Joe Gores - Interface

Kolinski’s hand mauled the receiver as if it were Docker’s neck. Kolinski’s own voice sounded strangled.

“Is... he still there?”

“He surely isn’t. But when I seen him go by de desk, I went down to Miss Robin’s room ’cause I was scared... I mean, Mist’ Kolinski, she was askin’ me ’bout whether I know which girl was with him las’ week, an’...” Her voice quavered with terror at his possible displeasure. “An’ Mist’ Kolinski, it was Miss Robin he was with last week!”

“You fucking black bitch, what are you telling me?” His voice snapped Hariss erect, alert.

“She’s...” The Dixie voice got even closer to the phone, so it had the intimacy of intercourse to Kolinski’s ear. “She’s done shot herse’f up, Mist’ Kolinski! She’s already goin’ on the nod, an’ she laughin ’. She sayin’ you gonna have to wait for her to come down off her high ’fore she tell you where he’s at. An’ she say you gonna have to beg her...”

“You fucking cunt!” Kolinski screamed at her.

He slammed down the receiver, twisted toward the door. Hariss was in his way. Hariss put a small beautifully-groomed hand on his chest. It stopped Kolinski like a log through the windshield.

“Get hold of yourself.”

“Docker was just up at that fucking Robin’s room! The nigger cunt spotted him sneaking out, and...” He was fighting for control and ramming his arms into his overcoat. “... and after he left, that fucking bitch shot herself up.”

“And?” Hariss’ voice was ominous.

“Robin told the spade she knew where he had gone but that I was going to have to crawl to get the information.”

Hariss quoted drily, “ ‘I own her.’ You ignorant, strutting animal! You...” He stopped, shook his head almost in admiration. “Strong genes. Her father’s daughter...”

Kolinski was once more at the door. “What pisses me, Walt, I left her those two extra bindles of shit this morning myself. So she could use them to...” Flecks of spittle had appeared at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were quite mad. His hands convulsed themselves like dogs fucking. “She figures because she’ll be on the nod before I get there—”

“Alex.”

“I’ll get her awake and I’ll—”

“ Alex! ” The importer’s tone slashed through his rage. Kolinski tried to meet the other’s eyes, couldn’t.

He growled, “Goddammit, Walt, I—”

“Crawl for her, Alex, if that is what is necessary.”

Kolinski drew a deep breath. His rage was passing. He nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Whatever I have to do to find out where he is. But afterwards...”

“Of course. Afterwards.” As Kolinski started for the door, Hariss added, “One further point.”

“Christ, Walt, I gotta—”

“The point is that Docker has a car. Yet he pauses to confer with a junkie whore with whom he casually slept a few nights before.”

“Well?”

“Why hasn’t he gotten out of town?”

The two men stared at one another with a recognition dawning between them. Mixed in with the struggling comprehension were the first hints of personal fear. It was Hariss who voiced it.

“Docker?” he whispered. “And Robin? And what does he want?”

Kolinski blustered, “When I get through with that bitch, we’ll have a lot of answers.”

His voice was that of a boy drawing a line in the dirt and daring a bigger boy to step over it. The lights of the small office raised a sheen of perspiration on Walter Hariss’ heavy features.

At the same moment Kolinski stormed out, Docker lowered the wrist with the watch on it so he could look through the smeary front window of the narrow pensioners’ hotel directly across from 517 Jones. That was the address of the second-floor hotel in which Robin Stayton had just completed her dying.

Docker dropped a dime, dialled. His eyes were intense behind their hornrims, his lips were pursed almost as if he were counting. The pay phone was isolated in the front corner of the lobby, well away from the old men watching the afternoon soaps on the lobby TV. By merely switching his gaze downhill through the smeared window, to the coffee shop on the far corner of the O’Farrell Street intersection, he could see his quarry.

In the front booth were a red-haired man and a black-haired man, the redhead in profile and the other with his back to the window.

The phone was ringing. Docker was chewing on a wad of toilet paper. Through the window he could see the coffee shop’s Chinese waitress reach under the counter to pick up the receiver.

“There should be two men sitting in the window booth drinking coffee,” said Docker, as if he were not where he could see them himself. His voice labored like an asthmatic’s around the wad of moist paper. “One of them should be a red-headed Irishman—”

“Say, who is this? What do you—”

“The other should be a Jap. Tell the Jap he’s got a phone call.”

He watched the waitress pause, decide, lay the receiver against her breast so he could no longer hear her breathing or her voice as she leaned across the counter. Her mouth moved. The back of Henry Tekawa’s sleek black head jerked to her words. He stood swiftly, went to the counter and put one knee on a deserted stool so he could lean forward to take the receiver.

“Tekawa,” he said.

“Docker again.”

Tekawa had a voice as smooth as butter, totally unaccented. He was third-generation American. He said, “Mr Docker, my partner and I have wasted almost forty-five minutes drinking lousy coffee in a crummy cafe because—”

“Shut up!” The viciousness in Docker’s voice came through the wad of paper. Quasi-hysteria joined it there. “You fucking cops are always the same! Lean on everybody, always lean on people! Only now I’m doing the leaning. I hang up this fucking phone and you’re fucked, Tekawa. Got that?”

“I could hardly miss it.” Tekawa’s voice was light, almost humorous. He turned and scanned the street casually through the window, took in the enormously fat man in a light-colored sport coat who was wedged into the public phone booth on the other side of O’Farrell. “You called me yesterday, Docker, said—”

“I’m doing the talking,” cried Docker. Tension whined in his voice. He too could see the fat man in the phone booth. He paused, so when the fat man gestured again he could speak in rhythm with the gesture. “I’m offering you a big bust, Tekawa, and you come on cop-heavy with me...”

“A drug bust, I believe you said yesterday?”

“It’s bigger than that today.”

Tekawa moved his eyes to his red-headed partner and back to the fat man in the phone booth. As he did, an aging queer with a slack mouth and avid eyes and dandruff on the shoulders of his black ribbed sweater came out of the liquor store a few steps from the fat man’s phone booth.

“Bigger?” prompted Tekawa.

“Murder,” said Docker.

His mouth smiled around the disfiguring wad of paper as he saw the red-headed narc start very casually across O’Farrell with the green light, sauntering toward the fat man. Just as he reached the curb, the fat man hung up.

Tekawa said very quickly, as the redhead looked questioningly back at him, “What do you mean, murder?”

“Quit stalling me, man,” snapped Docker. He slid a thin blade of paranoia into his voice. “You tryna keep me talking, is that it? You tryna keep me on the line so you can trace the call? You tryna—”

“From a phone I didn’t know you were going to call me on?” Tekawa shook his head at his red-headed partner, who stood on the curb facing downhill, which put his back to Docker. His hands were in his pockets; he teetered on his toes, idly. Tekawa went on, “Hell, Docker, you sound like you’ve been around long enough to know it’s damned near impossible to make a trace with all the electronic equipment they use today anyway.”