Joe Gores - Interface

With infinite leisure, the lieutenant sauntered over and looked down at the glowing mess on the rocks below, now scattered and burning through the mist in a dozen different places.

“Always some goddam thing,” he said. He motioned to his driver. “Better call the fire department.”

The man went away to work the radio.

“Alert the Coast Guard, too,” the lieutenant called after him. “They’ll want to send a patrol boat in from the ocean side.”

After that, all they could do was watch it burn, and take turns wondering whether they really could smell the roasting flesh.

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.”