by Dane Hartman
“Thank you, Ted. Violence against women is not new in the City by the Bay, but it seems as if it has reached epidemic proportions this year. For background on this story, here’s Connie Baxter. Connie?”
It was impressive in its callous slickness. Callahan had to hand it to them. Not only had they stirred up terror and titillation, but they had also taken a swipe at alleged police inefficiency. Now the pretty, capable, dark-haired Baxter was sonorously reminding her sisters how dangerous it was out on the street as if she had no personal interest in the situation. Her voice was as clipped and reserved as though she were reading a recipe. In fact, someone later told Harry, she had returned to do a restaurant review further on in the broadcast.
“Yeah, guys,” Harry told the TV screen as he turned it off. “And James Brady was killed during the Reagan assassination attempt.”
Given his media-fueled state of mind, Callahan went right back to the Justice building between the Skyway and the Southern Pacific station, ready to chew up and spit out anybody who got in his way. He left his green bomb at the curb and vaulted right toward the front steps. There were reporters on the stairs, outside the main doors, inside the lobby, and in front of the homicide department’s door on the seventh floor.
They accosted almost everyone of note who came in, jostling for position, holding their cameras over their heads and using their microphones and tape recorders like electric prods. Every time an officer or politician appeared, they would crowd around him like bees to honey, forcing him to push his way through while their questions were thrown together in a shouted buzz.
They had just given the treatment to someone when Harry appeared. At first they turned on him expectantly, but when they recognized the face, they gave him plenty of room. Dirty Harry was well known to the veterans of the City Hall Beat, only they thought his nickname signified something other than his investigation techniques.
More than a half decade ago, when they sorely abused him during the “Scorpio Sniper” and the “Enforcer” cases, Callahan decided he wouldn’t be seen in the papers or on the TV news again. So now, whenever a camera or mike is turned his way, all he does is make faces, obscene gestures, and swear grievously.
Someone could try to embarrass him by printing the goofy pictures, but he’d slap a suit on them which would bring their ethics in question. And a paper or network could lose its license on a question of ethics far faster than it could on almost anything but pornography.
Harry ran up the steps without interruption and just made it out the seventh floor elevator doors when a young photographer tried to catch him off-guard. Bringing the camera up to capture Callahan’s serious expression on the way to room seven hundred and fifty, he shouted.
“Over here, Inspector!”
He saw Harry’s head turn in his direction, so he quickly brought the Nikon up, a feeling of success in his head. He found himself looking through the viewfinder at a widely smiling Harry, whose middle finger was prominently in evidence.
He left them all behind the door of the homicide department. The world could be going to hell in a hand-basket—and judging by their caseload, it was—but very little changed within the walls of suite seven-fifty. It still smelled like a locker room and looked like the psychiatric ward of S.F. General Hospital. The major difference between it and the horror of the Vice Squad was that, there, the nuts were all the suspects; here, the cops were the crazies.
“Hey Harry!” he heard Reineke call. “I heard you had some blind date last night.”
Harry remembered the crushed horrid remnant of the girl he pulled out of the goo several hours earlier. “Yeah,” he replied to the Sergeant, “but she was still better looking than the dogs you take out.”
The squad’s basic insanity came from the fact that had the Mortician Murderer’s graveyard not been discovered, Harry still would have had plenty to occupy him. With violent deaths coming in at an average of two and a half a day, the whole force had to tread water just to keep the bends away.
And if one were foolish enough to ask how half a death a day could be reported, as one rookie did, Harry would be happy to show you, as he did the youngster—care of the chopped-up bodies in the morgue.
As he had put it at the time—“It isn’t always halves. Sometimes it’s thirds, or quarters; occasionally it’s even in fourteenths.” The rookie vomited as punctuation.
So Harry went to his plastic cubicle, flanked on three sides by other cubicles, thinking about how easily the men and the public became familiar with murderer’s adorable little nicknames. Albert DeSalvo was called the Boston Strangler. Then there was his buddy the Hillside Strangler. Then good old Son of Sam. Now there was the Mortician Murderer who not only killed his victims, but buried them as well. There was nothing new in terms of cute, quick monikers; the press had been coming up with nicknames for decades and the public had gone right along with it.
Just as Harry was lowering himself onto his well-worn seat behind his chipped wooden desk, Lieutenant Al Bressler came bustling into his office with his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up.
“About time you got here, Harry,” he said without rancor. “The mayor is breathing down the commissioner’s neck, the commissioner is putting the heat on the chief, and the chief is chewing up the desk in my office.”
“So what do you want from me, Lieutenant?” Callahan inquired, leaning back behind his own desk, “I’ve run out of Tums.”
“Jesus, Harry, didn’t you know? The chief himself put you on this case. He’s been waiting for some kind of action since early this morning.”
The inspector dropped his fists to his blotter. So that explained it, he thought. That was why McKay was so hot on getting in touch. He wanted to make it seem as if the decision to assign Callahan came from his office, not higher upstairs.
“So why is the captain trying to lead me by the nose?” Harry wanted to know.
“It’s McKay’s case,” Bressler explained, “but the chief wanted you on it personally.”
Callahan frowned. “I thought he didn’t like my style.”
“Nobody likes your style, Harry,” Bressler said flatly. “But you get results, and that’s why the boss wanted you. So what have you got so far?”
“Very little sleep,” Harry reported. “Lieutenant, I’ve been up for almost two days.”
“Oh yeah,” Bressler remembered. “That Bender thing.”
“I got results,” Callahan said sarcastically.
“It was an open and shut case, Harry,” the lieutenant assured him. “The money was embezzled and all the information on the hit was found at Tuccio’s office. He was going to frak an associate so a real estate deal would go through. And you didn’t kill him. All your actions were clearly self-defense. You just saved the taxpayers a lot of money.”
“I’ll bet McKay feels the same way,” Harry answered with a touch of sardonicism.
Bressler leaned forward conspiratorily. “Between you and me,” he said with soft haste, “I don’t think McKay will be happy until you lick his shoes when you want a case, drop your pants when you want a warrant, and kiss his ass when you make an arrest.”
Harry leaned back, mock shock in his eyes. “Lieutenant, I do believe you’re learning.”
Bressler threw his hands up, turning away from the desk and pacing the floor. “You wouldn’t believe the garbage that’s been going down around here this morning,” he said as a way of explanation. “The mouths upstairs are getting as tight as their assholes. They’re really constipated about something, Harry, so if the shit hits the fan, it’s all going to drop on you. Now tell me what the hell you’ve got.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” said Bressler in pained amazement. “You’ve got nothing?”
“No,” Harry disagreed. “We’ve got a corpse less than twenty-four hours old.”
“So what?”
“So this,” Harry ticked off on the fingers of one hand. “The face is all but gone, but the skin hasn’t deter
iorated yet. And where there’s flesh, there’s fingerprints. And where there’s fingerprints, there might be a file.”
“Only if she committed a crime,” Bressler reminded him.
“It’s a start,” Harry countered. “Compared to what we had before she showed up, it’s a big head start.”
“It’s slim,” Bressler disagreed. “But at least it’s something. What are you going to do next?”
Ron Caputo from downstairs in Missing Persons saved Harry from having to tell his immediate superior that he had absolutely no idea. The blond officer quartered on the fourth floor talked directly to Bressler. “Reineke told me you’d be here, Lieutenant. I think you better come listen to this,” he said, then turned his head toward the Inspector. “I hear you’re on the Mortician Murderer case too, Harry. You’ll probably want to hear this as well.”
He led them out of Harry’s nook and walked toward Bressler’s office—the only one on the floor that was completely enclosed. A Chinese detective Harry remembered was named Alex Wu and an extremely well built young woman were in the office. Her shape was all Callahan could make out since her reddish blonde hair was cascading over her face as her head hung down.
Bressler recognized Wu as well. “Rape case?” he asked Caputo, who nodded.
“But more,” the Missing Persons man promised. “A lot more.”
As he said it, the girl raised her head and looked at the approaching trio. Then Harry could clearly see the bruises and welts that was marring her otherwise extraordinary beauty. From among the blotches and discolorations, her blue eyes burrowed into Callahan’s face like burning spotlights.
The information was not long in coming, and as Caputo promised, it was spectacular.
Harry went over it in his mind again while sitting at the bar of The Third Degree, a dive for cops on Tenth Street less than a half mile from headquarters.
He had drifted over at three-thirty in the afternoon, needing a respite from the last twenty-four hours. Things had slowed quite a bit in the long, dark, heavily wooded place since the lunch crowd and it was just beginning to wind up again for Happy Hour. The bar was along one wall, with a row of booths along the other. In between the two were tables set for twos and fours. There was a cigarette machine next to the bar, a television above it, and a jukebox at the end of the booths. Harmless police paraphernalia was tacked up everywhere.
“Turn that off, will you, Clarence?” Callahan asked, motioning at the T.V.—seeing that there were only a few patrons in the booths and none were watching the soap opera that was playing with the sound off.
“Sure,” said the barkeep, slapping the set off with one pudgy paw. “What can I get you, Harry?” he asked. He was the burly Irishman, one of two bartender-partners of which the other was the Italian Tony Donzelli.
“A double scotch,” the inspector replied. Clarence usually asked his afternoon patrons if they were on duty, but he didn’t bother with Harry. “And a beer chaser,” Callahan added.
“On tap,” Clarence replied lightly while Harry thought about Kim Byrnes’ eyes.
They gave off momentarily flickerings of bright life that made their return to dullness all the more sad. It was heartening to note that her brutal attacker had not beat all the emotion out of her. Nor had the news that her best friend had been murdered.
Yesterday it was an unlucky night to be young, female, and good looking. As near as Bressler, Wu, Caputo, and Callahan could figure, Lisa Patterson was getting murdered while Kim Byrnes was getting raped. Having done a quick once over on her brownstone, Detective Wu couldn’t find an immediate source of entry—a broken window or a jimmied door—but he also didn’t see any special locks or precautions to keep the seasoned, professional rapist out.
Being best friends, Patterson was the first one Byrnes called after her assailant had left. When she heard that no one was answering the phone, she called a cab and went over to Patterson’s apartment. Finding no one there, she was in the perfect mood to assume the worst and called the police.
Unable to get a clear story out of her, the uniforms turned her over to the desk sergeant. Seeing her condition, he turned her over to the rape squad. It was only when Wu pieced together her story that he called in Caputo. And finally, the Missing Persons man was knowledgeable enough to remember the wealth of Jane Does which were shipped over to the morgue from Mount Douglas that morning.
Clarence dropped the two glasses in front of Harry just as the inner door of the bar flew open and four guys in motorcycle outfits came sauntering in.
They spread out like they owned the place, one sitting at the bar down to Harry’s left, the other sitting to Harry’s right, and the other two leaning against the booths behind him.
“It’s a beautiful day,” one of the booth cyclists said to a seated couple. “You shouldn’t be wasting it.” He then picked up both their drinks and handed one to his standing friend.
Callahan didn’t even glance around, although Clarence was not reluctant to express his feelings. “You guys have got to be crazy if you think you can start trouble here.”
“No trouble, pops,” the one to Harry’s left told him, smiling beneath his mirrored sunglasses. “Just making a healthy suggestion, that’s all.”
Clarence swallowed his anger and took the diplomatic approach. “Sorry about that, folks,” he told the now nervous couple. “I’ll get you another round.”
As Clarence’s hands went under the bar, the sitting cyclist pulled a revolver out of his leather jacket.
Harry had no trouble recognizing it—or any of the others when the three companion hoods got theirs out. It was the infamous Saturday Night Special; the cheaply made, inexpensive, mass-produced revolver, usually either a .22 or .25 caliber, that one could acquire underground. These particular versions looked to be the higher caliber models.
“No, you won’t, pops,” he advised affably. “And you’ll keep away from your gun under there too, won’t you?” Then, without a trace of kindness, he snapped, “Hands on the bar. Now!”
Clarence complied. Harry remained motionless, only moving to take a swig of his beer.
The couple in the booth moved to rise, only the two punks were blocking their exit, two more guns wrapped tightly in their gloved hands.
“You had your chance,” one of the leather-jacketed bikers told them. “Now just sit back and relax, OK?”
The pair took the hint. They both slowly returned to their seats, the girl’s eyes tearing, the boy’s eyes wild.
This time Harry did look around, his head and eyes moving as if he were only minutely interested. He saw that the well-dressed couple was in their late twenties—probably lovers taking a break from their respective jobs. The expressions on both their faces said that this sort of violence was something they did not comprehend.
Harry turned slowly back to look at his own face in the mirror behind the bar.
“If it’s money you want,” Clarence told the lead hood, “you can just forget about it. I’ve already banked this afternoon’s receipts in there.” He motioned his head at a squat, thick safe on the floor which looked to be about a half a ton heavy and came complete with a miniature time lock. “Even I can’t open it until tonight.”
“We don’t want your money, man,” the lead man with the gun said, smiling. “We just want to talk to your friend there. He’s the one they call Dirty Harry, ain’t he?”
Clarence said nothing—just looked in Callahan’s direction. The tired Inspector slowly turned toward the seated motorcycle gunman, his face highlighted by the glowing beer signs behind the bar.
“Well, if you know about somebody called Dirty Harry,” the cop said softly through clenched teeth, “then you know what he did to four motorcycle punks just like you.”
The gunman smiled even wider. “That was a lot of years ago, Dirty Old Harry,” the guy said, his smooth, young cheeks stretched from ear to ear. “Take your gun out and lay it on the bar.”
“Fuck you,” said Harry, going back to his dri
nks.
That gave the gunman pause. “I said give me your gun or I’ll scatter this guy’s brains all over the mirror!” He pushed the barrel of his snub-nose revolver toward Clarence.
Harry looked over again. “And if you do that, I’ll blow off all your heads.”
The gunman’s expression wavered, then his smile shakily returned. “Are you that fast?” he said with skeptical derision.
Callahan looked at his own face in the glass. It was devoid of emotion. “Do you feel lucky?”
The question hung in the bar like a mushroom cloud. Then the gunman snorted. “We just want to know,” the leader breathed. “We just want to know if Dirty Harry is a fag hag, OK? We just want to know whether the pig likes his meat dark or white, you know what I mean? We just want to let him know that we know, dig? And that it’s got to stop. It’s going to stop. Soon.” He turned to the two in the booth. “You tell the other pigs that when they come to clean the mess up.” He kept his gun on Clarence and motioned at Harry with his head. “OK,” he said. “Waste him.”
Harry just heard the words emerging from the man’s mouth before he started to move. As the lead gunman was speaking, the cop was raising the beer to his lips. But at the last minute, he continued the motion quickly to throw the liquid over his shoulder and into the eyes of the man to his right.
Even though the hood’s gun was out, the stinging liquid sent him sputtering back, his snubnose revolver wavering. Harry kept his momentum, letting the toss whirl him around, his left hand grabbing a fistful of the blinded man’s shirt. He pulled him forward just as the two men by the booth aimed and fired.
Their point blank bullet sparked across the room and burrowed into the trunk of their friend. Harry hunched behind the punk, his right hand wrapping around the ample .44. He felt the hood jerk in his hands as the tiny balls of lead ripped up his insides, seeing the lead hood out of the corner of his eye.
The boss gunman was shouting in surprise and bringing his own revolver over for a clear shot at Harry’s profile.
As soon as the barrel left Clarence he was ducking and sliding under the bar. He fell to his knees, ripped the .357 Python from its holder under the counter and shot through the bar.