Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (3 page)

With satchel in hand, Teddy let himself out. The satchel was heavier than before, but Teddy was a strong man, and his step was as light as a man who woke up one spring day to find himself in love.

C H A P T E R
O n e

“T
his is some piece of art this fucker put together” muttered Al Bressler who in his years as a lieutenant on the San Francisco Police Force had witnessed many such artworks, though seldom one so macabre.

You had the feeling that Lieutenant Bressler stood a bit in awe at the spectacle that greeted him and his entourage. Here, in the rubble of what had once been a rentable room, practically nothing remained that was whole or wasn’t charred or consumed entirely by the fire. Firemen were busy extinguishing what was left of the blaze. Three of them had had to be taken to the hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation. For the fire, which had begun in Room 358, had spread down half the third floor corridor, forcing those trapped in their rooms to either leap to the ground or else risk losing their lives after the fire had taken their oxygen. Four elderly residents, too intimidated to make the jump despite the nets the firemen had out for them, had met their death this way. Another had attempted to escape by dashing through the flames. He had managed to make it to the stairway but had sustained such terrible third-degree burns that little hope was held for his survival.

That meant five deaths, not counting the two the fire had evidently been set to cover. Not much was left of those two, not much had been left of them even before the fire had started from what investigators could determine. No fire could be so devastating that it would obliterate absolutely all evidence of heads and hands. But there could be no doubt; the blackened forms that lay in the middle of the room had been deprived of heads and hands before the fire.

Sergeant Reineke, who stood directly behind Bressler, coughing from the noxious fumes in the air, had to see for himself. He went and looked, then ran to the door and out of it, searching for someplace he could throw up in solitude. No such place existed in the vicinity, so he vomited right there in the hallway, disgorging his insides on the scorched floor.

Bressler had more of a stomach for these things, but even he was disgusted.

“Carson,” he said, turning to another detective who’d accompanied him, “any chance we’re going to get anything out of this?”

Carson, who generally excelled at digging up evidence where others had failed, shook his head sadly. “The fire’s done a pretty good job of wiping out just about anything we could use.” He gestured to the ceiling, then to the walls. “Look, there’s nothing here the fire hasn’t touched. For Chrissakes, there’s a good chance we’ll never be able to identify these bodies. No hands, no fingerprints. No heads, no dental plates. Whoever did this wasn’t just a maniac. He knew what he was doing. Though it sickens me thinking there’s some jerk walking around out there with a couple of heads and a quartet of loose hands. Gives me the willies, you know what I mean.”

Bressler knew exactly what he meant.

The investigators adjourned to the lobby; the smoke was too dense to linger in the room, and it was obvious they weren’t going to accomplish much until the firemen had finished with their work.

The lobby was crowded with members of the press who, denied access to the third floor, occupied themselves shouting questions at the fire department’s arson squad chief, who was being exceptionally unhelpful. The news photographers and the TV mobile-camera units, having nothing of great interest to capture on film, aimed their cameras at the lobby’s interior. Flashbulbs popped continuously. The Tocador Hotel would be famous by the time the eleven o’clock news was over, but not in the way the hotel’s management would have hoped.

“What’s his name?” Bressler asked, looking at the hapless man who sat in the office that was located just off the lobby. The man was hard of hearing and cupped his ear, straining to hear. He was pale and trembling; possibly he expected to be accused of the barbarous crime that had just been committed or else blamed for allowing it to occur.

“Melvin Tessel. He’s the day clerk. Only one on duty.” The detective who had just provided this information seemed heartened to see Bressler; probably glad to be relieved of the responsibility for interrogating a man who seemed to be half-deaf.

Bressler pulled up a chair next to where the clerk was sitting and addressed him as he would a not terribly bright schoolboy. “Now, Mr. Tessel, you say that you never saw anyone who might have followed the two ladies—” he glanced down at the report he had in his hands—“Doris Paine and Mary Nold.”

Melvin Tessel shook his head worriedly. “I’m sorry, sir, you see I was busy watching
As the World Turns,
and I had it turned way up loud because of my ears, you understand.”

“I understand, Mr. Tessel,” Bressler said impatiently. “And you never saw anyone suspicious leave?”

“No, sir. Somebody strange would have caught my eye, but I didn’t see no one.”

“And it was only when one of the residents, a Mr. Tully in Room 372, called down to complain of smoke that you became aware there was a fire on the third floor?”

Melvin Tessel nodded in the affirmative.

“That will be all, Mr. Tessel. Tomorrow some of my men will probably want to take a statement from you, but if between now and then you remember anything else, anything at all no matter how unimportant it may seem, get in touch with me immediately.” He thrust his card into the clerk’s hand.

Then he strode out into the crowded lobby, refusing to speak to the reporters who badgered him for a comment. “I’ll have something for you in the morning,” he asserted, hoping that would satisfy them.

Actually, Bressler did not know what he’d have in the morning. It did not surprise him that a preliminary check with the authorities in Palm Springs had not yielded anything substantive regarding the identities of Misses Paine and Nold. No such names were listed in the telephone directory, and the poor bureaucrat who had been roused from bed and sent to study the municipal records and tax and electoral rolls could find nothing either.

It did not surprise Bressler; he’d assumed from the outset that the names were fraudulent. The girls could have come from anywhere in the country.

The case promised to be nothing but ugly and sordid and, worst of all, futile. The best forensic pathologist in the world was not going to find any useful leads from the charred, headless, handless remains he was saddled with. Unless the psychopath who was responsible for this butchery had committed similar crimes in the past or intended to repeat himself in the future, they might never solve the murders at all.

When such cases came his way Bressler invariably chose the same person to investigate them. A man whom he felt was absolutely appropriate for something like this: Inspector #71, Harry Callahan.

Harry didn’t need to be told. He had an instinct about these things. As soon as he heard the news of what had happened at the Tocador Hotel he resigned himself to being assigned to the investigation. The more pitfalls a case held for a detective the more likely it was that Bressler would pick him in the hope that he would fuck up, and fuck up so catastrophically that he could be busted down to traffic cop. Harry had fucked up in the past, occasionally it was unavoidable, but generally he’d avoided the more unspeakable punishments that Bressler had in mind for him.

He had no sooner entered the Homicide Department, on the seventh floor of the Justice Building, than he was informed that Bressler was waiting to see him. It was ten minutes of nine in the morning, a day which up to now had shown no sign of ever clearing up enough to let the sun shine through. The murkiness of the atmosphere was reflected in Harry’s face.

“You’re going to burn out before your time, Harry,” Bressler said, taking a good look at him.

“It’s possible it’s already happened,” Harry wearily conceded.

“You know what they say about burning your candles at both ends.”

“Speaking of burning, is this about the Tocador?”

“Yes, this is about the Tocador. You got a feel for this business, Harry.” Sarcasm lay heavy in his voice.

Bressler raised his eyes to the clock on the wall. “In exactly one hour I am going to hold a news conference. The mayor will be there. And what I will say to the members of the press is that we will have the murders solved by the end of the month, that we have some significant leads, and that right now we have men out on the streets, watching for anyone who might be attempting to dispose of evidence of the crime.” He regarded Harry almost sorrowfully. “In fact, only the last part is true. The rest of it is bullshit. There is, however, a pressing need to make an arrest in this. It would be one thing if you got two hookers stiffed. That’s stuff for the
National Enquirer.
Nobody worries. But what we have here is five additional stiffs, elderly residents of the damn hotel, respectable people eking out a living from Social Security checks.”

He lifted a folder off his desk and held it up as though it were a trophy he’d just won. “What we got here is the Mission Street Knifer.”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“We went through our records, ran everything through our computers, this is what we came up with, the only known murderer-mutilator we got actively running around town.”

“But his victims are usually derelicts, winos. From what I can recall he’s never gone in for women, never beheaded anybody.”

Bressler did not seem disconcerted by this. He had expected Harry to raise the point. “What you’re saying is on the one hand, we have a middle-class, maybe upper-class, mutilator who goes in big for chopping hands and heads off. Now our lower-class mutilator, he goes in big for hearts and genitals. A difference in class, and I suppose you’d say a difference in anatomical preference. People don’t worry about your lower-class mutilator, no sex appeal to offing winos and junkies nodded out by the tracks. Pretty girls aren’t likely to be his victims. Well, suppose our demented friend just decided to confuse the issue, change his M.O.?”

“I don’t buy it,” Harry said simply. “There are two different people involved.”

Bressler sighed. As much as he wished he could disagree with Harry he recognized that only by a great deal of tortured reasoning could one arrive at the conclusion that the Mission Street Knifer was the same man as the one who had struck at the Tocador.

“Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I don’t buy it either. But you’re going to find me the Mission Street Knifer anyhow because that’s the only option I’ve got right now. Otherwise what do I have? Two stiffs, no prints, no dental plates, fake I.D.s. And no murder weapon, no witnesses, no nothing. About all we’ve really got is some shreds of clothing the stiffs were wearing. People expect action, I’m going to give them action.”

This sounded like sheer madness to Harry. “You’ve already got half a dozen men on the Knifer, Collins and Bonfiglio, what good is adding me going to do?”

“Just bring me the Knifer, Harry. Let me worry about the assignments.” Bressler stepped to the door, opened it, and called out, “Would you show Officer Owens in please?”

What was this about? Harry sat gloomily, waiting to see who this Owens was and what part Bressler intended him to play in this affair. He doubted very much he’d care for it, no matter what it was.

Drake Owens looked like an actor, not a lead actor, not somebody whose name you’d see up on a marquee, but more like a character actor, the handsome, perennially boyish type who’s always holding his hat in his hands in Westerns, saying, “Yes ma’am,” almost apologetically because he is so attractive to women. He was slender, of solid build but not strapping. His hair was an unruly mop of dirty blondness, his eyes were as blue as San Francisco Bay on the sunniest of days. He gave Harry a polite, almost sheepish smile as if to say, I don’t know what I’m doing here either, don’t blame me for any of this.

“Harry, Drake Owens.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’ve heard a great deal about you,” Owens said.

“Not much of it good, I suppose.”

“You said it, not me,” Bressler interjected.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Owens, whose voice was as smooth and calming as his appearance. “I’ve seen you at the shooting range. I’ve watched what you can do with a .44.”

“I’d like to see what he could do with a mind,” Bressler said, apparently incapable of resisting the dig. “Not that he doesn’t have one understand, it’s just that he seems only occasionally inclined to use it. Stay, Harry, I’m not finished.” So as not to allow Harry a chance to argue he continued, “Officer Owens will be your partner on this case. That is, he will aid you in capturing the Mission Street Knifer.”

“Do you know what has happened to my partners?” Harry was speaking to Owens now, hoping to discourage him from undertaking this assignment.

Owens matter-of-factly answered: “Gerrard Fanducci, deceased. Deitzick, wounded. Gonsales, wounded. Smith, deceased. DiGeorgio, wounded. Moore, deceased.”

Harry regarded him with astonishment. Not only had he known it all, but he’d gotten the names, the order, and their fates precisely. “And you still want to work with me?”

“I try not to go by precedent. Human beings would never have evolved if they had relied on precedent alone.”

“Shit,” Harry muttered, shaking his head. It wasn’t that he objected to what Owens had said or the conviction with which he had said it. Rather it was the feeling that he was being burdened with the responsibility for another man’s life, that he’d spend as much time protecting Owens from harm as he would running down the Knifer, Mission Street or Tocador, whichever came first.

“If it doesn’t work out after a few weeks you can pull me off the case,” Owens said, eager to allay Harry’s fears.

“There is a special reason I am assigning Owens to you, Harry,” Bressler said. “Owens is the best decoy we have on this force. It may surprise you to learn that in his past life Drake Owens was a star of TV and movies.”

Owens demurred. “Sir, if I may, not exactly a star. But I did a lot of work in many forgettable films when I was living in L.A.”