Interface (Crime Masterworks) (8 page)

When he’d spent enough time there, Docker walked back to the change desk.

‘You ought to furnish handkerchiefs,’ he said to the hard-faced harpy on the stool. ‘I almost had an accident all over the front of one of your nice machines.’

‘So next time wear a rubber.’

Docker crossed First Street still laughing. He ignored both the mid-block crosswalk and the angry horns and squealing brakes of the cars which the light at Mission released just in time to swerve or stop to avoid hitting him.

‘I declare,’ muttered the black man named Browne. ‘He’s a wild man.’

As soon as Docker had disappeared into the Trailways Terminal, Browne went after him. He was slower than Docker in crossing the street, more careful of traffic and using the crosswalk, so Docker was already at the ticket window when Browne came through the swinging doors.

Browne immediately slowed to an Uncle Remus shamble down the broad aisle between the orderly rows of nearly depopulated benches. He came into earshot as the ticket agent was saying, ‘One-way to Los Angeles? Yes, sir. The Silver Eagle leaves in just twenty-one minutes.’

Docker put his money on the counter. The lean, stooped, sad-eyed black man moved up beside him to study a posted timetable. Docker said, ‘What gate?’

‘We … don’t have a gate,’ said the ticket agent somewhat defensively. ‘Just outside and to your left, in Natoma Street. The bus stops there. Your luggage—’

‘This.’ Docker lifted the attaché case, then lowered it below counter-level. ‘I’ll carry it. What time does the bus get in?’

‘Well, it makes several stops. San Fernando, Glendale, Burbank, North Hol—’

‘I’m glad Trailways is hiring the mentally handicapped.

I bought a ticket for Los Angeles.’

‘Ten-forty tonight.’ The ticket agent had flushed.

Docker pocketed his change. ‘Jesus Christ. I could walk faster.’

He turned away from the window. The ticket agent turned angry, now florid features at the grey-haired black man reading the schedules.

‘Next,’ he snapped.

‘Just browsin’.’

‘Then quit blocking the ticket window.’

Browne put his face close to the agent’s. Browne’s eyes had yellowish bloodshot whites. ‘A soft voice turneth away wrath,’ he said in a soft voice. ‘And saveth a fat lip.’

He followed Docker back through the terminal. The travellers scattered around the echoing, low-ceilinged room were mostly older men buried in paperbacks or newspapers. Browne’s steps quickened as Docker went toward the banks of doors opening into Fremont Street, then slowed again as the quarry turned right between the rows of benches.

This led only past a two-bit shoeshine stand and a bank of storage lockers to the men’s room. Browne hesitated, checked his watch, rubbed his hands together nervously. They were long, tapering dry-palmed hands that made a rustling sound against each other. Finally the black man went into the restroom also, entering the tiled facility crab-fashion as if to avoid the full force of any blow launched at him from behind the door.

Docker was nowhere near the door. Indeed, he was just feeding a dime into the slot of the furthest pay stall in the line. He went in without looking around at all as Browne headed for a urinal. Four of the twenty-one minutes before the Silver Eagle’s departure had passed.

The moment Docker’s stall door had clapped shut with its heavy click designed to make the patron feel his dime was well spent, Browne drifted down the line of stalls on silent feet. He stopped just short of Docker’s, precisely where the overhead fluorescents had no chance of casting his shadow under Docker’s door. He listened, poised.

From inside came the rustle of clothing. A pause. Then a grunt, a splash, a relieved sigh.

Browne was already moving, quickly and silently, trotting at little short of a run toward the First Street entrance and the pay phone outside it. He dropped his dime, dialled. Alex Kolinski’s heavy voice came on the line.

‘He’s here,’ exclaimed Browne, ‘In the men’s room takin’ a shit!’

Before Browne was out the men’s room door, however, Docker’s stall had opened. The big, blond, hard-faced man had emerged fully clothed. Docker had the attaché case pinched between arm and body again to free both hands. He was drying, with a heavy wad of toilet paper, the fist he’d used to make the splash. He dropped the paper on the floor, went out of the restroom.

In the phone booth outside the far end of the block-long terminal, Browne was saying, ‘Trailways Terminal on First Street is where. He—’

‘He’s getting a bus.’ Kolinski’s voice made it a statement.

‘Ain’t I tellin’ you? Los Angeles Silver Eagle, it leaves here at twelve-twenty. He—’

‘He’s got an attaché case with him?’

‘Uh. That like a briefcase only it square-like?’

Docker had stayed against the wall, had gone out the Fremont Street door closest to the men’s room and thus had not been visible from the body of the waiting room, let alone from Browne’s phone booth outside in First Street. He turned right, toward Natoma Street, then right again and went along Natoma toward First Street, where the Silver Eagle would load. The bus was waiting. Docker ignored it.

‘Man, I tell you he try to leave I follow him. Be like pickin’ cherries off a tree—’

‘
Listen
, goddam you!’ cut in Kolinski angrily. ‘
Don’t
go up against him, hang back if he doesn’t get that bus. I and some men are on the way. He beat the living shit out of Rowlands over at the Greyhound station about an hour ago, acted like he might be dropping meth …’

Browne, whistling cheerily under his breath, headed back into the terminal. Thirteen minutes to bus departure.

Docker, who had been standing just out of sight on Natoma, went across First Street in long strides toward the open dark maw of the parking garage directly opposite. His topcoat tails flapped around his legs and the attaché case swung in asymmetrical rhythm to help with his balance.

He pulled up just inside the door with a little skip made necessary by his limp, then twisted to scan the front of the terminal building. Browne was nowhere in sight. Satisfied, he straightened his lapels, rubbed on the back of one calf the shoe-tip of the other foot which had gotten scuffed, then went away between the rows of parked cars.

This echoing passageway took him through the sprawling dim low-ceilinged garage to a series of open-air blacktop lots. These, leased to private operators by the state, followed the course of the Skyway which shook and rumbled with traffic above Docker’s head.

Eventually he emerged into Howard Street between two immense concrete abutments. He was nearly two blocks from the Trailways Bus TerminaL There was no one behind him. It was 12:18, two minutes before the Silver Eagle would leave for Los Angeles without him.

Back at the terminal, Browne was staring in disbelief as the last southbound passenger boarded the big double-decker bus. The door shut with a pneumatic sound very much like phooey. Browne sprinted back into the terminal and through it toward the men’s room. In his wake moved a very big man wearing a droopy mustache that made him look like an overweight Rock Hudson during the actor’s mustache phase.

Browne straightened up from looking under the locked door of Docker’s empty stall with shock in his face. As he did, Kolinski came in, preceded by the overweight Rock Hudson and followed by another man equally as large. All three of them had their hands in their overcoat pockets. No one else was in the restroom. The last man stopped and leaned against the door so anyone trying to open it would find it unyielding unless they got back and took a run at it.

Browne was backing up. Unfortunately for him, he was already at the last stall, almost against the back wall. Kolinski’s deep-set eyes were dangerous.

‘So?’ he said.

Browne said: ‘I swear he … I come in here after I seen he wasn’t on the bus. I swear—’

‘Blaney?’

‘He wasn’t on the bus,’ said Rock Hudson.

‘Any other bus out of here he could have caught?’

‘No.’

‘I swear,’ said Browne. ‘I swear, Mr Kolinski …’

‘Daggert. Amtrack?’

‘The last train out was at nine o’clock,’ said the man who was making sure there would continue to be no one else in the restroom.

‘I swear, Mr Kolinski—’

‘Upstairs? An East Bay bus?’

Blaney merely shook his head. ‘He must of smelled our friend here and just split. Unless …’

‘Yes,’ said Kolinski. ‘Unless.’

Browne had gone silent. Silence did not attract attention. But Kolinski’s attention was apparently already attracted. Since silence hadn’t worked, Browne began trying to make himself fit into the corner formed by the final stall and the back wall. He was too long and lean and suddenly dolorous to be successful.

Then Kolinski smiled. A lot of Jews wearing tattooed numbers would have recognized the quality of that smile. ‘How much did he pay you to lose him?’ asked Kolinski softly.

Browne’s face glistened. His lips were dry. He said, ‘Mr Kolinski, I swear—’

‘Blaney.’

The search was swift, thorough, professional, not at all gentle. Blaney shook his head. ‘Not enough to buy a piece of ass off his mother.’

‘Pure stupidity, then.’

Kolinski swung a round-house right as he spoke. It was a sucker punch, but it drove Browne’s head sideways against the wall tiles because Browne had made no attempt to block it, counter it, or move his head out of its way. Like silence, it didn’t work either to deflect Kolinski’s anger.

‘Make this stupid nigger hurt,’ Kolinski said.

Browne’s mumbled, incoherent pleadings rose to a sharp scream of pain as the strongarm’s feet and hands got busy before Daggert even had time to let Kolinski out through the guarded door.

‘Y
our cigarettes,’ the jump-suited guard explained to the woman in the red coat.

‘But I—’

‘The foil on the pack.’

Neil Fargo followed her across the very slightly raised wooden ramp as his left hand gave topcoat, car keys, cigarettes, and pocket knife to the other, older guard. The buzzer sounded.

‘What the hell, you packing your piece, man?’ demanded the young black guard who had been hassling with the red-coated woman about her cigarettes.

Neil Fargo shook his head, stepped back, then through again. The machine buzzed again.

‘Better do it,’ said the black.

Neil Fargo held his empty hands away from his sides, arms wide to facilitate the white guard’s body search. It was sufficiently professional to seem perfunctory. The guard straightened up. Bending had made him red in the face. Small strips of his light blue shirt showed through the gaps between the buttons of his tan uniform jacket.

‘My money clip,’ said Neil Fargo abruptly. ‘I always forget the damned thing.’

The guard nodded and puffed out a breath laden with recent lunch. He slapped the heavy swell of gut under his jacket.

‘Neil, how the hell you stay in the shape you do?’

‘Night work, Ben.’

Neil Fargo crossed the marble lobby of the Hall of Justice, past the bronze plaque commemorating San Francisco’s police dead. The number of recent additions to the roster was one reason everyone entering the Hall was subject to a body search. He crossed to the banks of elevators at the rear of the lobby. Several professional freaks in their prescribed hippie uniforms were protesting something to a uniformed deputy who looked as if his patience was getting as thin as his hair.

The elevator was crowded with attorneys, identifiable by their attaché cases, bushy sideburns, overlong hair, and trendy clothing. The clients and plainclothes cops were drab by comparison. Neil Fargo got off at three.

It was 1:01 when he pushed open the hall door identified as the Homicide Squad. He ignored the empty reception desk and the waiting room chairs, instead went directly through the metal gate in the hip-high railing. Through a doorway was the big room where the homicide detectives lived. For years they had been only one squad of the General Works Detail, but a briskly rising murder rate, most of it connected with drug-buy burns and thrill-kills during grocery store rip-offs, had earned the squad separate quarters.

By the water cooler, Vince Wylie was arguing Brodie versus Spurrier with a huge toothpick-chewing, shirtsleeved man whose tie had been loosened with such enthusiasm that the shapeless lump of knot was down at his third button. Neil Fargo caught Wylie’s eye, then jerked his head at one of the glass-walled interrogation cubicles lining the room, at the same time raising his eyebrows.

Wylie nodded. Neil Fargo went into the room, sat down in one of the chrome and black plastic chairs which flanked the desk, lit a cigarette, drifted smoke.

Three minutes later Wylie sauntered in, followed by the cop with whom he had been second-guessing Dick Nolan’s quarterback strategies. This second man was big enough to make even Neil Fargo look delicate, with heavy soft sloping shoulders and the start of a paunch under his pastel shirt. In his hip holster was a non-reg Python .357 magnum, the one with the four-inch barrel. His slacks were wrinkled like an elephant’s ass from accommodating his wide butt and heavy thighs. He had eyes like Santa Claus and hands to tie bowknots in pokers.

‘Should I have brought my lawyer?’ asked Neil Fargo, unsmiling.

He neither stood up nor offered his hand, nor did Wylie offer his. Instead, Wylie sat down behind the desk. The big cop leaned against the edge of it. Wylie got out a cigarette and indicated the big cop with it.

‘Charlie?’ He made a deprecating gesture. ‘He’s got a few minutes waiting for a witness to show up, he thought he’d sit in to—’

‘Read me my rights or get him to fuck out of here.’

A slow flush, the color of old bricks, rose up Wylie’s heavy throat. The big cop, who had settled back with his arms crossed on his chest like a farmer settling in to discuss the weather, slowly uncrossed his arms and came erect. He took his toothpick out of his mouth, looked at it regretfully, dropped it in the wastebasket.

‘They always put peppermint in them,’ he complained. He winked at Neil Fargo, said, ‘Pleasure,’ and shambled out.

Wylie flopped a lined yellow legal-size pad on the desk and took out a ballpoint pen as if he were mad at it. Unlike Charlie, he was wearing the jacket of his suit even though it was stufly in the cubicle.