Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death (18 page)

A few more comments and questions from Gallant, dropped off-handedly, were all that was needed to break down the barrier between the two of them. Within a week’s time, Silk was inviting Gallant into his living room—an event unprecedented in the history of the Silk household—and engaging him in conversation about art and life. Silk believed everybody had a philosophy of life, no matter how crudely developed, and he wanted to hear Gallant’s.

Modestly, Gallant claimed to have once worked in the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park and that was how he knew so much about painting and sculpture.

“But you study, don’t you, young man?” Silk said.

“Some.”

“You are not being candid with me, sir. I believe you have studied a great deal. Why have you sought employment at such a low station when you are obviously capable of so much more?”

Gallant explained that to some, money did not come easily.

Silk, to whom money did come easily, was unimpressed with this argument. He intimated that if Gallant—or David Holstrom, as he thought him to be—proved a loyal and trustworthy employee in the role of chauffeur-bodyguard, he might soon be in line for a promotion. “To a job more suited to your talents,” said Silk.

Gallant, naturally, expressed his gratitude. There was no question Silk perceived in his clever and unassuming chauffeur a man he could one day succeed in molding in his own image.

Not unexpectedly, he told Sheila about Gallant. It was almost as if Gallant was his discovery. A director talking about the waitress he’d made into a movie star would have sounded no less excited.

Sheila listened patiently to what her father had to say. Although circumstances obliged them to live in the same house, that house was so big they seldom had to speak to each other if they chose not to. And more often than not, Sheila chose not to. She was polite with her father, even deferential, but uneasy around him. This uneasiness was a legacy from her childhood, and it had only grown more acute with time. While Silk was careful never to mention her unhappy involvements with police officers, the matter was obviously never far from his thoughts. Every conversation they had, no matter how trivial the subject, was fraught with tension.

It was six-year-old Louise that made their living together tolerable. Silk doted on his granddaughter and she, unwittingly, became the mediator, the go-between, bridging some of the unconquerable distance that separated Silk from Sheila.

It had been almost a rule with Sheila that any man her father liked was someone she avoided. It had started way back when she was in high school and just beginning to date, and nothing had really changed in all the years that had passed since then. So when her father began speaking frequently about the virtues and considerable skills of his chauffeur, Sheila was hardly disposed to pay much attention.

On the other hand, her curiosity was provoked in spite of herself. When had her father ever spoken highly of a servant? Never in all her years.

There was something about this man, David Holstrom, that fascinated her although she could not say for certain what it was. They’d rarely exchanged more than a couple of words, mostly having to with the destination she wished to be conveyed to, or the state of the weather on any given day.

He was handsome enough, surely, and had a disquieting intensity that reminded her a bit of her husband when he was courting her.

One day, she encountered him as he was on his way to the cottage where he lived.

He smiled and said good evening and was about to proceed when she blocked his way.

“My father tells me you know an awful lot about art.”

“Your father exaggerates.”

“My father also says you’re very modest.”

He shrugged. He didn’t seem to know what to say to this.

“Would you mind if I gave you a test? I’m curious to see just how educated you are.”

“I think you’ll only be disappointed,” he said. “I’ll probably fail.”

“But there’s no harm in trying, is there?”

“I guess not.”

To his utter amazement, she took him through the house to her bedroom. It was situated off a hallway on the second story just down from the bedroom where her daughter slept, and across from the bedroom the woman who cared for Louise occupied.

The bedroom was entirely done in pink. Everywhere there were flowers—lilacs, carnations, crysanthemums, azaleas—flowers on the wall, and flowers sprouting from vases placed at intervals around the bed. The bed was a
lit à polonaise.
The bedboard contained a triptych whose colors duplicated the rose-brown hues of the draperies that hung over the bed itself.

Gallant let out a low appreciative whistle.

“Wait,” she said. She slid open a mirrored closet door to reveal shelves of small statues. One of them, a squat and voluptuous nude bronze, she held out in her hand. “Who did this?”

“I’d say it was a Venus by Maillol.”

“You are good.” She put it back and removed a second one, producing a far more abstract piece. “This you’ll never guess.”

“Marino Marini,” he declared authoritatively.

Her mouth fell open. “You’re amazing.”

“I passed the test?”

“You passed all right.”

“What do I get for it?”

Her smile was enigmatic, almost mischievous. “You’ll see. You’re just going to have to be patient. Good night, Mr. Holstrom.”

There was always a point, Gallant believed, when you knew you had the woman or you had lost her. Sometimes that point came and went in a flash, so quickly you didn’t realize it. It was a look in the eyes, a light touch of fingers dancing on the back of your hand, a confidence whispered suddenly into your ear in the middle of a nightclub performance. But once it happened, once you knew, and knew without any doubt, then you had to move. With a woman, timing was perhaps the most important thing. While Gallant recognized this, he feared all those years in prison had eroded his instinct for timing. But now he understood that that hadn’t happened at all. He’d lost nothing of his knack. If anything, those six years behind bars had sharpened him.

And he knew Sheila was ripe. As much as she attempted to maintain the distance an employer’s daughter was expected to show to a servant, the façade was growing thinner day by day.

One afternoon, she told him, “You’re the only person I can speak to freely around here.”

“You must have friends . . .”

“I left them all behind,” she said wistfully.

“That sounds tragic.”

“No. Not tragic, something else, but not tragic.”

He took her hand in his. She looked at him as if to reproach him, but said nothing and didn’t withdraw her hand.

They sat that way for a time, in the garden, saying little, until the light dwindled from the sky. She said, “Maybe I ought to go now and look in on Louise.”

He released her hand. She began walking in the direction of the house. Then she turned and regarded him. He was still sitting on the bench.

“Later tonight, are you doing anything, oh say, around eleven?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Why don’t you come around to my room for a drink?”

“You have more statues you want me to identify?”

She threw her head back laughing. “Maybe,” she said.

It was a long ride, and as fast as he drove, Harry realized he would not reach Paradise Road for another hour. There was no way he could keep on this way. His head was light. He needed more nourishment and several cups of coffee if he were to keep going. He stopped at a diner along the highway and went inside to order a cheeseburger. He again deliberated, as he had several times since he’d left the headquarters of The Saving Remnant, about phoning Sheila. But what was he going to say? Is anything wrong? Is someone making off with your father’s valuables? Is there someone suspicious prowling about the grounds? Is James Gallant there? Not the James Gallant the way you remember, but a man whose face has been changed? She would think him a madman whose perilous and unpredictable lifestyle had turned him paranoid. Each time he considered making the call, he imagined the sound that would come over the wire as she hung up on him.

And so he ate the cheeseburger and had his cups of coffee and never made the call.

She welcomed him in a chemise of olive silk shantung. As he was used to seeing her in jackets and tweed skirts, in crisp white button-down blouses and gabardine slacks, the sight of her in such casual, and seductive, attire caught him by surprise.

As she let him in, Gallant happened to notice hers was not the only door opening up along the hallway corridor. A faint trickle of light was coming from the bedroom belonging to the nursemaid. A woman only in her early fifties, she had the look of an embittered spinster many years older. Gallant imagined she thrived on gossip and prying into other people’s affairs.

True to her word, Sheila had a drink set out for him, sparkling champagne. There was a drink for herself as well.

“Are we celebrating anything in particular?”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t about to clarify this, and Gallant didn’t press her. “Why don’t you sit down? You make me nervous standing up like that.”

Disregarding the other chairs and sofa, he sat on the bed. He decided to stretch out on it. It felt so comfortable and warm it was difficult for him to recall the prison bunk he’d slept on for six long years.

“Aren’t you bored here?” she asked him.

“Bored?” It was not a question he’d anticipated. “Not anymore, no, I actually like it here.”

Which was, in fact, true. He hadn’t thought much about Harry Callahan for several days now. Harry no longer seemed important to him. He’d gotten mostly everything he’d wanted, especially this woman sitting next to him. He’d severed virtually all his links to his checkered past. If he continued to enjoy Silk’s favor, there was no telling how far he could go. He pictured for himself a long prosperous life as master of this vast estate high above Paradise Road.

“Were you ever married?”

“No,” he replied. “I somehow never got around to it.”

He helped himself to another glass of champagne, and refilled hers simultaneously. As he drank he talked, but was always careful to say very little, always holding himself in check lest he give away too much or let slip some remark that conflicted with what he might have told her or her father before.

But as she was getting drunker—and it was obvious that she was determined to get drunker—her attention began to drift. She was not listening to his words, but rather to the sound of his voice, a voice he owed to Dr. Jonas Pine.

All at once, her face darkened. She regarded him closely. He thought, the game’s up. She knows, she must know. He stopped in the middle of a sentence. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do if she should now accuse him of murdering her husband.

However, rather than accuse him of anything, she clasped his hand in hers and leaned forward so the only air he had to breathe was filled with the scent of her perfume. “Kiss me,” she said. “I want you to kiss me.”

He did. He drew her down into the bed, into the wide endless bed, which groaned audibly, its fine old rosewood being unaccustomed to this much weight upon it.

Under the chemise, she wore nothing. As she repositioned her legs, the sudden motion forced the silk material to hike up to her thighs. Gallant burrowed his head into the opening, under cloth and into flesh.

She rocked, and like the bed itself, she groaned, her head tilted back, her eyes shut tight, her hair scattered in disarray about the pillow. All the while, Gallant worked his tongue into her. He couldn’t quite believe he had gotten this far. His luck had not run out.

He was getting lost in her, and she in him. Neither of them heard the distant rumble of a car and the decisive slam of a door when it stopped or the sound of footsteps approaching the walkway that led through the garden up to the house.

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

“I
am sorry, sir, but no one is permitted beyond this point. This is private property.”

The security man was dressed in civilian clothes, but the bulge of his gun against his jacket left no doubt of his profession.

Harry displayed his badge though, technically, of course, he had no right to claim he was a police officer on duty.

The security man was unimpressed with his credentials. “Unless you can show me a warrant, Inspector, I am still not obliged to let you on this property. If you are responding to an invitation issued by Mr. Silk, I need only make a phone call to confirm.”

But as it was now past midnight, and all but a couple of the windows visible in the house beyond were darkened, it seemed to the security guard there was little likelihood that Harry was here by invitation.

“Why don’t you call Mr. Silk, tell him Callahan is here.”

Though the security man was dubious, he consented to do this. There was a remote phone situated in a niche carved out of an oak. As the man dialed a series of four digits, he briefly turned away from Harry.

With the side of his hand, Harry struck him in the back of his neck. The blow sucked his consciousness from him and he slumped to the ground.

But he had not taken into account a second man who materialized unexpectedly from the garden. He produced a gun and ran to intercept Harry.

There were few lights in the vicinity, and so Harry was able to work with the darkness, and elude his pursuer, at least until he reached the porch steps on the far right side of the house. It was there the second security man found Harry again.

“Stop there, Mister, I don’t want to hurt you,” he shouted.

Harry didn’t stop. The man fired. The shot went wide, but managed to puncture a window, producing a shriek of glass.

Gallant came fully awake. While Sheila’s bedroom was located in the left wing of the house, the detonation of a gunshot was unmistakable. Sheila, however, seemed not to have heard it. She sighed, half-opened her eyes, shifted position in bed, then fell back asleep.

Gallant drew himself out of bed, and reached for his clothes. Sheila, reawakened, saw what he was doing, and groggily asked him where he was going.