“A ukulele ain’t exactly a deadly weapon,” Paco said.
“No, but jerking out his trachea tube is a pretty goddamn aggravated assault, you ask me!”
“Oh, so you wanna book Bernice and let Clyde go home, huh? He’s more acceptable?”
“He’s as acceptable as a lesion on my dick,” Nathan Hale Wilson said, with the conviction of a man who’s had a few. “But at least one a them oughtta get something outta this.”
“If they both apologize will you be satisfied?” Paco argued. “And if they promise never to do it again? Jesus, can you imagine the picture in the newspaper if we take these two down to the Indio Hilton and lock them up?”
“Okay, okay,” Nathan Hale Wilson said finally. “But don’t make us drive em back home. That’s degrading!”
“The walk’ll do em good,” Paco said. “Let em out five minutes apart. Okay with you, Maynard?”
“Okay,” the Indian said. “Which one gets the weapon?”
“Lemme see that,” Paco said. “Funny-looking ukulele. One, two, three … this one’s got eight strings. Never saw a uke with eight strings.” Then he strummed it a few times. “Wish I could play music.”
Clyde Suggs made an announcement from the holding celclass="underline" “This is the Foreign Legion for misfit cops, but Paco Pedroza sure ain’t no Beau Geste!”
“See, that’s part a the problem here,” Paco said to Maynard. “Clyde’s read a couple books in his time and thinks he married beneath him.”
Five minutes later, when Maynard Rivas was leading Clyde to the door, Paco was sitting with his feet up on his desk singing his heart out. “ ‘Ain’t she sweet!’ ” he sang, strumming away discordantly.
Maynard interrupted him. “Uh, Chief, time to give Clyde back the deadly weapon.”
“Oh, yeah,” Paco said. “Here you go, Clyde. Nice uke.”
“I bought it to serenade Bernice,” the old man croaked. “Now I’d like to stick it in her …”
“Okay, enough violence!” Paco warned.
The old man was still mighty pissed off as he trudged down the Mineral Springs main drag. He started toward the back door of the Eleven Ninety-nine Club but stopped when he thought about all the goddamn cops that hung around there. He cut through the eucalyptus trees toward the Mirage Saloon.
“I’ll have a beer,” Clyde said, when he hobbled up to the bar. “A pitcher. Will you take this for a pitcher a beer? Make it two pitchers.”
“A uke?” Ruben the bartender said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Paid fifteen bucks for it from Beavertail Bigelow,” Clyde said. “You can have it for two pitchers.”
“Okay,” the bartender said. “Looks like it’s in pretty good shape except for this dent.”
“That’s from my skull,” Clyde croaked. “I was gonna serenade Bernice with it. Now she can just watch Love Boat and go suck her tooth.”
CHAPTER 8
The detectives couldn’t get away from Harlan Penrod until they’d had a complete tour of the Watson property, which meant a dissertation on Coachella cacti and desert flora in general. And while Otto Stringer was learning about how such spiny plants could produce such lovely blossoms, Sidney Blackpool was satisfying himself that, just as the Palm Springs detectives had concluded in their reports, nobody who wasn’t played by Sean Connery or Roger Moore could defeat the infrared on the top of the fence with the old mirror trick. And if the system was armed, nobody could have silently forced open the electric gate as he and Otto had done. Harlan Penrod was adamant that Jack Watson was as careful as he about setting the inside and outside alarm systems before retiring for the night. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t snatched from the house, but if he was, it probably wasn’t by an unknown intruder.
Instead of going to Palm Springs P.D., they went back to the hotel. Otto wanted to “take” brunch.
“Is this going to be part a your life now, Otto? Taking brunch?” Sidney Blackpool asked, as they left his car with the valet-parking boy.
“I’m hungry from all the good police work, Sidney,” Otto said. “I think we should go to Palm Springs P.D. tomorrow. Maybe we oughtta play a few holes today after brunch.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to eat. Ill go up to the room and give the P.D. a call.”
“You’re getting too skinny, Sidney,” Otto said. “Come and join me.”
“I’ll have dessert later,” Sidney Blackpool said, leaving his partner in the hotel lobby.
When Sidney Blackpool got to their suite, he found a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and a card saying: “Hit em long and straight. Victor Watson.”
He lit a cigarette and flopped down on the bed, trying not to think of Victor Watson. He hadn’t felt sorry for anyone except himself in a long time. He didn’t want to start feeling sorry for some guy who probably owned his own jet and didn’t bother to play golf in places Sidney Blackpool dreamed about because Watson probably enjoyed himself even more in other places. But then the detective had to admit that the man he’d met in the Century City office wasn’t enjoying himself anywhere. That was an incomplete human being looking for missing pieces.
He realized that the radio was on. The housekeeper had made the beds and tidied up the suite but let the radio play. It was a Palm Springs station with music that wasn’t so easy to find on the Los Angeles scene. Marlene Dietrich was singing “La Vie en Rose” and “Lili Marlene.” Sidney Blackpool’s parents and his older brothers listened to music like that when he was a boy. There was something about the desert. You did feel that time had regressed thirty years or more. There was something in the air, and not just the dry heat. Those mountains surrounding? Like Lost Horizon with Ronald Colman clawing his way toward the hidden valley, toward peace and longevity. But you didn’t live forever in Palm Springs either, as Jack Watson discovered.
Then his heart missed a regular beat, and another, and he felt an emptiness in his chest and swelling in his throat that made it hard to swallow. He had an indescribable longing. For what? He used to think the dreams came because he kept family pictures beside the bed, but after he put them away he still dreamed. That was something else that Victor Watson had probably learned: you’re afraid to be reminded and afraid not to be reminded.
Victor Watson probably learned that the first weeks after his son’s death were nothing compared to what would come. The shock and horror and grief is impossible to accommodate those first weeks, as you gradually come to grasp what forever means. There is nonsense which your mind seizes upon. Should Tommy be put in the ground or cremated? As though a decision to keep Tommy’s fingernails and teeth and bones intact was a meaningful one.
Yet all that was nothing like the despair that peaked eight months after Tommy was gone. When, for the first time in forty-one years of life, Sidney Blackpool had to confront this outrage, a son preceding his father to the grave. This perversion of the natural order.
He came close to the end at a police department retirement party in Chinatown. He heard a morose retired cop crying in his whiskey because he no longer had camaraderie and purpose. The cop said he couldn’t enjoy things any longer and talked about looking for pieces of himself. Sidney Blackpool could’ve told him a thing or two about that, about being incomplete.
But he listened and started to despise the cop. He despised him so much he found himself starting to cry. The first time ever in a public place. Of course, he had also been drinking that night. He rushed outside to the parking lot and looked not up to the smog-shrouded sky but at the lights of downtown Los Angeles.
He thought of that maudlin cop, and he cried out: “Why are you alive then? Why you and not Tommy?”