The Secrets of Harry Bright (26 page)

"You oughtta clean up your act, Oleg," Ruth advised, as boozy as the midget. "You get drunk'n you always start talking like a disgusting scum-sucking little creep. That's why Portia Cassidy hates your disgusting little guts."

"I just don't understand the female sex," Oleg moaned. "I do everything for women and I can't get love!"

"So get rid of your collection of revolting sex aids you're always bragging about," said Anemic Annie.

"I'd do almost anything," said Oleg Gridley. "I wouldn'
t g
ive up my genuine oak chastity belt with the glory hole drilled in it. That's an antique!"

"Lemme think about your problem," Ruth the Sleuth said, tapping on the glass with her pencil. Then she looked behind the bar, made a sleuthlike note or two, and grinned at the midget.

"Elementary, my dear Oleg," she said. "I can help you score with Portia Cassidy."

"You can, Ruth?" the midget cried. "Oh, I'd be so happy! I'd do anything for you! I'd even put you in the Wamsutta wonderland of my little trundle bed! I'd show you my blow-up donkey with the life-size . . ."

"Knock that shit off, Oleg!" Ruth barked. "That's your problem, you rotten little slime bucket!"

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. So what can you do for me?" Well,, Ruth said, "you got only one thing going for you, far as I can see."

"What's that? My auto-parts store? I made fifty grand last year."

"Okay, you got two things going for you. You're rich and you're pretty cute-looking."

am?"

"Yeah, you're pretty frigging cute," Anemic Annie also had to admit, and now she was slurring as badly as Ruth the Sleuth.

"Gee, Annie, I only do the deed of darkness with real big girls," Oleg apologized. "But what's a little fellatio among friends. Can you put your feet behind your ears?"

"Here's my plan, you maggot-mouth," Ruth interrupted, looking behind the bar at the eight-string ukulele that Ruben the bartender had propped up by the cash register. "That uke gives me an idea."

"What's the idea, Ruth?" Oleg cried. "Stop teasin
g m
e!"

"We're gonna change your act. What kinda clothes you got at home? Annie, you can help. We're gonna need to borrow a hairpiece from Edna's Salon before she closes:, We're gonna make Oleg into somebody Portia can't resist.

"We are?" the midget squealed in delight.

And though she could never have guessed it, Rut
h t
he Sleuth had taken a significant step toward her consuming ambition of solving a whodunit homicide.

By the time Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer got to the Eleven Ninety-nine Club, the walls were starting to vibrate. It sounded like someone was lobbing mortars from the top of the mesa and they were landing short, thumping steadily.

"Must be payday," Otto observed. "Maybe we'll get lucky and J. Edgar won't have no chili left."

When they got inside, Wingnut Bates was standing at the bar hoisting his third margarita, complaining about a citizen who was threatening to sue him.

"She said she's suing me and the city for eighty million dollars!" Wingnut wailed. "I shot her dog in the foot is all. Just as he came to the end of his chain which I didn't see. All I saw was teeth that don't let go till you cut the head ofd"

"I know that broad," Nathan Hale Wilson commiserated. "She's one a those loonies from the Animal Liberation Front. Brought a stray inta the station and says, `What'll you do with this poor little thing, Officer!' 'Grind it up and feed it to the other dogs,' I says. She threatened to sue me, for chrissake!"

"That's what police work's come to," J. Edgar Gomez observed. "Every time a cop cranks on the cuffs too tight some guy shows up in court with a surgical collar, a body cast, and F. Lee Bailey."

"We don't get paid enough to put up with lawsuits on top a everything else," Maynard Rivas groused. "If I was the right brand a Indian I'd walk away from this shit in a minute. If I was an Agua Caliente I'd drive a Ferrari instead of a five-year-old Ford pickup with a transmission whinyer than John McEnroe."

"I hate poor-mouthing! Gimme your phone number so I can call in a pledge!" yelled Beavertail Bigelow from his seat by the jukebox, causing all the cops to glare at the desert rat for his heartless ways.

"Least police work's steady and gives you a regular paycheck,"
O. A.
Jones said, pissing off everybody fo
r l
ooking on the bright side. "I know a cop in Orange County quit to become a movie star and doesn't make five hundred bucks a year. He'll spend his old age broke and senile, yodeling his heart out like Johnny Weissmuller in the actors' rest home."

"You hear about Selma Mobley, that bubble-assed female cop in Palm Springs?" Nathan Hale Wilson asked. She s marrying her lieutenant."

"I just love cop weddings," Prankster Frank observed. "They're about as safe as a San Francisco bathhouse."

"Oughtta give them his-and-hers saps for those special family disputes," said
O. A.
Jones.

"Well, they're both cops," Pigasus, the sheriff's chopper pilot, noted. "They oughtta understand each other."

"Like Snoopy and Cujo're both dogs," said Dustin Hoffman, the fingerprint man. "He's Snoopy, the poor fucker."

Sidney Blackpool looked around the bar and at first the only black man he saw was Choo Choo Chester. He was making a serious move on a masseuse from a hotel in Rancho Mirage, but she wasn't treating his complaints about his wife with too much sympathy.

"So how'd you meet your wife?" the girl asked.

"I bought a couple dances with her," Chester whined. "It was all a mistake!"

"You gonna dump her or what?"

"I can't," Chester moaned. "She's expecting a kid in three months!"

"Really, honey?" the masseuse said. "Is it yours?"

Hoping he might have a chance to steal the masseuse right out from under Chester, Prankster Frank sidled up on her left side and whispered, "Baby, you got a body any eighteen-year-old would want."

"Yeah," said the sulky masseuse. "So send me an eighteen-year-old and maybe I'll loan it to him;,"

"You're about as exciting as a wet dream, Prankster Frank sneered, moving back down the bar to greene
r p
astures.

"Don't plan to end up in my diary, funnel-face," sai
d t
he masseuse.

J. Edgar Gomez tried to avert a brawl by yelling, "Who wants another round? I'm extending happy hour fifteen minutes!" It brought a chorus of cheers and hoorahs. When people started getting surly, J. Edgar knew to ease them into the next stage.

Sidney Blackpool started searching for another black face, one that rested on a much bigger body. Then he saw him, away from the cops, on the side of the saloon occupied by civilians. He was two tables from Beavertail Bigelow. He was alone. It was the president of the local chapter of Cobras, Billy Hightower.

Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer both ordered a drink and a bowl of J. Edgar's infamous chili, and this time there was nothing still alive in the bowl. They could have had a table alone near the John Wayne mural, but walked to the side of the saloon where Billy Hightower sat nursing a double vodka, silently watching the revelry.

"Can we join you?" Sidney Blackpool asked.

Billy Hightower studied both men, and then looked toward the table on the other side of the room, then back at the detectives.

"I'm Blackpool. He's Stringer. We're dicks from Hollywood Division, L. A. P. D.

That was enough to make Billy Hightower curious, so he nodded at the empty chairs and they sat. Otto started spooning through the chili for dead bodies.

"Buy you a drink?" Sidney Blackpool asked.

"I got a drink," said Billy Hightower.

"We're working on the Watson homicide," Sidney Blackpool said, sipping at his Scotch. "The Palm Springs kid they found in the Rolls?"

"Little off your beat, ain't it?" Billy Hightower said, toying with the double shot of vodka. Up close he looked like a real boozer and Sidney Blackpool had to resist a policeman's urge to glance at the biker's enormous forearms for meth tracks.

"We have some information that the Watson kid might've been in Hollywood the day he was killed," Sidney Blackpool said. "That's how we got involved."

Billy Hightower looked from one man to the other
,
then at Otto's brown gruel. "It ain't Hollywood, but it ain't t ,b ad, he said. "Microscopic animals can't live in it."

"Hollywood ain't Hollywood, neither," Otto shrugged, and he tried a spoonful. It wasn't bad!

"Hear you used to be on the job," Sidney Blackpool said. "San Bernardino County sheriffs, was it?"

"Uh-huh," Billy Hightower said.

"Hear you were in Vietnam," Sidney Blackpool said.

Served my country and served my county," Billy Hightower said. "They gonna do a cop benefit for me or what?"

"We asked around about you cause we got a little something on the Watson case. Maybe."

Billy Hightower watched Sidney Blackpool's hand reaching into his pocket, the way a cop watches hand movements, the way a crank-dealing outlaw biker would surely watch sudden hand movements. His muscles tightened and relaxed when he realized there could be no threat.

"Just on the remote chance that this kid might've come up to the canyons to score some drugs," Sidney Blackpool said, pushing the picture across to Billy Hightower.

The biker picked up the photo and held it toward the dim light from a shaded wall sconce. Then he lit a match and examined the snapshot more closely. Then for the first time he smiled, displaying large broken teeth.

"So, my tip might work out after all?" he said.

"Your tip?" Otto said, chewing up a mouthful of chili beans.

"Yeah, this is the guy I called in about."

"The Watson kid?" Sidney Blackpool said, pointing at the picture.

"No, his picture was in the papers. The other kid. This kid." He pointed a thick scarred forefinger at Terry Kinsale.

"I'm not following," Sidney Blackpool said.

"You musta got this picture from Palm Springs P
. D
.
,
right?"

"No," Sidney Blackpool said. "This is a lead we're developing independent of Palm Springs P
. D
."

"Guddamnit!" Billy Hightower whispered. "What is this shit? I gave up this dude three days after they found the body. Soon's I read about the old man posting a fifty-thousand-dollar reward! If this kid's the one that smoked Watson, that reward's mine, guddamnit!"

Sidney Blackpool felt his heart jump. Even Otto Stringer paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth.

"You help us and if this kid's our man, you'll be in line for Watson's reward," Sidney Blackpool said.

"I want your word on that, man," Billy Hightowe
r s
aid.

"You got it. I'll put it in writing if you want."

"Was that your Toyota out in the canyon tonight?" the biker asked.

"Yeah."

"Gimme thirty minutes and then drive back to that spot," Billy Hightower said. "I'll send someone to meet you and drive you up the hill to my house. We'll talk on my turf, not yours."

"Okay," Sidney Blackpool said.

"That money's mine," Billy Hightower said. "You unnerstand what I'm sayin?"

When he stood, the biker was even bigger than he seemed. He crossed the saloon with six boot-crashing steps and was out the door before Otto had his last bite swallowed.

"We gotta go back out there," Sidney Blackpool said to his partner who nodded unhappily but didn't comment.

They hadn't noticed when Anemic Annie and Ruth the Sleuth entered the bar and selected a 1950's tune on the jukebox, one that J. Edgar Gomez tolerated because it was old enough. The record started spinning just as Ruth's husky voice boomed over the din, amplified by a police bullhorn that scared the hell out of everybody.

"Ladies, gentlemen and others!" Ruth announced on the bullhorn. "The Eleven Ninety-nine Club is proud to present the one and only--Elfis himselfis!"

When the first beats of Elvis Presley singing "Yo
u a
in't nothin' but a hound dog" crashed out of the jukebox, Anemic Annie threw open the front door and Oleg Gridley waddled in.

He was wearing a white satin shirt with collars bigger than his head, a remnant from his disco days. He was wearing the tightest pants he could find from when he still weighed seventy-five pounds and hadn't ballooned up to eighty-three. He had on a drum majorette's sequined boots that Annie had borrowed from the daughter of a hairdresser at Edna's Salon, and on his head was a black pompadour wig with sideburns drawn in black mascara over half his face.

He carried what looked like a midget-sized eight-string guitar but was actually a ukulele borrowed from Ruben, the bartender at the Mirage Saloon.

" 'You ain't nothin' but a hound dog,' " Elvis sang while Elfis himselfis lip-synched the words, driving the crowd mad with delight.