Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (6 page)

By further exploring the geography of this third roof, Harry discovered a door that gave access to the building itself. Cautiously, he proceeded down the steps that led into a brightly lit hall. But the terrorist hadn’t decided to linger in hope of ambushing him. He had chosen more wisely and had simply vanished.

C H A P T E R
T h r e e

F
resh cologne could not entirely eradicate the faint scent of blood, but otherwise there was nothing about William Davis’ appearance or demeanor to suggest the ordeal that he had just undergone.

A small dressing room adjoined his office on the twenty-fifth, and highest, floor of Cavanaugh-Sterling Headquarters, and it was there that Davis had showered and changed while Harry and Owens waited for him.

Davis’ office was elaborately paneled; the walls were of teak and rosewood, the furniture mahogany and fine ebony. The atmosphere was subtle, and, without the lights set discreetly into the walls, dark as a rainforest at night. Harry had expected a window vast and panoramic so that Davis’ sense of power could be confirmed by the view. But there was no window, only paintings: a Rothko canvas, all browns and blacks, a dreary landscape of Edvard Munch, a depiction of grotesques that looked like a Bosch.

On his desk, which was so empty as to suggest that all of Davis’ work had either been completed or consigned to others, there was one black push-button phone with three extensions and a framed photograph of a frail-looking woman whose hair was pulled back; she was pretty enough but wan, and her expression intimated at some great sadness. Harry, taking advantage of Davis’ absence, regarded it closely. He guessed that the woman must be Davis’ wife.

Unlike Davis, neither Harry nor Owens had enjoyed the opportunity to change, and they looked less like police officers than derelicts of the sort that were favored by the Mission Street Knifer: mud-spattered and bloody, their hair unkempt and dirt-ridden, their trousers ripped, bruises everywhere on their flesh. Until they’d displayed their badges to the security officials in the lobby, they had stood in danger of being arrested by their uniformed colleagues on charges of trespassing. Even then they were made to wipe their feet clean of mud lest they stain the expensive carpets that lined every corridor and smothered every office floor.

Davis, emerging from his dressing room, regarded them with some amusement. He took a seat behind his desk and spread out his hands on the blotter, taking hold of a pen and absently tapping it on the pointed ebony surface.

“I understand you were the two who neutralized the terrorists,” he said, taking the initiative in the conversation although he was the one who was supposed to answer questions, not issue statements.

Harry, in no mood to be particularly deferential, no matter that the man before him was a self-made millionaire who wielded immense economic and, of course, political influence, cut him off. “Why do you think this attack was made? Do you believe you were the exclusive target?”

“Of course. You realize that this terrorist strike, because it was that, mark my words, was meant also to decimate much of Cavanaugh-Sterling’s top leadership. And unhappily, two of my vice presidents were murdered.”

There was nothing in his tone of voice, Harry noted, to indicate that Davis was suffering from their premature demise.

“I am grateful that my Japanese friend—”

“That would be Mr. Asabuka?” Owens said, consulting his hastily drawn-up notes.

“Correct. He sustained nothing more than a braised scalp. But there are men to replace the men we lost.”

“Your vice presidents?” Harry asked, wanting him to be precise.

“Yes.”

“And what about your security men?”

Davis seemed to have forgotten about them. “Oh yes, naturally.”

“Why would terrorists wish to carry out such a strike against you and others here at Cavanaugh-Sterling?”

“Because we are capitalists, we believe in free enterprise, and there are those elements, foreign and domestic, which oppose our investment policies, our expansion, accusing us of exploitation, the usual errant nonsense . . .”

“Who do you believe these terrorists are exactly? Have you any idea where they might have come from?”

“I would assume they’d have to be imported. From Nicaragua, from San Salvador maybe. Possibly Cuba. Anywhere where revolutionaries can flourish. But what is an outrage is that such an attack could take place here in San Francisco. I am surprised and alarmed that the police would allow these people to operate freely.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

Davis held up his hand in an attempt to forestall any rebuttal.

“I want to make it clear that I am not implicating either of you two gentlemen. As far as I’m concerned you are the only ones to show any courage, any balls. Everyone else I noticed was paralyzed, rooted to the spot, waiting for God knows what, the National Guard, maybe hoping the Strategic Air Command would nuke the sons of bitches. Only you two seized the chance, risked your lives, and I want you to know that if I can do anything for you in the future, either of you, I would be happy to lend whatever assistance I can.”

His phone rang. He excused himself, picking it up. “No, no, I don’t want to be disturbed now. I am not about to speak to the reporters. Tell them I have no statement.”

He slammed the phone back down, stared hard at Harry and Owens as if to determine who they might be and why they were sitting here in his office. Then he allowed a smile, as cryptic as the one Leonardo gave to the Mona Lisa, to come to his lips. “Will that be all or is there anything else I can do for you?”

Harry rose, sensing that he was unlikely to acquire any useful responses from Davis so long as he remained on his own turf. He was too fully in command and confident of himself, showing no visible sign that he was ever in fear for his life. Being pinned down on the steps of his building, protected from death only because one of his loyal security men had permitted his body to be used as a receptacle for bullets intended for him, had failed to make any apparent impression. Accidentally burning his fingers with a match would probably have aggravated and disturbed him more. And his detached attitude in the face of the deaths of his corporate officers, not to mention his guards, struck Harry as very odd.

“No, I think that’s all for now,” he said politely. “We will probably have some more questions for you later. In the meantime, I suggest that you and your staff exercise extreme caution. There is every possibility that the terrorists, if that’s what they are, might strike again.”

“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.