Joe Gores - Interface

“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?”

“Or Mars in somebody’s seventh house with Venus ascending, or the wrong dragonfly getting stuck in amber back in the Carboniferous era. Who the hell knows what operates on people?” His voice got irritated. “Who even knows what anyone else is ever really thinking?”

Stayton nodded heavily. “I see. Somebody’s bought you off. I’m to get unsupported statements of Roberta’s condition, vague generalities. No names, of course, nobody I can go after and—”

“You had a chauffeur three or four years ago named Kolinski.” Neil Fargo’s color had heightened at Stayton’s charges, but he gave no other signs of having heard them. Stayton was shocked at the detective’s statement.

“Alex Kolinski? You can’t be serious. To suggest that Alex—”

“He’s the one who hooked her. Gave her the first fix a year, fourteen months ago. That’s why she was such a good girl for so long, staying off the sauce and acting like dear mommy to the brat. She disappeared four months ago because Kolinski suddenly cut off her supply and you had cut off her allowance so she couldn’t buy elsewhere. Then you wait until just three weeks ago to call me in—”

“Kolinski doesn’t have the brains to—”

“He’s not a stupid man, or an unfeeling one. He never was. You knew he was sleeping with her while he worked here; why in hell didn’t it ever come up any of the times you sent me out looking for her? I’ve known for a couple of years that Kolinski’s been a small-time H pusher.”

“Pulled him off her myself, once, in his room up over the garage.” Stayton was abstracted; he apparently had begun to believe Neil Fargo. “You’re saying he hooked her now because I threw him out then...”

“That wasn’t why he went after her. You know how she always was. Kicks. The chauffeur...” He made a gesture both cruel and illustrative at the same time. It had a startlingly feminine quality, as did his voice; he was an excellent mimic. “ ‘Just too heavy , man, daddy’s chau ffeur...’ He planned for years, I imagine, to humiliate her. Then somebody made it financially worthwhile.”

Stayton missed the cue, for the moment; his thoughts were turned inward. “She took you over the jumps once, too, didn’t she, Neil? I’d forgotten that. Might not have been such a bad thing at that — though Dorothy wouldn’t hear of it.” He shook his handsome grey head. “Women forget so damned easy! What was I when Dorothy married me, for Chrissake? A fucking longshoreman’s kid with a football scholarship.” Steel came back into his eyes. “So this fucker Kolinski hooked my daughter. We’ll unhook her. Methadone treatments, Synanon—”