Fair Game

by Doreen Owens Malek

  “It was.”

  “Well, I’m very happy for you.”

  “You don’t look very happy for me.”

  “That’s because I just remembered that luncheon this afternoon. Could we say I came down with something rather suddenly? Something serious.”

  “Whooping cough?”

  “Only kids get that.”

  “Oh. Diphtheria?”

  “There’s a vaccine for that now.”

  ‘Then I guess you’ll have to go.”

  Ashley nodded glumly and stood, stretching.

  “What should I say to Tim on my way out?” Meg asked.

  ‘“Bye, Tim.’”

  “Okay,” Meg agreed, smiling. “It’s all up to you.” She left the bedroom and pulled the door closed behind her.

  * * * *

  Ransom studied the diagrams on the computer screen before him and took a final drag on his cigarette. Then he shut off the machine and stubbed out the smoke in the same motion, relaxing back into the cushions of the sofa in his apartment.

  It had to be Millvale, which was only a few days away. He had examined and discarded the other possibilities for various reasons. Fair’s murder would take place in the Millvale Hotel ballroom.

  Ransom was satisfied; it was the best choice. He’d analyzed the detailed architectural plans of the hotel and the structures on either side of it, which included all passageways, fire exits, and utility doors. There was an apartment building next to the hotel, which made access easy. He was an expert at slipping past doormen. Once inside, he could take the staircase to the roof, cross onto the hotel’s fire escape, and break in through a window leading to a service hallway on the second floor.

  It was all there in the information he’d pirated from Meg’s computer. Lucky for him she was so thorough.

  It should be a snap, he thought; he’d gone through similar scenarios dozens of times, with less preparation. Meg was making it very easy for him.

  Meg. He didn’t want to think about her, but she kept creeping into his consciousness, disturbing his concentration. He’d told her he was going away on a business trip to leave himself open for the hit, but she didn’t think he was departing until the next morning.

  He sat up suddenly and sneezed loudly, his eyes watering. He went into the kitchen and swallowed a handful of tablets with a glass of water. Goddamn cold. He had no tolerance for illness, especially his own. He was accustomed to his body’s perfect obedience, and when it revolted he felt like killing it. He would have done so if it hadn’t meant killing himself in the process.

  * * * *

  The doorbell rang, and he glanced toward the computer immediately. There was only one person it could be. With the hit so close, he couldn’t afford another visit to Meg’s room, so he had brought her to the apartment a couple of times. Now she knew where he lived.

  Better that it was ending soon. This was getting out of hand.

  “Just a minute,” he called as he unplugged the computer and lugged it to his bedroom closet, where he dropped it into its original packing box and closed the lid. He returned to the living room and grabbed the software, tossing it all on the closet floor and kicking it behind his row of shoes, under a folded blanket. He slammed the door closed and parked a straight chair directly in front of it, on which he piled his briefcase and coat.

  If she tried to get into the closet, he would have enough warning to intervene and stop her.

  He ran to the door and opened it to find Meg standing on the threshold, holding a covered cardboard container.

  “Surprise,” she said. “What took you so long?”

  “I was in the bathroom.”

  She brushed past him into the living room. “I knew you weren’t feeling well, so I thought you might like this for lunch.”

  “What is it?” he asked, viewing her present suspiciously.

  “Chicken soup.” She took off the cover, and the pungent aroma escaped into the room.

  “Why?”

  She turned to stare at him. “Hasn’t anyone ever brought you chicken soup when you were sick?”

  “No,” he replied honestly.

  Her brows knit as she went into the kitchen and dished up the steaming soup. “What about your mother when you were a little kid?” she asked.

  He sighed. “There was no mother when I was a little kid.”

  “What do you mean? You told me your parents were dead, but they must have been alive once. Did your mother die when you were born, or very young?”

  He shook his head.

  “How come you have no pictures of them around here, mementos or snapshots, things like that?” she asked.

  “I told you my parents were dead to forestall your questions in the beginning. It’s not the sort of thing you want to get into right away; it creates the wrong impression.”

  She turned and faced him. “Well?”

  “I have no family, and never did.” Surely it couldn’t hurt to give her just this little part of himself, let her know something that was actually true, and that explained so much.

  “None at all? You’ve never been married, no kids? You never talk about yourself.”

  “I’m alone. I was abandoned as an infant, raised in orphanages.”

  “Really?”

  Ransom shrugged. “Why is that so surprising? It happens.”

  “I’m surprised because it happened to me, too,” Meg said, rattling spoons.

  Now she had his full attention. “What do you mean? You’ve told me about your relatives.”

  “My parents adopted me when I was a baby. In the biological sense, I have no family either.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Two lost souls, eh?” she said lightly, handing him a full bowl of the soup.

  Ransom watched her eat, ignoring his portion. She must have shared his own fundamental sense of rootlessness and rejection, but unlike him she had made something of herself, something good that people respected.

  He had lost his appetite.

  “Aren’t you going to have any of that?” she asked him. “I made it myself, specially.”

  “Maybe later,” he said, putting down the bowl. “Right now I’d rather have you.”

  She smiled and came to him willingly, as she always did.

  She didn’t know it, but he had told her a basic truth. He would rather have her, permanently, than do anything else.

  Chapter 7

  IT WAS raining lightly when Fair’s group hit Millvale, Pennsylvania, on the last leg of the Senator’s junket.

  Martin was nervous about the tour’s final fundraiser. He and Capo had visited the sites of major events beforehand, and they saw immediately that the Hotel Millvale’s ballroom was too vast to supervise adequately, with a great many narrow, interlocking hallways leading up to it.

  Peter Ransom had come to the same conclusion. He’d checked out the ballroom and the adjacent apartment building and was convinced he had made the right choice.

  On the afternoon of the dinner, Ransom packed an overnight case in his apartment and put his passport and other necessary papers in the zipper portion of the bag. He removed all traces of personal occupancy from the rooms, shipping the clothes and dishes, even the computer, to Goodwill with no sender’s address. He dumped the leftover toiletries into plastic bags and put them into the car, then wiped the place clean of prints, doing a final check to make sure that everything that might be traced to him was gone.

  As he left and locked the door, he didn’t look behind him. The place where he had lived for almost two months was no longer functional and therefore of no further interest to him.

  The gun he would use that evening was concealed inside his jacket. It was a lightweight Luger equipped with telescopic sights and silencer. He had bought it from his usual source, a dealer in illegal weapons, for about three times what he normally paid, but it was perfect for the job. The serial number was filed off and its foreign manufacture made it ideal, difficult to trace. Even better than that, it
was impeccably accurate. He had practiced with it at a local target range until he could use it in the dark.

  When he left the apartment, he drove the gray Mercedes to a suburban Philadelphia shopping mall he had selected for its wealthy ambience and parked the car near a dumpster. He left the sedan there, wedged between the Jaguars and Volvos and Audis, where it probably would not be noticed for days, possibly weeks. He threw the plastic bags into the vast metal rubbish container, mixing them with the mall refuse that he knew would be picked up later that day, and dropped the apartment and car keys through a sewer grating on his way out to the street.

  Then, wearing dark glasses and nondescript work clothes, he took a Greyhound bus to Millvale.

  * * * *

  Meg had reserved the bridal suite in the Millvale Hotel for the Senator, and at seven o’clock his party assembled there, outfitted for the occasion. The women wore cocktail dresses, and the men, including the two cops, wore three-piece suits.

  Ashley, in a pearl-gray sheath that matched her eyes, was noticeably fidgety. She kept glancing in the mirror and adjusting the sequined shoulders of her dress. Meg, in deep rose-pink, came up behind her and said, “If you tug at those pads any more, you’re going to look like Joan Crawford.”

  “I feel like Joan Crawford. What’s that movie where she’s going to a party full of Nazis?”

  “She’s doing that in about ten movies. These people are not Nazis, Ash. They all like your father a lot and they all want to give him tons of money.”

  “I guess I’m just running out of gas.” Ashley sighed. “I’m glad this is the last major event.” She glanced in the mirror and met Martin’s gaze. She looked away.

  “He never takes his eyes off you,” Meg said to her in a low tone. “Has he said anything else about the two of you?”

  Ashley shook her head. “And he won’t. He tried once, and that’s enough.” She knew instinctively that his pride would prevent him from trying again.

  The situation was in her hands.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get through tonight first,” Ashley replied. “You know, it’s a big hurdle for us. Lots of press coverage, the grand finale. One thing at a time.”

  Meg didn’t push her. Instead she sniffed the air and said, “That’s your usual scent, isn’t it? What happened to Carlo’s?”

  “I sent it back to him, told him I was allergic to it.”

  “You liar!” Meg said, laughing.

  “I was not lying. Every time I smelled it, I remembered Tim’s meeting with Carlo on the yacht and broke out in hives.”

  “Speaking of breaking out, have you heard from Jim?”

  “He called this morning and offered to escort me tonight if I promised never to see Tim again after his assignment ended.”

  “I can imagine what you replied to that.”

  Ashley smiled thinly. “You don’t see Jim here, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, Ash.”

  “Don’t be. It had to happen. You were right. It wasn’t fair of me to string him along just because I wanted an acceptable escort. And I’m not about to call anyone else, either. I’m a big girl, and I can do this alone. You’re going stag too, right?”

  Meg nodded. “Peter won’t be back until tomorrow or Saturday at the earliest.”

  There was a burst of laughter from the Senator’s corner. Ashley and Meg exchanged glances. Fair was sporting a red plaid vest, and his mood was jaunty. Too jaunty. He tended to get very up for events like the one they were about to attend, and the more up he was, the less he worried about security.

  Martin stepped forward abruptly and broke through Fair’s circle of advisers.

  “Senator,” he said, “stay inside the ballroom. Don’t go into any of the hallways; they’re too enclosed. And if you go to the bathroom, take me or Sergeant Capo with you.”

  Joseph Fair nodded indulgently, undaunted, and returned to his conversation.

  Capo looked at Martin and shrugged slightly. Martin stared back at him expressionlessly.

  Tim’s worried, Ashley thought. She knew that blank blue stare, and how furiously his mind was working behind it. She moved to her father’s side and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Dad?”

  He turned and looked down at her.

  “Please listen to Lieutenant Martin. He really has your best interest at heart.”

  Fair smiled and bent to kiss her cheek. “Don’t you worry, honey, I’ll be fine.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Ashley wanted to hear, but it would have to do.

  “Well, folks, I think it’s about that time,” announced Roger Damico.

  “I agree,” said Joe Fair.

  They all filed out toward the elevators.

  * * * *

  Ransom loitered behind the cab stand in the thin rain, watching the apartment building next door to the Millvale Hotel. The doorman lounged inside the glass-fronted lobby, looking bored. People went in and out occasionally, exchanging pleasantries with the man but never providing enough of a distraction to allow Ransom to slip past.

  Ransom shifted his feet. He was getting wet waiting for the right opportunity, and time was passing quickly. Too quickly. It was already seven-fifteen, and the Senator would be entering the ballroom any minute now.

  Finally, at seven-twenty, an old lady tottered to the front entrance and required the doorman’s assistance to inflate her umbrella and negotiate the stairs to the street. As soon as the doorman’s back was turned, Ransom sprinted for the steps and shot through the double doors like a gazelle. He crossed the main lobby and headed for the back stairway, which, according to the plans he had memorized, led directly to the roof.

  It all worked like an incantation until he got to the roof door, which was locked. He whipped off his jacket and wrapped it around his gun, to cushion the sound even more than the silencer would, and shot off the bolt. It hit the floor with a clatter and he kicked it aside, pushing the door open and emerging onto the roof.

  It was raining even harder now, but he no longer felt the discomfort; his whole being was concentrated on accomplishing his goal. The two buildings abutted with an alley between them, in the manner of structures in cities; Millvale was an old town and predated modern fire codes. There was an opening to cross of about four feet, and he glanced down at the ground once before backing up to take a running leap and hurdle the gap like a long jumper.

  He hit the roof of the hotel on a roll and then sprang up, catlike, glancing around immediately. The landscape was deserted, as he’d expected, but he still shook his head wonderingly. Why didn’t these people protect themselves better? Was it so difficult to station a guard on the roof? Men like Fair made themselves sitting prey for somebody like him, because they believed themselves invulnerable and resisted security measures. Ransom had seen it so many times, and he hoped they never changed.

  They made his job so easy.

  He paused for a breather, wiping the rain from his eyes. The fire escape was hooked over the edge of the roof like a swimming-pool ladder. He walked over to it and took the first step, looking down the side of the building to count the windows and locate the second floor. The service hallway should be just inside the window on the east side of the building, where he was.

  He climbed down the ladder, listening to the street noise get louder as he descended. Car doors were slamming as people arrived for the dinner, and snatches of conversation drifted up to him from the walkway. He was far enough back not to be seen, and he concentrated on getting into the building.

  He knelt in front of the selected window and took out the fiber tape he’d brought with him, taping the glass with long strips that converged in the center like the spokes of a wheel. When the job was done, he traced the diagram with a diamond-tipped knife, then aimed a precise kick at the middle of the pane. The glass cracked inward but did not shatter, the pieces held together by the tape. The technique avoided the mess and noise of a broken window.

  It was a tri
ck he’d learned in Vietnam, and it had never failed him yet.

  He picked apart the pie-shaped pieces, wrapping them in his jacket, and squeezed through the opening he’d created, dropping onto the wooden floor of a hallway that smelled of age and disinfectant. Once inside the building, he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, clearing his mind for the task ahead.

  The hard part was over; all he had to do now was find the right opportunity, aim, and fire.

  Downstairs they were checking invitations, the security people flanking the great man, fanning through the crowd, believing they could protect Fair.

  And here he was, with murder on his mind, and a gun.

  Ransom wondered briefly where Meg was, how close to Fair, and then forced himself to think about his next steps. He looked for the closet door he knew should be there, and found it. He removed the black knit hat he wore to extinguish his blond hair and keep it dry, and pushed aside cans of floor wax and semigloss paint to bury the hat with his jacket at the back of a shelf.

  By the time they found the clothes—if they ever did —he’d be sunning himself on a Caribbean beach.

  At the end of the hall was a larger door that opened into the second-floor corridor, which was flanked by guest rooms. He took out his pocket comb and mirror, combed his hair, and straightened the pullover sweater he was wearing over his shirt. The sweater was not wet, and his pants were thin enough to have dried very quickly.

  He could pass for a hotel guest who’d been inside all night. He opened the door a crack and then emerged into an empty hallway.

  All was silence.

  He passed the elevator bank and walked to the stairwell, listening to the sounds of the preparations taking place below him, and settled in to wait.

  * * * *

  The crush in the ballroom was indescribable. Martin knew that Fair thrived on such mass adulation and tried to keep him in hand, but the Senator was soon roaming indiscriminately, the two cops trailing him feverishly. Martin felt relieved when Fair finally sat down to dinner, and he and Capo stood on the sidelines, flanking the dais, as the guests ate the chicken and then applauded the Senator’s speech.

  Ashley looked pale and small beside her father. Her stepmother, on Fair’s other side, seemed almost florid by comparison.