The Secrets of Harry Bright by Joseph Wambaugh

closed.
    Paco Pedroza was absolutely ready to fire his surfer cop for driving out there in the first place, except that O. A. Jones provided the only possible clue to the murder. After the F . B. I . pulled out of the case, Palm Springs P . D . was left with a whodunit homicide, and all they had was O. A. Jones who convinced everybody that he was not delirious when he heard the guy playing the banjo and singing, followed by the sound of a vehicle racing away. It was theorized that the killer of Jack Watson had returned to the burned car two days after the murder. Perhaps to retrieve something. Officer O. A. Jones had heard a music man.
    O. A. Jones persuaded a local reporter to write a story calling him "the key to the riddle." The reporter also dubbed him a "courageous officer" who took it upon himself to scour the desert canyons for the missing Palm Springs lad.
    Paco Pedroza would still have liked to send his freaking hero back to fighting kelp in Laguna Beach on his potato-chip surfboard. Only he couldn't because the Mineral Springs City Council was giving O. A. Jones a citation for extraordinary police service.

    Chapter 4
    PRESIDENT McKINLEY
    OTTO STRINGER LOOKED LIKE THE WINNING TICKET IN A state lottery. He was waiting on his front porch with two suitcases and a set of golf clubs. He saluted his neighbors like Ronald Reagan at the door of Air Force One. He was wearing a brand-new pink polyester golf shirt that matched his plump cheeks, an acrylic sleeveless sweater with a pink-and-green argyle pattern, and a green Ben Hogan golf cap. He'd considered investing in plus fours but figured a guy should maybe break a hundred one time before blowing into Palm Springs all gussied up like a quarter-ton Byron Nelson.
    When he got Sidney Blackpool's phone call about the Palm Springs holiday he couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe any of the good things that had happened to him since he'd gotten out of a crazy narc job and into a crazy homicide job at Hollywood dicks where at least he felt safe. During his last months at narcotics he'd been getting a whole bunch of obvious messages from The Man Himself. Otto wasn't a very religious person--a lapsed agnostic, he called himself--who reverted to his early Presbyterian ways only in dangerous situations. The hints he figured The Big Boss was giving him weren't those "for your eye s o nly" messages he used to fear Jimmy Carter would thin k h e got while sitting by the nuke hot line. No, these wer e p lain enough for everyone to see. And they were ominous .
    For example, there was the time near the end when he let himself get talked into going in on a coke buy with an undercover snitch, and why a sixteen-year cop nearly forty years old didn't know better was in itself a mystery and a portent. The snitch was one of those hepatitis hypes who bragged to every cop who busted him that he worked for the F . B. I . or the Drug Enforcement Agency. Otto Stringer told him that as far as he was concerned anybody who d pal around with feds was about as welcome as a crotch full of herpes since the DEA was always trying to steal the city narcs' credit when they weren't stealing their informants.
    After they understood each other, the snitch talked Otto into going in with him on the coke buy so Otto could bear the brunt of the later court testimony. The snitch convinced Otto's lieutenant that none of the other narcs in the squad looked less like a cop in that Otto was built like something you slam-dunk at the sports arena.
    Problems popped up the second they walked into the motel room where the buy was to go down with "a very nice Hawaiian dude." The biggest problem was that there was no snort. Nor any other drugs. Nor any Hawaiian dude, nice or otherwise. It was a straight rip-off. They were met by three Samoans, the smallest of whom couldn't have squeezed into a phone booth and who had a one-track mind.
    The Samoans patted them down for weapons but missed the body wire buried under Otto's tummy