Interface

Fifteen

San Francisco’s Tenderloin has changed for the worse over the years. For several decades it was merely tough and a little raunchy: now it is nasty as well, like perfume behind the ears of a corpse. Seedy hotels with Rates for Senior Citizens still cater to the aged, but now the old folks living on inflation-ruined pensions must rub shoulders and mingle life-styles with whores, topless dancers, pushers and users, cool black cats, teenage male prostitutes, transvestites looking for sailors.

Coffee shops feature Breakfast All Day; bars turn on their garish neons at six A.M. Violence is endemic: drifting hard-eyed men roll drunks and gays and the fragile aged and cripples, both emotional and physical, as a way of life. Hustlers and grifters con social workers getting their jollies from seeing Life in the Raw, and one day at a time is how people live. Because in the Tenderloin anything can happen and sooner or later everything does.

Certainly the girl who panhandled Neil Fargo as he got out of his Fairlane was just hanging on by the hour. She would have been attractive if she hadn’t had lice and smelled bad. She was under twenty, wearing blue wash pants and a blue sweater and a crust of dried vomit around her mouth.

She asked for spare change as if for salvation. He gave her a dollar bill. She smiled shyly at him.

“You want a nooner, mister...”

He shook his head, watched her shamble up Jones Street. He shook his head again, finished locking the Fairlane, fed the meter, and started across the street to the FarJon Hotel.

In mid-stride he swerved downhill. A black-and-white was parked in the bus zone with one door hanging open and the radio crackling. He went into the liquor store on the corner, stood with his back to the door in deep contemplation of a quart of Early Times. A paddy wagon with mesh over the rear windows pulled up in the yellow zone on O’Farrell with a squeal of worn brake linings.

In a little more than two minutes, a pair of uniformed patrolmen went by the open door of the liquor store. Between them, wearing handcuffs and a dazed expression, was Alex Kolinski. He was having a little trouble with his feet. There was a trickle of blood down his chin and above the right eye a hard red knob which looked shiny. The cops looked tough, competent, and untouched.

Neil Fargo laughed aloud, catching the attention of the liquor store clerk. Men with stimulant-blown minds who chuckled and whistled and smirked to themselves before going berserk would be no rarity to him. The cool competence in Neil Fargo’s face seemed to reassure him.

The wagon had pulled out with its prisoner. Neil Fargo walked uphill on Jones with quick strides. The narrow door of 517 Jones was standing open under its faded FarJon Hotel, Weekly Rates sign. He went in.

The stairs were very narrow, the handrail slick from a million sliding hands. Insulation-wrapped steampipes ran up the corner of the stairwell. There were rat droppings on one of the wedge-shaped corner steps which made the ninety-degree left turn under the tilted mirror Kolinski had used that morning to watch Daphne go down these same stairs.

At the head of the stairs was another uniformed prowlie. Behind him Neil Fargo could see the office door with a hand-lettered sign over it:

The cop was holding one of the extra-long riot-control billies, the sort Tac Squads have made so popular, at present-arms across his chest. His face was too young, too unformed for his hard, competent body or for the cop’s eyes experience had already given him.

“Sorry, sir, residents only.” Neil Fargo moved a hand, and the face was suddenly as tough as the rest of him. His voice barked. “Hold it!”

“Just ID.” Neil Fargo got it out gingerly. “I had a tip that a skip I’m looking for is holed up in this dump.”

The cop returned the ID. “Sorry, sir, but we’ve had a homicide here.”

“Homicide?” His voice was unsurprised, as if Kolinski being led away had partially prepared him for it. “Wouldn’t be a woman, would it?”

The cop’s eyes sharpened. “Think she’s the one you’re looking for?”

“Could be. First name Roberta — although she probably wouldn’t be using her real name here.”

“Our DOA is called Robin by the manager. The Lieutenant’ll want to see you.” He turned to yell down the hall, “Lieutenant Tekawa, sir.”

“Tekawa? What’s a narc doing in charge of a homicide?”

The cop spun back to him. “Lieutenant Tekawa to you, Jack. And narc isn’t a word we—”

“Is that Neil Fargo you got?” Tekawa had appeared in the far end of the corridor. “Come on up, Neil.”

Neil Fargo went by the prowlie without saying anything; the cop’s face had closed up at being bypassed. The private detective paused in the doorway of Robin’s room, his eyes taking it in: the body on the bed, now with a sheet drawn over the face; the candle stub; the junkie’s paraphernalia; the chair turned toward the airshaft. The sunlight had now entirely departed from the red bricks opposite.

“Seeing how the other half lives, Hank?”

“Sometimes I think I ought to transfer to Bunco.” Tekawa’s gesture encompassed it all, from the dirty handprints around the light switch to the overflow stain in the corner of the ceiling above the sink. “Little old ladies conned out of their life savings might be a pleasure instead of junkie ODs. I don’t think you know my partner, Jerry Maley.”

Neil Fargo and the red-headed cop shook hands. The redhead looked like a cop; Tekawa, slim and elegant and bland-faced behind studious glasses, looked like an assistant professor at Cal.

“You’d get bored with the pigeon drop, Hank,” said Neil Fargo. “That how you read this? Simple overdose?”

“Take a look,” invited Tekawa. “But no touchie: Homicide and the interns haven’t seen her yet.”

He watched Neil Fargo raise a corner of the sheet to look down at the dead girl’s face.

“There goes a fat fee,” muttered the private detective.

“Someone you know?” Curbed curiosity made the Japanese cop’s eyes sleepy and his face even more bland. Neil Fargo let the sheet drop.

He said, “If it’s an accidental overdose, how come I see Alex Kolinski being led away in bracelets when I come in?”

“We walked in on him,” admitted Tekawa. “Black girl on the desk was having hysterics. Had a bruise on her jaw, and one on her tit, and said she got them from Kolinski when she tried to follow him into this room. Said she saw him with a hypo in his hand and the deceased on the bed before he shoved her out. Could be lying, of course...”

“Kolinski’s one of the owners of the building,” said Neil Fargo abstractedly, as if not really thinking about what he was saying. “Along with Walt Hariss he pays the black girl’s salary.”

“Well well well,” said Tekawa softly. “Didn’t know you were interested in real estate.”

Neil Fargo jerked a thumb at the bed. “In her.”

“Did you notice the syringe rolled under the edge of the bed? Beautiful set of latents on it. If they should be Kolinski’s...”

“It’d break your heart.” Neil Fargo added in an amused voice, “I saw you had him resisting arrest a little bit.”

Maley turned from the window, where he’d been staring down the airshaft as if carefully disassociating himself from the conversation. He had pleasantly blunt Irish features, wavy red hair just being touched around the edges with grey.

“Kolinski panicked when he saw us in the doorway behind him, tried to bust out. Past Hank.”

“Hai!” yipped Neil Fargo softly. He went suddenly into the karate front stance, threw in rapid succession an upward knife hand and a fisthammer, stepped away into a back stance, straightened, relaxed, laughed, and said, “Bullshit.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” said Tekawa to his partner. “He could put a bottom fist through this wall without bruising anything but the plaster.”

“I’d rather stand six feet back and throw an ash tray at ’em,” grinned Maley. His voice hardened. “You said you were interested in the deceased, Fargo. Exactly what did you mean by that?”

“Whoa, hoss,” said the detective softly. He looked at Tekawa. “You figure out yet why Alex Kolinski might want to OD a two-bit junkie whore?”

“That’s what worries me,” admitted Tekawa. He looked as worried as a slab of bacon. “She was going to turn him as a pusher?”

“Hank, we both know the connection isn’t a son of a bitch to the hype. He’s Mr Nice with the big cotton candy.”

“Accidental?”

“I don’t see Alex Kolinski making in front of a couple of narcs the kind of mistake Alex Kolinski wouldn’t make in the first place. If he was OD’ing her, it was a deliberate hotshot.”

Maley had been frowning from one to the other. He stepped suddenly in front of Neil Fargo, put a hand on his chest and shoved, not hard but not gently. Neil Fargo gave back a pace. Maley repeated the action. This time Neil Fargo didn’t move. Maley was nearly as tall as the private detective, but without the tremendous overlay of muscle the ex-pro footballer carried.

“You didn’t answer my question, Fargo. And we don’t feel like answering yours.”

“Sweet and sour, Hank? Honey and vinegar? Even to people who just see it on TV, that’s a wheeze. If you want me to get into trouble just have him put his hands on me again.”

“Jerry. It’s okay.” Henry Tekawa’s soft, unaccented voice had a hidden whiplash in it.

Maley stepped back looking confused, as if he wasn’t used to being denied his partner’s backing, especially in the time-honored police whipsaw of one cop being nasty, the other friendly.

“Which leaves you being tipped,” said Neil Fargo.

“Right,” said Tekawa. “That he was not only overdosing her, but with a hotshot of ninety-five percent pure shit. Somebody named Docker—”

“An anonymous tipster who gives you his name?” Neil Fargo started to laugh sardonically.

“He called me yesterday at the Hall, asked for me personally. Voice like he was eating mush. Very aggressive, very nervous, quick — hyper, you understand?”

“Dropping amphetamines?”

“Could be. Said yesterday he would give me a big drug bust, said he’d call again this morning. He did.”

“Hank, are you sure—” Maley began.

“It’s okay, Jerry,” said the Japanese again. “He told us to be at the greasy spoon down on the corner at two-fifteen. We waited until two-fifty for his call. He stalled around, suddenly said Kolinski was up here killing somebody with an overdose.”

“Knew ahead Kolinski was going to do it, waiting for him to show up.” Neil Fargo’s eyes gleamed. “Or was Kolinski maybe framed for it?”

“Not if it’s his fingerprints on that syringe. And not unless somebody bought the black chick on the desk to screw down the lid on him. Christ, Neil, I’m not sure the girl was even quite dead when we came in.” He paused. “Okay. Your turn.”

“Buttering up your partner?” grinned Neil Fargo.

Maley’s face darkened and his fists clenched at his sides, but he said nothing. His eyes were on Henry Tekawa, filled with a veiled anger and contempt.

“You weren’t after Kolinski, were you, Neil?” asked Tekawa softly.

“No. A girl.”

“This girl?”

“You have to ask?” His face was suddenly tired. “Voice like he was eating mush, you said. Same kind of voice called my secretary just before three o’clock, said I’d find my subject at this hotel. Didn’t identify himself as anyone named Docker, but it was probably the same guy.”

“And who is the subject?” Tekawa’s voice was still soft.

“Her name was Roberta Stayton.”

Jerry Maley, who had been silently prowling the tiny area of free floor space between the bed and the window, stopped abruptly. He let his breath hiss out between his teeth.

“As in Maxwell Stayton?”

“His daughter. Spoiled rich kid, the old story — debutante coming out ten or twelve years ago, when debs still came out, Stanford, then a quick marriage that cost the old man fifty thou to cut loose, a son from it. After that, pretty wild.”

“You went to Stanford yourself, didn’t you, Fargo?” asked Maley. There was frank insinuation in his voice.

“Yeah. And I knew Roberta Stayton there, yeah. She was a couple of years behind me. I also played football there, which was how her old man knew me. And why he started hiring me to find her when she started disappearing.”

“You did a good job this time,” snickered Maley.

“She was a girl who liked to kick off her shoes in a hotel room and settle down with a bottle.” He shrugged. “Anybody’s hotel room. I doubt if she even would have drawn a line at an Irishman.”

Henry Tekawa cut in quickly, “You’re saying she was a lush, not a junkie, Neil? If you’d seen the tracks inside her elbows and on the backs of her knees—”

“No, I’m not saying that. She was a hype, all right. That’s the word I picked up down in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago when I followed her trail down there. But it’s a recent development — within the past year.” He paused, very deliberately. “The word around is that Kolinski’s the one who introduced her to the needle. He used to be her old man’s chauffeur three, four years ago.”

“Convenient,” muttered Maley.

“Are you offering this as a possible motive?”

“I’m not offering anything as anything, Hank. I’m giving you what I know. But here’s something else I know: Roberta Stayton was a very hard-nosed girl. If she decided to take a cure, and if Kolinski hooked her originally, she could very well have decided to blow the whistle on him. And he could have decided to... Christ, Hank, face it: if you hadn’t walked in on him, it’d have gone down in the books as an accidental, self-administered OD. Right?”

“Right. And now all we have to do is figure out who the hell Docker is and where the hell he fits into all this.”

“You do,” corrected Neil Fargo. “Docker’s your problem, not mine. Mine is telling old man Stayton he just lost an heir.”

“You sound all broken up for him,” said Tekawa precisely, like a sparrow eating sunflower seeds.

“He’s a tough old bastard, played for the Bears in the thirties. He’ll stand up to it. See you at the gym tonight, Hank?”

“Sure.” Tekawa went into a karate stance of his own. “I’ll set you on your ass.”

“Ten bucks says you don’t.” He paused deliberately. “On that other thing I talked to you about...”

“All set to go,” said Tekawa smoothly.

When the big detective had departed, the redhead began, “Hank, don’t you think maybe we ought to hold—”

Tekawa cut him off with a headshake. “I don’t think anything,” he said. “Not yet.”

Maley nodded judiciously. He said, “You and him are pretty good friends, I hear. Belong to the same karate studio, trade off phone numbers...”

He was very carefully not looking at his partner, but his voice trailed off under Tekawa’s grave, unblinking regard. Maley finally met that gaze and his face began to grow pink as if trying to match his hair.

Tekawa said, in a disgusted voice, “Fargo won the Rose Bowl for Stanford his senior year. Played two years with the Forty-Niners and then quit to enlist in the Special Forces. Battlefield promotion to an officer, two tours of duty in Vietnam, resigned from the Army after his enlistment and extension were up. Came back here to go to work as a private investigator with Lipset while going to Hastings Law, nights...”

“Look, Henry—”

“Passed the bar after only three years, but never practiced. Set himself up as a p.i. instead, specializing in investigations for attorneys until Maxwell Stayton sort of put him on watchdog duty over the daughter.”

“All right, Henry, you’ve made your point. I just—”

“Fargo’s bigger than we are, tougher than we are, he’s smarter than at least you are, and he has better connections at City Hall than either of us — as long as Stayton’s his client.”

“Henry, you don’t have to rub it in.”

“On top of that, he knows his rights better than we know ours. Now, if you can figure out a way to pry anything — anything at all — out of Neil Fargo that he doesn’t want to have pried, you let me know. Will you do that, Jerry?”

“Well, sure, I—”

“Otherwise, would you just kindly shut to fuck up?”

The big red-headed cop stared at him hotly. Then both men suddenly began to laugh.