Interface (Crime Masterworks) Read online

  ‘Will you go downstairs to Stempel’s and get us some doughnuts, doll?’ The girl nodded hurriedly and stood up. Neil Fargo added, ‘And then go over to the Seventy-Six station and tell Emil to fill up the Fairlane. Don’t hurry.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Fargo.’ There was relief in her voice.

  She got her purse and started down the stairs. Rizzato looked appreciatively after her. He winked at Neil Fargo, made obscene gestures that crudely suggested sexual intercourse, and swaggered out after the girl.

  Neil Fargo stared after him, then returned to the cubicle where Hariss waited impatiently.

  ‘Sometime I’m going to do something about that little son of a bitch,’ he said to the importer.

  Walter Hariss made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He was a small-boned, solid man in his late forties, with a good tan and a round, slightly fleshy face and full lips, who wore very expensive clothes well. He wore his grey hair medium length, brushed back from his face in a modified pompadour. His shoes gleamed. Only the overripe diamond on his pinky finger destroyed the illusion of solid businessman.

  Neil Fargo sighed and nodded. ‘All right. What went wrong?’

  ‘We got knocked over.’

  ‘Knocked over!’ The detective’s thin lips tightened into a wolfish grin, emphasizing the Indian cast of his features. He made it an exclamation, not a question.

  ‘At the drop point. My courier, Julio Marquez, got killed and my chemist got laid out. And then the cops showed up before he could get out.’

  ‘Tipped,’ muttered Neil Fargo.

  He got up, paced twice back and forth beside the desk, cracking his fisted right hand into his left palm.

  ‘Your fucking friend Docker is missing and so is my kilo of H,’ said Hariss. ‘To say nothing of the attaché case.’

  ‘Docker called here before I got in. Docker. Hah!’ He struck the desk suddenly with the flat of his palm. His calender jumped an inch off the polished hardwood. His eyes got mean. ‘Well, you’re the fucker who wanted everything done through intermediaries. Didn’t want to be there yourself. Didn’t want me there. A hundred and seventy-five thousand bucks was in that attaché case and I’m responsible to the money man for it!’

  ‘Was there?’ asked Hariss. His pale eyes burned softly in his ruddy face. He had a well-modulated voice that suggested he had spent quite a lot of time learning to speak well.

  ‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You’re the one came up with Docker as the drop man. Old Army buddy from Vietnam, would lick the sweat off your balls for you.’ He leaned closer. He jabbed Neil Fargo in the stomach with the forefinger of the hand that held his dollar cigar. ‘Maybe you just kept the money, told your buddy to knock off the courier and Addison, my chemist, and—’

  ‘Sure,’ said Neil Fargo in a savage voice. ‘We plan murder in an apartment I rent in my own name that has my fingerprints all over it so the police will be sure to know where to look. Quit fucking around. I’m on the hook to the money man, Hariss!’

  ‘Who is the money man?’

  Neil Fargo just shook his head. ‘How did you get onto this so fast? The seven o’clock news?’

  ‘It was a phone tip, one of the prowlies who responded called me, he owed me a favor and knew I used Addison. He said there was a pottery figure broken on the floor – you know what that means.’

  ‘And no attaché case,’ muttered Neil Fargo.

  ‘I asked my man about that, casually. That’s when he remembered he saw someone getting on a Bryant Street bus with an attaché case. Just as they were pulling up. He didn’t know it was important at the time.’

  ‘Observant cop,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘Any description?’

  ‘Big man, long blond hair, glasses – that’s your fucking Docker, right?’

  Neil Fargo nodded sourly. ‘Docker.’

  ‘Do you know where to find him? Where he’d go? What he’d do?’

  ‘He’s only been in town three weeks – he was supposed to be staying in that apartment.’ He took his nervous turn around the little office again. ‘Christ, Hariss, he needed the money, he looked right for this. He was square with me in Nam, kept me from getting my ass shot off a couple of times.’

  Precision lent heavy menace to the importer’s voice. His gestures wreathed his head in cigar smoke.

  ‘I want that fucker, Fargo. A quarter of a million in smack in that clay figure, and—’

  ‘Street prices,’ said Neil Fargo almost contemptuously. ‘I figure you paid maybe twelve, thirteen thou for it in Mexico. If it was ninety-five percent pure, as you claimed.’

  ‘Your chemist.’

  ‘I had a chemist there in good faith—’

  Walter Hariss suppressed whatever he had been going to say. He stood up. He was a stocky five-eight, the top of his razor-cut grey hair came to Neil Fargo’s upper lip. He put an arm around the detective’s broad shoulders. He found a smile that cost him something extra.

  ‘We don’t have to fight, Neil. We both want the same thing, right? The money back, the heroin back. You—’

  He broke off as the street door opened, closed; Pamela’s light, nervously cheery tones came up the stairwell ahead of the sound of her heels on the stairs.

  ‘Find Docker, we’ll get the rest of it straightened out,’ said Neil Fargo hurriedly. ‘Have Alex Kolinski get his street people on Docker, and add to the description that he’s got a slight limp – nicked in the right knee in Nam. Partial disability. I’ll start at the other end – phone, utilities, driver’s license, the usual skiptracing routines.’

  He stood aside for Hariss to leave first, trailing aromatic cigar smoke. Outside, Pamela Gardner was back behind her desk, the white paper bag of doughnuts on the blotter in front of her. She looked as if the desk were a breached redoubt. Gus Rizzato was sitting on the edge of it, one hand on her shoulder, talking earnestly. In talking, he used eyebrows and mouth and his entire mobile Latin countenance. He looked up at the detective and grinned.

  ‘I like this little girl, Fargo. Why don’t you tell her it wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to act a little more friendly?’

  Neil Fargo said heartily to Hariss, ‘Good to have you drop by, Walt. I think we can clear up that little matter today.’

  Then his long arm shot out and his big hand gathered in the front of Rizzato’s shirt, tie and jacket lapels as well. The arm twitched. It jerked Rizzato off the desk and slammed him down on his feet like snapping a towel in a locker room.

  ‘You put any more hands on that girl, Peeler, I’ll break them off.’ His voice and mouth were cool, contemptuous. His eyes were hot and vicious. He let go of the shirt front and stepped back.

  Rizzato measured him icily, on the edge of violence, though he was at least a foot shorter than the detective. Hariss said sharply, ‘Gus.’

  Rizzato’s fighting-dog stance relaxed. He straightened his jacket with a pompous shrug, strutted out of the office like a jockey who can no longer make the weight. Hariss followed.

  When the street door closed behind them, the girl, who had been sitting very straight in her chair, put her hands up to her cheeks. Crimson suddenly flushed across her features.

  ‘He said to me … He told me he wanted to …’

  ‘Sorry I let him in here, doll.’

  She started to say something more, stopped, then took down her hands from her face. The flush was receding. She said, ‘Why did you call him Peeler?’

  ‘The story goes that he was once assigned to shut up somebody who was talking to an assistant DA back East …’ He broke off. He said tonelessly, ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  ‘I do.’ Her eyes were bright again.

  ‘The story goes he took this guy down into a basement in Brooklyn and skinned him alive.’

  The girl made a choked sound in her throat and her flush receded further, so her face was almost pale.

  ‘You asked,’ said Neil Fargo. He was bent over the desk writing rapidly on her scratch pad. As he wrote, he
talked. ‘Docker. Here’s everything I have on him, which isn’t a hell of a lot. I want the full drill, doll. DMV check for license and possible auto registration, credit check, phone company, our contacts at the gas company and scavengers. I want to know if he’s bottled up here in town, or if he made it out. Airlines, train, buses. If he doesn’t have a car, start a run on the car-rental places. Private charter plane services – you know the routine. If the police call, I went out, you don’t know where.’

  ‘Police?’

  ‘That’s the way it is. Friend Docker put me in the middle.’

  ‘Between Walt Hariss and who?’ she said bitterly. ‘Nobody ate any doughnuts and your car didn’t need any gas.’

  Neil Fargo laid a hand on her cheek, knuckles to the flesh, ran it back toward her ear like someone playing with a cat. Her eyes went very slightly unfocused. He went back into his own office, shut the door, sat at the desk, dialled a number he didn’t have to look up. Through the closed door he could hear Pamela dialling also on the other line, starting the skiptracing routine on Docker.

  The phone was picked up, but whoever had picked it up did nothing except breathe into it. Neil Fargo said, ‘Your money’s been hijacked.’

  The breathing arrested. ‘Hijacked?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘I thought you told me that money would buy me—’

  ‘Forget what I told you.’

  ‘I see.’ There was a pause. ‘Would it be asking too much to know how that amount of cash money was placed in a position where it could be hijacked?’

  ‘I trusted somebody I shouldn’t have. A man named Docker. He saved my life in Vietnam, but now …’

  ‘I wonder why I should trust you, Fargo.’

  The detective ignored the remark. ‘There’s another complication. At the same time your money got lifted, a man got killed.’

  ‘Who? Where? Did this man Docker—’

  ‘I’ll know more when the police catch up with me.’

  ‘Police? How do they know you have anything?’

  ‘I rented the place where it happened – in my own name. I didn’t expect anything like a killing there.’

  After a longer pause, the voice said, ‘How vulnerable are you?’

  ‘I’ll get by,’ said Neil Fargo. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  He hung up. He sat with his hands still on the phone for a few seconds, frowning. There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead although it was not particularly hot in the office. He stood up, flipped his topcoat over his arm, picked up a briefcase from beside the desk. He stopped at Pamela Gardner’s desk. Her scratch pad was open to a new sheet, and scribbled notations already covered it.

  ‘If Docker calls again, get a phone number out of him.’

  ‘Neil,’ she almost wailed. ‘Why? You promised you’d go down to the city assessor’s office today to get a lead on Maxwell Stayton’s daughter. That’s clean money. It isn’t dangerous. Why can’t you—’

  ‘And so I shall, doll,’ he said soothingly. ‘But meanwhile, if you get anything important on Docker, leave a message with Stayton’s secretary. I’ll be getting over there eventually to report. See, I am working on his case. I expect something to break on it today.’

  She said bitterly, ‘While you’re off—’

  He grinned and touched her under the chin. ‘You’re a lovely, romantic little nut. But if all I did was look for Roberta Stayton when she runs off threatening to marry some flake, neither of us would eat. Docker, doll. It is important.’

  He went out.

  3

  Age had shrunken the door from its frame, so it rattled discreetly under the timid knuckles. Alex Kolinski, fully clothed from the waist up, paid no attention. Instead, he spoke to the girl kneeling beside the ancient, broken-down double bed.

  ‘Keep it up, bitch,’ he said in a monotone, as if training a dog. The timid knuckles sounded against the door again.

  ‘Mr Kolinski?’ The voice from the hall was female, Negro south, frightened. ‘It’s the telephone, Mr Kolinski. It’s … Mr Hariss, Mr Kolinski.’

  Kolinski looked up unwillingly, like a man disturbed in the midst of an absorbing book. He had a prognathous jaw and heavy ridges of bone around the eyes, making them deep-set. But it was not a stupid face, nor was there anything Neanderthal about his body. The neck which supported the hominid face was surprisingly unmassive.

  ‘Mr Kolinski …’

  ‘All right, goddammit!’ he burst out. ‘Tell him …’

  A sudden spasm of cruel ecstasy stilled his voice. He plunged his hands into the thick, lifeless hair of the girl on her knees beside the bed. Dandruff speckled the scalp around the center part.

  ‘Oh, yeah! That’s it!’ exploded Kolinski in a hoarse, thickened voice.

  From the hall came the timid rapping again. ‘Mr Kolinski, he … he said it was important.’

  But Kolinski was finished. He stood up to dry himself with a corner of the sheet. The girl stared up at him from eyes which looked huge in her famished countenance. She had a face that had once been astonishingly beautiful. Even now, haggard and drawn, it was patrician of nose and striking of facial bone. A thoroughbred face. The eyes were dark, very dark-circled also, wet with tears even though they met his gaze without shame.

  ‘Alex, can I have it now?’

  Kolinski standing above her like a sated storm trooper, jerked his belt tight. ‘I’ve got a phone call.’

  ‘But afterwards, Alex.’ An almost childish hope of reward curved her thin lips. ‘Afterwards you’ll let me have it.’

  ‘We’ll see, bitch.’

  The girl put her face down in her arms, like an exhausted distance runner. The arms were thin. She was dressed in a strapless flannel nightgown so only her long narrow well-shaped feet, bare against the cold linoleum floor, were visible.

  ‘Alex, please, you promised …’ When he stepped away without answering, she raised her head from her arms to cry after him, ‘Alex, please!’

  He paused in the doorway to look back at her. He laughed.

  ‘Sweat, bitch,’ he said.

  He went out.

  The girl remained motionless after he had gone. Fnally, she climbed wearily to her feet, like a housewife summoned by the phone in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She was tall and would once have been fashionably slender, now was angular and thin under the washed-out, faded nightdress. Despite her height, she could not have weighed as much as Pamela Gardner.

  She walked back and forth in the center of the room with quick, jerky strides. Her face worked with passion or pain. She stopped abruptly in mid-stride to stare at the single straight-backed chair which, with the bed and the narrow, gaudily pink dresser, gave the room its only furniture.

  Kolinski’s three-hundred-dollar overcoat was tossed carelessly over the back of the chair.

  ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ the girl exclaimed in a low voice.

  She bent over the coat to stroke it with an almost feline motion, like a cat licking its paw so it can wash its face. She did not try to go through the pockets. Instead, she turned away quickly to the dresser.

  From the top drawer she got a white candle stub about three inches long. She lit it, dripped wax on the top of the dresser next to myriad shiny places where other blobs of wax had been scraped away. Next to the candle she laid a blackened tablespoon with the handle bent in a crude S-shape, and an empty ten-cc syringe with the needle already attached.

  The girl went back to the bed, sat down on the edge of it where Kolinski had sat. Sitting, she fidgeted and shivered. Only muscles standing out along the side of her narrow jaw like molded strips of putty kept her teeth from chattering. Her face looked aged under the lank, sweat-dampened hair. Her sweat had a sweetish smell, like the dried sweat in dancers’ leotards not laundered often enough.

  Sitting there, waiting, she kept monotonously flexing her left hand like an athlete squeezing a handball to strengthen his fingers. Twice she stopped to look anxiously at the veins insi
de the elbow, where the masses of scar tissue from needle tracks were. Some of the more recent tracks were ulcerated. She had long since stopped using Preparation H in an effort to shrink and minimize the marks.

  The girl gave a low moan of either pain or frustration. The skin was so calloused that the veins had not really come up beneath it.

  She extended the arm, palm up, and began gently slapping the scarred inner elbow with the fingertips of her right hand. The left hand kept spasmodically flexing as she did. Frustrated need made her hips writhe slowly on the bed in a terrible travesty of sexual arousal.

  The veins did not come up. The girl started to cry.

  Down the hall, standing at the pay phone and listening to the voice of Walter Hariss, Alex Kolinski was scratching his ass through his trousers. Twice he tried to interrupt. When he finally made it, he talked so fast that little flecks of spittle dotted the black plastic of the phone and the grey peeling wall behind it.

  ‘I don’t give a shit about your long view or your overall plans on this, Walt. You and I have had different aims from the beginning. That’s all right, we’ve been able to work around that. But you’re the one who insisted we bring that fucking Neil Fargo into it, because you thought you could milk him for info about old man Stayton and to give yourself protection at the same time. Protection!’ He spat out the word. ‘Sure, you’re protected. And also we don’t have any fucking …’ He checked himself over the word he had been going to use, said, ‘merchandise,’ and went on, ‘to sell, and no additional capital to …’

  He stopped. He had to, Walter Hariss was talking again. Kolinski listened for perhaps thirty seconds, nodding impatiently, then broke in again.

  ‘All right, sure, Fargo would say that whether he was in it with his fucking buddy Docker or not. And besides—’ He broke off, said in a different voice, ‘Wait a sec …’