Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (21 page)

“How many times would this man visit?”

“Five, six times a month maybe. But then the girls would go away for a while, it wasn’t as though they were there continuously. I wonder what they’ll think when they find out this has happened.” She looked over at the hulk their home had become.

“I don’t think they’re going to worry about it much,” Harry remarked without elaboration. “Did you ever know what this man’s name was?”

“Well, as I said, I never said more than good-morning or good-night to them, but I once heard them going on about somebody they referred to as Teddy. Teddy this and Teddy that, and do we really want to go up to San Francisco again, such a drag. They’d lay out nude in their backyard and they’d gossip like mad out there, and when they started an argument, you know, with Patience wanting to go up to San Francisco, and Eloise saying no, you could hear them all over the neighborhood.”

“Any family, any relatives you know of?”

“I’m sure they cut them all off years ago. Or vice versa, more likely. They lived in that place for four or five years, before we moved into this neighborhood, and to them, you know, Christmas was like any other day. Fuck a few more men, put more money in the bank.” She sounded oddly resentful. She was undoubtedly happy to see such destruction visited upon them. She didn’t know the half of it.

“Tell me, Mrs. David, what kind of transportation did this middle-aged man, Teddy, employ to get here?”

“It varied. I’d see him roll up in a white Porsche, but once or twice he arrived in a limo. One of those block-long gas-guzzlers with the sunroof? He used to have his chauffeur wait for hours for him. Driver would just sit there and read. I felt so sorry for him one time I brought him out some coffee.”

Harry had stopped listening. Something the woman had said about the limousine had sparked a sudden inspiration. The cryptic set of digits preceded by an equally cryptic X returned to his memory. “Mrs. David, do you mind if I use your phone for a moment? It’s long distance to San Francisco, but I will compensate you for it. But it’s urgent that I call.”

She seemed surprised by the intensity in his voice but had no objection to his using the phone.

It was perhaps little more than a wild guess, but it was just possible that he had something, that he had figured out the meaning of X801.

There was a slight delay as the transmission was completed. Then he heard the predictably upbeat voice on the other end: “Good morning. Cavanaugh-Sterling International.”

Harry paused for a moment, then requested the office he had called only a few days before. “Extension 801,” he said.

Another brief wait. Then a young woman’s voice: “Mr. Davis’ office, can I help you?”

Little did the secretary know it, but she already had. Harry hung up, reasonably certain that he now knew who had hired Tom “Pigeon” Loving. And further, he also felt that he knew who exactly Teddy was. “That son of a bitch,” he said aloud.

Alice scowled at him. “What?”

He turned around. He had forgotten she was right there beside him.

“I need to make just one more call, Mrs. David.”

“Go ahead. Can I get you some coffee? A Coke?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

He now dialed the hospital. As he waited for the doctor to respond to the page, he grew increasingly apprehensive. On the one hand, he felt exhilarated at finally uncovering the Tocador killer. On the other, he recognized that bad news about Owens would dampen that exhilaration and cause his triumph to pall.

At last the doctor—a polite but somewhat authoritarian figure who did not like to disclose more facts than he had to and who remained extremely cautious when it came to predicting the outcome of his cases—came on the line. “Ah, how are you, Mr. Callahan? What can I do for you?”

As if he didn’t know. Harry reminded himself not to loose his temper at this man—wouldn’t do any good.

“I would like to know how the surgery on my partner Drake Owens went.”

“Generally speaking, it went as well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that we have successfully removed the bullet. He has lost a considerable amount of blood, and we had to give him an additional three pints. He is now in recovery, and shortly we will send him up to the intensive care unit.”

“What are his chances, Doctor?”

“I would say that they are fifty-fifty, marginally better than they were last night.”

“I would like to see him.”

“I am afraid that no visitors are allowed at present. If he is coming along by tomorrow perhaps then . . .”

But Harry did not have time to wait in Los Angeles until tomorrow. He reached Mary Beth at the Holiday Inn on Wilshire, where she had gone after Owens had emerged from surgery, and told her that he was returning to San Francisco. “If anything happens let me know immediately,” he urged her, “and I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”

“I think it’ll be all right, Harry. The doctor tells me he’s almost out of the woods.” She did not sound nearly as optimistic as one would have inferred from the words alone. “And I hope that I don’t have to disturb you.”

“That’s the last thing you should be worrying about,” Harry said before hanging up.

And now he had to face another challenge: proving absolutely that William Davis, chairman of the board of Cavanaugh-Sterling, and the demented murderer Teddy were one and the same, and then putting him away before he could do any further harm. Neither task was going to be easy.

C H A P T E R
F i f t e e n

A
s Harry was walking toward his office, on the seventh floor of the Justice Building, he was stopped by Bressler, who happened to be coming in the other direction.

“Well?” he said. “What have you got?”

“Pieces,” Harry tersely replied. “I’m trying to put them together.”

“How’s Owens coming along?”

“When I talked to the doctor before I left L.A. he had a fifty-fifty chance.”

“That’s more than a lot of people get.” Bressler used cynicism to conceal the very real pain that he, like any other cop, felt when death threatened one of their own. “How soon are you going to have those pieces put together?”

“Very soon.”

“It better be. I am tired of taking flak in this case. I am tired of losing officers, I am tired of losing credibility. You better deliver something good.”

“If I deliver it’ll be good.”

“I wish I could believe that.” Bressler began to walk away, then he stopped suddenly and said, “By the way, that fellow Davis get ahold of you?”

“Davis? You mean William Davis?”

“That’s right. He said he had some information for you, wouldn’t say what it was, said he needed to speak to you immediately. I told him that you were flying down to L.A. and gave him the address where you and Drake were staying. Did he reach you all right?”

Now Harry understood how Teddy’s man Pigeon had managed to track them down.

“Oh yes,” Harry answered, “he certainly reached me all right.”

Bressler shot him a curious look, sensing that Harry was holding back an important detail, but when Harry failed to elaborate, he merely shrugged and continued on his way.

Harry decided to turn right around, forget about checking on the messages and paperwork that had piled up on his desk during his brief absence. He resolved instead to go to Davis’ home—one of his three homes, the one inhabited by Davis’ wife.

He realized that Davis would not be there and in fact hoped that he would not be. If Davis was the man he sought, and after what Bressler had just disclosed, he had even more reason to believe he was, then he could not take him directly, not yet. He intended to circle around him, close in on him, maybe force his hand.

His wife, he hoped, would be the place to begin.

Sheila Davis lived in a large, but hardly overwhelming, villa that overlooked Tiburon’s waterfront with its cluster of restaurants, galleries, antique shops and marinas that lined Main Street. Like the neighboring villas set into the hillside, it was painted a pastel hue, in this case, lemon. In its architecture and situation, it brought to mind an aristocrat’s home on the Mediterranean.

A woman came to the door and squinted at Harry. She was obviously the maid, a Chicano slightly stooped by the years and by her labor. She had difficulty comprehending what Harry was saying.

“Who is it, Maria?” Harry heard a woman call out.

Then Sheila Davis herself came to the door. She looked much like she had in the photograph Davis kept on his desk: pale and vulnerable, tentative about her movements as though nothing was to be depended on, even the sustaining pull of gravity.

Harry displayed his I.D. for her.

“Oh?” she said. “You’ve come about that terrorist attack. I’ve talked to your people before. I don’t know whether I can add anything but please come on in.”

Harry said nothing to disabuse her of her assumption. He did not want to say anything just yet that might suggest he was more interested in putting her husband behind bars than he was in putting away the men who’d tried to kill him.

She escorted him into a den that was lined on two walls with bookshelves. The books were all impressively bound in leather, but what astonished Harry, when he observed how they were arranged, was that all the books were of the same width. The Bible and
War and Peace
and Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
matched exactly as did several hundred others.

Sheila had left him alone for a minute while she went to prepare some coffee for them both, so Harry was allowed the freedom to investigate this small but tantalizing mystery. He reached out and grabbed one of the books. Opening it, he discovered that the pages were blank, that in fact the insides of the whole collection, at least in this room, were blank. Only an impressive cover and empty inside. Just like their owner.

There were also photographs on the walls, most of them framed and protected under glass. One showed Davis standing on the prow of a boat holding up a swordfish that he had just snared. He was grinning in triumph, gesturing to whomever had taken the picture. At the bottom, on the right side, Harry found a notation: “To Teddy—The Master of Dumb Luck.” It was signed “Chuck.”

At that moment Sheila entered the room, bearing a tray with two cups and a silver coffeepot.

“Tell me, Mrs. Davis, why is your husband referred to here as Teddy?”

She laughed. “Chuck, his best friend Chuck, calls him that. It’s a kind of nickname I’d guess you’d say. They go way back to when they were in high school together, which is why Bill lets him get away with it. If I called him Teddy, he’d go wild. Actually, almost nobody outside a small circle of friends knows he has a nickname.”

“How did he get it?”

Harry tried to make the question sound as offhand as possible.

“I think the story is that he was rather chubby in high school, and somebody thought he resembled a teddy bear.” She regarded Harry curiously, wondering perhaps why he was so interested in such a trivial matter.

“Just one more thing, Mrs. Davis. Has your husband shown any sign of tension, emotional distress that might have followed from the attack made on his life?” Harry was striving to make his question sound innocent, even sympathetic.

Sheila frowned. “My husband is a very closed-in man, and in all our twenty-two years of marriage I have seldom seen him display any emotional distress. He may get angry, but he doesn’t really express that anger. You can almost see him fighting it back. But to tell you the truth, in the last several months I so rarely see him that I can’t really give you an accurate idea. It may be that he releases all those pent-up emotions with somebody else. Not with me. I am a victim, as they say, of benign neglect.”

When Harry left Sheila Davis and returned by ferry to San Francisco, he contemplated his dilemma. He was convinced that Davis was his man, but he had grave doubts that he could lock him up with what he had. There was only circumstantial evidence—the coincidence of names, the possible identification of Davis by the woman who lived next door to Patience and Eloise—but nothing hard that could firmly tie Davis in with the slayings at the Tocador and the twenty-four-hour sex club on Folsom. Yet to delay further, while he scavenged about for the “smoking gun” that might constitute absolute proof, would allow Teddy to remain at large, with the freedom to commit another act of mayhem.

Harry saw now that to wait any longer might be a worse idea than risking an immediate arrest. Though placing Davis under constant surveillance was a possibility, he doubted very much whether it would be effective. Davis was too shrewd, too protected, and he would soon be alerted to the surveillance and take steps to avoid it.

He dialed Cavanaugh-Sterling’s Headquarters and again asked for extension 801.

“Mr. Davis is not here right now,” his secretary said, “but I know that he’s anxious to speak with you, Inspector.”

Harry asked if he could see him as soon as he got back to his office.

“Why don’t you come by around eight-thirty? Mr. Davis will be working late tonight.”

“Eight-thirty it is.”

“Fine. I am certain Mr. Davis is looking forward to seeing you again.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“Have a good day,” she perfunctorily wished him, neglecting to note the fact that the day was over.

The man standing across the street from Cavanaugh-Sterling Headquarters recognized Harry when he started up the stairs to the entrance. He recalled him from a day back in mid-October when this man had pursued him across the rooftops of the very buildings in whose shadows he now maintained his vigil.

The sight of this man, whom he knew to be a police officer, unsettled him. Was it possible, he wondered, that Davis realized he would be attacked again tonight and had called upon this man to help him?

Nonetheless, he would not recommend cancelling the assault. It had been too long in planning, too much depended on it. And in any case, if Davis truly did suspect trouble, wouldn’t he have sent for several policemen and not just one solitary officer? This thought reassured the man. He returned to his men and told them that everything was as it should be; the operation could go ahead as scheduled.