The Secrets of Harry Bright (3 page)

Victor Watson's office was not quite as overdone as the palace at Versailles but it did have a Louis XV parquet floor. And there were terra-cotta urns and Chinese pots on that floor, and Italian rococo mirrors, and a J. M. W. Turner oil painting on the wall, and polished granite tabletops, and a lacquered desk, if it was a desk, that looked like one of those ten-thousand-dollar numbers that're supposed to combine form and function but look like an organ pulled from the belly of a dinosaur.

Sidney Blackpool was looking for Victor Watson in all this loopy art mix when a voice from the adjoining salon said, "In here, Sergeant Blackpool."

The smaller room was a sudden relief. It was orderl
y w
ith nubby upholstery and wood, real wood, and rough tactile accents. It was a man's room, and the desk top of polished granite reflected the pupils and irises of the suntanned smiling man behind it.

"Doesn't that office make you want to puke?" Victor Watson said.

Who designed it, Busby Berkeley?" the detective said dryly.

"My wife did, I'm afraid."

She only forgot a singing waterfall," Sidney Blackpool said, shaking hands with the older man and being beckoned toward the camel sofa.

Everyone knew who the "wife" was even if they'd never heard of Victor Watson. She was at one time a top star of feature films and was now experiencing a comeback as a nighttime soap opera killer-bitch.

There were two crystal tumblers and an ice bucket on the simple oak cocktail table, but there was nothing simple about the Ming-dynasty figural group resting beside a full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.

Victor Watson looked at his wristwatch, Patek Phillipe of course, and said, "Late enough for a drink, Sergeant? You're almost off duty."

"I don't worry about duty," Sidney Blackpool said. "Only about my liver. Four o clock's late enough."

Victor Watson sat beside the detective and poured three fingers of Scotch into each tumbler, then added two ice cubes to both drinks. He was so tanned that his crow's-feet crinkled dead white when he smiled, as chalky white as his hair. His hands were delicate and they too were covered with white hairs.

"Tell me," he said, "do you resent being sent over here to humor some millionaire about a seventeen-monthold murder case?"

"Not as long as he buys the drinks, Mister Watson," Sidney Blackpool said, eyeing the older man over the edge of the glass.

Victor Watson shifted his weight on the sofa, adjusting the crease in his Nino Cerruti pleated pants as he did so. His outfit included a brocade vest, which was back i
n s
tyle (at least in Beverly Hills and its environs) after a fifty-year absence, and kiltie Italian slip-on loafers.

Then he saw the detective's cynical green eyes looking him over and said, "When I'm in my downtown offices in the financial district, I don't wear clothes from a Paris boutique."

Sidney Blackpool managed a halfhearted smile and continued to drink without comment. So far the guy had apologized for his wife's goofy taste and his frog clothes designer. Still, he was paying for the drinks.

As though he read the detective's mind, Victor Watson freshened the drink and said, "You're not about to ask me how I knew you drink Johnnie Walker Black, are you?"

Victor Watson chuckled and those polished granite eyes got a bit less riveting. "A childish trick I know, but things like that impress the idiots around this town. I asked your lieutenant when I called your office, and he asked your partner."

"My partner's on vacation. Won't be back for a couple a weeks."

"Of course, I was told that. He must've asked somebody in your office."

"It's okay with me," Sidney Blackpool said, and the Scotch was warming his belly and throat and if this kept up he might start to tolerate this guy.

"How oldie you, Sergeant?" Victor Watson asked. "Forty-two."

"I'm only fifty-nine years old and you thought I was sixty-nine."

"I didn't say that."

"It's okay; I know how I look. Life hasn't always been so nice to me. When I was nineteen I spent two days as a guest of your department. I was selling sandwiches from the back of a truck to the garment workers downtown and I got a few tickets for being parked in a red zone. I couldn't afford to pay them and one day one of your motor cops ran a make on me and put me in jail. The judge told me fifty dollars or three days. I didn't have fifty dollars.

That Lincoln Heights was one shitty jail. I got in three fights to save my virtue."

"Did you save it?"

"For a while," he said. "Then I married my present wife and backed one of her movies and got myself gang-banged every day by the studio goniffs."

Sidney Blackpool caught himself guzzling, which was what he had promised himself he wouldn't do the last time he failed to quit drinking. Well, shit, if you have to listen to some industrialist's life story .. .

"Help yourself," Victor Watson said, and the detective poured generously.

"People think I made my money in land development," Victor Watson continued, sipping with restraint. "High tech is where I hit it big. I have a tenth-grade education but I can sell anything: rags, cars, junk, land. You name it, I can sell it."

By now, Sidney Blackpool was drifting. The sun was filtering in the windows from the west, and twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker was making fifty-nine-year-old Victor Watson seem like an old pal.

"Fame is what works around these parts," Victor Watson continued. "Lots of guys who make Forbes magazine get snubbed by every snotty maitre d' in town. If you want to be where it's at you have two choices: buy a sports franchise, which is the second crappiest business in the world, or get into movies, which is the most crappy. I discovered a third way and married a famous movie star. We get the tables in her name. My picture gets taken when I'm with her. I go to parties because of her. Now I can go anywhere I want and eat cold potato soup and everyone knows me. Do you play golf?"

"As a matter a fact," Sidney Blackpool nodded.

"We'll play sometime. I like the Bel-Air course. I belong to half a dozen clubs but I don't get a chance to play much. What do you know about my son's murder?"

The guy could shift gears without a clutch, and before the detective could answer, Victor Watson said, "You may have read that my boy disappeared from our Palm Spring
s h
ome last year and was found murdered out in the desert near a blister of a town called Mineral Springs."

"I never read whether they caught the . . ."

"They didn't," Victor Watson said, and just for a second those irises flickered. Then he stood and walked to the window, gazing at the sun falling toward Santa Monica.

"I'm wondering what I can do for you," Sidney Blackpool said.

"Your department's got to get involved, Sid," Victor Watson announced, with just a touch of fervor. "I'm not bad-mouthing Palm Springs P
. D
. or anybody else. But it's been seventeen months and . . ."

Victor Watson was not a man to lose control and he didn't. He smiled and returned to the sofa, sitting down beside the detective. "It's come to my attention that my boy may have been in Hollywood the day he died. It could be that the events leading up to the murder in the desert emanated from Hollywood. In that case, Hollywood Division of the L
. A
. Police Department becomes the proper agency to join this investigation, right?"

"Hold on, Mister Watson." Sidney Blackpool didn't like this a bit. He had enough cases without being drawn into a cold Palm Springs homicide with a guy like this applying the torque.

"Listen to me, Sidney," Victor Watson said, leaning toward the detective. "I know it's stretching matters a bit to draw you in, but I need to keep this investigation going. I don't know where to turn. All the goddamn money I gave the Republicans the last four years, yet the F
. B. I
. dropped out within three days. And the Palm Springs P
. D
. was finished in six months. Oh, they still call me but they don't have leads. And my son, my boy, he . .

"I suppose I can maybe make a few calls, Mister Watson," the detective offered. "After you tell me about the new information that makes you think Hollywood's involved."

"I was thirty-six years old when Jack was born," Victor Watson said. "My daughters were already in high school when he came along. My first wife was probably too old for child-bearing, but it worked. Did it ever. H
e h
ad an I. Q. of a hundred and forty. And he was a talented piano player. And he had the sweetest golf swing you have ever seen. . . . Tell me, do you know about depression and despair? Without waiting for an answer Victor Watson said, I can tell you that despair is not merely acute depression. Despair is more than the sum of many terrible parts. Depression is purgatory. Despair is hell."

The detective almost sent the Ming-dynasty figurine spinning off the cocktail table, he snatched at the Johnnie Walker so quickly.

Victor Watson didn't notice. He just kept talking in a monotone that was getting spooky. "Do you know how a man feels when he loses his son? He feels . . . incomplete. Nothing in the whole world looks the same or is the same. He goes around looking for pieces of himself. Incomplete. And . . . and then all his daydreams and fantasies go back to June of last year. Whatever he's thinking about, it's got to precede the time he got the phone call about his son. You see, he just keeps trying to turn the clock back. He wants just one more chance. For what? He can't even say for sure. He wants to communicate. What? He isn't sure." And then Victor Watson breathed a sigh and said: "The ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons."

"I'd like to help you, Mister Watson." Sidney Blackpoo
l w
as getting unaccountably warm. He unbuttoned his collar, removed his necktie and shoved it into his coat pocket.

"Hear me out, Sid," Victor Watson said quietly. "It'
s i
mportant that I lay things out . . . well . . . methodically.

It's how I am. He isn't able to answer his phone at first
,
the father of a dead boy. Especially since so many peopl
e t
hink they have to call to express condolences. One frien
d c
alls four times and finally you speak to him and he says
,
`Why didn't you return my calls? I want to share you
r g
rief.' And you say to Min, 'You dumb son of a bitch. I
f y
ou could share any part of it, I'd give it to you! I'd give i
t a
ll to you, you stupid bastard!' And then of course I los
t t
hat friend."

Sidney Blackpool made a mental note, as though it were a crime confession, that Victor Watson had switche
d p
ersons three times before he was ready or maybe able to start telling it in the first person.

"Then for several weeks, all I could think about were the bad moments. I couldn't remember the good times, the good things we had together, Jack and me. Only the problems. Only the bad times. You know something? Booze used to make me silly and happy. Now I hardly touch it because it makes me morose and mean. Can I freshen that?"

"Yeah." The detective began massaging the back of his neck. He was starting to get a headache at the base of his skull. It was more than warm. It was stifling,
yet he could see the papers on the polished granite desk top fluttering from an overhead air register.

"On June twenty-first of last year, my twenty-twoyear-old son Jack went to Palm Springs after his last term at U
. S. C
, He went alone but was going to be joined by his fiancee who was a senior at U
. C. L. A
. He was there two days and two nights and then he was gone. So was my car. I keep a Rolls-Royce there because I sometimes fly to Palm Springs from LAX instead of driving. Our Palm Springs houseboy found the car missing and by the second night he got worried and called us. Jack was found two days later in the desert, in some godforsaken canyon near Mineral Springs. He was shot through the head and the car was burned with his body inside."

"Was he . . . uh, was he . . ."

"Yes, he was already dead when they torched th
e c
ar.

"They?"

"He, she, they. Whoever. At first the police thought there was some sort of accident where he ran off a dirt road down into a canyon and the car caught fire. But at the autopsy they found that though he was totally burned, the inside of his lungs was hardly scorched. And there was very little carbon monoxide in his blood. And then they found a thirty-eight-caliber bullet in his head. I brought in another pathologist and he concurred. Jack was shot and was dead or dying before somebody burned him.

"The F
. B. I
. called it a straightforward murder, mayb
e a
kidnapping and murder, but not within their investigative jurisdiction. The Palm Springs police've pretty well given up. I thought about hiring private investigators but I know the difference between movie private eyes and real ones. Even if I could find a good one, no police agency gives the time of day to private investigators."