Lorie had come to Sidney Blackpool’s house to pick up both children. Tommy was into drugs heavily by then and Sidney Blackpool had found hash in his room and was confronting the boy in front of his ex-wife. During the argument Tommy had cursed both parents, and Sidney Blackpool had exploded. The father grabbed the son by the shirt and said, “You miserable little son of a bitch! You little bastard. I’ll kill you!” And he’d punched Tommy twice and knocked the boy over the kitchen table, causing Lorie to start screaming when glass shattered and blood from Tommy’s nose spattered on the white vinyl floor.
The boy’s mother threw herself between father and son and Tommy cried obscenities and ran through the house, his blood dripping on the carpet before he was out the door and gone.
They discovered later that he’d spent the night with a neighborhood friend. The next morning he was truant from school. He was drowned that day by the huge swells while surfing in the cold winter twilight.
After the image of Tommy running bloody through the house finally faded, Sidney Blackpool said, “Oh, Tommy!” It was all he could say. This was his secret. Victor Watson had his and Harry Bright had his.
He had the dream that night. In the dream Tommy Blackpool at the age of twelve was watching a football game on television, displaying that special sort of chuckling grin of his. In the dream Sidney Blackpool was still with his wife, Lorie, and he took her aside and made her promise not to tell the wondrous new secret: that he had willed Tommy back! At least his essence. But only for them to know.
As always, the dream ended when she said, “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!”
“Oh, no! I’ll never tell him that!” he said to his wife in the dream. “Because now he loves me. And … and now he forgives me. My boy forgives me!”
As always, he woke up sobbing, and smothering in his pillow.
For once, his partner was up first. In fact, when Sidney Blackpool dragged himself out of bed with a headache almost bad enough to make him fear a stroke, he was surprised to see that Otto Stringer had gone. He looked at his watch and saw it was after nine, the latest he’d slept since arriving. He showered, shaved and stared at his swollen jaw. His face was done in desert pastels. He ate a light breakfast in the suite and vomited it back up almost immediately.
He checked out of the hotel at 1:00 P.M. and walked the boulevards of Palm Springs until 2:30 P.M. Then he drove to the Watson home.
When Harlan Penrod admitted him and saw his damaged face he said, “My gosh! What happened to you? Mister Watson called and said he was coming to meet you. Did you get Terry Kinsale? Is he the one who …”
“No, he’s not, Harlan,” Sidney Blackpool said. “How about getting me some coffee.”
“Sure, but tell me who …”
“Don’t ask me any questions, Harlan. I’ll tell it to Mister Watson. Jack was his kid. Ask him.”
“But …”
“Don’t ask me a single question.”
“Okay. Except how do you like your coffee?”
Victor Watson arrived from Palm Springs Airport by taxi. He wasn’t even in the house long enough to shake hands with Sidney Blackpool before he said, “Harlan, take the car down and gas it up, will you?”
“It’s full, Mister Watson.” Harlan said, “Can I get …”
“Go to a movie, Harlan. Come back at six o’clock. Please.”
“Sure, Mister Watson,” the houseboy said, looking at the grim set of Sidney Blackpool’s mouth.
“Look at you, Sidney!” Victor Watson said. “What happened?”
“Cactus,” Sidney Blackpool said. “The desert’s full a dangers for guys like me.”
“Tell all of it, Sid. All of it.”
They went into the study and Victor Watson sat behind his desk while the detective sat across the room on a sofa.
Sidney Blackpool told almost all of it. There was nothing to gain by naming Coy Brickman. He told Victor Watson about Terry Kinsale, and about his driving Jack Watson’s Porsche, and about the gun that was missing and which no doubt was the weapon used to kill Jack during a misguided act of mercy by a sick drunken cop. He protected Coy Brickman by implying that Harry Bright probably disposed of the gun himself.
It was nearly dark when he finished. Victor Watson had asked very few questions during the narrative. He sat staring at Sidney Blackpool and missed not a word. His eye sockets became progressively more hollow in the shadow from desert twilight. He looked even older than Sidney Blackpool remembered him. The detective consumed three glasses of water during the dissertation. He’d never felt more parched. He was slightly dizzy and a bit nauseated, like a diabetic. His jaw ached but he did not want a Johnnie Walker Black. He wanted to end this thing cold sober.
By the time the detective had finished, Victor Watson’s eyes were invisible. Sidney Blackpool was staring at empty sockets and could only imagine the granite irises.
Harry Bright had unforgettable eyes. When he’d crept close to his bed he could see them staring in their sockets: beautiful blue eyes. Victor Watson had no eyes at all. Sidney Blackpool looked at his water glass and waited.
When Victor Watson spoke, he said, “I accept full responsibility for the tragic event.”
Sidney Blackpool was about to console, to tell him that Jack’s death was not his father’s fault.
But Victor Watson said, “I should never’ve brought you into this case. Not you, Sidney. I believed we might have a kind of bonding, you and me. I felt, upon hearing about you, that it was …”
“An omen!” Sidney Blackpool said.
“Yes. Now I see it was just a mistake. A foolish tragic mistake.”
“Whadda you mean, Mister Watson? What mistake?”
“Perhaps my time in psychotherapy is worth something after all,” Victor Watson said. “I see myself in you. The way I was. The rage. The confusion. The guilt.”
“I don’t understand, Mister Watson.”
“I know you don’t, Sidney. I know. Call it a form of transference, but labels aren’t important. You’ve projected feelings from your life, feelings about your own lost son into this investigation. Can’t you see that?”
“But Mister Watson …”
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I saw in you a lost father of a lost boy who might succeed where others … well, I was right, and being right I was terribly wrong. I’m sorry to have done this to you.”
“Please, Mister Watson, I don’t understand!” Sidney Blackpool moved to the edge of the sofa but still could not see eyes in the hollow sockets. If only he could read the eyes. An investigator had to see the eyes!
“My son Jack,” Victor Watson said, “was the finest, brightest, most loving young man you would ever meet.”
“I believe that, Mister Watson.”
“Our relationship had the normal stresses of fathers and sons, but I think we handled it.”
“I believe that,” Sidney Blackpool said, and knocked over the empty water glass reaching for a cigarette.
“No one, but no one who had ever known Jack Watson could ever under any circumstances believe he was homosexual.”
“I didn’t say …”
“And no one, but no one, would ever believe he could be stupid enough … insane enough to drive up to that miserable canyon in the dead of night for any reason whatsoever, other than because a criminal held a gun to his head.” Then Victor Watson stood, but his eyes were still in darkness, backlit by the lamp. “A fact that was proved when a bullet was fired into his skull!”
“Please, Mister Watson, please …”
Victor Watson sat back down in the chair and said, “I find it all very interesting, what you’ve told me. It’s interesting that there’s a cop named Harry Bright who told somebody he shot my son while he was drunk.”