Joseph Wambaugh - The Secrets of Harry Bright

Coy Brickman, at forty-one, was ten years younger than Paco, several inches taller, and looked taller yet in his blue uniform.

“They think a pair a big town cops can clear a no-leads seventeen-month-old case?” Coy Brickman tore disgustedly at a meatball sandwich he’d got at the town’s only deli, washing it down with a quart of orange juice.

Paco settled back, letting the desert rays have at his bronze belly and said, “Wonder if they’ll send any a the dicks I used to know?”

“You don’t clear a no-leads, seventeen-month-old case very often,” Coy Brickman repeated.

“So?” Paco shrugged, closing his eyes. “They can have a week in a Palm Springs spa getting a facial, a body wrap and a blowjob. Speakin a which, what’s the wind look like?”

“Therapeutic breeze,” Coy Brickman said, watching the dust devils and whirlwinds forming in the valley.

Paco Pedroza sighed and said, “A breeze in this freaking town could blow the nuts off a ground squirrel. Bring me a snack next time ya drive by Humberto’s.”

“Three, four chicken tacos okay?”

“Make it four,” the chief mumbled, never opening his eyes. “ With frijoles. One thing about this freaking wind. You learn to fart silently and nobody ever knows.”

And while Paco dozed and his sergeant ate an early supper of ersatz meatballs on the roof of the police station, a Mineral Springs wino named Beavertail Bigelow was 86’d from a gin mill for picking a fight. A grimy wrinkled desert rat who looked as though he’d lurched into town with his bedroll lashed to a double-parked donkey, Beavertail drank a fifth of gin, they said, every day it didn’t snow in town, and never went home when the cops told him to, and respected authority about like Sacco and Vanzetti.

The cops wished that some night when he was sleeping it off on a table at the oasis picnic ground, a flash flood would wash the son of a bitch clear to Indio. But he was a true desert rat. He hated people, understood hostile environments and could survive fifty megatons at ground zero.

Beavertail Bigelow was sixty years old, weighed less than 130 pounds, was chinless and watery-eyed, and was described as having shoulders like Reagan-Nancy that is. He got his sobriquet from the flat oval cactus of the same name that proliferated in the Coachella Valley, a species that looked harmless but bore minute barbed hairlike spines. The saying went, “You think the little wimp’s spineless till you press him.”

As darkness fell so did Beavertail Bigelow, onto his favorite table at the oasis picnic ground. He was ten fathoms deep in a Beefeater slumber when a tall dark figure hoisted him up and hauled his carcass toward a waiting car, which roared toward the highway to Twentynine Palms.

There was a diner on that highway where a bus driver made regular rest stops and lots of passes at a counter waitress. The unattended bus was parked in the light by the road sign, but no one saw the dark-clad figure carrying his shabby bundle. Beavertail Bigelow was found thirty minutes later on the back seat of the bus when his snoring woke two marines on their way to their base. He got kicked off the bus, minus his cowboy hat, and had to hitchhike back to Mineral Springs, therefore adding bus drivers to the list of things he hated.

By the time Beavertail reached the outskirts of Mineral Springs the rising sun was smacking him in the eyes. His cerebellum was fogged by gin fumes and his soggy cortex was giving conflicting orders to his ravaged little body. All those millions of marinated brain cells were firing aimlessly. Beavertail Bigelow was parched and confused.

He decided to cut across a mile of desert directly to the oasis picnic ground where there was a water fountain piped from a natural spring. He kept his mouth clamped shut and breathed through his nose to keep the mucous membranes moist, but his narrow skull was already heating up. The sun was just above the horizon but soaring fast, and throwing purples and pinks and crimsons and blues across the Santa Rosa Mountains.

Beavertail realized that the gin was accelerating dehydration like crazy. The marrow in his bones was sizzling. Might as well stick a blow dryer in his mouth as drink a fifth of gin and start trucking across the desert, he thought. Then he decided that if he had lots of money like Johnny Cash and Liz Taylor and Liza Minnelli and all the other rich cocksuckers that came to the desert to get cured at the Eisenhower de-tox clinic, he wouldn’t be out here at the crack of dawn staggering around. He was only in this goddamn pickle because he was poor.

Beavertail was now about tired enough to accept help even from a cop if he spotted one, but he figured they were all sleeping in their patrol cars somewhere, the lazy pricks. He had to pull himself together and take a breather, so he wobbled toward a honeypod mesquite, the shade tree of the desert. It was about thirty feet tall, a dramatic species with rounded crown and rough-textured bark.

He scared a roadrunner who leaped from behind a spray of desert lavender and zoomed off, his topknot fluttering. The scented flowers and strong mint aroma attracted swarms of bees, but this one was beeless at the moment so Beavertail squatted beside it, careful not to disturb a large jumping cholla. The slightest touch of the cactus’ joints will shoot you full of barbs, yet birds nest in it. Another desert mystery.

As Beavertail squatted like a Morongo Indian, getting crankier by the minute, he spotted a banded gecko lizard doing a few pushups on a little sand drift. The gecko shot Beavertail Bigelow a mean little glare and tossed off about five more pushups for effect. The “pushup” movement is thought to be a display of territorial dominance, and this four-inch reptile was so full of anxiety he was into his third set.

Suddenly, the lizard took a bluff step toward Beavertail Bigelow and squeezed out three more pushups, though by now his little tongue was lolling from exhaustion and his eyes were sliding back in his skull.

Beavertail got very curious. The desert rat creaked to his feet and braced the lizard like a gunslinger. “You ain’t no fringe-toed, you little cocksucker,” Beavertail told the gecko. “I can kick your ass and who cares?”

With that, Beavertail Bigelow tried to give the gecko a swift kick, but since his brain cells were firing at random he only kicked desert air. Beavertail sailed over the sand drift, landing flat on his bony spine. He let out a yelp and was answered by a musical plink. He thought at first that the sound was a spinal disk blowing, so he gingerly pulled himself to a sitting position.

He figured the little cocksucker lizard had jammed on home until he saw what the lizard had been guarding. The asshole was home! He’d been living inside his treasure, which was now the property of Beavertail Bigelow by virtue of superior size. It was a funny-looking ukulele.

Beavertail picked it up, dusted it off and saw that it was in one piece. How the hell did it get here? Fell off a passing truck probably. He could clean it up and take it to a pawnshop he knew in Cathedral City, where there were no cathedrals but lots of secondhand joints and so many gay bars that desert barflies would say, “Are you married, fella, or do you live in Cathedral City?”

When at a later time, lawmen would reflect upon how a notorious Palm Springs murder case was methodically deciphered by seemingly random discoveries, they would find undeniable that a growing evidence chain was forged by a very macho lizard.

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.