Interface (Crime Masterworks) (7 page)

‘Or Mars in somebody’s seventh house with Venus ascending, or the wrong dragonfly getting stuck in amber back in the Carboniferous era. Who the hell knows what operates on people?’ His voice got irritated. ‘Who even knows what anyone else is ever really thinking?’

Stayton nodded heavily. ‘I see. Somebody’s bought you off. I’m to get unsupported statements of Roberta’s condition, vague generalities. No names, of course, nobody I can go after and—’

‘You had a chauffeur three or four years ago named Kolinski.’ Neil Fargo’s color had heightened at Stayton’s charges, but he gave no other signs of having heard them. Stayton was shocked at the detective’s statement.

‘Alex Kolinski? You can’t be serious. To suggest that Alex—’

‘He’s the one who hooked her. Gave her the first fix a year, fourteen months ago. That’s why she was such a good girl for so long, staying off the sauce and acting like dear mommy to the brat. She disappeared four months ago because Kolinski suddenly cut off her supply and you had cut off her allowance so she couldn’t buy elsewhere. Then you wait until just three weeks ago to call
me
in—’

‘Kolinski doesn’t have the brains to—’

‘He’s not a stupid man, or an unfeeling one. He never was. You knew he was sleeping with her while he worked here; why in hell didn’t it ever come up any of the times you sent me out looking for her? I’ve known for a couple of years that Kolinski’s been a small-time H pusher.’

‘Pulled him off her myself, once, in his room up over the garage.’ Stayton was abstracted; he apparently had begun to believe Neil Fargo. ‘You’re saying he hooked her now because I threw him out then …’

‘That wasn’t why he went after her. You know how she always was. Kicks. The chauffeur …’ He made a gesture both cruel and illustrative at the same time. It had a startlingly feminine quality, as did his voice; he was an excellent mimic. ‘“Just too
heavy
, man, daddy’s
chau
ffeur …” He planned for years, I imagine, to humiliate her. Then somebody made it financially worthwhile.’

Stayton missed the cue, for the moment; his thoughts were turned inward. ‘She took you over the jumps once, too, didn’t she, Neil? I’d forgotten that. Might not have been such a bad thing at that – though Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it.’ He shook his handsome grey head. ‘Women forget so damned easy! What was
I
when Dorothy married me, for Chrissake? A fucking longshoreman’s kid with a football scholarship.’ Steel came back into his eyes. ‘So this fucker Kolinski hooked my daughter. We’ll unhook her. Methadone treatments, Synanon—’

‘Your daughter isn’t chipping, for God’s sake! She’s hooked. You know what that means? Five cc’s a pop, three times a day. If you
could
get her to quit, what you got back wouldn’t be … Besides, why do you think Kolinski cut her supply in the first place? To get her out of your house, out in the open where she could be controlled, eventually manipulated. He didn’t dream all that up by himself.’

Stayton’s voice tightened further. ‘There’s someone else?’

‘A Battery Street importer named Walter Hariss,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘He and Kolinski have a number of investments together. A garage in Bush Street, maybe a couple of cheap hotels in the Tenderloin.’

‘I never even heard of Walter Hariss. What—’

‘It isn’t personal with him. He’s got a wife, teen-age daughter – good family man. He wants to be big. He saw potential when he learned Kolinski was still in touch with your daughter. I think he’s the one suggested hooking her. He makes fifty, seventy-five gee a year, thinks he can get his hooks into the Stayton empire through Roberta to make that half a mil a year.’

‘I want him destroyed.’

‘Legitimately?’ Neil Fargo shook his head. ‘He’s a master at never doing anything that would incriminate himself personally.’

‘I’ve paid you a lot of money to get my daughter back, Fargo,’ said the industrialist icily. ‘I want her saved. I want those men destroyed.’

Neil Fargo said nothing. His face was set, stubborn. He laid his file folder on the corner of the immense hardwood desk.

Stayton said, like a bidder at an art auction, ‘Once Roberta is back, I will need a right-hand man. He will name his own salary …’

He stopped because Neil Fargo had laughed out loud.

‘I wouldn’t fit into your operation, Max. I’ve got
nostalgie de la boue
.’

‘A craving for the gutter? Perhaps. You’re at home in it.’

Neil Fargo sneered, ‘So’s your daughter.’ His eyes were furious. ‘It took God six fucking days to create the universe, you want two men destroyed—’ he snapped his fingers ‘—like that. Do I get Sunday off?’

Stayton swallowed whatever reply he had been going to make. He shook his head.

‘This isn’t getting us anywhere, Neil. Where is Roberta?’

‘Some Tenderloin hotel. There’s a hell of a lot of them, and she won’t be under her own name. From here I’m going down to the tax assessor’s office to see if Kolinski and Hariss
do
own any hotels down there, or pay the taxes on them if they aren’t owners of record. If they do, that’s where Roberta will be.’

He pointed at the folder.

‘Quite a lot of this is in there, sanitized for that repressed sexual hysteric in the outer office when she snoops your files.’

Stayton didn’t bother to deny it. He pushed the folder around with the tip of the opal desk-set pen. ‘I want those men destroyed. If they aren’t … well, you have a great deal of my money.’

Neil Fargo was on his feet, zipping his briefcase.

He said scornfully, ‘Destroyed! What the fuck does that mean? Ruined? Jailed? Murdered? I don’t think you’ve got what it would take to buy me for any of those. As for threats about money—?’

‘I don’t threaten idly, Fargo.’

But the detective met, held his eyes; and it was Stayton who looked away first. They were both big men, hard men. Neil Fargo nodded.

‘I should have news about Roberta, good or bad, by tonight. Will you be available if I do?’

‘I can be.’ Seeing the look in the detective’s eyes, he added, ‘I will be.’

‘Get braced for the bad, just in case.’

This time Stayton offered to shake the detective’s hand.

In the immense open-air lobby below the building’s stubby pillar legs, Neil Fargo used a pay phone. Pamela Gardner answered on the second ring with her formula, ‘Neil Fargo, Investigations.’ When she heard his voice, she exclaimed, ‘Thank God you called.’

‘You’ve got a line on Docker? Great work, doll. What—’

‘No Docker. Homicide called. They want you down at the HalI of Justice as soon as—’

‘Who’s they?’

‘What? Oh.’ Understanding entered her voice. She had a very good phone voice, soft and extremely sensual, which did not fit either her fresh-scrubbed little-girl looks or the way her mind worked. ‘An Inspector Wylie.’

‘Son of a bitch. Vince Wylie hates my guts.’ He checked his watch. ‘Look, doll, call him back, tell him I’ll be there between one and one-thirty.’

‘Will do.’

‘And no luck with Docker, huh?’

‘The only Docker in the book is on Beach Street, Neil – and that’s a girl. She was d.a. when I called, I’m trying to get the landlady to—’

‘Forget all that. Anything from the state?’

‘DMV says no driver’s license, no autos registered in his name. Ma Bell says no phone, even unlisted. PG&E is still checking, but he’d probably have the sort of place where the utilities are in the landlord’s name if—’

‘Yeah. Look, doll, don’t waste any more time on that crap. Start calling car-rental outfits. Just for the last day, two days, he’d have to show a valid driver’s license from
somewhere
to get a car – Nevada or Oregon, maybe. I’ve put a couple of street types on him, too. They’ll call you if they turn anything. Just hit the high spots from now on. We’re running out of time. I’ll check in after I’m through at the Hall, if I’m not in jail.’

She took it literally. ‘Should I alert Jack Leavitt in case—’

‘I don’t think Wylie has enough to make us yell lawyer yet. Instead of worrying about what might happen to me, we have to find out where that goddam Docker has gotten to.’

D
ocker stepped off the N Judah car where Sutter Street stubbed its toe on Market. All streetcars inbound for the East Bay Terminal used Market, so the fact it was a Judah car originating out in the Sunset District offered no real clue to where he’d gotten onto it.

The blond man paused on the sidewalk in front of the ritzy new Standard Oil Building like a man undecided, swinging his attaché case as his ever-active eyes surveyed street, crowds, passing autos from behind their heavy hornrims. The air smelled of sewage, and a PG&E crew had a manhole open to look for whatever had died down there.

Docker did not seem to see whatever he was looking for. Beyond the beautiful little reflecting pool where ecology freaks liked to dump motor oil and expired seagulls whenever there was an oil spill in the Bay, a long-necked steel dinosaur was eating a dead building. Docker watched as it took another bite, seizing the edge of a wall in serrated steel jaws and shaking its head angrily when the ancient brick was stubborn about peeling away from the I-beam bones. Then the wall surrendered and the dinosaur disdainfully dropped a couple of yards of it into the rubble around its caterpillared feet.

‘Spare change, mister?’

Docker brought his eyes down from the building to the panhandling hippie chick. She wore washed-out jeans and somebody else’s sweatshirt and no shoes, and was as anachronistic as an Edsel. Her hair was the same ash-blonde as Docker’s, just about as long and worn much the same way, parted in the center and falling to her shoulders.

‘Sell your watch,’ said Docker.

She made a disgusted face. Despite his hair length, she said, ‘Fuckin’ straight.’

Docker turned away toward First Street. As he did, the sole of his shoe came down on the girl’s bare toes, hard. She yelled. One of the yellow-hatted PG&E workmen straightened up with a shocked look on his face. It wasn’t a face that had a whole lot left to be afraid of.

Docker kept going. Behind him, the girl hopped up and down on her undamaged foot and yelled curses. People watched. His eyes worried and angry at the same time, the PG&E workman put a detaining hand on Docker’s arm. Docker stopped. He looked at the workman as a pathologist would look at a cadaver he was about to cut up.

The workman’s gaze faltered. The hand dropped away.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Docker said.

Instead of continuing on down Market to First, he cut off down a narrow blacktopped alley called Ecker Street. His uneven stride was now springier, as if the Market Street confrontation was what he had been seeking. The alley took him between crowding ancient brick walls and eventually to Mission Street. Here he turned left, to First, crossed with the light and went out First.

The half-block to Minna Street was crowded with the sort of places which are always across the street from bus terminals, and Docker seemed to be searching again. He rejected first a drugstore that tastefully displayed its condoms on the candy counter, then a short-order joint with a back room featuring a wide variety of dildoes, merkins, and battery-operated body-massagers strapped like penises. At a bar which had
SALOON
painted across its front in heavy ornate circus-poster letters, he turned in.

Underneath
SALOON
was
All Girl Bartenders!!
in smaller red letters. Inside was a standard joint tricked out western, with a pair of plastic Texas longhorns over the back bar. Only one All Girl Bartender!! was behind the stick, wearing a Stetson and boots and a vest and a plastic pistol belt with a plastic Frontier Colt ball-ammo .44 in the holster, low on the hip of her dated red hotpants.

Docker dropped a dollar in front of the rodeo-shirted nipples she pointed at him across the bar. ‘Bourbon,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘Huh? Oh. Put it in a glass.’

‘Cute.’

The girl had a hawklike, predatory face and long black hair and legs like a dancer’s. Docker had his shot standing at the bar, putting it down in a lump like somebody dropping a horseshoe. The girl had no time to move away before he set the empty shot-glass back on the bar. She had no other customers to move to anyway, except a pair of south of Market types taking turns trying to sell one another pieces of the Yerba Buena Center.

‘I just got into town,’ said Docker to the girl. ‘I’m looking for a whore.’

‘What’s her name?’

Docker said patiently, ‘You’ll do. How much?’

She leaned toward him sweetly while dropping a hand on the bar so the extended forefinger pointed at the door. She said, ‘And it’s bye, bye, baby. Now. Out.’

‘Anything you think is reasonable. Just a cheap fuck—’

‘The owner is an ex-pro wrestler who loves to work out on guys who four-letter his waitresses. He’s out in back playing with the beer kegs for exercise. If I should call him—’

‘He gets a broken arm,’ said Docker.

Some time went by. She sighed. She said almost regretfully, in a much softer voice, ‘Look, mister, I’m married. Honest.’

‘So was my mother, it never stopped her.’

He patted the girl on the cheek and went out before she could say anything further, limping very slightly because the attaché case in his right hand put added strain on that leg. The All Girl Bartender stared after him. She wet her lips thoughtfully. Then she began assiduously wiping the plank with her bar rag, an unexpected blush mantling her cheeks.

Six doors down, Docker turned in at an open-fronted amusement arcade called Fun Terminal. Four guys were feeding the pinball machines that lined the left wall and ran down that side of the building’s midline. Three of them were whites; the fourth, at the machine closest to the door, was a wasted-looking black with greying hair and holes cut in his shoes to let his bunions breathe.

The right side of the Fun Terminal was filled with half-a-hundred dime and two-bit movie peep-show machines, each showing three-minute fuck films cut into thirty-second segments. Docker bought two bucks’ worth of quarters and fed them into the machines, switching after each quarter instead of watching any of the brutally pornographic films out. The eyepieces smelled of perfumed disinfectant. Unlike some of the other patrons, he occupied his right hand with his attaché case rather than his anatomy.