Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons (2 page)

She took off her floral-printed kimono, finding a pair of jeans and a blue velour, V-necked pullover to go with it. She slipped them over her rounded frame and pulled on her cork-bottomed shoes. She went back and stood in the living room for a moment to get her bearings. She heard the scratching sound from above continue.

Insistent and persistent little devil, she thought. It must be the rain. The moisture must be driving the cat crazy. Shrugging, she pushed her keys into the pocket of her tight denims and went to the door.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she told her other pets. “I’ll be right back.”

She walked out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. She considered locking it. Naw, she thought, I’ll only be gone a couple of seconds. Just to be on the safe side though, she looked downstairs over the banister. She could see no one. Just the comforting yellow lights of the hall and the deep rich brown of the wooden stairs and expensively papered walls. All she could hear was the scratching, growing no feebler. If anything, it was a little louder in the hall.

She followed the sound to the metal stairway that led to the door to the roof. The scratching was even clearer there.

“All right, Ellery, all right,” she soothed, moving slowly up the steps. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.”

Judy placed one hand on the metal door latch and the other palm flat against the door. She twisted the latch and pushed the door open onto the blue-gray rain-streaked night.

Ellery had not done the scratching. The cat was incapable of doing anything in its condition except dying. It was lying in a drain by the edge of the roof, its stomach cut open, blood pumping down the rain pipe.

How Judy reacted marked all the differences between she and her sister. Arlene had seen all those crummy horror movies. She had sat in the theaters with her boyfriends’ arms around her shoulders, jumping at all the right moments. But in the back of her mind, the older girl had been thinking how dumb all those screen heroines were. She wouldn’t be so stupid as to run back into the house or hide in a closet or answer the door.

Her sister Judy didn’t see movies much. She hadn’t mentally prepared herself for possible horror. All she saw was one of her cats horribly wounded on the wet rooftop. It didn’t dawn on her that he was too far from the door to have scratched it until she was already halfway to it.

The door closed behind her. She didn’t hear the killer approach. Just as she neared Ellery’s torn form, she felt the hand on her breast.

She looked down. A dark glove was squeezing on one side of her chest. Hard. She straightened in shock, throwing back her head to scream. The hand jerked up to clamp over her mouth. Her yell mingled into the howling wind as a low moan. She felt herself being pulled back—away from Ellery’s body and the roof’s edge. She raised her arms to slap away the hand crushing the lower part of her face. She couldn’t reach it. Another arm was in the way.

She felt hot, panting breath on the back of her neck. She looked up at the sky, the stars blurred from the rain that splattered across her glasses. She sensed the other arm being pulled out of the way as she suddenly felt a tearing pain at her throat.

Then she was free. The attacker had released her. She stumbled forward, her hands moving up instinctively. She felt the moisture at her neck. She opened her mouth to cry as loudly as she could. All she heard was her own strangled gurgling. She brought her hands away from her throat, and they came away covered in red. Her eyes bulged. She saw the rain wash the blood from her hands as she felt her legs giving out from under her.

John Monahan was walking home from a movie at the Charles Street Theater complex. It was another lousy horror flick,
Just Before Dawn.
Another heart-warming saga of some young people being stalked and murdered by a raving lunatic with a big blade. Monahan, an Emerson sophmore majoring in film, shook his head in amazement. It was the post-summer slump, he realized. All the major studios had already released all their big summer hopefuls. The ones that stunk faded away. The ones that hit stayed to great box-office returns. As usual, there were more stinkers than hits.

So come fall, the theater owners were desperate to schedule any movie that was a sure money-maker. And these cheap little bloody numbers always made back their investment—usually because they were made for a dollar and a quarter in someone’s backyard. Monahan marveled at it all. Why did he keep going back to movie after movie? They all had the same plots, the same shocks, and the same gore. What a waste of time. Monahan promised himself that
Just Before Dawn
would be the last horror film he would see.

He walked up the steep incline of Anderson Street into the heart of Beacon Hill. He loved the atmosphere of the place. It was straight out of a Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper movie. All the narrow, winding, cobblestone streets, sumptuous brownstones, quaint shops. Boston was a great place to be for the imaginative student or artist.

Monahan didn’t even mind the rain. In fact, he loved it. It added even more to the atmosphere. He could just imagine the special-effects technicians lining the tops of the sets with long watering pipes to create such an effect. Boston was so damn visual Monahan wondered why more films weren’t made there.

The student peered out from under the rim of his rain hat to get a better look at the architecture. He turned left at Mount Vernon Street. He could go straight down there, recross Charles, cross the Arthur Fiedler bridge over the highway, and go right in the back way at 130 Beacon Street. On the way he could think about what sort of horror movie he would make if they gave him the money.

Monahan decided that his would be realistic. He wouldn’t stick a bunch of kids out in the wilderness. He’d set the scene in any major metropolitan city. At the same time, his would be stylistic. He’d make impressionistic scenes of violence, ones that would shock as well as, impress his audience.

Then he saw the blood congealing around his shoes.

John Monahan stopped dead on the sidewalk of Mount Vernon Street. He stared in wonder at the red liquid passing between his legs, carried along by a greater torrent of flowing water.

He blinked, thinking his imagination had maybe gotten the better of him. The blood was still there when he looked again. Monahan turned and followed the crimson trail back to its source. The red stuff was alternately dripping and coursing out the bottom of a drainpipe.

Monhan looked up. The pipe traveled uninterrupted all the way up to the four-story brownstone’s roof. For a second, Monahan didn’t know what to do. But then his imagination and curiosity got to be too much for him. He created all sorts of scenarios to explain the red liquid, some of them quite perverted and violent, but he didn’t really believe any of them could actually happen. Not in real life.

Monahan was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Arlene Halliwell. She acknowledged the movies she saw as fiction but secretly felt they could be fact. Monahan was so wrapped up in the world of image-making that nothing was real anymore. Every person he met was a character. Every place he went was a set. And he couldn’t leave Mount Vernon Street without checking out the possible drama at the top of the brownstone.

John Monahan trotted into the alley between the apartment houses toward the fire escape.

Judy Halliwell wasn’t dead yet. She was very cold. She was on her back, her hands lying useless at her side, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. The rain beat down on her as her life drooled out. She felt the hands back on her chest. They were rubbing in a circular motion. Then they were lifted and she felt a slight pressure at her waist. She heard her belt buckle being undone. She heard her zipper get pulled down. She felt the hands tugging at her waistband, trying to get the wet denim down her hips. The jeans were so tight they were taking her underwear with it.

She couldn’t talk, but she could still think. She couldn’t believe it. She was going to be raped while she died.

She realized it then. She was dying. She was really dying. Someone was killing her. Her head rolled to the side, some last tears mingling with the rain water on the roof.

Through her misting vision, she saw a figure appear. A man was looking at her from over the side of the building. He just seemed to be floating there, his head and shoulders above the roof line. His face held an expression of abject horror.

As she watched, she felt the hands leaving her legs. She saw another figure racing toward the man watching from over the brownstone’s side. The second figure’s back was dark and shapeless, disguised by a large, heavy raincoat. Incongruously, there was a thin white belt amid the tan cloth.

She saw this figure jump off the side of the building. She was surprised when it didn’t fall out of sight. The two people stayed on the same level. The man fell back when the other person raised a long knife. Judy watched the knife come down and go up again. Then the action was repeated. Again and again and again.

Judy Halliwell looked back up at the stars. She didn’t want to see any more. Her coldness had left her. She was beginning to feel warm again. In fact, she was beginning to feel very good. Relaxed. Comfortable. Rested. She felt a strange, deep, horrible peace. A peace she knew would never end.

At the last, she remembered her Unitarian teachings. There was only the Oneness, the Unity. She was going to the God she had served so hard and so long. His beauty was far greater than anything she would find here.

Mercifully, Judy Halliwell died before her killer returned.

C H A P T E R
T w o

S
an Francisco Homicide Inspector Harry Callahan saw
Superman II
on the cross-country plane trip. He smiled all the way through it. Not because he liked it but because he wished his own job was that easy. For a few seconds he toyed with the thought of throwing away his Magnum, ripping off his shirt, and leaping out of the 747 to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

Then his smile and the fantasy were gone. By and large, Callahan didn’t like the movie. It was beautifully done and probably very entertaining to someone who didn’t get the overdoses of reality he had to deal with. Harry did not like fantasy. They were dreams and wishes that never came true. He couldn’t waste his time dreaming and wishing anymore.

It was fine for someone who could pick up the morning paper, cheerily supplied by the smiling flight attendant, and read about the double murder on Beacon Hill with objective detachment. But Harry had been too close to too many murders to be detached. He had had his face rubbed in real-life murder and actual human blood. The cheery optimism of
Superman II
was not for him. When some pumped-up asshole stuck a Saturday Night Special in his face down some dark alley one night, where was Superman going to be then?

There would only be Harry Callahan and hundreds like him doing the best damn job they could. Under the circumstances.

Callahan didn’t look up when he heard the bell. He had been on enough planes to know what it meant. They were either about to hit turbulence or about to land. Harry checked his watch. It said two o’clock
P.M.
, California time. That meant it was three hours later Boston time. Harry had left San Francisco at nine o’clock Monday morning, supposedly the third day of his once-a-year vacation. The nationwide trip took five or six hours. The plane was due to arrive in Massachusetts at five fifteen
P.M.
, just in time for rush hour.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” came a studied, mellifluous feminine voice over the intercom, “may I have your attention please? In a few minutes we will be arriving in Boston, Massachusetts, by way of Logan Airport. Kindly return to your seats and extinguish all smoking materials. Thank you for flying us today. I hope you will think of us when you travel again. Please fasten your seat belts . . .”

Harry waited for it: the phrase that had originated on the West Coast and spread like a fungus across the states.

“And have a nice day,” the voice finished. Harry nodded. His slightly depressed irritability was capped. He didn’t know anyone who didn’t get at least a little surly when some plastic fantastic pulled back and let them have it with, “Have a nice day.” Never had such a well-meaning bunch of words had such an adverse effect. More people kicked their dogs and chewed the heads off loved ones because of that phrase than any in Callahan’s memory.

It was bad enough he had to take the vacation in the first place. Although the police force bylaws decreed it necessary, Harry had avoided the off-time as much as possible. Murderers, bless their slimy disgusting hearts, never took a day off, so Harry was usually able to sneak through his assigned off-week on the tail of an investigation.

He had been hoping his last case, the Slez murders, would last all this week as well. It seemed promising. A lawyer had killed two of his clients when it looked like he would be brought up on charges of conflict of interest, perjury, and contempt of court. He had slaved twelve years to pass the bar so he went a little overboard. The lawyer had been sly so Callahan had dug in for a long hunt. Unfortunately for Harry’s plans, the lawyer had also been repentant. He had given himself up yesterday.

Harry shook his head slightly, remembering. Try as he might, he couldn’t get his superior, Lieutenant Al Bressler, to assign him another case.

“The only investigating you’re going to be doing,” the lieutenant had informed him, “is of the coeds crawling all over Boston. Too bad they’re all covered up with leggings and raincoats this time of year. They may not be California girls, but they’ll have to do.”

Callahan had marched fairly miserably back to his office to straighten out some paperwork and waste some time before he would force himself to go.

“Look at it this way,” Bressler had suggested, following his best man back to the inspector’s cubicle. “They may not be as blonde or as skimpily dressed, but there are a hell of a lot of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in one place.”