by Dane Hartman
“Oh? I missed last year’s festivities. Is it really that crazy?”
“Let’s just say it won’t be easy to forget.”
Owens was agreeable to the change in geography. He wasn’t especially partial to the neighborhood he’d had to roam last night. And since they had no real leads to go on what did they have to lose?
He found it ironic, and rather comical, that for once his own personal costume party was being duplicated by tens of thousands throughout the city. Halloween was an occasion when everybody could play decoy if they so chose.
Harry, however, as always went as himself: the weary and skeptical Inspector #71.
Each year the parade seemed to get longer, and tonight it was strung out for blocks. Ghosts, witches, warlocks, skeletons, Space Age creatures bedecked in silver foil, characters out of Star Wars, women festooned in silver and white, a larger-than-life Marie Antoinette, her giant head bobbing, a sixty-piece brass band, men in Richard Nixon masks, one after another, they just kept coming, their passage announced by whistles, drums, and frequent renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Floats—of immense multi-segmented snakes, of a gigantic skeleton whose torso and skinny white limbs moved in time to the music that sailed up into the air—were borne aloft by the crowd as it progressed down Van Ness. Thousands thronged into the street, cheering, expecting at any moment to be surprised and delighted anew by the continuing spectacle. In the distance, horns blared furiously as drivers trapped in the rerouted traffic protested their paralysis.
In his own car on Sacramento Harry listened to the familiar female voice that dominated the police band. “Charlie 8, a 1080 on Pine. Woman says she’s been robbed. That’s the corner of Octavia and Pine . . .” And from Charlie 8, the reply: “10-40,” meaning that Charlie 8 would respond to the call rather than passing the responsibility along to another patrol car.
The calls kept coming in with increasing frequency: 1080s, 801s, 211s, thefts, suicides, robberies . . . On a night like this, incidents of violence had a habit of breaking out with a certain momentum; it was as though there was some weird current in the air that prompted madness in one person and passed it on to another. It was more contagious than the bubonic plague and maybe just as virulent. A full moon Harry had found could do it, too.
Occasionally, Harry would check in with Owens. There was, after all, no way to keep visual track of him, not with the hordes that had descended into the city’s center for the parade.
“Everything’s fine here, Harry. Just a bit confusing,” Owens would answer. In the background Harry could hear some of that confusion, a tumult of voices and jittery music.
“Where are you now, Drake?”
“Headed east on Golden Gate.”
“10-4.”
Harry decided to put his car in motion so that the distance separating him from his partner would not become too great. The problem was that with traffic blocked and detoured, it was difficult to get anywhere without protracted delays, and Harry was no luckier than most of the motorists who’d made the mistake of coming out on a night like this.
He got to Ellis half an hour later, and he was still three blocks from Golden Gate. He had not heard from Owens in the interim, and he thought he’d best raise him again on the radio and discover exactly where he was.
But he failed to receive a response.
“Drake, this is Alpha 2, do you read me?”
Nothing.
“Drake, this is Alpha 2, Harry Callahan here. Where are you?”
Nothing. Nothing but static and the intrusion of competing signals that somehow had jumped to his channel.
With passage impeded the way it was, Harry realized the futility of relying on his car any longer. While it was conceivable that the radio transmission was at fault, he did not believe it. Either Owens was in some danger or he was in a situation where he could not risk exposing his own radio to view. In either case Harry was sufficiently alarmed to park his car—which actually meant double-parking it—and proceed on foot.
In a half hour’s time Owens could have wandered much farther afield. He might not be on Golden Gate at all any longer, but that was his last given location and so it was there that Harry determined he would first look.
Almost twenty blocks to the north and several blocks to the east, in a discotheque on the corner of Union and one of the streets intersecting it between Van Ness and Fillmore, a masked ball was well in progress. It was, to be sure, an unusual masked ball, appropriate to the 1980s in terms both of the costumes that the revelers had chosen and of the energy that they exhibited in carrying on their celebration. For instance, several individuals of both sexes displayed what might be called the “sick” or the “infirm” look; these people came gauzed and bandaged, in wheelchairs, or limping with the aid of walkers. One man arrived in a fully electric rolling hospital bed, wowing the public while propped up on pillows.
But this was nothing compared to some of the more ingenious revelers who’d doused themselves in genuine animal blood, sold by a place called McDermott Meats in Oakland: the sight of them was repulsive enough, but it paled beside the smell.
And, of course, there were the usual ghouls and goblins and many, many women in leotards, tanktops, floor-length gowns, all with faces painted to make them look as though they had been recently exhumed from their final resting place, except that the eyes had been darkened and the lips brightened in order to present a contrast to the pasty whiteness of the skin that surrounded them.
An actress to begin with, Martha Denby was practically unrecognizable, with a black mask that gave her the look of an executioner and a loose black garment that hung to her feet, from which sandaled feet, protruded. Whenever she moved into the light, and there wasn’t much reliable light in this place, anyone with an observant eye would notice that the black gown she wore was so fragile and gossamer that it was virtually transparent and that she had nothing on underneath. Nothing whatsoever.
In fact, the only way you could determine that this was Martha without hearing her identifiably lilting voice was by Jim Corona’s anxious presence. He, dressed as a pirate, eye patch and big gold looped earring in left ear, never let her get farther than the outer limit of his own shadow.
If she was open with Teddy about Jim, she was not open with Jim about Teddy. He was more likely to leave her if she told him she was seeing another man, whereas Teddy regarded Jim patronizingly, thinking of him as a harmless boy who entertained Martha only so long as they were making a movie together. Teddy, Martha understood, felt that only he could successfully pleasure her. He naturally assumed that when the movie was over, and Acapulco loomed closer, that he had only to snap his fingers, and Martha would discard Jim without a second’s hesitation.
Martha, when she was with Teddy, exulted in the excitement he aroused in her. But when she was with Jim she felt more comfortable, cozier. She could imagine settling down with him one day.
The specific problem she and Jim were encountering tonight was that she was hellbent on having a good time and Jim, despite his pirate outfit, seemed not to be in the spirit of the occasion. In fact, he was downright peevish and irritable. He wouldn’t dance with her, and he made it clear that he resented her dancing with anybody else.
“You’re a drag,” Martha said and went off to dance anyhow, but for fear of agitating him further she made certain only to dance with flamboyant homosexuals who delighted in bedecking themselves in wild regalia: chains, keys hanging out, leather jackets, leather pants, leather boots, impenetrable dark glasses, motorcycle helmets, or sometimes just about nothing at all except some tiny trace of cloth that wound about their loins but left the cheeks of their buttocks fully revealed.
When she returned to Jim, she was drenched with sweat but happy and excited, and she wanted him to be excited, too. She wrapped her arms around him and drew him close to her. “Hey, Captain Kidd, what’s wrong?” She kissed him, brushing his face with the vinyl of her mask.
“Nothing.�
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Refusing to release him, she said, “That’s not true. You’ve been acting weird all night. What is it, something to do with the film?” She knew it wasn’t the film, but she wanted to get him talking.
“Not the film. Nothing to do with the film.”
“Then what?”
He could be restrained no longer. “There’s somebody else,” he declared, spitting the words out.
“What do you mean someone else?” she asked, feigning astonishment, though she knew exactly what he meant.
“Just what I said. You’re seeing another man.”
She promptly denied the accusation. “What led you to think that?”
“I can tell, I know.”
“Have you been following me around?”
“Then it’s true.”
“I didn’t say it was true. It’s not true. But I want to know whether you’ve been spying on me.” What she was thinking was: I’ve already got Teddy spying on me, I don’t need another one.
“Do you think I would have to spy on you to figure out you’ve been having it off with someone else. People have eyes, you know. They talk.”
“Talk? Who talks? Margo? Sandy? Peter?” She was naming possible suspects among the cast and crew who might, just might, have heard something and who were too untrustworthy to keep a secret long.
“You’re only digging yourself in deeper, Martha. You’re as much as admitting you are. You are screwing another man, who is he?”
“I am not going to engage in this conversation a moment more.”
She was furious, furious that her evening was being ruined and that her juggling act with Teddy and Jim might be in jeopardy. She decided that she would terminate the argument before it grew too heated.
So she wheeled about and stormed off into the crowd. At first Jim stood and watched her, then he rushed after her.
“Come back.”
He caught hold of her arm.
“I’m going home.”
“Let me take you.”
“No.”
It was impossible to carry on a conversation like this, since both of them were constantly being buffeted by dancers who weren’t very happy about tripping over them.
Unlike the man Jim Corona played in the movie, the real-life Jim Corona could not persuade Martha either to remain with him or to allow him to accompany her.
He did not believe that she intended to go home. In fact, that was her plan. She wanted to mull things over, figure out how she could allay Jim’s suspicions while at the same time determine whether there was a leak on the part of someone on the set or whether Jim was just acting on a hunch because of his own insecurity.
At the entrance to the disco, a fur wrap draped over her flimsy dress giving her protection from the autumn chill, she extended her arm to flag down a taxi, thinking that because the parade had drifted farther south in the city, and with the streets surrounding Union being freer of traffic, she would not have too long to wait.
But when after ten minutes no cab appeared, she gave up and began walking, mixing with noisy, costumed celebrants who thronged the pavement, delighting in the anonymity her costume gave her.
Then she felt a hand on her arm. Jim! she thought angrily. He’d chased her all this way. “I’m not going with you!” she shouted.
But when she turned she saw that it wasn’t Jim at all. It was Teddy. Uncostumed.
He looked mildly surprised, more amused, and he said, “Oh no? Is that your final word on the subject?”
She was heartened to see him. “Teddy! What are you doing here? How did you recognize me?”
She still had not removed her mask. Unless he had followed her out of the discotheque there was no way he could have known who it was.
But all she got from him was his customary smile that suggested he knew the world and the ways people had of dealing with it far better than she. “It must be magic,” he said.
“Magic? Were you watching me all this time?” She did not wish to provoke him by using the word spying. Teddy was not Jim Corona.
“I am always watching you. I find you lovely, in costume or out, and so I see nothing wrong with watching you.”
She drew her wrap tighter around her. “Well, I don’t like it.”
She was thinking: He must have been in the discotheque, disguised, observing me and Jim.
He ignored her last remark. Instead he took her arm and began to guide her up the street. She did not resist. “Where are you taking me?”
“First to my car.”
“And then?”
“Then to a very special place.”
Because of the mask he could not see the dubious expression that had taken hold of her face. “You’re crazy, Teddy,” she said affectionately.
“I am at that,” he agreed quite seriously.
C H A P T E R
S e v e n
Harry could not find Owens, not on Golden Gate, not on McAllister or Fulton, which ran parallel to it, not on Buchanan, Laguna, Webster, Steiner, or Octavia, which ran perpendicular to it. Among the stragglers who had detached themselves from the parade or had simply never caught up with it in the first place Harry could see no one who vaguely resembled the boozing, shambling derelict that Owens had become. Ghosts and Merlins, Jack the Rippers and Count Draculas, Frankensteins and vampires there were aplenty, even a few genuine bums who dazedly stared at such unusual exhibitionism, probably wondering whether what they were seeing had any basis in reality or was merely a result of hallucinations brought on by alcohol and the d.t.’s.
Harry kept going, having no time to admire the ingenuity of the disguises that greeted his eyes, half-running, half-walking, impatient with those that unwittingly impeded his progress. Every now and then he took out his radio and again attempted to establish communication with his partner. No luck.
Thirty-five minutes had been exhausted in this manner, and yet Harry had no intention of giving up his search even if he was obliged to call out an entire search party to join him in the effort.
Where, he thought, stopping now to catch his breath, where would he go to find trouble if trouble was what he wanted? It did not take him long to find an answer.
Golden Gate Park. There, with the woods and the brush and the dark, a man could commit his crimes, be they minor or major, without fear of discovery.
When he’d first seen him, Owens hadn’t given him a second thought. He was just another man in mufti though his size was formidable. Draped completely in a thick cotton robe all of black, with a skeletal mask blotting out his entire face, he must have measured almost seven feet, but his height alone wasn’t the most distinguishing thing about him. He was massive, and this massiveness was not useless fat and sagging flesh but muscle, sinewy and probably made tougher by rigorous exercise. To be sure, he attracted attention even among a crowd that was partial to eccentric disguises. If his size and weight failed to gain people’s notice, the scythe he carried in his hand certainly did. You could believe that this was Death incarnate, coming to reap his grim harvest this Halloween eve.
Wherever he walked people drew aside to let him pass. Quite reasonably, no one had any wish, no matter how intoxicated they may have been, to provoke him to a quarrel.
On spotting him, Owen’s first thought was: Too obvious. This cannot be our man.
But nonetheless, he proceeded to tail him, staying well behind, which presented no problem as this figure of Death was all too conspicuous.
At a certain point, however, as the man proceeded at a slow but steady rate it became apparent to Owens that he was headed straight into the park. Golden Gate was just about empty of pedestrians and traffic at this time of night. Although Death never looked back—and Owens never expected him to—it was no longer so easy to shadow him. After awhile they were the only two walking in the same direction. Owens thought of how ridiculous it must look to an outsider; he imagined a painting entitled “Bum Chases Grim Reaper Who Won’t Have Him.”
Nonetheless, he was still wary an
d a bit frightened. It might look ridiculous, but he was beginning to think that his instinct had been on target, that whether this was the Mission Street Knifer or not, he was up to some mischief. So that he would run no risk of alerting Death to his true identity Owens turned his radio off. It might be simple paranoia on his part. He didn’t know, but he hoped that Harry would understand his apprehension.
As they approached the park—with Owens half a block behind his mark—the lights grew fewer. Death at times seemed to be swallowed up in the gloom, but just when Owens figured he’d lost him he reappeared. He was making more noise now as brambles and fallen leaves crumpled noisily under his feet.
Owens was as quiet as he could be traversing the same terrain, but there was no way of avoiding making some noise. Still, the distance that separated them was such that Death did not notice, or noticing, care to investigate its origin.
Owens lost track of how much time he had invested in this enterprise. All he knew was that he was being led on a tour of the park that took him, improbably, into the Japanese Tea Garden. The two passed over a hand-carved gateway into the garden proper. Below them Owens could make out the reflecting pools, which were dark. Occasionally, their placid water would be disturbed by a fish coming to the surface, but otherwise these smooth bodies of water were like perfect mirrors, waiting for Death, whose form, hideous and immense, extended across the entire length of one pool.
Owens looked and saw that his image, too, was visible upon the water of the same pool. For an instant the two reflections collided and merged, but only for an instant. Then Death vanished, from the pool, from the other side of the graceful humpback bridge. All that Owens could make out on the other side were the dwarf trees and the moss-covered rocks but not Death. He could not see how he could have vanished like that, and so continued across the bridge himself, wondering whether he’d been spotted in spite of his precautions, wondering, too, whether Death wasn’t waiting in ambush for him, ready to put his intimidating instrument to use.
