“Neil, how the hell you stay in the shape you do?”
“Night work, Ben.”
Neil Fargo crossed the marble lobby of the Hall of Justice, past the bronze plaque commemorating San Francisco’s police dead. The number of recent additions to the roster was one reason everyone entering the Hall was subject to a body search. He crossed to the banks of elevators at the rear of the lobby. Several professional freaks in their prescribed hippie uniforms were protesting something to a uniformed deputy who looked as if his patience was getting as thin as his hair.
The elevator was crowded with attorneys, identifiable by their attaché cases, bushy sideburns, overlong hair, and trendy clothing. The clients and plainclothes cops were drab by comparison. Neil Fargo got off at three.
It was 1:01 when he pushed open the hall door identified as the Homicide Squad. He ignored the empty reception desk and the waiting room chairs, instead went directly through the metal gate in the hip-high railing. Through a doorway was the big room where the homicide detectives lived. For years they had been only one squad of the General Works Detail, but a briskly rising murder rate, most of it connected with drug-buy burns and thrill-kills during grocery store rip-offs, had earned the squad separate quarters.
By the water cooler, Vince Wylie was arguing Brodie versus Spurrier with a huge toothpick-chewing, shirtsleeved man whose tie had been loosened with such enthusiasm that the shapeless lump of knot was down at his third button. Neil Fargo caught Wylie’s eye, then jerked his head at one of the glass-walled interrogation cubicles lining the room, at the same time raising his eyebrows.
Wylie nodded. Neil Fargo went into the room, sat down in one of the chrome and black plastic chairs which flanked the desk, lit a cigarette, drifted smoke.
Three minutes later Wylie sauntered in, followed by the cop with whom he had been second-guessing Dick Nolan’s quarterback strategies. This second man was big enough to make even Neil Fargo look delicate, with heavy soft sloping shoulders and the start of a paunch under his pastel shirt. In his hip holster was a non-reg Python .357 magnum, the one with the four-inch barrel. His slacks were wrinkled like an elephant’s ass from accommodating his wide butt and heavy thighs. He had eyes like Santa Claus and hands to tie bowknots in pokers.
“Should I have brought my lawyer?” asked Neil Fargo, unsmiling.
He neither stood up nor offered his hand, nor did Wylie offer his. Instead, Wylie sat down behind the desk. The big cop leaned against the edge of it. Wylie got out a cigarette and indicated the big cop with it.
“Charlie?” He made a deprecating gesture. “He’s got a few minutes waiting for a witness to show up, he thought he’d sit in to—”
“Read me my rights or get him to fuck out of here.”
A slow flush, the color of old bricks, rose up Wylie’s heavy throat. The big cop, who had settled back with his arms crossed on his chest like a farmer settling in to discuss the weather, slowly uncrossed his arms and came erect. He took his toothpick out of his mouth, looked at it regretfully, dropped it in the wastebasket.
“They always put peppermint in them,” he complained. He winked at Neil Fargo, said, “Pleasure,” and shambled out.
Wylie flopped a lined yellow legal-size pad on the desk and took out a ballpoint pen as if he were mad at it. Unlike Charlie, he was wearing the jacket of his suit even though it was stufly in the cubicle.
“Just what the hell did that accomplish, Fargo?”
“I’m going to talk in front of two Homicide cops at the Hall of Justice when I don’t know what it’s about? Go on with you.”
“Don’t you know what it’s about?”
Neil Fargo said nothing.
Wylie sighed and lit the cigarette he had laid aside earlier while getting his pad and pen ready. The private detective watched him. Wylie laid down the just-lit cigarette without having drawn on it, and picked up the pen again.
“Bryant Street have any significance for you, Fargo?”
Neil Fargo shook his head.
“You know a man named Julio Marquez?” the silent denial was repeated. “T. E. Addison?” Again negative. “Docker?”
A light gleamed for a brief instant behind Neil Fargo’s eyes. He said, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“Goddammit, Fargo—”
Neil Fargo stood up, smeared out his cigarette and put an open palm on the desk and leaned across it toward Wylie in one smooth motion. His face was tight. “Charge me with something and talk to my lawyer, or tell me what the fuck you’re after.”
Wylie who had also sprung to his feet as if he thought he was about to be assaulted, slowly sat down again. This time he shortened his cigarette with a long greedy drag. He stubbed it out.
“Trying to quit the goddam things, I’m down to one pack a day from three. Will power. How about the seventeen-hundred block of Bryant. That mean anything to you?”
“Sure.” Neil Fargo also relaxed back into his chair. “Seventeen-forty-eight. I rented the upper flat there two weeks ago.”
“That’s good. A realtor named Deming already told us that.”
“Deming’s a lush.”
Wylie’s eyes and voice had become elaborately casual. “Ever been inside the flat?”
“Sure. When I rented it.”
“That’s good. Your fingerprints were all over the place.”
“Who got it there?”
“Who said—”
Neil Fargo made a disgusted gesture that encompassed where they were. Wylie hesitated, then grinned sourly like Before in a Pepto-Bismol ad.
“Mex name of Julio Marquez.”
“Who I already haven’t heard of.”
“You said that, didn’t you?” Wylie stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He moved around on his feet, made clinking noises with his pocket change. A child started bawling in one of the cubicles across the room. A torrent of Spanish followed, three voices, two of them male. The voices made no impression on the child’s crying. Wylie stopped moving, said, “Why’d you rent the apartment?”
“Stash a witness.”
“Who? What’s he a witness to?”
Neil Fargo shook his head regretfully. His chin was stubborn again. “Not unless you can tie him in to whatever happened to this Marquez. It isn’t anybody named Addison or Docker and he didn’t witness any murders and he isn’t due in town until the end of the week anyway.”
“Where were you this morning, Fargo? Between, say, five and seven?”
“Five, getting laid. Seven, trying to get it up again.”
“You can prove that?”
“It’s hard to get laid by yourself.”
Wylie gave his hard abrupt laugh. “Boys in Vice tell me these days you can get a life-size plastic mannekin that does everything but tell you she didn’t know it could ever be like that. What’s the girl’s name? Address?”
“Cup size?” Neil Fargo said savagely. Then he hesitated, shrugged. “Rhoda Wahlström — that’s got the umlaut over the o. We use her place, twenty-one eighty-six Filbert, apartment seven. Don’t talk to her at work, okay? She’s a good lay and I’m not tired of her yet and she works at a bank where they’d still use quill pens if they could get the work out with ’em.”
Wylie was writing on his pad. “You bachelors.” He added, without looking up, “Got something on your conscience, Fargo, you’re being so awful goddam cooperative all of a sudden?”
“I figure if I kiss your ass hard enough I might find out what’s going on.”
Wylie grunted. He laid down his pen again, made an automatic motion toward the pack of cigarettes on the desk, then with a quick, almost guilty look in Neil Fargo’s direction changed the movement to sweep the offending pack into the desk drawer. He started talking in the flat impersonal voice of a trained observer used to summarizing facts.