Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (17 page)

When Harry declared that he was just seeking information, the salesperson would visibly relax, breathe easier, and because she would generally feel, however irrationally, that she had just been let off the hook, she would be far readier to help.

Then, one by one, Harry would draw out of the large manila envelope he carried with him full-color glossies of the half-burned evidence. He would then carefully explain just what he was showing them since to the untutored eye what had once been a suede jacket and a velvet dress and a cloche hat looked indistinguishable from one another.

But despite the good intentions of the boutiques’ personnel, nobody could say whether these were the sort of items that they might have at one time sold or whether they had once regularly served two young women who mysteriously no longer shopped there.

After a full day of making the rounds, Harry had begun to feel that he was wasting his time. Still he had a strong, gut-level feeling that there was something to what Mary Beth had told him, that it made sense to continue looking further.

Before abandoning the Polk Street area altogether, he stopped in at the Palace Museum, located at 1546. Aside from carrying a full and exhaustive (perhaps even exhausting) line of designer jeans, the store featured what one guidebook said were “once-loved clothes from the twenties to the forties.”

A man whom Harry guessed to be in his twenties stepped forward to help. He stared at Harry for a few moments in something like astonishment. “Don’t tell me,” he started. “You wish to change your whole image. We had in a man just the other day, he was going through a mid-life crisis, you know, divorcing his wife, leaving his home, his work, his family, throwing it all aside for love.”

“A younger woman?”

“No, a younger man. It’s hard to keep up.”

“I imagine it is. But the fact of the matter is I am not looking to change my image.”

The man sighed. “What a shame. You certainly could do with a change.”

After a day of touring shops like this, Harry was scarcely in the mood to exchange mindless banter with anyone. He got right down to business, pulling out the glossies with an air of resignation. He did not expect to be rewarded here any more than he’d been in the last dozen boutiques.

But after he had described what he was displaying to the man, it proved to be more enlightening than Harry was prepared for.

“We don’t sell exactly this sort of thing in our store, but I am pretty certain that the place you are searching for is Lazlo’s.”

“Lazlo’s?”

“It’s a specialty shop, very expensive, exorbitant I should say. I’m told there are people who come from halfway around the world to be outfitted there. It’s located in Los Angeles. Maybe Beverly Hills, I’m not sure. But they would certainly have the combination of high fashion and antique clothes and unique accessories you’re looking for. And they do have personnel trained to clothe their regular customers. Sometimes they will go to the homes of their clients and outfit them there, sparing them the trouble of turning out in public. You know how some of these celebrities get?”

Harry said that he had an idea and then, thanking the man, left, wondering whether this was the lead he’d been searching for.

He phoned Mary Beth with the news.

“Lazlo’s, of course,” she said. “How stupid of me not to think of it. I could have saved you a lot of time.”

“No problem. Tell me, do you think a phone call to them would help?”

“I have the feeling, Harry, that Lazlo—and there is a real Lazlo, some doddering European who claims to have aristocratic lineage, I’m told—acts like he’s psychiatrist and father-confessor rolled into one, and he is very scrupulous about protecting his customers. He fears that some newsman will leak word of a star’s new fall wardrobe. I know it sounds foolish, but that’s the way some of the people in this business are.”

“Then I suppose I’ll just have to go to L.A. and present myself in person.”

“I’m sure you’ll be very persuasive.”

There was no question of Bressler authorizing the excursion to L.A. He had, for once, given Harry virtual
carte blanche
(though this latitude on his part could scarcely be expected to persist beyond this case). He might very well have authorized a trip to Hong Kong if it would have helped.

But what Harry did not anticipate was Bressler’s insistence that he not go by himself.

“Who is stuck with me this time?”

“The same man who was stuck with you last time,” Bressler told him.

This astounded Harry. “Why? Have you informed Drake of this?”

“Informed?” Bressler looked mildly surprised as he sat there, tilting slightly in his seat. “I thought you knew. It was Owens who pleaded with me to let him join you. And since you seem to work so well together, after bringing down that monster in Golden Gate, I figured why not?”

Harry realized it was pointless to argue with Bressler, but he did his best to talk Owens out of it. Just as he had been beginning to feel relieved of the burden of guilt that went with having a partner, particularly a partner he liked, that burden had been reimposed.

But Owens was insistent. “I know Los Angeles, I lived there for years, I have contacts there. And besides, we might walk into Lazlo’s and find out nothing, just a dead end. That’ll be it. It’ll be like a small vacation. There’s almost no chance of trouble.”

“You haven’t been around me long enough,” Harry said, interrupting him.

“What I was about to say was that if there is trouble I want to be with you. I feel like we, that is my wife and myself, have a stake in this case. If it weren’t for Mary Beth you wouldn’t even be going to L.A.”

His reasoning was not out of line, Harry recognized, but it was Owens’ sheer tenacity that convinced him to acquiesce.

He glanced at his watch. They were seated in the living room of Owens’ rambling house. It was approaching three in the afternoon. “You know somebody we can stay with there?”

“I surely do. An uncle of Mary Beth, retired film producer, used to be pretty big in the business years ago. His wife died, his kids have all gone off, so he has a lot of extra room.”

“Well, call him right now, say that we’re coming down there today. Then let’s get out to the airport and catch a shuttle.”

Within 463.7 square miles there exist eighty-one cities, which together constitute Los Angeles. And in that vast dominion there are six hundred movie and television firms. And in that vast dominion, too, there are more than five million registered vehicles.

And it seemed to Harry and Owens as they drove their rented Ford Matador from the airport into the city that all of those five million vehicles were on the road. Specifically, the road they were taking. It was rush hour, though that phrase carries the rather erroneous implication that a rush is in progress. On the contrary, the freeway system that defined Los Angeles County almost as much as it crisscrossed it had been turned into what New York refugees might call a gridlock. Nothing was moving, and nothing looked like it was going to move any time soon.

As the sun sank lower, the sky, filled with a thick haze to begin with, began to pale, growing not darker but yellower with dust and smog and smoke from brush fires that were erupting on the hillsides with perilous frequency, turning million-dollar houses into burnt-out shells and causing scrub pine and chapparal and sumac to disappear while at the same time releasing their respective odors and dispatching them throughout the city.

The radio was filled with reports about the fires in Sunland, in the Verdugo Hills, and in Carbon Canyon to the east, and the blaze that was running out of control near Lake Elsinore and the one that almost wiped out all of exclusive Country Club Drive.

Harry shut the radio off. He’d had enough news about doom, both impending doom and doom that was already here. After all, he had only to open the windows of the car to discover that there were fires raging on the outskirts of L.A. He didn’t need a news commentator telling him about it, too.

“It gets like this this time of year,” Owens said with the air of a man who feels obliged to apologize for a home that is in a constant state of disrepair. “The winds, and then there’s the dryness. But usually it’s not so bad.”

Harry and Owens had packed light suitcases on the premise that they wouldn’t be staying in L.A. longer than a day or two. Harry, who rarely got to L.A. and even less frequently felt the urge to, hoped that they could find out all they needed and leave by tomorrow. That is if they could ever get off this damn freeway. “At this rate, we could walk and be there faster,” he commented ruefully.

“Just hold on. We’re beginning to move.”

They nosed ahead to the next light. Not far.

“Some move,” noted Harry who then lapsed into a sullen silence that did not end until the traffic jam did.

As it turned out, Lazlo’s, which was their first stop even before putting in at Mary Beth’s uncle’s house, was in Beverly Hills, just as the man at the Palace had thought. It was to be found on Melrose Avenue, between La Cienega and Robertson boulevards. This was a predictable location since there were well over a hundred boutiques and antique stores crowded into the same stretch of Melrose. Many of the shops Harry noticed were converted bungalows, testifying to the onetime residential character of the street.

Lazlo’s, in size and in elaborateness dwarfed its competitors. The interior was filled with silver latticework and mirrors and tiled floors that brightly reflected the patrons who walked on them. Fountains, partially shielded from view by an enormous profusion of plants and tendril-like growths inching their way up marble columns, sputtered constantly with recycled water.

But the effect was neither warm nor welcoming but rather cold, almost severe, as though the place were designed by some of the same people who put together sets for sci-fi movies. Women who might be customers or mannequins, it was hard to tell which, sauntered from one display to the other, casting indifferent looks at the dresses, jackets, coats, handbags, hats, blouses, underthings, overthings, and jewelry almost as though nothing in the world, be it person or object, could interest them at all.

It required considerable skill to locate somebody who was responsible for more than one department (cosmetics, say, or the exclusive Yendi forties collection). Eventually they were guided to an office where the Matisse and Klee and de Koonings that hung on the walls were not prints but very much originals.

A matronly woman, with hair that looked like one of the traditional wigs British judges wear in court, rose to greet them.

“You are policemen,” she said, mulling over the implications of this. “From San Francisco?”

Owens explained why they had come. He then proffered the glossies that Harry had taken on his rounds of San Francisco boutiques.

The woman, whose name was Ms. Weil (or so it said on the small sign on her desk), shook her head when she saw them. “Such destructiveness,” she muttered.

Harry assumed she was referring to the clothes and not to the women who’d worn them. Owens leaned forward to point out to her what each charred shred of cloth represented. He had undertaken the role of spokesman because Harry had wanted it that way. Being more impatient and more irritable than Owens, particularly after their tortuous ride into L.A., Harry had the feeling he would say something, even an innocent remark, that would offend this proper lady, which was the last thing he wanted to do—at least until they obtained the information they wanted from her.

“Is it possible that these items might have been purchased in your store?” Owens asked with the deference he thought appropriate to Ms. Weil’s exalted station.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She scrutinized the prints again. “We do stock such apparel as you mention.” She was being as noncommittal as possible within the limits of the truth.

“Do you keep a list of your regular clients?”

“We do.”

“Would it be possible to examine that list and to have a look at the sales receipts going back say, three or four months?”

“We could never allow that.”

Harry could no longer remain silent. “And why not?”

“As a private company we are under no such obligation.”

“You could be subpoenaed for your records, you realize,” said Owens.

“I suppose that it is conceivable.”

“Tell me,” Harry said, “is Lazlo here?”

Ms. Weil was evidently unaccustomed to having her employer referred to in such a casual manner. “Mr. Lazlo is out of the country.”

“Good for him.” Harry smiled politely. Owens didn’t like it. The smile was too polite. That wasn’t Harry. “Tell me, Ms. Weil, do you keep your records in this office?”

Without considering the reason he’d asked this question, she replied in the affirmative.

“Then would you do us the favor of bringing them out?”

“But I just told you that I cannot do such a thing.”

“And I heard you very well. But frankly, your opinion doesn’t interest me.” He stood up and approached the desk so that he loomed over the diminutive Ms. Weil. “There is a murderer running around San Francisco who so far has been responsible for twelve deaths. He’s beheaded a few, blown up a few more, and incinerated the rest in fires he’s set. Now, to tell you the truth, it would take us some time to get a subpoena from a judge here, but we’d damn well do it and you know it. And that would just waste time. And I don’t have time. My partner doesn’t have the time. Only the killer has the time.”

Ms. Weil was obstinate in her refusal. “Out of the question. I am certain you have worthy motives but—”

Harry refused to allow her to finish. “Look, I am not interested in hearing excuses—”

The phone rang, and Ms. Weil answered it with relief, thinking that she could terminate this unpleasant discussion by simply ignoring Harry and Owens.

“Ms. Weil,” she said to whomever was on the other end.

She didn’t get much farther because Harry with one quick and determined motion tore the cord out of the wall, immediately severing the connection.

Shocked, Ms. Weil raised her eyes to Harry, her face flushed, her hands shaking in outrage. “How dare you do that? You are acting illegally, sir, I forbid it.”