Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (10 page)

When, twenty minutes later, he had adjusted his trousers and tucked his shirt firmly in so that his appearance would in no way betray how he’d just spent his time, he gently reached down to where the blankets and sheets had collected in a heap and somehow succeeded in unravelling the tangled mess. Then he raised the reddest of the two red blankets and hoisted it along the length of Martha’s unclothed body, drawing it finally over her head. He stepped away as if to better inspect what he’d accomplished.

Just then Martha, giggling, mumbled something under the covers.

Teddy good-humoredly uncovered her head. “What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t breathe,” she was still laughing.

“Air as a means of sustenance is highly overrated,” he said, butting his head down suddenly so that it was squashing both her breasts. With his lips he cradled the nipple of her left breast, allowing his teeth to tease the hardened protrusion as though he intended at any moment to bite it off. Then he withdrew, an unshakable calmness reflecting itself on his face.

In the dimness, and in such proximity, it was difficult for Martha to discern much more of his face than the luminous intensity of his eyes bearing down on her.

Then he stood up, put on his jacket. “So I shall see you tomorrow at the same time?” he said, never thinking that she could possibly raise an objection. “I promise to be prompt.”

“I don’t think so, Teddy. Tomorrow’s Halloween. The cast is throwing a party, and there’ll be the parade. You could come if you want.”

“Halloween, yes, I’d forgotten,” Teddy said, a bit disgruntled that a mindless celebration should get in the way of his evening tryst. “Enjoy yourself then. We will do it Friday.”

“Friday, yes, that’d be terrific.” Though she didn’t want him around she still felt obligated to ask him again if he’d like to attend the party with her.

“You know what I think about parties. My presence would only weigh on you, you wouldn’t enjoy yourself.”

“Oh, Teddy, don’t say that. You know it’s not true.”

He let himself out. “Good-night, Martha. See you on Friday.”

C H A P T E R
S i x

H
alloween. Though darkness hadn’t settled in on the city, witches and ghosts were already on the march down Polk Street, making their way to parties or preparing to join the parade that would advance through downtown.

This was a night that the San Francisco police force generally dreaded. When people disguised themselves they felt protected in their anonymity, and they often acted in ways they would never think of when wearing their own clothes. The spirit of the night, with its vaguely sinister and pagan connotations, only heightened the possibility that someone might go off the deep end. And, in any case, there was always more danger whenever large numbers of people got together.

So the police were determined to make their presence well known and prior to the start of the parade the blue-and-white patrol cars, with “Police Services” imprinted on their chassis, and the less conspicuous black-and-white ones could be sighted everywhere along the parade route and on important intersecting streets.

It was Harry who suggested that tonight when they searched for the Mission Street Knifer they might consider straying farther from the drabber precincts surrounding the Greyhound Bus Station.

“Why would we want to do that?” Owens asked.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if our Knifer takes advantage of the parade, maybe dresses in a costume himself. Could be that one reason he keeps to the Mission and Market Street area is that he knows anywhere else he’d stick out. But tonight nobody, no matter how bizarre-looking he is, is going to stick out. Not with the crowd we’ll be getting.”

“Oh? I missed last year’s festivities. Is it really that crazy?”

“Let’s just say it won’t be easy to forget.”

Owens was agreeable to the change in geography. He wasn’t especially partial to the neighborhood he’d had to roam last night. And since they had no real leads to go on what did they have to lose?

He found it ironic, and rather comical, that for once his own personal costume party was being duplicated by tens of thousands throughout the city. Halloween was an occasion when everybody could play decoy if they so chose.

Harry, however, as always went as himself: the weary and skeptical Inspector #71.

Each year the parade seemed to get longer, and tonight it was strung out for blocks. Ghosts, witches, warlocks, skeletons, Space Age creatures bedecked in silver foil, characters out of
Star Wars,
women festooned in silver and white, a larger-than-life Marie Antoinette, her giant head bobbing, a sixty-piece brass band, men in Richard Nixon masks, one after another, they just kept coming, their passage announced by whistles, drums, and frequent renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Floats—of immense multi-segmented snakes, of a gigantic skeleton whose torso and skinny white limbs moved in time to the music that sailed up into the air—were borne aloft by the crowd as it progressed down Van Ness. Thousands thronged into the street, cheering, expecting at any moment to be surprised and delighted anew by the continuing spectacle. In the distance, horns blared furiously as drivers trapped in the rerouted traffic protested their paralysis.

In his own car on Sacramento Harry listened to the familiar female voice that dominated the police band. “Charlie 8, a 1080 on Pine. Woman says she’s been robbed. That’s the corner of Octavia and Pine . . .” And from Charlie 8, the reply: “10-40,” meaning that Charlie 8 would respond to the call rather than passing the responsibility along to another patrol car.

The calls kept coming in with increasing frequency: 1080s, 801s, 211s, thefts, suicides, robberies . . . On a night like this, incidents of violence had a habit of breaking out with a certain momentum; it was as though there was some weird current in the air that prompted madness in one person and passed it on to another. It was more contagious than the bubonic plague and maybe just as virulent. A full moon Harry had found could do it, too.

Occasionally, Harry would check in with Owens. There was, after all, no way to keep visual track of him, not with the hordes that had descended into the city’s center for the parade.

“Everything’s fine here, Harry. Just a bit confusing,” Owens would answer. In the background Harry could hear some of that confusion, a tumult of voices and jittery music.

“Where are you now, Drake?”

“Headed east on Golden Gate.”

“10-4.”

Harry decided to put his car in motion so that the distance separating him from his partner would not become too great. The problem was that with traffic blocked and detoured, it was difficult to get anywhere without protracted delays, and Harry was no luckier than most of the motorists who’d made the mistake of coming out on a night like this.

He got to Ellis half an hour later, and he was still three blocks from Golden Gate. He had not heard from Owens in the interim, and he thought he’d best raise him again on the radio and discover exactly where he was.

But he failed to receive a response.

“Drake, this is Alpha 2, do you read me?”

Nothing.

“Drake, this is Alpha 2, Harry Callahan here. Where are you?”

Nothing. Nothing but static and the intrusion of competing signals that somehow had jumped to his channel.

With passage impeded the way it was, Harry realized the futility of relying on his car any longer. While it was conceivable that the radio transmission was at fault, he did not believe it. Either Owens was in some danger or he was in a situation where he could not risk exposing his own radio to view. In either case Harry was sufficiently alarmed to park his car—which actually meant double-parking it—and proceed on foot.

In a half hour’s time Owens could have wandered much farther afield. He might not be on Golden Gate at all any longer, but that was his last given location and so it was there that Harry determined he would first look.

Almost twenty blocks to the north and several blocks to the east, in a discotheque on the corner of Union and one of the streets intersecting it between Van Ness and Fillmore, a masked ball was well in progress. It was, to be sure, an unusual masked ball, appropriate to the 1980s in terms both of the costumes that the revelers had chosen and of the energy that they exhibited in carrying on their celebration. For instance, several individuals of both sexes displayed what might be called the “sick” or the “infirm” look; these people came gauzed and bandaged, in wheelchairs, or limping with the aid of walkers. One man arrived in a fully electric rolling hospital bed, wowing the public while propped up on pillows.

But this was nothing compared to some of the more ingenious revelers who’d doused themselves in genuine animal blood, sold by a place called McDermott Meats in Oakland: the sight of them was repulsive enough, but it paled beside the smell.

And, of course, there were the usual ghouls and goblins and many, many women in leotards, tanktops, floor-length gowns, all with faces painted to make them look as though they had been recently exhumed from their final resting place, except that the eyes had been darkened and the lips brightened in order to present a contrast to the pasty whiteness of the skin that surrounded them.

An actress to begin with, Martha Denby was practically unrecognizable, with a black mask that gave her the look of an executioner and a loose black garment that hung to her feet, from which sandaled feet, protruded. Whenever she moved into the light, and there wasn’t much reliable light in this place, anyone with an observant eye would notice that the black gown she wore was so fragile and gossamer that it was virtually transparent and that she had nothing on underneath. Nothing whatsoever.

In fact, the only way you could determine that this was Martha without hearing her identifiably lilting voice was by Jim Corona’s anxious presence. He, dressed as a pirate, eye patch and big gold looped earring in left ear, never let her get farther than the outer limit of his own shadow.

If she was open with Teddy about Jim, she was not open with Jim about Teddy. He was more likely to leave her if she told him she was seeing another man, whereas Teddy regarded Jim patronizingly, thinking of him as a harmless boy who entertained Martha only so long as they were making a movie together. Teddy, Martha understood, felt that only he could successfully pleasure her. He naturally assumed that when the movie was over, and Acapulco loomed closer, that he had only to snap his fingers, and Martha would discard Jim without a second’s hesitation.

Martha, when she was with Teddy, exulted in the excitement he aroused in her. But when she was with Jim she felt more comfortable, cozier. She could imagine settling down with him one day.

The specific problem she and Jim were encountering tonight was that she was hellbent on having a good time and Jim, despite his pirate outfit, seemed not to be in the spirit of the occasion. In fact, he was downright peevish and irritable. He wouldn’t dance with her, and he made it clear that he resented her dancing with anybody else.

“You’re a drag,” Martha said and went off to dance anyhow, but for fear of agitating him further she made certain only to dance with flamboyant homosexuals who delighted in bedecking themselves in wild regalia: chains, keys hanging out, leather jackets, leather pants, leather boots, impenetrable dark glasses, motorcycle helmets, or sometimes just about nothing at all except some tiny trace of cloth that wound about their loins but left the cheeks of their buttocks fully revealed.

When she returned to Jim, she was drenched with sweat but happy and excited, and she wanted him to be excited, too. She wrapped her arms around him and drew him close to her. “Hey, Captain Kidd, what’s wrong?” She kissed him, brushing his face with the vinyl of her mask.

“Nothing.”

Refusing to release him, she said, “That’s not true. You’ve been acting weird all night. What is it, something to do with the film?” She knew it wasn’t the film, but she wanted to get him talking.

“Not the film. Nothing to do with the film.”

“Then what?”

He could be restrained no longer. “There’s somebody else,” he declared, spitting the words out.

“What do you mean someone else?” she asked, feigning astonishment, though she knew exactly what he meant.

“Just what I said. You’re seeing another man.”

She promptly denied the accusation. “What led you to think that?”

“I can tell, I know.”

“Have you been following me around?”

“Then it’s true.”

“I didn’t say it was true. It’s not true. But I want to know whether you’ve been spying on me.” What she was thinking was: I’ve already got Teddy spying on me, I don’t need another one.

“Do you think I would have to spy on you to figure out you’ve been having it off with someone else. People have eyes, you know. They talk.”

“Talk? Who talks? Margo? Sandy? Peter?” She was naming possible suspects among the cast and crew who might, just might, have heard something and who were too untrustworthy to keep a secret long.

“You’re only digging yourself in deeper, Martha. You’re as much as admitting you are. You are screwing another man, who is he?”

“I am not going to engage in this conversation a moment more.”

She was furious, furious that her evening was being ruined and that her juggling act with Teddy and Jim might be in jeopardy. She decided that she would terminate the argument before it grew too heated.

So she wheeled about and stormed off into the crowd. At first Jim stood and watched her, then he rushed after her.

“Come back.”

He caught hold of her arm.

“I’m going home.”

“Let me take you.”

“No.”

It was impossible to carry on a conversation like this, since both of them were constantly being buffeted by dancers who weren’t very happy about tripping over them.

Unlike the man Jim Corona played in the movie, the real-life Jim Corona could not persuade Martha either to remain with him or to allow him to accompany her.

He did not believe that she intended to go home. In fact, that was her plan. She wanted to mull things over, figure out how she could allay Jim’s suspicions while at the same time determine whether there was a leak on the part of someone on the set or whether Jim was just acting on a hunch because of his own insecurity.