Interface (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  ‘Hank, are you sure—’ Maley began.

  ‘It’s okay, Jerry,’ said the Japanese again. ‘He told us to be at the greasy spoon down on the corner at two-fifteen. We waited until two-fifty for his call. He stalled around, suddenly said Kolinski was up here killing somebody with an overdose.’

  ‘Knew ahead Kolinski was going to do it, waiting for him to show up.’ Neil Fargo’s eyes gleamed. ‘Or was Kolinski maybe framed for it?’

  ‘Not if it’s his fingerprints on that syringe. And not unless somebody bought the black chick on the desk to screw down the lid on him. Christ, Neil, I’m not sure the girl was even quite dead when we came in.’ He paused. ‘Okay. Your turn.’

  ‘Buttering up your partner?’ grinned Neil Fargo.

  Maley’s face darkened and his fists clenched at his sides, but he said nothing. His eyes were on Henry Tekawa, filled with a veiled anger and contempt.

  ‘You weren’t after Kolinski, were you, Neil?’ asked Tekawa softly.

  ‘No. A girl.’

  ‘This girl?’

  ‘You have to ask?’ His face was suddenly tired. ‘Voice like he was eating mush, you said. Same kind of voice called my secretary just before three o’clock, said I’d find my subject at this hotel. Didn’t identify himself as anyone named Docker, but it was probably the same guy.’

  ‘And who is the subject?’ Tekawa’s voice was still soft.

  ‘Her name was Roberta Stayton.’

  Jerry Maley, who had been silently prowling the tiny area of free floor space between the bed and the window, stopped abruptly. He let his breath hiss out between his teeth.

  ‘As in Maxwell Stayton?’

  ‘His daughter. Spoiled rich kid, the old story – debutante coming out ten or twelve years ago, when debs still came out, Stanford, then a quick marriage that cost the old man fifty thou to cut loose, a son from it. After that, pretty wild.’

  ‘You went to Stanford yourself, didn’t you, Fargo?’ asked Maley. There was frank insinuation in his voice.

  ‘Yeah. And I knew Roberta Stayton there, yeah. She was a couple of years behind me. I also played football there, which was how her old man knew me. And why he started hiring me to find her when she started disappearing.’

  ‘You did a good job this time,’ snickered Maley.

  ‘She was a girl who liked to kick off her shoes in a hotel room and settle down with a bottle.’ He shrugged. ‘Anybody’s hotel room. I doubt if she even would have drawn a line at an Irishman.’

  Henry Tekawa cut in quickly, ‘You’re saying she was a lush, not a junkie, Neil? If you’d seen the tracks inside her elbows and on the backs of her knees—’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that. She was a hype, all right. That’s the word I picked up down in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago when I followed her trail down there. But it’s a recent development – within the past year.’ He paused, very deliberately. ‘The word around is that Kolinski’s the one who introduced her to the needle. He used to be her old man’s chauffeur three, four years ago.’

  ‘Convenient,’ muttered Maley.

  ‘Are you offering this as a possible motive?’

  ‘I’m not offering anything as anything, Hank. I’m giving you what I know. But here’s something else I know: Roberta Stayton was a very hard-nosed girl. If she decided to take a cure, and if Kolinski hooked her originally, she could very well have decided to blow the whistle on him. And he could have decided to … Christ, Hank, face it: if you hadn’t walked in on him, it’d have gone down in the books as an accidental, self-administered OD. Right?’

  ‘Right. And now all we have to do is figure out who the hell Docker is and where the hell he fits into all this.’

  ‘You do,’ corrected Neil Fargo. ‘Docker’s your problem, not mine. Mine is telling old man Stayton he just lost an heir.’

  ‘You sound all broken up for him,’ said Tekawa precisely, like a sparrow eating sunflower seeds.

  ‘He’s a tough old bastard, played for the Bears in the thirties. He’ll stand up to it. See you at the gym tonight, Hank?’

  ‘Sure.’ Tekawa went into a karate stance of his own. ‘I’ll set you on your ass.’

  ‘Ten bucks says you don’t.’ He paused deliberately. ‘On that other thing I talked to you about …’

  ‘All set to go,’ said Tekawa smoothly.

  When the big detective had departed, the redhead began, ‘Hank, don’t you think maybe we ought to hold—’

  Tekawa cut him off with a headshake. ‘I don’t think anything,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

  Maley nodded judiciously. He said, ‘You and him are pretty good friends, I hear. Belong to the same karate studio, trade off phone numbers …’

  He was very carefully not looking at his partner, but his voice trailed off under Tekawa’s grave, unblinking regard. Maley finally met that gaze and his face began to grow pink as if trying to match his hair.

  Tekawa said, in a disgusted voice, ‘Fargo won the Rose Bowl for Stanford his senior year. Played two years with the Forty-Niners and then quit to enlist in the Special Forces. Battlefield promotion to an officer, two tours of duty in Vietnam, resigned from the Army after his enlistment and extension were up. Came back here to go to work as a private investigator with Lipset while going to Hastings Law, nights …’

  ‘Look, Henry—’

  ‘Passed the bar after only three years, but never practiced. Set himself up as a p.i. instead, specializing in investigations for attorneys until Maxwell Stayton sort of put him on watchdog duty over the daughter.’

  ‘All right, Henry, you’ve made your point. I just—’

  ‘Fargo’s bigger than we are, tougher than we are, he’s smarter than at least you are, and he has better connections at City Hall than either of us – as long as Stayton’s his client.’

  ‘Henry, you don’t have to rub it in.’

  ‘On top of that, he knows his rights better than we know ours. Now, if you can figure out a way to pry anything – anything at all – out of Neil Fargo that he doesn’t want to have pried, you let me know. Will you do that, Jerry?’

  ‘Well, sure, I—’

  ‘Otherwise, would you just kindly shut to fuck up?’

  The big red-headed cop stared at him hotly. Then both men suddenly began to laugh.

  16

  Harsh calipers of pain that had not been there when he had talked with Neil Fargo that morning creased Maxwell Stayton’s face. The cold room’s glacial light gleamed off his grey hair.

  ‘Yes,’ he said formally. ‘That is my daughter. That is Roberta Stayton.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Inspector Vince Wylie.

  The two men turned away. Stayton, though he was at least fifteen years older than the policeman, looked the harder, better-conditioned of the two. Wylie held the door for him. If Stayton heard the rattle of the runners behind them as the attendant slid the body back into its refrigerator drawer, he gave no indication. In the hallway outside the viewing room, he stopped. One way led to the entrance off Ahern Alley where the morgue wagons delivered their goods; the other led back to the Coroner’s business office through which they’d come.

  ‘You are a Homicide inspector, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In charge of the investigation of my daughter’s murder?’

  ‘Her death. Yes, sir.’

  Stayton frowned at the change of emphasis Wylie had made, but did not comment on it. Instead, he remarked, ‘I understood that personnel from the Coroner’s office, not from the police department, displayed bodies for identification purposes.’

  Wylie was suddenly uncomfortable.

  ‘Well, you see, sir, I … ah …’

  ‘You wanted to see if I’m as cold a son of a bitch as I’m supposed to be. I am, Inspector. You’d do well to remember that.’

  Wylie was no longer abashed. ‘I’m conducting an investigation into an alleged murder, Mr Stayton. You were apprised of your daughter’s demise by a civilian instead of aut
horized police personnel. This—’

  ‘Neil Fargo,’ agreed Stayton. ‘And this robbed you of a chance to study my reactions, to judge whether my surprise at news of her death was genuine or not. A daughter who was a – what is the term, a hype? – could be a great embarrassment for a man in my position, and the man who murdered her is an ex-employee. So you decided to retrieve what you could of the situation by studying my reactions to seeing her dead body. Is that so?’

  ‘Something like that, yes, sir.’

  Stayton nodded. ‘I’ve seen dead bodies before. What is happening with Alex Kolinski?’

  Wylie moved up the hall, the industrialist falling in beside him. A greedy light had entered the cop’s eyes.

  ‘I believe he is going through the booking process, Mr Stayton. But I can arrange for you to speak privately with him if you—’

  ‘I don’t want to see the bastard. I just want to make sure he gets strung up by the nuts.’

  Without waiting for a reply, Stayton opened the door which led into the narrow room, desk-crowded, which was behind the Coroner’s office reception counter. Wylie held back.

  ‘I understand there was friction between you and Kolinski while he was in your employ.’

  ‘I found him screwing my daughter while he was my chauffeur, and kicked his ass out of my house. I suppose you could call that friction.’

  They went through the narrow office, past the civil service stenos typing like aged arthritics, and out to the broad concrete ramp from the Hall of Justice to the Harrison Street municipal parking lot. Beyond the lot and above it, the Skyway moaned and shook with the beginnings of the rush-hour traffic.

  ‘One other little thing has bothered me, sir,’ said Wylie.

  Stayton, who had been starting down the ramp toward the lot, turned resignedly back. The air was chilly, for the sun was low above the soft, maimed breasts of Twin Peaks; but it was not nearly as chilly as the air in the room they had just quit. Stayton, in a suit but without a topcoat, seemed impervious to both sorts of cold.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked impatiently.

  ‘This thing of Neil Fargo calling you about your daughter’s death.’

  ‘He is in my employ. I expect loyalty of my employees.’

  ‘If that loyalty should conflict with the police in their authorized investigations—’

  ‘Then the police have legal remedies. Meanwhile, you’ve been a policeman long enough to know the power realities of this city. I am one of those realities, and my daughter is dead. The man who made her dead will pay the full penalty of the law.’

  ‘And if he didn’t make her dead?’ demanded Wylie stubbornly.

  ‘If you have doubts as to Kolinski’s guilt, dismiss them. They are puerile. Get in the way of his conviction for murder in the first degree, and I will crush you, utterly.’

  The planes of Wylie’s rather ugly face tightened and flattened. Unconsciously, he set his feet as if to take or deliver a blow. He said thinly, ‘Are you threatening a police officer, Mr Stayton?’

  ‘It is not a threat.’ He laid a finger against the middle button of Wylie’s honest, off-the-rack suit. ‘It is a statement of objective fact. Utterly, if you interfere.’

  He turned on his heel and strode down the ramp. Below, in a red-curbed zone where no cars were allowed to park, his long black sleek Continental waited, the chauffeur stiff beside the open back door. Wylie watched the grey-haired industrialist get in. The door shut with a sound like a vault being closed. The car pulled away with the noise of autumn leaves being drifted by the wind.

  Wylie looked at his outstretched right hand. The outspread fingers were tremoring. He said, ‘Shit,’ aloud, and got out a cigarette. As he hunched over it and his match, drawing in the fragrant harsh smoke, a voice spoke lightly behind him.

  ‘And that’s today’s word from God. Stay tuned for the Bay Area weather.’

  ‘You heard that bastard?’

  Henry Tekawa nodded. He was lounged against the pipe railing in lofty disdain of soot and dirt. He said, ‘You have to make allowances, Vince. The man has lost a daughter.’

  ‘And found a son named Neil Fargo,’ he sneered. He cursed several times in a tired voice, then shook his head. ‘You looking for me?’

  ‘I understand you have an APB out for somebody named Docker.’

  ‘Somebody named Docker is right. That’s all we got on him, a lot of good the APB’s going to do. Homicide this morning out on Bryant Street. Just the last name, no initials, no prints, nothing in R&I. Material witness at the moment. Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a sort of informant named Docker. Just the last name, no initials—’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Wylie. ‘I’m buying the coffee.’

  They rode the elevator to the Hall of Justice basement and the low-roofed, pale-walled public cafeteria across from the personal property room of the city jail. They found a corner table away from the attorneys and their clients, and where they had a chance of not being spotted by any newsmen working the police beat.

  ‘You have a package on the dead man? Marquez?’ Tekawa’s flat-planed face was politely interested, nothing more.

  ‘He’s a Mexican national. We’ve teletyped, but …’

  ‘Could he have been a drug courier?’

  ‘Hey.’ Wylie was silent, considering. They drank coffee. ‘That’s cute. I’ll tell you something, Hank. Addison, the cat we found unconscious at the scene, is a chemist. We don’t have a package on him, but …’

  ‘Marquez brings it in, Addison tests it for purity,’ mused Tekawa. ‘When Docker told me that Kolinski was giving somebody an OD, he was very specific. It was a hotshot of pure skag hijacked at Bryant Street this morning. Said a courier got killed and that you were handling the case.’

  ‘Any question at all that Kolinski didn’t hit her?’

  ‘I just had the fingerprint report on that syringe. Kolinski, no question.’ Tekawa’s grin was pure pleasure. He parted forefinger and index finger to hold the hypo, with his thumb depressed the imaginary plunger. ‘Like that. If the autopsy confirms overdose, he did it.’

  ‘But then where does that fucking Docker fit in?’

  ‘Where does he fit in down at Bryant Street?’

  Wylie told him, all of it.

  When he was finished, Henry Tekawa said, ‘There any suggestion of dope, besides the chemist being there?’

  ‘Well … Rosas, the hype they collared there, picked up that speed from the medicine chest. And another ampule of speed was busted on the bathroom floor that he says he didn’t drop. So there could of been more, and Docker could have used it. That boy is cutting a wide enough swath to read like somebody on something.’

  ‘And prints on the shards of the broken ampule?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wiped?’

  ‘Rubber gloves. Again, in my book, Docker. I’ve reconstructed what I think are his movements after he left Bryant Street at seven-thirty this morning. He’d already killed Marquez with his bare hands, and roughed up Addison. Now he roughs up Rosas in Franklin Square, tries to set him up for the fall on the Marquez wipe. Next, two spade baggage-handlers down at Greyhound give his description as the cat who beat hell out of a little hanger-on named Rowlands – only he told the spades he was a syndicate enforcer.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the same man?’ asked Tekawa.

  ‘Description fits. An hour, hour-and-a-half later a guy with the same description shows up on Market and First, stomps some hippie chick’s toes, comes on heavy in a First Street bar, then buys a one-way bus ticket to LA on Trailways. Then—’

  ‘Did he get a bus ticket at Greyhound?’

  ‘Yeah. I forgot that. Seattle. One-way.’

  The voices at the next table rose sharply enough to cut into their discussion. One of the men was hawk-nosed, heavy-jawed, with greying dark hair brushed straight back. He wore oddly-assorted clothing: a yellow knit pull-over t-shirt, black narrow shoes, one black and one brown sock, pyjama bottoms, and a yellow sp
ort shirt that didn’t go with anything else, especially the pajamas.

  ‘… don’t know when I can pay you back the bail money, Dave!’

  ‘How the hell did you end up in the slam in the first place?’ Dave was younger, long-haired, with a mechanic’s grease permanently imbedded beneath his fingernails.

  ‘Had a fight with the old lady and she swung at me with a butcher knife so I called the cops. But they came and took me. And the landlord was raising hell, I don’t know what his beef is, I’ve been there six years, he gets thirty-one dollars a week from me, he’s got a good thing going …’

  They became aware of the cops’ scrutiny, lowered their voices. Wylie shook his head. ‘There’s some fucking compensations to being plainclothes at that, Hank. We don’t have to break up domestic beefs. Anyway, a few minutes after Docker bought this bus ticket at Trailways – which he didn’t use – a black hanger-on named Browne got the shit beat out of him in the men’s can there. We can’t tie it strictly to Docker, and Browne ain’t talking, just like Rowlands, but …’

  ‘But,’ said Henry Tekawa in a disgruntled voice. ‘None of it makes much sense, does it? Weird mixture of irrationality and cunning. And none of it ties in with a heroin OD in a Tenderloin hotel …’

  ‘Wait … a … minute …’ exclaimed Wylie with narrowed eyes. ‘There was a Mexican figurine busted on the floor at Bryant Street. Would of been hollow when it was whole—’

  ‘The lab test the pieces for H dust?’ demanded Tekawa quickly.

  ‘No, but they sure as fuck will now.’

  Tekawa said excitedly, ‘Walter Hariss imports clay figurines from Mexico.’ Wylie started to interrupt, but he went right on. ‘Hariss and Alex Kolinski are owners-of-record, according to information I received just this afternoon, of the FarJon Hotel where Roberta Stayton died. And Vice confirms that Kolinski probably has been running a string of junkie whores out of that hotel.’

  ‘Roberta Stayton a junkie whore?’

  ‘Little hard to figure, isn’t it?’ agreed Tekawa. ‘But according to the black chick who managed the place, she was one of the string – specialized in giving head. She was down to around ninety pounds and her mouth was about the last thing she had left that anybody’d pay to use.’ Somehow, Tekawa’s brutal words were delivered with such utter disinterest that they were robbed of salaciousness or even of offense. They were merely a recital of facts.