The room was near the far end of the corridor. It was a private room with one bed. There was a lamp on a table beside the bed. Also on the bedside table was a radio with a built-in cassette player. There were I.V.’s nourishing him and oxygen available. Otto looked at the cadaverous old man. Only the feet bulged under the sheet.
“Where’s Harry Bright?” Otto asked.
“Take a closer look,” Coy Brickman said.
Otto crept closer to the bed to inspect. The face was yellow, with a burst of spidery veins on the nose and cheeks and under the eyes. The eye pouches were yellow-brown like nicotine stains. His hair was wispy and sparse and gray. His fingernails were fungus yellow. Stretched from head to toe he looked to be about six feet three inches. Otto guessed he weighed one hundred pounds, only because of the size of his large bones. The eyes were yellow except for the irises, which were beautiful and blue.
The man stared at the ceiling with his jaw hanging open. There was saliva forming at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were tearing slightly. He stared as unblinking as Coy Brickman. Otto leaned over the bed to look in those blue eyes for response and saw just the faint twitching of his tongue. He had a strong cleft chin.
The bedsheet fluttered every few seconds with his heartbeats. “That man should be in an intensive-care unit,” Otto said.
“I believe he’d rather do his dying here,” Coy Brickman said. “I think Harry likes it here.”
Sidney Blackpool wouldn’t approach the bed. “Is it, Otto?” he said. “Is it him?”
“It’s Harry Bright,” Otto said. “After life got all through fucking with him.”
And then Sidney Blackpool said something that astonished Otto more than anything he’d heard this day. Sidney Blackpool took three steps closer to the bed of the dying man and said, “Brickman, why not tell me where his gun is? If it matches ballistics, that’s it. We can write up this investigation to leave you completely out of it, can’t we, Otto? I give you my solemn word we can write it up so it looks like you never knew that Harry Bright got drunk and shot the kid after the car crashed. We can tell it just the way it happened and we can prove it, if the ballistics test is positive. Then I’d tell Victor Watson that you deserve the reward for figuring out how the shooting went down and for helping us. Fifty thousand could be yours.”
Coy Brickman didn’t take his eyes from Sidney Blackpool’s face when he walked around the bed. He looked below the side rail, then he looked back at the detective and said, “Damn, it’s empty.”
“What’s empty?” Sidney Blackpool asked.
“The catheter bag. I wanted to throw it in your face. From Harry and me.” Then he turned to the breathing corpse and said, “Damnit, Harry, why can’t you take a pee when I need it?”
“Let’s go, Sidney,” Otto said. “Let’s go home.”
“Before you go, I got something you wanted,” Coy Brickman said. Then he punched the button on the cassette player and slipped in a cassette he took from the pocket of his uniform pants. He looked at Harry Bright as he pressed the play button. They heard a few off-key chords from the uke and then it was in tune, Harry Bright introduced a song again.
Harry Bright’s voice said, “This is happy Harry Bright coming to you from the Mineral Springs Palladium out on Jackrabbit Road where I’d like to introduce a tasty tune, a sizzling side, a heavenly hit! It’s called ‘Make Believe.’ And ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to dedicate this number to Patsy.”
Otto Stringer turned away and absolutely could not look at the cadaverous figure in the bed as Harry Bright sang:
“We could make believe I love you,
“Only make believe that you love me.
“Others find peace of mind in pretending.
“Couldn’t you, couldn’t I, couldn’t we?”
Sidney Blackpool looked like a sleepwalker. He forced himself to lean over the bed. He studied the corpse that breathed. He leaned over the bed on one side while Coy Brickman stood on the other side watching him. The color drained from Sidney Blackpool’s face. He stared into Harry Bright’s beautiful blue eyes. Looking for what?
“Make believe our lips are blending
“In a phantom kiss or two or three.
“Might as well make believe I love you
“For to tell the truth, I dooooooooo!”
When it was over, Coy Brickman took the cassette out and reached across the bed, jamming it into Sidney Blackpool’s shirt pocket. “There,” he said. “You wanted it so bad. Take it.”
“Let’s go, Sidney,” Otto said. “Now. Let’s go, now!”
As they were walking away, they heard Coy Brickman turning the radio to the Palm Springs station where Fred Astaire was singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
“Hey, it’s Fred,” they heard Coy Brickman say to Harry Bright. “Pipes aren’t quite as good as old Harry Bright’s, but not so bad for a hoofer.”
Otto Stringer took one last glance and saw the tall cop leaning over Harry Bright, gently dabbing the saliva from the strong cleft chin of the dying man.
“The world won’t be the same when old Fred’s gone, will it, Harry?” Coy Brickman asked Harry Bright, while Fred Astaire sang it as only he could.
CHAPTER 18
There was no conversation on the ride back to the hotel. When they got to their suite, Otto went into his bedroom and came back with the expense money, throwing it on the coffee table. “Are you going home with me tomorrow?” he asked.
Sidney Blackpool picked up the telephone and said, “I’m calling Victor Watson. I’ll do what he wants me to do.”
When he reached Victor Watson’s Bel-Air residence the call was answered by a housekeeper and then Victor Watson came on the line and said, “Sidney? Have you discovered something?”
“Mister Watson,” Sidney Blackpool said, “I know how your boy died. But I can never prove anything in a court of law.”
Victor Watson merely said, “I’ll meet you at my Palm Springs home at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Thank you, Sidney. Thank you!”
After Sidney Blackpool hung up, Otto said, “Give him my President McKinleys. Or keep them yourself. I’m catching a bus to L.A. first thing in the morning. I’ll pick up my golf clubs when I see you at work on Monday.”
“Why don’t you stay, Otto? Why go home? What’s the point? What’re you trying to prove?”
“There’s nothing to prove,” Otto said. “I don’t wanna be there when you tell him about Harry Bright. It might make me feel more putrid than I do now.”
“I want that job, Otto,” Sidney Blackpool said. “I want a new life. If you can’t understand that, I’m sorry.”
“I hope you get what you want,” Otto Stringer said.
Otto went straight to bed without eating. Sidney Blackpool had no thought of food. He spent the evening planning the best way possible to tell Victor Watson how his son was shot by a drunken cop named Harry Bright in an act of mercy. He hoped he could leave Coy Brickman totally out of the story.
Harry Bright’s taped voice was haunting him. There was a time after Tommy Blackpool’s death when he craved to hear his son’s voice once more. But their home movies were without sound. Once he had tried watching a home movie. He never got past the first reel.
At one time in his life he’d foolishly yearned for his son to be more like him. Now, if he had a soul he’d give it just for his son to be.
It took him two hours and a lot of Johnnie Walker Black before he could fall asleep. Before he did, it came more fiercely than it had in a very long time: the memory of Tommy Blackpool. The last time his father saw him alive.
Sidney Blackpool held his hands over his eyes as he lay in the dark but that wouldn’t stop the memory. Nothing would stop it once it started to come. Someday, if he were ever to smoke his.38, it would be to stop it, that memory.