Interface (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  When Docker reached Mission he turned left, out of their sight. He began to whistle jauntily, swinging the attaché case like a kid on his way to school with a tin lunchpail.

  7

  Going past the tellers’ windows from the back of the bank, where the loan payments were made and the safe deposit boxes were kept, Neil Fargo checked his long stride. He rooted in his nearly empty briefcase for his checkbook. At one of the chest-high counters he wrote out a check for pocket money, then let two other patrons go ahead so he could get a big blond teller who carried abundant, beautifully shaped muscle and flesh over her heavy Scandinavian frame. Her placid face lit up with a display of very white teeth when she saw Neil Fargo in front of her.

  ‘First time you’ve been able to find my window for months,’ she said.

  ‘That’s because you’re so popular I can never get near you.’

  She made a small derisive noise in her throat. She had a lovely throat, and very clear, healthy skin. She reached for his check. He put a hand over hers, imprisoned it. She looked at him with clear blue eyes. His face wore a smile that looked insincere but at least softened his features and made them slightly vulnerable.

  ‘You going with anyone these days, Rhoda?’

  ‘You mean you’d care, after ignoring me for—’

  He shook his head almost impatiently, but didn’t remove his hand. ‘I’m working. I might need to have slept with you last night. Possible?’

  ‘Hair-wash night so I was alone – you’d remember that. That’s probably why you’ve picked me.’ Her wholesome expression had thinned. She said in soft bitterness, ‘You bastard! How long has it been? Six months? Seven?’

  ‘You won’t have to swear to it in court, might not even get asked, but if you are asked, it’ll be by cops.’

  She pulled her hand out from under his, carried the check away to the big square sheaf of computer printouts which told whether it would clear or not. Neil Fargo still leaned one elbow on the counter so his heavy shoulders and broad tapering back effectively shut out anyone behind him from their conversation without seeming other than casual. The polite smile remained fixed on his face.

  Rhoda returned, rubber-stamped the check, counted out a twenty, two tens, and two fives from her cash drawer. Her face was once more placid, like a dust jacket for Heidi. She smiled brilliantly at him across the money. She was such a big girl that her eyes were only a couple of inches below his own.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said again. This time there was a hint of caress in her voice.

  Neil Fargo picked up the bills, nodded, smiled, backed away from the window.

  ‘You’re a love,’ he said.

  Ten minutes later the express elevator deposited him on one of the topmost floors of the gleaming white Transamerica pyramid which thrusts its graceful spire up from the foot of Columbus Avenue. The panorama caught Neil Fargo, held him for perhaps two minutes. It was truly amazing. From the Farallone Islands thirty miles toward Hawaii to the East Bay hills which cupped Oakland and Berkeley, from the Golden Gate to San Mateo’s Dumbarton Bridge twenty miles to the south. People were mites, cars beetles, Coit Tower the end of a wooden matchstick stuck upright into an insignificant mound covered with toy houses. Only the ugly dark monolith of the Bank of America headquarters, like a stake driven into the city’s heart, challenged his view.

  He turned from it, pushed the button beside Maxwell Stayton’s office door. Stayton Industries had the entire floor. The voice of Miss Laurence came over the speaker, tart as vinegar.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Neil Fargo. By appointment.’

  There was a faint click, the smooth round brass knob turned under his hand and the superbly balanced oak door, twelve feet high and three inches thick and inlaid with Tanzanian ebony, swung open. He went in. He already would have been examined on the closed-circuit TV at the reception desk, which was what would have put the asperity into Miss Laurence’s voice.

  ‘Mr Stayton expected you at ten o’clock,’ she informed him in her frosty BBC accent.

  ‘I was delayed.’

  ‘It is well after eleven o’clock. Have you any idea how much Mr Stayton’s time is—’

  ‘Just push the goddam button, mate.’

  Miss Laurence paled. She had mousy brown hair and close-set eyes the approximate color and toughness of manganese. She also had a walker’s bulbous calves, wore sensible shoes to the office, and made forty thousand a year plus stock options. When Miss Laurence had the flu, it was reflected in that quarter’s corporate earnings.

  Miss Laurence pushed the button. Neil Fargo touched her under the chin with a forefinger, went through the inner door with her furious expression sticking out of his back like a hurled icicle.

  Maxwell Stayton’s personal office was a den with the fireplace missing. The walls were of walnut panelling that was not veneer, and were covered with framed and signed photographs of sports greats, most of them from the mid-thirties. One of the pictures was of Stayton himself, wearing a Stanford football uniform and old-style leather helmet. He was cutting, high-stepping in the photo, clutching the ball fiercely in one hand and holding off an imaginary tackler with the other.

  Neil Fargo paused in front of a photo of himself, also in a Stanford uniform, bare-headed, grinning at the camera. He snapped the picture with the same fingernail he had used to chuck Miss Laurence under the chin.

  As if this action reminded him of the other, Maxwell Stayton demanded sourly, ‘Do you have to do that to her?’

  ‘She expects me to,’ said Neil Fargo. He ran his hand along the bookshelves, over leather-bound volumes patinaed by age and handling. ‘It confirms her view of the colonies.’

  Stayton merely grunted. The room, not large, was made to seem even smaller by his size. Age had distended his belly, thinned and grizzled his hair, but had not ravaged him. Behind him was a beautifully-detailed model of the Feather River, a 600,000-ton supertanker being built for Stayton Marine in Japan. If the ecologists could be bought or mollified, it would eventually unload crude at the Farallone Islands.

  ‘Those football pictures stir memories?’ said Stayton abruptly.

  Neil Fargo crossed a rug that cost as much as a Cadillac. He looked out the fourth wall, which was tinted plate glass and echoed the reception area’s views of the city.

  ‘They’re hanging on your wall, not mine.’

  ‘What do you hang on your walls?’

  ‘Scalps.’

  Stayton gave a short burst of heavy laughter. He had removed a Churchill-length cigar from his mouth to speak, didn’t offer a hand to shake, not even after putting the cigar down in an ashtray. The ashtray was a solid four-pound clump of polished stainless steel that a sculptor had taken a swipe at to make it a work of art. Stayton sat down behind the desk.

  ‘You’re late,’ he charged in a different, executive voice.

  Neil Fargo appeared to bear up under the assault. He sat down across the desk from Stayton and put his briefcase on the floor beside his chair. He crossed his legs while getting a cigarette started. He waved out the match, squinted at Stayton through the smoke.

  ‘Miss Laurence said you wanted a report on the investigation to date.’

  Stayton made an impatient gesture with a thick-fingered hand. ‘Do we have to go through all that? Just tell me—’

  ‘I have my reports right here,’ continued Neil Fargo ruthlessly.

  Stayton reddened slightly and leaned forward to pick his cigar off the lump of stainless steel. As he did, he said, ‘No calls,’ and in the same motion tapped one of the buttons on his desk. He leaned back. ‘Satisfied?’

  ‘If that thing’s closed now.’

  ‘You afraid Miss Laurence might steal your techniques?’

  ‘It’s your daughter we’re talking about,’ shrugged Neil Fargo.

  ‘All right, damn you, you’ve made your point,’ growled Stayton. ‘With all the security precautions, this had damn well better be good.’

  ‘That’s how you lo
ok at it. I traced your daughter down to Mexico City, down there found out—’

  ‘You told me that a week ago.’ Stayton stood up behind the immense hardwood desk, walked over to the window. He looked out over the financial district of which he owned quite a lot, turning the cigar with pensive fingers. ‘You’ve got a good thing going in me, haven’t you, Fargo? Whenever Roberta decides to pick up with some deadbeat, I pay you good money to find her—’

  ‘Because she married one of them and it cost you a lot of money to pry him loose. I’m a hell of a lot cheaper than—’

  ‘Up until now.’ For the first time, Stayton showed emotion. ‘At least I’ve got a grandson out of the marriage. And he’ll be raised right, believe me.’

  He came back, leaned his butt against the edge of the desk. His momentary vulnerability had hardened into anger.

  ‘Each time I pay you a fat fee—’

  ‘And I find her.’

  ‘And it happens again.’

  ‘This time it’s different. This time three weeks up in the redwoods at a fancy sanitarium isn’t going to do it.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ When the younger man didn’t answer, he leaned forward as if taking up his position for the snap of the ball. ‘I’ve already given you a ridiculous amount of money to cut the current one loose, and I want you to explain where it’s gone—’

  ‘Money.’ Neil Fargo’s voice overrode his. ‘Money isn’t the question. Your daughter’s graduated from the booze, old man.’

  ‘Experimenting with drugs?’ He brushed it away. ‘We’ve been through that syndrome before. Pot in a crash pad with kids ten years younger than she is—’

  ‘Heroin,’ said Neil Fargo.

  Stayton echoed his flatness of tone. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Hooked. Hooked hard. Now, even if I find her … Christ, face it, man, in a very real sense, nobody’s ever going to find Roberta again. She’s a zombie, a hunk of shit—’

  ‘That’s enough, goddammit!’

  ‘—a death-wish looking for someplace to jump off.’

  Stayton’s face was contorted. ‘You fucking—’

  ‘If you can’t accept that, then there’s no use digging her out of whatever rathole she’s been stashed in. Treatment might save her – physically – but I doubt if you’d ever get back the daughter you think you knew. So there it is. She’s been back in San Francisco for two months, I’ve learned, in one of the Tenderloin fleabags. I’ve got feelers out to isolate which one, but … Are you sure you want her found?’

  ‘What a stupid fucking question,’ said the industrialist. During all of it, the smoke going up from the cigar in his right hand had been absolutely steady. Neil Fargo shrugged.

  ‘Hell, the kid’s always meant more to you than your daughter has anyway.’ His voice deepened. ‘He’s a male heir! So we find Roberta before the H kills her, how’s he going to like reading those clippings when he’s old enough to understand them?’

  ‘The papers won’t get hold of Roberta’s condition.’

  Neil Fargo’s lips curled as he delved into his briefcase for a file folder. ‘Dream,’ he told the industrialist.

  ‘How sure are you of your information?’

  ‘It’s solid. I paid enough for it, here and in Mexico.’

  ‘You said “stashed.” If you mean she’s being manipulated by someone, I’ll destroy them, whoever they are. Anyone responsible for Roberta’s condi—’

  ‘Roberta’s responsible for Roberta’s condition.’ Neil Fargo’s face was unrevealing, but when he moved his hands on the polished arms of the chair, the fingertips left smears on the wood.

  Stayton’s face darkened. He reached across the desk to drop a full inch of grey ash from his cigar into the hunk of stainless steel. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘That addiction is psychological before it’s physiological. It starts out as a symptom, not a cause.’

  Stayton ran a heavy-fingered hand down his heavy visage. He seemed momentarily unsure of himself. ‘You’ve known Roberta for years, Neil. D’you mean me? Or Dorothy?’

  ‘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 chauffeur …” 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 save
d. 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?’