“Take care, son,” Sidney Blackpool said.
As they were leaving the Eleven Ninety-nine Club for the boozy ride back to their hotel suite, they heard Bitch Cassidy tell Oleg Gridley that she’d like to stuff him in her microwave, causing the lovesick midget to cry out desperately: “Why do you do this to me, Portia? Why do you treat me like I butt-fucked Bambi?”
CHAPTER 9
“Another fun-filled evening in the desert resort,” Otto moaned during the ride back from Mineral Springs. “This is about as much fun as a month in Gdansk.”
“That sergeant, that Coy Brickman’s a strange guy, isn’t he?”
“Strange, yeah. I don’t like guys that only blink their eyes every other Tuesday. He looks as warm as the ace of spades. Goddamn, this desert’s black at night!”
“But look at the stars. Baskets of them. When was the last time you saw that in L.A.?”
“When those Samoan stevedores played Ping-Pong with my head. Let’s go to the hotel and meet some women. That broad in the Eleven Ninety-nine scared me to death. She had veins on her veins. She looked like the monster that ate Akron. She even had pimples on her teeth. And she was talking to the midget about AIDS! Do you know they’re gonna put in a resort hotel for AIDS victims in Palm Springs?”
“That’s a last resort,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I’d like to stop by the Watson house one more time. I got a question about Jack Watson’s Porsche and I can’t find the answer in the Palm Springs police report.”
“After hearing about AIDS, we gotta go see Harlan Penrod? Keerist, I don’t even wanna think about AIDS. Straight people can get it too, ya know. I used to worry about crabs when I’d meet a broad in a gin mill. The thought a AIDS makes the hair on my crabs stand on end! But if we gotta see him I’d rather do it tonight and get it over with. So what about the Porsche?”
“The Watson kid’s Porsche was at the house when they found him missing.”
“Of course.”
“Did you peek in that garage? Big house, small garage. There were three rooms of old furniture and a dune buggy and Oriental rugs and their new Mercedes in there.”
“So?”
“So, after they parked the Rolls in the garage, there’d be no room for a Porsche.”
“So?”
“That driveway turns. If you park a Porsche or anything else in the driveway, you’d have to back it up and get it out a the way to get at the Rolls.”
“so?”
“So nothing, except if there was a kidnapper, did he move the Porsche out? If so, where’d he put it? Or was it maybe parked in the street by Jack Watson that night?”
“Since there’s no mention in the reports I imagine it was parked in the street by the Watson kid before he went to bed.”
“Remember what Harlan Penrod said about the Las Palmas area? About how dark it is?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard a couple a Palm Springs cops in the bar saying that when local folks hear a splash in the swimming pool at night, it’s either a raccoon, or a cop falling in chasing a prowler.”
“What’s that got to do with the Porsche?”
“Would you park a Porsche Nine-eleven on a street that dark and secluded?”
“Not if I wanted to keep the car stereo. Not to mention what it’s attached to.”
“That’s what I wanna talk to Harlan Penrod about. The more I think about it, I wonder if Jack Watson drove the Rolls out to Mineral Springs of his own free will.”
“And if he did, what would that prove?”
“Not a thing, maybe.”
“Has ten grand made you this diligent?”
“We’ll have plenty a time for golf, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“Wake me when we get there.” Otto scooted down in the seat and adjusted the radio volume. “Rolls-Royces, Porsches, how do I know what rich people do with their wheels? I just wish I could buy a Camaro Z-twenty-eight like a twenty-two-year-old cop. Trouble with working homicide is these whodunits. Least when I worked narcotics we usually knew whodunit, it was just how do we catch him with it. Whodunits make me sleepy.”
While Otto dozed during the ride back to Palm Springs under a glittering desert sky, Sidney Blackpool thought of how ten thousand dollars did not make him so diligent. But one hundred thousand dollars a year, and a clean job with Watson Industries with all privileges and perks attached thereto, that made him more diligent than he thought he could still be. He didn’t believe there was a chance of an outsider clearing this homicide, but if he went through the motions with sufficient zeal Watson might be impressed.
Victor Watson would need a new director of security whether or not he ever learned who killed his boy. So what if the detective came back from Palm Springs with little more than a golfer’s tan? After twenty-one years of blowing bureaucratic smoke as a Los Angeles civil servant he ought to be able to compile a report to make a neurotic millionaire think that he’d made a run at it. Watson was no fool, but overwhelming grief softens up the brain’s left hemisphere, oh yes, it does.
Suddenly he noticed that Hildegarde was singing, “ ‘I’ll always be near you, wherever you are. Each night in every prayer …’ ”
That lets me out, Sidney Blackpool thought. He used to pray as a reflex action. Those millions of little incantations they drill into you in Catholic grammar schools. A prayer for every occasion. He stopped that long before he lost Tommy, but he still went to mass in those days just to have something to do together with his children. He wondered if that ritual made them closer or drove them farther apart during those last few years when Tommy and Barb lived with their mother and Sidney Blackpool got them only on weekends. Of course adolescents want to be in their own homes, in their own neighborhoods, with their friends and not with their old man on weekends.
What was it Watson said about the bad times? You only remember the bad times. Sidney Blackpool had a thousand bad times to remember after the boy started cutting classes and doing pot and hash and ludes with the other surfers. Like the time he went to the beach in Santa Monica on a winter day and caught Tommy riding four-foot swells, so loaded he’d left his new wet suit on the beach and didn’t even know he was blue from the cold. That one had ended with Tommy shoving his father and running off while a bunch of beach bums threw beer cans and forced the detective to retreat to his car. Tommy was missing for ten days.
Why does a father of a dead son think only of those times? The night dreams were never like that. The night dreams were sometimes wonderful, so wonderful he would awake sobbing into a damp pillow. Too many of those wonderful dreams could kill a man, he was convinced.
The recurring dream hardly varied at all. His former wife, Lorie, and his daughter, Barb, would be playing Scrabble on the floor of the living room, and Tommy, at age twelve, would be watching a football game on television in the den, showing his special sort of chuckling grin whenever the U.S.C. band struck up their “Conquest” theme after scoring a touchdown.
In the dream Sidney Blackpool would take his wife aside privately and make her promise not to tell the secret. The secret was that they had re-created Tommy at the most wonderful time, before the rebellion and the misery of adolescence and drugs. The dream was strange in that it was understood that somehow they had willed him back to them, but the dream was unclear as to whether he was alive as far as anyone else was concerned, or even if Barb was aware.
The dream was so incredibly joyous he never wanted it to end, but of course it always did and he was powerless to change the ending. The dream was over when his wife would say, “Sid, we can enjoy him forever now. But you mustn’t tell him he’s going to die when he’s eighteen. You mustn’t tell him!”