Spearfield's Daughter

by Jon Cleary

  “Get fucked,” said Rossano, no respecter of ladies, and he, too, was gone.

  Cleo stood for a moment, then she hurried after the thin young man, keeping him in sight but not catching up with him. She would never know what made her follow Rossano; perhaps it was the instinct of a reporter scenting a story. She had learned a lot in the company of Hal Rainer.

  Out in the square she saw Rossano get into a cab. She quickly looked around, saw another one cruising towards her and hailed it. As she got in she said, “Follow that cab,” and immediately felt like an amateur actor doing a bad audition.

  Even the cab driver wasn’t impressed. “You didn’t say that line very well, lady. You want more snap to it, y’know what I mean? Follow that cab!” His face was as battered-looking as his cab; his voice and its engine had the same grating quality. “You one of them undercover women cops or something?”

  “No, I’m a reporter.”

  “Hey, we’re on a story, are we? I’m your man, lady. I drove Walter Winchell a coupla times back in the old days. I once even picked up Damon Runyon, just the once, he was a guy didn’t talk much, y’know what I mean?”

  He talked all the way uptown; but he was a good driver and he never lost sight of the cab in front. At last he pulled up.

  “Well, there he goes, into Gracie Park. You want me to wait?”

  Cleo told him yes, gave him some money and jumped out of the cab and hurried into the park. She cast a quick glance at Gracie Mansion, the Mayor’s residence, but Rossano was not heading towards it. He sat down on a bench and gazed out at the East River and an empty garbage scow making its way up towards Hell’s Gate. He looked no different from the dozen or so other people in the park, the two or three tourists, the young mothers with their children, the old men soaking up what might be the last spring sun of their lives. Up by the Mayor’s mansion a young man was taking photographs.

  Cleo kept in the background, waiting and watching; she knew that Rossano had not come up here to look at the view or get over his aching jaw. The Italian had been sitting there about five minutes when two men, both dressed in dark suits and grey fedoras, came into the park. They passed close to Cleo and she saw that the shorter of the two fancied himself as a smart dresser; the bigger man was a bargain basement copy. They went down the path to the bench where Rossano sat. He stood up, the three of them shook hands formally, then they all sat down and looked out at the river; the newcomers might have been property developers and Rossano a real estate salesman who was going to sell them Long Island across the river. But after a minute or two Rossano took out his notebook and began to read from his shorthand notes.

  Cleo was too far away to hear anything. She debated whether she should stay here, whether to follow Rossano and the two strangers when they left; then decided she could spend the rest of the day running around for no result and very little information. Then she saw that the youth who had been taking pictures of Gracie Mansion had moved close to her.

  She walked along to him. “Do you have a telescopic lens?”

  “Sure.” He was about twenty, plain and thin as a blank signpost; acne had been at him like borers. He was festooned with cameras and lenses, he was ready to shoot the world. “What you want shot? Shoot!”

  Crumbs, thought Cleo: New York was full of characters today. “See those three men down there on the bench? Could you get me some shots of them?”

  “Hey, what are you with that accent you got? You from the United Nations or anything? Those guys Commie spies or something?”

  “No, I’m from the New York Courier. Get me those pix and I’ll take you downtown, develop everything else you’ve taken today and give you fifty bucks. Okay? Shoot!”

  She guessed he had never sold a photograph in his life; he seemed to think fifty dollars was more than enough. He took six photos, never once attracting the attention of Rossano and his companions on the bench. Going back downtown in the cab he introduced himself: “George Hurlstone, I come from upstate, near Rochester. I been crazy about photography ever since I was a kid. You got any vacancies on the Courier, eh?”

  “It’s a tough town, kid,” said the cab driver. “Let me tell you—”

  The two of them had a dialogue all the way down to the Courier’s office. Cleo hurried George Hurlstone up to the picture editor, Bill Puskas, argued fifty dollars out of petty cash, said goodbye to Hurlstone and waited for Bill Puskas to bring her the pictures.

  “Jesus, was that kid hard to get rid of! He’s gonna be a pain in the ass, you believe me . . . Well, there they are. They’re not great, but maybe they’re good enough.”

  Cleo had already talked to Carl Fishburg, who had shown neither much interest nor enthusiasm. “Look, Carl, I don’t think this guy Rossano is a reporter—I think he’s covering the inquiry for someone unconnected with newspapers. What if it’s some Syndicate boss who’s so far been unnamed? I want to show these pix around, maybe someone will recognize either or both of the two strangers—”

  It was Hal Rainer who recognized the smaller of the two men, the smart dresser. “It’s Frank Apollo—I’d know him anywhere. He comes from Kansas City—he went down there from Chicago, I dunno, ten or twelve years ago. I was out there on a story about the old-time bootleggers. He wasn’t big-time in those days, but what I hear, he’s got things going for him out there now.”

  Carl Fishburg now began to take an interest in the story. “Okay, a week, no more. Both of you work on it. No running all around the country. Whatever you dig up, you gotta dig up right here in New York. You want to go anywhere else, you go on your own time and your own expenses.”

  “They’d have loved you over at Life magazine,” said Cleo. “You’d have had them photographing the world with a Box Brownie.”

  “If the pix were in focus . . .” said Fishburg, unsmiling.

  “I’ll stick with Rossano,” Cleo told Hal. “You try and find out what connection Apollo has with any of the Mob.”

  “I’m still not sure what we’re after.”

  “It’s a hunch, Hal, nothing more. I think there’s a nigger in the woodpile—”

  “Hold it! Ain’t no niggers in this country no more, you Aussie white trash.”

  “A racist figure of speech.” She knew Hal was no racist, but like a lot of old-time newspapermen he had difficulty in not using phrases that had become clichés with him but were now taboo. He was the same with so-called sexist terms: he never used chairperson or spokesperson and the copy editors, acting under a recent reluctant order from Jake Lintas, another old-timer, were constantly correcting his copy.

  “Right,” said Hal. “Now what were you saying about the wop?”

  “I think there’s someone who’s hoping the Syndicate, or whatever it’s called these days, will collapse under the pressure of the hearings. It might be Frank Apollo or it might be someone bigger than him. We may get nothing, not even worth a line, but all we’ll have wasted will be some Courier time. The trouble with the Courier has been that it’s never wasted a day or a dollar, never gambled on a story. I’m gambling now.”

  Over the next two days Cleo tried to nail down Rossano. But he was too shifty and slick and disappeared every time she approached him. Hal Rainer, using the phone to Kansas City and contacts in New York, had more luck.

  “Our friend Mr. Apollo was one of Billie Locke’s boy friends when she first went up to Chicago from her hometown somewhere down in Oklahoma. He didn’t last long, but evidently he’s always had a yen for her. He’s running a fairly big operation out in K.C. and around there, but he’s out of favour with the Syndicate, they want nothing to do with him. Whether he wants to be in or out, I don’t know. But in K.C, so I’m told, he thinks he’s the Mid-West’s answer to Al Capone.”

  “That dates him a bit, doesn’t it?”

  “That may be the reason the Syndicate doesn’t want anything to do with him. Now they’re all trying so goddam hard to look respectable.”

  “I think we need to have an interview with Mr. Apollo.�
��

  “Sure. I’d like to do an exclusive with the Queen of England, too. Come to think of it, the Queen might be more agreeable.”

  “We’re going down to Foley Square and you and I are going to box in Rossano. I’ll take him from one side and you from the other. He’s not going to get away this time.”

  Tony Rossano did his best to get away, but didn’t succeed. Sour and dark-faced, he went out between Cleo and Hal Rainer into the grey drizzle of the Square. “I could call up the Guild. You’re harassing another reporter—”

  “I’ve checked, Mr. Rossano,” said Cleo. “You don’t belong to the Guild. You’re not even on the staff of Il Corriere, they’ve never heard of you. We’re not harassing you. All we want is an interview with Frank Apollo.”

  “Frank who? You’re fucking crazy. Look, I’m going back inside there—”

  “Frank Apollo, from Kansas City. We have a picture of you and him taken up in Gracie Park . . . Hold it. We’re not planning to run it. But we know Mr. Apollo is in town and we’d like a word with him. We’re not gunning for him—”

  Rossano smiled then: like a brat pulling wings off a butterfly. “That’s funny, that is—”

  “A figure of speech,” said Cleo and gave a side smile to Hal Rainer. “Tell Mr. Apollo that we’d like an interview. Just half an hour at any place he cares to name. We’re going to do a piece on him anyway, and he might prefer to see we get our facts right. You know how stories turn out when the writers never bother to check their facts. Call me at the Courier. No later than five today.”

  Going back to the Courier in a cab, Hal said, “What are we going to write if Apollo won’t see us?”

  “Nothing. What have we got that would make a story? But Apollo doesn’t know that.”

  “You’re a natural-born newspaperman, my girl. Conniving, nefarious, underhanded. You’re also a very tough lady. I’d give fifty bucks to see you in the same ring as Billie Locke.”

  “I wouldn’t last one round with her.” She didn’t think of herself as tough and didn’t want others to think so.

  Rossano’s call came at five o’clock, dead on, as if he had been deliberately waiting to pick up the phone wherever he was. “Mr. Apollo will see you on one condition. That you don’t mention he is here in New York. You’ll interview him as if you had gone out to Kansas City.”

  “Agreed,” said Cleo. “Where and when do we meet him?”

  “I’ll pick you up outside the Courier, front entrance, at nine o’clock.”

  When Hal heard the arrangements he said, “We’ll have a photographer follow us, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case we get bumped off. The Courier will have an exclusive on our corpses. That should satisfy Carl Fishburg.”

  “That’s a horrible joke.” But she wondered if Hal Rainer, who had had much more experience of gangsters than she had, really was joking.

  Rossano picked them up in a cab right on nine o’clock: he seemed to be a stickler for punctuality. He hardly spoke on the ride across and uptown. At last the cab pulled up and Cleo looked out.

  “The Tower of London?” She knew it to be a newly opened restaurant, expensive, exclusive and specializing in English food; but she had never been here before. “What’s a nice Italian boy doing in a place like this?”

  Rossano said goodnight and the cab drove off. Hal said, “I wonder why he’s not taking us in to introduce us?”

  “It looks safe enough. At least it’s not a dark alley.”

  The Tower of London had a Beefeater on the door, an out-of-work actor who did a passable English accent. The decor was not meant to suggest the dingy dungeons of the Tower; the decorator had excelled himself in making incarceration look attractive. Red silk drapes hung from the fake barred windows; there was thick pile carpeting on the floor woven to look like rushes; the carved oak chairs were upholstered with thick leather cushions for Park Avenue behinds not accustomed to corporal punishment in public. The waiters, fortunately, were not dressed in period costume: Luigi, Vito and Pasquale would not have been varlets in the original Tower, not even as guest workers.

  Frank Apollo sat at a table in the rear, put there by the snobish maître d’hôtel who knew a foreigner when he saw one. With Apollo was the man who had accompanied him to Gracie Park to meet Rossano. He was introduced as Paul Sirio, “my legal adviser.” Mr. Sirio didn’t say a word during the rest of the dinner, which, Cleo reckoned, must have set some sort of record for a lawyer and his legal advice.

  Apollo was in silk: grey silk suit, white-on-white silk shirt, silk silver tie; Cleo looked for a spring of mulberry in his lapel. Minus twenty pounds he might have been handsome; as it was, his face was round and bland, except for the eyes. If there were such things as lean eyes, Apollo had them. They would tirelessly be seeking opportunities and enemies, he accepted that his world would be divided equally between them. Cleo doubted that he would have any friends.

  “You like English food? Tony Rossano recommended this place to me.” He had a soft, rough voice. “I don’t like the pasta. All the time, everyone think Italians eat nothing but the pasta. The best food is the English roast and beef and the Yukshire pudding. Is better for you than all that pasta. Now what you want? Don’t forget we’re in Kansas City, not here.” His smile had a certain charm to it if one didn’t look at his eyes. “You ask the questions, I give you the answers. Maybe.”

  Hal attacked the roast beef and left the questions to Cleo. “You weren’t called to the hearings in Kansas City, Mr. Apollo, nor in Chicago, though you’ve had business dealings there for some years.”

  “Not in Chicago.” Apollo glanced at Sirio, but the legal adviser didn’t seem to think that was a statement that might incriminate him. “I ain’t had any business there, eight, ten years. In K.C. I’m in legitimate business, dry cleaning, parking lots, things like that. Why would the committee wanna call me, a legitimate businessman? They don’t call David Rockefeller from the Chase Manhattan, right?”

  Cleo cut into the Yorkshire pudding, which defied her knife as if it were Malayan rubber. “Mr. Rockefeller isn’t an ex-boy friend of Miss Billie Locke.”

  “You done your homework.” Apollo was still amiable. “She was some dame, y’know that? She coulda been real class, she hadn’t got mixed up with some of them bums she knows.”

  Cleo gave up on the Yorkshire pudding. “Mr. Apollo, why are you unpopular with the Syndicate?”

  “Unpopular? You don’t like your Yukshire pudding? Gimme.” He speared the pudding and transferred it to his own plate. “They don’t like me because I wanna be my own boss in my own terr’tory.”

  “In the dry cleaning and parking lot territory?”

  Apollo smiled again, unoffended. “At’s right. You see, Miss Spearfield, I wanna be one of the Good People—”

  “The Mafia,” said Hal as Cleo looked blank.

  “What’s the Mafia, Mr. Rainer? We call ourselves the Good People, sometimes the old men call us the Honoured Society. I wanna be one of ‘em, but I don’t wanna be told what I can do in my own terr’tory.”

  As the dinner progressed it began to dawn on Cleo that Apollo had granted this interview out of vanity. The man was laying himself open to a declaration of war by the Syndicate if he allowed himself to be quoted on what he had said so far; the Syndicate or the Mafia, or the Honoured Society or the Good People did not like men who talked to outsiders. Apollo wanted his name in the papers along with all those Big Names that had featured at the hearings. He was not the first man whose vanity had made him stupid.

  “You wouldn’t volunteer to give evidence before the committee?”

  Apollo looked at Sirio, then at his plate. Suddenly he pushed the plate away from him, gulped down his wine as if he had all at once become very thirsty. “Depends. Some of these guys, the ones everybody sees in the papers and on TV . . . A man, he’s got a right to earn a living in his own terr’tory, right?”

  Hal said, “You mean the Syndicate is try
ing to muscle in on Kansas City?”

  “You know K.C., Mr. Rainer? You know what a nice quiet place it could be, if people mind their own business? You want dessert, some nice bread-and-butter pudding?”

  Shades of Jack, thought Cleo. What would he say if he saw whom I’m was eating good sensible food with?

  “Those guys, no names but you know who I mean, they stay outa K.C., I got a nice business terr’tory. But they’re greedy . . .” He sounded sorry for himself. He was in the right place, the Tower of London: no one in the original Tower had ever been ecstatic.

  The restaurant had begun to empty now; it was the hour between the early diners and the theatre crowd who would come in for a late supper. The Beefeater came in the front door and stood there; a man in a dark topcoat and hat stood behind him. The man looked over the Beefeater’s shoulder, as if deciding whether he liked the look of the restaurant, then said something to someone behind him. Two other men, also in topcoats, hats pulled low on their foreheads, suddenly stepped out of the alcove beside the front door. They came down towards the rear of the restaurant, not running but walking swiftly, taking the submachine-guns from under their coats as they did so. The few diners still in the restaurant looked up at them, but didn’t take in what was about to happen.

  Apollo and Sirio, facing the front door, suddenly stood up. Cleo looked back over her shoulder and saw the guns; she hurled herself sideways, knocking Hal off his chair. The two of them sprawled on the floor and the brief hail of bullets went over them and into the chests of Frank Apollo and Paul Sirio. Both men teetered back, then Sirio crumpled to the floor. Apollo remained on his feet for a moment, one hand raised as if in protest to the two gunmen; then he fell face forward into the bread-and-butter custard that had just been brought by the waiter. Cleo, lying on the floor beneath the table, saw one of the gunmen look at her and Hal, then point his gun at her. She waited to die, mind and body paralysed. Then the other man shook his head and both turned and went back up to the front door, moving their guns back and forth across the restaurant, like cleaners waving brooms and telling the tardy diners it was time to go home. They joined the man at the front door and went out without a backward glance. The Beefeater, the guardian of the Tower, fainted in a red, ruffled heap like a rooster overcome at having just missed the axe.