Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons

by Dane Hartman

  As she watched, she felt the hands leaving her legs. She saw another figure racing toward the man watching from over the brownstone’s side. The second figure’s back was dark and shapeless, disguised by a large, heavy raincoat. Incongruously, there was a thin white belt amid the tan cloth.

  She saw this figure jump off the side of the building. She was surprised when it didn’t fall out of sight. The two people stayed on the same level. The man fell back when the other person raised a long knife. Judy watched the knife come down and go up again. Then the action was repeated. Again and again and again.

  Judy Halliwell looked back up at the stars. She didn’t want to see any more. Her coldness had left her. She was beginning to feel warm again. In fact, she was beginning to feel very good. Relaxed. Comfortable. Rested. She felt a strange, deep, horrible peace. A peace she knew would never end.

  At the last, she remembered her Unitarian teachings. There was only the Oneness, the Unity. She was going to the God she had served so hard and so long. His beauty was far greater than anything she would find here.

  Mercifully, Judy Halliwell died before her killer returned.

  C H A P T E R

  T w o

  San Francisco Homicide Inspector Harry Callahan saw Superman II on the cross-country plane trip. He smiled all the way through it. Not because he liked it but because he wished his own job was that easy. For a few seconds he toyed with the thought of throwing away his Magnum, ripping off his shirt, and leaping out of the 747 to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

  Then his smile and the fantasy were gone. By and large, Callahan didn’t like the movie. It was beautifully done and probably very entertaining to someone who didn’t get the overdoses of reality he had to deal with. Harry did not like fantasy. They were dreams and wishes that never came true. He couldn’t waste his time dreaming and wishing anymore.

  It was fine for someone who could pick up the morning paper, cheerily supplied by the smiling flight attendant, and read about the double murder on Beacon Hill with objective detachment. But Harry had been too close to too many murders to be detached. He had had his face rubbed in real-life murder and actual human blood. The cheery optimism of Superman II was not for him. When some pumped-up asshole stuck a Saturday Night Special in his face down some dark alley one night, where was Superman going to be then?

  There would only be Harry Callahan and hundreds like him doing the best damn job they could. Under the circumstances.

  Callahan didn’t look up when he heard the bell. He had been on enough planes to know what it meant. They were either about to hit turbulence or about to land. Harry checked his watch. It said two o’clock P.M., California time. That meant it was three hours later Boston time. Harry had left San Francisco at nine o’clock Monday morning, supposedly the third day of his once-a-year vacation. The nationwide trip took five or six hours. The plane was due to arrive in Massachusetts at five fifteen P.M., just in time for rush hour.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” came a studied, mellifluous feminine voice over the intercom, “may I have your attention please? In a few minutes we will be arriving in Boston, Massachusetts, by way of Logan Airport. Kindly return to your seats and extinguish all smoking materials. Thank you for flying us today. I hope you will think of us when you travel again. Please fasten your seat belts . . .”

  Harry waited for it: the phrase that had originated on the West Coast and spread like a fungus across the states.

  “And have a nice day,” the voice finished. Harry nodded. His slightly depressed irritability was capped. He didn’t know anyone who didn’t get at least a little surly when some plastic fantastic pulled back and let them have it with, “Have a nice day.” Never had such a well-meaning bunch of words had such an adverse effect. More people kicked their dogs and chewed the heads off loved ones because of that phrase than any in Callahan’s memory.

  It was bad enough he had to take the vacation in the first place. Although the police force bylaws decreed it necessary, Harry had avoided the off-time as much as possible. Murderers, bless their slimy disgusting hearts, never took a day off, so Harry was usually able to sneak through his assigned off-week on the tail of an investigation.

  He had been hoping his last case, the Slez murders, would last all this week as well. It seemed promising. A lawyer had killed two of his clients when it looked like he would be brought up on charges of conflict of interest, perjury, and contempt of court. He had slaved twelve years to pass the bar so he went a little overboard. The lawyer had been sly so Callahan had dug in for a long hunt. Unfortunately for Harry’s plans, the lawyer had also been repentant. He had given himself up yesterday.

  Harry shook his head slightly, remembering. Try as he might, he couldn’t get his superior, Lieutenant Al Bressler, to assign him another case.

  “The only investigating you’re going to be doing,” the lieutenant had informed him, “is of the coeds crawling all over Boston. Too bad they’re all covered up with leggings and raincoats this time of year. They may not be California girls, but they’ll have to do.”

  Callahan had marched fairly miserably back to his office to straighten out some paperwork and waste some time before he would force himself to go.

  “Look at it this way,” Bressler had suggested, following his best man back to the inspector’s cubicle. “They may not be as blonde or as skimpily dressed, but there are a hell of a lot of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in one place.”

  Harry had grunted, raising his eyebrows in mock anticipation. He typed a little, pushed some papers around, sighed, and got up to go home and pack.

  As he had neared the door of Suite #750, the Homicide office in the Frisco Justice Building, Bressler had called to him a final time.

  “And Harry?”

  Callahan turned.

  “Say hello to your folks for me.”

  “Not folks,” Harry had corrected for the third time that week since getting the letter. “Cousins. Distant cousins.”

  That was the catalyst, Harry tiredly acknowledged as he stared out the plane window at Boston Harbor. A letter from his cousins on his father’s side. A letter from some people he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. A letter asking . . . no, begging him to come to Boston as soon as he could.

  Harry held on as the plane banked in for its approach, still thinking about the letter.

  “I don’t want to say that it is a matter of life or death, because it is such a cliché and you probably hear that sort of thing a lot in your work, but it is. It really is a matter of great importance to us and the family. Please come. We need to talk to you. We all miss you and would like to see you very much. Love, Linda.”

  Linda. Linda Callahan. Harry’s father had a brother. His brother had a wife who had a child. That child was Linda. Linda got married and had a child of her own. Now she was writing him, asking for some sort of help.

  “. . . a matter of life or death . . .”

  “. . . a matter of great importance . . .”

  A “family” matter. Harry didn’t want to acknowledge it. He liked to think that he didn’t have a family. It hadn’t always been that way. A long time ago he’d had loving parents and a beautiful bride. But they were all dead, taking whatever family feeling he once had with them.

  His police job had done the rest. He had seen so much pain, so many atrocities, and so much of the underside of what love can do that he didn’t want a family. He didn’t want to think there were still people somewhere who could be hurt because of him. He didn’t want to think there were people who could hurt him.

  Still, he couldn’t shut out his past. The damage had already been done. In better times he had visited his cousins, and they had taken to him. And no matter what he wanted to think they were still blood. And they had written to him for help. He probably wouldn’t have turned his back on a stranger in the same situation. So why did he feel so reluctant to help Linda?

  Before he could find an answer, his thoughts were interrup
ted by the plane’s final descent and the sudden, raucous sound of blaring music behind him. As soon as his ear adjusted, he realized it was the heavily overdubbed beat of disco music. Harry pivoted in his seat, looking through the crack between chairs. Behind him was a lithe black man bopping to the beat of a huge hand-held radio-tape recorder. He had it on so loud everyone in the 747 could hear it.

  The lady sitting on the aisle next to Harry was an inexperienced flier. If it wasn’t her first plane trip, then it was mighty close. She had been nervous throughout the entire flight, and this final blaring noise during the craft’s most crucial maneuver nearly sent her over the edge.

  “Oh my God!” the matronly woman cried. “Please! Please turn that thing off.”

  Harry waited for the music to disappear or at least diminish in volume. It didn’t happen. He saw a harried, concerned flight attendant hustle down the aisle toward him. She was obviously worried about being out of her seat during the landing procedure. She stopped behind Harry to request politely that the machine be switched off.

  “Hey, baby,” said the man indignantly. “You all switched off the music on the headphones, and I need the beat to keep my seat. Be cool, it’s not bothering anybody.”

  “Its disturbing everyone,” the stewardess corrected. “Would you kindly . . . !”

  “No, baby,” the man interrupted. “Would you kindly turn the headphones back on?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Then I can’t do this.”

  Harry looked at the woman beside him. Her face was set in fear, and her knuckles were changing colors on the seat arm. The cop sighed, undoing his seat belt. He rose ominously from his chair to appear in both the black man’s and stewardess’ vision. Without a word he reached down, hit the “eject” button, and pulled the cassette tape out in one smooth movement.

  “Hey, man, what the hell you think you’re doing?” the radio man yelled.

  Harry looked sympathetically at the flight attendant while casually crushing the cassette with one hand. That quieted the fellow. The stewardess smiled in thanks at Callahan and trotted back to her seat. The silence did not last long.

  As they were passing over the roofs of surrounding houses to come in for the final leg of their landing, the music blared again. Harry immediately got up while turning. The black man had inserted a new tape and was looking right at Harry with a smug smile. The only difference was that he had a big black friend sitting beside him now, also with a wicked grin plastered on his mug.

  Harry was unconcerned. With a fast tug, he pulled the radio out of the man’s hands. The black man babbled in shock, trying to get up. The seat belt held him in for a second. While he was trying to extricate himself, Harry hit the back of the machine and neatly ripped out its six batteries. He dropped them in the black man’s lap and dropped the radio in his own seat.

  The black man finally undid the buckle and rose with rage. “Hey, man, you’re asking . . . !”

  He got those four words out before Harry grabbed the front of his shirt tightly with his right hand and lifted up. With his left hand, he hit the overhead baggage compartment release. The black man rose and the heavy hinged plastic section fell. The two objects met somewhere in the middle, the resulting crack as loud as the music had been.

  Harry let go of the man’s shirt front so he could fall back into his seat, eyes closed and mouth open. His friend also had his mouth open. Harry looked at him.

  “Anything you’d like to hear?” he asked dangerously.

  “No, man, oh no, sir,” was what the music man’s big friend said.

  Harry nodded in agreement and sat down just before the 747’s wheels touched ground. Along with his carry-on bag and suit holder, Harry brought the empty radio along with him as he prepared to leave the plane. As he neared the door and all the stewardesses wishing the exiting passengers a nice day, he turned to look back at the seat behind his. The big friend was still trying to awaken the music man completely. The music man was babbling incoherently, the whites of his eyes showing.

  Harry turned back toward the exit just as the flight attendant he had helped approached him. She was a mature, very attractive blonde. “Thank you for your assistance,” she said, slipping something into his jacket pocket. “Have a nice night.”

  Harry pulled the piece of paper out of his pocket as he walked down the airport’s entry hall. It was the name, address, and room number of a Boston hotel. At the bottom of the page was a time, “11:30 on,” it said, and her name, “Terri.” Harry allowed himself a smile. She didn’t care whether he was married, or engaged, or had a girl, or what. And to tell the truth, neither did he. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  The San Francisco inspector walked out into the early evening of Boston. It felt like he had never left his home town. Although Boston had harder winters, the two cities were remarkably the same in late September. The air was crisp and full of the smell of the ocean. Each city was full of hills, and both had the same sort of architecture. Harry took a deep breath and walked toward a line of departing buses. He arrived just as a big, eight-wheel jobber was pulling out. As it swept into traffic, Harry nonchalantly dropped the black man’s radio under the rear wheel. The machine flattened and split into a dozen unsalvageable pieces.

  Harry turned to see the entire mass of humanity around the buses staring at him, tourists and redcaps alike. Harry took the moment to look up at the sky, snap his fingers, and say, “Oh darn,” as if he had dropped it accidentally. Then he went over to the airline entrance to wait for Linda.

  The rush hour had done its usual work. All the traffic was snarled, even on the normally well-planned airport roadways. Unless his cousin had left the house two hours early to avoid the crush, Harry was sure she’d be late. He found a concrete supporting post to lean on, set down his luggage, and contentedly watched humanity pass by.

  He watched people inside the terminal wait interminately for their suitcases to crawl off the conveyor belt and onto the metal showcase. Harry glanced at his own two bags. Inside were about all the clothes he owned, really. He dressed nattily, but no one would call him a clothes-horse. Brown was his favorite color, and tweed was his favorite material. That and the regulation Levis, sport shirts, ties, and raincoat were about as far as Harry went. While the choice may have gotten boring to others, at least Harry never had to wait for his bags.

  The cop redirected his gaze elsewhere. He stood on the end of a line of taxicabs, all waiting patiently for passengers they could chariot into the city and its eight sections. Harry watched the yellow cars come and go, the first in line always taking off and the others moving forward accordingly. While he waited there was only one instance of any difficulty.

  Some dark-skinned foreign students were having a hard time deciding which cab they wanted to take. The driver in the head car at that time had bounded out of his seat to complain.

  “Hey, you can’t take the other ones. I was here first! You gotta take my cab. That’s the rules. We all go in order here. That’s the American way.”

  If ever Harry heard a cue for Superman, this was it. But the man of steel did not show up, so Harry edged forward.

  “We do not want to take your auto,” the dark-skinned young man said, holding the arm of the young lady next to him. She was looking at the sidewalk, obviously confused and just a little bit scared.

  “That’s tough, buddy,” said the cab driver. “Because either you take mine or you don’t get into town.”

  By then Harry had sidled up to the young couple. “Where do you want to go?” he asked quietly.

  The two young people turned to face the inspector. They first stared right into his chest. They weren’t used to men his size. They looked up into his craggy, lined face and wind-swept, wheat-colored hair. Then they began happily babbling to each other in their native Mediterranean tongue.

  “Cowboy,” was the only word they said in English to each other. “Cowboy, cowboy.”

  Harry realized that the American film industry
did more than supply the nation with superhero fantasies. It also supplied the world with visions of the United States. These two foreigners had only seen Harry’s like before in Western movies. Naturally they assumed Callahan was a cowboy, too.

  Once they had finally calmed, the young man was able to reply in fractured English. “We desire to travel to Cambridge.”

  Callahan looked over the foreigners’ heads at the still-upset cabbie. “How much to Cambridge, driver?”

  There was a slight pause while the driver thought. “Seven-fifty or ten dollars, depending on the traffic,” the cabbie finally said.

  “That is not true!” the young man exploded.

  Before Harry could question the young man, the cabbie tried to roll over the foreigners with words. “What do you mean that’s not true? I just said it didn’t I? How do you know it’s not true? You a cabbie or something? You know the rates in this town? I said seven-fifty, OK? It’s the best price going and if you know what is good for you, you’ll take it!”

  Once the driver began talking, Harry’s eyes narrowed. What he had merely suspected before, he was sure of now. As the cabbie went on, Harry walked around the front of the car, approached the driver, and put one hand on the man’s shoulder. The cabbie’s words suddenly diminished. Harry used his other hand to put his forefinger against his lips in the “quiet” sign. The cabbie’s words ran out.

  “What do you mean it is not true?” Harry asked the young man from across the hood.

  “He say something different to us. No seven-fifty.”

  Harry kept his hand on the cabbie’s shoulder in a friendly manner. “What did he say to you?”

  “He say that it an American custom to pay first chauffeur with all the currency in right pocket. He say it was a game of chance where if pocket were empty, one would ride free.”

  Harry looked at the driver like a father who has caught his son’s hand in the cookie jar. His expression said, “You should have known better.” The driver responded.