by Dane Hartman
“No problem. Cavanaugh-Sterling takes care of its own.”
“If they take care of their own,” Harry said to Owens once they had stepped out into the corridor, beyond Davis’ hearing range, “they sure as hell haven’t done a very good job of it so far.”
“I don’t like that guy,” Owens offered. “Seems to me like a heartless bastard.”
Harry gave his new partner a searching look. Then he smiled.
“You know, Drake, we might get along well after all.”
The following morning, the Chronicle, in a banner headline that descended nearly halfway down the front page, declared woefully that San Francisco had become a “city of blood.” A large photograph, taken as soon as the sniper firing had ceased by an intrepid newsman willing to put his life on the line for a Pulitzer, showed what the steps of Cavanaugh-Sterling Headquarters had looked like at four-thirty in the afternoon: bodies strewn haphazardly, patches of blood smearing the marble, figures dazedly pulling themselves erect, paramedics bearing stretchers as they rushed to the aid of the injured . . . The accompanying story tied together, in not always believable fashion, the terrorist attack, the unsolved murders and fire that had occurred at the Tocador Hotel, and the spate of mutilations accredited to the so-called Mission Street Knifer.
That these three violent eruptions were probably unrelated (Bressler’s statements to the press notwithstanding), that their only link was that they occurred within a short time of one another, made little difference to the reporter who wrote the news analysis.
Harry sat at a saloon called Ramble’s, getting around to reading the paper finally by mid-afternoon, interested in seeing how distorted the account turned out. He was relieved to find that his name had been spelled right.
A bright October sun, again in the ascendancy following yesterday’s severe drenching, streamed in through the big square window of the bar.
At half past three, precisely on schedule, Owens strolled into the bar and joined Harry.
“You’re a hero,” he said, indicating the paper that Harry now had turned to the sports section.
“Some hero,” Harry muttered. He was more interested in the Phillies’ chances of winning the pennant.
“What’s wrong, you got something against the Astros?”
“Yeah, I don’t like Houston. And I don’t like artificial turf.”
“Phillies have artificial turf,” Owens pointed out.
“Have to forgive them then. You gotta forgive them for being in Philadelphia in the first place. After that it’s easy to forgive them anything.”
Owens wasn’t sure he followed the logic of this, decided not to pursue the subject, and ordered a Coors.
“What do you say to a home cooked meal, Harry?”
“Home cooked meal?” Harry sounded almost incredulous. A man used to fast-food joints, takeouts, sandwiches gobbled down between cases, a man for whom indigestion was practically a way of life, Harry would have regarded a good meal in a moderately priced restaurant with a certain awe, but a home cooked meal? That was approaching the miraculous.
“You a good cook?”
“I can barbeque up a burger or steak, that’s about all. No, it’s my wife, Mary Beth, she’s the one who’ll prepare the meal. I thought it’d be a nice opportunity. She is dying to meet you. I told her all about you.”
“All about me?” Harry gave Owens a questioning look.
“Nothing embarrassing.”
Harry nodded. “Well, so long as we’re through by seven.”
Seven was when they were obliged to begin their search for the Mission Street Knifer. At least they could do so on full stomachs.
“No problem. The only thing is we have to pick Mary Beth up at work. Why don’t you come along? You might find it interesting to see what she does.”
“Oh, what does she do?”
“Wardrobe consultant for a movie they’re shooting here in the city. I might have gotten out of the movies, she never really did. It’s kind of like an addiction. She got starstruck as a kid, never outgrew it.”
“Were you the star?”
Owens smiled. “Something like that.”
They were headed in Owens’ car, one of the new K-Cars Chrysler had just brought out in hope of resuscitating the company, in the direction of Polk Street, where the day’s shooting was going on. “One thing you might find interesting to note,” Owens told Harry before they arrived, “is that the production company doing this film is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cavanaugh-Sterling. Global Film Company it’s called.”
“That so? The fucker pops up everywhere,” Harry commented ruefully.
There was no doubt in Owens’ mind that he was referring to William Maxim Davis.
“It’s a long way from chairman of the board to a wardrobe consultant.”
“Don’t think I was implicating your wife. A job’s a job. From what I hear breaking into movie work is a bitch.”
“Unless you know somebody. It’s all connections. That’s what the business is, connections.”
“That’s what every business is, believe it.”
Just ahead of them, not far from where Bush intersects with Polk, they beheld a line of awesomely large white vans, parked one after another, some filled with equipment, others the temporary residences of the cast and crew. There was just one parking space on the block, and Owens found it.
“When it comes to parking spaces,” he explained, “I got this weird luck. Places people say are impossible to park, where you’ve got to drive around for hours before you give up and go to a garage, I find something right away. Don’t ask me how I do it. Only problem is I think sometimes when I really need some luck, God’ll say: ‘Tough tittie, Drake, you exhausted your quota on parking spaces.’ ”
Harry found this amusing. Owens was so different from his previous partners—he was in fact unlike anyone on the force he’d ever met—that Harry didn’t quite know what to make of him. His sense of humor, the casual manner he affected, his self-effacing quality which Harry assumed to be extremely rare in an actor, former or current, distinguished him from his colleagues and might well account for some predictable skepticism on their part. They would, as Harry had been tempted to do, consider him a dim prospect when it came to the demands of police work that was anything more than routine. But Owens had amply demonstrated his courage and competence yesterday afternoon, which was about all the convincing that Harry needed.
Only thing was, Harry found himself liking Owens. Bad enough to lose your partners, it was worse when those partners were friends as well.
They were walking past a place called Mom’s Apple Grave, whose window displayed not just a baffling feast of exotic and colorful clothes but an open casket with an unhappy-looking skeleton resting inside it. Harry thought it a good thing that he did not believe in signs and omens, for open caskets with skeletons exhibited for public inspection certainly did not augur well for the future.
Half a block away, powerful klieg lights surrounded by a tangle of cords and cables brought more intense illumination to the immediate area than even the afternoon sun could hope to provide.
It was impossible from a distance to determine who was in command or, for that matter, who were the actors and who were the members of the crew. All that one could say for sure was that no shooting was going on. Instead people were running around in all directions, screaming orders at one another, evidently in hope that whatever scene they were in the middle of filming could be reshot without further delay.
At last the preparations seemed done with. A young woman with a megaphone ordained silence. A man, who scarcely looked thirty, with unruly brown hair and wearing a turtle-neck and jeans, likewise bearing a megaphone, seated himself in a folding chair with his name on it and shouted, “OK, let’s get on with it.” He yelled for a woman named Martha.
“Martha is Martha Denby, the actress,” Owens explained to Harry.
Harry thought he’d heard of her somewhere along the line or maybe caught a pi
cture she was in.
Martha now emerged from a boutique, which had been expropriated at least for the duration of the afternoon, for whatever scene this was. She was an attractive but by no means glamorous woman, slender, almost frail, with refined features and auburn hair. At this moment she looked a bit pallid, perhaps from the ordeal of going through this same scene again and again and again, and yet appealingly vulnerable, too.
She was wearing a silk cardigan jacket to her waist and a pleated skirt, wine-red in color, that extended to her ankles. Whenever she shifted her position, the front of the jacket would part sufficiently to reveal a surprising portion of her breasts, but the glimpse would last for no longer than a moment or two, before she’d shift, drawing the jacket together again. The breeze that was blowing in from the bay was growing stiffer, and the poor girl looked like she might be cold.
“They were shooting this scene yesterday,” Owens said. “They were shooting it the day before yesterday. If I didn’t know this business I’d never figure out how a movie ever got made. Sometimes, of course, they don’t.”
“Where’s your wife?”
Owens gestured to one of the large white vans parked across the street. “She’s in there. Don’t worry, she finishes at five even if they go on with this shit all night.”
Looking admiringly at Martha Denby, Harry assured his partner that he did not expect to be bored.
The scene was a short one even if the director was never very happy with it. Martha would make her entrance from the boutique, then stand quite still, a bewildered expression on her face as though she could not decide where she was going. Before a destination occurred to her, a man suddenly materialized on her right. So quickly and silently did he approach her that Harry was rather surprised; not having realized that he was an actor because he was standing off to one side, indifferently observing the proceedings, Harry had assumed he was one of the crew. But he was obviously in the picture, and when he stepped up to Martha, the actress grimaced, a look of fierce displeasure on her face.
“She has had an affair with this man,” Owens explained, “but she’s broken it off, never wants to see this guy again. He’s a real bastard. She had to get a court order to keep him away.”
“This is the movie you’re talking about?”
Owens laughed but quietly so as not to disrupt the silence on the set. “Martha’s personal history is something else again, from what Mary Beth says, but no, this is just the plot of the movie.”
Now the actor, a young man who looked as malevolent as the script called for, began to speak to Martha, though what he was saying was inaudible to Harry and Owens, and would, in any case, later be dubbed in in a sound studio. Nonetheless, it was clear that the man was attempting to persuade the girl to accompany him somewhere. At the same time, others began to move into the scene, an elderly couple, a mother with child in tow, a man in a business suit toting a briefcase. They were meant to be pedestrians, and they passed by the two leads, ignoring their argument which, given the more frequent and more exaggerated gestures they were making, seemed to grow increasingly heated. The man caught hold of the girl’s wrist and tried forcibly to drag her with him. She resisted and in doing so offered the viewers on the set and presumably, if the scene survived the cutting room, those in the movie theaters, a generous and tantalizing view of her breasts, which considering how very slender and small-boned she was, were astonishingly ample. Then the man released her and, apparently despairing of convincing her, threw up his arms and began to walk away.
A cameraman now dollied his equipment behind him while another camera remained focused on Martha who looked stricken, her face ghostly white, her mouth taut. All at once, she broke down, tears streamed from her eyes. She wheeled about and screamed—and this time Harry and Owens could hear—“Come back, damn you, come back!”
But the man kept walking, refusing to listen to her. She chased after him, sobbing, entreating him to stop. The man was not going very fast, and she had little difficulty in catching up with him.
“Cut!” the director shouted, rising from his chair triumphantly. “That’s a take. That’s a goddamn take!” His face expressed his jubilation.
“Well, maybe you brought some luck with you, Harry,” Owens said. “That was as perfect as they’ll ever get it.”
“That was some piece of acting,” Harry marveled.
The actress, savoring the moment, was no longer crying. On the contrary, she was every bit as happy as the director, maybe more so, and with girlish enthusiasm, she hugged her co-star and kissed the director.
“She just started living with the male lead, so don’t get any ideas,” said Owens, noting the glint in Harry’s eyes.
“No ideas,” he replied somewhat irritably. “Tell me, what happens after this?”
“After this I’m not quite certain. The script’s a big secret, even the leads don’t know exactly. But I do know that the man you saw there, his name’s Jim Corona by the way, well, Jim, he takes her to a room somewhere and fucks her. And—”
He stopped, suddenly looking across the street. A woman was making her way toward him. Mary Beth.
“And what?” Harry prodded him.
“Oh, and then he murders her.”
“Shit, can’t get away from it anywhere,” Harry muttered.
Owens wasn’t listening. He was too busy greeting his wife, embracing her, then introducing her to Harry.
Mary Beth Owens was a fair-haired woman, with a pleasing face that suggested Midwestern-Scandinavian stock, and a figure that while slightly on the plump side would still make a man happy. Taking Harry’s hand, she smiled demurely, “Well, it’s a pleasure finally to make your acquaintance.”
“Finally?” Hadn’t she only heard about him the day before?
“Oh yes, Drake’s spoke of you often. All your adventures inside the department and out. You don’t realize you’re something of a celebrity.”
“It’s nice of you to say so.” Harry neglected to add that his was the sort of celebrity that inspired people to think of killing him.
“Now, Inspector Callahan, tell me, have you any objections to roast beef?”
Harry had no objections to roast beef, nor to the salad or baked potatoes that accompanied it. It was an all-American dinner served in a no-nonsense fashion. Harry had the impression that Mary Beth was an eminently practical woman, equally efficient at home or at work.
The Owens’ house was a renovated two-story, Victorian-influenced structure. Five or six years ago the neighborhood in which it was located, half a dozen blocks or so from the celebrated intersection of Haight and Ashbury, would have been considered a slum. But now, with creeping gentrification, characterized by boutiques and drinking places that favored plants, picture windows, pretentious names, and a tendency to sell great quantities of Perrier and quiche to their clientele, the last thing anyone would call this area was a slum.
“This house for us is like a boat to others,” Owens said. “There’s always more restoration to be done or something to be fixed.”
“That’s where most of my wages go,” Mary Beth added. “Our next objective is to insulate the attic. We can’t afford it until next month.”
“Next month,” Owens scoffed. “You’re a hopeless optimist.” He did not seem to appreciate the contradiction in that last phrase. “My wife has a five-year plan for everything,” he added, gently mocking. “First the attic, then we build more bookcases in the living room . . .”
“Then we have a baby,” Mary Beth put in, smiling mischievously. “In that order.”
Owens laughed. “See if the City of San Francisco gives me a raise. Or if Global gives you one.”
“The only way I’m going to keep working for Global is if I go to L.A. You know what I think of L.A. I wouldn’t want my child conceived there, let alone born and raised there.”
“Well,” Owens said in the manner of a man who has repeated himself many times over, “money is money. And Global does pay well. Maybe there’l
l be more work for you in San Francisco. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a job with another production company.”
Mary Beth shrugged, evidently not anxious to continue discussing this subject.
Looking from one to the other, Harry was struck by the utter normalcy of their lives. Whatever financial problems they might be experiencing, whatever schedule they had worked out for bringing a child into the world, they were of little significance when weighed against the air of domestic tranquillity that obtained in this household. For a moment Harry wondered at why such a normal life was a goal that had eluded him. On the other hand, being a good cop, even being a bad one, and maintaining a successful marriage were not always compatible objectives. One had a tendency to cancel out the other. Harry only hoped that Owens and his wife would be able to make it in the future as they seemed to be doing now. Once again, he regretted that Owens had become his partner just because as far as he could see he was not the greatest asset to the institution of marriage—for himself or anyone else.
Before they left the house, Owens announced that he was first going to get into his costume.
“Wait until you see him,” Mary Beth said, delighted that her husband would finally be able to demonstrate to Harry a talent that he had not yet witnessed.
Twenty minutes later Owens appeared, though if Harry had not known in advance it was the same man he would never have been able to identify him.
The man who stood before him no longer resembled a cop or indeed any member of respectable society. Here was a derelict who had undergone the ravages of a life lived entirely on the streets and in men’s shelters. His clothes were naturally ragged, but they were also stained and exuded a powerful odor of alcohol and urine long since dried. The coveralls he wore were loose, precariously held up by a strand of rope, his flannel shirt was alternately patched, and riddled with gaping tears, and generally looked as though it had been worn so continuously that a razor would be required to remove it from Owens’ body. But the pièce de résistance was the face, the way Owens had with makeup and a wig created a creature so pathetic, so lost, and so resigned to scorn and abuse that Harry was practically ready to stuff his grime-coated hands with all the money he had in his pockets.