Interface

Twenty Two

The weathered whitewashed building and miniature triangle of sand which comprise Phalen State Beach are open to the public, hence are unwelcome to the residents of the exclusive Sea Cliff area. But Phalen State Park has been there longer than many of them, and will probably outlast the rest of them. It is new money in Sea Cliff these days, nouveau riche money that thinks it has Arrived, but that is laughed at behind the discreet hands of Presidio Terrace money. San Francisco is an old and a cruel city, and one of the few that honors its bawdy past more than its supposedly progressive present.

At night, the gate which closes the winding walkway down to the public beach is closed and padlocked and the tatty little parking lot is indifferently lighted. Neil Fargo was just a dark, bulky shape crossing the lot. He shivered in the wet chill of the fog. His shoes scraped muffled shards of sound from the wet concrete. Somewhere below him in the mist, surf growled like a baffled tiger.

He had taken only about fifteen minutes longer than the hour he had estimated while talking with Hariss on the phone.

“Hold it right there, mister.”

Neil Fargo stopped dead in his tracks. The flashlight struck him in the chest, stayed there while he very slowly brought his empty hands out of his topcoat pockets and spread his arms wide.

The light moved up to his face to identify him, blind him for a few moments. and kill his night vision for twenty minutes. It dropped again. Nicely done. He could not see the figure behind the light, but it was probably Blaney. If it was, Blaney was probably holding the light at arm’s length so a shot at the light would miss him. Just a strongarm, perhaps, but Blaney had managed to stay around for quite a few years. He was the only one of Kolinski’s people that Fargo had ever even met. All the others were new, untried.

“Neil Fargo,” said Neil Fargo.

“So it is.”

Still the detective did not move. He was a dozen yards from the gate, electrically controlled, which was set flush on impenetrable hedges of Italian buckthorn.

“My piece is on the belt on the right-hand side.”

Brisk, impersonal hands removed the weight from his hip, briefly patted him down for other armament.

“He sounded goddam jumpy on the phone,” said Neil Fargo while the frisk was going on.

The big indistinct shape stepped back. Neil Fargo’s .38 was in its left paw. “I’m goddam jumpy myself, out here in the fog.”

“Only a few minutes more,” he said cheerfully. “Docker’s dead.”

“Not such a fucking hotshot after all, huh? Well, it don’t break my heart. I’ve earned my fucking fifty bucks. I’ll let you through the gate.”

He waited while Blaney found the concealed switch among the green waxy leaves of the buckthorn and activated it with a key. The white picket fence — backed with a ten-foot height of pipe-framed hurricane mesh — swung wide. This automatically lit up the driveway like a Cecil B. De Mille production. The drive was blacktop, flanked with more white rail fence right out of the Kentucky bluegrass country. The head-high, formally clipped hedges were privet here.

“Better not step off the drive, Mr Fargo,” said Blaney’s apologetic voice behind him. “The alarms are set.”

“Jesus Christ, when does World War III start?”

“I guess when you got it, you’re scared shitless somebody’s gonna take it away from you.”

The house was a good sixty yards back from Sea Cliff Avenue, sixteen rooms with a gently-peaked and slate-shingled roof, set above the drive and garages on an artificial plateau which had been gouged from the rounded forehead of the bluff. Three-storied, immense living room windows on the ground floor which would look out across the neck of the Golden Gate at the incredible rocky sweep of Marin headlands when there was no concealing fog. A house from the twenties, when San Francisco land had not been valued by the square inch.

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.