Interface (Crime Masterworks) (11 page)

‘I see.’ Kolinski’s bony face had become pensive. ‘But if Fargo’s stringing us along, he’ll have briefed his secretary on what to tell us.’

Hariss chuckled richly. ‘Gus has an extremely persuasive way of asking questions of young ladies.’

The back of Gus Rizzato’s open hand drove Pamela Gardner’s delicately-boned skull sideways against the plasterboard partition beside her desk. The pigskin driving gloves he wore left a mottled red pattern on her cheek.

‘I asked you about a package, dearie.’

Outrage and terror fought in the girl’s face. In a voice high with fear but still defiant, she exclaimed, ‘You, you … get out of here! When Neil hears—’

The knuckles whipped across her cheek the other way. She broke, screamed, scrambled from her chair so she could get the desk between them. Rizzato’s dainty size six shoe swept sideways against her ankles, slamming them together and taking her feet out from under her.

Pamela went down heavily on her side, only partially breaking the fall with one hand. In the same motion she tried to roll under the desk in a flurry of nyloned thighs.

Rizzato’s hand darted down between the churning legs. The girl screamed again, whether in pain, further terror or outrage was impossible to distinguish. She kicked up and out; her shoe missed Rizzato’s face by the slimmest of margins. Since she was on her back she used elbows, bottom and heels to scrabble backward into the well under the desk like a threatened spider into a corner.

Rizzato was around the desk as quick as a weasel. He grabbed her short brown hair from behind as she emerged, jerked her head up and then back and sideways to rap it just hard enough on the edge of the well. The girl made a strangled sound in her throat as if she were trying to retch. He rapped again. The girl quit fighting his hands.

‘That’s it, dearie,’ he chirped. His eyes and voice were cheerfully birdlike. He bent his own face over hers, so he could look down into her fear-haunted eyes. ‘Now tell me about the package.’

‘There wasn’t any—’

Rizzato reached down his free hand and almost contemptuously massaged one of the small ripe globes beneath her fuzzy yellow sweater. The girl’s body stiffened, her mouth opened as if in rictus, but she made no sound.

Rizzato removed his hand. Blood congested his face, either from rage or arousal. ‘Answer my questions, dearie, or I’ll strip that sweater off you and suck on that nipple until it’s the size of a grape. Now out from under the desk and on your feet, no tricks. Right?’

There was a long pause. Pamela finally nodded her head, mutely. Her face was nauseated. A thin line of blood had run down one corner of her mouth where she had bitten herself.

‘That’s my girl. Now tell me about the package.’

Rizzato stepped back three swift paces, stood poised on the balls of his feet as she awkwardly crawled out from under the desk. The girl was shivering as if with cold. She shot a single shamefaced look at Rizzato, then looked at the stairwell.

‘I locked the downstairs door, dearie. Neil Fargo, Investigations is closed temporarily for inventory.’

‘If Neil should come back—’

‘He’s out looking for Docker.’

The girl shuddered. She pressed back against the edge of the desk. Her body shielded her right hand from Rizzato’s view. The hand crept back, spiderlike, toward the telephone.

Rizzato had removed his suitcoat, carefully hung it over the back of a chair. To go with his six-inch-wide necktie, he wore bright golden suspenders three inches wide. Somehow, these did not make him look ridiculous.

He reached back as if to scratch the back of his head, then his arm was a sudden blur and a slim black commando’s knife was lying on his open palm. The girl’s hand leaped back to her side as if scalded. Rizzato laughed complacency.

‘Fargo must have told you why they call me Peeler.’

The girl made her eyes find his face. Her pupils had dilated with emotion like a cat’s, so almost no iris showed. Somehow she made her voice low and steady.

‘You don’t have to hurt me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

‘That’s my girl. Did Fargo bring a package with him when he came in this morning?’

‘Package?’

‘Dearie …’ He pointed the flat black blade at the front of her dust-marked skirt. ‘Maybe I’ll open you up down there so you can take a stallion right to the balls and yell for more.’

The girl’s face became exactly the shade of parchment. It took her lips, so dry had they become, three times to whisper, ‘Please … I … don’t know what you mean. He … was empty-handed. Completely.’

‘There’s this morning’s
Chronicle
on top of the file cabinet.’

‘I brought that myself. I bring it every morning.’

‘Now we find out if you’re lying.’

The office was small, with few hiding places. Only one filing cabinet was locked, and that one Rizzato dumped on its face and opened by working loose the lock-rod. There was no package, no money. Finally he heaped up some of the dozens of file folders he had dumped out, unplugged the coffee pot, carefully removed the basket which held the sodden grounds and dumped them over the files. He completed the destruction by pouring the steaming coffee over the grounds. Then he sat down on the edge of the girl’s desk.

‘And now, dearie, tell me about this car Docker is driving …’

He left exactly twenty-two minutes after he had first entered the building. Since the Bush Street garage was less than eight blocks distant, he drove directly there to report in person. Then he went back out to sit behind the wheel of the Cadillac again.

Inside the office, Hariss said, ‘So. Fargo is clean so far as we can determine. No money, no package—’

‘And an informant actually did call in with the information Fargo passed on to us about Docker’s rental car. And he passed
all
of the information on to us.’

‘We may have been unduly suspicious of friend Fargo.’

Kolinski blew air through his nose. ‘Unless he called the info in to her himself.’

‘She would have recognized his voice.’

‘She could lie—’

‘To Gus?’

Kolinski was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. ‘
I
wouldn’t want that little bastard coming after me.’ He chuckled. ‘I wonder what Fargo’s reaction is going to be when he sees his office.’

‘Gus can take care of himself.’

‘Against Fargo? I watched him play with the Forty-Niners.’ His voice was suddenly worried. ‘I hope that bastard never finds out that we’ve got Roberta Stayton stashed in the Tenderloin while he’s running all over hell looking for her.’

‘I would say we have much more proximate concerns that Neil Fargo,’ said Hariss stiffly.

As if to punctuate his remark, the telephone rang. It was 2:47
P
.
M
.

A
t 2:24
P
.
M
., Docker had gone up the stairs of a faded residence hotel midway along the 600 block of Geary Street. It was a neighborhood of cheap bars, buildings torn down to make way for parking lots, and beyond mid-block, post-quake construction totally without charm.

The heavy varnished front door, its glass protected by twisted wrought iron rods, was open. The way Docker entered made it apparent that he had known the door was unlocked. He limped down the hall on a cheap carpet given spurious depth by the foam rubber pad beneath it, went through another door at the far end of what once had been a quite ornate lobby. A mirror gave him back his own bulky image fragmented by the silver peeling from the back of the mirror.

Rough concrete steps led down a half-flight to another door. This was old, weathered even on the inside, painted a faded yellow which looked almost brown in the dim light. The light over the door didn’t work. Docker let himself out.

This put him in a low-roofed, concrete passageway. At the far end was scraggly foliage, ground-hugging juniper and a wildly out-of-place Fatsia japonica, whose deeply indented spatulate leaves were turning brown from lack of chemicals in the soil. Down a dozen groaning wooden stairs was a narrow alley.

Docker turned left, went along the littered blacktop to pause in a doorway on the right-hand side with his back against the door. The building was of faded red brick. The doorway had a red
EXIT
light above it in a metal cage. Docker drew on his cigarette, let his eyes roam behind their hornrims. No one was in sight.

Docker ground out the cigarette against the wall, pocketed the stub, pushed backwards against the door. It opened with his weight, he slid through. He was at the foot of dark narrow stairs. He went up them through the gloom, laboring a little with his right leg yet sure-footed, his fingers in their surgical rubber serving as delicate antennae to aid his orientation as do a cat’s whiskers.

At the top of the stairs was a firedoor. The hand that did not hold the attaché case turned the knob. This door was also unlocked. Docker opened it a scant inch, laid an eye to the strip, saw only empty hallway with peeling grey walls and a grey threadbare rug with a pink flower design like spilled animal guts.

He let the firedoor click shut behind him, crossed the hall in two quick strides, twisted the closest knob, went through the door and shut it behind him.

The junkie whore called Robin had turned around the chair over which Kolinski’s coat had earlier been thrown to face the room’s lone window. This stared out at a red brick airshaft through greyed nylon curtains. The open window let air stir her lank hair and the greyed curtains. At this hour oblique sunlight touched only the upper third of the age-softened brick wall opposite.

Robin smiled at Docker over her shoulder, thus throwing her head back and tightening the muscles in her neck to give her throat a smooth deceptive grace. Her face was pinched; normally, she already would have used the second of the glassine bags of heroin Kolinski had left with her.

She laughed softly at the expression on Docker’s face. There might have been the faintest note of hysteria in her merriment. If Docker noticed, he let nothing show in the smile he found to put on.

‘He brought your name up himself this morning,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have to maneuver him at all.’ Docker said nothing. She said, ‘I can’t ever get used to …’ She stopped, shook her head. She said, ‘Have you got it?’

Docker opened the attaché case on the bed. ‘I’ve got it.’ He held up one of the baggies of pure heroin for her to see, tossed it on the rumpled covers. He delved again, and dropped on the blanket beside the heroin a ten-cc syringe that looked the twin of the one which Kolinski had used on Robin that morning. ‘You?’

‘In the top drawer of the dresser.’

Docker sighed. He sat down on the edge of the bed, legs thrust wide in front of him. He stared glumly at the cracked dirty linoleum. His position was so unconsciously reminiscent of Kolinski’s that morning and all the other mornings that the girl shuddered.

‘Is this the way the world ends?’ she asked softly.

Docker raised his head very quickly to surprise the momentary horror on her face. She was still sitting in her chair, knees drawn up to her chest, arms locked around her folded legs. Only her bare feet showed beneath the frayed hem of the nightgown.

‘We don’t have to go through with it, Robin.’

‘Daphne’s going to call at two-forty-five. You saved out the five thousand?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes were suddenly feverish with rage. ‘He hurt her this morning. He loves to hurt people. He calls her Aunt Jemima.’

Docker sighed again. ‘Robin, I still think …’

She ran a hand through her hair. There was some of that morning’s urgency back in her movements, but it was under control. The dregs of the dose Kolinski had administered still remained in her body. The sweats and sniffles were still some way off.

‘I thought about getting my hair done,’ she said. ‘Putting on makeup, buying a robe. Then I realized that would ruin it.’

Docker took a turn around the room. His face was icy behind the glasses; a faint sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead. He didn’t meet her eyes. He looked at his inexorable watch as at a bomb. He stopped by the sink, leaned over it as if he wanted to vomit into it. He straightened, turned, leaned back against the wall. He seemed disinclined or unable to stand up straight; being on his feet seemed to tire him.

‘Yes,’ he said harshly. ‘Business as usual for it to go down. But …’

‘The time for “buts” is gone.’ She paused, added his name deliberately, almost mockingly, as if tasting the shape of it with her mouth. ‘Docker. The time for anything is gone. Time is gone.’

‘It doesn’t have to be—’

‘For me it does.’

She stood up, crossed the linoleum on bare narrow feet. Her skin was luminously pale. Although she was a tall woman, her head fit under Docker’s stubborn chin. The chin was already lightly stubbled since his morning shave. She reached up, removed his glasses, folded them, stuck them end-down in the outer breast pocket of his jacket.

She said against his chest, ‘Jesus, I’ll be glad.’ She leaned back to look up into his face, then pressed hers against his chest again. ‘You understand that, don’t you? I’m tired, tired in my soul.’

Docker put a hand wedge-shaped with muscle under her chin, tipped her head back, bent and with a ritual tenderness pressed his open mouth against hers. It was a long, sexually alive kiss, though the lips of both man and woman were dry and feverish. Her arms went around him, clung fiercely.

She broke the kiss so she could whisper into his mouth. ‘I wondered whether I would wish we’d saved time for it. Now I’m glad we didn’t.’ She suddenly giggled. ‘I’m probably syphed up again.’

‘Robin, there’s still time to call it off …’

She didn’t bother to reject his plea. She began softly humming a dance tune. To a few bars of it they actually danced, a dream-like waltz step from a long time before. Docker’s limp was not apparent in their slow matched movements. They were graceful together.

‘Remember?’

Docker nodded. ‘Twelve, thirteen years ago. The grand ballroom of the St Francis.’

She stopped dancing.

‘Miss Stayton was the hit of the Cotillion. She was stunning in her cerement and shroud.’