Free Interface (Crime Masterworks) by Joe Gores Page B

said.
    Browne’s mumbled, incoherent pleadings rose to a sharp scream of pain as the strongarm’s feet and hands got busy before Daggert even had time to let Kolinski out through the guarded door.

9
    ‘Y our cigarettes,’ the jump-suited guard explained to the woman in the red coat.
    ‘But I—’
    ‘The foil on the pack.’
    Neil Fargo followed her across the very slightly raised wooden ramp as his left hand gave topcoat, car keys, cigarettes, and pocket knife to the other, older guard. The buzzer sounded.
    ‘What the hell, you packing your piece, man?’ demanded the young black guard who had been hassling with the red-coated woman about her cigarettes.
    Neil Fargo shook his head, stepped back, then through again. The machine buzzed again.
    ‘Better do it,’ said the black.
    Neil Fargo held his empty hands away from his sides, arms wide to facilitate the white guard’s body search. It was sufficiently professional to seem perfunctory. The guard straightened up. Bending had made him red in the face. Small strips of his light blue shirt showed through the gaps between the buttons of his tan uniform jacket.
    ‘My money clip,’ said Neil Fargo abruptly. ‘I always forget the damned thing.’
    The guard nodded and puffed out a breath laden with recent lunch. He slapped the heavy swell of gut under his jacket.
    ‘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