Interface (Crime Masterworks) (6 page)

Docker, like a man possessed and foaming obscenities, dropped the case to thud his fists into Rowlands’ lower belly. Rowlands had screamed once when his collarbone had snapped. He flew back against the side of a bus under the frightful power of Docker’s blows, lit on his ass and puked in his lap. Docker set his feet to kick the fallen man in the head.

‘Hey!’

He was already whirling as a second voice exclaimed, ‘What the fuck, man!’

Still straddle-legged and with startling agility, Docker had sprung in a complete 180-degree turn so he was facing the two black baggage-handlers who had burst out of the empty bus where they had been eating sandwiches.

One of them was a big man, big as Docker, with a scar across his forehead that said he’d mixed it in the past. Docker, in a slight crouch now, pointed a thick accusing finger at him like a ref calling a foul on Nate Thurmond.

‘
Freeze!
’ he shouted.

All fury had gone from his voice and face, so the words carried a momentary authority. Behind the hornrims his eyes were level and observant and not at all worried. The black man froze, startled.

‘You kickin’ the livin’ shit outta this dude,’ objected the second weakly. He was a smaller man, not in condition for fighting. Grey touched both his voice and his tight-kinked hair.

‘He welched.’

That stopped them totally. The big one rubbed his jaw with one ham-hand. The fight had gone out of his stance. ‘You mean you’re—’

‘I mean you don’t want my kind of trouble.’

He made a perplexed gesture. ‘But, man …’

Docker shot a quick glance at the fallen Rowlands without giving them a chance to come at him. The little rotund grifter lay sideways in his own mess, making agonized noises as he tried to get his breath back. Docker nodded to the blacks. He chuckled.

‘I guess I made my point, at that. But just in case …’

Before either of them could move, he drove the toe of his right shoe against the side of the fallen man’s face. Rowlands cried out softly, like a bird caught by a tomcat.

Docker picked up his attaché case, nodded pleasantly to the two outraged and confused Samaritans, and limped calmly between them and down the passageway toward Mission Street. Unmoving, they watched him go, the smaller one with a half-eaten sandwich still in one hand and his mouth hanging open as if for the next bite.

When Docker reached Mission he turned left, out of their sight. He began to whistle jauntily, swinging the attaché case like a kid on his way to school with a tin lunchpail.

G
oing past the tellers’ windows from the back of the bank, where the loan payments were made and the safe deposit boxes were kept, Neil Fargo checked his long stride. He rooted in his nearly empty briefcase for his checkbook. At one of the chest-high counters he wrote out a check for pocket money, then let two other patrons go ahead so he could get a big blond teller who carried abundant, beautifully shaped muscle and flesh over her heavy Scandinavian frame. Her placid face lit up with a display of very white teeth when she saw Neil Fargo in front of her.

‘First time you’ve been able to find my window for months,’ she said.

‘That’s because you’re so popular I can never get near you.’

She made a small derisive noise in her throat. She had a lovely throat, and very clear, healthy skin. She reached for his check. He put a hand over hers, imprisoned it. She looked at him with clear blue eyes. His face wore a smile that looked insincere but at least softened his features and made them slightly vulnerable.

‘You going with anyone these days, Rhoda?’

‘You mean you’d care, after ignoring me for—’

He shook his head almost impatiently, but didn’t remove his hand. ‘I’m working. I might need to have slept with you last night. Possible?’

‘Hair-wash night so I was alone – you’d remember that. That’s probably why you’ve picked me.’ Her wholesome expression had thinned. She said in soft bitterness, ‘You bastard! How long
has
it been? Six months? Seven?’

‘You won’t have to swear to it in court, might not even get asked, but if you are asked, it’ll be by cops.’

She pulled her hand out from under his, carried the check away to the big square sheaf of computer printouts which told whether it would clear or not. Neil Fargo still leaned one elbow on the counter so his heavy shoulders and broad tapering back effectively shut out anyone behind him from their conversation without seeming other than casual. The polite smile remained fixed on his face.

Rhoda returned, rubber-stamped the check, counted out a twenty, two tens, and two fives from her cash drawer. Her face was once more placid, like a dust jacket for
Heidi
. She smiled brilliantly at him across the money. She was such a big girl that her eyes were only a couple of inches below his own.

‘You bastard,’ she said again. This time there was a hint of caress in her voice.

Neil Fargo picked up the bills, nodded, smiled, backed away from the window.

‘You’re a love,’ he said.

Ten minutes later the express elevator deposited him on one of the topmost floors of the gleaming white Transamerica pyramid which thrusts its graceful spire up from the foot of Columbus Avenue. The panorama caught Neil Fargo, held him for perhaps two minutes. It was truly amazing. From the Farallone Islands thirty miles toward Hawaii to the East Bay hills which cupped Oakland and Berkeley, from the Golden Gate to San Mateo’s Dumbarton Bridge twenty miles to the south. People were mites, cars beetles, Coit Tower the end of a wooden matchstick stuck upright into an insignificant mound covered with toy houses. Only the ugly dark monolith of the Bank of America headquarters, like a stake driven into the city’s heart, challenged his view.

He turned from it, pushed the button beside Maxwell Stayton’s office door. Stayton Industries had the entire floor. The voice of Miss Laurence came over the speaker, tart as vinegar.

‘Yes?’

‘Neil Fargo. By appointment.’

There was a faint click, the smooth round brass knob turned under his hand and the superbly balanced oak door, twelve feet high and three inches thick and inlaid with Tanzanian ebony, swung open. He went in. He already would have been examined on the closed-circuit TV at the reception desk, which was what would have put the asperity into Miss Laurence’s voice.

‘Mr Stayton expected you at ten o’clock,’ she informed him in her frosty BBC accent.

‘I was delayed.’

‘It is well after eleven o’clock. Have you any idea how much Mr Stayton’s time is—’

‘Just push the goddam button, mate.’

Miss Laurence paled. She had mousy brown hair and close-set eyes the approximate color and toughness of manganese. She also had a walker’s bulbous calves, wore sensible shoes to the office, and made forty thousand a year plus stock options. When Miss Laurence had the flu, it was reflected in that quarter’s corporate earnings.

Miss Laurence pushed the button. Neil Fargo touched her under the chin with a forefinger, went through the inner door with her furious expression sticking out of his back like a hurled icicle.

Maxwell Stayton’s personal office was a den with the fireplace missing. The walls were of walnut panelling that was not veneer, and were covered with framed and signed photographs of sports greats, most of them from the mid-thirties. One of the pictures was of Stayton himself, wearing a Stanford football uniform and old-style leather helmet. He was cutting, high-stepping in the photo, clutching the ball fiercely in one hand and holding off an imaginary tackler with the other.

Neil Fargo paused in front of a photo of himself, also in a Stanford uniform, bare-headed, grinning at the camera. He snapped the picture with the same fingernail he had used to chuck Miss Laurence under the chin.

As if this action reminded him of the other, Maxwell Stayton demanded sourly, ‘Do you have to do that to her?’

‘She expects me to,’ said Neil Fargo. He ran his hand along the bookshelves, over leather-bound volumes patinaed by age and handling. ‘It confirms her view of the colonies.’

Stayton merely grunted. The room, not large, was made to seem even smaller by his size. Age had distended his belly, thinned and grizzled his hair, but had not ravaged him. Behind him was a beautifully-detailed model of the
Feather River
, a 600,000-ton supertanker being built for Stayton Marine in Japan. If the ecologists could be bought or mollified, it would eventually unload crude at the Farallone Islands.

‘Those football pictures stir memories?’ said Stayton abruptly.

Neil Fargo crossed a rug that cost as much as a Cadillac. He looked out the fourth wall, which was tinted plate glass and echoed the reception area’s views of the city.

‘They’re hanging on your wall, not mine.’

‘What do you hang on your walls?’

‘Scalps.’

Stayton gave a short burst of heavy laughter. He had removed a Churchill-length cigar from his mouth to speak, didn’t offer a hand to shake, not even after putting the cigar down in an ashtray. The ashtray was a solid four-pound clump of polished stainless steel that a sculptor had taken a swipe at to make it a work of art. Stayton sat down behind the desk.

‘You’re late,’ he charged in a different, executive voice.

Neil Fargo appeared to bear up under the assault. He sat down across the desk from Stayton and put his briefcase on the floor beside his chair. He crossed his legs while getting a cigarette started. He waved out the match, squinted at Stayton through the smoke.

‘Miss Laurence said you wanted a report on the investigation to date.’

Stayton made an impatient gesture with a thick-fingered hand. ‘Do we have to go through all that? Just tell me—’

‘I have my reports right here,’ continued Neil Fargo ruthlessly.

Stayton reddened slightly and leaned forward to pick his cigar off the lump of stainless steel. As he did, he said, ‘No calls,’ and in the same motion tapped one of the buttons on his desk. He leaned back. ‘Satisfied?’

‘If that thing’s closed now.’

‘You afraid Miss Laurence might steal your techniques?’

‘It’s your daughter we’re talking about,’ shrugged Neil Fargo.

‘All right, damn you, you’ve made your point,’ growled Stayton. ‘With all the security precautions, this had damn well better be good.’

‘That’s how you look at it. I traced your daughter down to Mexico City, down there found out—’

‘You told me that a week ago.’ Stayton stood up behind the immense hardwood desk, walked over to the window. He looked out over the financial district of which he owned quite a lot, turning the cigar with pensive fingers. ‘You’ve got a good thing going in me, haven’t you, Fargo? Whenever Roberta decides to pick up with some deadbeat, I pay you good money to find her—’

‘Because she married one of them and it cost you a lot of money to pry him loose. I’m a hell of a lot cheaper than—’

‘Up until now.’ For the first time, Stayton showed emotion. ‘At least I’ve got a grandson out of the marriage. And
he’ll
be raised right, believe me.’

He came back, leaned his butt against the edge of the desk. His momentary vulnerability had hardened into anger.

‘Each time I pay you a fat fee—’

‘And I find her.’

‘And it happens again.’

‘This time it’s different. This time three weeks up in the redwoods at a fancy sanitarium isn’t going to do it.’

‘Meaning what?’ When the younger man didn’t answer, he leaned forward as if taking up his position for the snap of the ball. ‘I’ve already given you a ridiculous amount of money to cut the current one loose, and I want you to explain where it’s gone—’

‘Money.’ Neil Fargo’s voice overrode his. ‘Money isn’t the question. Your daughter’s graduated from the booze, old man.’

‘Experimenting with drugs?’ He brushed it away. ‘We’ve been through that syndrome before. Pot in a crash pad with kids ten years younger than she is—’

‘Heroin,’ said Neil Fargo.

Stayton echoed his flatness of tone. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Hooked. Hooked hard. Now, even if I find her … Christ, face it, man, in a very real sense,
no
body’s
ever
going to find Roberta again. She’s a zombie, a hunk of shit—’

‘That’s enough, goddammit!’

‘—a death-wish looking for someplace to jump off.’

Stayton’s face was contorted. ‘You fucking—’

‘If you can’t accept that, then there’s no use digging her out of whatever rathole she’s been stashed in. Treatment might save her – physically – but I doubt if you’d ever get back the daughter you think you knew. So there it is. She’s been back in San Francisco for two months, I’ve learned, in one of the Tenderloin fleabags. I’ve got feelers out to isolate which one, but … Are you sure you want her found?’

‘What a stupid fucking question,’ said the industrialist. During all of it, the smoke going up from the cigar in his right hand had been absolutely steady. Neil Fargo shrugged.

‘Hell, the kid’s always meant more to you than your daughter has anyway.’ His voice deepened. ‘He’s a male heir! So we find Roberta before the H kills her, how’s he going to like reading those clippings when he’s old enough to understand them?’

‘The papers won’t get hold of Roberta’s condition.’

Neil Fargo’s lips curled as he delved into his briefcase for a file folder. ‘Dream,’ he told the industrialist.

‘How sure are you of your information?’

‘It’s solid. I paid enough for it, here and in Mexico.’

‘You said “stashed.” If you mean she’s being manipulated by someone, I’ll destroy them, whoever they are. Anyone responsible for Roberta’s condi—’

‘Roberta’s responsible for Roberta’s condition.’ Neil Fargo’s face was unrevealing, but when he moved his hands on the polished arms of the chair, the fingertips left smears on the wood.

Stayton’s face darkened. He reached across the desk to drop a full inch of grey ash from his cigar into the hunk of stainless steel. ‘Meaning what?’

‘That addiction is psychological before it’s physiological. It starts out as a symptom, not a cause.’

Stayton ran a heavy-fingered hand down his heavy visage. He seemed momentarily unsure of himself. ‘You’ve known Roberta for years, Neil. D’you mean me? Or Dorothy?’