Interface (Crime Masterworks) (12 page)

‘For God’s sake, Robin—’

‘Twelve, thirteen centuries ago, baby. I’m old. Ancient. Burned out. Time?’

Before he could check, she twisted his thick wrist so they could read his watch together.

‘Two-thirty-three,’ she said.

She walked away from him without a tremor of hesitation, pulled open the dresser drawer which contained her treasures. She set aside the handkerchief-wrapped syringe very gingerly, as if it were fragile crystal. Then she quickly and efficiently arranged her matches, her candle, her bent tablespoon. These defined her physical world, these were her Shakespeare folio, her Gauguin original, her Hope Diamond.

Without being bidden, Docker got the baggie of heroin and the syringe from the bed. He set the attaché case on the floor.

Robin heaped the tablespoon three-fourths full of the terrific jolt of white powder. She added water at the sink, returned to move it gently over the candle flame. As she worked, she talked, her voice almost sprightly, snatches of poetry, the Shakespeare line about motive and cue for passion.

In a suddenly flat rational tone, she demanded, ‘How pure?’

‘Ninety-five percent.’

A shiver ran through her, whether from anticipation or fear or merely from bare feet on cold linoleum was impossible to tell. She tipped up the spoon, filled the opened ten-cc syringe.

‘The hottest shot in the world. The ultimate flash. My usual is five percent.’ Her eyes glittered. She was sweating badly, pouring sweat; great moons of dampness had appeared under the arms of the flannel nightgown.

‘Be by me, darling,’ she said.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, holding the hypo in her left hand as her right delicately began working to bring up the veins. She was so totally absorbed in this that it was obvious her absorption was spurious, or rather was intensified so as to shut out all other thought.

Docker had no such anaesthesia. Sweat poured off him to equal hers. In a hoarse voice he said, ‘Robin …’

She shook her head. Her tongue came out one corner of her mouth in concentration. She switched the syringe to her right hand, then, with the suddenness of a fisherman gaffing a shark, she rammed the needle into her arm.

‘Got it, first try!’ she exclaimed.

She did not yet depress the plunger. She laid back on the balled-up pillow and looked at Docker almost joyfully. In her movements had been none of the hesitation which had seduced Kolinski into injecting her that morning.

‘Two months I pretended to dislike the needle. A lot of hypes really do, you know.’ She met his eyes almost mockingly. ‘Darling, I’d do it if you were here or not. Accept that. The only difference is that it’d be wasted.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Time?’

Docker had been sidling closer. Unthinking, concealed desperation glinted in his eyes. He turned the action of checking his watch into a sudden lunge for the syringe. His hand was still a dozen inches from it when her thumb rammed the plunger home. Her body arched slightly.

‘Are you in such a hurry for me to … oh! Oh, Jesus Christ! It’s beautiful! It’s pure … pure …’

Her face now wore a look of utter ecstasy. Her hand was already relaxing on the syringe. Her feet were drooping outward as the muscles of her calves and ankles relaxed.

‘So … so sleepy-tired!’

‘Robin. Oh, Jesus, Robin …’

Her face was relaxing, smoothing out. Her eyes under suddenly sleepy lids were now very clear. The angles of her face were elegant and fine and altogether lovely.

‘Shleepy,’ she said gaily. ‘Sh-h-h …’ She raised her head with an effort. ‘I don’t love you, you know, darling. Not anymore. We just … You …’ She stopped as if she would not be able to speak again. Then she said in an abrupt clear surprised voice, ‘Who would have believed it’d all … all shlip … all … away …’

Her head rolled sideways on the pillow. Her right hand fell laxly away from the hypo, so it flopped over against her arm, the needle still sticking in her vein and raising a long narrow ugly blue-looking welt of flesh with its imbedded length. Her breathing was regular but already growing shallow.

Docker stared down at her with a shocked look on his face, as if he could not believe the speed with which the deadly infusion was working. In a tight, agonized voice, he said, ‘Jesus, oh, Jesus, Robin, what have we … Wasn’t there any …’

His voice died away. There was no response, no movement from the girl on the bed. Her breathing had lengthened further, was becoming labored. At that instant the needle, responding to gravity and its own weight, slid from her arm. It fell past the edge of the bed.

Docker moved with dazzling speed, his hand shooting down and out and snapping shut around it just as it touched the floor. It had no chance to break. He straightened slowly with it clutched in his gloved fingers. He was breathing heavily. His eyes looked as if he wanted to scream. Yet by catching the hypo before it could smash on the floor he seemed to have made his ultimate acceptance.

For some minutes he stood unmoving above her, watching her chest continue to stir under the faded flannel. He stooped, laid a hand on her ribs, pressed delicately up under the meager flaccid globe of her left breast.

‘
Presque morte
,’ he said in soft sorrow. The two isolated French words had a finality that their English equivalents lacked. Nearly dead. He seemed to be searching for the hard edge of that finality.

Docker drew a deep breath that was also a sob, came erect, then bent once more to touch his lips to hers. They were warm and yielding, as if she were dropping into sleep instead of death.

He said, ‘Goodbye, Robin.’

He crossed quickly to the dresser, picked up the handkerchief and its burden the way he would have picked up a primed charge of
plastique
. He held it beside her left elbow, then let the handkerchief drop open so the syringe fell on the floor where the other would have struck if he had not intercepted it.

Docker stepped back, regarded the scene critically, then carefully toed the syringe a little further under the bed where it would not be instantly apparent to anyone entering the room. He was working with fine tolerances now.

Docker opened his attaché case without lifting it from the floor, put in the hypo which had killed her, withdrew a banded sheaf of bills. They were hundreds, fifty of them. His gloved fingers laid them on the corner of the dresser.

One last quick look around the room.

Breeze gently stirring the dirty lace curtains, very slightly guttering the candle on the dresser top. Sunlight gone from the mellowed brick wall opposite. Spoon. Ripped baggie which had brought her the death she sought.

He looked at his watch. He touched nothing except his attaché case and the doorknob going out. He left the room, the building, by the same route he had entered, like a cloud passing from the pale face of the moon. The goose-plump black girl using the pay phone at the far end of the hall did not see him go. No one saw him go.

It was 2:47
P
.
M
.

E
lided syllables made the voice on the phone as rich as chicken gumbo.

‘Mist’ Kolinski you gotta come over here right quick—’

‘What? Who the hell—’

‘This here’s Daphne. At the hotel? It’s Miss Robin. Mist’ Kolinski, she …’ The voice paused, became suddenly intimate with puzzlement or dread. ‘He was
here
! Dat man. Dat man who
limps
. He was in her room, I seen him …’

Kolinski’s hand mauled the receiver as if it were Docker’s neck. Kolinski’s own voice sounded strangled.

‘Is … he
still
there?’

‘He surely isn’t. But when I seen him go by de desk, I went down to Miss Robin’s room ’cause I was scared … I mean, Mist’ Kolinski, she was askin’ me ’bout whether I know which girl was with him las’ week, an’ …’ Her voice quavered with terror at his possible displeasure. ‘An’ Mist’ Kolinski, it was Miss Robin he was with last week!’

‘You fucking black bitch, what are you telling me?’ His voice snapped Hariss erect, alert.

‘She’s …’ The Dixie voice got even closer to the phone, so it had the intimacy of intercourse to Kolinski’s ear. ‘She’s done shot herse’f up, Mist’ Kolinski! She’s already goin’ on the nod, an’ she
laughin
’. She sayin’ you gonna have to wait for her to come down off her high ’fore she tell you where he’s at. An’ she say you gonna have to beg her …’

‘You fucking cunt!’ Kolinski screamed at her.

He slammed down the receiver, twisted toward the door. Hariss was in his way. Hariss put a small beautifully-groomed hand on his chest. It stopped Kolinski like a log through the windshield.

‘Get hold of yourself.’

‘Docker was just up at that fucking Robin’s room! The nigger cunt spotted him sneaking out, and …’ He was fighting for control and ramming his arms into his overcoat. ‘… and after he left, that fucking bitch shot herself up.’

‘And?’ Hariss’ voice was ominous.

‘Robin told the spade she knew where he had gone but that I was going to have to crawl to get the information.’

Hariss quoted drily, ‘“I own her.” You ignorant, strutting animal! You …’ He stopped, shook his head almost in admiration. ‘Strong genes. Her father’s daughter …’

Kolinski was once more at the door. ‘What pisses me, Walt, I left her those two extra bindles of shit this morning myself. So she could use them to …’ Flecks of spittle had appeared at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were quite mad. His hands convulsed themselves like dogs fucking. ‘She figures because she’ll be on the nod before I get there—’

‘Alex.’

‘I’ll get her awake and I’ll—’

‘
Alex!
’ The importer’s tone slashed through his rage. Kolinski tried to meet the other’s eyes, couldn’t.

He growled, ‘Goddammit, Walt, I—’

‘Crawl for her, Alex, if that is what is necessary.’

Kolinski drew a deep breath. His rage was passing. He nodded. ‘Yeah. Okay. Whatever I have to do to find out where he is. But afterwards …’

‘Of course. Afterwards.’ As Kolinski started for the door, Hariss added, ‘One further point.’

‘Christ, Walt, I gotta—’

‘The point is that Docker has a car. Yet he pauses to confer with a junkie whore with whom he casually slept a few nights before.’

‘Well?’

‘Why hasn’t he gotten out of town?’

The two men stared at one another with a recognition dawning between them. Mixed in with the struggling comprehension were the first hints of personal fear. It was Hariss who voiced it.

‘Docker?’ he whispered. ‘And Robin? And what does he want?’

Kolinski blustered, ‘When I get through with that bitch, we’ll have a lot of answers.’

His voice was that of a boy drawing a line in the dirt and daring a bigger boy to step over it. The lights of the small office raised a sheen of perspiration on Walter Hariss’ heavy features.

At the same moment Kolinski stormed out, Docker lowered the wrist with the watch on it so he could look through the smeary front window of the narrow pensioners’ hotel directly across from 517 Jones. That was the address of the second-floor hotel in which Robin Stayton had just completed her dying.

Docker dropped a dime, dialled. His eyes were intense behind their hornrims, his lips were pursed almost as if he were counting. The pay phone was isolated in the front corner of the lobby, well away from the old men watching the afternoon soaps on the lobby TV. By merely switching his gaze downhill through the smeared window, to the coffee shop on the far corner of the O’Farrell Street intersection, he could see his quarry.

In the front booth were a red-haired man and a black-haired man, the redhead in profile and the other with his back to the window.

The phone was ringing. Docker was chewing on a wad of toilet paper. Through the window he could see the coffee shop’s Chinese waitress reach under the counter to pick up the receiver.

‘There should be two men sitting in the window booth drinking coffee,’ said Docker, as if he were not where he could see them himself. His voice labored like an asthmatic’s around the wad of moist paper. ‘One of them should be a red-headed Irishman—’

‘Say, who is this? What do you—’

‘The other should be a Jap. Tell the Jap he’s got a phone call.’

He watched the waitress pause, decide, lay the receiver against her breast so he could no longer hear her breathing or her voice as she leaned across the counter. Her mouth moved. The back of Henry Tekawa’s sleek black head jerked to her words. He stood swiftly, went to the counter and put one knee on a deserted stool so he could lean forward to take the receiver.

‘Tekawa,’ he said.

‘Docker again.’

Tekawa had a voice as smooth as butter, totally unaccented. He was third-generation American. He said, ‘Mr Docker, my partner and I have wasted almost forty-five minutes drinking lousy coffee in a crummy cafe because—’

‘Shut up!’ The viciousness in Docker’s voice came through the wad of paper. Quasi-hysteria joined it there. ‘You fucking cops are always the same! Lean on everybody, always lean on people! Only now I’m doing the leaning. I hang up this fucking phone and you’re fucked, Tekawa. Got that?’

‘I could hardly miss it.’ Tekawa’s voice was light, almost humorous. He turned and scanned the street casually through the window, took in the enormously fat man in a light-colored sport coat who was wedged into the public phone booth on the other side of O’Farrell. ‘You called me yesterday, Docker, said—’

‘I’m doing the talking,’ cried Docker. Tension whined in his voice. He too could see the fat man in the phone booth. He paused, so when the fat man gestured again he could speak in rhythm with the gesture. ‘I’m offering you a big bust, Tekawa, and you come on cop-heavy with me …’

‘A drug bust, I believe you said yesterday?’

‘It’s bigger than that today.’

Tekawa moved his eyes to his red-headed partner and back to the fat man in the phone booth. As he did, an aging queer with a slack mouth and avid eyes and dandruff on the shoulders of his black ribbed sweater came out of the liquor store a few steps from the fat man’s phone booth.

‘Bigger?’ prompted Tekawa.

‘Murder,’ said Docker.