Dirty Harry 02 - Death on the Docks Read online

  FOR “DIRTY HARRY” CALLAHAN,

  IT’S A LABOR OF HATE

  WHEN HE BUSTS

  A LABOR RACKETEER!

  There are some guys in this world even dirtier than Harry Callahan. Like union czar Matt Braxton, the biggest deal on the docks. He’s corrupt enough to be cozy with the Mob, rich enough to afford friends in the highest places, and ruthless enough to kill anything that stands in his way. Dirty Harry’s standing there all right—and he doesn’t intend to give an inch.

  Fatal Female!

  Darlene whipped around, her eyes blazing, her lips like a red gash on her face. “You bastard! You killed him! You killed him!”

  Darlene brought her gun around and fired. Harry turned aside, narrowly missing the bullet meant for him. There was another shot. But this one came from an altogether new direction. And found a completely unexpected target . . .

  Books by Dane Hartman

  Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

  Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks

  Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death

  Dirty Harry #4: The Mexico Kill

  Dirty Harry #5: Family Skeletons

  Dirty Harry #6: City of Blood

  Dirty Harry #7: Massacre at Russian River

  Dirty Harry #8: Hatchet Men

  Dirty Harry #9: The Killing Connection

  Dirty Harry #10: The Blood of Strangers

  Dirty Harry #11: Death in the Air

  Dirty Harry #12: The Dealer of Death

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1981 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 0-446-90792-8

  First Printing: September, 1981

  DIRTY HARRY #2

  DEATH ON

  THE DOCKS

  The Beginning . . .

  It was way past midnight when the blue Dodge convertible belonging to Bernard Tuber pulled into his driveway. There was just one light left on in the house—in the front hall—so that Tuber wouldn’t have to fumble around looking for a switch. The shades were drawn in the upstairs windows; Marianne and the children were asleep.

  For nearly half a minute Tuber and Halsey, his bodyguard, waited in the car. They did this by force of habit. If either of them sensed anything was wrong, Tuber would simply start the ignition and race back down the driveway. It had been like this since the onset of the election campaign for Local 242 of the Brotherhood of Longshoremen. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Bernard Tuber had been given little chance of winning. The problem was that he had every prospect of being victorious in the election the following day.

  He was a quiet, reflective man; you looked at him and you figured he was a professor of anthropology at nearby Stanford University. You didn’t take him for a former stevedore who twice had nearly lost his life on the docks. He didn’t appear to be very strong, but he was; more than muscle he had the will and stamina to try and wrest control of the union from Matt Braxton’s machine.

  But will wasn’t enough. Not when you began getting obscene phone calls threatening the lives of you and your family; not when prowlers hurled rocks through your picture window in the middle of the night. You needed more than will then. You needed somebody like Halsey, a man who knew how to use a .357 Magnum and when to use it.

  Halsey was big, football big and basketball tall, and when he stepped out of the car and took up position astride Tuber he loomed over his boss by nearly a foot.

  “Something’s wrong,” Tuber said, gazing out at the street. “I’m not sure what it is but I can smell it.”

  Halsey’s eyes were working furiously to determine what it was.

  “Streetlight’s out,” he noted.

  The light that should have illuminated the sidewalk and lawn was not there. The only available light was coming from the lamp Marianne had left on.

  “Of course, it could be that the bulb failed,” Tuber said dubiously. “It happens.”

  “You want to go back to the car?”

  They were already approaching the winding paved walkway that led to the door.

  “No, no, it makes no sense to do that. Nothing else seems wrong.”

  He was right; except for the monotonous chirping of crickets and the occasional sound of a car passing in the distance, there was nothing to disturb the air of tranquillity.

  The two men advanced quickly. Not running, nothing to show panic, but a well-paced step that got them up to the handsome white door where they stood out starkly in the lamplight.

  To either side of the door there were bushes that rose waist-high; they were thick but manicured, a nice suburban touch.

  It was a sudden rustling in the bushes on his right side that caused Halsey to turn abruptly in that direction. At the same time, instinctively, he brought his .357 into view.

  Tuber, his key already in the door, looked blankly at Halsey. He’d had little sleep in the last few weeks and tonight he’d had to endure a final strategy session that had gone on interminably. His reaction speed wasn’t as good as it should have been.

  “I don’t know,” Halsey started to say when there was a roar from the left, from the bushes over on that side. Halsey, his chest torn open by the blast of a shotgun, pitched over backward, smacking his skull hard against the cement walkway. The fractured skull was gratuitous; he was already dead.

  Tuber scarcely had a chance to react. Two men wearing ski masks had risen from the right, another—the one who’d just killed Halsey—emerged on the left, all brandishing shotguns. They seemed to wait—not long, a second, two seconds maybe, just long enough for Tuber to realize his fate. Still he struggled with the key, succeeding in opening the door just as all three men fired their weapons, as if on cue. One blast threw Tuber forward, another back, and so for the briefest time he seemed to be suspended in midair, a corpse even before he landed, without a face, without a chest, without a stomach. Blood spouted into the air in grotesque mimicry of a geiser. Then, inevitably, he came down, crashing against the splintered door he’d just opened and toppling into his carpeted foyer.

  “What is going on?”

  Marianne’s hysterical voice carried down to the assailants. They stepped into the foyer, raising their guns just as Tuber’s wife, a modestly attractive woman in a red flannel robe, came down the stairs.

  Seeing the men, malignant figures in blue ski masks, their clothing spattered with blood, then spotting her husband’s body sprawled out beneath them, she tried to scream. Couldn’t. No sound at all emerged from her lips.

  Her face had paled, her hands trembled noticeably by her sides, and her eyes had gone as wide as they could. It was the moment when everything changes with no warning. No time to build up to it, no time to prepare. It’s the suddenness of it that gets people. And it’s that moment that the three men in the foyer savored most of all. They were very still, just waiting for her to do something. The way they were acting it was as if they had all the time in the world.

  Right then she thought of her children. That spurred her to action. She turned and in her haste almost tripped, then she started to scamper up the stairs. The first blast took her head almost clean off. The body had some momentum and kept on for another step while the head, with its thick crest of brunette hair, swayed precariously on the stump of her neck. Then she collapsed, tumbling clumsily down the stairs, but so rapidly that the gunmen were forced to step out of the way for her. She came to rest on top of her husband’s prostrate form.

  It should h
ave been enough. It wasn’t. The men made their way up the bloodsoaked stairs. At the top two more victims were waiting for them, a six-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. The six-year-old was out on the landing, screaming in terror, clutching his teddybear close to his chest, his eyes blinded by tears.

  “Hey, kid, what are you bawling for? There’s nothing to cry about.”

  The gunman, with his gloved hands, carefully put down the shotgun. This gesture, however, did nothing to reassure the child. Nor should it have. For the assassin now had a Browning automatic gripped in his right hand; he pointed it straight down so that it touched the little boy’s scalp and discharged it. The head seemed to explode; flesh and agglutinative gray matter and blood spattered over the walls.

  Retrieving the shotgun, the gunman now proceeded into the children’s bedroom. Sighting the rifle on the crib in front of him, he fired. The crib and the three-year-old girl lying in it disappeared for a moment in a cloud of smoke and splinters. When it became visible again, the gunman could see that he had failed to hit the girl. Not that it made any difference. A slice of wood, shaven off the crib by the blast, had come down on the sleeping girl like a dagger, impaling her to what was left of the mattress.

  The three assailants now left, hastily but not in panic, more like guests who’d lingered too long at a party than murderers who’d left behind four corpses—all that remained of Bernard Tuber and his family.

  C H A P T E R

  O n e

  The phone rang. At first it was not clear to Harry that the insistent ringing was not part of his dream. From his bed he groped for the evil instrument, and then remembered that it was his day off and that there was no compelling reason to answer the phone. The hell with it, he thought, let it ring.

  And it rang. And it rang. Whoever was on the other end had a good idea that Harry was home and was not about to give up. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Harry surrendered.

  “Callahan.”

  “Harry? Can you get down here right away?”

  Lieutenant Bressler did not need to introduce himself; his voice was immediately—and painfully—recognizable to Harry.

  “You got the wrong man, Lieutenant. You forget, it’s my day off.”

  “It used to be your day off. Don’t worry, we’ll make it up to you. Someday. It’s important, Harry.”

  “Is this an order you’re giving me?”

  “Think of it as a personal favor.” With that Bressler hung up.

  “Personal favor, shit,” muttered Harry as he sat up in bed, wondering just how he was to get a handle on the coming day. And God knows, there was a lot of the day to come: it was only six-thirty in the morning.

  The phone rang again.

  “Callahan.”

  “Harry, this is DiGeorgio. The lieutenant says to tell you to make sure you pick up a paper on the way to work.”

  “What’s he going to do, test me for my knowledge of current events?”

  “Front page, Harry. That’s all you have to know.”

  “Tell him he owes me twenty cents then. And the day.”

  MASSACRE IN PALO ALTO

  Tuber, Wife, Kids Shot

  Union Elections Postponed

  Harry scanned the Chronicle’s coverage of the slayings; it went on for pages. Nothing like a juicy bit of mayhem to get the adrenalin rushing in a jaded reporter, he thought.

  The paper folded in his hand, Harry strode through the station house which smelled like stale cigarette smoke, stale coffee, and stale sweat. No one looked particularly awake, neither the officers who were getting off nor the ones who were just coming on duty.

  DiGeorgio was tapping out a report on a cranky old typewriter. He glanced up as Harry passed. Observing that he’d picked up a copy of the paper he said, “It’s a shitty business, Harry. Two kids. Adults, that’s one thing. Kids. What kind of son of a bitch blows defenseless kids away?”

  Harry just shook his head. He didn’t want any part of it. It was his day off, or it used to be, and the killings took place in Palo Alto. This was San Francisco.

  Bressler had a succinct enough explanation. “You’re being lent out, Harry.” He was pacing back and forth behind his desk. He, too, appeared fatigued. Harry could sense, when the lieutenant was about to snap; you could see it in his eyes, there was a real coldness there, absolute zero coldness. He didn’t like Harry, and yet usually he could keep his distaste for him under control. But when the lieutenant got like this, frazzled, worn down, that control slipped away.

  “Mind telling me why I’m the lucky one?”

  “Let’s just say it’s your type of case. Sick, scummy, dirty.”

  “And political?”

  “Who said anything about politics?”

  “Tuber was a dissident. He opposed Braxton and Braxton’s handpicked candidate Ryan. He was going to win.”

  “That’s speculation. Who knows who would’ve won. That’s not your concern.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Lieutenant. Suppose it was Braxton who ordered the hit, you think you’re going to put the darling of every politician and bureaucrat in this state behind bars?”

  Bressler pretended to ignore him. “You seen this?” He indicated a column on the front page of the Chronicle that Harry had already read. That didn’t stop Bressler; he insisted on reading it aloud: “ ‘Matthew Braxton, retiring president of Local 242 of the Brotherhood of Longshoremen, when informed of the murders, said that he was “anguished and shocked beyond description,” adding that he “would do all in my power to see to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators of this horrible outrage.” To that end, he has instructed the union to put up a fifty thousand dollar reward for information leading to—’ ”

  “I get the picture, Lieutenant. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t mean shit.”

  “They’re expecting you in Palo Alto, Harry. I’ve told them you’re on your way. The man you see there is Redhorn. Captain Redhorn.”

  “Got it.”

  Redhorn would have made a terrific tour guide. He had a face for poker games and a mind for computer chess. He escorted Harry through the Tuber house as though he’d been doing it for the last twenty-two years. Everywhere Harry looked members of the Palo Alto force were exploring for evidence. There were ballistics people and homicide people and forensics people. What the hell did they need him for?

  The Tuber house, in fact, could have been some ancient archaeological site the way investigators were poring over it. Flashbulbs were popping furiously as police photographers sought to record every possible nook and cranny. Specialists were down on their hands and knees with knives, shredding flakes of dried blood into plastic envelopes which were then labeled and sealed. Others were gouging out chunks of the walls in which bullets were embedded.

  “We’ve questioned the neighbors,” Redhorn was saying. “An elderly couple across the street say they heard some noises around midnight, but they apparently didn’t get out of bed to see what it was. The problem is that this house is located way at the end of the street. As you probably saw when you got here there’s nothing behind the house. Just woods. As for the house right next door, it’s up for sale so no one’s in it.”

  “No witnesses,” Harry said, “and no suspects.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.” Redhorn was guiding Harry up the stairs which were now naked wood, the bloodied carpet having been stripped completely and sent down to the Chem-Toxicology lab for analysis. “While we don’t have any suspects yet we’re waiting word from PATRIC. PATRIC hasn’t failed me yet.”

  PATRIC, Harry remembered, was an acronym for a computer system called Pattern Recognition and Information Correlations. The system contained a vast bank of data on known criminals, MOs, outstanding warrants, stolen vehicles, rap sheets, field reports. If it was fed the right sort of information, in twenty minutes it could come back with a list of possible suspects. But this was not a case where PATRIC could be of any help.

  “The fucking people who did this,
” Harry said, starting grimly at the jagged stain the six-year-old’s blood had made on the wall, “are professionals.”

  “Professionals!” Redhorn scoffed, looking at Harry, probably wondering why they sent somebody like him from the San Francisco office. “Professionals do a much cleaner job. And they don’t generally do a number on kids. It’s my opinion that this is the work of psychopaths, raving lunatics—maybe high on drugs.”

  “You don’t think it has anything to do with the union?”

  “The union, the union. That’s all I ever hear about. This morning when I get here the press is outside screaming about the union. What do I know from unions?”

  Harry understood that in this Palo Alto captain he was not about to discover an ally.

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you. Once we get the results back from ballistics and the serology report we’ll let you know. And I’ll get a copy of the field report to you.”

  “And PATRIC? I’d like to hear what PATRIC has to say.”

  Redhorn didn’t catch the mockery in Harry’s voice. “Oh sure. Absolutely. Fuck-ups who pull this kind of thing, they should stick out like a sore thumb. PATRIC should pick them up pretty quickly.”

  PATRIC didn’t pick up shit, of course. Serology reports showed only blood from the victims was present on the site and none from any perpetrator. The ballistics report revealed that the bullet that had killed Tuber’s son was a 9mm Parabellum cartridge. Otherwise, all the bullets were 2¾-inch, 12-gauge shotshells, fired from Kawaguchiya M-250 autoloading shotguns. The Kawaguchiya, imported through a marketing firm in Tucson, was something of a newcomer to the country. It was hoped that the ones used to murder the Tubers wouldn’t be too difficult to trace. Harry knew better. They’d never find them. It wouldn’t surprise him if the shotguns were back in Japan; who knows, maybe some clowns were using them right now to hold up a Tokyo bank or blast one another away on the Ginza.

  In any case, Harry wasn’t convinced that finding the hit men was the most important part of this case. The hit men were only flunkies, probably imported like the Kawaguchiyas they used. But the man who had employed them, for all his protestations of innocence, that man was right here in San Francisco. Matt Braxton.