Rizzato measured him icily, on the edge of violence, though he was at least a foot shorter than the detective. Hariss said sharply, “Gus.”
Rizzato’s fighting-dog stance relaxed. He straightened his jacket with a pompous shrug, strutted out of the office like a jockey who can no longer make the weight. Hariss followed.
When the street door closed behind them, the girl, who had been sitting very straight in her chair, put her hands up to her cheeks. Crimson suddenly flushed across her features.
“He said to me... He told me he wanted to...”
“Sorry I let him in here, doll.”
She started to say something more, stopped, then took down her hands from her face. The flush was receding. She said, “Why did you call him Peeler?”
“The story goes that he was once assigned to shut up somebody who was talking to an assistant DA back East...” He broke off. He said tonelessly, “You don’t really want to know.”
“I do.” Her eyes were bright again.
“The story goes he took this guy down into a basement in Brooklyn and skinned him alive.”
The girl made a choked sound in her throat and her flush receded further, so her face was almost pale.
“You asked,” said Neil Fargo. He was bent over the desk writing rapidly on her scratch pad. As he wrote, he talked. “Docker. Here’s everything I have on him, which isn’t a hell of a lot. I want the full drill, doll. DMV check for license and possible auto registration, credit check, phone company, our contacts at the gas company and scavengers. I want to know if he’s bottled up here in town, or if he made it out. Airlines, train, buses. If he doesn’t have a car, start a run on the car-rental places. Private charter plane services — you know the routine. If the police call, I went out, you don’t know where.”
“Police?”
“That’s the way it is. Friend Docker put me in the middle.”
“Between Walt Hariss and who?” she said bitterly. “Nobody ate any doughnuts and your car didn’t need any gas.”
Neil Fargo laid a hand on her cheek, knuckles to the flesh, ran it back toward her ear like someone playing with a cat. Her eyes went very slightly unfocused. He went back into his own office, shut the door, sat at the desk, dialled a number he didn’t have to look up. Through the closed door he could hear Pamela dialling also on the other line, starting the skiptracing routine on Docker.
The phone was picked up, but whoever had picked it up did nothing except breathe into it. Neil Fargo said, “Your money’s been hijacked.”
The breathing arrested. “Hijacked?”
“This morning.”
“I thought you told me that money would buy me—”
“Forget what I told you.”
“I see.” There was a pause. “Would it be asking too much to know how that amount of cash money was placed in a position where it could be hijacked?”
“I trusted somebody I shouldn’t have. A man named Docker. He saved my life in Vietnam, but now...”
“I wonder why I should trust you, Fargo.”
The detective ignored the remark. “There’s another complication. At the same time your money got lifted, a man got killed.”
“Who? Where? Did this man Docker—”
“I’ll know more when the police catch up with me.”
“Police? How do they know you have anything?”
“I rented the place where it happened — in my own name. I didn’t expect anything like a killing there.”
After a longer pause, the voice said, “How vulnerable are you?”
“I’ll get by,” said Neil Fargo. “I’ll be in touch.”
He hung up. He sat with his hands still on the phone for a few seconds, frowning. There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead although it was not particularly hot in the office. He stood up, flipped his topcoat over his arm, picked up a briefcase from beside the desk. He stopped at Pamela Gardner’s desk. Her scratch pad was open to a new sheet, and scribbled notations already covered it.
“If Docker calls again, get a phone number out of him.”
“Neil,” she almost wailed. “Why? You promised you’d go down to the city assessor’s office today to get a lead on Maxwell Stayton’s daughter. That’s clean money. It isn’t dangerous. Why can’t you—”
“And so I shall, doll,” he said soothingly. “But meanwhile, if you get anything important on Docker, leave a message with Stayton’s secretary. I’ll be getting over there eventually to report. See, I am working on his case. I expect something to break on it today.”
She said bitterly, “While you’re off—”
He grinned and touched her under the chin. “You’re a lovely, romantic little nut. But if all I did was look for Roberta Stayton when she runs off threatening to marry some flake, neither of us would eat. Docker, doll. It is important.”
He went out.
Three
Age had shrunken the door from its frame, so it rattled discreetly under the timid knuckles. Alex Kolinski, fully clothed from the waist up, paid no attention. Instead, he spoke to the girl kneeling beside the ancient, broken-down double bed.
“Keep it up, bitch,” he said in a monotone, as if training a dog. The timid knuckles sounded against the door again.
“Mr Kolinski?” The voice from the hall was female, Negro south, frightened. “It’s the telephone, Mr Kolinski. It’s... Mr Hariss, Mr Kolinski.”
Kolinski looked up unwillingly, like a man disturbed in the midst of an absorbing book. He had a prognathous jaw and heavy ridges of bone around the eyes, making them deep-set. But it was not a stupid face, nor was there anything Neanderthal about his body. The neck which supported the hominid face was surprisingly unmassive.
“Mr Kolinski...”
“All right, goddammit!” he burst out. “Tell him...”
A sudden spasm of cruel ecstasy stilled his voice. He plunged his hands into the thick, lifeless hair of the girl on her knees beside the bed. Dandruff speckled the scalp around the center part.
“Oh, yeah! That’s it!” exploded Kolinski in a hoarse, thickened voice.
From the hall came the timid rapping again. “Mr Kolinski, he... he said it was important.”
But Kolinski was finished. He stood up to dry himself with a corner of the sheet. The girl stared up at him from eyes which looked huge in her famished countenance. She had a face that had once been astonishingly beautiful. Even now, haggard and drawn, it was patrician of nose and striking of facial bone. A thoroughbred face. The eyes were dark, very dark-circled also, wet with tears even though they met his gaze without shame.
“Alex, can I have it now?”
Kolinski standing above her like a sated storm trooper, jerked his belt tight. “I’ve got a phone call.”
“But afterwards, Alex.” An almost childish hope of reward curved her thin lips. “Afterwards you’ll let me have it.”
“We’ll see, bitch.”
The girl put her face down in her arms, like an exhausted distance runner. The arms were thin. She was dressed in a strapless flannel nightgown so only her long narrow well-shaped feet, bare against the cold linoleum floor, were visible.
“Alex, please, you promised...” When he stepped away without answering, she raised her head from her arms to cry after him, “Alex, please!”
He paused in the doorway to look back at her. He laughed.
“Sweat, bitch,” he said.
He went out.
The girl remained motionless after he had gone. Finally, she climbed wearily to her feet, like a housewife summoned by the phone in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen floor. She was tall and would once have been fashionably slender, now was angular and thin under the washed-out, faded nightdress. Despite her height, she could not have weighed as much as Pamela Gardner.