Interface (Crime Masterworks) (17 page)

‘And what if he happens to get on an airplane before you get there?’ demanded Hariss acidly.

‘He won’t. It’s the middle of the rush hour, he’s on an unfamiliar freeway – he won’t be making much time. Besides, he’s not getting on any airplane with that attaché case. He wouldn’t be able to get it by the anti-hijack security guards.’

The detective departed without waiting for an answer, but then swerved across the garage to Hariss’ waiting Fleetwood. The driver’s window was down, and Neil Fargo leaned on the frame.

He said to Rizzato, ‘You’re a dead man tomorrow morning if you’re still in San Francisco. Remember that.’

Rizzato said nothing, but spat deliberately against the side of the Fairlane as it went by him and out into the traffic-jammed lanes of Bush Street. In the office, Walt Hariss had relayed Neil Fargo’s plan to his airport contact; but there had been significant changes in the instructions. He sat for a full minute behind the desk, eyes hooded, as if reviewing his battle plan.

Then he arose abruptly, went to the door to signal Rizzato. He was rotating a fresh cigar in his lighter flame when the chauffeur appeared in the doorway. Hariss outlined it all for him: the arrest of Kolinski, the telephone call from Neil Fargo’s informant, the detective’s instructions for the men at the airport and his abrupt departure there.

‘I want you to get down there as quick as you can, Gus. On the white courtesy telephone page a man named Nolan Avery. He will tell you whether Docker has arrived, where he is, what he’s doing.’

Gus Rizzato showed his yellowish teeth in a grin. ‘Instead of telling Fargo. Beautiful!’

‘Most important, Avery will tell you where Docker parked. Wait for him at his car, take the attaché case away from him. You ought to be able to manage it, he’s never laid eyes on you. He’ll park in the garage directly across from the terminal, I’m sure.’

‘But if he gets on a plane, Mr Hariss …’

‘Docker isn’t going to check that attaché case, and he will also be unable to carry it aboard any plane without having it opened and searched by the security guards. Once he realizes that, he will have to return to his car.’

‘And that’s when I get the attaché case.’ Rizzato’s eyes had brightened at the prospect.

‘Be careful of him, Gus. From everything we’ve heard, he’s fast and ruthless.’

‘He’s a gimp, right. Mr Hariss?’

‘A fast gimp, Gus. Believe me, he—’

Rizzato repeated the single blazingly fast movement behind his neck to have the commando knife lying in his hand, as he had done in front of Pamela Gardner earlier that day. His lips pursed in silent laughter.

‘He’ll never see it coming, Mr Hariss.’

Walter Hariss nodded. ‘Into my hands, Gus, that attaché case. My hands only.’

Rizzato reversed his lightning movement, and the knife was back in its neck sheath. He paused in the doorway.

‘What about Neil Fargo, Mr Hariss?’

‘Yes, he’s a problem, isn’t he? Apparently he’s fond of that secretary of his.’ He thought for a moment; then his eyes cleared. He chuckled. ‘We’re forgetting. Fargo must account for a large sum of money he will be unable to account for – to someone whom he fears. That means someone who is tougher than Fargo himself. By tomorrow morning his major concern will be staying alive, not avenging what you did in his office.’

Rizzato grinned. He rolled his shoulders to make the padded suitcoat sit better on his narrow sinewy frame. ‘Fair enough, Mr Hariss.’

After he was gone, Walter Hariss went to the door, peered out. He waited until he saw the overweight Rock Hudson named Blaney, and crooked a finger at him. Blaney, whose regular job was running the night crew, appeared in the doorway wearing a white knee-length smock. Outside, the three car-parkers were bringing down a steady stream of commuter cars for their homeward-bound owners.

‘I have some bad news, Blaney.’ He gestured the big man into a chair across the desk. ‘Cigar?’

‘Don’t mind if I do, Mr Hariss.’

‘Alex Kolinski is in jail. He was arrested this afternoon in the act of giving an overdose of heroin to a girl in a Tenderloin hotel.’

Blaney was shocked. He dropped the cigar, had to root around on the unswept floor to find it again. He came erect. ‘Alex? Busted?’

‘They have him cold, according to my information. Now, I know you have always worked for Alex, and I’m sure you hold him in the same sort of esteem that I do. On the other hand, business must continue.’ He paused as if inviting comment from the big man across the desk. None was forthcoming. Hariss nodded. ‘I’m sure that you were sufficiently in Alex’s confidence to know that I have a discreet financial interest in this garage.’

‘Sure. Half-owner.’

‘There you are,’ said Hariss delightedly. ‘I want to assure you, Blaney, that the situation here at the garage will remain stable while Alex is … away.’

‘I’m glad to hear that, Mr Hariss.’

Hariss leaned forward, bringing his heavy ruddy features into the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. ‘I would like to feel that in the eventuality of Alex’s permanent … absence, I could count on your primary loyalties lying with the … um, partnership instead of with Alex himself. Who, after all, created the trouble in which he now finds himself.’

Blaney leaned forward himself. His lips curved under the heavy mustache. ‘You’re here, Mr Hariss. Alex ain’t.’

‘Admirably put. One other point, Blaney. Alex had certain … outside activities having to do with the projected distribution of a certain highly-lucrative commodity. I’m sure Alex had a … buffer, someone to stand between himself and the street people – who can be unstable and need stern handling from time to time.’

‘Yeah,’ said Blaney. He sat utterly still, flat-faced, considering. He smiled again. ‘Yeah. I know who they are, and I’m the man who deals with them.’

‘I feel that shortly I will have a kilo of ninety-five percent pure which should be cut and … offered for sale.’

Blaney began, ‘I thought that was …’ Then caught himself and stopped.

‘Alex’s arrest has changed that situation,’ said Hariss smoothly. ‘Our best interests now will be served by distributing this commodity ourselves rather than selling it as a unit elsewhere as an expedient toward raising more cash.’

Blaney’s voice tightened hopefully. ‘I’ll need a percentage.’

‘Were you to get a percentage from Alex?’

After an appreciable pause, the big man shook his head. ‘Lump sum.’

‘You’ll get a percentage from me.’

‘Hey!’ he exclaimed, as if he had run a bluff and had won. ‘That’s swell, Mr Hariss.’

When Blaney had returned to the garage floor, Hariss laughed to himself. ‘A percentage – and of course standing between me and danger if anything goes wrong.’ He laughed again, softly. ‘And of course
no
percentage of the money in the attaché case that the money man will be taking out of Neil Fargo’s hide.’

He dialled his home number, told his daughter to come and pick him up. Then he leaned back in his chair with the contemplative face of a man with a clear conscience and good digestion who has supper on his mind. His wife had recently hired an excellent cook.

S
ome twenty minutes before Walter Hariss had telephoned his daughter, Docker had driven the yellow Montego up onto the San Francisco Skyway. Not at Tenth and Folsom as the tipster had informed Neil Fargo and Hariss, however, he had entered the concrete maze at Gough and Turk Streets. Freeway is a misnomer during rush-hour traffic; almost instantly, Docker was in the stop-and-go tie-up where the Oak Street on-ramp poured fresh commuters into the Central Freeway’s main stream.

Docker edged the powerful car into the right lane after the South Van Ness/Tenth Street influx had been assimilated, then spent five motionless minutes before he could begin edging forward again.

The delay did not seem to unduly frustrate the hulking blond man, although he did keep a nervous tattoo of muscular fingers going on the steering wheel. His inner tension displayed itself in other ways, too. His bleak eyes behind their hornrims kept searching the cars massed in the growing twilight behind him, and every minute or two he would jab the radio station-selector in search of relief from the mindless rush-hour commercials.

Finally the yellow Montego was past the tight-jammed lanes which went east toward Bay Bridge, and he was able to take the one-lane concrete loop which put him into the main traffic stream south. After he’d left the monstrous concrete spaghetti of the Southern Freeway interchange behind, he was able to touch the posted 50 mph for the first time as holes began appearing among the solid lanes of cars on the Bayshore; Interstate 280 had siphoned off the westbound traffic.

Docker reached 65 mph and began paying even more attention to the rear-view mirror after the South San Francisco off-ramp, but then abruptly abandoned the surveillance.

‘Couldn’t spot a tail in this traffic anyway,’ he muttered aloud.

He lit a cigarette, which kept his face busy and perhaps his mind as well. His harsh features were illuminated from below by the dashboard lights. His calloused, deadly hands were rock-solid on the wheel except when he moved the dwindling cigarette around in his mouth.

After the San Bruno off-ramp ten miles south of the city, he got into the right-hand lane reserved for the airport turn-off a mile-and-a-half further on. The big yellow car, slowed to a decorous thirty, went by a stalled motorist on the overpass who had his hood raised and a plastic Highway Patrol
already helped
pennant impaled on his radio aerial.

Ahead of Docker were the ever-changing auto traffic patterns heading toward the twin terminals, each lane now marked with its special destination. Behind, his rear-view mirror showed him, the stalled motorist was slamming down his hood, sprinting around his car for the driver’s side.

Docker smiled grimly to himself. His big hands swerved the auto into the left-hand,
PARKING
lanes. His foot suddenly goosed the accelerator and the car went into a three-quarters slide right under the
INCOMING PLANES
ramp and down a narrow blacktop lane which led to the lowest tier of the parking garage.

This won him precious seconds. No lights showed in his rear-view mirror as he collected from the automatic ticket machine, drove under the electronically-folding restraint arm, fast, then stood the car on its nose a dozen yards beyond.

Across half a lane coming in from the right were sawhorses, which bore the sign:
LEVEL FULL
.
USE RAMP TO UPPER FLOORS
.

Docker twisted the power-assisted wheel over hard, shot past the sawhorses, almost instantly made a hard left into the intersecting lane. He drove forward three car lengths, stopped, killing lights and motor in the same moment.

The Montego was now in a lane parallel to the entry lane and hidden from any car coming through the ticket machines.

Docker left the car, crept unevenly forward between parked cars, squatted down so his head would not show above them. A bare ten seconds later a car nosed down the ramp, collected a ticket. Docker grinned tightly. It was the stalled motorist’s green Plymouth.

The Plymouth hesitated at the sawhorses. Docker was tense. The Plymouth finally went on. Docker relaxed. He came partially erect so he could watch over the hood of one of the parked cars as it went up the ramp.

It didn’t. It went past, on toward the next intersecting lane down the garage which was parallel to that which was sawhorsed.

Docker ran unevenly back to the Montego, kicked it alive, squealed back to the sawhorse lane, swung quickly back into the main aisle down which the Plymouth had just gone.

Ahead, the Plymouth had already disappeared down one of the cross-lanes.

Docker followed. For the next three minutes he criss-crossed the entire floor, always a lane behind the Plymouth as it made its slow search, able to follow its progress by watching for the oblong of plastic forgotten on the aerial over the roofs of the intervening rows of parked cars.

Finally the Plymouth tired of the search and went up the ramp out of sight. Docker parked in an open space under a
NO PARKING
sign and directly below the immense air blower which served to ventilate the garage.

He retrieved his attaché case from behind the seat, carefully locked the car. He was at the very end of the dimly-lit garage, half a city block from the closest moving sidewalk which carried passengers to the sub-floor of the Central, older of the two terminals.

Docker limped right by this oasis of escalators, stairs and elevator to the upper garage floors, ignoring the glaring fluorescents and canned mechanical voice tolling the airlines which could be reached by this conveyor belt.

Instead, he went most of the length of the garage to the second, similar complex which carried people by escalator belt from the upper floors and by conveyor belt from this floor, under the two-tiered street outside, to the Southern Terminal.

Docker waited inconspicuously between parked cars until the down-ramps disgorged a group of five servicemen, two of them in civvies. Docker didn’t really blend in with them because of the length of his hair, but he did get protective coloration from them.

At the far end of the moving sidewalk were escalator stairs up to the luggage and transportation level, then yet another escalator to the terminal main floor.

He seemed to be with a woman and a three-year-old baby getting off the escalator in the immense expanse of waiting area, by staying a tight three paces behind them as they angled over toward the newsstand in the center of the building.

Despite this a youth with a bad complexion, and the sort of scraggly beard so often worn to mask a receding chin, glanced up sharply from his comic book when Docker passed. The youth was sitting on one of the black Naugahyde chairs that flanked the escalator.

He sighed, folded his comic book, stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans as he stood up. By chance he wandered in the direction of the newsstand.

Beyond the newsstand, and enclosed on three sides by glass walls to discourage rip-offs, were several rows of paperback book shelves. Docker threaded his way through browsers and time-killers to the rear of the bookracks, where he stood with his back to the glass wall and scanned the crowds for a full two minutes.