Spearfield's Daughter (73 page)

“I'm tired, too, sweetheart. But I haven't talked to you, really talked, in ages. We've let so many chances go—”

She was suddenly drawn to him. She put her arm in his and they went up to his room, scrutinized by the elevator operator out of the corner of his eye. He wondered how some of these old bastards managed to get some of these younger chicks up to their rooms. She certainly didn't look like a hooker.

As they got out of the elevator Cleo said, “I'm his daughter. I'm not a hooker.”

“Don't let her fool you,” said Sylvester. “She is a hooker.”

They both let out the Spearfield belly-laugh as the elevator doors closed and they went down the corridor arm in arm, enjoying their silly joke. It was the sort of joke they had enjoyed together twenty years ago.

Sylvester mixed them a night-cap, then said, “Did you hear Mrs. Roux asking me about whether I was coming back to New York? I didn't want to tell you in front of her, but Mal Fraser
has
offered me the
post
of Consul-General here.”

“Dad! Why didn't you tell me and Tom earlier?”

He swirled his drink in its glass. “I don't know. I guess I'm a bit ashamed. It hasn't been announced back home yet, but I'm going to get hell when it is.”

“Meaning the Party will accuse you of selling out?”

“What else? They'll be right. I still can't believe I've accepted the job—it's as if it's someone else, a distant relation. It just sort of happened. I was at a reception and I found myself in a corner with Mal Fraser. I've always got on okay with him, as well as one can with such a shy, stuffy bastard. He asked me about you and I said you were doing fine, but I never saw enough of you. Then he said he was appointing a new Consul-General here and jokingly I asked him, What about me? He laughed and we both thought it was a good joke. Two days later he rang me and asked was I serious. It was one of those days when you'd just phoned me. I was sentimental, I suppose—” He looked at her. “I get like that, occasionally.”

“Me, too.”

“I added it all up and I decided I wanted to spend my declining years, as they call them, with you. I'd have had only one more term in the Senate and that would have been it. I've given damned near fifty years to the Party and it wouldn't comfort me in my old age. I've seen it happen to other blokes who've retired. I've been a success, a moderate one anyway, and I decided I wanted to come here and bask in your success.”

She put a hand on his. “I want you here, Dad. But my success has nothing to do with it.”

“Righto, have it your way. But you are successful and I'm proud of you. It wasn't easy, was it?” He smiled at the frown of puzzlement on her brow. “Sweetheart, I'm not blind, never was. You ran away from home to get away from me. There's a quotation from Milton that begins,
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
. . . I've forgotten the rest of it. There's something else about fame. It throws a shadow. You wanted to get out of that shadow, right?”

She stood up, wanting to go home to Tom before she broke down and wept like the small child that she felt. “Come to New York, Dad, and we'll start all over again. You and me and Tom, and no shadow.”

He stood up, kissed her. “It's not too late. I hope your mother is watching.”

Then
she did break down. She leant her face against his chest and wept for all the chances that had been lost.

V

Rosa Fuchs got out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and walked down 89th Street. She was wearing a light tan raincoat; in its pocket was the fully loaded Luger. She had brought no gun to the United States, not wanting to set off any alarm if she were searched; her new American friends, who had not been told why she needed a gun and had not asked, had had no trouble in finding the Luger she had insisted upon. Assassination has become a trade and tradesmen prefer to use tools they have become accustomed to.

She was wearing nothing to disguise herself except the black wig; no dark glasses, since it was eleven o'clock at night, no broad-brimmed hat pulled low down over her face. It was her own wry joke, and she was not much given to humour, that she had chosen to wear a wig that duplicated the hair style of the woman she had chosen to kill.

She had spent the past three days studying Cleo Spearfield's daily routine. She knew now that the Australian bitch came home around this time every night, often with the American Tom Border, with whom she was apparently living. She hoped to find the two of them arriving home together, but if they didn't it wouldn't matter. She would kill whichever one arrived first. Her preference would be the Spearfield woman, since it was she who wielded the power.

On the opposite side of the street Tony Rossano's hit man got out of the black Buick; his companion behind the wheel started up the engine. The hit man crossed the street, walking unhurriedly, the sawn-off shotgun held against his side under his black raincoat. He was from Cleveland and he did not know New York well; he did not like the narrow cross-streets, busy with traffic even at this hour, and he would have preferred to have made the hit somewhere else. He had come into New York two days ago, had studied several photos of the woman he had to kill; last night he had waited across the street to catch a sight of her in the flesh and seen her come home in a limousine. He wondered why, tonight, she should be coming home on foot; he had heard that women walked nowhere in New York at night for fear of muggers and rapists. Well, he was neither of those, thank Christ.

He stopped in front of the woman and, because he always made sure he was killing the right
person,
he said, “Miss Spearfield?”

Jack Cruze got out of the limousine where he had been sitting for the past half-hour. He had cancelled his connecting flight to Charleston; the sight of Cleo this afternoon had upset him too much. He had to see her again, make one last attempt to have her come back to him. He had felt ridiculous and juvenile sitting in the limousine and he knew the chauffeur must have been wondering what sort of English fool had hired him and the car. He had no real hope that Cleo would listen to his plea, but he had to make the attempt. If she turned him away, no matter how gently, that would be the end of it. He would sell the
Courier
stock, cut her out of his will and go back and try for a reconciliation with Emma. He did not want to end his days alone and he knew he could never fall in love again.

At first he did not see the man in the black raincoat crossing the street. He was ten yards from Cleo before he saw that it was not her at all, just someone with the same hair style. Then the man in the raincoat stepped in front of the girl, said “Miss Spearfield?” and took the gun from under his coat and shot her. Jack wasn't sure whether the girl had answered the question the man had put to her; he was already running forward when he saw the gun exposed. He would never know if he was being heroic; perhaps, because the girl did resemble Cleo, he acted on instinct. He ran at the man, shouting a protest that died in his mouth as the killer turned and put two bullets into his chest. He stumbled sideways, hit a parked car and fell to the sidewalk only feet from the dead Rosa Fuchs. In the moment before he died he wondered why he had been rushing to save a stranger, something he had never done in his life before.

20

I

CLEO AND
Tom postponed their wedding; there was no disagreement between them about it. Sylvester could not delay his return to Australia and went home shocked and disappointed, promising to be back as soon as his appointment as Consul-General was ratified. A phone call to Tom's parents told them of the tragedy in the street outside Cleo's apartment and they were shocked that their future daughter-in-law should have been the intended target of such a killer. They said they would come to New York as soon as a new date was set for the wedding. In the meantime if Tom wanted to bring himself and Cleo home to Friendship, a safe town, they would love to have them both.

“You could be married here,” Olive Border said.

“Thanks, Mom. But we both have to stay here in New York. We still have our jobs to do.”

Tom wanted to write the story on the double killing, but the night of the murder had been his last at the
Courier
and he had left the office, was already in Cleo's apartment, when the shooting took place. He was on hand to get the facts but Cleo, coming home five minutes later, insisted that his name could not be on the story. The
Courier's
chief crime reporter, Bob Wilkie, came to the scene, put together his story in Cleo's apartment and phoned it in from there. Cleo had rung the production manager and told him to hold the presses; she was then switched through to the newsroom and caught Carl Fishburg just as he was leaving for home. Page One was ripped apart and remade. Carl, an old-fashioned newspaperman, had always been less than enthusiastic about video display terminals, but that night he appreciated the time saved by the VDTs. The last edition of the
Courier
went on the street only forty minutes later, running a bigger spread with its story and pictures than either the
Times
or the
News.

At one o'clock in the morning Cleo rang Carl, still in the office, to congratulate him. “I couldn't have held my head up if we'd missed getting out the story. The
Post
would have run it over two or three
pages
this afternoon and beaten us on our own story.”

“There was no time to remake the editorial page, Cleo. Are you going to run an editorial?”

“We'll have to. And an obit on Lord Cruze. I'll write that. I'll do the editorial too.”

“Cleo—” Carl sounded concerned. “Why don't you take it easy? You know as well as I do that the Fuchs dame and the hit man, whoever he was, were gunning for you. Something went wrong and it was screwed up. But it doesn't alter the fact you were the target.”

“I'll be all right, Carl. Tom is here with me and so is my father. I'll be in tomorrow at the usual time.”

But she was not as calm as she tried to sound. She had busied herself as a newspaperwoman to keep her mind from blacking out under shock. When she had reached home, the bodies in the street were already covered with sheets and waiting for the ambulances; Tom had been down on the sidewalk and he had told her what had happened. She had not had to look at Jack's body; Tom would go down tomorrow to the morgue to identify it officially. She felt nothing about Rosa Fuchs, not even pity for the girl's death; Tom had told her the police had found the Luger in the German girl's raincoat and it had not been difficult to guess on whom she had intended to use it. But she felt for Jack: pity, love, a sense of loss. He had died for some reason connected with her and he did not deserve to have gone in such a way.

Tom insisted she take a sleeping tablet, something she had always prided herself on not needing; she finally dropped off, but devils walked in the darkness of her mind and Tom came into the bedroom once when she cried out. He and Sylvester kept vigil in the living-room and between long silences came to know each other well enough for respect to be firmly and permanently established. At nine in the morning the phone rang and Tom grabbed it lest it wake Cleo.

“It's me, Mrs. Roux. Tom Border. Cleo is still asleep. She was pretty shaken up by what happened last night. Do you want to speak to her father?”

But Sylvester shook his head. He was suffering from his own shock. It had come to him during the night that, if he had not delayed Cleo at his hotel, trying to catch up on all the chances they had let go, she might now be dead.

“No,” said Claudine. “Tell Miss Spearfield I'm relieved and pleased she is safe. Who is looking after Lord Cruze's remains?”

Remains.
Jesus, Tom thought, ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . More than that remained of a man. “I don't know. I guess I'll do it. I'll call the
Examiner
in London. Or maybe Mr. Kibler will do it.”

“Leave it to me. I'll have Mr. Kibler do it. Just see that Miss Spearfield doesn't worry about it. She's been through enough.”

Tom hung up, wondering at the sympathy and understanding one found in the most unlikely places. Claudine hung up her end of the line, thinking of Jack, his life finished, his power gone. Up till not so long ago she had never thought about her own death, but now the thought hovered in her mind, a shadow that had darkened when she had been told of Jack Cruze's death. She would go to Mass this evening, pray for Jack and herself.

“Don't be so surprised,” Sylvester told Tom. “Women are always better at that than us men. I think they mean it, too. They like to share suffering.”

Tom didn't know whether Sylvester was being cynical or sincere. He was saved from asking by Cleo's appearing from the bedroom.

“Who was that?” She had been sleeping with one ear awake, for gunshots, screams for help.

Tom told her, then said, “There are guys from the other papers and the wire services camped downstairs and enough TV cameramen to shoot
Gone With The Wind.
I really hate those guys, they think they own the world.”

“Go down and tell them I'll see no one till tomorrow.”

“By tomorrow you won't be news.”

“That's what I'm hoping.”

But she was still news even when Sylvester left on the Sunday and she had had to grant interviews. She could have refused, but she knew how she herself would have felt if the editor of some other paper, in similar circumstances, had tried to keep his story exclusively for his own paper. Everyone tried to beat everyone else to a story skulduggery; was part of the game, but there were certain rules that had to be honoured. Two outsiders, working independently, had tried to murder an honest editor and that was everyone's story. The freedom of the press occasionally applied amongst itself.