Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood

by Dane Hartman

  The invitation list was scarcely more helpful. First, there were hundreds of names on it, and second, the sponsors of the party, Global Film Company executives, admitted that many people had undoubtedly gotten in who were not on the list, friends of friends, enterprising bullshit artists who could talk their way into a private party at the White House if they had to, and so the original list was far from reliable. What’s more, Harry realized, he wasn’t certain which name he was looking for. It was just at this point that any clue whatsoever would be invaluable.

  In the interim, the police lab was working overtime in an effort to sort through all the debris that had been carefully recovered from the floor of the devastated locker room. Like archaeologists picking through pottery shards and metal fragments from a lost civilization, the technicians toiled indefatigably in an effort to separate and identify the various objects. But there were so many of them, and there was so much that had been incinerated in the explosion and the fire that it sparked, that little hope was held for finding anything significant soon—or ever, for that matter.

  Frustrated, cursing the murderer’s shrewdness in concealing all evidence that might lead police to him, Harry decided that he would take advantage of an offer that had not so long ago been made to him.

  Which was why he found himself on the fourth day of November in front of Cavanaugh-Sterling Headquarters.

  William Davis, Harry reckoned, would have connections that practically no one else in the city had, and he hoped to take advantage of them. And it wasn’t as though Davis was not an interested party. Global, after all, was a subsidiary of his company, and though no public announcement had yet been made, it was obvious that production on the movie being shot in the city would be suspended indefinitely. With one lead actress dead and her male lead confined to a psychiatric hospital for shock, there was no way that the movie could be completed. It would prove too expensive to recast and start all over again.

  Although Harry had been assured that he would not have to wait to see Davis, he was not surprised to find himself banished to a waiting room where the only source of distraction were old magazines and the most recent stockholder’s report, in which Cavanaugh-Sterling’s executives gave themselves a pat on the back for record-high earnings in the previous twelve-month period.

  Harry gave Davis five minutes, which was about what he expected Davis would give him if he ever got in to see the man. Then he returned to the secretary, a young woman of nineteen or twenty whose pretty face was tautened into a look of perpetual exasperation. Working for Davis must take years off your life, Harry thought as he stared at her.

  “You tell Mr. Davis that I can’t wait.”

  “Please, don’t be impatient. Mr. Davis is a very busy man. You don’t know.” The secretary, as though to convince him, showed him a list of names. “Telephone messages,” she said. “Just from this morning.”

  “I’m impressed. I sympathize. But I’m still leaving.”

  The secretary panicked and buzzed Davis. After conferring with her boss for a few moments, she ran out to where Harry was waiting for the elevator to come.

  “He’ll see you now, sir.” She took hold of his hand, fearful that he might go away anyhow, then, realizing that this gesture was an inappropriate one for a secretary to make, quickly released it.

  Davis seemed no different to Harry than when their last interview had taken place. If anything, he looked better, his skin burnished by a Palm Springs tan, his body made leaner by a strict regimen of exercise and eighteen holes of golf twice weekly.

  “Pardon the delay, Inspector, it has been a trying morning.” He motioned Harry to sit, adding, “They’re all trying mornings. For a man in my position there’s no escaping responsibilities, I am afraid.”

  Harry waited a moment longer to see if he had anything else he wanted to say in his defense, then began himself, “I am sure you’ve heard about what happened down on Folsom Street three nights ago.”

  “A terrible tragedy.”

  “And, of course, it is a tragedy that directly affects you.”

  Davis looked puzzled. “In what way?”

  “In that it has shut down production of one of your subsidiary’s films.”

  “Ah yes, of course. Global. So it has.” Davis did not sound disturbed by this, and it was possible that it was the first time he’d given the matter any thought. On the other hand, Harry decided, this man seemed absolutely incapable of expressing any emotional response whatsoever.

  “Well, it could be worse,” Davis continued after reflecting for a moment. “Movies are a risky business as you know and what with advertising costs, which can double your below-line expenditures, very often you make more by shelving the project altogether.”

  “Then why go into the business at all, Mr. Davis?”

  “Write-offs. The longer I live the more business, all business, I don’t care whether it’s movies or toilet paper, comes down to just one thing. Write-offs.”

  “Write-offs?” Harry repeated dubiously.

  “That’s exactly it.” Davis smiled triumphantly as though he had just imparted a great piece of wisdom to his guest.

  But tax write-offs were not what Harry had come here to discuss.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to the subject.”

  “The subject? Ah, you mean the unpleasantness down on Folsom Street?”

  “Unpleasantness is one way to put it.” Harry made no effort to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I would be greatly appreciative if you could use whatever contacts you have in the movie business or out of it that might help us find the killer. All we know at this point is that he is middle-aged and has been known to drive a white Porsche.”

  “And that’s all? I would have thought the police would’ve made greater progress than that.”

  “Sometimes these things are a bitch to crack.”

  The phone began to ring, but Davis ignored it. “Yes, I realize that. I suppose that I should not maintain very high expectations of the police, present company excepted, of course. I am still waiting for a report pertaining to the identities of the terrorists who attacked the Cavanaugh-Sterling executive staff.”

  “I can’t help you there. I am no longer working on that case.”

  “It’s not of any importance right now. I’ve bolstered my security force. At least I have the privilege of buying protection. I fear for the citizens of our city who are forced to rely on the police for it. Not that there aren’t some brave men among your people, but they operate under the handicap of laws which systematically undermine the rights of the victims for the benefit of the criminals.”

  Just as he had refused to enter into an argument over taxes, Harry balked at discussing the police force’s relationship to the law or the populace. “I must ask you again, Mr. Davis, do you think that you could help me? Perhaps if you communicated to the people who run Global, somebody there might know something. We have fairly reliable information that this middle-aged man—”

  “Our Porsche driver?”

  “That’s right. This man was seeing Martha Denby at least for a few weeks prior to her death.”

  “Martha Denby?” Davis was looking bewildered again.

  “One of the victims. The actress in the film your company was shooting.”

  “Oh yes, how stupid of me. It’s hard to remember these things. Cavanaugh-Sterling owns, completely or at least in part, eighty-seven companies, you realize. Global is just one of them.”

  “A man of your responsibilities has too much on his mind, I expect.”

  “That’s correct, Inspector.”

  The phone was demanding to be answered again.

  Davis stood up. The interview was obviously at an end. “I will do all in my power to help you find this man. And if anything develops I certainly will notify you immediately.”

  He took Harry’s hand. “It’s always good to see you,” he said in the manner of a conscientious host at a cocktail party. “You can find your way out?�
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  “I can always find my way,” Harry told him, but Davis wasn’t listening. He was already on the phone and for him Harry wasn’t there any longer. That was how Davis was, going from one thing to another, one person to the other, never looking back.

  The afternoon wasn’t a total loss. Owens came by Harry’s desk and told him that if he was free he was invited to dinner that evening.

  “My wife is worried you’re not eating right. She feels responsible for putting some nourishment in your body.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of her. You can tell her that I accept. By the way, how’s that shoulder?”

  Underneath Owens’ shirt Harry could barely make out the white swaths of tape that held the bandages in place. “Recovering nicely. Still hurts if I move too suddenly, but nothing to get alarmed about.”

  With the slaying of the Mission Street Knifer, or the Halloween Monster as Owens now referred to him, Owens was no longer assigned to Harry who was once again on his own. But even in the short time that they’d been partners, perhaps partly because of what they had gone through together in Golden Gate Park, Harry regarded him as a friend. And in a department, department hell, in a world where people came into Harry’s life too fast and left too easily, it was good to be able to hold onto a friendship. It was good to hold onto anything.

  And because Owens was his partner no longer, Harry felt relieved, shorn of the burden he’d been carrying around with him since Bressler had united them. He didn’t have to be responsible for Owens’ life. Only his own and that, God knows, was responsibility enough.

  Dinner was to be at seven, right after Harry was due to get off from work (though with this case the work, the plodding routine of the work, never ended, and Harry stopped only when he was too exhausted to stand or focus his eyes). But by the time he arrived at the Owens home, the table was set and Mary Beth was waiting with an open bottle of Spanish red wine.

  “I hear you’re worried I’m not eating well,” Harry teased her as he entered the house.

  “Let’s just say I’m concerned. From the way Drake talks about you I wonder if you’re eating at all.”

  “If you want to call half a tuna sandwich and a Big Mac eating, well, then I’m eating.”

  The dinner that Mary Beth had prepared was somewhat more extravagant than half a tuna sandwich and a Big Mac in that it consisted of flounder broiled in a Dijon mustard sauce that gave it a tart yet subtle taste. The only problem was that Harry scarcely had any appetite left, no matter how good the food in front of him.

  Owens asked him what was wrong. Although Harry usually made it a point to say nothing about his work on purely social occasions, the mystery of the Tocador murderer weighed so heavily on him that he couldn’t help himself. He feared that somewhere out in the city that very evening the man would strike again. What right did he have to be sitting here and enjoying excellent food and company?

  So he told Owens and his wife about the case, much of which they already knew from the papers. And, of course, Owens had heard a good many stories that were floating around the department. But neither of them was aware of all the particulars. Without being specific (essentially because he couldn’t be specific), the police commissioner had, in a statement to the press, implied that there were significant leads in the case and that while an arrest might not be imminent it could be expected “shortly.” The idea behind this reassuring, and rather misleading, declaration was to lessen the growing anxiety of the populace and to bolster the public’s perception that the police were actually getting somewhere. A second motivation was the hope that if the perpetrator felt he was in danger, he might panic and do something stupid or just plain clumsy and in that way expose his identity.

  Needless to say, from the mayor on down, extraordinary pressure was being applied now to invest the commissioner’s words with credibility. If the commissioner stated that there were significant leads well, goddamnit, somebody had better come up with them—and quickly. And being, more or less, at the bottom of this pressure cooker, Harry felt the heat most intensely.

  “Now it seems to me,” Harry was saying, “we have two interlocking parts of the puzzle. In one part we know the identities of the victims. One is Martha Denby . . .”

  “I’m still shocked that it could happen to such a sweet girl,” said Mary Beth who, while never regarding her as sweet in life, felt obliged to defend her honor now that she was dead.

  Harry continued. “The other, just identified yesterday, was an out-of-work actor who drove a taxi on weekends. His name is Rick Hollister. That’s one-half of one part, that’s all we got. We have no trace of the murderer.

  “All right, now the other part is even worse. That’s the Tocador slayings. In that part we not only don’t know who the killer is we don’t even know who the victims were. It’s been weeks now, and the forensic boys haven’t come up with anything that might somehow tell us who those two girls were. We’ve circulated ads in this part of the state and wired departments in most of the major cities in the country, requesting information on any missing women. And we’ve been deluged all right, but nothing connects. And no one’s stepped forward to claim the bodies. Whoever those girls were, if they’ve got anybody to cry over them, they’re doing it in private.

  “Now it is my belief that if we’re to make any progress on this thing we have got to have more than one out of four pieces. If we knew who the Tocador girls were, we’d have something to go on.”

  “How exactly do you mean, Harry?” Owens asked.

  “Those girls were not your ordinary ten-dollar hookers, whatever else they were. And the Tocador is not your average sleazy hotel where you’ve got johns coming in night and day. It’s just the opposite, an old-time residential place. So that means the girls were expecting somebody, all right? From what Jim Corona says, Martha probably knew the man who murdered her. Which means that Martha and the Tocador pair probably had one man in common. We find out who the Tocador girls were hanging out with, match it up to somebody who would have access to Martha, and bingo, we might, just might, have our man.”

  “So you have nothing at all to go on?” Drake persisted.

  “What we’ve got are just a few scraps of clothing, a bit of suede, a bit of velvet, a bit of felt.”

  Mary Beth looked suddenly fascinated. “How much of each would you say you have?”

  Harry shrugged. It had been some time since he’d last examined the evidence. “A few tatters, and they’re pretty fragile at that because of the fire.”

  “I wonder if I could take a look at them.”

  “I don’t see why not. Why are you interested, if I may ask?”

  “Well, I know a good deal about clothes. I am a wardrobe consultant—at least I was until they closed down the shooting.”

  “And Mary Beth worked for a while at a boutique when we lived in L.A.”

  “I’m convinced. Look, I’d be grateful for anything you can contribute.”

  “OK, when can I see these tatters? Being unemployed as I am, I have plenty of free time these days. I can do it tomorrow morning if you’d like.”

  “What about right now?”

  “Harry, the lab’ll be closed now,” Owens pointed out.

  “So we’ll rouse somebody and make him open up for us.”

  “Don’t you stop for a minute?”

  “When the killer stops I’ll stop,” said Harry and in such a way that Owens was immediately silenced.

  It was not so easy to get a man to open up the lab, and when they succeeded more than an hour had passed. A cranky Walter White, armed with a set of keys he jangled in annoyance, greeted them in the hallway directly outside of the lab. He frowned upon seeing Mary Beth.

  “She authorized?”

  “I’m authorizing her,” Harry said.

  White looked from her to Harry and back again. Owens he chose to ignore. “Oh, it’s one of those, eh?” He decided that he wasn’t about to engage Harry in an argument and opening the door, allowed all three to enter.


  More time elapsed before White extracted the evidence from a bureau that held large cumbersome drawers. “Somebody fucked up the filing system,” he muttered more to himself than to his nocturnal visitors. “Can’t find a goddamn thing in all this mess.”

  But he was being too pessimistic. He knew every nook and cranny and obscure crevice in this lab, and somehow he managed to find things even when they were misplaced or lost.

  The shreds of clothing were stretched out on oversized mats and sealed in a plastic container to protect them from further deterioration. Unless you looked closely, one sample resembled the other, each being badly charred and torn.

  But extremely brilliant light and magnifying glasses were available, and microscopes, too, if they were required, and in any case, Mary Beth had a practiced eye when it came to clothing. She was able to decipher the original material beneath the black coating even without resorting to the chemical analysis already run by the lab.

  “This suede jacket,” she said after examining the six mats that had been presented to her. “You see the inside of it there?”

  Harry really didn’t see it; it all looked equally scorched no matter from which angle the fabric was observed. But he nodded as did Owens who was peering over his wife’s shoulder.

  “Silver fox fur, I’m almost certain of it. For some reason your people didn’t register it in the analysis. Now take this one.” She extended a finger toward the next mat. “This is cloche. It’s not from a dress or anything like that, it’s probably from a hat and I would imagine one of those sculptured antique hats that you rarely see women wearing anymore.”

  She gazed up at Harry who was growing more impressed as she went on. “Keep going,” he urged her. “You’re doing fine.”

  “This third one I’m not sure about. It’s suede, but not the same suede as the first fabric I looked at. But this fourth sample, you see the way it curves here. I’d say that what you have here is a kind of pants, knickers, bloomers, something baggy, not my style at all. But it’s a very recent thing in fashion, these baggy pants legs for women.