Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (6 page)

“Where’s Patterson?” the Inspector asked quickly, almost ignoring the confrontation which had just occurred.

“I don’t know, Harry,” DiGeorgio said in amazement. “Checked out, I suppose. Gone.”

“Well, check it out,” Callahan said irritably. “I want to know where she lives and works.”

The Sergeant let the harsh words roll off his back. He had known Harry too long to be surprised by anything. “While I’m doing that,” he recommended, “I suggest you get checked out by Doctor Rogers back at headquarters.” With that parting advice, DiGeorgio left to do what Callahan had told him to.

Harry followed shortly after, but not before he had turned to the surgeon, who was toiling quickly over patient MacCurdy. “He’ll live,” the doctor announced.

“He
won’t,” a security guard said of Maggin.

Harry shook his head and walked to the operating-room door. He took a last look at the smoky chaos and shook his head again.

“Better dying through science,” he muttered.

C H A P T E R
F i v e

“A
mazing, really amazing.”

Doctor Steve Rogers was spending more time marveling at Callahan’s wounds than repairing them. Finally, Harry had stripped off the decrepit Salvation Army jacket and shirt to find that each had a perfect, thin slice in the sleeve. Just beneath that was an equally thin, perfect slice in Harry’s right arm.

“You’re incredibly lucky, Inspector,” the black police doctor commented as he looked at the surgical cut from almost every direction.

“So what else is new?” Harry said, with drawled impatience. It was hard for him to take Rogers’s comment seriously, considering the number of wounds his battered body had already sustained in his career—not to mention the fact that he had stared down a laser to get his latest marking.

“Really, I mean it, Harry,” Rogers continued, not picking up the cop’s sardonic tone. “Since the condensed light hit your arm, it was no worse than getting a shallow knife slice. But if it had hit any part of your upper torso or face, forget it.”

“All right, already, enough with the examination,” Harry declared. “Just wrap the thing up and get out of my way. I’ve got work to do.”

“Not so fast, Inspector,” Lieutenant Bressler said from the door of the first-aid cubicle on the seventh floor of the Justice Building. “I think you deserve a little R and R after your performance at the hospital today.”

Harry looked from Rogers, who was rummaging around a standing medicine cabinet for some gauze, a bandage, and Mercurochrome, to the dark-haired, ruddy-faced Bressler, who stood in front of DiGeorgio in the door opening.

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said, “but something smells about this whole Murray murder, and I don’t think I could sleep very well with the stench still in my nostrils.”

“Death,” Bressler hastily corrected. “The Murray death, Harry. And if there was any foul play involved, I think you tied that up neat and clean back at the laser operating room.”

Rogers concerned himself with wrapping the Inspector’s arm while Harry cocked a suspicious eye at his superior. “What do you mean by that?”

“Just this,” Bressler said easily, coming into the room. “What reason would Maggin have for suddenly going crazy? The way we figure it is that he knew that he pushed the Murray girl . . . and maybe the two other girls as well.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Harry asked cautiously.

The Lieutenant’s face became an expressionless mask. “The San Francisco Police Department,” he said blankly.

“How do you figure?” Harry pressed skeptically.

“All right,” Bressler admitted affably. “So maybe he didn’t push the Murray girl. Maybe he was trying to snatch her purse and she fought back too hard. Maybe, in the scuffle, she slipped and fell.”

“Petrillo . . .” Harry began. “The late Patrolman Petrillo interviewed many of the witnesses,” Harry continued. “No one mentioned a scuffle of any kind.”

“They also made descriptions of everyone from a black man with a ghetto blaster to a sinister Oriental with a scar, standing behind the girl,” DiGeorgio said uncomfortably.

“You must know from experience that we can’t depend on eyewitness descriptions, Harry,” Bressler contended. “The only thing that makes any sense is that Maggin figured he had nothing to lose when he went berserk in the hospital. He figured that it was only a matter of time before we nailed him on the Murray thing.”

“And what about the other two pushing incidents?” Callahan inquired as Rogers finished up on his arm.

“We’re looking into that,” Bressler said, his eyes veiled. “But you know as well as we do, Harry, that those incidents could be totally unrelated to this one. And this one is the most important. This one resulted in a death.”

“Ahem,” interrupted Doctor Bogers. Everyone looked at him. “I’m all through here,” he reported. Turning toward Harry, he continued, “I wouldn’t recommend you do any shot-putting with that arm for the next few days.” Turning toward Bressler, he finished up. “If you require my services any further, I’ll be down in the lab. Good day, gentlemen.”

Bressler waited until the doctor had left the room before turning back to Harry and slapping, then rubbing, his hands together. “Well,” he exhaled. “You heard what the doctor said, Inspector. Why don’t you take the rest of the week off and go home for some much-needed rest until we need you on this Goldfarb thing, eh?”

Without waiting for an answer, Bressler left the room, his desires known. Harry looked pointedly at DiGeorgio, who looked back with worried skepticism. Both had worked under the Lieutenant long enough to read him like a mediocre police-procedural novel.

“The Lieutenant’s sphincter seems tighter than usual,” Harry commented, still sitting shirtless on the first-aid table.

“Um,” DiGeorgio agreed. “Lots of the editorial ‘we’ in that speech.”

“Sounds like he’s been getting some pressure from on high,” Harry surmised.

“That’s the bad word going around the office, all right,” the Sergeant agreed.

“Well,” Harry concluded, “if I’m going to get all this bed rest, I suppose I’ll need to get dressed.”

DiGeorgio was way ahead of him. Holding up a finger, he stepped outside and started producing clothing from atop a file cabinet. “A seven ninety-nine dress-shirt special from Penney’s from your left, bottom drawer,” he narrated, throwing Harry the light-blue shirt still heavily pinned and in its plastic wrapping. “A sleeveless, red V-necked sweater from your locker downstairs,” he continued, while tossing, “and your well-worn, light-beige corduroy jacket from the hat rack in your office. What the well-dressed police punching bag is wearing today.”

Harry smiled while slipping into the clothing. “Okay, so where does this Patterson woman live?” he asked lightly.

DiGeorgio grimaced. “I was afraid you’d remember that,” he admitted. “Don’t you think it would be a real good idea to leave this one alone, Harry?”

“You saw how she reacted when I mentioned the subways, Frank,” Callahan retorted. “And you, yourself, mentioned the similarity between the way she and Martha Murray looked.”

“Yeah,” DiGeorgio countered, “but the first girl was not a good-looking blond—she was an ordinary-looking, black-haired girl. And her having bad memories about the subway is no big deal. She fell onto the tracks, remember? That would put anybody off BART travel.”

Harry still wasn’t convinced, but he couldn’t quite tell his partner why. He didn’t think he could explain the connection between the girl blowing on her fingertips in the hospital room and the chill he had felt in the Fulton Station—at least not in a way that wouldn’t make him seem overworked.

“Her address, Frank,” he said simply.

Callahan couldn’t bring himself to do it. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t bring himself to go to Patterson’s address directly from police headquarters. He could feel his brain turning to mush. There was just no benefit in going over there if he was unable to put a coherent sentence together.

Realizing that, Harry’s first stop was his third-floor apartment on Russian Hill, where he fell into his unmade bed without undressing. He fell asleep immediately, and woke up a little more than six hours later, his cut arm aching and his empty stomach growling with a vengeance.

His second stop was Jaffe’s Kwik Lunch, his favorite hot-dog hangout, which stayed open for the dinner as well as the midnight-snack crowd. The place hadn’t changed very much since the time Harry had had his lunch interrupted by a bunch of bank robbers down the street during the Scorpio Sniper investigation. He had broken up the heist with six shots of his .44, then he had gone back to finish his frankfurter.

The only major change had come in the form of three video game machines stuck in the back corner, where a regular crowd of acne-ridden adolescents with excellent hand-eye coordination congregated. They never seemed to go to school or stay home.

“Economics,” Jaffe had explained. “They play a game, they buy a hot dog. They buy a hot dog, they play a game. To tell you the truth, I make more on the machines than I do on the wieners.”

“So why don’t you turn the whole place into a pinball parlor?” Harry had irritably suggested.

“Because of you, Harry darling,” Jaffe had whispered. “Only because of you. Now will that be a lunch Callahan special or a dinner Callahan special?”

A lunch special was one dog, while a dinner special was two. This night, Harry ordered a dinner, complete with fries, coleslaw, and a large milk. He watched the kids racking up millions of points on “Qix,” “Ms. Pac-Man,” and “Centipede” while he waited. While he ate, he blessed Jaffe for keeping the volume turned down on the sound effects, at least.

It was late in the evening by the time Harry got to Patterson’s address, but he was feeling fairly human by that time. It was a nice four-story apartment building near Grand View Park, just across the way from the Shriner’s hospital. Entering the well-lit but narrow foyer, he checked the buzzers until he saw the tag saying “4-B: D. Patterson.” He pressed the button, hoping that she was home—for more than interrogatory reasons. He liked the way she looked. And there would be nothing he would like better than to find she had had nothing to do with the Murray killing.

The speaker crackled, and he heard her distorted voice asking, “Who is it?”

“Inspector Callahan,” he replied. “The policeman you met at the hospital today.”

After a long pause, the door buzzer sounded, and he was let in. He walked up the long and winding carpeted staircase, to find Patterson waiting for him in the doorway of her apartment. Hers was the second of only two apartments on that floor.

D. Patterson was wearing faded jeans and a V-necked sweater. There was no shirt under the sweater, and only thick socks on her feet. Harry was extremely impressed with his own taste. Had she not been part of the case, he would have faked evidence to make her a part.

“Inspector Callahan?” she said skeptically. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“Our talk was interrupted,” Harry reminded her.

“Even so,” she countered, “I thought you might at least wait until business hours.”

“We couldn’t find your place of business,” Harry said honestly. As much as DiGeorgio had tried, he had come up with zilch. “Besides, I thought it would be best if we talked when I wasn’t smelling of bad hooch.”

“Yes,” she agreed, taking in the brown wool slacks, maroon sweater, and tweed jacket he had changed into after waking. “That’s much better. Won’t you come in, Inspector?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Harry answered, following her lead.

The apartment immediately opened up on a combination living and dining room with a three-paned bay window across the far wall. Harry could see three more doors to his left. He assumed one led to a kitchen, the next to the lav, and the last to a bedroom.

The living room proper was handsomely appointed, with thick Oriental rugs on the shiny hardwood floor, a decorator couch, a large color television, an impressive stereo system in its own free-standing cabinet, a fine dining room set, and a border of flowering plants hung around the bay window. Whatever Patterson did for a living, she made more than the average secretary or teacher.

“Make yourself at home, Inspector,” she said breezily, heading for the far-left door. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?”

“No thanks,” Harry said, standing amid the tasteful splendor of her place. “But it won’t be easy for me to make myself at home. What do you do for a living? Rob banks?”

There was silence from where Harry had correctly guessed the kitchen to be, until Patterson replied with sweet suspicion. “Is that your clever way of sugarcoating a third degree, Inspector?”

“Not especially clever,” Harry countered, sitting down on the beige couch. “What do you do for a living, Ms. Patterson?”

Patterson laughed as she came out of the kitchen with a large, steaming mug of coffee. “Why, ‘Ms.’, is it?” she exclaimed. “You must be one of these new liberated policemen, Inspector.” She sat at the head of the dining table on the other side of the television. She looked at him with calculating but inviting eyes from over the cup’s rim as she sipped.

Harry sighed and leaned forward. “I’m investigating the death of a high-school girl,” he said plainly. “Now, she might have fallen on the subway tracks, or she might have been pushed. Now, you might be adjusting to the shock of her death, or you might be trying to avoid answering my questions. So, again. What do you do for a living?”

She didn’t have a chance to answer.

Harry was considering standing up and walking toward her, but he decided against it. That decision saved his life. It was someone’s bad aim that saved hers.

Callahan saw the glint and heard the click at the same time. He could have ignored one or the other, but not both at the same time. His Magnum was magically out of its holster and in his already pointing hand when one of the panes of the bay window cracked, and Patterson’s coffee mug shattered into dozens of pieces.

C H A P T E R
S i x

T
he Magnum .44 roared with deadly rage.