Dirty Harry 01 - Duel For Cannons (6 page)

The music and the coolness of the cellar gave Harry’s search an eerie edge. He looked in every corner of the cellar, trying to make a connection in his mind. He knew the men’s room had windows that opened out on a next door alley but where did the ladies’ room windows open to? If he had it figured right, there had to be a connection in this cellar.

He came up empty. After searching the entire length twice. Harry admitted to himself that he was alone. He was about to attribute the whole thing to frustration over Tucker when he heard bass beats. They were out of sync with the music upstairs.

Harry followed the sounds. They were like uneven pumps of air through a tight valve, making muffled bleats that ended on a slightly higher note. They were coming from the back wall, behind the wine rack.

There was a small hole in the wall. Between the bottles there was a space on the back wall made by some planks and some bricks that didn’t quite fit together. Harry leaned down and looked through the hole.

He saw short-hair, collegiate, and two other guys raping the second girl.

The light from the ladies’ room windows made it clear enough. There was a space between the lavatory and the cellar. And in that space short-hair was holding the auburn-haired girl’s head in her lap; one hand clenched in her red hair, the other holding the girl’s panties in her mouth. Collegiate was holding down her arms on either side of short-hair’s sitting form. Another guy was holding her ankles around the final guy’s raping form. They were all positioned in such a way that the raper had his back to Harry. The leg-holder was a bit to Harry’s right while the other two were facing him, but too intent on their writhing victim to notice the cop’s face in the darkness beyond the little hole in the wall.

Harry put his weapon away. As good as he was, he didn’t see a way of nailing all four without hurting the girl. But if he could split them up, he might be able to pick them off. Harry studied the hole. It was about five inches wide and four inches tall, surrounded by crumbling cement and rotting wood. Harry judged the rapist to be about twenty inches away from the hole. Harry took off his jacket.

Harry clenched and unclenched his fists. Harry took two deep, silent breaths. Harry took up a solid position in front of the hole. Harry reached in and wrapped his right arm around the rapist’s neck.

“You remember what it was like being born?” he asked.

Then he pulled.

The rapist’s head slammed into the wall with the speed and power of a wrecking ball. Harry felt the concrete scrape against the back of his hand, then the material gave way and he was smashing the rapist’s shoulders against the widening hole. He wrapped his other hand around the rapist’s neck and kept pulling. The wall held for a minute, then opened to let the bastard through.

Harry hauled the choking, terrified rapist through the wall, through the wine bottles, and across the metal rack. Glass and liquid exploded in every direction from the force of Harry’s violent maneuver. He pulled until the rapist’s head was directly in front of him then swung to the side and threw the guy away.

The rapist flew headfirst into another metal rack, bringing it down with him. He came to a rest, his neck broken, twisted among ten-pound cans of tomatoes.

Harry’s Magnum was out before he even let completely go of the rapist. He pointed it through the bigger hole just as short-hair was whipping out a switchblade. She hauled the victim’s head back to expose her neck and brought the blade up, snarling.

Harry shot her between the tits.

Even before her back exploded out, the two remaining guys were crawling through the lavatory windows. Harry wasn’t going to be particular whether Collegiate bought it next, so he shot through the first window that came into his sights. One of the remaining rapists blew into the ladies’ room in a shower of crimson liquid and glittering glass. The last guy slithered all the way through and hauled ass for the ladies’ room door.

Harry got a bead on the retreating figure. It was Collegiate. He was squeezing the trigger when the victim’s head floated into his view, her eyes tightly closed, tears rolling down her blood-splattered face, her mouth open in a silent wail and short-hair’s hand still tightly clenched in her hair. Harry let his trigger finger go slack. He lowered his gun just as the bathroom door slammed shut behind the last rapist.

Collegiate tore down the hall to the men’s room, knocking over a coed couple in the process. In mortal fear that the big guy with the big gun might be coming after him he slammed through the men’s room door, roared past the urinals and dove headfirst through the window. He fell into the alleyway headfirst, cutting himself badly on the broken glass.

The panic-stricken kid rolled and crashed up against the alley wall. He looked back through the broken window. The lavatory was empty. The big guy wasn’t coming after him that way. Collegiate nearly cried with relief. He was all set to take off into the night when DiGeorgio stuck the barrel of his service revolver against the kid’s neck.

“Going somewhere?” he inquired. What DiGeorgio lacked in originality he made up for in timing.

Harry crawled into the newly widened hole between the cellar and the ladies’ room wall. He pried short-hair’s fingers from the auburn hair. Using a piece of the victim’s torn dress, he wiped the blood from the crying girl’s face. Then he wrapped his jacket around her waist to cover what had been exposed. Then, gently, he took the auburn-haired girl in his arms. Later, he carried her upstairs.

Her name was Faye, and she didn’t like pretty girls. Collegiate told them everything back at headquarters. Faye, it seemed, had a real interesting way of showing her dislike of pretty girls. Faye would make deals. Faye would make deals with guys who liked pretty girls a little too much. Faye would make deals with guys who pretty girls didn’t like at all.

The first guy Faye made a deal with wound up being Megan Fullmer’s last date. Faye perfected her technique with several deals after that. The date would cover for Faye, and Faye would provide a cover for the date. While it would seem a rapist stole the girl from the date, Faye discovered the best way to get a girl from her date was to have the date be the rapist.

Harry and DiGeorgio were happy to collect all the previous dates that very morning. With Collegiate’s confession, it was child’s play to knock the others’ stories. By midday, the Fullmer case had netted four murderers.

“That’s what I love about this job,” Harry said with disgust. “It’s a showcase for humanity’s ingenuity. The fucking ways they think up for killing each other off . . .”

DiGeorgio snorted and went back to his 1977
Playboy.
The Playmate of the Month was the one with the blonde hair all the way to her ass. Harry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as DiGeorgio turned the magazine sideways and folded out. Harry was thinking about his next move on the Tucker case when Sergeant Reineke walked in.

“I’ve got good news and bad news, Harry,” he said without a smile. “The good news is they just found a girl answering McCarthy’s description in L.A.”

Harry opened his eyes and sat up. “The bad news?”

“She’s got a .44 slug in her.”

Harry leaned back. Slowly. DiGeorgio put the
Playboy
down on the desk and snorted. “You win some and you lose some,” he said.

Harry got up and put on his coat. He stopped beside Reineke on the way out. “Tell Confucius to find another partner,” he told the sergeant. “I’ll be in L.A.”

Candice McCarthy was dead. Harry Callahan was tired. Los Angeles Homicide Detective Lester Shannon was disgusted. They all were in the bridal suite of a North Hollywood hotel.

“Unbelievable,” Shannon was saying. “He made the reservation by phone, paid a small time stoolie to check in and get the key, then carried his ‘bride’ over the threshold in broad daylight.”

Harry didn’t look up from the girl’s still figure on the blood-soaked bed. Her arms were up, tied to the brass headboard. Her mouth was open, filled with a terry washcloth held in place with one of her stockings. Her green silk shirt was open, exposing the bullet wound in the middle of her chest. The coroner had said that her eyes were open under the handkerchief blindfold.

“Anybody see them come in?” Harry asked the muscular L.A. detective.

“Yeah, a lady whose window faced the entrance. She watched them because she thought they looked so cute. The bride had her arms around her hubbie’s neck and wore a veil. The groom wore a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low and had a coat draped over his shoulders with the collar up. The lady upstairs couldn’t see the girl’s hands or the guy’s face.”

“Didn’t she think it strange that the girl was wearing a veil with a green shirt and jeans?”

“She wasn’t wearing jeans by then,” Shannon answered. “She had on a long skirt. And the lady thought the veil was cutest of all. A blow struck for tradition and all that.”

Harry nodded and sighed. He noticed a variety of different clothes scattered around the room, including the denims and long skirt. The skirt had covered the ropes around McCarthy’s ankles, the veil had covered the gag in her mouth and the coat had covered the bindings on her wrists. The hitman was very professional and very sick. He took a chance by bringing a live witness into a motel to kill her, but he must have really got off on it.

“He couldn’t leave her alive,” Shannon muttered. “What was it?” he asked Harry, “A question of pride?”

“A question of identification,” answered Harry. “Anybody else see him?”

“No. He ordered everything through room service, had the waiter leave his meals outside the door and left the signed bill with the leftovers.”

“And naturally he left without paying up.”

“Naturally,” said Shannon, his handsome face screwing into an expression of distaste. “He left her as collateral,” he concluded, motioning to the corpse on the bed.

“How about the stoolie who fronted for him at the desk?” Harry inquired further.

“The manager remembers him as a short, wiry guy, like an ex-jockey or something,” Shannon described. “We have him figured as Little Brian Heald, a guy who works over at the Warner’s lot.”

“Pick him up yet?”

“The positive I.D. came through just when you showed up,” Shannon blandly replied, watching the rest of his men troop into the room and start wrapping the body up. “I’ll do it personally when we’re through here.”

“We’re through here,” Harry declared pointedly. “Let’s go.”

Shannon didn’t need much convincing. For a homicide detective, his demeanor was as bland as his face was handsome. Harry pegged him for a failed actor turned cop. Not only did he take directions willingly, he couldn’t seem to stay quiet. He always had to keep himself entertained, performing for his audience of one.

Los Angeles was like that all over, Harry decided, looking out the window of Shannon’s unmarked car. If you weren’t working on a movie, you weren’t working. Even Heald, known about town as a small-time hood, did his nine-to-five at a studio. Harry could see Heald practicing his Richard Widmark laugh and Shannon wishing he lived at 77 Sunset Strip.

“Listen,” Shannon interrupted his thoughts, “if this hitman was so hot to keep himself a secret, why did he kidnap the girl at all? Why didn’t he just kill her at the park along with the Garris kid?”

“I don’t know,” Harry answered irritably, “Maybe he was homicidal and horny.”

Shannon laughed at that. Harry scowled and looked out the window. They were heading for the Warner Studio lot along Barham Boulevard, treating the San Francisco inspector to the sights of wide, nearly empty sidewalks and wide, nearly full open-air restaurants.

“No, really,” Shannon pressed. “It’s like he doesn’t want anyone to know what he looks like, but he wants everyone to know he did it.”

“Yeah,” Harry replied drily. He stared at the palm trees, stores, and one-story cement, adobe, and paneled dwellings as they seemed to zip by the car. He had to admit to himself that Shannon’s question and theory were valid. It would be hard for Harry to believe that the mystery hitman was just a joke-playing, bloodthirsty psycho, although all the signs pointed to it.

But Harry kept looking behind the facts. Why had the guy chopped up two innocent kids at the amusement park? Why drag a girl from Fullerton to L.A. only to kill her in a honeymoon hotel? Why be such a slavering bastard about the whole thing?

He was getting a very uncomfortable feeling about the whole Tucker investigation. The hitman had killed the sheriff in the most spectacular way possible, then he seemed intent on leaving a trail that was about as subtle as a thermonuclear attack. Why, Harry kept asking himself. Why not bury the girl’s body so there’d be nothing to bring either the Fullerton or San Fran force to L.A.? And why leave a live stoolie around to put the finger on him? Even if Heald got his orders over the phone, he was still around to say that he did. At the very least, Harry would know he was heading in the right direction.

It didn’t make sense. Up until now, no one could get a line on this particular hitman. Unless he had started his business with Tucker, that anonymity was the sign of a pro. So why was a pro leaving a trail of blood crumbs for Harry to follow? The whole thing stunk worse than the drank tank on Sunday morning.

“Here we are,” Shannon announced, turning onto the Warner lot. Harry looked up while the L.A. detective flashed his I.D. to the gate guard. Directly in front of them was an old fashioned water tower marked “The Burbank Studios.” All around that were two- and three-story buildings nestled amidst trees, hills and greenery. Shannon didn’t ask for any information or directions. The L.A. detective knew where he was going. Harry figured he had been to the studio as many times before as he could manage. Shannon just silently drove along a multicolored line painted on the dark pavement.

“Those color lines direct visitors to different departments,” he explained to Harry. “Heald works in the delivery department, which crosses the blue line.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry answered, seeing a speed bump up ahead.

As soon as Shannon had slowed to cross the mound, Harry opened his door and hopped out. Shannon braked in surprise. Before the L.A. cop could say anything, however Harry had laid his hands on the open passenger’s window and leaned down to elaborate.