Free Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death by Dane Hartman Page A

replacing their common sense, Harry realized. Just as expressionlessly, the cop turned and walked out.
    “Open and shut. Clear as day.”
    Fatso Devlin was going through his inventory of crime clichés as he drove toward the University of California campus at Berkeley.
    “Easy as pie. Nothing to it.”
    “Either get on with your theory or shut the fuck up,” Harry suggested from the passenger seat, one hand over his eyes.
    “You’re definitely losing your warmth and sensitivity, Harry,” Devlin chortled as they passed over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge onto Route 80 north.
    “What I’d like to lose is my warehouse of fat fuzz waiting to quip me to death every time I pull time with them.”
    “Don’t you like me or Frank DiGeorgio?”
    “If I don’t get the fat guinea, I get the fat mick,” Harry snarled. “Either way I lose.”
    “Now there’s the tender sentimentalist I know and love,” Devlin laughed.
    “I wish DiGeorgio wasn’t on vacation now,” Harry continued seriously, looking out the window for the Telegraph Avenue exit. “He knew about the ‘Enforcer’ investigation.”
    “He ought to know,” Devlin mentioned. “He’s got a knife scar from his cock to his navel to prove it. Besides, what more do we need to know? Mohamid and his boys get a little hot, send a letter to the papers, get a little horny, and get caught with the corpse.”
    “He’s not that stupid.”
    “Hey, Harry, no big deal. Everything goes fine until one of his boys gets a little queasy from all the gang-raping. He gets guilty, calls in a tip, and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, case closed.”
    “You keep talking like that,” Harry warned. “And they’re gonna promote you to captain.”
    The University of California at Berkeley was a solid West Coast establishment—laid back, spread open, and overpopulated. There were more than 20,000 students, many of them the glowing blond coeds that the Beach Boys and Sunkist Orange Soda commercials made famous. As the cop car pulled onto Bancroft Way, Harry marveled at the nearly stunning display of flesh in the early evening light. Tank tops, cutoffs, jogging shorts, swimsuits, elastic tube tops, slit skirts, designer jeans, high heels, roller skates, radios, leotards, boots, string bikini bras, and T-shirts of all kinds.
    Ripped T-shirts, white T-shirts, net T-shirts, and T-shirts with such subtle messages emblazoned across the chests as “Good and Plenty,” “Foxy Mama,” “Mounds-Indescribably Delicious,” “Lawyers Do it in Their Briefs,” and “Stick in Your Tongue, You’re Drooling on My Shirt.” Occasionally these 100 percent cotton tops were stuck into shiny spandex pants. The main effect was that the cops had just died and gone to voyeur heaven. Harry remembered the times during the “Scorpio Sniper” case when he found himself looking in windows with binoculars during a stake-out and seeing the most interesting of things. The way things looked here, he wouldn’t need the binoculars anymore.
    “Find a place to park,” Callahan instructed as the car slowed down in front of the Student Union. “I’ll go in and try to find . . . ?”
    “Hinkle,” Devlin told him. “Roy Hinkle is . . . uh . . . was her counselor.”
    “Hinkle. Right.” Harry pushed open the car door and hopped out without Fatso having to stop. He paused on the steps of the Union and looked down the street both ways. Down one direction he saw a variety of book stores. Down the other way he saw a long, squat building. At the very edge of the building was the left side of a small shack. The rest of the dilapidated shed was masked by the building. Having gotten his bearings, Harry went inside.
    The parade of feminine flesh continued unabated inside. There had to be mediocre women and men on the campus, but they were very hard to notice among the good-lookers. Almost everyone had something to show off and they were doing their best to spotlight their highlights. Harry made his way