Joseph Wambaugh: The Secrets of Harry Bright

“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.

“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” Chief Paco Pedroza once said to a gathering of all the heads of law enforcement in the Coachella Valley. “We’ll take some a the third-round draft picks you can’t use but don’t give us your whodunits! I got one detective, and far as crime labs go, the only labs around Mineral Springs cause crime. I mean the speed labs operated by the outlaw bikers. So if your whodunits leech on into Mineral Springs, just be ready to handle them without too much help from my nine-person work force.”

Paco Pedroza never had any trouble with whodunits from Palm Springs or anywhere else until the disappearance of Jack Watson back in 1983. Victor Watson’s residence was in the old Las Palmas section of Palm Springs, not far from homes formerly owned by Hollywood legends. Now the desert’s best addresses are moving down the valley, but in the old days Las Palmas was the center of a posh bedroom community. The homes are large and old, concealed by walls and nearly impenetrable oleander. Most of the streets circle mazelike, and many a new cop in town has gotten lost chasing wily local kids around the Las Palmas neighborhoods.

The residents of Las Palmas, particularly the older residents, seldom go shopping. Groceries and other essentials are brought in by delivery vans. In fact, after Jack Watson’s disappearance, a delivery boy with a burglary record was questioned for three hours at the Palm Springs Police Department.

On the second day of Jack Watson’s disappearance, even before the victim’s terrified parents flew into the Palm Springs airport from Los Angeles by private jet, the police had given the Las Palmas residence a pretty good going over. In the beginning they thought the young man might’ve been kidnapped from his bedroom while sleeping. The bed was unmade, the burglar alarm was not set and a sliding door in the guest bedroom wasn’t entirely closed.

Victor Watson’s home was so well alarmed that he even had a dozen point-to-point infrareds on the outside. They cost $1,000 a pair and were mounted high up on the fence that enclosed the property. They were designed to detect climbers, but they were not wired into recording channels like the inside alarm. The outside infrared system would ring only at the residence, alerting the Watsons or neighbors or passing patrol cars. The reason they could not transmit by radio wave or telephone is that there were too many false alarms. Birds, animals, a falling leaf could trigger the system.

The infrared had a transmitter and receiver on one end of an invisible beam that traveled a straight line, hitting a mirror and bouncing back, striking the receiver precisely. It was remotely possible that someone with a great deal of training and practice could interrupt the beam with another mirror if it could be so finely and instantly adjusted that the beam came back precisely to the receiver. James Bond could do it, they decided, but probably no thug in Palm Springs.

There were lots of false trails taken by the police and F.B.I. during those first days, while Victor Watson hovered over the scene, cordless phone in hand, experiencing for the first time the impotence of the crime victim. He received the telephone call at 6:00 P.M. of the second day. It was from a woman who said that Jack Watson was being held “close by in the desert” and to await instructions. Of course “close by” in open desert could mean anywhere within five hundred square miles. Victor Watson thought he heard the sound of air brakes in the background and cars whizzing by at high speed. It was the only clue except that an elderly neighbor had seen a red pickup truck turn around in the Watson driveway the day before. It may have meant nothing, but it was all they had.

A telephone call from Palm Springs P.D. to Mineral Springs P.D. was made at 7:00 P.M. when Chief Paco Pedroza was home mopping up five thousand calories and neither of his sergeants was in the station. Unfortunately for Paco, the cop who was in the station that night was Officer Oscar Albert Jones, a twenty-four-year-old former surfer who’d worked a year for the Laguna Beach P.D. and a year for the Palm Springs P.D. before he felt it was wise to move on. While still with the Palm Springs police, O. A. Jones spent most of his time in Whitewater dove country blazing away with his 9mm automatic at doves and jackrabbits who were perfectly safe in that O. A. Jones couldn’t have hit them with a shotgun. Still, he’d shoot up a box of reloads nearly every night. Once he’d gotten so carried away he shot up every silver-tipped hollow point he had and was caught bulletless by a sergeant, after which O. A. Jones became known as Outta Ammo Jones.

On the night that encouraged O. A. Jones to resign from Palm Springs P.D. and get picked up on waivers by Mineral Springs, he was patrolling Indian Avenue and happened to spot a drunk staggering across the street against the red light. O. A. Jones followed the drunk, who wore shorts and a tank top and was shuffling north on the sidewalk.

When O. A. Jones got abreast of the guy, he saw that it wasn’t a drunk at all. It was Hiram Murphy, eldest son of Moms Murphy, boss of a clan that, Gypsy-style, traveled all over the desert valley pulling pigeon drops on the many retirees, stealing their life savings in confidence scams and using the money to buy speed to slam in their arms. In fact, the narcs had found fresh tracks on the arms of Moms’ youngest son, Rudolph. He was nineteen but had the mind of a six-year-old, and his brothers shot him up not with crank but heroin since it kept him quieter. That was the kind of family Moms Murphy shepherded, so O. A. Jones was delighted to see Moms’ oldest boy, Hiram, in a state of stagger from an overload of crystal and bar whiskey.

Hiram had been in a gay bar trying to expand the family business to include fruit-rolling. Except that he was so ugly he couldn’t score. He had eyes and ears like a bat and he smelled like a ruptured appendix.

“Hello, cretin,” O. A. Jones said, rolling up beside Hiram Murphy in his patrol car. “You’re too loaded to walk. Let’s ride.”

Hiram Murphy was as surly and mean as usual, but he was also a coward. He wouldn’t pick a fight with anybody, let alone a strapping young cop like O. A. Jones, unless he had at least one brother lying in wait with a claw hammer. He mumbled a few “pricks” and “motherfuckers” under his breath, but got in the backseat of the police car, his hands cuffed behind him.

While driving to the station, the blond cop gave Hiram Murphy a “screen test” which Hiram didn’t like at all. The former surfer whispered something that Hiram didn’t hear, and when Hiram said, “What’s that?” the young cop turned in profile as he drove and whispered it in a slightly louder voice. But it was still unintelligible to the cranked-out thug.