The Secrets of Harry Bright

by Joseph Wambaugh

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Raucous cops, outlaw bikers, and suntanned celebrities collide in a steamy landscape swirling with natural beauty and unnatural death.
 
Seventeen months ago the California desert revealed the remains of Jack Watson. The rich man’s son was found incinerated in a Rolls-Royce, a bullet in his head. Now, a year and a half later, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Sidney Blackpool is called into the desert to take on the case. But what begins for Blackpool as an investigation sandwiched between golf games in nearby Palm Springs quickly becomes an obsession.
 
For the savage beauty of the wastelands holds many secrets. Secrets that stir up Blackpool’s long-suppressed nightmares of his own son’s death. Secrets that threaten to destroy an entire police department. Secrets that, by rights, should remain forever buried by the wind in the ageless desert sands.

In this riveting novel, bestselling author Joseph Wambaugh jolts our emotions while entertaining us with his special brand of bawdy, beautiful, dark humor.

Release date: August 14, 2013

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER • 1 
 
THE MACHO LIZARD
 
Across the globe there are two narrow belts 25 degrees north and south of the equator where the movement of winds and oceans prevents rain clouds from penetrating the earth. The sun, without cloud cover below, is free to suck the moisture from earth, plants, animals. The night sky in such places is very clear, and it turns suddenly cool when the ground heat bounces back to the heavens. The daytime baking and night cooling of the earth’s floor creates formidable winds. Where mountains exist, the rising hot air is replaced by cool air from the mountains that funnels down the canyons and dries the land even more.
 
In former times such places were thought inhospitable to ordinary human beings, but then nobody ever said that ordinary human beings lived in Hollywood. It was probably the excesses of the good life during Hollywood’s Golden Age that pushed them out there, just two hours drive from Los Angeles but a world away.
 
People who lived their lives like they were hot-wired to Caddy convertibles, people who claimed to wear cocaine on their genitals to stay hot-wired, found that for the first time in years they could actually uncoil. The desert possessed magic.
 
At first some of them didn’t see it. The desert looked forbidding and hostile, but pretty soon the enveloping mountains stopped seeming like slag heaps. The mountains took on noble shapes, elegant lines. The movie stars talked of subtle desert pastels and ever-changing light shows. Cloud shadow from feathery cumulus banks spangled the mountains and hills with light and dappled shade. A movie star could sit by poolside or in a natural hot spring and watch the shadows magically swirling in color, and the coral, scarlet and purple cactus blossoms and wild flowers flooding the foreground. The foothills were so covered with verbena that they were called the Purple Mountains. And then there were the nights, cool nights when movie stars would gaze at real ones. The dipper burned like a strand of diamonds on a sable cloak.
 
So Palm Springs provided a refuge, a sanctuary between pictures. They all came: Gable, Lombard, Cagney, Tracy, Hepburn, the Marx Brothers, even Garbo. And no matter how fearful they might be about Time, those people who had to remain changeless, the desert had an answer even for that. The warm dry climate soothed arthritic pain, bursitis, lung disorders. Everyone started feeling more vigorous, playing tennis and golf, swimming, cavorting like Errol Flynn.
 
There were endless surprises. Mount San Jacinto’s peak at dusk was backlit by the sun setting over the Pacific. It gave the thrilling impression that just west of the mountain was the city, the searchlights of Grauman’s Chinese, The Pantages and The Egyptian theaters. The drooling mobs with their pencils and notebooks and flashbulbs seemed to be just on the other side. It was all so comforting it allowed them to relax and play like children. The mountain was backlit for them by The Great Gaffer in the sky. They were safe. They could rest because reassuringly close, ever waiting in the lights, was Hollywood.
 
Then of course after show biz found sand and cactus to its liking, land developers invaded the desert like Rommel’s panzers. They started in Palm Springs and eventually spread south to Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta. The Coachella Valley was blitzkrieged.
 
It appeared that absolutely nothing could halt the country club and resort developers. Those big cat tractors would challenge Godzilla, they said. But one of Godzilla’s little cousins slowed them down a bit. Apparently, certain portions of the Coachella Valley provide the last chance for a tiny endangered creature called the fringe-toed lizard. He’s an unremarkable little fellow with overlapping eyelids, fat belly and snowshoe scales for sand dwelling. Yet he has become the environmentalists’ best hope for slowing the momentum that Hollywood started so long ago. But some of the richest and most famous people on earth own real estate in the fringe-toed lizard’s bailiwick, so gamblers aren’t betting much on the little reptile.
 
Today there are at least fifty golf courses in the Coachella Valley and over two hundred hotels, and the low humidity condition in the desert has been forever altered by colossal raids on the underground water table.
 
But there are parts of the valley that aren’t amenable to raids by big cat tractors. One of them is the little town of Mineral Springs, about ten miles out of Palm Springs. The reason is simple: wind. Desert wind that could drive ten thousand wind turbines. The Mineral Springs Chamber of Commerce calls the winds “therapeutic breezes.” The residents call them gale force.
 
There’s little sand left, the residents say. It’s been blown clear to the Salton Sea. That wind can make it rain pebbles and stones like a desert hailstorm. Cars left with windows open need to be pickaxed, they say.
 
But in 1978 the good people of Mineral Springs decided that wind or no wind they wanted some of the tourist bucks from their neighbors on the other side of the valley. After all, their mineral water spouting from the ground at 180 degrees Fahrenheit was pure, and didn’t smell like rotten eggs as does most mineral water. In fact, it was so clean that they wanted a federal grant to study the phenomenon of odorless hot mineral water, until it was pointed out that the smell is probably blown away before it can reach the nose.
 
The townsfolk decided that if their small city was going to be taken seriously it needed among other things its own police force, so they decided to take applications for a chief of police and eventually settled on a fourteen-year veteran of the county sheriffs office. Paco Pedroza had also been a sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department for nine years prior to that, and had moved to a desert climate hoping to arrest his daughter’s chronic bronchitis.
 
The town of Mineral Springs thought it could get by with a three-man police force until its new chief pointed out a few territorial problems. Mineral Springs, being remote, yet easily accessible to the rich desert resorts, was the home of more chemists than Cal Tech, but they were all amateurs. The lonely windblown desert canyons were full of Cobras, an outlaw motorcycle gang that made its living by brewing vats of methamphetamine. If there was an ideal place for speed labs this was it. The ether smell of “crank” or “crystal” was blown halfway to Indio the second it escaped the lab. There was no danger of cops literally nosing their way into a lab as in ordinary neighborhoods. So there were a lot of Harley hogs and chopper bikes in or about the town, and they did more business than the Rotary Club.
 
In addition to the crank labs, Mineral Springs, with its low-cost housing, was also an ideal spot for most of the meat eaters who flock to rich resort communities to feed on tourists. It had two halfway houses and a de-tox center for the ex-cons and “reformed” dopers and alcoholics of the Coachella Valley. The only mansion in town had been built by a pimp who ran thirteen girls into Palm Springs during the height of the season to work the hotels. An early reputation for a laissez-faire life-style also brought a nudist colony, and the nudist colony brought hordes of hang gliders, which often crashed in the treacherous winds. It was not an easy town for cops in that the ex-cons, bikers, crank dealers, Palm Springs burglars, nudists, robbers and pimps, horny kite pilots, dopers and drunks didn’t necessarily want a police force of any kind.
 
Paco Pedroza needed savvy cops, and they had to be the right kind to make it in these parts, being ten miles from the closest police jurisdiction where there might be help available.
 
He gave each cop he hired over the years the same admonition: “I gotta have people with street smarts and moxie but they also gotta have somethin more important: diplomacy. When you’re out there all alone and no help on the horizon you gotta be able to talk people into doing it your way. Remember one thing: out here you ain’t got no ‘or else’ at your disposal.”
 
And Paco gave each cop he hired (except the lone female, Ruth Kosko) the same warning: “I won’t hassle you about the weapons you carry. We got M-fourteens in your car with a clip a thirty that you can fire in three round bursts. You can carry forty-four magnums, or forty-fives with as hot a load as they can stand. You can carry nine millimeters cocked and locked, if you need more rounds. You can wear a Whammo wrist rocket or you can stash a backup derringer up your ass if it makes you feel better. I ain’t gonna hassle you about the iron you carry even if it looks offensive. And there ain’t much of a dress code. I won’t worry about a shoeshine since the sun’ll melt it off anyway. I won’t worry if you catch a few winks sometimes on a graveyard shift if you got to. I have just a few rules for my cops: no drugs and no thieves at no time. And no booze on the job. And no aberrant sexual behavior inside the city limits with anybody under the age a forty even when you’re off duty. And that’s about it, far as rules.”