“Don’t push, Brickman,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Not too much.”
“What’re you talking about.” Coy Brickman’s question wasn’t a question at all. “I was told by Paco that you guys have some cockamamy theory about Harry Bright and me smoking the Watson kid. He says you want a ballistics check on our guns.”
Then Coy Brickman scared Otto by whipping his revolver from the holster while staring at Sidney Blackpool. He offered the gun butt first. “Careful, it’s loaded,” he said.
“Fuck you,” Sidney Blackpool said, not touching it.
“You don’t want it? Change your mind?”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Harry Bright’s gun is?” Otto asked.
“Sure,” Coy Brickman said, with what passed for a smile. “It’s back here.” He walked to the wardrobe, opened it, and said without emotion, “It’s gone.”
“Whaddaya know,” Otto said.
“You say you found the place unlocked?”
“We didn’t say that,” Otto said.
“Well, did you?”
“Yeah,” Otto said. “We found the place unlocked.”
“Then the gun musta been stolen. I told Paco that Harry’s keys shouldn’t be kept around the station. Too many people come here. The plumber came a couple times. The cleaning lady comes every two weeks. A window washer came and …”
“No telling who left the door unlocked,” Otto said.
“That’s right,” said Coy Brickman. “Looks like nothing else was taken.”
Then for the first time Sidney Blackpool spoke to Coy Brickman in other than profanity. He said, “Another thing was taken.”
“What’s that, Blackpool?” Coy Brickman asked, turning those unblinking eyes on the detective.
“A cassette. With Harry Bright singing some songs. One a them is a song called ‘Make Believe.’ ”
“Yeah,” Coy Brickman said. “Paco just told me all about that piece a business. So did O. A. Jones. Saw him a little while ago. You been spinning your wheels all over the desert trying to trace a uke and find a cassette? All you had to do was ask me. I bought that uke for Harry’s birthday, and I have the tape. I play it for him from time to time.”
“You play it for him?” Otto said.
“Sure. I play him lots a music. Harry loves music. You can’t be sure if he can understand it now, but I believe he can. Do you know what an intracerebral stroke can do to a man?”
“Maybe we oughtta see what it can do,” Sidney Blackpool said. Now he and Coy Brickman were staring at each other with such fury that Otto stepped between and lit his partner’s cigarette.
“You wanna see Harry Bright?” Coy Brickman said. “Sure. I’ll ask Paco if I can go down to the nursing home tonight. I think he won’t mind. He’d probably like you to satisfy yourself. I know I would. So we can see you out of our little city.”
“Just for the record,” Otto said, “I don’t suppose you were up in Solitaire Canyon the day the Watson car was found.”
“Heavens no,” Coy Brickman said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“And I don’t suppose you knew Harry was given a potentially important tip by Billy Hightower a couple days after that?”
“Harry? No, he didn’t tell me anything about Billy Hightower.”
“I’d like to ask Harry Bright myself,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“Well, why don’t we go see him then?” said Coy Brickman. “You can ask him anything you want. Now how about you guys answering a question for me.”
“And what’s that?” Otto asked.
“What prompted all this hard-core sleuthing we been seeing? I mean, this is a Palm Springs case all the way. Most detectives I ever knew were always trying to figure out how to give their cases to another jurisdiction, and here you guys are trying to take a case away from Palm Springs. Now I just can’t help wondering if maybe Victor Watson said he’d like to give you boys that fifty-grand reward if you came up with something. Could that be what’s happening here?”
“You answer a hypothetical and I’ll answer your hypothetical,” Sidney Blackpool said.
“Okay,” said Coy Brickman.
“Hypothetically, give me a situation where a guy like Harry Bright could murder a Palm Springs kid when the kid was out where he shouldn’t be. What could the kid’ve seen that’d make a cop murder him?”
“Drinking on duty?”
“Don’t fuck with us too much, Brickman,” Otto said. “You already won but don’t fuck with us.”
“What’s there to win around here anyway?” Coy Brickman’s face was darkening now. “All I can think of is maybe fifty grand from Daddy Watson if you guys hang something on some poor bastard like Harry Bright.”
“Okay,” Otto said. “Keep all this hypothetical. What could the kid’ve seen in the canyon that’d make Harry Bright smoke him?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Then, in a hypothetical, why would the kid be murdered?” Otto asked. “Give me something Victor Watson might buy.”
“You want a fifty-thousand-dollar story?” Coy Brickman asked. “Is that what you want?” The cop sat down on the sofa directly across from Sidney Blackpool and said, “You tell me. If that’s what you want.”
“Yeah, I want a story,” Sidney Blackpool said hoarsely. “A story he’d buy for a lot of money.”
“Now, that’s different,” Coy Brickman said, riveting Sidney Blackpool with his gray eyes. “I got lots of imagination. Let’s see, how about this: the Watson kid drove daddy’s Rolls up the canyon to maybe score some crank. You want another reason, I’m lost. I can’t think of another reason for him to be up there.”
“So far so good,” Otto said.
“It’s a treacherous drive up there. Most guys do it on bikes or in off-road vehicles. If you take a wrong turn you end up on the windy side of the canyon. It blows like a hurricane over there and the road narrows to nothing. When you see that, you got a chance to back up and turn around, but it’d be real tricky to do in a big Rolls-Royce. I think it’d be awful easy to slip on over the canyon and fall maybe eighty or a hundred feet down on the rocks by the tamarisk trees. And those trees could hide anything unless someone happened by.”
“So far old man Watson might buy that much,” Otto said.
“Well, for fifty grand I’d have to spin a tall tale,” Coy Brickman said. “How about one about this old cop who gets drunk out there in the canyons. Maybe a cop that lives in a place full of photos of what he’s lost. Ever know a guy that’s lost everything, Blackpool?”
“Let’s make this short,” Otto said.
“Okay,” said Coy Brickman. “Well, you could say there’s this old cop who’s pretty close to his pension and he’s up there in the canyon doing what he does. Getting drunk and playing a uke and singing songs like ‘Make Believe’ or other oldies. He hears a crashing noise. And then he sees a flash of fire. It shoots up in the air and then settles down when the wind blows it against the rocks.
“Maybe he thinks it’s a prospector, or a camper with a blown butane stove. He drops the uke and runs to the trunk of his patrol unit and grabs a fire extinguisher and heads toward that flame back behind the canyon wall, hoping nobody got hurt. Of course, a forty-nine-year-old cop with a skin full of hooch and only months away from a stroke and a heart attack wouldn’t be in very good shape to begin with. And by the time he picks his way through the rocks with his flashlight, he’s all worn out. Then he comes on it. The wrecked car. It’s burning.
“He thought it was only the wind howling at first but he gets close as he can, which is pretty close because the wind’s blowing the flames away from him and into the rocky wall. He hears it and knows it’s not the wind. Someone’s screaming.
“He runs up to the car but it’s almost engulfed, and his little fire extinguisher is useless and he sees a young guy pinned underneath. The kid’s enveloped in gasoline fire from his waist down and the fire’s licking up and the kid sees him and throws out his arms and starts screaming like a child for his daddy. But the wind shifts and the fire keeps licking around and the car’s all consumed but the kid won’t stop screaming and maybe the face in the fire looks like a face he once found on the ground … but that’s another story. Anyway, the old drunk, the sick crazy drunk cop, he pulls out his piece and …”