Interface (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  ‘We’ll do something about him, doll,’ he said placidly. He leaned toward her slightly. ‘Do you think you might be up to telling me what he wanted? What he said and did? Everything?’

  Pamela told him everything, her face forlorn. She stumbled over any detail about the way Rizzato had put his hands on her. The very omissions were quite graphic. Her telling took less than three minutes.

  ‘Before Rizzato got here, had anything more come in on Docker’s car that he got? License plate or anything?’

  ‘Oh! License plate!’ she cried. Excitement momentarily displaced the revulsion on her features. ‘The same man who called about the car originally called back and said the license was—’

  ‘Before Rizzato got here, or after?’

  ‘After.’

  ‘And you bore up well enough to get the information, even after he had slammed you around? You’re a wonder, doll.’

  The wildness, which had started to enter her eyes again, died in a flush of delight at the frank admiration in his voice. She said, ‘The license is 636 ZFF. Mercury Montego rented this … Oh!’ she exclaimed suddenly, breaking in on herself.

  Neil Fargo’s foot stopped swinging. ‘What, doll?’

  ‘Just a few minutes ago, another call! A man spoke Roberta Stayton’s name, and then gave me an address—’

  Neil Fargo banged his fist lightly on the desk in glee. ‘That’s the way, doll!’

  ‘She … The address was on Jones Street …’ She was rummaging paper on her desk. ‘I think it’s a Tenderloin hotel …’

  Neil Fargo had gotten rigid. He said softly, ‘Five-one-seven Jones?’

  She had found her paper. ‘Five-one …’ Her face fell. ‘How did …?’

  ‘The FarJon Hotel,’ he said bitterly. ‘I just found out at the tax assessor’s office that Alex Kolinski and Walter Hariss are owners of record and also pay the taxes on the FarJon Hotel at five-one-seven Jones. We’re breaking our butts looking for Roberta Stayton, and those …’ He stopped over the word he had been going to use. ‘And they have her at their fingertips.’

  ‘Ha – have?’

  ‘She’s hooked, doll. On H. Hooked hard.’

  ‘You didn’t put it in any of the reports.’ She looked almost hurt.

  ‘Verbal only, direct to Stayton. That’s what I was telling him this morning. His executive secretary snoops all his files, so I didn’t want to put it on paper.’ His eyes had gotten thoughtful. ‘The FarJon! I know the place, a real dump, equal proportions of whores and old farts you have to move from chair to chair with a shovel. If I’d known those mothers had her there …’ He stood up briskly. ‘Well.’

  He pointed at the telephone.

  ‘Call yourself a taxi, doll, go home. I’ll lock up when I leave.’

  ‘Neil, I’m all right. Really. I—’

  ‘Home with you, doll. Have your mother give you a glass of sherry or something.’ He frowned abruptly. ‘The informant who called, did he identify himself?’

  The girl got a surprised expression through her tears.

  ‘Neil, it … it was … it was that man! Docker.’

  ‘Docker?’

  ‘I know it’s silly, but I … really, I told you, he has this mushy voice like … like loose teeth. I … it was the same voice as this morning! I’m sure it was.’

  Neil Fargo started to say something, then merely leaned down and took her dainty pointed chin in one huge paw, squeezed it gently.

  ‘Call yourself a taxi, doll, put in an expense voucher for it. I’ll wait until the cab gets here. I’ve got some thinking to do anyway.’ His face was set and cold. He added, almost to himself, ‘About just how much else I don’t know.’

  ‘Neil …’

  But he had turned and gone into his private office and had sat down behind the desk. He left the door open but his action had discouraged further talk. Five minutes later the taxi honked below the window. He went back into the outer office. Pamela was pulling on her coat. She made a hopeless gesture at the room.

  ‘I should clean up this mess …’

  ‘I’ll have the janitorial service do it,’ said the detective.

  At the head of the stairs she paused hesitantly again.

  ‘Neil, shouldn’t … shouldn’t somebody call Mr Stayton and tell him we think we’ve located his daughter?’

  ‘I have to make sure she’s there first, doll. Besides, you don’t know that old bastard. He’d be down there trying to get the hotel condemned or something. This is going to take handling. You go on home.’

  As soon as the outer door had shut behind the girl, Neil Fargo went directly to her phone, picked up, dialled. He drummed impatient fingers on the desktop through two rings.

  ‘Hariss? I just dropped by my office. Pam tells me that your driver was around to ask a few questions.’

  Surprise smoothly entered the importer’s voice. ‘Gus? Gus wouldn’t go off on his own like that, Neil.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, now you mention it …’ Sly laughter danced around the edges of his words. ‘Yes, I guess I did tell him to drop around at that. Wanted him to ask your secretary where you might be reached. You’ve been pretty hard to get hold of today.’

  ‘I thought we had a business arrangement,’ said the detective in curiously flat tones. The laughter abruptly went out of Hariss’ voice.

  ‘We do, Fargo. Do, not did. You try to back out—’

  ‘Since we have a business arrangement there’s nothing I can do about you at the moment, Walt. But sometime along the line I’m going to be wondering why Roberta Stayton happens to be living in a hotel that you own, with me knowing nothing about it even though you know I’ve been hired by her old man to find her. But—’

  ‘Now, Neil, there’s a reason—’

  ‘But even that can wait. This can’t. I want you to go out and tell that little cocksucker you call a chauffeur that he doesn’t work for you anymore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he doesn’t work for you and that his ass is going to be out of San Francisco by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s the most ridiculous—’

  ‘Because if I see him after tonight, Hariss, see him on the street, see him in your office, see him anywhere, just lay eyes on him, ever, I’m going to kill him. You got that?’

  ‘If you think—’

  ‘I mean dead, Hariss.’ The very flatness of his voice lent absolute conviction to the words. ‘He put his slimy fucking hands on my secretary. Not busted ribs, not a broken arm, not a ruptured kidney. Dead. Dead and buried. I’ll be in touch.’

  He slammed the receiver down on the hooks. He was breathing deeply and harshly. His hands were shaking. Almost immediately the phone began ringing. He stood, pulled back on his topcoat, walked out of the office and away from the ringing phone without even looking at it. He locked the office, went back across Franklin Street to the Seventy-Six station where he parked his Fairlane.

  He maneuvered the metallic blue car out of the slot in which it had been buried, just as Emil slapped a calloused, grease-rimed hand against the fender. Neil Fargo stuck his head out of the open window.

  ‘I’m in a hurry, Emil.’

  ‘Fargo, what you do now?’ He waved an arm at his precious parking slots as if Neil Fargo had not spoken. ‘What I do the man who rents the stall shows up, huh?’

  Neil Fargo made a suggestion concerning Emil and the car which belonged to Doctor Follmer, the stallholder, that was quite impossible even though the doctor’s car was a compact. Emil was still cursing the detective in his broken English when the blue Fairlane drove off. The garageman stared after him with bushy eyebrows drawn down angrily. Then he gave a sudden laugh, and shook his head fondly.

  ‘One crazy bastard,’ he said in admiration.

  15

  San Francisco’s Tenderloin has changed for the worse over the years. For several decades it was merely tough and a little raunchy: now it is nasty as well, like perfume behind the ears of a corpse. Seedy
hotels with Rates for Senior Citizens still cater to the aged, but now the old folks living on inflation-ruined pensions must rub shoulders and mingle life-styles with whores, topless dancers, pushers and users, cool black cats, teenage male prostitutes, transvestites looking for sailors.

  Coffee shops feature Breakfast All Day; bars turn on their garish neons at six A.M. Violence is endemic: drifting hard-eyed men roll drunks and gays and the fragile aged and cripples, both emotional and physical, as a way of life. Hustlers and grifters con social workers getting their jollies from seeing Life in the Raw, and one day at a time is how people live. Because in the Tenderloin anything can happen and sooner or later everything does.

  Certainly the girl who panhandled Neil Fargo as he got out of his Fairlane was just hanging on by the hour. She would have been attractive if she hadn’t had lice and smelled bad. She was under twenty, wearing blue wash pants and a blue sweater and a crust of dried vomit around her mouth.

  She asked for spare change as if for salvation. He gave her a dollar bill. She smiled shyly at him.

  ‘You want a nooner, mister …’

  He shook his head, watched her shamble up Jones Street. He shook his head again, finished locking the Fairlane, fed the meter, and started across the street to the FarJon Hotel.

  In mid-stride he swerved downhill. A black-and-white was parked in the bus zone with one door hanging open and the radio crackling. He went into the liquor store on the corner, stood with his back to the door in deep contemplation of a quart of Early Times. A paddy wagon with mesh over the rear windows pulled up in the yellow zone on O’Farrell with a squeal of worn brake linings.

  In a little more than two minutes, a pair of uniformed patrolmen went by the open door of the liquor store. Between them, wearing handcuffs and a dazed expression, was Alex Kolinski. He was having a little trouble with his feet. There was a trickle of blood down his chin and above the right eye a hard red knob which looked shiny. The cops looked tough, competent, and untouched.

  Neil Fargo laughed aloud, catching the attention of the liquor store clerk. Men with stimulant-blown minds who chuckled and whistled and smirked to themselves before going berserk would be no rarity to him. The cool competence in Neil Fargo’s face seemed to reassure him.

  The wagon had pulled out with its prisoner. Neil Fargo walked uphill on Jones with quick strides. The narrow door of 517 Jones was standing open under its faded FarJon Hotel, Weekly Rates sign. He went in.

  The stairs were very narrow, the handrail slick from a million sliding hands. Insulation-wrapped steampipes ran up the corner of the stairwell. There were rat droppings on one of the wedge-shaped corner steps which made the ninety-degree left turn under the tilted mirror Kolinski had used that morning to watch Daphne go down these same stairs.

  At the head of the stairs was another uniformed prowlie. Behind him Neil Fargo could see the office door with a hand-lettered sign over it:

  NO CHECKS CASHED

  RENT DUE IN ADVANCE

  NO VISITORS AFTER 11:00 P.M.

  EXCEPT YOU GOT YOUR OWN KEY TO LET THEM IN

  The cop was holding one of the extra-long riot-control billies, the sort Tac Squads have made so popular, at present-arms across his chest. His face was too young, too unformed for his hard, competent body or for the cop’s eyes experience had already given him.

  ‘Sorry, sir, residents only.’ Neil Fargo moved a hand, and the face was suddenly as tough as the rest of him. His voice barked. ‘Hold it!’

  ‘Just ID.’ Neil Fargo got it out gingerly. ‘I had a tip that a skip I’m looking for is holed up in this dump.’

  The cop returned the ID. ‘Sorry, sir, but we’ve had a homicide here.’

  ‘Homicide?’ His voice was unsurprised, as if Kolinski being led away had partially prepared him for it. ‘Wouldn’t be a woman, would it?’

  The cop’s eyes sharpened. ‘Think she’s the one you’re looking for?’

  ‘Could be. First name Roberta – although she probably wouldn’t be using her real name here.’

  ‘Our DOA is called Robin by the manager. The Lieutenant’ll want to see you.’ He turned to yell down the hall, ‘Lieutenant Tekawa, sir.’

  ‘Tekawa? What’s a narc doing in charge of a homicide?’

  The cop spun back to him. ‘Lieutenant Tekawa to you, Jack. And narc isn’t a word we—’

  ‘Is that Neil Fargo you got?’ Tekawa had appeared in the far end of the corridor. ‘Come on up, Neil.’

  Neil Fargo went by the prowlie without saying anything; the cop’s face had closed up at being bypassed. The private detective paused in the doorway of Robin’s room, his eyes taking it in: the body on the bed, now with a sheet drawn over the face; the candle stub; the junkie’s paraphernalia; the chair turned toward the airshaft. The sunlight had now entirely departed from the red bricks opposite.

  ‘Seeing how the other half lives, Hank?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I ought to transfer to Bunco.’ Tekawa’s gesture encompassed it all, from the dirty handprints around the light switch to the overflow stain in the corner of the ceiling above the sink. ‘Little old ladies conned out of their life savings might be a pleasure instead of junkie ODs. I don’t think you know my partner, Jerry Maley.’

  Neil Fargo and the red-headed cop shook hands. The redhead looked like a cop; Tekawa, slim and elegant and bland-faced behind studious glasses, looked like an assistant professor at Cal.

  ‘You’d get bored with the pigeon drop, Hank,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘That how you read this? Simple overdose?’

  ‘Take a look,’ invited Tekawa. ‘But no touchie: Homicide and the interns haven’t seen her yet.’

  He watched Neil Fargo raise a corner of the sheet to look down at the dead girl’s face.

  ‘There goes a fat fee,’ muttered the private detective.

  ‘Someone you know?’ Curbed curiosity made the Japanese cop’s eyes sleepy and his face even more bland. Neil Fargo let the sheet drop.

  He said, ‘If it’s an accidental overdose, how come I see Alex Kolinski being led away in bracelets when I come in?’

  ‘We walked in on him,’ admitted Tekawa. ‘Black girl on the desk was having hysterics. Had a bruise on her jaw, and one on her tit, and said she got them from Kolinski when she tried to follow him into this room. Said she saw him with a hypo in his hand and the deceased on the bed before he shoved her out. Could be lying, of course …’

  ‘Kolinski’s one of the owners of the building,’ said Neil Fargo abstractedly, as if not really thinking about what he was saying. ‘Along with Walt Hariss he pays the black girl’s salary.’

  ‘Well well well,’ said Tekawa softly. ‘Didn’t know you were interested in real estate.’

  Neil Fargo jerked a thumb at the bed. ‘In her.’

  ‘Did you notice the syringe rolled under the edge of the bed? Beautiful set of latents on it. If they should be Kolinski’s …’

  ‘It’d break your heart.’ Neil Fargo added in an amused voice, ‘I saw you had him resisting arrest a little bit.’

  Maley turned from the window, where he’d been staring down the airshaft as if carefully disassociating himself from the conversation. He had pleasantly blunt Irish features, wavy red hair just being touched around the edges with grey.

  ‘Kolinski panicked when he saw us in the doorway behind him, tried to bust out. Past Hank.’

  ‘Hai!’ yipped Neil Fargo softly. He went suddenly into the karate front stance, threw in rapid succession an upward knife hand and a fisthammer, stepped away into a back stance, straightened, relaxed, laughed, and said, ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Don’t let him fool you,’ said Tekawa to his partner. ‘He could put a bottom fist through this wall without bruising anything but the plaster.’

  ‘I’d rather stand six feet back and throw an ash tray at ’em,’ grinned Maley. His voice hardened. ‘You said you were interested in the deceased, Fargo. Exactly what did you mean by that?’

  ‘Whoa, hoss,’ said the detective softly. He
looked at Tekawa. ‘You figure out yet why Alex Kolinski might want to OD a two-bit junkie whore?’

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ admitted Tekawa. He looked as worried as a slab of bacon. ‘She was going to turn him as a pusher?’

  ‘Hank, we both know the connection isn’t a son of a bitch to the hype. He’s Mr Nice with the big cotton candy.’

  ‘Accidental?’

  ‘I don’t see Alex Kolinski making in front of a couple of narcs the kind of mistake Alex Kolinski wouldn’t make in the first place. If he was OD’ing her, it was a deliberate hotshot.’

  Maley had been frowning from one to the other. He stepped suddenly in front of Neil Fargo, put a hand on his chest and shoved, not hard but not gently. Neil Fargo gave back a pace. Maley repeated the action. This time Neil Fargo didn’t move. Maley was nearly as tall as the private detective, but without the tremendous overlay of muscle the ex-pro footballer carried.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question, Fargo. And we don’t feel like answering yours.’

  ‘Sweet and sour, Hank? Honey and vinegar? Even to people who just see it on TV, that’s a wheeze. If you want me to get into trouble just have him put his hands on me again.’

  ‘Jerry. It’s okay.’ Henry Tekawa’s soft, unaccented voice had a hidden whiplash in it.

  Maley stepped back looking confused, as if he wasn’t used to being denied his partner’s backing, especially in the time-honored police whipsaw of one cop being nasty, the other friendly.

  ‘Which leaves you being tipped,’ said Neil Fargo.

  ‘Right,’ said Tekawa. ‘That he was not only overdosing her, but with a hotshot of ninety-five percent pure shit. Somebody named Docker—’

  ‘An anonymous tipster who gives you his name?’ Neil Fargo started to laugh sardonically.

  ‘He called me yesterday at the Hall, asked for me personally. Voice like he was eating mush. Very aggressive, very nervous, quick – hyper, you understand?’

  ‘Dropping amphetamines?’

  ‘Could be. Said yesterday he would give me a big drug bust, said he’d call again this morning. He did.’