Interface (Crime Masterworks) (23 page)

‘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 …’

Neil Fargo was silent for long moments. Then he nodded.

‘Yeah. Sure. He could have pointed the finger at us all. At you. At me. He could have cleared Kolinski, could have cleared Hariss. And he had become an unstable man.’

‘But … he was supposed to be your friend! You … he’d saved your life in Vietnam.’

Neil Fargo shrugged. ‘So I’m a son of a bitch. But I’m still alive. And Docker isn’t.’

‘You won’t ever work for me again, Fargo,’ the industrialist choked out. His voice shook. ‘You know that I value personal loyalty above any … Not now, not ever again.’

Neil Fargo shrugged. From the doorway, he said, ‘You never gave a shit about what happened to Robin, Stayton. Only about the fact that she was carrying your name. You
think
you care she’s dead, but you don’t. Not really. Now you’ve got her son all to yourself. You failed with her, you think you won’t fuck it up this time with the kid. The only one who cared about Robin –
really
cared about Robin – was Docker. He loved her enough to help her go out with dignity.’

The whey-faced financier said nothing. Neil Fargo nodded.

‘My secretary will send you a closing bill and our final report in the morning.’

He left. Back at his own office. he dictated the promised report, drinking bourbon straight from a pint bottle between paragraphs. When he’d drunk enough of it, he went to sleep on the office couch.

I
t was a mild morning. Pamela Gardner had her cloth coat over her arm when she paused in the vestibule of the street level door bearing the inscription N
EIL
F
ARGO
–
INVESTIGATIONS
. She was humming a tune to herself with youthful resiliency, as if yesterday had not happened, or had happened to one of the characters in the weighty best-seller she again bore under her arm.

The office smelled of stale cigarette smoke. On the top step she stopped so abruptly that she dropped the book again, as she had done the morning before.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh! I …’

Neil Fargo turned from the electric coffee maker. He was scowling. ‘How the hell do you make this bastard thing work?’

‘Oh.’ She was blushing, as if meeting him here before office hours made it an assignation rather than a work day. ‘You … have to jiggle the cord in the socket a certain way to—’

‘Jiggle it,’ commanded Neil Fargo.

Pamela eyed the pot critically, did things with the cord no manufacturer’s instructions ever included. The pot began to perk, hesitantly, like a two-cycle engine with only one cylinder working.

‘You look hung over,’ she said snidely to the detective.

‘I am. There’s a report on the tape.’

His hands had tremored ever so slightly while fooling with the coffee pot. His eyes were bloodshot. He had shaved with the office razor, but carelessly. He turned toward his inner sanctum.

‘At least the janitor got the mess cleaned up last night. A cup of that when it’s ready will save my life, doll.’

But Pamela had followed him into his office. She laid the newspaper, folded open to the story, on the desk under his eyes. ‘Is that the same Docker?’

‘The very same.’ His voice was mocking, but his eyes were somber.

‘It says they haven’t found the body yet, but that—’

‘Yeah. He’s dead.’

The words were blunt. The girl’s very small, very soft capable hands that smelled of Jergen’s Lotion found another news story. ‘It says that terrible man, that one you called Peeler—’