“That’s the most ridiculous—”
“Because if I see him after tonight, Hariss, see him on the street, see him in your office, see him anywhere, just lay eyes on him, ever, I’m going to kill him. You got that?”
“If you think—”
“I mean dead, Hariss.” The very flatness of his voice lent absolute conviction to the words. “He put his slimy fucking hands on my secretary. Not busted ribs, not a broken arm, not a ruptured kidney. Dead. Dead and buried. I’ll be in touch.”
He slammed the receiver down on the hooks. He was breathing deeply and harshly. His hands were shaking. Almost immediately the phone began ringing. He stood, pulled back on his topcoat, walked out of the office and away from the ringing phone without even looking at it. He locked the office, went back across Franklin Street to the Seventy-Six station where he parked his Fairlane.
He maneuvered the metallic blue car out of the slot in which it had been buried, just as Emil slapped a calloused, grease-rimed hand against the fender. Neil Fargo stuck his head out of the open window.
“I’m in a hurry, Emil.”
“Fargo, what you do now?” He waved an arm at his precious parking slots as if Neil Fargo had not spoken. “What I do the man who rents the stall shows up, huh?”
Neil Fargo made a suggestion concerning Emil and the car which belonged to Doctor Follmer, the stallholder, that was quite impossible even though the doctor’s car was a compact. Emil was still cursing the detective in his broken English when the blue Fairlane drove off. The garageman stared after him with bushy eyebrows drawn down angrily. Then he gave a sudden laugh, and shook his head fondly.
“One crazy bastard,” he said in admiration.
Fifteen
San Francisco’s Tenderloin has changed for the worse over the years. For several decades it was merely tough and a little raunchy: now it is nasty as well, like perfume behind the ears of a corpse. Seedy hotels with Rates for Senior Citizens still cater to the aged, but now the old folks living on inflation-ruined pensions must rub shoulders and mingle life-styles with whores, topless dancers, pushers and users, cool black cats, teenage male prostitutes, transvestites looking for sailors.
Coffee shops feature Breakfast All Day; bars turn on their garish neons at six A.M. Violence is endemic: drifting hard-eyed men roll drunks and gays and the fragile aged and cripples, both emotional and physical, as a way of life. Hustlers and grifters con social workers getting their jollies from seeing Life in the Raw, and one day at a time is how people live. Because in the Tenderloin anything can happen and sooner or later everything does.
Certainly the girl who panhandled Neil Fargo as he got out of his Fairlane was just hanging on by the hour. She would have been attractive if she hadn’t had lice and smelled bad. She was under twenty, wearing blue wash pants and a blue sweater and a crust of dried vomit around her mouth.
She asked for spare change as if for salvation. He gave her a dollar bill. She smiled shyly at him.
“You want a nooner, mister...”
He shook his head, watched her shamble up Jones Street. He shook his head again, finished locking the Fairlane, fed the meter, and started across the street to the FarJon Hotel.
In mid-stride he swerved downhill. A black-and-white was parked in the bus zone with one door hanging open and the radio crackling. He went into the liquor store on the corner, stood with his back to the door in deep contemplation of a quart of Early Times. A paddy wagon with mesh over the rear windows pulled up in the yellow zone on O’Farrell with a squeal of worn brake linings.
In a little more than two minutes, a pair of uniformed patrolmen went by the open door of the liquor store. Between them, wearing handcuffs and a dazed expression, was Alex Kolinski. He was having a little trouble with his feet. There was a trickle of blood down his chin and above the right eye a hard red knob which looked shiny. The cops looked tough, competent, and untouched.
Neil Fargo laughed aloud, catching the attention of the liquor store clerk. Men with stimulant-blown minds who chuckled and whistled and smirked to themselves before going berserk would be no rarity to him. The cool competence in Neil Fargo’s face seemed to reassure him.
The wagon had pulled out with its prisoner. Neil Fargo walked uphill on Jones with quick strides. The narrow door of 517 Jones was standing open under its faded FarJon Hotel, Weekly Rates sign. He went in.
The stairs were very narrow, the handrail slick from a million sliding hands. Insulation-wrapped steampipes ran up the corner of the stairwell. There were rat droppings on one of the wedge-shaped corner steps which made the ninety-degree left turn under the tilted mirror Kolinski had used that morning to watch Daphne go down these same stairs.
At the head of the stairs was another uniformed prowlie. Behind him Neil Fargo could see the office door with a hand-lettered sign over it:
The cop was holding one of the extra-long riot-control billies, the sort Tac Squads have made so popular, at present-arms across his chest. His face was too young, too unformed for his hard, competent body or for the cop’s eyes experience had already given him.
“Sorry, sir, residents only.” Neil Fargo moved a hand, and the face was suddenly as tough as the rest of him. His voice barked. “Hold it!”
“Just ID.” Neil Fargo got it out gingerly. “I had a tip that a skip I’m looking for is holed up in this dump.”
The cop returned the ID. “Sorry, sir, but we’ve had a homicide here.”
“Homicide?” His voice was unsurprised, as if Kolinski being led away had partially prepared him for it. “Wouldn’t be a woman, would it?”
The cop’s eyes sharpened. “Think she’s the one you’re looking for?”
“Could be. First name Roberta — although she probably wouldn’t be using her real name here.”
“Our DOA is called Robin by the manager. The Lieutenant’ll want to see you.” He turned to yell down the hall, “Lieutenant Tekawa, sir.”
“Tekawa? What’s a narc doing in charge of a homicide?”
The cop spun back to him. “Lieutenant Tekawa to you, Jack. And narc isn’t a word we—”
“Is that Neil Fargo you got?” Tekawa had appeared in the far end of the corridor. “Come on up, Neil.”
Neil Fargo went by the prowlie without saying anything; the cop’s face had closed up at being bypassed. The private detective paused in the doorway of Robin’s room, his eyes taking it in: the body on the bed, now with a sheet drawn over the face; the candle stub; the junkie’s paraphernalia; the chair turned toward the airshaft. The sunlight had now entirely departed from the red bricks opposite.
“Seeing how the other half lives, Hank?”
“Sometimes I think I ought to transfer to Bunco.” Tekawa’s gesture encompassed it all, from the dirty handprints around the light switch to the overflow stain in the corner of the ceiling above the sink. “Little old ladies conned out of their life savings might be a pleasure instead of junkie ODs. I don’t think you know my partner, Jerry Maley.”
Neil Fargo and the red-headed cop shook hands. The redhead looked like a cop; Tekawa, slim and elegant and bland-faced behind studious glasses, looked like an assistant professor at Cal.
“You’d get bored with the pigeon drop, Hank,” said Neil Fargo. “That how you read this? Simple overdose?”
“Take a look,” invited Tekawa. “But no touchie: Homicide and the interns haven’t seen her yet.”