“Alex, if our association ever terminates, it will be on the basis of your verbal vulgarity—”
“Yeah, I know, Walt — but you don’t mind taking your cut out of the FarJon Hotel operations.”
“Business is business. All right: I sent Gus over to Neil Fargo’s office to make sure the missing hundred-seventy-five gee’s aren’t hidden there.”
“You mean the paper-wrapped package—”
“Of course. We have only Neil Fargo’s word for it that Docker ever had that money. Assume for the moment that he and Docker, at least initially, planned the hijack together. Docker’s attaché case could have been taken to the Bryant Street flat empty, merely to serve as a receptacle for the key of heroin.”
“Yeah!” exclaimed Kolinski softly. “I like that.” His expression changed. “But Fargo’s not stupid. He wouldn’t leave the money in his goddam office. He’d put it in a safe deposit box or—”
“Events have moved rapidly. Docker may have betrayed Fargo as well as us. Safe deposit boxes cannot be reached until ten A.M., he may have had to leave the money in his office and may not have had a chance to collect it since. In any event, the girl will know whether he brought a package, a briefcase, anything which could have held the money into the office with him this morning. And Gus will make sure there is no money there now.”
Kolinski’s eyes had sharpened again. “And checking up on whether the information about Docker’s car-rental came through the secretary—”
“Fargo may have held back a license number, let us say, that would aid your people materially in spotting Docker’s car.”
“But why would Fargo—”
“Alex, I’m surprised at you.” He laid aside his cigar to illustrate his words with gestures. “Let us turn it around and suppose that Fargo is not involved in the hijack with Docker. That means that somewhere out there is a man with a hundred-seventy-five thousand dollars in cash, plus heroin worth a quarter of a million on the street once it has been cut to the standard five percent.” He chuckled. “Fargo may very well feel — as we do — that if he could beat the other principals to Docker—”
“I see.” Kolinski’s bony face had become pensive. “But if Fargo’s stringing us along, he’ll have briefed his secretary on what to tell us.”
Hariss chuckled richly. “Gus has an extremely persuasive way of asking questions of young ladies.”
The back of Gus Rizzato’s open hand drove Pamela Gardner’s delicately-boned skull sideways against the plasterboard partition beside her desk. The pigskin driving gloves he wore left a mottled red pattern on her cheek.
“I asked you about a package, dearie.”
Outrage and terror fought in the girl’s face. In a voice high with fear but still defiant, she exclaimed, “You, you... get out of here! When Neil hears—”
The knuckles whipped across her cheek the other way. She broke, screamed, scrambled from her chair so she could get the desk between them. Rizzato’s dainty size six shoe swept sideways against her ankles, slamming them together and taking her feet out from under her.
Pamela went down heavily on her side, only partially breaking the fall with one hand. In the same motion she tried to roll under the desk in a flurry of nyloned thighs.
Rizzato’s hand darted down between the churning legs. The girl screamed again, whether in pain, further terror or outrage was impossible to distinguish. She kicked up and out; her shoe missed Rizzato’s face by the slimmest of margins. Since she was on her back she used elbows, bottom and heels to scrabble backward into the well under the desk like a threatened spider into a corner.
Rizzato was around the desk as quick as a weasel. He grabbed her short brown hair from behind as she emerged, jerked her head up and then back and sideways to rap it just hard enough on the edge of the well. The girl made a strangled sound in her throat as if she were trying to retch. He rapped again. The girl quit fighting his hands.
“That’s it, dearie,” he chirped. His eyes and voice were cheerfully birdlike. He bent his own face over hers, so he could look down into her fear-haunted eyes. “Now tell me about the package.”
“There wasn’t any—”
Rizzato reached down his free hand and almost contemptuously massaged one of the small ripe globes beneath her fuzzy yellow sweater. The girl’s body stiffened, her mouth opened as if in rictus, but she made no sound.
Rizzato removed his hand. Blood congested his face, either from rage or arousal. “Answer my questions, dearie, or I’ll strip that sweater off you and suck on that nipple until it’s the size of a grape. Now out from under the desk and on your feet, no tricks. Right?”
There was a long pause. Pamela finally nodded her head, mutely. Her face was nauseated. A thin line of blood had run down one corner of her mouth where she had bitten herself.
“That’s my girl. Now tell me about the package.”
Rizzato stepped back three swift paces, stood poised on the balls of his feet as she awkwardly crawled out from under the desk. The girl was shivering as if with cold. She shot a single shamefaced look at Rizzato, then looked at the stairwell.
“I locked the downstairs door, dearie. Neil Fargo, Investigations is closed temporarily for inventory.”
“If Neil should come back—”
“He’s out looking for Docker.”
The girl shuddered. She pressed back against the edge of the desk. Her body shielded her right hand from Rizzato’s view. The hand crept back, spiderlike, toward the telephone.
Rizzato had removed his suitcoat, carefully hung it over the back of a chair. To go with his six-inch-wide necktie, he wore bright golden suspenders three inches wide. Somehow, these did not make him look ridiculous.
He reached back as if to scratch the back of his head, then his arm was a sudden blur and a slim black commando’s knife was lying on his open palm. The girl’s hand leaped back to her side as if scalded. Rizzato laughed complacency.
“Fargo must have told you why they call me Peeler.”
The girl made her eyes find his face. Her pupils had dilated with emotion like a cat’s, so almost no iris showed. Somehow she made her voice low and steady.
“You don’t have to hurt me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“That’s my girl. Did Fargo bring a package with him when he came in this morning?”
“Package?”
“Dearie...” He pointed the flat black blade at the front of her dust-marked skirt. “Maybe I’ll open you up down there so you can take a stallion right to the balls and yell for more.”
The girl’s face became exactly the shade of parchment. It took her lips, so dry had they become, three times to whisper, “Please... I... don’t know what you mean. He... was empty-handed. Completely.”
“There’s this morning’s Chronicle on top of the file cabinet.”
“I brought that myself. I bring it every morning.”
“Now we find out if you’re lying.”
The office was small, with few hiding places. Only one filing cabinet was locked, and that one Rizzato dumped on its face and opened by working loose the lock-rod. There was no package, no money. Finally he heaped up some of the dozens of file folders he had dumped out, unplugged the coffee pot, carefully removed the basket which held the sodden grounds and dumped them over the files. He completed the destruction by pouring the steaming coffee over the grounds. Then he sat down on the edge of the girl’s desk.
“And now, dearie, tell me about this car Docker is driving...”
He left exactly twenty-two minutes after he had first entered the building. Since the Bush Street garage was less than eight blocks distant, he drove directly there to report in person. Then he went back out to sit behind the wheel of the Cadillac again.