Fugitive Nights (13 page)

Before Lynn could get into his Rambler, Nelson showed him that daffy grin and said, “If we get him I hope you'll put in a good word for me with your ex-captain. I jist gotta get a lateral transfer to Palm Springs P.D. They got eighty-four officers so there's always somebody retirin or leavin. They
gotta
take me!”

Lynn couldn't remember if his gun was in the trunk, but what good would it do? The Dirty Hareems of this world couldn't be stopped with silver bullets. They just keep going and going and going, with more lives than that Energizer battery and Richard Nixon.

“I gotta go home and mull this over, Nelson,” Lynn said wearily. “The guy's a foreigner: husky, bald, resourceful. I wonder if he has a big pink birthmark on his forehead?”

O
ne slice wheat toast no butter, a small grapefruit juice, a multivitamin, two cups of coffee. Breda hadn't altered that breakfast since she'd moved to the desert. That, coupled with all the bike riding, and measuring red meat portions by their atomic weight, had gotten her back into a size six where she intended to stay.

But she had to remain longer at the breakfast table since moving from Los Angeles. Now she had to read the local paper for potential business information, as well as the
L.A. Times.
The local obituaries were grim. The desert valley had one of the state's highest per capita incidence of AIDS. The obituaries would usually begin: “After a long illness … And survived by longtime friend …”

Being a single woman she often thought about AIDS, but in the months she'd been in the desert it wouldn't have mattered to her personal safety if the whole male population had hepatitis. Working to get her house and her business established had left Breda little time for men. She'd had drinks with a few, and dinner with a Palm Springs lawyer whom she'd met through another attorney client, though it wasn't actually a date. They just went to the same place after a meeting, and had sat at the same table, and he'd paid. He'd called her several times, but she learned he was married. Breda didn't have time in her life for complications like that.

She finished writing a letter to her daughter, Lizzy, stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink, checked the time and hurried to the bathroom to brush her teeth. A silk jumpsuit, blue to match her eyes, and white flats seemed okay for this day's work. She had a “shopping” job she had to do in the afternoon, if she could find the time.

Shopping to a P.I. meant loss-prevention work. Breda had been hired by a downtown department store to investigate the sales clerks. The store had been having some unexplained losses in the sportswear department, and three clerks were suspected. For over a week Breda had been trying to give two hours a day to the shopping job but hadn't spotted anything unusual.

She hated shopping jobs but hated another job even more, and one of those too was on her calendar. She'd been retained to investigate the bartenders at The Unicorn, a restaurant recently opened on south Palm Canyon Drive. The owner of The Unicorn had hired a new bartender who wore a Rolex and a diamond ring, and this alone had worried the boss, who was sure that one of his bartenders was ripping him off.

Breda told her client that he should be glad that the new bartender had the Rolex and ring because it meant that he'd already stolen the money to buy them from somebody
else.
She told him that if he wanted an absolutely honest deal from a bartender he'd have to make the guy work in a Speedo swimsuit, follow him every time he went to the John, and hire someone from Chicago to search his body cavities at closing time.

Breda decided that she'd give the saloon job to Lynn Cutter and take over the Clive Devon surveillance that morning. She couldn't bear the thought of sitting in a gin mill like a daytime barfly, avoiding the moves of local lotharios so old they were moldering.

She drove to Clive Devon's Las Palmas home and found Lynn in his car half a block away drinking coffee. He'd parked in the opposite direction this time so as not to alarm gardeners, maids or other servants who might get curious. This time he spotted her in his rearview mirror before she opened his car door.

Without so much as a good morning, Lynn said, “It's too bad I'm not an Augua Caliente Indian. Just think about it. I could get drunk and raise hell anywhere I want, and keep the law out by claiming I live on
sacred
ground. I could plug the cracks in my walls with five-dollar bills. I could use my spa to barbecue cows in. I could have Kevin Costner speak up for me if anybody tried to throw me in jail, and no one would dare say I was a drunk, or even dumb. They'd say I'm an Indian. I wish I was a Palm Springs Indian. I'd never have to worry about money again.”

“What brought all this on?” Breda asked.

“This job you gave me,” Lynn said. “I met a guy last night, a little policeman from the south end, they call him Dirty Hareem. And he informed me we're in the middle of some kind a smuggling conspiracy. Or at least, Clive Devon might be. And I don't need a thousand scoots bad enough to jeopardize my pension by getting involved in whatever it is.”

“Explain, please.”

“Have you heard or read anything in the past couple days about some smuggler jumping out of a private plane long enough to do a soccer demonstration on some deputy?”

“Sure. It was on all the local news programs.”

“I just gotta start watching something besides
The Simpsons
and
Tag Team Wrestling.
Guess what? The guy Clive Devon picked up in Painted Canyon yesterday? He's the fugitive smuggler they're looking for! I think. Why don't I look for a safer job? Maybe the President of Haiti needs a food taster.”

“Are you hung over again, or just nuts?”

“Both, but I'm coming around. I'm gonna go talk to one a those ex-FBI agents that run security for Thrifty Drug Stores. I'd rather be a drug store dick than a P.I.'s helper, cause I'm not as nuts as I was when you found me.”

“Are you ready to explain in full?” she asked, with that irritating smirk.

Funny how the little freckle on her lip looked darker today. How come that freckle aroused him, he wondered. “First you'd have to meet Nelson Hareem,” he began. “His paternal grandfather came from Beirut, but Nelson's not really a Muslim terrorist or anything. They'd never have him cause he's too fanatical. Here's what he told me.…”

Breda Burrows hardly blinked while Lynn Cutter told her the whole story, and why Nelson Hareem was, in effect, forcing him to dick around at motels and hotels from the A to C yellow pages.

When Lynn was finished, Breda sat back and stared toward Clive Devon's house for a few minutes. Then she said, “This is truly nuts.”

“Sure it is,” Lynn said. “So's Nelson. But he's still capable of turning over all his hot little clues to the sheriff's department. After which somebody would no doubt contact me. After which somebody else would no doubt contact my department. After which …”

“Okay, okay, I get it. You're worried about your disability pension, I
get
it!”

“Not at all,” he said. “Who needs a pension? I got enough money to last till one o'clock this afternoon if I don't buy that bag a potato chips I been craving.”

Breda reached in her purse, removed her wallet, and took out three twenties. “Here,” she said. “For expenses. Doesn't the guy whose house you're sitting have a pantry?”

“Yeah, and I ate everything in it except the cat food, which ain't my brand. How about another couple a these?”

Breda gave him another two twenties and said, “This is an advance against your fee. If you earn the fee.”

“If I … hey! I already earned something! I'm risking my pension with all this smuggler bullshit!”

“That's
your
problem.”

“
My
problem. Yeah, because I took on this job!”

“We had a deal. I didn't plan on some drug dealer entering the picture. I don't think he
did
enter the picture. I think Clive Devon is just a nice man who gave a ride to a guy, and he doesn't know zip about drug smuggling or any other felony or misdemeanor.”

“Well I'll stop worrying then. One a these days an earthquake's gonna hit the San Andreas Fault so hard Palm Springs'll just liquefy and turn into quicksand anyway. We'll be all gone like Sodom and Gomorrah. And here I am worrying about starving to death! I
must
be crazy!”

“I'm taking over the surveillance today,” Breda said. “Why don't you go talk sense to this cop, Nelson Hareem. Explain to him that this smuggler business can't go anywhere. Make him see.”

“He couldn't see with the Hubble Space Telescope. He's got an obsessive-compulsive personality. He's gonna call you today, and if I know Nelson he'll be flying in your airspace and mine till we start doing legwork at motels that begin with A, B and C.”

“You can do another job for me since you've got money now,” Breda said. “Go to The Unicorn restaurant on south Palm Canyon and watch the two bartenders. Someone's stealing a hundred bucks a shift, or so the owner thinks.”

“Do I get extra pay for another job?”

Breda showed him her world-champ sneer and said, “All right,
another
hundred. Meet me at seven o'clock tonight. Clive Devon's always back home before seven in the evening, girlfriend or not.”

“Let's meet at The Furnace Room.”

“Okay, I'll see you there at seven. Remember, Nelson Hareem's your problem. Deal with it.”

“My first wife always said that to me,” Lynn informed her. “
Deal
with it. You're a lot alike.”

Knowing it was probably a mistake, Breda said, “And what was she like? A bossy bitch, I suppose.”

“More self-indulgent than a spaghetti western. She liked to make me sweat for hours while she'd decide whether or not to pump a few
more
slugs into my fun zone.”

“Do you think I overreacted, sir?” Nelson Hareem asked his police chief when he was called before him at nine o'clock that morning.

“No, I wouldn't think so,” the chief told him. “No more than the Chinese in Tiananmen Square, or the Russians in Lithuania, or the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee.”

The chief was sweating Nelson Hareem because of a threatened lawsuit from a mortgage banker who'd passed through their little town two weeks earlier in a Porsche 928 while driving from a seminar in Scottsdale to his home in Encino. The mortgage banker had turned off Highway 10 intending to get one of those tasty date-shakes he'd heard so much about. He'd carelessly blown past a stop sign without making a complete stop, and quickly found himself lighted up by the whirling gumballs of Nelson Hareem, who happened to be dawdling down the street at a poky seventy miles per hour, the speed limit he ordinarily reserved for parking lots and residential driveways.

After that, the story was open to interpretation. The mortgage banker, having contributed heavily to the reelection of one of Southern California's most prominent sheriffs, possessed one of those courtesy badges that the sheriff handed out as a thank you. The mortgage banker had pinned the badge inside his alligator wallet next to his driver's license for just such eventualities as this.

First, the banker had handed his driver's license to Nelson and then he flipped open the wallet. With one of those “You got the loan at
prime!
” banker grins, he'd said, “How far will this go, pal?” referring to the badge.

But Nelson thought that the banker was referring to a fifty-dollar bill, whose corner was clearly protruding from the alligator wallet, thus signifying a bribery attempt. Nelson became totally indignant, incensed, offended and finally
outraged
by the insult.

Nelson said, “I don't know how far it'll go. Let's see!” And he impulsively ripped the wallet from the fat guy's hand and sailed it like an alligator Frisbee over his shoulder into the passing traffic, where it happened to land on the bed of a flatbed truck bound for Phoenix.

Then there was a semidesperate wrestling match out there, with outraged little Nelson Hareem rolling around on the ground with an equally outraged mortgage banker before Nelson managed to get the fat guy hooked up with his hands cuffed behind him and proned out on the ground, and only a few bumps and bruises that had to be treated.

But that wallet was never seen again, and the mortgage banker claimed he had over a thousand bucks in it. The banker got cited for running the stop sign, but was booked into jail for battery on a police officer. The deputy district attorney said that Nelson Hareem might use a tad more patience and better judgment next time he
thinks
he's being offered a bribe.

The morning after Nelson had met Lynn Cutter, his chief said to him, “The guy's lawyer's offered to drop the five-million-dollar lawsuit if we drop the charge of battery on a police officer, along with the vehicle code violation. And the city manager wonders if this might be a bargain for all of us. He also wonders if a daily dose of one thousand milligrams of Thorazine might make you a nondangerous citizen of our community.”