When Docker was halfway across the grassy area, the youth with the bandido mustache appeared at the top of the slope. He went through the trees, started out into the open as Docker reached the distant restrooms. His mustache, color, and facial features made it impossible to tell whether he was of Negro or Spanish blood.
He started trotting when Docker emerged from the restroom and disappeared around the far side of the small stucco building. He went around the corner fast. But Docker had waited, his back against the notice someone had spray-canned on the wall beside the phone booth: SYLVA CAN ASS IS VISITACION VALLEY’S SLUT!
Docker seized double handfuls of the boy’s fleece-lined carcoat and slammed him up against the phone booth, hard enough so the back of his head starred the glass. Only thin crisscrosses of embedded wire kept the glass from breaking.
“Jesus, man, what—”
“You followed me up from Bryant Street,” said Docker almost dreamily. He lifted the dark youth so the toes of his boots just touched the ground and held him that way, jammed back against the side of the dark green phone booth. “Talk to me.”
“Man, I was just... you know...”
The youth’s eyes were watering and his nose was running. His arms twitched. Docker giggled suddenly and set him back on his feet.
“What are you on?”
“Smack. I figgered... When I seen you go into the can...”
“There’s a pusher working this park?”
“Right, man.” The hype was sweating. His eyes darted first one way and then the other. “It’s my connection’s turf, man, dig, but he got busted. But I heard someone was takin’ over, so I waited.”
Docker broke into sudden laughter. It was a high, nervous laugh edged with paranoia, which didn’t go with his earlier calm. He said, “There’s a dead man over in seventeen-forty-eight. There’s another man there, unconscious. There’ll be money in their pockets. In the bathroom is a twenty-mill ampule of speed you can sell for more bread. The key’s in the mailbox. Get moving.”
The young addict was staring, wide-eyed. “What are you tellin’ me, man?” he exclaimed in alarm. “What are you tryina do to me?”
“Up to you,” said Docker.
He was still laughing. He seemed to have a hard time stopping. The laughter had tones of hysteria in it. He stood with his hands in his topcoat pockets and the attaché case between his feet, watching the hype edge away around the corner of the building. When he had disappeared, Docker quit laughing. His face looked as if it had never known laughter of any kind.
He fished a dime out of his pocket. After he had used it, he caught a bus.
Two
The phone was ringing in the empty office when Pamela Gardner unlocked the street door. On the inside of the glass in capital letters were the words NEIL FARGO and underneath in smaller caps, INVESTIGATIONS; Pamela was carrying a newspaper, her brown-bagged lunch, the current doorstop from Book of the Month, and a dress in a large cardboard box which she was returning to House of Nines after work. She was a tiny girl barely five feet tall, perhaps 95 pounds in weight.
“Coming,” she muttered as she fought to get her key back from the door.
The ringing phone hurried her, however, so she dropped first the Book of the Month, then, in retrieving it, the dress. She finally left them to run up the narrow straight stairs to the second-floor office. Her skirt was short enough so she would have been showing a great deal of pantyhose to anyone climbing the steps behind her. Her thighs still had a slight adolescent chunkiness which was somehow rather innocent.
The phone stopped ringing just as she picked it up.
“Oh, damn!”
She had rescued her packages, had begun distributing items into drawers, on desk and file cabinet tops in the time-honored secretarial ritual, when the phone started ringing again.
“Neil Fargo, Investigations.”
Still wearing her coat, she took the message, hung up. The phone immediately began ringing again.
“Neil Fargo, Investigations.”
She took another message, got out of her coat and got the coffee started. She always cleaned the pot before leaving the office at night. She was around twenty, with a short nose and a long upper lip. Her eyes were blue, very bright, wide-set. Given five more years and five fewer pounds, the right clothes and a different hair style, she would be a beautiful woman. Right now she was a perky kid with a trim figure a little too wide in the hips for her diminutive size, her small, pointed breasts softened by a furry pale yellow sweater.
Twelve minutes later, at 8:19, the street door admitted Neil Fargo. He came up the stairs two at a time, whistling cheerily. Pamela was reading the morning Chronicle, since there had been no reports on the dictating machine.
“Any calls?”
“Maxwell Stayton’s secretary will expect you when Mr Stayton arrives at ten.” She made a face, either for Mr Stayton or his secretary but probably the latter. “Two calls from that importer down on Battery Street, Walter Hariss; he’ll drop by personally. One from a man named Docker, no message, and—”
“Docker?” demanded Neil Fargo sharply.
His direct brown eyes had gotten surprisingly bleak. He was a big, blocky man with an angular, somewhat Indian face and nondescript brown hair cut subtly shorter than current styles. It made his face almost brutal in the way that Burt Lancaster’s once was brutal, although he looked nothing at all like Lancaster.
“No first name or initial.” She suddenly giggled, betraying her youth. “He had a mushy voice, like he had false teeth.”
“He leave a number?”
“Said he’d call back.” But something in his voice had sobered her. She looked up at him with bright blue eyes alive to nuance. Her face was narrow, narrow-chinned, all the features fine and sharp as good portraiture. “Is something the matter, Neil? Who is Docker?”
Neil Fargo tapped lightly on the edge of her desk with his knuckles. He smiled. The smile made the hard, bony face less stark even though he did not have the sort of features that a smile particularly enhanced.
“If Docker calls back, try to get a number.”
“Neil...” She paused, troubled, then said in a rush, “This doesn’t have anything to do with Walter Hariss, does it?”
“Why?”
She made a small, meaningless gesture. “I’ve heard he... People say he imports more than cheap pottery and tourist curios. And that Docker mentioned his name. Something about getting to you before Hariss did.”
“Docker and Hariss?” Neil Fargo was not totally successful in making the idea sound new to him. He said, “You’ll be a detective yet, doll.”
He went into his small private office set off from the main room by head-high partitions. The windows looked down on the intersection of Bush and Franklin Streets. Neil Fargo took off his topcoat. He was wearing a dark blue double-knit suit and a white shirt with a wide dark tie that gave him a substantial, conservative air. He set the dusty Venetian blinds so he could look out the windows.
By the time he had drunk a cup of black coffee and smoked one cigarette, Walter Hariss had arrived. Neil Fargo smiled without mirth, watching the importer get out of the rear seat of the black Fleetwood his nasty little chauffeur had maneuvered into a slot halfway up Bush Street.