Interface (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  Browne’s mumbled, incoherent pleadings rose to a sharp scream of pain as the strongarm’s feet and hands got busy before Daggert even had time to let Kolinski out through the guarded door.

  9

  ‘Your cigarettes,’ the jump-suited guard explained to the woman in the red coat.

  ‘But I—’

  ‘The foil on the pack.’

  Neil Fargo followed her across the very slightly raised wooden ramp as his left hand gave topcoat, car keys, cigarettes, and pocket knife to the other, older guard. The buzzer sounded.

  ‘What the hell, you packing your piece, man?’ demanded the young black guard who had been hassling with the red-coated woman about her cigarettes.

  Neil Fargo shook his head, stepped back, then through again. The machine buzzed again.

  ‘Better do it,’ said the black.

  Neil Fargo held his empty hands away from his sides, arms wide to facilitate the white guard’s body search. It was sufficiently professional to seem perfunctory. The guard straightened up. Bending had made him red in the face. Small strips of his light blue shirt showed through the gaps between the buttons of his tan uniform jacket.

  ‘My money clip,’ said Neil Fargo abruptly. ‘I always forget the damned thing.’

  The guard nodded and puffed out a breath laden with recent lunch. He slapped the heavy swell of gut under his jacket.

  ‘Neil, how the hell you stay in the shape you do?’

  ‘Night work, Ben.’

  Neil Fargo crossed the marble lobby of the Hall of Justice, past the bronze plaque commemorating San Francisco’s police dead. The number of recent additions to the roster was one reason everyone entering the Hall was subject to a body search. He crossed to the banks of elevators at the rear of the lobby. Several professional freaks in their prescribed hippie uniforms were protesting something to a uniformed deputy who looked as if his patience was getting as thin as his hair.

  The elevator was crowded with attorneys, identifiable by their attaché cases, bushy sideburns, overlong hair, and trendy clothing. The clients and plainclothes cops were drab by comparison. Neil Fargo got off at three.

  It was 1:01 when he pushed open the hall door identified as the Homicide Squad. He ignored the empty reception desk and the waiting room chairs, instead went directly through the metal gate in the hip-high railing. Through a doorway was the big room where the homicide detectives lived. For years they had been only one squad of the General Works Detail, but a briskly rising murder rate, most of it connected with drug-buy burns and thrill-kills during grocery store rip-offs, had earned the squad separate quarters.

  By the water cooler, Vince Wylie was arguing Brodie versus Spurrier with a huge toothpick-chewing, shirtsleeved man whose tie had been loosened with such enthusiasm that the shapeless lump of knot was down at his third button. Neil Fargo caught Wylie’s eye, then jerked his head at one of the glass-walled interrogation cubicles lining the room, at the same time raising his eyebrows.

  Wylie nodded. Neil Fargo went into the room, sat down in one of the chrome and black plastic chairs which flanked the desk, lit a cigarette, drifted smoke.

  Three minutes later Wylie sauntered in, followed by the cop with whom he had been second-guessing Dick Nolan’s quarterback strategies. This second man was big enough to make even Neil Fargo look delicate, with heavy soft sloping shoulders and the start of a paunch under his pastel shirt. In his hip holster was a non-reg Python .357 magnum, the one with the four-inch barrel. His slacks were wrinkled like an elephant’s ass from accommodating his wide butt and heavy thighs. He had eyes like Santa Claus and hands to tie bowknots in pokers.

  ‘Should I have brought my lawyer?’ asked Neil Fargo, unsmiling.

  He neither stood up nor offered his hand, nor did Wylie offer his. Instead, Wylie sat down behind the desk. The big cop leaned against the edge of it. Wylie got out a cigarette and indicated the big cop with it.

  ‘Charlie?’ He made a deprecating gesture. ‘He’s got a few minutes waiting for a witness to show up, he thought he’d sit in to—’

  ‘Read me my rights or get him to fuck out of here.’

  A slow flush, the color of old bricks, rose up Wylie’s heavy throat. The big cop, who had settled back with his arms crossed on his chest like a farmer settling in to discuss the weather, slowly uncrossed his arms and came erect. He took his toothpick out of his mouth, looked at it regretfully, dropped it in the wastebasket.

  ‘They always put peppermint in them,’ he complained. He winked at Neil Fargo, said, ‘Pleasure,’ and shambled out.

  Wylie flopped a lined yellow legal-size pad on the desk and took out a ballpoint pen as if he were mad at it. Unlike Charlie, he was wearing the jacket of his suit even though it was stufly in the cubicle.

  ‘Just what the hell did that accomplish, Fargo?’

  ‘I’m going to talk in front of two Homicide cops at the Hall of Justice when I don’t know what it’s about? Go on with you.’

  ‘Don’t you know what it’s about?’

  Neil Fargo said nothing.

  Wylie sighed and lit the cigarette he had laid aside earlier while getting his pad and pen ready. The private detective watched him. Wylie laid down the just-lit cigarette without having drawn on it, and picked up the pen again.

  ‘Bryant Street have any significance for you, Fargo?’

  Neil Fargo shook his head.

  ‘You know a man named Julio Marquez?’ the silent denial was repeated. ‘T. E. Addison?’ Again negative. ‘Docker?’

  A light gleamed for a brief instant behind Neil Fargo’s eyes. He said, ‘Animal, vegetable, or mineral?’

  ‘Goddammit, Fargo—’

  Neil Fargo stood up, smeared out his cigarette and put an open palm on the desk and leaned across it toward Wylie in one smooth motion. His face was tight. ‘Charge me with something and talk to my lawyer, or tell me what the fuck you’re after.’

  Wylie who had also sprung to his feet as if he thought he was about to be assaulted, slowly sat down again. This time he shortened his cigarette with a long greedy drag. He stubbed it out.

  ‘Trying to quit the goddam things, I’m down to one pack a day from three. Will power. How about the seventeen-hundred block of Bryant. That mean anything to you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Neil Fargo also relaxed back into his chair. ‘Seventeen-forty-eight. I rented the upper flat there two weeks ago.’

  ‘That’s good. A realtor named Deming already told us that.’

  ‘Deming’s a lush.’

  Wylie’s eyes and voice had become elaborately casual. ‘Ever been inside the flat?’

  ‘Sure. When I rented it.’

  ‘That’s good. Your fingerprints were all over the place.’

  ‘Who got it there?’

  ‘Who said—’

  Neil Fargo made a disgusted gesture that encompassed where they were. Wylie hesitated, then grinned sourly like Before in a Pepto-Bismol ad.

  ‘Mex name of Julio Marquez.’

  ‘Who I already haven’t heard of.’

  ‘You said that, didn’t you?’ Wylie stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He moved around on his feet, made clinking noises with his pocket change. A child started bawling in one of the cubicles across the room. A torrent of Spanish followed, three voices, two of them male. The voices made no impression on the child’s crying. Wylie stopped moving, said, ‘Why’d you rent the apartment?’

  ‘Stash a witness.’

  ‘Who? What’s he a witness to?’

  Neil Fargo shook his head regretfully. His chin was stubborn again. ‘Not unless you can tie him in to whatever happened to this Marquez. It isn’t anybody named Addison or Docker and he didn’t witness any murders and he isn’t due in town until the end of the week anyway.’

  ‘Where were you this morning, Fargo? Between, say, five and seven?’

  ‘Five, getting laid. Seven, trying to get it up again.’

  ‘You can prove that?’

  ‘It’s hard to get laid
by yourself.’

  Wylie gave his hard abrupt laugh. ‘Boys in Vice tell me these days you can get a life-size plastic mannekin that does everything but tell you she didn’t know it could ever be like that. What’s the girl’s name? Address?’

  ‘Cup size?’ Neil Fargo said savagely. Then he hesitated, shrugged. ‘Rhoda Wahlström – that’s got the umlaut over the o. We use her place, twenty-one eighty-six Filbert, apartment seven. Don’t talk to her at work, okay? She’s a good lay and I’m not tired of her yet and she works at a bank where they’d still use quill pens if they could get the work out with ’em.’

  Wylie was writing on his pad. ‘You bachelors.’ He added, without looking up, ‘Got something on your conscience, Fargo, you’re being so awful goddam cooperative all of a sudden?’

  ‘I figure if I kiss your ass hard enough I might find out what’s going on.’

  Wylie grunted. He laid down his pen again, made an automatic motion toward the pack of cigarettes on the desk, then with a quick, almost guilty look in Neil Fargo’s direction changed the movement to sweep the offending pack into the desk drawer. He started talking in the flat impersonal voice of a trained observer used to summarizing facts.

  ‘Anonymous phone call at seven-thirty this morning, reporting a gunshot and sounds of a struggle coming from seventeen-forty-eight Bryant, top flat. Prowl car responded at seven-forty-one, intercepted a Mex junkie named Rosas just leaving the apartment. They held him, of course; checked upstairs and found this Julio Marquez, dead. A Colt .38 auto, one shot fired. A second man named T. E. Addison in the hall—’

  ‘Which one was shot?’

  ‘Neither. The bullet went into the ceiling. Marquez pulled the trigger, his prints were all over the gun. Addison had been clipped on the chin and knocked cold.’

  ‘The Mex kid coked up?’

  Wylie leaned back in his chair and chuckled. In telling his story he apparently had momentarily forgotten his antipathy to Neil Fargo. ‘That’s a funny one. Just got the doc’s report on him, he’s a heroin addict but had shot himself a twenty-mill ampule of speed in the apartment. Said he found it in the medicine chest.’

  ‘If he’s hooked on H—’

  ‘I find out from Narco that lots of ADs will use meth when they can’t get heroin – apparently it helps kill the withdrawal pains. There was a second ampule of speed busted on the bathroom floor, but Rosas says that was there when he got there. That suggest anything to you?’

  ‘That whoever killed Marquez and laid down Addison might have been high on methedrine. What has Addison told you?’

  ‘His lawyer’s phone number. Period. We ran him through R&I, all we got is that he’s a chemist for a drugstore down on Market Street. He’s clean, but … a chemist.’

  ‘Yeah. Any other fingerprints except mine in the flat?’

  Wylie shrugged niggardly. ‘You know.’

  Something in his voice made Neil Fargo lean forward, face taut.

  ‘How about glove smudges? Overlaying some of my fingerprints, maybe?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Wylie admitted sourly, after a marked pause.

  ‘Any of mine overlaying anybody else’s?’

  Wylie shrugged. He seemed suddenly abashed. ‘Deming’s. The realtor’s.’

  ‘Beautiful!’ Neil Fargo’s face wore a sardonic grin that seemed to have genuine amusement in it. He said without heat, ‘You fucking bastard, you haul my ass up here—’

  ‘You rented the place,’ said the homicide inspector stubbornly. ‘It wasn’t busted into – whoever got there first this morning used a key.’

  ‘Sure. And I got one key – one – from Deming when I rented it, and none of the locks have been changed. What about this Docker you mentioned? Where does he fit in?’

  ‘His name’s on the mailbox.’ He shot a sharp look at the private investigator. ‘He ring bells with you?’

  Neil Fargo’s eyes had changed. Something glinted in them.

  ‘What do you have on him?’

  ‘Big cat, big or bigger than you, long blond hair to the shoulders, hornrim glasses, slight limp—’

  ‘Deep cleft in the middle of his chin, like Cary Grant,’ said Neil Fargo in a very fast, very excited voice. ‘Spatulate fingers, excessively thick earlobes, mole up high on the left buttock—’

  Wylie slapped the desk in delight. ‘You do know him. All right, goddammit, now I will read you your rights. You have …’

  His voice ran down. Neil Fargo had given one short, vicious burst of triumphant laughter, then had gotten very busy lighting another cigarette. The brick color rose sharply up the back of Wylie’s neck again. His fingers flexed as if seeking a nightstick around which to curve. Neil Fargo met his eyes lazily through the drifting smoke.

  ‘Docker,’ he said in a thoughtful voice. He shook his head in a parody of regretfulness. ‘Never heard of him.’

  Wylie was silent for nearly a minute. The flush receded. He had been shooting judicious looks at Neil Fargo’s pack of Pall Malls. He succumbed and reached across the table and speared one. When he spoke, only the thinnest edge of his bottled rage touched his voice.

  ‘All right. Call it square.’

  ‘You said the name was on the mailbox. Couldn’t he just be a former tenant?’

  ‘Could be.’ Wylie’s voice was soothing as cough syrup now. ‘Maybe, when you rented the place, you saw his name already on the mailbox and just forgot it? Maybe you just left the old nametag on there?’

  In flat, indifferent tones, Neil Fargo began. ‘Maybe. I didn’t look at the mailbox, I knew I wasn’t going to get any mail there, all I want the place for is this witness who has a thing about hotels …’ He suddenly chuckled. ‘What happened, the lab boys tell you that nametag on the mailbox was brand new? And you hoped I’d say I saw it there two weeks ago?’

  Vince Wylie’s silence was eloquent. He lit the cigarette he had bummed. Neil Fargo went on without heat.

  ‘How do you tie that description you gave me to the name Docker? The realtor?’

  ‘You dealt with him, Fargo. It ain’t long enough between drinks for his records to be anything but a handful of flea dirt.’

  ‘Then who gave you the description? Addison? Marquez, speaking from the dead?’

  Wylie’s voice was almost ashamed. ‘Rosas.’

  ‘The hype?’ Neil Fargo started to laugh. ‘Jesus Christ, Vince, you ever hear the one about Little Red Riding Hood and—’

  ‘All right, all right, but the guy’s story was goddam rational. He was waiting around for a new pusher to show up in Franklin Square, his other connection got busted—’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Narco confirms a collar there yesterday. Anyway, Rosas says this big blond guy with the limp we think is Docker comes out of seventeen-forty-eight around seven-thirty this morning. Rosas is desperate for a fix, he thinks this cat might be the new connection, so he follows him. This guy makes him, knocks him around a little, acting high himself, you follow me? Erratic, paranoid, hyperactive.’

  ‘Speed freak?’ mused Neil Fargo.

  ‘Then the blond guy tells Rosas there’s a dead guy and an unconscious guy in this flat that he can rob, and some speed in the medicine chest he can sell for smack, and the key’s in the mailbox and good luck.’

  Neil Fargo nodded. ‘And then this Docker – if there is a Docker – calls the police himself in hopes Rosas will be blamed for Marquez.’ He looked keenly at the Homicide cop. ‘Awfully talkative hype, isn’t he, this Rosas? What do the people in the downstairs flat say?’

  ‘It’s empty.’

  Neil Fargo stood up, smeared out his cigarette. The flat Indian planes of his face were carefully devoid of emotion.

  ‘You take a name off a mailbox and tie it in with some big blond guy nobody’s seen but a heroin addict who’s strung out to the point he’d sell you his left nut for a fix, and you have the guts to haul my ass down here—’

  ‘You rented the apartment,’ repeated Wylie stubbornly.

  ‘That don’t mean
I killed anybody in it. You got two live ones besides this – maybe – Docker at the scene, why pick on me?’

  ‘Addison? Rosas?’ Wylie shook his head. ‘No way. You ain’t got the picture, Fargo. Marquez got knocked right over the couch. Over it, friend. From behind. Got his neck broke landing on the floor. That looks great on TV, but it takes one fuck of a lot of raw power to really do it.’

  Neil Fargo had his topcoat back on, was standing wide-legged in front of the desk like a captain on the bridge unconsciously braced against the roll of his vessel.

  ‘When can I get my apartment back? I’m still gonna have a witness to stash, no matter who got knocked off where.’

  An almost triumphant look came into Wylie’s pale cop’s eyes. He said, ‘It’s got a police seal on the door, so maybe you better leave your key with me for the time being.’ He paused expectantly.

  ‘I don’t carry it around with me, for Chrissake.’

  Wylie’s face lit up; he opened his mouth.

  Neil Fargo said, ‘Call my secretary, tell her to drop it in the mail, you want it so fucking bad.’

  He stopped there, laughed again when he saw how sullen Wylie’s face had gotten.

  ‘The key in the mailbox. You hoped I’d given it to Docker.’ He stared at Wylie, then shook his head in apparent disbelief. He said, ‘Cops. Jesus Christ.’

  Wylie stared after the tall, lithe figure until Neil Fargo had passed out of the squad room. Then he sighed and shook his own head, and fished a cigarette out of the pack he had put in the desk drawer.

  ‘Shit,’ he said aloud to no one in particular.

  Down in the lobby, Neil Fargo stopped at the cigarette counter for another pack of Pall Malls, even though he had opened the one in his pocket just before entering the Hall of Justice. As the blind man behind the counter waited on other customers, Neil Fargo chatted with him. Then, when they were momentarily alone, Fargo leaned closer and talked earnestly in a low voice. He seemed to be explaining something and the blind man seemed to be memorizing several things.

  ‘I won’t let you down, Mr Fargo.’

  ‘That’s the boy, Jimmy.’

  Before leaving the Hall, he used a phone booth to get Pamela Gardner. She said she was eating a sandwich at her desk. She said she was working through the car-rental outfits but she’d had no luck so far. None of Neil Fargo’s informants on the search for Docker had called in. Docker himself had not called in. Then she had a practical question of her own.