Dirty Harry 06 - City of Blood (18 page)

“Lady, I don’t give a shit what you do or do not forbid.”

“Harry . . .” Owens started to say because he was genuinely alarmed at what his partner might do. But Harry ignored him.

He chose instead to knock all the papers and the disconnected telephone off her desk. The telephone jangled as it met the floor.

“If you do not bring me those records and all the sales receipts my partner requested just now we are going to systematically ransack this office until we find them. Do you understand me?”

Ms. Weil might have understood, but she was having none of it.

“Well, I never . . . This is the sort of behavior I would have expected from hoodlums, but police!” She rose from her chair with the evident objective of going for the door.

Firmly, but taking care not to hurt the woman, Harry laid his hand to her shoulder and forced her back to the seat. “We can remain here all night if you prefer, same difference to me.” He signaled Owens who took the cue and locked the door in back of him.

It had now begun to register on Ms. Weil that these men were serious and that she would be temporarily obliged to accommodate herself to their demands.

“Very well,” she said, “I will get you what you want. But I must warn you that I will report you, and I expect to have you both brought up on charges.”

Harry was used to this sort of thing. Owens, however, was not and from the look on his face you could tell that he was quite apprehensive about the consequences of what they were doing. Well, Bressler had given him free rein. He was only taking advantage of his unaccustomed freedom.

Once Ms. Weil had produced the pertinent records, she seated herself in her chair, her arms folded sternly under her heavy breasts, fixing the two invaders with an icy stare. She reminded Harry of a third-grade teacher watching two of her recalcitrant pupils misbehave while she contemplated what sort of punishment she should mete out to them.

“You wouldn’t want to help us, would you?” Harry asked her, and when she defiantly shook her head, he gave her a broad grin and said, “I didn’t think so.”

The idea in sifting through these records was to locate two women who came in often, perhaps once or twice a week, and who bought velvet dresses and suede jackets with silver fox lining and antique cloche hats and to match their names up against all the sales receipts from the last few months. It was Harry’s hope that sometime, just shortly before the Tocador Hotel slayings, no additional receipts would turn up to be matched against their names.

It took one and a half hours before they discovered their most likely candidates: Eloise Cummings and Patience Bell. They were frequent and extravagant customers from all appearances. In July they had made purchases totaling three thousand, four hundred and thirty dollars. In August they had made purchases in excess of two thousand, and three times in September they squandered at least a thousand dollars on each occasion. The last date recorded was September 28. One thing in particular struck Harry: they always shopped together. At no time did just Eloise or Patience come into Lazlo’s on her own. Real togetherness, Harry thought.

“How were these purchases paid for?” he asked the disapproving Ms. Weil.

Her sharp eyes rested for a moment on the documentation.

“In cash. Always in cash.” She had decided that she would cooperate at least to this extent.

“That’s a lot of money to be carrying around in your purse.”

“We do not question our customers’ spending habits.”

“No, I imagine not.”

“Well,” Harry said to Owens, “I think we struck pay dirt.” He turned back to Ms. Weil. “Do you know these women?”

Reluctantly, Ms. Weil admitted that she did. “I am acquainted with all of our regular clientele.”

“Were they young, middle-aged, old, what?”

“Young. Very young.”

“Compared to what?”

A glimmer of a smile came to her lips. “To me. Compared to me. They were frivolous but very spirited. I will say no more.”

“Thank you, Ms. Weil. You have been a great help.”

After taking down the address of the two women—for they lived together it seemed—Harry and Owens left the woman in peace.

“We’ll have to send her a dozen roses,” Harry said, a suggestion that astounded Owens.

“She’s likely to have us busted.”

“I don’t think so. I think she rather enjoyed the experience. Send her a dozen roses and a note expressing our gratitude and apologies for disrupting her day. See if anything happens.”

Owens shrugged. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. Where to now?”

The sun was down by this point, and the night sky was violently red as it mirrored the brush fires running out of control. The air was suffused with particles of dust and soot that got into the lungs and caused people to cough continuously as they hastened to their cars or into buildings because everybody wanted to be somewhere inside.

“We’re going to Santa Monica, to visit Patience and Eloise. Or at least to see where they lived.”

Robertson Boulevard led into Santa Monica, and with the rush hour over they managed to reach their destination in fifteen minutes.

The two women resided on Ocean, not far from where it intersected with Pico Boulevard. The lights from the nearby Royal Inn were visible even with the dense pollution, but they seemed to be distant and very diffuse.

Across the street Harry and Owens could just make out the gradual slope of the beach, and they could hear, but not really see, the Pacific lapping against the shoreline.

The house they were searching for was typical of many in the area: a white stucco two-story structure with a balcony protruding out from the second floor, from which the people who lived inside could observe the ocean. That was only in theory; it was a wonder that anyone could see more than a few feet away in this atmosphere.

The windows were dark. There was no sign of life. Harry and Owens stepped up to the door. Rang the bell. They heard chimes in response, but no one came to find out who they were.

Harry tried the door. Locked. He suggested they go around to the back. A small cobblestone lane described a semicircle which culminated at a rear door, which also proved to be locked.

“We break in?” Owens asked who was getting better at reading Harry’s mind.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know, Harry. First you intimidate some poor woman and tear out her telephone, now you illegally break and enter a house two women live in who may or may not be dead.”

Owens seemed more to be cataloguing Harry’s offenses against the state than objecting to them.

“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

Though he could always employ his .44, which would surely debilitate a lock for good, Harry was more dexterous than that. A credit card was more effective and more—discreet.

Harry used a flashlight. To put on the lights might only alert a vigilant neighbor who’d be inclined to call the police. The very last thing Harry wanted was to face questions from his counterparts on the LAPD.

It was apparent at the outset that Eloise and Patience lived in style. The rugs they had were nearly as deep as the water near the shore, and the furnishings that the narrow light disclosed had that polished, modern look more frequently encountered in the pages of
House Beautiful
than in real life.

Harry touched his fingers to the surface of a chrome-lined glass table and then raised them to his eyes. A coating of dust stained his fingertips. “One would think that if they’d been here recently they’d have cleaned. They seem like the sort who’d maintain a neat house, wouldn’t you say?”

And it was true. From what they could see everything was properly in place. Even the plants; they were right where they should be, perched on the windowsills, waiting for the sun to shine through though that might be a long wait and would, in any case, do them no good since just about all of them had died. When Harry touched the leaves of the philodendron plant nearest him they crumbled in his hand.

They discovered a closet. Actually, they discovered a great many closets. There were closets nearly as spacious as some of the rooms, and they were crowded with so many coats, camisoles, kimonos, maillots, bikinis, halters, dresses, pants, blouses, designer jeans and lamé shorts that Harry doubted whether their owners could have worn the same thing twice.

“These girls were really freaks,” Owens said, whistling in wonderment at the spectacle.

But what really interested Harry was the prospect of locating a desk, even a drawer where there might be papers, perhaps a journal or diary that would name a suspect.

The girls who lived here, however, seemed to keep little in the way of writing. There were only a few cookbooks, a diet book or two, and many many fashion magazines. They did find a calendar, one of those big-date calendars with a full-color photograph of a Gila monster, the endangered species, it said, for the month of October. (The whole calendar from the Audubon Society was filled with pictures of endangered species.) It was hanging on the wall of the refrigerator and right in the middle of it, in the box labeled 17, was the single name Teddy. October 17th was the day the two women had been killed at the Tocador Hotel.

Teddy, Harry thought. He rummaged in his mind for a corresponding memory, waited for a bell to ring. But there was no memory or bell.

“We have to keep looking,” Harry said. “We have to find something else, a letter maybe that could give us more of a clue. Particularly if there are any references to Teddy.”

“Teddy,” repeated Owens, but his mind was on something else. He began to sniff at the air. “Do you smell something? Smoke?”

Harry’s nostrils quivered. “Yes, I do. It’s coming from somewhere in the house.”

Suddenly there was the sound of glass shattering in the rear of the house. But when the two men sought to find out what had caused it, they were greeted with a surge of flames traveling at an astonishing rate through the whole back of the house. Through the smoke and fire Harry detected the faint but unmistakable odor of gas. He knew, without seeing, what the glass breaking had meant. Somebody had just hurled in some incendiary device to exacerbate the fire that he’d already set while Harry and Owens were investigating the premises on the second floor.

They started to make their way to the front of the house in hope of escaping, but another blaze had started up there. While it was not as fierce as the one in back, it would be soon.

Wherever Owens and Harry went, the flames, like an impassioned predator, followed them, scorching their faces, their hands, singeing their clothing. Worse was the heat, which grew increasingly more intense, gripping hold of the air and sucking the oxygen right out of it. And the smoke, dense and sulfurous, curled thickly through the rooms, obscuring their vision, causing them to sputter and nearly choke as they fought their way to freedom.

The inner structure of the house was surprisingly frail, and though they could not always see its destruction, they could certainly hear it. Wooden beams in the upstairs were giving way, crashing to the floor as their moorings disintegrated. Glass kept exploding as the heat worsened, and just about all the windows in the second-story rooms were obliterated. At the same time, the blaze consumed the vast wardrobe that Eloise and Patience had amassed for a small fortune, the closets affording no protection at all. As the collection of dresses, kimonos, shorts, bathing suits, jackets, and blouses burned, they emitted a strange, almost perfumey odor that mixed with the smoke and the gas.

The rug that was so thick and welcoming to naked feet was more welcoming still to the flames that took root in its tangled fibers and in minutes overwhelmed its surface, then leaped up to the walls, finding further refuge there. The whole house, in fact, even without the gas, was in its chemistry a hospitable environment for the fire.

With their jackets held up over their heads, Harry and Owens, having no other choice, propelled themselves through the fire, ignoring the flames that stung their ankles and the burning embers that bombarded them and the smoke that seeped into their lungs.

The door, either door, in front or in back, was impossible to open. The fire was simply too daunting and the metal knobs of the door handles too hot to risk touching.

So Harry decided that he would simply have to throw himself through one of the downstairs windows that remained intact. He had to jump over a couch directly beneath the window. The couch, like every other article of furniture in the room, was becoming reduced to charred rubble and ash. The fire was in love with the synthetic composition of the couch, and periodically there would be a loud pop as the cushions, of which there were a great many, exploded and released their stuffing.

Harry executed the jump with relative success though this did not mean he escaped the flames altogether as they danced around his legs. But ignoring the pain, with one foot balanced on the edge of the windowsill, which was sufficiently wide, and with his hands flat against the achingly hot walls for purchase, he kicked at the windowpane with as much force as he could summon. The glass cracked but did not give way. He struck out again, and again the glass shivered and cracked but refused to yield. A third time he tried, and this time the pane shattered, scattering shards all over the place, some of which pincered his legs and arms, penetrating through the cloth like tiny daggers. Then, without hesitation, he threw himself out through the opening he had created though this meant sustaining several smaller cuts as the remaining glass grazed his body in its clumsy passage. He tumbled out in a column of brackish smoke and fell into the shrubbery that grew in front of the house.

Owens, duplicating Harry’s movements, leapt to the windowsill and similarly jettisoned himself. Though he thought to roll, to blunt the impact of his fall, he could not quite accomplish this with the shrubbery in the way, and he ended up spraining his ankle.

Harry gathered him up and helped him out toward the sidewalk before the fire could overtake them. Their skin was blackened and crisscrossed by cuts, each of which oozed fresh blood, and their clothes were torn and blackened as well. Harry’s brows had been singed, Owens’ nearly burned off. From the sky, ash and embers rained down on them.