The Eighty-eighth Key Ch. 07

part one

chapter seven

Harry Callahan's return from Southeast Asia marked the beginning of a cold, dark and bitter period in his life, a time marked most of all by very personal loneliness. His mother was gone and his father slipped in and out of anger and depression; worst of all his father rarely visited these days, not even when he'd just returned from sea. Harry went by the house from time to time and every time he found the yard an overgrown mess. It still hurt to see the Everson house next door, too, and he dreaded making the trip out to his old home for that reason more than any other. He would fight past the memories, past the tattered For Sale sign to the front porch and peer in the glass, not quite knowing what he'd find inside beyond heartache and broken dreams. Some trips his father was home and he must have seen Harry over there and he'd come out and meet him in the yard and they'd be angry and depressed together before heading to a seafood shack down on the wharf. They'd drown all their misgivings in schooners of cold beer while talking about how there was nothing better in life than fresh, hot onion rings and a fresh bottle of ketchup. Nothing much mattered at that point; life seemed over and done with, just one more thing that had passed them by on the way to nowhere.

Harry slipped into all the routines on the street like he had never left the city. All the same problems were still out there, waiting, only now Callahan had a little less patience for what felt like petty bullshit calls at four in the morning. A few weeks after his return to the street he responded to yet another family disturbance, and when he went up to the door he was met at the door by a belligerent, knife wielding drunk. The man started cursing Callahan, and Harry simply tossed the man aside and walked into the apartment, found the man's wife crumpled on the floor, her face a pulpy mass of bleeding contusions. Then the drunk was in the doorway, yelling at Callahan about his rights as a citizen and how he was 'gonna sue your ass into the ground' when Callahan turned around and looked at the man.

Who saw the look in Callahan's eyes and stopped talking.

The drunk still had the same knife in hand when Callahan walked up to him, and Callahan unholstered his Smith & Wesson and beat the man's face until it looked something like his wife's, then he dragged the man out into the street and kicked him in the groin once before dragging the writhing form over to a huge commercial trash dumpster. Callahan picked up the man and tossed him inside, then went back and picked the woman off the floor and carried her to San Francisco General, leaving the three other responding officer slack-jawed by their patrol cars.

He'd never said a word. Not one.

And pretty soon word got out, went around precinct houses and neighborhoods like a wild fire.

Don't fuck with Callahan.

When Harry worked a beat the word quickly got out: neighborhoods suddenly grew quiet. Anyone dumb enough to create a disturbance soon went to the School of Callahan; and so-called men stupid enough to beat-up on their wives or girlfriends soon met with the same fate as that first drunk.

And soon enough word spread throughout the detective division, too.

Deep Night shifts, the overnight shift that typically stretches from midnight to eight in the morning, tend to operate under rules all their own, at least they did out in the real world beyond the courts, judges and lawyers that defined the other side of the criminal justice equation in the 60s and 70s, and San Francisco tended to operate somewhere way beyond 'nice and proper' those days. And that was not taking into account cops like Callahan, who seemed to operate with huge chips on their shoulders -- on their good days.

Then one night while Callahan was out patrolling a residential neighborhood around four in the morning he passed a streetlight and saw a blanket in the shadows. He stopped and looked at it -- until it moved, anyway -- then he radioed in and stopped to check it out.

He found a little girl maybe five years old wrapped-up in a tattered, flea-infested blanket and he parted the rancid fabric, found the girl was naked, her body covered with bruises and what looked like little burn marks. Callahan had seen these burns before, and too many times to count by then; they were made by someone holding a burning cigarette up to the skin and pressing in just hard enough to broil the tissue underneath, but this little girl's body was literally covered with them -- even her eyelids.

Callahan picked-up the little girl, heedless of the fleas and other crawling things all over the blanket, then he cupped the girls face and whispered to her: "Can you hear me? Just move your eyes if you can."

"It hurts," the girl said, her voice a faint trembling remnant of someone long past gone.

"My name is Harry, and I'm a police officer. What's your name?"

"Susan," came the withered, brittle reply.

"Well Susan, you're going to be okay now. We're going to take care of you, but first I need you to show me where you live. Can you do that for me?"

She pointed to a house across the street.

"The one with the blue roof?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Who did this to you? Do you know?"

She nodded her head. "Todd did it. He's my mommy's boyfriend." She seemed to tremble a little more, then she held up her head. "Are you Officer Callahan?" she asked.

"I sure am, Honey."

She smiled as she drifted off, as back-up units pulled up behind his patrol car.

"Get an ambulance," Callahan growled, handing off the little girl to another officer as he started across the street...

...right about the time a new homicide detective named Carl Stanton pulled up on the scene. He had heard all the stories about Callahan and knew the score, so when he'd heard the call come out he knew Callahan had found something, so he raced to the scene. Still, he kept to the shadows and watched...

...as Callahan crossed the street, walked up the stoop and politely knocked on the door.

Stanton saw the shotgun barrel, but not before Callahan -- who grabbed the end of the barrel as he kicked the door in, and in one continuous motion slammed the butt of the shotgun into his would-be-assailants face. Stanton ran up to the porch and got there just in time to see Callahan stick the end of the barrel in a man's mouth -- then pull the trigger.

There was a muffled 'woompf', and about all Carl Stanton saw was a pink mist in the air, then a scorched piece of carpet where the man's head had been. Stanton walked into the house, then went room-to-room until he found a woman's body in the little bathroom, her battered body a bloody mess, curled up and lifeless in the dingy bathtub.

As a detective who had 'on-viewed' the incident, Stanton was the senior officer on-scene so it was his call now, his report to make, so he walked over to Callahan and took the Winchester pump from him and laid it across a chair...then he looked into Callahan's eyes...

...and saw tears behind a veil of rage...

A sergeant walked in, saw Harry then the detective. "You got this, Carl?"

Stanton nodded. "Call Dell, would you. And get a CSU headed this way."

"Right."

But then Callahan turned and walked from the little house, then across the street to the little girl. He took her and held her close until the ambulance came, then he got in back with her and rode with her to the hospital, holding her close all the way. Only after she'd been checked-in and turned over to the docs did he return to the scene, but by that point Dell Delgetti and Frank Bullitt had already come and gone.

Stanton turned his report over to Bullitt, who read it over then carried it upstairs to the captain in command, Sam Bennett.

Bennett read the report, then looked up at Bullitt. "So, he's the real deal?"

"I think so, yeah."

"Well, keep an eye on him. He's supposed to take the sergeant's exam next month, so if he does good on that you go ahead and start the background check. Keep me posted, Frank."

+++++

Callahan aced the exam and reported to Academy for another round of classwork, then was back out on the street a month later. Still, he soon found that supervisory work left him feeling cold and more than a little useless. He started jumping calls, backing up rookies on hot disturbances whenever he could, but by then Bullitt had picked up all the signs. Callahan had probably seen too much in 'Nam, and probably done too much over there to ever fully recover, and he told Captain Bennett as much after he reached that conclusion.

"Have you read his jacket, Frank? Because I don't think it's that simple. Yeah, there's something burning the kid up inside, but I'm not sure it happened over there."

Bullitt nodded. "So, you want me to sit down with him?"

Bennett thought for a minute, then shook his head. "Pick him up and bring him over for hot dogs. This Saturday, after the game."

"Got it."

+++++

When Callahan got up that morning he knew something deep inside had changed; sometime in the night -- with Cat snuggled-in tight -- before the tears came -- when he'd been awash in the ebb and flow of hot-fingered guilt. Smokey bile from the Caravelle crept into his consciousness when echoes of his Looney-Junes tried to push everything else away, leaving the present on very uncertain ground. He listened to her breathing not really sure whose breath he heard -- until memory returned as vast and clear as the green sheet pulled over June's face.

He tried to fight it...that feeling of anomie he felt when thoughts of seeing her in the hospital basement that last time. That always pushed everything else aside. Standing their between the only two fathers he'd ever really known, his and June's, he'd felt like an intruder, someone who'd stolen away the best years of all their lives and tried to keep everything for himself...

...and that hadn't worked out so well, had it?

Their last summer together had grown in his mind ever since into something beyond the mythical, into something more like an Arcadian landscape by one of the Hudson River painters that June gravitated to when they went to museums. But by then everything had been twisted and turned in on itself, blasted into something beyond the merely symbolic a year later, but maybe that was because everything seemed to fall apart on a crisp November morning when three bullets rang out from a school book depository in Dallas, just as the president's motorcade passed alongside Dealey Plaza. They heard about it in the library and June fell into his arms, sobbing along with a few others who suddenly felt adrift in a world they no longer recognized.

But all that mythical stuff was a world away now, one that this Cat knew nothing about, and despite his sudden reawakening he sat in the darkness coming to the realization that he knew less than nothing about this girl. How could you love someone you didn't even know? What alien substance had invaded his mind and turned off his ability to think? Was that, in the end, what love was? Hormonally induced moral incapacitation?

And just then he'd looked at little sandalwood-scented candles scattered around her tiny room, at all the amber shadows moving to a stilled heartbeat far, far away from this time and space. She would never leave, he knew then; she would follow him wherever he went...no matter how far away he tried to run. There would be no coming to terms with June's past. She wouldn't let that happen now.

When Cat woke she lay in bed looking at this stranger, and her feelings could not have been more different. She saw a kind-hearted man, strong enough to carry her into a lifetime of happiness, and she loved the feeling inside when she looked at him. It was a soft thing that glowed, something at once new and familiar, like this round-eye had discovered the secret way to her happy place, and that was enough for her.

So when he talked of things like love and marriage she knew what he said was true because, she told him, she felt those things too.

So he told her he would come visit her soon, as soon as he could, and she believed him.

And two weeks later he came back to her, though he seemed to possess a very different soul that time. He seemed tired, maybe even more than tired. Like he had seen things no human being should ever see, and when he went away that time he promised to come back and she was happy he said the words but still not quite so sure what those words really meant.

Yet when he came back a month later his spirit was bright and full of laughter, maybe because that other round-eye, the crazy doctor, was with him. They all went out to dinner together and she helped them see some of the things around her city that were still beautiful and clean. They spent a day walking through markets and eating local treats from open stall vendors, and Harry took pictures of her...dozens of pictures, which somehow made her happier than she had ever felt before. No one had ever shown such interest or thought her important enough to photograph, and suddenly being regarded as such left her feeling dizzily exotic, beyond the merely special she had felt before.

Before Harry left that time he said he might be coming back very soon, that he might be returning home to America much sooner than expected, and that there were things he needed to tell her. How he planned to take her to America, how they would make a life together in San Francisco, and what mattered was how his words shattered her expectations of the future, left her feeling once again more than merely special. She felt like she was the center of someone's universe again, like there was a molten mass of hot stars gathering in her breast, and after he left that time wild dreams filled her sleep. Dreams of an unknown land, dreams of an impossible future. He wrote down things he said she should have, gave her papers she could show people, and then he was gone.

Gone.

Only this time he did not come back.

+++++

Harry sat for the detectives exam after his return from Israel and, not unexpectedly, he scored top marks once again. He would once again return to the Academy and begin coursework in Methods and Procedure if, that is, he decided to take the position offered.

He wasn't so sure he would.

He liked working patrol, and in a way it was all he'd ever aspired to. Captain Briggs had tried to recruit him to join Traffic Division, but that meant working on motorcycles and writing tickets all day, and the idea bored him just thinking about it. What, he wondered, was so bad about wanting to stay in patrol?

Maybe Bullitt had some idea of the doubts nipping at Callahan's heels, because he dropped by more than once -- with Cathy -- and she asked him to play the piano before they asked him out to dinner. Frank hoped it was a soft-sell, too; he didn't want to come across as desperate but Homicide had recently experienced a lot of trouble getting quality personnel into the division. For whatever reason, Captain Bennett seemed to think Callahan would be a good fit, but after going over Stanton's report, Bullitt now had serious misgivings.

A few weeks after the exam Callahan responded to a medical welfare concern down in the warehouse district adjacent to the waterfront east of Fisherman's Wharf. A group of dockworkers arriving for their morning shift had heard screaming in the roach-motel next door and called it in; Callahan was first on scene and he talked to the men and soon had an idea where to look. He called-in the information and ran into the hotel next door...

There was no one behind the filthy desk, nothing visible at all except some rancid smelling fried chicken on a desk behind the counter, then he heard another scream, a woman's scream, and he bolted up the stairs two at a time. He heard an old man telling the girl to not move, and to 'shut up or else' -- then Callahan kicked-in the door and burst inside what looked like a makeshift hospital room.

The girl on the bed had her feet up in makeshift stirrups and the old man looked up, surprise on his face, as the blood drained from Callahan's face.

He saw a young girl in the process of having an abortion, some sort of squalid looking instrument inserted in her vagina, and in a small bedroom off this sitting room Callahan saw two more girls curled up in fetal positions, moaning in fever-soaked agony.

"Get out of here, you fucking moron," the abortionist cried, "before I call your supervisor!"

"Whatever you're doing," Callahan sighed, his voice now a deadly coiling hiss, "stop it right now. Clean her up, and do it quickly."

"Fuck off, you imbecile!"

Callahan unholstered his Smith & Wesson and walked up to the man, shoving the end of the barrel into his right ear so forcefully it began to bleed. "Do it now, while you still can."

"Go to hell!"

Moving with a preternatural calm, Callahan holstered his weapon and the man smiled, then Callahan asked the man his name.

"Barton, and the chief is a friend of mine, so you'd better watch your ass."

Callahan's eyes flickered when he heard the name, then he grabbed the man by the nape of the neck and by the waistband of his trousers, lifted him from the floor and ran with him towards the room's only window, an ancient, double hung wooden unit that had seen better days fifty years earlier.

Then he tossed the man through the glass, head first.

People down at street level looked up at the sound of shattering glass and saw a middle-aged man crashing through a shattered fifth-floor window and screaming as he tumbled through the air, landing in a pulpy heap atop an old green VW Beetle. Callahan came out of the hotel a minute or so later and walked over to his patrol car and talked on the radio, then he walked over to the bleeding ruins to feel for a pulse. A moment later he stood, satisfied, and did his best to make sure no one saw his grin.

Delgetti and Bullitt were the first detectives on scene, and by then Frank knew the score, knew about Callahan's girlfriend's abortion during their senior year of high school. He could guess how Callahan felt generally, and what must've coursed through his mind's eye when he opened the door and found that butcher at work.

He took Callahan to his car and they sat inside. Bullitt saw Harry's hands up close then, the bruised finger-tips, the ragged tremble of shock setting in.

"So Harry, the way I see it you might get a clever defense attorney to get you to plead temporary insanity, and who knows...that might work..."

Harry's eyes flickered as he came back to reality.

"The other option is simpler. Are you listening?"

Callahan nodded. "Yeah."

"So, you heard a woman scream and kicked in the door. Right?"

"Yup."

"And that's when the man ran and jumped out the window, right?"

"What?"

"Listen to me Callahan. That's when the bastard made a run for it. He must've forgotten he was up on a high floor. Got it?"

Harry turned and looked at Frank, only now Delgetti and Stanton were huddled there in the doorway, listening.

"Actually, Frank," Delgetti chirped, "I was about five feet behind Callahan, and that's exactly what happened. Right Harry? About five steps behind you, all the way up the stairs."

"You got that, Callahan?" Bullitt added. "Five steps, all the way up."

Callahan looked at Bullitt, then at Dell and Carl. "He's the one, Frank. He's the one who did it."

"Did what, Harry?" Callahan's face was ghostly now, his eyes a blank canvas.

"He's the one who killed June."

Bullitt turned to Delgetti when he heard that. "Bring his car in; I'm taking him to Bennett's office for now. We'll let internal affairs have at him when he's settled down."

"They're not gonna like it, Frank."

"Fuck 'em."

Callahan finished his stint at the Academy three months later. As usual, top in his class.