by Dane Hartman
Now, with a towel wrapped around his privates, he looked like hundreds of others circulating through the club who appeared more depleted and more desperate given the lateness of the hour. Teddy reasoned that it should not be too difficult to make off with somebody else’s clothes: he could not walk out clad only in a towel.
The fit wasn’t exactly right, nor the style to his taste, but Teddy had no difficulty finding suitable attire that some man had left lying about while he went off to contribute to the decline of Western civilization.
Not more than ten minutes after Teddy, unnoticed, had left the club, Jim Corona began his exploration of the private rooms, absolutely intent on catching Martha in the act. In doing this he disturbed a number of couples who, while cursing him, did not generally accuse him of being a pervert, that classification having very little meaning in a place like this.
Methodically, Jim went from one room to the other until he got to the room that Martha and Rick occupied. Without knocking, for Jim was never one to stand on ceremony, he threw the door open and looked toward the bed.
What he saw at first confused him—a man’s body sprawled in a growing pool of blood that had begun to ooze off the bed-sheets and onto the floor. His mind refused to absorb the horror, and he hardly dared look farther. He couldn’t help himself though. He stepped into the room, but in doing this found he’d placed his foot on top of something slippery and malleable. Another body, more blood. And then he noticed Rick’s head, face up.
He grabbed hold of the door jamb to keep his balance. He felt faint, his vision kept blurring. Staggering back, he retched, but the horrors he had just witnessed were nothing in comparison to what awaited him.
For there, sloppily bundled in a blood-saturated towel, in the middle of the room, not far from where Rick’s head lay, was another head. Jim did not have to guess at whose it was. A quick glimpse at the body he’d inadvertently stepped on—and a quick glimpse was all that he could manage—told him that this must be the head that went with it.
Afraid to look, he looked, carefully unfolding the towel so that it fell away, revealing Martha’s head, her face wiped free of blood so that there was no doubting who it was.
From a place deep within him, Jim threw his head back and shrieked for all he was worth, a keening sound so penetrating that it could be heard even above the cascading waters of the Jacuzzi, and it just about stopped everybody in their tracks, waylaying even those in the heat of passion.
And then, overcome as much from the noxiously sweet stench of death as from the sheer shock and terror of it all, Jim fainted, toppling over onto a floor smeared with blood so that he, too, looked like he’d been one of the victims.
C H A P T E R
T e n
Harry was just getting into bed, pleased that finally he would be rewarded for a long night’s work with oblivion, when the phone rang.
Wrong number, he prayed, recognizing that he’d probably exhausted his quota of luck for the day, that it was more likely bad news.
He was not surprised to hear Bressler’s voice on the other end.
“We’ve got trouble, Callahan.”
“Is that any surprise?”
“The bastard from the Tocador . . .”
“What about him?”
“Looks like he struck again. In a sex club on Folsom.”
“What’s the address?”
Bressler gave it to him. “Hear you got the asshole that might be the Mission Street Knifer.”
“That’s right. Well, it’s obvious he isn’t our friend from the Tocador.”
“No, no, he isn’t.” Bressler wasn’t willing to concede the possibility he’d been wrong by putting Harry onto the Knifer while the psychopath he really wanted brought in—because a butcher of pretty women is feared far more than a butcher of homeless derelicts—was still running loose. “I’ll meet you down there in fifteen minutes. Hope you haven’t eaten in the last few hours. I wouldn’t want you to lose your dinner.”
That gave Harry an idea of what to expect.
No one, except for those properly authorized, was being permitted to enter or leave the club. What looked like a battalion of police officers stood guard at the exits, nervously averting their eyes from the customers, because they might prove too much of a distraction. Everybody had been ordered to remain where they were and perhaps more importantly, as they were. That meant that no one undressed could change that state of affairs until the detectives had completed their investigation.
As time went on, people began growing restive, complaining about their constitutional rights, but being as naked as they were, immersed in saunas, hot tubs, or simply each other, their appeals did not carry much weight. They looked like children who’d been caught jerking off by their prying mothers.
Bressler was there to welcome Harry though it wasn’t anything Harry especially liked being being welcomed to.
“Two stiffs: a male, about twenty-five, I’d say, a female, maybe of the same age. Female’s been identified as Martha Denby.”
“The actress?” Harry was brought up short. He recalled the arresting young woman he’d watched run through a scene just the other afternoon. He generally did not allow things like this to bother him. He had a feeling that this might be different.
“You know her?”
“I don’t know her, I saw her once—from a distance.”
Bressler nodded. He wasn’t much interested, being eager to get on with his presentation. “Same M.O. as the Tocador perp employed. To a point. By that I mean he chopped off the heads but didn’t attempt to do the same with the hands. And he left the heads behind this time. Probably because he panicked, ran out of time. The place is a fucking mess.”
“Who found them?”
They were striding through the public area, two clothed men threading their way through a sea of nudity.
“Fellow who knew one of the victims, this Denby, says he’s an actor, Jim Corona.”
Harry nodded, recalling the name—and the face.
“He a suspect?”
“Make things easier if he was. But no, he fainted dead away. I use the word dead advisedly. Smelling salts brought him around, didn’t help the other two.”
“He see who did it?”
“I doubt it, but he’s not real responsive when you talk to him. Still in shock. Seems he had a thing for this Denby, hasn’t adjusted to the fact that somebody lopped off her head. You’re going to want to talk to him. And you’re going to have to make him come up with something. Because on something like this we’ll need all the help we can get.”
“What about these other jokers?” Harry surveyed the orgy that had come to an unexpected and brutal halt
“Oh, we’ve been questioning them all right, but you got people burning up in the hot tub and you got people fucking their brains out and you think they’re going to notice if somebody looks a little suspicious? And on Halloween night when half of them are coming in and going out in costumes? Everything’s suspicious, and nobody gives a shit.”
Harry had to agree with this assessment. A twenty-four-hour sex club was not the best place to acquire a reliable witness.
“And I presume there are a few people you’ve got here who’ll give us false names and addresses because they’d hate to have their wives find out they’ve been here.”
“That’s right, that’s exactly the way it is,” Bressler said.
Down the corridor, off of which were the private rooms, additional police officers were milling about. A balding man, grown too thick in the waist, whom Bressler identified as one of the managers, was heatedly engaged in conversation with a plainclothesman. He was insisting that his operation was legitimate, that this unfortunate “incident” as he kept referring to it, was simply an aberration that should not be allowed to reflect on the club’s integrity and adherence to the legal statutes of the city.
“But we are not arguing over your license,” the plainclothesman was saying. “We want to find out who did this fucking thing.”
“Everything’s just the way Corona found it. Haven’t found the murder weapon yet. We’re still looking.”
Harry stooped down so that he could better make out the head of Martha Denby.
“At least the bastard didn’t burn the joint down,” Bressler added, searching for the silver lining in all of this, probably because he was already rehearsing his story for the mayor tomorrow.
“Fingerprints?” Harry asked, stepping out of the room now because there was just so much that he, even with his hardened stomach, could take.
“We’re getting in the forensic guys real soon, but I wouldn’t expect much. The blood, you know. Covers over everything.” Now he looked coldly at Harry. “I don’t care what you have to do. I don’t care where you have to go. But you’re going to find this creep. It could be your ass, it might very well be mine.”
“I understand,” Harry kept his voice neutral.
“I don’t want to know what you do, I don’t want to know about it. You just bring me the creep on a silver platter by the end of next week.” He left unsaid what punishment he might mete out if Harry failed, and Harry certainly wasn’t about to inquire.
Harry turned to the detective who had been questioning the manager for the last half hour. He was young and very serious, and he gave the impression of someone who believed all cases ultimately could be solved and closed. His name was Shaw, Jerry Shaw.
“I can’t get anywhere with him,” Shaw said, indicating the bald man who only came up to his shoulder in height.
“Whaddya mean you can’t get anywhere with me? I’m telling you true what I know.”
Harry drew Shaw aside. “What about the other people here, the customers, the staff? They notice anything?”
“We got a couple of people who seem eager to tell us their life stories, one son of a bitch who invited me to join him in the sauna, but in all this craziness nobody has come up with anything we can use. You know, nothing reliable.”
“That’s what I figured. Where have you got Corona hiding?”
“Over in that room there.” He pointed to a door that was guarded by two of the more imposing officers on the force. “We’ve been plying him with a couple of shots of whiskey. It may not be in accordance with departmental rules, but Jesus, that guy really needs a drink.”
“He needs a lot more than a drink,” Harry noted.
As he was about to step away from Shaw, Shaw stopped him.
“Just one question.”
“Sure.”
“You the Harry they call Dirty Harry?”
“That’s right.”
The whiskey didn’t seem to be doing Corona a whole lot of good. His face was ashen—ghosts don’t look any whiter—and his hands were trembling as they clutched the glass containing his restorative.
“Your name is Jim Corona?” Harry maneuvered a chair up to the bed where the man was sitting, listless and inattentive.
The room was, in all its aspects, a duplicate of the one in which Martha and the unidentified lover had met their end. It was an odd transformation that had occurred; an hour ago people had come to this room for sex, now they came for interrogation.
Harry, eliciting no response from the young man, repeated himself, touching his hand in hope that the contact would bestir him.
“Yes,” he answered at last. “I’ve told you people everything I know. I just want to go home and be left alone.”
“I understand your feelings perfectly.”
This caused Jim to raise his head and regard Harry with bitterness and anger. “How could you understand? Just what makes you think you could understand?”
Calmly, Harry replied, “Because I lost my wife. Because just like Martha, she died suddenly and violently.” This was true. A hit-and-run driver had destroyed her and in taking her life, had taken a part of Harry’s as well.
Jim had not been expecting anything like this, and it sucked the anger right out of him, leaving only a vast and profound despair. He buried his face in his hands, and his whole body shook with sobbing.
Harry waited for several moments longer. “How did you know Martha would be here tonight?”
“I didn’t,” he mumbled, his voice hoarse and in danger of petering out altogether. “I didn’t. I followed her here. If I’d stopped her from leaving the party . . .”
“What party was this?”
So Jim explained, and Harry took it all down. “This party, did it have a guest list?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I think it did.”
“Good, good, we might be getting somewhere. Now Jim, think a minute. Did you see Martha come in here with anybody? You followed her, right? Was she with the victim when she entered the premises?”
“No, no, I don’t know who he was, never saw him before in my life. No, it was with some older dude. I didn’t get a good look at him. It was dark, and I kept a good distance away, you know, because I didn’t want Martha seeing me.”
“Old? How old would you say?”
Jim shrugged. “Middle-aged, fifty, fifty-five maybe, I don’t know.”
“You get a look at the car he was driving?”
“It was a white Porsche.”
“You see the license plate?”
“No, I didn’t notice it. I was concentrating so much on Martha I wasn’t paying attention to things like that.”
“That’s all right. You and Martha have been what, lovers, friends?”
“Lovers, I’d guess you’d say.”
“How long?”
“A couple of months since the shooting began. I’m working on a movie, you know.”
“Yes, I saw you once. You were quite good.” Ironically, the scene that Harry remembered witnessing was grimly prophetic of what was to come.
This surprised Jim. “You did, you saw me? In the dog-food commercial on the tube?”
“On the set with Martha just a couple of days ago. Let’s say I sort of happened on the shoot. Did you suspect Martha was seeing anyone else? She come to a place like this a lot?”
“Hell, no.” Jim was outraged at the suggestion. “She was a homebody. Whoever that asshole was that took her here, he was the corrupting influence. She lives in L.A., she wouldn’t know about a place like this.”
“But this older man, you think this was somebody else she was seeing? Somebody she might have picked up from the party?”
“Mmmm, let’s see. Well, yes as a matter of fact, that was why we were arguing at the party. Yeah, there was somebody else.”
“You know who it was, you hear a name?”
“A name? No, I asked friends of mine in the cast, but nobody seemed to know his name. All they said was that she was seeing another guy. Maybe they’ll tell you, they wouldn’t tell me.”
Before Harry could probe Jim Corona further there was an enormous roar, like a thunderclap, but so close that the walls of the room shuddered and Harry was virtually knocked out of his chair. Instantly, smoke floated in under the door.
“Shit, there goes our evidence,” Harry muttered.
“What was that?” Corona looked surprised, which was a surprise in itself since he probably had thought he was beyond surprise by this point.
“Stay here, don’t move.” Harry rushed from the room. The men guarding Corona were coughing from the smoke that seeped along the corridor. They resorted to handkerchiefs, which they put to their noses and mouths.
It was impossible to see more than a foot or two ahead, but Harry could hear all right. People were screaming and yelling, betraying panic and confusion.
After a minute, the smoke cleared, leaving in its wake a toxic, pungent stench that hung tenaciously in the air. Everywhere people were running, oblivious to their partial nudity, oblivious to instructions by police to orchestrate an orderly evacuation. There was always the possibility that there was another bomb cached somewhere that might detonate at any time.
The locker ro
om was in tumult. Half the bank of lockers had been blown to the opposite wall by the force of the explosion, and several other lockers had been ruthlessly torn open, their contents scattered and shredded by the blast.
How many people had died was impossible to determine because everywhere you looked there was a bloody limb or mutilated torso. The victims had just concluded their interviews with detectives and had been allowed to get their clothes and go home. Well, these luckless individuals were never going home.
Others were injured and lay writhing and thrashing about amid the wreckage as policemen hastened to minister to them.
In the rubble somewhere Harry was certain there was evidence crucial to unlocking the mystery of the murderer’s identity. But given the magnitude of the destruction the police were unlikely to have much success in sifting it out.
Bressler appeared shortly, and the way he regarded Harry was practically as though he blamed him for this latest disaster.
“You spoke too soon when you said he didn’t burn the joint down this time. This joker just doesn’t cut and run, he leaves his calling card, too.”
Outside they heard the wail of sirens as ambulances and fire trucks came barreling down Folsom.
“You’re going to get this bastard, aren’t you, Harry,” was all that Bressler would say. It was not a question either.
C H A P T E R
E l e v e n
Over the course of the next three days, Harry followed every lead that Corona had provided him with. In doing this, he had as much help as he needed, for apprehending the man who had now struck twice in San Francisco had been given highest priority. Basically, what Harry had to go on was a white Porsche and the invitation list for a costume party given on Union. Everybody who was on that list would have to be interviewed. Every Porsche dealer would have to be asked whether he had ever sold a white Porsche and to whom if it turned out he had. And, of course, anyone sighted in such a car, particularly if he was a middle-aged man, would be placed under surveillance.
Eventually, the white Porsche was found—smashed and burning at the bottom of a steep cliff off Coastal Highway 1, not far from the resort town of Timber Cove. There was no occupant nor was there any witness found who could tell the authorities in Timber Cove how the vehicle came to plummet off the highway.
