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

toward the Information desk slowly. He had had a hard life and a tough case to crack, but he still had eyes and he wasn’t going to waste them.
    One of those mediocre-looking women sat behind the long, light oak Information desk. Harry assured himself that she was probably a lovely, interesting girl once one got to know her, but somehow, all this seething skin exposure made his mind label the bodies around him merely “male” and “female” in self-defense. It was hard to see the flashing legs, tight bums, and wiggling tits stuffed inside all manner of clinging material as human beings. On display as they were, they just became so much meat.
    “Roy Hinkle in this building?” Harry asked the girl.
    “Mr. Hinkle?” the girl echoed, looking down at the typed list on her desk. “Let me see. Just a minute . . .”
    While she checked, Harry turned to scan the lobby again. In the corner a group of students were lounging around watching a six-foot-tall TV projection screen. They were watching the six o’clock local news. A studiedly serious woman reporter was gravely relating the murder of Barbara Steinbrunner while standing in front of the Uhuru house. By the looks of it, she wasn’t the only reporter using Mohamid’s headquarters as a rallying point. The students reacted to the report by reading the Berkeley Barb, talking to each other, picking their noses, and observing other television etiquette. On a campus of over 20,000 it wasn’t likely that more than one person in every fifty knew each other.
    Harry still couldn’t understand why he was so pissed at their reaction, however. What did he want them to do? Scream? Cry? Go running off in all directions? The damn thing was being reported on television—on the same channel that brought them The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo and Diff’rent Strokes. Could he blame them for not taking it as reality? After all, what was he doing? Ogling at flaccid cheeks while a mediocre girl looked up Roy Hinkle.
    “Here it is,” said the girl, pulling Harry out of his fuzzy reverie. “It’s Friday night, so Mr. Hinkle will be at his Independent Filmmakers’ Spectrum series in the AV building.”
    Harry got directions and met Fatso on the Student Union steps. They walked by a few campus stores; each with copies of area newspapers as well as Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Forum, Hustler, Genesis, Variations, Chic, and Cosmopolitan magazines displayed. There was a clothes store with a sale on Calvin Klein, Vidal Sasson, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. And there was a record store with such albums in the window as the latest one from Blondie, Carlene Cash, Tanya Tucker, Pat Benatar, and The Plasmatics. Devlin shook his head in wonder as they reached the Audio-Visual Building.
    They followed directions downstairs into a long hallway with little windows near the top of the walls. They entered Room 27B. Inside was a cork-lined passage dotted by windows that revealed radio and video station setups. The only door open was one all the way down and to the left. Out of it was coming the weirdest noises. Harry and Fatso heard heavy breathing, tinkling sounds like a glass wind chime, and a light, feminine voice singing “La-la-la-la-la.” That was followed by the sound of a small crowd giggling.
    The pair approached the doorway and looked inside. Dozens of students were staring to the left in a dark room with a bluish glow all over them. Harry stuck his head farther into the room. To the left was a small screen. The kids were watching a strange movie. The glimpse Harry got was some huge close-ups of an eye, some piano keys, and the moving spools of a tape recorder.
    “Where’s Roy Hinkle?” he asked the first student in front of him, a sandy-haired, vacuous-looking thin guy. The sandy-haired, vacuous-looking thin guy pointed back at the projector without taking his eyes from the screen. He was smiling all the while.
    Harry rejoined his partner in the hall.
    “What’s going on?” Devlin