Joseph Wambaugh - The Secrets of Harry Bright

“Yeah, I want a story,” Sidney Blackpool said hoarsely. “A story he’d buy for a lot of money.”

“Now, that’s different,” Coy Brickman said, riveting Sidney Blackpool with his gray eyes. “I got lots of imagination. Let’s see, how about this: the Watson kid drove daddy’s Rolls up the canyon to maybe score some crank. You want another reason, I’m lost. I can’t think of another reason for him to be up there.”

“So far so good,” Otto said.

“It’s a treacherous drive up there. Most guys do it on bikes or in off-road vehicles. If you take a wrong turn you end up on the windy side of the canyon. It blows like a hurricane over there and the road narrows to nothing. When you see that, you got a chance to back up and turn around, but it’d be real tricky to do in a big Rolls-Royce. I think it’d be awful easy to slip on over the canyon and fall maybe eighty or a hundred feet down on the rocks by the tamarisk trees. And those trees could hide anything unless someone happened by.”

“So far old man Watson might buy that much,” Otto said.

“Well, for fifty grand I’d have to spin a tall tale,” Coy Brickman said. “How about one about this old cop who gets drunk out there in the canyons. Maybe a cop that lives in a place full of photos of what he’s lost. Ever know a guy that’s lost everything, Blackpool?”

“Let’s make this short,” Otto said.

“Okay,” said Coy Brickman. “Well, you could say there’s this old cop who’s pretty close to his pension and he’s up there in the canyon doing what he does. Getting drunk and playing a uke and singing songs like ‘Make Believe’ or other oldies. He hears a crashing noise. And then he sees a flash of fire. It shoots up in the air and then settles down when the wind blows it against the rocks.

“Maybe he thinks it’s a prospector, or a camper with a blown butane stove. He drops the uke and runs to the trunk of his patrol unit and grabs a fire extinguisher and heads toward that flame back behind the canyon wall, hoping nobody got hurt. Of course, a forty-nine-year-old cop with a skin full of hooch and only months away from a stroke and a heart attack wouldn’t be in very good shape to begin with. And by the time he picks his way through the rocks with his flashlight, he’s all worn out. Then he comes on it. The wrecked car. It’s burning.

“He thought it was only the wind howling at first but he gets close as he can, which is pretty close because the wind’s blowing the flames away from him and into the rocky wall. He hears it and knows it’s not the wind. Someone’s screaming.

“He runs up to the car but it’s almost engulfed, and his little fire extinguisher is useless and he sees a young guy pinned underneath. The kid’s enveloped in gasoline fire from his waist down and the fire’s licking up and the kid sees him and throws out his arms and starts screaming like a child for his daddy. But the wind shifts and the fire keeps licking around and the car’s all consumed but the kid won’t stop screaming and maybe the face in the fire looks like a face he once found on the ground … but that’s another story. Anyway, the old drunk, the sick crazy drunk cop, he pulls out his piece and …”

Otto Stringer became aware he wasn’t breathing when his chest heaved. He looked at his partner who only stared. “Go on, Brickman,” Sidney Blackpool said.

“Well, for a fifty-grand fairy tale let’s say he fired one, two, three rounds at that doomed boy. Let’s say he didn’t even know if a slug hit the kid or if the kid passed out. But at least the boy slumped down into the flames and stopped screaming. Then let’s say the sick crazy drunk old cop ran back to his unit and tossed the fire extinguisher in and drove off without thinking of his ukulele and went straight to another cop’s house and got him out of bed and told him more or less what happened.

“Let’s say the other cop thought about it very calmly and made a few decisions. Let’s say he took the old drunk home and put him to bed and covered for him with a story that he got sick and had to go home. Let’s say the friend thought a whole lot about the old drunk only having a short way to go for his pension. And thought about how then the drunk could live whatever years he had left with a little peace and dignity. Let’s say when the friend put the old drunk to bed he even took a look around a room like this. At all the pictures. At a make-believe house.

Maybe after enough booze and memories and sickness it did become an enchanted cottage for the old drunk. Maybe the friend just said, fuck it, this guy’s had enough .”

“So there never was a murder in your fifty-grand story!” Otto said, looking at his partner. “That’s why you couldn’t work it out, Sidney. There never was a murder!”

“Not in my story,” Coy Brickman said. “I don’t know how Watson’d like that, but I can’t come up with anything more believable for you. Yet even without a murder there was a crime of sorts: voluntary manslaughter? Maybe involuntary manslaughter, given all the circumstances. Well, since mercy killing isn’t even legal for doctors, the old drunk cop in my story would be in some serious trouble. They just don’t give pensions for mercy killing, far as I know. In fact, you can bet the D.A.’d say that if he wasn’t drunk, there were other courses of action open to him. So if he didn’t get jail time he’d get fired and lose his pension and spend the rest of his life living on handouts and eating dog food. That’s why his buddy stepped in.

“Anyway, that’s how I’d tell it. So the friend cleaned and reloaded the drunk’s gun and went back to the canyon the next day as soon as he realized the uke was lost. A uke that could maybe be traced. And he took a peek at the burned car and found two bullet holes in the windshield where the old drunk’d missed. So he knocked the glass out and hoped the drunk hadn’t even hit the kid who was torched like a matchstick. The buddy hoped the kid had burned to death. But then the buddy never had the compassion for his fellowman that the drunk had.

“But the old drunk didn’t have compassion for himself, and after he got sober he wanted to step right up and tell what happened. Only now the tables were turned. His friend had already covered for him and obliterated evidence of the gunshots. In fact, his friend had aided and abetted, and might be called an accessory if there was a manslaughter rap to face. So the friend persuaded the old drunk that they had to keep mum now, for the buddy’s sake if not for the drunk’s. And that’s the way it ended.

“In a way, something happened to their friendship after that. The old drunk, who had more than enough heartbreak in his miserable life, now had a big load of guilt to carry every time he thought of the parents not knowing what really happened to their dead boy. He was always thinking of how the burned corpse was out there in the canyon for two days with the animals.

“So maybe the drunk’s buddy, with all those good intentions that lead people straight to hell, had actually increased the load the old drunk was already carrying in life. And which was leading straight to a monster headache and a limp right arm and a bed where he ended up diapered and drooling like a baby.”

And now Coy Brickman was no longer looking at them with unblinking eyes. He was blinking quite a bit because his eyes were damp.

“That’s the story I’d tell for fifty grand. If I wanted fifty grand as bad as you guys must want it. But of course this is all a make-believe story so maybe Watson wouldn’t think it was worth fifty cents. Maybe you shouldn’t ever tell such a silly story to anyone because you’d sure look dumb trying to prove a single bit of it, wouldn’t you?”