by Dane Hartman
“Evidence that The Sojourner and the Hyacinth are one and the same?”
“Now you’re talking!”
“One issue we haven’t talked about.”
“Money?”
“That’s right.”
“How’d I guess? What do you have in mind?”
Harry told him. “And funeral expenses if necessary.”
“Deal. But funeral expenses?”
“Like to have all possibilities covered. But don’t worry about flowers. I don’t think I’d like flowers at my funeral.”
“Oh no? And why is that, Harry?”
“I’m allergic to them.”
Keepnews liked that and laughed heartily.
His wife heard them and came into the living room. She wanted to know what they found so humorous.
“Harry is a very funny man,” Keepnews told her.
“That was the feeling I always got,” said Wendy, giving Harry a conspiratorial wink he couldn’t divine the meaning of.
Wendy escorted him off the grounds.
“When will we be seeing you again?”
“Depends on what I find out tonight. Could be tomorrow morning.”
“That would be lovely.” She was wearing a robe now over the bikini. It was easier to look at her without staring—but not much. They approached Harry’s car. It needed a wash and a paint job badly. Harry kept meaning to get around to it, but there never seemed to be enough time. Until now. Just as he was about to get into it she stepped closer to him. She had that imploring expression people get on their faces when they want desperately to say something to you, but don’t know just how to go about it. She struggled and at last found a way. “Did Harold tell you we’re getting a divorce?”
The way she said this was so offhanded that Harry thought that he’d misheard her.
“Are you surprised?”
“Well, yes, I think I am.” He gazed out at the rambling mansion up the hill. It was gleaming white in the sun, a splendid spectacle that celebrated the mating of money, architecture, and cultivated taste. Divorce was something that didn’t seem to belong to a house like this; only what was beautiful and immortal should live there.
“Harold has been very nice about the whole thing. He doesn’t want the divorce. We’ve talked about it endlessly. But we both agree it’s probably the best thing.”
“Mind me asking one question?”
She shrugged. “Sure, go ahead.”
“Most couples, they’re getting a divorce, they don’t keep living together.”
“We’re not your usual couple. The house is big enough for the two of us. We never have to see each other if we don’t want to. We haven’t slept together for six months.” She fixed her eyes on Harry the way an interrogator might. “Do I shock you?”
“I’m not sure shock is the right word for it. I don’t know whether there’s a word in the English vocabulary that’s the right word for it. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, that could be it.”
“As soon as Harold and I work things out I’ll find myself a new situation.”
Harry didn’t know that people talked about new situations in that manner unless they were characters in the nineteenth-century novels he was compelled to read in high school.
“And how long do you think that’ll be?”
“Hard to tell with this yacht thing,” Wendy said. “Once everything’s settled and he’s got the Hyacinth back and the pirates put behind bars then maybe I’ll move out. He’s still my friend, he’ll always be that, and I wouldn’t want to desert him now.”
“It’s heartening to see there’s no animosity.”
She looked offended. “Between Harold and me? Never.”
“Tell me, Wendy, what do you think is Harold’s uppermost priority—getting his boat back or finding the men who killed his crew? That is, if they were killed.”
It was hard to tell what she was thinking by the mysterious look on her face. Nor would she answer his question directly. All she said was, “Why do you think I want a divorce?”
Harry understood—or thought he did at any rate.
C H A P T E R
F o u r
That same evening, when the sky was flushed with a soft amber light that was the sun’s final legacy, Harry settled down behind the wheel of his car and started down Columbus on his way to the Marina Yacht Harbor. Beside him were the documents and photos provided by Keepnews. He was not certain how he would get on board The Sojourner nor how he would uncover the hard evidence that would identify it absolutely as the Hyacinth. He would have to do what Sonny Rollins was doing to “My Old Flame” with his tenor saxophone on the radio—improvise. Sonny had his horn, Harry had his gun, but they were each only instruments; it was the mind, the imagination, that indefinable something that made it all work. Or not. It depended sometimes on the adrenalin in your blood, on the time of day or night it was. There were occasions when everything looked wrong and you couldn’t see how in the world you would make it, and still it worked, held together and miraculously clicked. Of course, there were those occasions when the exact opposite happened. Dangerous occasions when it all looked perfect, then blew up in your face.
No one in the Broadway area was waiting for darkness to overtake them. Already the strip joints and the peep shows were going full-blast, pouring music and florescent colors out into the street. High-strutting hookers who you’d never catch in the light of day were parading in twos and threes, down the avenue, black and white and yellow with hair crowded thickly on their heads. Their pimps hung back in the shadows, contemplating the next several hours’ profits. Youths, their minds gone blank with ludes and angel dust, roamed up and down, dazedly peering into the topless bars where the girls were bathed in harsh pink lights and compelled to writhe in simulated passion to the same jukebox tunes they’d writhed to the night before. Tourists, thinking there was some sort of new thrill to be discovered here, bore the expression of Alice in Wonderland just before she went through the looking glass.
It was only when he was close to the junction of Bay Street that he realized he was making the man in back of him angry by being in his way. A green Chevy showed up in his rearview mirror, and from what he could see there were three men in the vehicle, two in front, one in back. The driver was doing everything he could think of to pass Harry, veering into the adjacent lane, risking oncoming traffic, blasting his horn so that Harry would pull over and let him by, and, when that didn’t work, he began tailgating him, drawing so close that as soon as Harry stopped for a red light, the Chevy nearly crashed into him. There was a noisy plaintive screech of tires and a further paroxysm of hornblowing.
Harry was rather amused by the frustration he was causing the joker behind him, and he had no intention of making life easier for him. On Bay Street the Chevy’s driver became even more desperate; if Harry wasn’t going to allow him to pass on his side then he was bound and determined to pass him on the other. What this meant was that he had to maneuver the Chevy onto the curb, half-on, half-off, in the process upsetting a couple of garbage cans which rattled noisily to the ground and terrified some unwitting pedestrians. Harry was just about to cut him off on the right—which was not difficult—when he reconsidered. For the first time he noticed in front of him—three cars ahead—a black Mercedes which was, like the Chevy, doing whatever it could to surge ahead and overcome the trap of early evening traffic. It occurred to Harry that whoever the three gentlemen in the Chevy were they had a serious interest in the gentlemen in the Mercedes. Just what that interest was was, at this point, hard to figure. So Harry decided to let the scenario go ahead without his interference—at least at this juncture. Accordingly, he got out of the way.
The blare of horns on all sides of him, growing to an earsplitting crescendo, signaled that this chase-in-progress had caught the attention of other drivers in the vicinity. They didn’t like being cut off or suffering dented fenders that would draw skeptical questions from their insurance agents. But like it or not, that was j
ust what was happening. The two cars in their fight to penetrate the traffic lurched ahead, their drivers evidently oblivious of the damage they were causing. The sickening sound of metal against metal was repeated again and again. But gradually, in recognition of the frightening resolve of these beserk people, other drivers drew out of their way, allowing them freer passage as Bay Street yielded to Marina Boulevard. Inadvertently, they paved the way for Harry who raced after them.
The men in the Mercedes and those in the Chevy were too intent on one another to pay attention to Harry. And besides, he was as anonymous as the car he drove; there was nothing to connect him to the police save his two-wave radio, which he considered using, then decided not to. All that would happen, if he alerted them, was that the drivers of the respective cars would be stopped and given summonses for speeding. And the way they were driving, accelerating with every passing block, these were not the sort of people, who would find a summons for exceeding the limit by forty miles per hour a particularly humbling experience.
Better to wait, Harry thought, and find out what these people were really about. That might not be a sensible policy, but it was one that he had no compunction about adopting. On the AM station he had going Jimmy Smith was driving hard on the organ, backed by an ingenious guitarist and a drummer propelling up a harsh primal rhythm. What the number they were playing was Harry didn’t know but it sure was a terrific accompaniment to the car chase in front of him.
The Mercedes shot ahead on Marina, then veered left and headed south down Presidio Drive. Traffic was lighter on this stretch, and the two cars were that much more conspicuous. The Mercedes was speeding in the direction of Golden Gate Park; the line of trees at its perimeter could be made out in the dusk.
It was not possible to tell whether the Mercedes had a destination or was simply trying to elude the Chevy. Harry, however, was beginning to get the sense that of the two possibilities the latter was the more likely.
The Mercedes was entering the park, the Chevy was gaining on it though Harry couldn’t believe that it would ever catch up. But he hadn’t reckoned on the driver of the Mercedes. He was apparently not equal to the car or what it could do.
The driver didn’t seem to anticipate the turns he’d have to take, and at times the vehicle would stray off the paved surface, onto the grass, into clumps of bushes. Once it banged noisily into the side of an innocent oak. Could be that the driver was drunk or on drugs or else was so carried away by this enterprise that it had all gotten a bit too much for him.
Because Harry was directly behind the Chevy and because the road pursued such a twisting and unpredictable course, he was not always able to keep the Mercedes in sight. He could, however, hear it. The tires screeched maddeningly as the car bounded from one side of the road to the other. Then there was another sound—a sound of crunching shrubbery—which was followed by moments with a terrific clatter of metal yielding quickly to the unresisting surface of a boulder that jutted out nearly to the highway, a big granite thing that had been sitting for a couple of million years waiting for some excitement.
The Chevy passed right by the final resting place of the Mercedes, but only because it was going too fast to stop immediately. It slowed down with a fervent protest from the brakes and drew up to a gravelly stretch that ran flush along the road.
Harry kept going until he was hidden from view beyond a bend in the road, then stopped and got out of his car.
The Mercedes, when he crept to within sight of it, using the trees and the shadows they sent down along the high untrimmed grass to conceal himself, was a wreck. At least the front part of it was, jammed up against the boulder, practically melded into the damn thing by the force of the impact. There was nothing left of it aside from the windshield which, while resembling a roadmap with lots of roads and riverbeds, still remained intact. Where the occupants of the Mercedes had gone Harry couldn’t determine. In fact, he couldn’t even figure out what had happened to their pursuers. The Chevy, too, was vacant.
But he didn’t have to go looking for them. They made themselves known with a sudden burst of fire. At first there were only scattered reports, then a relentless fusillade. The conflict seemed to be going on just up over the hillock and through a cluster of oaks just to Harry’s left. The question he faced was whether to return to his car and alert the station or to risk getting closer to better ascertain the situation—and to do so without somehow stumbling into the middle of the fray.
He decided to return to his car. There were too many men involved for him to handle on his own. The dispatcher recognized Harry’s voice immediately.
“You back with us, Inspector?” he inquired.
“Not exactly. But don’t let technicalities stop you.”
“Course not. I will relay the message. Ten-four.”
Even from this distance the gunfire could be heard. It was not loud enough, however, to cause the few passing cars to stop. Then again when people were shooting one another usually the best thing you could do was to keep right on going. It was only the ones like Harry who felt the pull in the opposite direction. He wasn’t about to stay by his car until help arrived. By then the gunmen might all be gone. Or dead.
Harry ventured in through the oak-strewn landscape, keeping low to avoid the stray bullet that every so often tore away the bark and smaller branches from trees in Harry’s immediate vicinity. As he approached the area that the gunmen had converted into a battlefield the trees grew fewer in number, allowing for an open grassy knoll. There were on the periphery of the knoll smaller boulders, cousins of the big one that had done in the Mercedes, and these were being used by the men for cover. Who was shooting at whom Harry couldn’t say for sure, and which ones had come from the Mercedes and which from the Chevy was a similar mystery. Harry, however, did have one advantage; as far as he was concerned he was against both parties to the conflict, so he really didn’t care who emerged victorious. His only objective here was to put a stop to the fight, though he had no idea just how he was going to go about this.
Hunkered down, he waited for the battle to define itself, for a strategy on the part of one side or the other to become evident. He was certain that this unrewarding exchange of fire couldn’t go on much longer. With everyone dug in and protected as they were, no one stood a chance in hell to hit his enemy. Sooner or later someone was going to move or else they would all have to give up, go home, and think about other ways of passing a Thursday evening in San Francisco.
In his assessment of the situation, Harry proved correct, though this did not necessarily mean anyone would give him any awards for the accuracy of his judgment. When it came to awards, people seemed more interested in taking them away from him.
In any case, someone moved, then someone else joined him. They didn’t risk exposing themselves on the knoll. There were better and less painful ways of committing suicide, after all. Instead they clung to the darkness that was especially friendly on the perimeter of the knoll; there there were the trees and the brambles and brush. Their opponents apparently had failed to see them because they were still aiming in the same general direction as before. One of the men had stayed behind, maintaining an even level of fire so as to give his friends more time in which to skirt around the knoll and spring their little surprise.
Harry couldn’t resist spoiling their fun. It was simply too much of a temptation. He was the wild card in the deck, the X part of the equation. Since he had the two men in view—and the view was growing better all the time since they kept coming closer, having no idea that Harry was monitoring their progress—he decided to wait no longer. He raised his Magnum and fired—but not to hit either of them. That wasn’t his purpose.
Astonished, even a bit incredulous, the two gunmen jumped back, firing wildly since they couldn’t understand where this unexpected assault had originated. Harry fired again. And now, alerted to the two men’s presence, their enemies on the opposite end of the knoll began firing in their direction too. Someone’s aim was good or else h
e was just lucky. The man who was hit probably wouldn’t spend much time contemplating which it was; the blood was pumping out of his lower back too fast for him to pay much attention to anything else. He lay in a bed of green detritus, but wouldn’t stay still. Instead he thrashed about, screaming words that got drowned out by the increasing fury of the bullets flying every which way over the knoll.
The second man apparently managed to get himself to shelter before he was hit. His flight seemed to encourage the assailants across the knoll because now one of their number emerged, testing the atmosphere, maybe in preparation for a full-scale assault. Could be these jokers were playing at World War II? Harry thought. Summer nights can get boring around town.
Harry set out with the intention of circling around the knoll, laying down a barrage that wasn’t meant to hit anyone but rather to confuse them. And confuse them it did. They fired at Harry, they fired at each other, they went through one clip after another, trying like hell to achieve something significant for all their trouble.
Way in the distance, sounding more like cows bellowing than anything else, you could make out the sirens of the squad cars. High time help arrived, Harry thought. But help was a mixed blessing. The appearance of the police might panic these gun-wielding gentlemen and result in considerably more bloodshed. Not that Harry cared about these characters, but he feared for the lives of the men he served with—or used to serve with before a D.A. named Nolan began reciting Supreme Court decisions to him.
It seemed to him that he was at a point midway between the two groups of gunmen. But for the moment he had no way of knowing since the fire had subsided, maybe because they wanted to be absolutely certain it was sirens they were hearing. But the imminent coming of the police evidently didn’t quite put the fear of God into them because in half a minute they resumed, though their bullets were doing little more than scooping up dirt and thudding into tree trunks.
