Interface (Crime Masterworks) (22 page)

The wide marble stairway led to an inset porch and a massive hardwood door decorated with wrought iron. It was too much house for Hariss’ current financial status; he had to be fighting the payments, had to have gotten it on the come.

Neil Fargo knuckled the bell; lights came on so he could be inspected. He looked off to his right, toward an angle of the house plunging off into the fog to form a two-story, narrow observatory which seemed to grow from the steep brown hill.

Somewhere out there would be Daggert, the second guard.

It was Hariss himself opening the door, displaying bravado.

‘Ah, Fargo.’ Old-world gentility tonight. ‘Come in. You have news?’

‘Some.’

Beyond the tall door was a hallway; from his single previous time in the house, he knew that the immense formal living room lay to the right. A powder room where arriving guests could freshen up was to the left, with a small reception room complete with fireplace beyond that. This had its own small serving kitchen.

‘You still keep the Courvoisier in the reception room?’ asked Neil Fargo. He turned left, with Hariss behind. Over his shoulder, the detective added, ‘I thought your daughter would answer the door.’

‘She’s angry with me, she’s decided to sulk in her room.’

Hariss headed toward the serving counter from the pantry as they entered the reception room. The presence of the guards seemed to have calmed him. None of his earlier hysteria remained in his voice.

‘You cut her allowance to a hundred a week?’

Hariss snorted appreciatively, but said, ‘She wanted to go out on her motorcycle tonight with some of her friends. In this fog, and with Docker on the loose, I had to …’

‘You can let her go.’

The detective’s eyes were on the older man’s back. Hariss was pouring cognac from a cut-glass decanter; he stopped dead when Neil Fargo spoke. There was a subtle relaxation of the back muscles. He finished pouring.

‘You
do
have news.’

Neil Fargo sipped the Courvoisier, one of the few liquors it is a mortal sin to drink any way but straight. ‘Some good, some bad.’

‘I can use the good.’

Neil Fargo leaned back in one of the leather chairs which, with a low table of ancient scarred and varnished oak, were the room’s only furniture. His face was exhausted, drawn; he looked puffy around the waist as if out of condition. He hadn’t bothered to remove his topcoat.

‘Docker is dead. He went off the cliffs in the Presidio and down on the headland rocks the other side of Baker Beach. The car exploded.’

Hariss looked up quickly. ‘There’s no question that he actually died in the crash?’

‘He couldn’t have lived through it. I’ve got a police band on my car radio, I picked up the chase on the way up from the airport. I swung by. They were trying to scrape enough of him off the rocks to make an ident when I left. They’ll be at it all night. The military police got onto him somehow as he was on his way through the Presidio—’

‘Coming here.’ Hariss shivered as if a fire should have been laid in the fireplace. ‘To take my life.’

‘He took the high dive instead. Ran a couple of roadblocks.’ His eyes were remote. ‘I remember that guy when he was the coolest head around.’

‘Less than two miles from here when he died.’ Hariss shuddered again. His earlier suave jauntiness had disappeared as if Docker’s death had paradoxically made his threat more real. ‘If he had made it—’

‘He’d have taken the Bobbsey Twins outside without breathing hard.’ Neil Fargo set his empty snifter aside and struggled from the leather chair’s embrace. ‘He was a rough fucker when I soldiered with him. Funny. After he came home with the other POWs, he swore nobody’d ever put him in a cage again. Then he dies in a burning car. That powder room have a can in it?’

Hariss nodded, tossed off his cognac like bar whisky, poured another. Neil Fargo had found the light switch, had pulled the door shut behind him. There was a small table flanked with strips of vanity lights for repairing makeup. In front was a red plush bench. Neil Fargo regarded his image in the mirror. It looked peaked, but he made it wink at him.

Through the door came Hariss’ raised and impatient voice. ‘You said there was some bad news. Fargo.’

‘Docker wasn’t all that went over the cliff.’

He took toilet paper from the roll; with it wound around his fingers he flipped up the seat of the toilet. He unzipped, began urinating.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning the MPs searched the area where the car went over, and didn’t find anything.’

Before flushing, he lowered the seat again, removed the top of the tank, still with the toilet paper around his fingers. He looked inside. He nodded and set the top of the tank on the seat.

‘Meaning the attaché case is gone,’ called Hariss heavily.

‘And the heroin. And the money.’

Neil Fargo worked very quickly, then rezipped his pants, drew in his belt the couple of extra notches, put back the lid of the toilet, opened the seat to drop in the toilet paper, flushed it using the back of a knuckle, opened the door with the end of his topcoat sleeve as he had done in closing it a couple of minutes earlier.

Hariss was waiting for him. ’We have only your word for that, Fargo.’

‘I wasn’t the one doing the search,’ he said mildly.

‘I don’t mean that. I mean there’s a reasonable chance that you and Docker were in this together from the beginning. That he didn’t have the money when he went to Bryant Street—’

‘I wish you were right.’ He shot his cuff, checked his watch. ‘Because in just a little over twenty minutes I’m going to have to be convincing someone that his hundred-seventy-five thousand went up in smoke. I’d rather have the money to give back, believe me.’

‘
You
say. Meanwhile—’

‘Meanwhile, you haven’t come out so fucking bad, Hariss! So you’re out the twelve, thirteen thou you paid for the smack in Mexico, and Kolinski is in the can and Roberta Stayton isn’t around anymore to give you a lever to use on her old man. But you’re out of jail, and you’re clean. Nobody can tie you into anything.’

Hariss snorted and turned away. Neil Fargo’s hand darted out, scooped up the snifter he had drunk from, and dropped it into a topcoat pocket.

To Hariss’ back, he said, ‘Well, do we keep on doing business together or is this going to scare you off?’

‘I don’t scare easy.’ The importer jabbed a finger into Neil Fargo’s rock-hard gut. ‘But you brought Docker in—’

‘And now Docker is out. All the way out. So you can
afford
to not scare easy.’

The big detective went down the hall, stepped out under the miniature porte-cochere. He turned back toward Hariss, the overhead lights making his face very hard and momentarily quite nasty.

‘I’ll be in touch.’ His expression made it seem more threat than promise.

The fog seemed to have lessened. He waited while Blaney electronically swung the gate open again, collected his revolver and the handful of copper-jacketed bullets which had been in the gun when he had handed it to the strongarm.

‘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.

T
he 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.’