Fugitive Nights (8 page)

The
campesinos
spoke a few words to the man, who answered in their language, and as soon as they saw he was no threat they returned to their campfire. The bald man urinated in a grape vineyard, climbed into the back seat of the Ford, locked his car doors and went to sleep.

The only reason that detectives would learn about all of this was that one of the migrant workers was spending his last night on earth, and his friends would need to talk to the police.

H
is two marriages were part of a rags-to-witches story, Lynn Cutter always said. His first wife, Claudia, had spent him into bankruptcy by finding “little frocks” to wear to Palm Springs restaurants frequented by movie stars, millionaires and swarthy guys with “dapper don” haircuts. But when it came to fancy duds his second wife, Teddi, could spend California out of a recession in a day and a half.

His marriage to Claudia had lasted eighteen months. She was a good-looking flight attendant based in L.A. who liked to visit the desert every chance she got. Claudia always stayed at a cozy hotel near the Tennis Club in the days when tennis was tops, when developers there wouldn't dream of doing a hotel, condo or country club without top-drawer tennis facilities. Even Cathedral City—at that time a community of blue-collar folks who serviced the resorts—was pouring a lot of concrete for the sport of strings.

Claudia's favorite hotel was one of the hideaways snuggled up against the mountains. The first time Lynn saw her she was wearing tennis whites, lounging by a pool that reflected a sparkle of sunbeams, framed by a backdrop of mocha desert hillside laced with purple verbeña.
Enchantment.

He'd decided he had to learn to play tennis for Claudia, so he'd signed up for five lessons a week. Those flat-bellied young pros used to run him down like process servers. He'd go out to the playground as soon as he got off duty and smack balls against a concrete wall until his elbow got so sore he couldn't lift his arm higher than his shoulder. He'd later admitted to his pals that Claudia had him busting more balls than the Gabors, who also lived in Palm Springs, where they got a fleet discount on face-lifts.

Lynn and Claudia had decided against having kids in that her paycheck was urgently needed if they were to live like deposed Iranians. In those days a relative of the shah had visited Palm Springs with her pet peacock and lost it. Lynn was one of the cops assigned to the peacock posse and he'd tracked the bird by listening to its Roseanne Barr screams. Peacock wrangling, that summarized Palm Springs for you, Lynn always said.

But one day Claudia had returned from a flight and informed Lynn that she'd met somebody in Denver who'd “opened up new vistas” for her.

He asked, “Is it okay for you to ball someone out of state? I mean, if it's a different time zone is it still considered cheating? I'm just wondering.”

Claudia answered by saying, “I hope you'll be
man
enough to deal with this maturely.”

Lynn said, “I'll try to pinch off my tear ducts. Goodbye, Claudia.”

He'd gone out and gotten hammered that night, relieved that he'd never again have to feed her Doberman, which she called her “DNA dog.” The little charmer had trained it to eat anyone with a nonwhite genetic code.

His second ex-wife, Teddi: Now there was a woman
nobody
could figure out. She was about as understandable as acupuncture. On some days, her idea of a profound decision in life was whether or not to have her lug nuts chromed, but a day later, she'd drag him to a poetry reading at the University of California, Riverside, where some hairball who could make a rap group throw up would scream “poems” at them. As far as Lynn could discern, they were all about excrement, necrophilia, incest, rape, mayhem and vomit.

Teddi had gotten positively moist at their last reading, when they were allowed to shake hands with a poet and buy an inscribed copy of his work, published by some vanity press in San Francisco. As the poet took Lynn's bucks for the book, he asked whether Lynn had enjoyed the reading.

Lynn said to him in front of thirty people, “Oh yeah, very tasteful. I never once heard you mention pus or vaginal discharge.”

On the drive home to Palm Springs that night, Teddi told Lynn that she thought they lived in two different worlds, and that his was without “texture, subtlety or nuance.”

“You're not ready to change for me,” she informed him that night.

“I got
cut
for you,” he reminded her. “Your Siamese tomcat now has the only fully operating pair a balls in the house.”

“You only see things in black and white,” Teddi told him.

“You want Technicolor, you better hook up with Ted Turner,” he responded, long before the mogul's merger with Jane Fonda.

A highway patrol officer-cum-lawyer had handled that divorce, giving him a police discount. The lawyer told Lynn that he knew a doctor who would reverse the vasectomy if Lynn ever got married again.

But Lynn had informed the lawyer that women were about as impenetrable as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that as a single man he was happy as a rutting rabbit, intending to stay that way forever.

His “dates” in recent years usually began at The Furnace Room, but all relationships withered after a few weeks or months. Wilfred Plimsoll announced that Lynn had the staying power of a cherry popsicle.

Lynn had forced himself not to have more than half a dozen drinks the night before, but hadn't gotten to bed early enough. Still, he'd set the alarm and managed to arrive at the home of Clive Devon in Las Palmas at 6:30
A.M.

The desert sky was breathtaking at that hour. Cloud shadow made the Indio Hills shimmer in dappled silver light. All of the pastels in the desert landscape had deepened. The sky was dove gray, with burgundy smears behind pink cotton cumulus, as he sat in his car and drank coffee from a thermos.

At 7:00
A.M.
Clive Devon drove out of his driveway in a black Range Rover. He was wearing a floppy hat, a knit shirt, chinos and hiking boots, dressed very much like Lynn except for the hat. He meandered slowly through the narrow streets of Las Palmas, traditional home of Palm Springs' old money. It wasn't an ideal place to hang a tail on somebody. The streets twisted too much, and there were too many huge homes with whitewashed adobe walls and ten-foot oleander hedges for privacy. There was no place to hide on streets like that, and there were no cars to get behind at such an early hour. Mostly there were just gardeners coming to work in pickup trucks, with mowers and gardening tools stacked in the truck beds. Clive Devon turned on Via Lola because it flowed into Palm Canyon Drive, and you could go either way on that main artery.

Fortunately, Lynn Cutter's old Nash Rambler looked like it could belong to a Mexican gardener, or to a black maid from north Palm Springs. Lynn had gotten a good buy on the car from a used-car dealer in Cat City whom he'd once stopped for drunk driving on Christmas Eve. Instead of booking the guy he'd driven him home, mostly because the lawyer for Lynn's second wife had opened Lynn's veins and he figured it might be prudent to make pals with a guy that dealt with rent-a-wrecks and second-hand wheels, the kind of cars he could afford. And at least the Rambler had a new engine and retreads.

They drove past Gene Autry Trail and the Desert Princess Country Club, finally heading to the south end on Highway 10. Lynn began to wonder if this guy was one of those eccentrics who drove several hundred miles on a whim, maybe to see the Phoenix Suns play the L.A. Lakers? Lynn figured he had enough gas money in his pocket to get back if Clive Devon didn't travel more than sixty minutes from home. He was glad when the Range Rover turned off the freeway, heading back to Highway 111, passing by the little airport that had made a lot of cops breathe hard the night before, during the long and fruitless search for a fugitive.

Obviously Clive Devon wasn't a man who worried about somebody following him. Lynn soon realized that he could bumper-lock the Range Rover and never be noticed. The sixty-three-year-old man was moseying toward the Salton Sea, a thirty-five-mile lake near the foot of the Chocolate Mountains. What the guy intended to do by the north shore of the desert lake, where only a few hundred people lived in mobile homes, Lynn Cutter couldn't imagine.

The Salton Sea was a mistake of man and perhaps of nature. Just after the turn of the century, some railroad builders made a horrible error with the Colorado River, and a levee burst, allowing millions of cubic feet of water per day to rage into a huge salt marsh left over from an ancient inland sea. The new Salton Sea submerged everything under water fifty percent saltier than the ocean. It was said that pumice rock could float in this saltiest of water, 235 feet below sea level.

Many of the migrant workers, particularly Asian boat people, liked to fish the salt water for local corvina, using illegal gill nets. The cops figured that anybody hungry enough to eat the mutant fish from that selenium-loaded water—polluted by sewage and agricultural waste—should be welcome to it.

Lynn Cutter was astonished when the Range Rover parked at a café that advertised itself as a bait shop, near the north shore marina. There were several gulls lurking around the parking lot but not much else. The desert wind ruffled across the green-yellow water, making it very chancy for two fishermen trying to launch a small dinghy.

Clive Devon strolled inside the café. There was one old pickup in front and Lynn didn't dare get too close. The only convenient place to park and observe was five hundred yards down the highway, so he decided to use Breda's fancy binoculars.

He was watching the café when a man ran across the highway from the direction of the All-American Canal, a twenty-foot wide artery of fresh water from the Colorado River. Lynn didn't pay much attention to the guy, who wore a baseball cap and a dark windbreaker. He was wondering why a rich guy like Clive Devon would hang around this dying place. Even the lowliest desert denizens had just about given up on the Salton Sea. That morning the wind was blowing a foul algae-sewage smell his way.

Clive Devon came out of the café with a six-pack of something, beer or soda pop, and what looked like a bag of potato chips, and stood by his Range Rover. The man in the baseball cap also walked out, with a newspaper, and ran across the road, disappearing from sight.

Early that morning the migrant workers who'd camped in the stand of tamarisk trees had awakened to find the bald man driving away. He was gone for perhaps thirty minutes. When he returned he took off his jacket, parked under the trees once again and began reading a newspaper. After a little while he started the car as though to back out from under the trees, but just then a police car cruised down Box Canyon Road. When the police car had gone, the bald man jumped out of the Ford with his red canvas bag.

Before he left them he warned the three
campesinos
in Spanish that the car was stolen and that they must not drive it. He asked which way it was to Palm Springs and if he could get there by going the opposite way from where the police car had gone. They pointed him toward Highway 10 assuming he would hitchhike.

The Ford was a big temptation for three migrant workers, the oldest of whom, though he looked thirty, was only twenty years old. He had lived by his wits for five years, and had made many illegal crossings from Mexicali to work in the fields of the Imperial and Coachella valleys. He knew how to start a hot-wired car. Skillful driving was another matter.

Through binoculars, Lynn watched Clive Devon drink two soda pops during the half hour that he remained in the parking lot. Lynn saw only three other cars coming and going from the café during that time. Then a rusty old Plymouth rattled down the highway from the direction of Mecca and Thermal, and pulled into the parking area. A short slender woman got out. Even from his distant vantage point Lynn could see that she was young. Her shiny black hair hung down to her waist and she wore a blue T-shirt and jeans.

The young woman and Clive Devon greeted each other, but they stood on the far side of the Range Rover. Lynn's view was completely blocked and he could only get glimpses of Clive Devon through the side windows. He thought they stood close enough to be kissing but he couldn't be sure.

A large brown dog leaped out from the backseat of the rusty Plymouth and bounded toward Clive Devon; then he too was blocked by the Range Rover. After a moment Clive Devon opened the door of the Range Rover and the dog jumped up onto the backseat. Then the young woman got into the front next to Clive Devon, who started the Range Rover and drove back toward Mecca and Thermal.

By the time Lynn had allowed them some lead time he had to floor the Rambler because the Range Rover was accelerating. Lynn tried to see the license number when he passed the rusty Plymouth in the parking lot, but couldn't. He figured he'd get it on the way back. He was very surprised when the Range Rover turned right on Box Canyon Road and headed toward a county park.