The Secrets of Harry Bright by Joseph Wambaugh

Author:Joseph Wambaugh [Wambaugh, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER • 12

THE OUTLAW

There were two women employed by the Mineral Springs Police Department, but only one was a sworn law officer. Ruth Kosko, the department’s sole detective, was known of course as Ruth the Sleuth. The other woman was Paco’s secretary, record clerk and radio operator, Annie Paskewicz, called Anemic Annie from the days when she worked for the crime lab in San Diego, drawing blood from arrestees suspected of being under the influence of drugs.

There seemed to be someone like Anemic Annie in crime labs and county morgues everywhere. She was pallid in winter and summer, not albino white but close, and she’d formerly spent her days drawing and analyzing blood while seeming to have none of her own. Anemic Annie always wore sensible shoes that made clunky footsteps like Boris Karloff, and she was yet another law-enforcement burnout, biding her time for a pension. It was because of her ravaged nerves that she’d left her job in San Diego and come to Mineral Springs. She’d gotten so nervous in mid-life that she couldn’t make a clean hit anymore.

Once when they brought in a junkie for a blood sample, Annie broke the Guinness world record for misses with a syringe. She made twenty-six straight attempts to hit a vein without success. The horsed-out junkie started yelling and screaming about Annie poking more holes than the Three Musketeers, and the narcs who’d arrested the hype decided that Annie’s antics would be deemed cruel and unusual punishment so they had to let the guy go.

People started spreading rumors that poor Annie carried her syringe at port arms. They claimed she had pulled out bone marrow during that world-record performance. Cops said that she had to work nights, and never ate garlic, and slept in a box of dirt with a lid. People warned if you owned her favorite flavor, type AB, not to get your neck too close or you’d be sporting the world’s biggest hickey.

Finally she got sick of it and telephoned a cop she used to know in San Diego who was working as a sergeant at a little police department in the Coachella Valley. An interview was arranged during which Sergeant Harry Bright said, “Paco, you’ll never find a harder-working woman than Annie here.”

Anemic Annie gave up orchids in San Diego for a cactus garden in Mineral Springs, and found that if she wore a big straw hat and long skirts, her pale skin did okay in the dry heat. She was generally much happier than when she was bloodletting down south.

On the evening that Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer were getting the crap scared out of them in the desert, Anemic Annie and Ruth the Sleuth were commiserating at the Mirage Saloon, neither wanting to drink at the Eleven Ninety-nine Club because of all the chauvinist pigs that hung around there. But both knew if they wanted to score with some young hunking cop they had little choice in Mineral Springs other than to boogie over there in the shank of the night.

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