Interface (Crime Masterworks)

by Gores, Joe

  ‘That’s a nice piece, Mr Fargo. Nice balance.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re not too bad at being careful yourself, are you?’

  ‘Man’s gotta stay alive, Mr Fargo.’

  ‘Might remember that if people start asking questions, Blaney.’

  Neil Fargo dropped the shells into one topcoat pocket, the gun into the other, tapped Blaney on the arm with a closed fist, sauntered off into the fog. Out of sight of the gate, he looked straight up and caught the veiled glow of a quarter moon. The fog was lifting.

  At a clump of tightly-trimmed decorative bushes on somebody’s lawn, he retrieved the attaché case he had found in the bushes above Baker Beach where Docker had left it. Ten fast minutes brought him out of the opulent residential area on El Camino del Mar. He walked in Lake Street to Twenty-Fifth, scattered dimes on the tray in a gas station phone booth on the corner of California, and started phoning.

  His first call brought a familiar age-quavered voice. He said: ‘Jimmy? Neil Fargo.’

  ‘How’d I do, Mr Fargo?’

  ‘Beautiful. The timing was perfect on every call.’

  ‘That’s great, Mr Fargo. Makes me feel … Well, it’s the next best thing to having my eyes back, to know—’

  ‘There’ll be a hun bonus, Jimmy.’

  ‘A hundred bucks? Mr Fargo—’

  ‘Everybody gets healthy on this one, Jimmy.’

  His next call was for a taxicab. He gave them the name of Smith and said he’d be waiting in the Lone Star Bar on Twenty-Fifth and Clement.

  He checked his watch. Not yet ten o’clock. Events had moved very rapidly. He dialled, was rewarded with a singsong voice speaking the name of a karate studio.

  ‘Yes, Mr Fargo, Mr Tekawa wait for your call even though we all close up now. Here …’

  ‘Okay, Hank, I just got the word. No. After I found out Kolinski OD’d the Stayton woman. Huh? Yeah, that’s right. Anonymous, even within your own department. Shit, Hank, dummy up some paper leads to make it look like you dug it out of the woodwork yourself …’

  He listened, nodded, grunted, shook his head, finally cut in again.

  ‘Okay, you’ve got the judge lined up. You’ll have him by the ass but he’ll have good lawyers and … yeah. Okay.’

  He listened a final time, laughed.

  ‘Thank me when you find out if the tip was any good or not. Hell yes, bring your partner in on the bust if you want. Just don’t tell him the tip came from me.’ He recited a phone number from memory. ‘I’ll be there for an hour or so. Let me know how it goes.’

  He walked the block to Clement, was standing in front of the little neighborhood bar when his taxi arrived.

  23

  The taxi driver didn’t like hippie freaks and he didn’t like coffee. He drank milk from a half-pint box on the dashboard as he drove.

  ‘Night work like this, y’know, you gotta drink something. When I drank coffee I had this backache all the time. Got so bad I went to this doctor, see?’

  Neil Fargo grunted. The fog was dissipating. He could see several blocks down deserted California Street.

  ‘So he tells me I got something with a long name, see, and I should quit hackin’. So what’m I gonna do, sell apples?’

  He shot a quick look at Neil Fargo to see how these confessions were being handled. He was short and middle-aged and wore a cardigan sweater bunched up around his upper arms.

  ‘So I’d read this article somewheres about coffee, all the crap it puts in your blood stream, see, so I stayed hackin’ but started drinking milk instead. You know what happened?’

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘Next corner.’

  ‘That’s right. My back quit aching, and that’s like six, almost seven months ago.’ He pulled over to the curb, turned again to watch Neil Fargo getting out some money. ‘You can say what you want about them fuckin’ hippies, but they got something in all this natural foods shit, y’know what I mean?’

  Neil Fargo paid, tipped enough but not so much he’d be remembered. He was three blocks from his office. He said, ‘I think you’ve got something too. About milk.’

  The cabbie’s face seamed in a grin. ‘Me an’ Mark Spitz.’

  Neil Fargo walked down to the closed Seventy-Six station, got his Fairlane started so the defroster would clear the windows, left it running while he used the pay phone.

  ‘I’m on my way up,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes.’

  California Street in-town was mostly clear of traffic apart from clots at the red lights and pedestrian cross-traffic where Grant Avenue dragged Chinatown athwart his bow. The fog had dissipated enough to show him the flat glitter of Treasure Island as he went down Nob Hill past a rattling, nearly-empty cable car. There was an empty slot across from darkened Tadich’s Grill.

  He walked back to Montgomery Street, and the two short blocks out to Clay where the immense leg-like white pillars slanted up to support the massive pyramid shape. He signed in with a fictitious name, for the second time that day was whisked up to Stayton Enterprises. The outer door past Miss Laurence’s deserted desk was open, and Maxwell Stayton’s blocky silhouette filled his private doorway.

  Only when he turned to accompany Neil Fargo into his office did the lights slant across his features, showing how the day had ravaged them. But he said, ‘More like eighteen minutes.’

  ‘And time is money. How’s Dorothy taking it?’

  ‘Another fucking stupid question. Cognac?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ve already had one. Which reminds me.’

  He took the brandy snifter from his pocket which he had carried away from Hariss’ house. Stayton frowned uncomprehendingly at it.

  ‘Evidence?’ he asked.

  Neil Fargo nodded. He went around behind the desk.

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  He nodded again, rapped the glass sharply on the rim of the wastebasket to break it, dropped the shards into the basket. ‘My own. I didn’t want to leave any hard evidence I’d been out at Walter Hariss’ house tonight, so I carried it away with me. If he can’t prove I was there, he takes a long fall.’

  Maxwell Stayton began, ‘If you think I’m going to—’

  ‘I came in with you, Max, remember? After we’d had supper together to discuss your daughter’s murder. You pick the restaurant – somewhere they won’t contradict anything you say. And have a word or two with the security guard here in case he’s ever questioned—’

  ‘Why should I?’

  Neil Fargo sat down in the same chair as that morning. Also like the morning, Stayton sat down behind the desk. The detective put his head back against the curved leather back, stared at the ceiling. His legs were thrust out ahead of him in utter relaxation, his hands hung loosely on either side of the chair arms. He was so motionless he might have been asleep.

  To the ceiling, he said, ‘Because if you don’t, the frame against Harris won’t stick. Or might not stick. Of course you can tell me to go to hell. What the fuck, nobody pushes old Maxy Stayton around.’

  Stayton reached for a cigar. His hands shook, very slightly; it had been a long day. He said icily, ‘You’d do well to remember that, Fargo. With my daughter dead, your claim to my consideration …’

  Neil Fargo met his eyes steadily.

  ‘Uh-uh. I’ll get by. You said this morning that you wanted the men responsible for Robin destroyed. And like magic, by tonight they’re destroyed. I hope you like it.’

  ‘Kolinski destroyed himself by murdering Robin. As for Hariss—’

  ‘Bullshit. Robin suicided. With ninety-five percent pure heroin that I used your hundred-seventy-five grand as bait to bring up across the border from Mexico.’

  Maxwell Stayton got almost clumsily to his feet and came around the end of the desk. His cigar was in his left hand. He slowly hooked a hip over the edge of his desk and leaned forward so he loomed over the younger man. Neil Fargo made no move at all.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘Not that I knew Robin was
going to get her hands on any of it,’ continued Neil Fargo as if the older man had not moved or spoken. ‘That was something she and Docker cooked up between them.’

  ‘Docker’s the man you said this morning you trusted and shouldn’t have? The same Docker who the eleven o’clock news said went off a cliff in the Presidio in a stolen car?’

  ‘The same Docker.’

  Stayton said in a terrible, soft voice, ‘How did Docker and my daughter come to meet?’

  ‘It’s a long story. But he was in my employ, and—’

  Stayton’s heavy features convulsed. Without the rest of his body moving, his right arm swept in a tight vicious arc so his massive right fist smashed against Neil Fargo’s cheekbone, driving his head sideways with such power that it upset him, chair and all. He hit the floor on one shoulder, came up with fists like rocks hanging at his sides, very much like a downed fighter will bounce up before the mandatory eight count to show he hasn’t been hurt by the blow which floored him.

  For quite thirty seconds, Neil Fargo stood in the middle of the room breathing deeply, staring at his employer with eyes like hot coals. Then the tension went out of his pose.

  ‘Feel better?’ he asked.

  Stayton made a vague gesture. He went back around his desk, sat down slowly in the massive executive chair, slowly put his head between his hands. His cigar jutted out from between his palms like the barrel of a gun.

  ‘When I said this morning I wanted them destroyed …’

  ‘Roberta did it for you. At least Kolinski. She bought his destruction with her own death and with five thousand dollars for the testimony of the black girl on the desk.’

  Stayton’s voice said brokenly from between his hands, ‘The five thousand for the black girl. That came from my hundred-seventy-five—’

  ‘Yeah. Docker took it out at Robin’s suggestion. I didn’t even know it was missing until too late.’

  ‘It’s … gotten away from me, hasn’t it?’ asked Stayton almost querulously.

  ‘Yeah.’ Neil Fargo rubbed a palm across his bruised face. ‘You’re past it, daddy. But you still pack a hell of a wallop.’ He suddenly shrugged wryly. ‘Shit, it got away from both of us.’

  A gleam appeared in Stayton’s eyes. ‘Meaning Docker?’

  ‘Docker and Robin. I should have been able to foresee that if she’d gotten sick of life she’d do something about it. And find somebody like Docker to help her do it.’

  He righted the chair he had been sitting in, slumped back against it once more. He tilted his head back, began talking in a soft voice.

  ‘Let me tell you about Docker. Captain in my outfit in Nam, a tough cookie, the hardest man I’ve ever known. Then he was MIA, presumed dead until the big POW release, when he turned up on one of the lists. He looked me up when he came through Travis Air Force Base. Still just as tough, but the Cong had put him in a cage for a number of months. It turned the hard into nasty …’

  He stopped talking. Stayton said, ‘Did Robin buy his cooperation, too?’

  ‘They met in Mexico City,’ said Neil Fargo. He sighed and lowered his head to look at the industrialist. ‘That’s where it got away from me. When you hired me to find Roberta this last time, and I found out here and in Mexico what I was up against – her addiction – and who I was up against – Kolinski and Hariss – I needed a wrecker. The Cong had made a wrecker out of Docker, so I contacted him in Vegas, where he’d gone to work as security in one of the big hotels, and hired him. Without knowing he and Robin had met in Mexico when she was down there trying to kick her habit, and had … I guess, had fallen for each other for a while.’

  ‘Why did you need a wrecker?’ asked Stayton. ‘I gave you all the money you asked for …’

  ‘Money wouldn’t buy them off. Hariss wanted power – the sort of power you have – and Kolinski wanted Robin’s degradation. And a drug distribution setup. They were bringing in a kilo of pure heroin; I made them think I had a cash buyer. Your cash, of course. Since I knew Hariss had an almost pathological fear of being himself involved in anything shady, I suggested Docker as bagman. That way, I said, none of the rest of us would have to show in it at all. Mexican courier, bagman, chemist, nobody else. Hariss loved it. Kolinski was touchy but he went along.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Docker went wrong – the one element in the situation I thought was stable. He was supposed to lay out the courier and grab the heroin before the chemist showed up. Instead, he killed the fucking courier, hung around to beat up the chemist, then went on the run from me as well as from Kolinski’s people. I thought he’d gone berserk. Now I know he was working to a pre-existent scheme he and Robin had worked out to destroy Kolinski.’

  ‘From the way he died, I’d say he intended to keep both the heroin and the money, and—’

  ‘Not the money. I had never given him that, although he’d handled it, of course. Then this afternoon—’

  The phone shrilled, cutting him off.

  ‘That’ll be for me,’ he said.

  Neil Fargo crossed to the instrument, picked it up, said, ‘Yeah,’ and started listening. He listened for a full three minutes, interjecting only occasional monosyllables. He hung up. He seemed suddenly to dominate the room with ill-concealed excitement.

  ‘They nailed that fucker,’ he said.

  ‘Which fucker?’

  ‘Walter Hariss. The narcs, on a tip and with a valid search warrant, just raided his place out in Sea Cliff. Taped to the inside of a toilet lid – the oldest gag in the book – they found a key of pure heroin wrapped in waterproof plastic. Stupid of Hariss, huh? But then the most careful guy around can be made to look stupid if he’s worried about dying.’

  Understanding had dawned in Stayton’s eyes. ‘You mean that you—’

  ‘I mean that when the police technicians get busy inside those layers of plastic, they’re going to find a lot of fingerprints from Julio Marquez, the courier who Docker killed this morning.’

  ‘And on the outside?’

  ‘Smudges only, made by someone careful not to leave fingerprints.’

  ‘But careless enough to hide it inside the toilet tank?’ Stayton was on his feet, prowling the office. The fog was gone, black night sky now cloudless, the twinkling insignificant carpet of San Francisco lights spread below his eerie. Facing the window, he said, ‘Are you really naive enough to believe they’ll make it stick? With the sort of lawyers he’ll be able to afford?’

  ‘Hank Tekawa, the lieutenant in charge of the raid, is a hell of a bright cop,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘Besides, even if he beats this rap, Hariss won’t be out of the woods.’

  Stayton whirled suddenly, pointed a blunt finger at him.

  ‘I thought Docker was on the run with that heroin. How did you get it?’

  ‘At one point he ran to the airport. I found him there, as did Kolinski’s people. They didn’t make it stick. Docker told me he was going to make a run for it, by car, to Marin County. I told him we had a chance to knock off Hariss, too, if he’d stop at a phone booth to call Hariss and threaten his life. Then Hariss would ask me to come to his house – to protect him.’

  ‘And Docker did it for you? And gave you the heroin? Just like that?’

  ‘He and I went through a lot together in Vietnam. And he really didn’t much give a shit any more whether he lived or died. Not once Roberta was gone. He left the heroin where he knew I’d find it once he saw he wasn’t going to make it out of San Francisco.’

  Stayton sighed. ‘I’m not saying I believe you. But even if I did, your reconstruction leaves out one important item: my hundred-seventy-five thousand dollars. If Docker never did have it—’

  ‘Hundred-seventy. Five thousand went to the black girl.’

  ‘All right. Hundred-seventy thousand.’

  ‘It’s in a safe deposit box.’

  ‘In your name, I suppose?’ There was a sneer in his voice.

  ‘In Walter Hariss’.’

  There was a moment of
frozen silence. Stayton exploded, ‘Are you mad? Putting that kind of money in—’

  ‘Internal Revenue will receive the tip in the morning. One of the safe deposit keys will be found in Hariss’ office desk. I put it there myself earlier this week. I dropped the other down a manhole this morning after putting the money in the box.’

  ‘But the signature won’t be Hariss’—’

  ‘He’s going to convince Internal Revenue of that? A hundred-seventy-thousand in cash, old bills, not sequential, not traceable, not reported on his income tax returns? They’ll pick him clean and jug him for tax fraud, then audit him for the rest of his life – even if he would beat the narcotics rap, which I don’t believe for a second. The beauty of it is, however loud he screams, nobody’ll believe it’s a frame. The amount is just too goddam big. Nobody would put out that kind of money to do somebody down. That’s why it’ll work.’

  Stayton was silent for a time, mouth set in an angry slash. Finally he said, ‘And his family? His wife and daughter?’

  ‘He should have thought of them before he started fucking around with Kolinski. You should have thought of them before you hired me.’

  Stayton had an expression in his eyes which could have been respect not unmingled with fear. ‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you, Fargo?’

  ‘I’m a manhunter. I work at it.’

  ‘And you say that your friend Docker was a hard man?’

  ‘Not hard enough,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘So is my daughter.’

  ‘By her own hand, Stayton. Remember that. She wanted to die. She was a syphed-up junkie whore, she’d have died before she was forty of malnutrition or an accidental OD or one of the diseases hypes don’t have enough resistance to avoid getting. Serum hepatitis, spinal meningitis – shit, you know the litany. This way she went out clean, took Kolinski with her – the man who’d made her what she’d become. Or at least had given her the opportunity.’

  Stayton looked old, crumpled, scarcely strong enough to have made the already discoloring bruise on Neil Fargo’s face. ‘I’d better get home. The boy doesn’t know about his mother’s death yet, I haven’t …’ He stopped speaking. A frown creased his tired features. ‘You said your friend Docker was going to try to bust out – north, into Marin County. Why did he have to bust out? The police didn’t know where he was or what he was driving. Only one man knew …’