Free Dirty Harry 12 - The Dealer of Death by Dane Hartman

assumed she’d fallen asleep. She’d fallen into something much deeper and more permanent than sleep.
    No one in Homicide particularly wanted to deal with this assignment. It was the kind of tawdry mess that Vice usually handled. And with such a scarcity of clues, it was bound to be a frustrating undertaking. Which was why Harry considered it a punishment, Bressler’s way of getting back at him for losing his gun—which was now state’s evidence.
    What was he supposed to do, drive around town, waiting until he stumbled upon two men coaxing an innocent young thing into the car with them? The problem was there wasn’t any law against picking up a single girl, no matter how naive she might be.
    His only recourse seemed to be to interview the women that had gone through the ordeal and see if they remembered some telling details that had escaped them the first time they were questioned.
    He decided to start with Marietta Hamalian who, according to the original case officer, was the most reliable witness of the half dozen women known to have been kidnapped by the mysterious pair.
    Harry found her waitressing in a bar not far from the celebrated corner of Haight and Ashbury. The bar once catered to hippies who dwelled in the area, but lately it had switched its clientele to the Perrier and quiche crowd. Its windows harbored a great many tropical looking plants.
    Marietta was a petite, washed-out woman of about twenty-five. She had a booming voice that was surprising coming from someone so tiny. It was a voice that could be heard over the clatter of dishes and pans in the kitchen in back. There was a smell of spilled beer and grease in the air.
    Marietta did not appreciate having to speak to Harry. Especially she did not appreciate talking about an incident she obviously preferred keeping in the back of her mind.
    “I told that other guy . . .”
    “Officer Cox?”
    “Cox, right. I told him all I could remember. What are you coming around with this shit again for?”
    Harry knew better than to argue with her. Calmly, he told her it was possible she might have thought of something she’d forgotten to mention the first time. “What might seem trivial to you might turn out to be important to us.
    The girl didn’t look convinced.
    “Now, what do you recall about these two guys who picked you up?”
    “Just what I told Cox. Nothing special, you know. Two guys, not bad-looking, not great, but not bad-looking. One’s white, about six feet tall, the other’s black, a little taller. I thought, you know, what the hell? They’re just a couple of guys in their twenties tooling around in a pink MG looking for fun. They had a great sense of humor, you know, and when they wanted to they could really turn on the charm.”
    Some sense of humor, Harry was thinking.
    “And where did you meet them?”
    “I told Cox,” she protested again. “At the Annex.”
    The Annex on Fillmore was a well-known singles bar, and investigators had gone there and made inquiries, but they didn’t get anywhere. Whoever these two men were, they made a point to keep moving. There was no instance of their returning to the same place twice.
    “And they said they had a country place, is that it?”
    “That’s right. They said there was a party going and would I like to come? How did I know what kind of party it was going to be?”
    She gazed at Harry with defiance as if to say that her actions needed no excuse.
    “All right. You said that it was a house, but that they took you underground? A cellar was it?”
    “No, not a cellar. I told Cox it wasn’t any cellar. It was like one of those things Hitler had, the one he offed himself in . . .”
    “A bunker you mean?”
    “That’s right, a bunker.”
    Now that was interesting. She’d not said anything about a bunker-like structure in the initial questioning. “How did you recognize it was a bunker?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. It had these big heavy metal doors, and you wouldn’t find them in any