Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death (8 page)

“He’s not going to intervene in this one I’ve got a feeling.”

“What did I say about sarcasm from you? I could have you suspended.”

“And you’re not going to?”

“Fuck.”

“I could agree with that.”

Bressler wearied of pacing back and forth. He sat down. He stared dolefully at Harry. “Who is so clever that he could get hold of your gun while you’re asleep and then go out and kill people you are known, publicly, to detest? Who hates you that much they’d do that?”

“Lots of people.”

This gave Bressler pause. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Let me rephrase the question. Who the hell would have the ability to pull off a stunt like this?”

The truth was Harry had been attempting to determine this for several hours. As soon as he’d woken to discover his gun missing, he realized he, Sheila and her daughter could all have been killed as they slept. In spite of the air of indifference he affected for Bressler’s sake, he was deeply concerned, even afraid. Afraid not just for himself, but also for the woman and child whose lives had, for better or worse, become entangled with his.

Yet he had no intention of displaying any sign of weakness or guilt to Bressler. Better to act impassive and see not whether the shit hit the fan, because that was preordained, but just how much shit there would be.

“Well?” Bressler was waiting for a reply. “Have you a candidate for our evil genius?”

“Did the lone survivor get a look at the man?”

“Nan Raphael? She saw an eye, a nose and a pair of lips in the crack of a door. The man was white, that’s about all we could get from her. She couldn’t so much as tell us the color of his hair.”

“There was one man who could’ve done something like this.”

“Yes?” Bressler’s voice clearly betrayed his expectation.

“But he’s dead.”

“That’s right.”

Harry was thinking of Gallant, his memory freshened by the murderer’s escape and subsequent demise just two nights before. Gallant had the stamina and creativity to engineer the massacre of eight people and get away with it. But, as he was a charred corpse in the morgue, he had an incontrovertible alibi.

“And there’s no one else you can think of?”

“No one,” Harry answered resignedly.

“That’s a problem.”

“Damn right that’s a problem.”

“I’ve given this some thought, Callahan, and though the temptation is mighty, I’ve decided not to place you on suspension. We’ve got some nut out there who has this hard-on for you. I’m gambling we can bust him before it gets out of hand. But I don’t want you near this thing, understand? This is not your case.”

“Who’ve you given it to?”

“Black and Towers.”

Harry didn’t think much of detectives Black and Towers, but he knew there was nothing he could say to change Bressler’s mind.

“You got something to keep me occupied?”

“I think I do, I think we got something right up your alley.”

The way he said this gave Harry the feeling he might want to start looking for another alley.

It wasn’t an assignment so much as a punishment, Harry decided once Bressler had briefed him. There were two jokers circulating about town, picking up women, apparently at random, then blindfolding them and taking them way out into the country somewhere for the amusement of themselves and their assorted friends. Once they were through with them, they’d abandon them on a roadside far from any habitation.

Generally, the women were found wandering along the shoulder of the road, with glazed eyes and an unsteady step. They appeared to have been sedated and their accounts of what happened to them tended to be rambling and incoherent. Even after recuperating, they were generally unhelpful, either because they did not recall the experience they’d undergone with any clarity or because they preferred to say nothing. It seemed most of the victims had willingly accepted invitations to accompany these two men and they might have believed that it was their fault they’d gotten involved in the first place.

Homicide wouldn’t have been called into this sordid business were it not for the fact that one of the women turned up dead. An autopsy showed that she had been raped repeatedly and that she’d suffered the tearing of vaginal tissue as a consequence. But what had killed her was all the seconal in her system. She’d probably been alive when she was deposited on Route 12, midway between Sebastapol and Santa Rosa, but she didn’t stay that way for very long. A truck driver spotted her at two
A.M.
, staggering half-naked, toward the highway divider. He’d stopped, hauled her into the cabin of his truck, and asked her where she lived. She did not comprehend the question. She stammered some sort of response, then toppled over. The truck driver assumed she’d fallen asleep. She’d fallen into something much deeper and more permanent than sleep.

No one in Homicide particularly wanted to deal with this assignment. It was the kind of tawdry mess that Vice usually handled. And with such a scarcity of clues, it was bound to be a frustrating undertaking. Which was why Harry considered it a punishment, Bressler’s way of getting back at him for losing his gun—which was now state’s evidence.

What was he supposed to do, drive around town, waiting until he stumbled upon two men coaxing an innocent young thing into the car with them? The problem was there wasn’t any law against picking up a single girl, no matter how naive she might be.

His only recourse seemed to be to interview the women that had gone through the ordeal and see if they remembered some telling details that had escaped them the first time they were questioned.

He decided to start with Marietta Hamalian who, according to the original case officer, was the most reliable witness of the half dozen women known to have been kidnapped by the mysterious pair.

Harry found her waitressing in a bar not far from the celebrated corner of Haight and Ashbury. The bar once catered to hippies who dwelled in the area, but lately it had switched its clientele to the Perrier and quiche crowd. Its windows harbored a great many tropical looking plants.

Marietta was a petite, washed-out woman of about twenty-five. She had a booming voice that was surprising coming from someone so tiny. It was a voice that could be heard over the clatter of dishes and pans in the kitchen in back. There was a smell of spilled beer and grease in the air.

Marietta did not appreciate having to speak to Harry. Especially she did not appreciate talking about an incident she obviously preferred keeping in the back of her mind.

“I told that other guy . . .”

“Officer Cox?”

“Cox, right. I told him all I could remember. What are you coming around with this shit again for?”

Harry knew better than to argue with her. Calmly, he told her it was possible she might have thought of something she’d forgotten to mention the first time. “What might seem trivial to you might turn out to be important to us.

The girl didn’t look convinced.

“Now, what do you recall about these two guys who picked you up?”

“Just what I told Cox. Nothing special, you know. Two guys, not bad-looking, not great, but not bad-looking. One’s white, about six feet tall, the other’s black, a little taller. I thought, you know, what the hell? They’re just a couple of guys in their twenties tooling around in a pink MG looking for fun. They had a great sense of humor, you know, and when they wanted to they could really turn on the charm.”

Some sense of humor, Harry was thinking.

“And where did you meet them?”

“I told Cox,” she protested again. “At the Annex.”

The Annex on Fillmore was a well-known singles bar, and investigators had gone there and made inquiries, but they didn’t get anywhere. Whoever these two men were, they made a point to keep moving. There was no instance of their returning to the same place twice.

“And they said they had a country place, is that it?”

“That’s right. They said there was a party going and would I like to come? How did I know what kind of party it was going to be?”

She gazed at Harry with defiance as if to say that her actions needed no excuse.

“All right. You said that it was a house, but that they took you underground? A cellar was it?”

“No, not a cellar. I told Cox it wasn’t any cellar. It was like one of those things Hitler had, the one he offed himself in . . .”

“A bunker you mean?”

“That’s right, a bunker.”

Now that was interesting. She’d not said anything about a bunker-like structure in the initial questioning. “How did you recognize it was a bunker?”

“Hell, I don’t know. It had these big heavy metal doors, and you wouldn’t find them in any cellar, would you? And there were huge crates and barrels and shelves and shelves of canned goods. You had to go deep down to get to it.”

“How many feet would you say?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. All I know is that we had to walk down two or three sets of stairs.”

“Deep as going down to a BART station, would you say?”

“Yeah, maybe, it was as deep as the subway. Maybe.”

“Could it have been a fallout shelter?”

“A what?”

“A place you’d go when they start dropping the bombs on you?”

This seemed to puzzle her. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen a fallout shelter so big,” she said.

“Have you seen many fallout shelters?”

She admitted she hadn’t.

“Were the walls soundproofed? I mean could you hear anything from the outside?”

She shook her head again.

“And what about when you were going into the shelter—we’ll call it a shelter, if you don’t mind—did you hear any noises then? Or coming out?”

“It was in the woods, you know, I could smell pines. You could hear birds.” She paused, adding, “And then, just for a minute when I was leaving, I thought I heard gunshots.”

“Gunshots?”

“Yeah, I remember, I thought, ‘Shit, they execute people here, and they’re going to kill me.’ But one of the men said they were only practicing, and not to worry.”

“Practicing?”

“Yeah, practicing.”

“Thank you, Miss Hamalian, you’ve been a great help.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it for now.”

There’d been nothing about the gunshots either in the report he’d been given. He began making a series of calls both to neighboring police forces and to the National Rifle Association in an effort to discover the location of practice ranges in the area.

Once he had a list, he perforated a map of the Bay region with a handful of colored pins. He selected those that he considered most likely, and got into his car, and went visiting.

But most of the practice ranges were located no where near a house to which a lavish underground shelter was attached. After three days it began to get rather discouraging. Besides his ears were ringing constantly from protracted exposure to dozens of .22’s and .38’s discharging simultaneously.

So he decided to travel another route and put in calls to building contractors in the northern part of the state who handled underground shelters.

A contractor by the name of Samuel Keating, of S.T.V. Builders, Inc., said he had installed an elaborate shelter north of Santa Rosa about five years previously.

“What was the terrain like, do you recall?”

Keating sounded like a man who prided himself on not forgetting anything. “Woods, lots of woods.”

“Could you tell me where exactly you built this, and who hired you?”

“No problem. Hang on.” He returned in a couple of minutes with the information. He gave Harry the address and said that the client’s name was the Saving Remnant.

“Saving what?”

“Saving Remnant, that’s the name of the client. It’s some sort of fanatic organization, to be personally frank with you. What they call a survivalist group. You know, the type of people who believe the world’s coming to an end, but that they’re going to hang in there. But, look, it’s good money, this end of the world business.”

“You wouldn’t know the name of the man who runs Saving Remnant, do you?”

“Not really, but I think they publish a newsletter or something, same name as the organization. The man you want would be the editor.”

Harry was about to hang up when Keating posed a question, “You don’t think it is, by the way, do you?”

“Don’t think what is?”

“The world coming to an end?”

“Not a chance,” Harry assured him.

“Good. That’s just what I thought,” said Keating.

The newsletter Keating referred to was not widely available. Its circulation was restricted to true-believers evidently, but even true-believers discard their clutter from time to time. Harry dug up a copy of
The Saving Remnant
in a second-hand bookstore on Columbus.

The Saving Remnant
was filled with dire predictions about the future of America. The Communists were on the verge of taking over Washington, they already controlled New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Why would the Communists want those places? Harry wondered. Gold, titanium, platinum, silver, Impressionist (but not modern) paintings, and antiquities of all kinds were worth getting hold of and cacheing away, according to the authors of the inflammatory journal, but there was no sense collecting anything unless one had a safe place in which to put it and yourself. Gold, as the newsletter so adroitly pointed out, was of little use to one when one was fried to a cinder in a nuclear attack.