Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons (3 page)

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 interrupted 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.

“They’re these damn Middle-east kids,” he said softly. “Iranians or Arabs or something. They’ve got all the oil, and they bleed us dry.”

“The bleeding’s got to stop somewhere,” Harry told the man, then returned to the foreign pair. “How much money do you have in your right pocket?” he asked.

The young man reached slowly into his slacks and pulled out a wad as thick as a pack of tarot cards. He gave the stack of bills to Harry without hesitation. They were all fifties and twenties. Harry counted up to five hundred dollars without making a dent in the stack before stopping.

“Seven-fifty, huh?” he said to the cabbie. “More like seven hundred and fifty, wasn’t it?”

The driver thought it had gone on long enough. “Hey, you can’t prove nothing, mister, so why don’t you butt out. I’ve got a wife and kids to feed, y’know.”

“Fine,” Harry said, putting his hands up innocently. “Let’s do it your way.” He stuck the pile of cash in the foreigner’s left pocket. “What do you have in your right pocket now?” he asked the young man. The foreigner pulled out empty cloth. “Oops,” Harry said to the cabbie. “You lose.”

Only then did he show the man his badge. The driver was too far away to see it was from San Francisco, and instead of checking further, he lowered his head on his taxi’s roof, groaning. Harry took the opportunity to open the door for the lady.

“You make sure he takes you to the right place,” he told the young man, “and if he asks for anything, call a policeman.” The foreigner nodded and hopped into the back seat after his countryman. Harry returned to the driver’s side. “I’ve got your taxi number from the trunk, and I know your name from your license inside. You give these kids any trouble, and I’ll pull this car out from under you. Now go get their luggage.”