, robbers and pimps, horny kite pilots, dopers and drunks didn’t necessarily want a police force of any kind.

Paco Pedroza needed savvy cops, and they had to be the right kind to make it in these parts, being ten miles from the closest police jurisdiction where there might be help available.

He gave each cop he hired over the years the same admonition: “I gotta have people with street smarts and moxie but they also gotta have somethin more important: diplomacy. When you’re out there all alone and no help on the horizon you gotta be able to talk people into doing it your way. Remember one thing: out here you ain’t got no ‘or else’ at your disposal.”

And Paco gave each cop he hired (except the lone female, Ruth Kosko) the same warning: “I won’t hassle you about the weapons you carry. We got M-fourteens in your car with a clip a thirty that you can fire in three round bursts. You can carry forty-four magnums, or forty-fives with as hot a load as they can stand. You can carry nine millimeters cocked and locked, if you need more rounds. You can wear a Whammo wrist rocket or you can stash a backup derringer up your ass if it makes you feel better. I ain’t gonna hassle you about the iron you carry even if it looks offensive. And there ain’t much of a dress code. I won’t worry about a shoeshine since the sun’ll melt it off anyway. I won’t worry if you catch a few winks sometimes on a graveyard shift if you got to. I have just a few rules for my cops: no drugs and no thieves at no time. And no booze on the job. And no aberrant sexual behavior inside the city limits with anybody under the age a forty even when you’re off duty. And that’s about it, far as rules.”

The last one was because the 150 single-parent divorcees and widows who lived in the mobile-home park (which the citizens called Mid-Life Junction) were driving the chief bughouse. They came every month to the city-council meeting with a ten-page list of what was wrong with the town and figured that the police chief was responsible for most of it. Paco Pedroza, who admitted to being a sexist pig, figured that all those waitresses and manicurists and hairdressers who lived in Mineral Springs but commuted to jobs in the resort towns were suffering from the fact that available women greatly outnumbered men except during the height of the tourist season when the conventions hit the desert. So he encouraged his cops to do “P.R. work” at Mid-Life Junction by attending their coffee klatches. But his cops were mostly young dudes, and the burnouts at Mid-Life Junction looked to them even older than they were. After the press began calling a particularly dangerous strip of desert highway “Blood Alley,” the cops started calling Mid-Life Junction “No-Blood Alley.”

When Paco Pedroza got the call from Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department informing him of a possible hot new lead in a cold but notorious desert murder case that had touched the town of Mineral Springs, he promised total cooperation to the boys from his old alma mater. Then he hung up and posted a notice to his eight man and one woman police force that they would be receiving guests from planet Hollywood, after which he had his secretary and clerk, Annie Paskewicz, draw a picture of a coiled desert sidewinder with a caption that said: “We don’t give a shit how they do it in L.A.,” which he attached to his incoming file basket.

Paco Pedroza dragged his overweight body up the steps to the roof of the police station/city hall/jailhouse, stripped off his mustard-yellow aloha shirt and groaned at the sight of his gelatinous pecs which seemed to fall a quarter of an inch a year.

“I oughtta have our Hollywood guests bring me something black and lacy and big from Frederick’s,” Paco groaned to his sergeant. Then Paco squeezed one of his hairy breasts, dropped into a battered lawn chair and said, “That’s it . I’m way past a training bra. No more burritos for this Mexican.”