Joe Gores - Interface

The whey-faced financier said nothing. Neil Fargo nodded.

“My secretary will send you a closing bill and our final report in the morning.”

He left. Back at his own office. he dictated the promised report, drinking bourbon straight from a pint bottle between paragraphs. When he’d drunk enough of it, he went to sleep on the office couch.

It was a mild morning. Pamela Gardner had her cloth coat over her arm when she paused in the vestibule of the street level door bearing the inscription NEIL FARGO — INVESTIGATIONS. She was humming a tune to herself with youthful resiliency, as if yesterday had not happened, or had happened to one of the characters in the weighty best-seller she again bore under her arm.

The office smelled of stale cigarette smoke. On the top step she stopped so abruptly that she dropped the book again, as she had done the morning before.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Oh! I...”

Neil Fargo turned from the electric coffee maker. He was scowling. “How the hell do you make this bastard thing work?”

“Oh.” She was blushing, as if meeting him here before office hours made it an assignation rather than a work day. “You... have to jiggle the cord in the socket a certain way to—”

“Jiggle it,” commanded Neil Fargo.

Pamela eyed the pot critically, did things with the cord no manufacturer’s instructions ever included. The pot began to perk, hesitantly, like a two-cycle engine with only one cylinder working.

“You look hung over,” she said snidely to the detective.

“I am. There’s a report on the tape.”

His hands had tremored ever so slightly while fooling with the coffee pot. His eyes were bloodshot. He had shaved with the office razor, but carelessly. He turned toward his inner sanctum.

“At least the janitor got the mess cleaned up last night. A cup of that when it’s ready will save my life, doll.”

But Pamela had followed him into his office. She laid the newspaper, folded open to the story, on the desk under his eyes. “Is that the same Docker?”

“The very same.” His voice was mocking, but his eyes were somber.

“It says they haven’t found the body yet, but that—”

“Yeah. He’s dead.”

The words were blunt. The girl’s very small, very soft capable hands that smelled of Jergen’s Lotion found another news story. “It says that terrible man, that one you called Peeler—”

“Yeah, he’s dead, too.” He added cruelly, “Virgins will now sleep soundly in their beds.” She began to color. He said, “Roberta Stayton is dead. Julio Marquez is dead. They’re all dead.”

“Roberta Stayton made the front page.” There was no sorrow in the small girl’s voice. Her nose twitched, somewhat like a rabbit’s. Her voice had been just short of snide.

“Her old man has the money, what do you expect? Which reminds me. Once that report is typed up, send him the original and our closing bill. Jack the price up — way up. We won’t be shaking that particular money tree any more.”

Her face was shocked. “Oh, Neil! He’s our... he...”

“We’ll just have to go back to doing legal investigations, doll.” He laughed shortly, with little real pleasure. “Maybe we ought to offer our services to Walter Hariss. He’s going to be needing a lot of help.”

“Do you think they’ll really make it stick?”

“It’ll stick,” he said solemnly. “But let’s help it along. Give Internal Revenue a call, you’re a secretary used to work for Hariss Ltd down on Battery Street. You know for a fact he has a safe deposit box stuffed with undeclared cash. They’ll take it from there.”

Her eyes shone. “Oh, Neil, does he?”

“He does. I found it out just yesterday. I wasn’t spinning my wheels all day.”

“Why don’t we claim the informant’s percentage?”

“This one’s for sweet charity, doll. Isn’t that damned coffee ready yet?”

She disappeared, but no coffee appeared. Instead, he could hear the rattle of her electric typewriter. He seemed to forget about the coffee, merely sat behind the desk staring almost vacantly out the window. Pamela came back in, sat down on the edge of his desk closest to him. In that position she showed a dangerous amount of slightly chubby thigh; but there was a dangerous look in her eyes to match the display. Neil Fargo regarded the exposed flesh.

“What would your mother say?”

She started to blush, but she made no move to cover her legs and refused to lower her eyes from his. “I’d get an apartment of my own if I thought it would do me any good.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“I know that, too. Neil, this report to Stayton — it’s full of a lot of... of things that didn’t happen.”

“Such as?”

“Going down to Mexico to look for Roberta. You never went to Mexico. You told me three weeks ago, the day after Stayton hired us, that you thought she was right here in the city in a Tenderloin—”

“Jacks the expenses up,” he said lightly.

“Can you tell me what really happened yesterday, Neil?”

“Part of it, doll.”

He told her part of it, picking and choosing through what had actually transpired. When he finished, her eyes were round.

“You took the heroin into Hariss’ house stuffed down the front of your shirt? That man searched you...”

“Just a standard frisk for a gun — there wasn’t much chance he’d find it.”

“And... and Docker killed them both with his bare hands?”

“Self-defense, both times, but nobody would have believed it. Not the cops or the DA anyway — the ones who’d matter if it came down to arrest and trial.”

“A jury would have believed him.”

Neil Fargo shook his head slowly. “Remember, the Viet Cong had him for over a year before the North Vietnamese got him. He told me nobody’d ever put him in a cage again — not for one day, not for one hour. He said he’d kill his ass first.”

Her eyes were shining again. They were very blue, very clear. “He must have been a very brave man.”

“Some Frenchman in the underground in World War Two said that only an optimist kills himself. How about that coffee now ?”

She slid off the desktop reluctantly, started out with the back of her short blue skirt deeply creased from the hard surface. Then she turned back and stood in the doorway, with her crossed arms pushing her swelling youthful breasts together as if offering them for his approval.

“He loved her very deeply, didn’t he? Docker?”

“I didn’t get a chance to ask him, doll. Coffee.”

She was in the outer office when the phone rang. She answered, after a few seconds laid down the receiver. Her heels detoured to the coffee pot before coming across the floor to his open doorway. She set down a steaming mug. Her face was tight.

“It’s that Rhoda Walström who used to—”

“Thanks, doll.” His briefing had not included Rhoda. He said into the phone, “Hello, darling, I was going to call you this morning. You at work already? Mm-hmm. Early, huh? Yeah, me too. The police been around yet?”

He winked at Pamela Gardner. She left abruptly, but he could hear her heels falter, stop within earshot. Sunshine slanting through the east windows laid her shadow on the floor near his office door.

“Wylie himself?” he said into the phone. “I’ll bet he gnashed his teeth when you said...” He listened. He laughed. “I doubt if you really mind about ruined reputations, Rhoda. Tonight? Why not? I told Wylie you were a terrific lay, I guess I’d better make sure I didn’t lie to the police...”

When he hung up thirty seconds later, Pamela’s shadow was gone from the floor. He could hear her making secretarial noises at her desk. He checked his watch like a man marking time to an important appointment; his face was cold and withdrawn and totally without the animation he had injected into his chatter with the big Scandinavian girl.