“Was it hot enough for you today, dah-ling?” Otto asked, watching a pair of thirtyish women stroll out by the pool, look toward the two detectives, and go back inside without apparent interest.
“Yeah, I guess it was hot enough,” his partner shrugged.
“That’s half a the conversation. Now, where we eating tonight?”
“I dunno. Should I worry about it?”
“That’s the other half a the conversation.”
“What conversation?”
“The Palm Springs conversation,” Otto said. “I listened to a bunch a people by the pool today. That’s the only thing they say. Hot enough today and where we eating tonight. That’s it.”
“Exciting.”
“That’s all people got to worry about around here,” Otto said. “They don’t even move enough to keep their watches wound.”
“Rich people, Otto. Not people like you and me.”
“We’re rich, Sidney,” Otto reminded him.
“This week only.”
“You got that right,” Otto said, which next to Tom Selleck aloha shirts and moustaches was this year’s cop mannerism. The phrase “You got that right.”
“That waitress is all time,” Otto said. “She’s the kind tries to lick you with her eyes.”
“I thought you said you were looking for ugly broads.”
“To marry. A rich ugly broad to marry. Not to spend a vacation with. That’s what I like about Yoko Ono. She looks like the leading lady in Kabuki theater and they’re all men. I’d marry her in a minute.”
“Let’s sign for the drinks and go to dinner,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“Signing for drinks.” Otto grinned. “Let me sign. I wanna write in a big tip for that little heartbreaker. She’ll remember Otto Stringer before this week’s out.”
“I hope ten grand’s gonna be enough,” his partner said, as they strolled inside.
The dining room was like the rest of the hotel, but there was less wicker and rattan, and the floral patterns weren’t out of control. The maître d’ dressed formally and the waiters wore standard desert chic: white dress shirt, black bow tie, no coat.
The menu required two hands to lift. In fact, Otto Stringer, hidden behind it, said, “Sidney, I could take this thing out by the pool tomorrow, shove two poles under it and have enough shade for me, a golf cart, and Liz Taylor.”
“She’s not your size anymore,” Sidney Blackpool said, trying to decide whether to order things he couldn’t spell or keep it a cop’s night out. That is, steak or prime rib.
“I’m glad they translate the French,” Otto said. “I hate restaurants where the menu’s all in French or Italian.”
“How often do you eat at restaurants where the menu’s in any language but English, Spanish and Chinese?”
“Sidney, I’m a man a the world! Let’s get a wine steward.”
Just then the dining-room captain came to the table and said, “Have you gentlemen decided yet?”
“I’ll have grease,” Otto said. “I usually eat grease.”
Otto didn’t end up with grease, but he did get a lot of unfamiliar and very rich continental cuisine. He started out with champagne and escargots, and red caviar because they didn’t have the good stuff. He went on to veal with a champagne cream sauce you could lose a fork in. He had a side of fettucine Alfredo because, like Mount San Jacinto, it was there. He finished up with half a pound of marzipan and a flambé crepe because he wanted something they set on fire.
Sidney Blackpool, realizing that he was way past his limit of Johnnie Walker Black, had only one glass of champagne, veal piccata with lemon and capers, a Bibb lettuce salad and no dessert.
Otto was halfway through the crepe, saying, “Sidney, you gotta relax and let yourself go,” when he started to hiccup.
“Damn,” he said.
“Let’s order you some bitters and lime. It works for me,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“These hiccups feel funny,” Otto said, his upper lip beading with sweat. “I think I’ll run to the John and …”
He barely made it. Otto upchucked for ten minutes. When he returned, he was pale and shaky.
“You’re a little green around the gills,” his partner observed.
“I just lost a hundred bucks worth a fancy groceries!” Otto moaned.
“Well, it was your first time, Otto. You’ll do better tomorrow. Your tummy’s a rookie on this beat.”
“Ooooh, I’m sick,” Otto said. “And now I’m hungry!”
“Let’s go to sleep,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“But I wanted to see the night life.”
“Let’s get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow you can order breakfast in bed. You’ll be a new man.”
“Tomorrow I’m sticking to grease,” Otto said.
“I’ll have room service bring you a plate a grease first thing in the morning,” his partner promised.
A deluge. There had never been so much rain in the desert. Sidney Blackpool watched a terrifying flash flood swell like a tidal wave on the very crest of Mount San Jacinto, then cascade down on the hotel. Men and women were screaming. It was awful, and though his own life was in jeopardy, he had to stand and face the next wall of water because he could see it riding the crest: a coffin. The lead-lined coffin rode like a fiberglass surfboard. Sidney Blackpool was weeping with the other doomed hotel guests, but not for his imminent death. He wept because he knew the coffin bore the half-drowned body of Tommy Blackpool who, wearing a red-and-black wet suit, clung like Ishmael as the coffin suddenly began cartwheeling away, down the Coachella Valley.
“Tommmmmmmy!” he sobbed, and then he was awake. It was dawn. He hadn’t awakened at the dreaded drinker’s hour as he deserved, having put away so much Johnnie Walker Black. The bed was soaked as always after a recurring dream about Tommy Blackpool.
In the dream, Tommy would often be clinging to his coffin, or sometimes to his surfboard, which had been torn from his ankle strap by the huge wave in Santa Monica that drowned him.
Sometimes Sidney Blackpool would dream simply that Tommy was getting soaked to the skin lying in that coffin in the cold ground. This, during rainstorms. Sidney Blackpool hated rainstorms now and had begun to wish that he’d had Tommy cremated. His ex-wife had suggested it, but deferred when he insisted on burial in the ground. Like many lapsed Catholics he could not entirely escape the tenets drilled into him in grammar school. Even though the modern Church no longer cherished mystery and ritual and burial in the ground. The dead with bones intact to await the Redeemer? He never really knew why they used to demand it, but he had buried Tommy in the ground. And now he regretted it every time it rained. He used to read weather forecasts even before the headlines in the days when he was going mad.
In all his years as a cop-even during the Watts Riot when he was trapped inside a burning warehouse believing he’d be burned alive-he’d never awakened in what they call a cold sweat. Dreams of fire had never tormented him. It was these dreams of water, and Tommy so cold. The detective was shivering as he plodded toward the shower, feeling very old, hoping he could stem the headache starting at the base of his skull.
Cold sweat. A parent who dreamed of something as outrageous, as unnatural as his eighteen-year-old child lying in the ground, that’s who coined that one. He showered, shaved, dressed, took three aspirin and went downstairs hoping the hotel coffee shop opened early.
Otto Stringer had breakfast served in his bedroom as promised. It was a typical Palm Springs November day. “The kind you expect” as the radio disc jockey said. About 78 degrees with humidity around 19 percent, making it comfortable and invigorating. Otto finished four eggs, two orders of bacon, toast, jam and coffee. He showered, shaved, put on a baby-blue golf shirt with a navy sweater tied around his neck, and realized they hadn’t decided where to play.
They had the names of three head pros who would arrange games for them at some of America’s most famous country clubs. Victor Watson’s secretary had assured Sidney Blackpool that even if all the courses were not yet ready for the official opening of the 1984-85 desert season, she could make arrangements for them at just about any club that was. When Otto arrived at the coffee shop, his partner had a copy of Palm Springs Life on the counter beside him, along with the file containing the police reports dealing with the murder of Jack Watson.