“I went to Capo’s house for dinner and played with his kid’s trains,” Martin said, laughing.
“Well, I didn’t know!” Ashley shook her hair back from her face impatiently, remembering her anguish. “I even thought you might call Carmen Hughes.”
“Now that might not have been a bad idea,” Martin said, smiling slyly. He dragged deeply on his cigarette.
Ashley punched him playfully. “So you haven’t forgotten her!”
“How could I forget a body like that?”
“I beg your pardon. You practically broke your leg trying to get away from her, Lieutenant.”
“Then why did you think I would call her?”
“Jealousy, I suppose. I certainly knew she would be receptive. I guess I was paranoid.”
“Sounds like it.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the bedside tray and pulled her down next to him. “I was the one with reason to be jealous, watching you with Dillon all the time. It drove me wild.” He buried his nose in her hair, inhaling its fragrance.
“It’s over with Jim, you know that,” Ashley said. “But he’s still a friend, and I guess I should have expected him to show up here when he heard what happened.” She pressed her lips together in distaste. “I’m so sorry about what he said to you.”
“Forget it. And don’t worry about that Hughes dame. I like my women a little less...”
“Forward?” Ashley suggested after a pause. “Obvious?”
He grinned.
“I know your style,” Ashley said, reaching up to trace his lips with a delicate fingertip. “You want to take a ladylike type and break her down in bed.”
“How did you ever guess?” he muttered, lowering himself on top of her.
She wound her bare legs around his hips. “After this afternoon, it wasn’t difficult.” She kissed him lingeringly. “I can’t imagine being with anyone else but you now. I feel like I’ve been branded, marked indelibly for life.”
“You have,” he said huskily. He lifted her to meet his thrust, and she arched like a cat to receive him.
“Enough talk,” he murmured.
Ashley could not disagree.
* * * *
About an hour later, Ashley rolled over and said, “I’m starving.”
“What a surprise. How long since your last meal this time?”
She propped her elbows on his chest and stared down into his face. “Can you honestly tell me you’re not hungry?”
He lifted his head and kissed her lightly. “I can honestly tell you that I am.”
“Good. I’ll call down to Elsie for a snack.”
He watched as she got out of bed and wrapped the sheet around her. She went to a phone on a small gilt table and pressed a button.
“Elsie, could you bring a tray of sandwiches and a pot of coffee up to the green suite for me?” she said into the receiver.
Martin observed as Ashley listened to the response.
“Yes,” she said. “Fifteen minutes would be just fine. Thank you, Elsie.”
“So that’s how you do it, huh?” Martin said admiringly from the bed. “So easy.”
“Do what?”
Martin ignored the question. “Do you think Elsie could come to my apartment?” he asked ingenuously. “She could make herself very useful; there’s quite a lot to do. Actually I could use a whole team of Elsies, one to cook the meals, one to wash my dirty gym clothes, maybe even one to go to the record store and get me some new tapes when I don’t have the time for it.”
Ashley came back to the bed and sat next to him. “All right, all right, I get the idea.” She took his hand and held it to her cheek. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? The difference between us.”
He withdrew his hand; she didn’t try to hold it. “Ashley,” he said, “at my place when you want a sandwich you get up and make one. And if there’s no stuff in the refrigerator or there’s no bread, or it’s moldy, or the cheese is bad, you go down to the deli. If the deli’s closed or it’s too cold out or you forgot to cash a check, you do without the sandwich. I’m just not used to this.”
“It doesn’t have to affect us,” she said quietly. “I don’t live like this all the time. I have my own apartment in Georgetown. I work. This is my father’s lifestyle, not mine.”
“But you fall right into it when you’re here, and you did grow up with it.”
“Are you going to punish me for that now?” she asked, frowning at the unfairness of it.
“Baby, I don’t want to punish you,” he said, touching her hair. “It just disturbs me. I can’t help it; I can’t see where this is going to go.”
“This?’
“Us,” he replied.
She dropped the sheet and crawled into his arms. “It will go wherever we want it to go, won’t it? We’re in control, not the rest of the world.”
“I’m afraid that’s where you’re wrong,” he murmured, his fingers trailing down her arm.
“What do you mean?” she asked anxiously.
He could see that he was upsetting her, and she had been through enough in the past couple of days. He released her and got up, looking around for his clothes. He rescued his wrinkled pants from the floor where they had landed in a heap.
“I think I’ll take a shower before the food comes,” he said. “I’ve got to get on the road soon. The bathroom’s through there, isn’t it?”
Ashley nodded, her expression withdrawn.
“Be right back,” he said, and left her alone. She heard the water begin to run next door seconds later. Her eyes roamed the familiar room, then settled on the patterned rug morosely.
Physically she was relaxed and sated, deliciously comfortable, with a subtle edge that subconsciously waited for Martin again. Now that she had experienced him, the thought of doing so again made her weak with anticipation. She was hooked; satisfaction of her desire for him had not cloyed, but rather whetted, her appetite for more of the same. In that respect, her time with him had been all she could have wanted.
But still her mind was racing with unsettling thoughts, not only about her father’s recent death but about the man who had just left her bed.
It was certainly curious. Out of all the men she had met in her life, she wound up falling for a macho cop who thought her family was effete and indulged, who actually objected to servants and mansions and yachts. Everyone else she knew would have taken those things for granted, or else been impressed by such evidence of wealth. Not Martin. His sense of fairness, or decency, or whatever it was, objected to the excesses of the haves in a world of have-nots. Whereas she could understand his attitude, and even respected him for it, she was terribly afraid that in the end it would take him away from her. She could not change what she was, where she came from and what she had been, and she feared that a part of him would always resent her background.
The water shut off as she stood and slipped into Martin’s shirt, buttoning it up the front on the wrong side and rolling the sleeves to her elbows.
When he stepped into the room, he was wearing his pants, barefoot, and toweling his damp hair. He stopped and surveyed her appreciatively from head to foot.
“You look better in that than I ever did,” he said.
“On second thought, I’ll change to my dress. Elsie overlooks a lot, but I don’t want to push it,” Ashley replied.
“What do you imagine she thinks we’ve been doing up here?” Martin asked her, smiling.
“She won’t have to guess if I answer the door in your shirt,” Ashley replied dryly.
She retrieved her dress and slipped into it. When she returned to him, he dropped his towel and zipped the dress up the back. Then he put his arms around her waist from behind.
Ashley turned her head to look up at him. His hair was curling in glistening ringlets, and his lavish eyelashes were still clumped and beaded with water.
“Mmm, you smell so good,” she said, resting her head back against his bare shoulder.
“I found some regular soap in the closet. There was a
dish of seashell-shaped things in the shower, but they kept squirting out of my hands. Smelled a little swishy, too.”
“Regular soap?” she asked.
“Yeah, you know. A bar, in a wrapper, the kind you buy in a supermarket. No fancy stuff.”
“That’s my man,” Ashley said fondly. “No fancy stuff.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Elsie?” Martin said in a dramatic stage whisper. “I sure hope it’s not a raid.”
Ashley threw him a dirty look as she opened the door and took the tray from the maid. She set it on the nightstand next to the bed and poured coffee from the silver server into ivory china cups with a deep-blue intaglio border,
“Here you go,” she said, handing a cup to Martin.
He sipped from it, watching her over its rim. “Ashley, we have to talk about your father.”
She closed her eyes, then bent briskly to unwrap a sandwich. “Can’t I just be happy a little while longer?” she asked distantly, not looking at him.
“I’m sorry, but you must know this. I’m going to see Rourke tomorrow to get reinstated on the case.”
Ashley’s hand paused with half of the chicken sandwich part way to her mouth. “What do you mean? The federal people have taken it over, haven’t they?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I think it may matter to them,” Ashley said quietly, her eyes on his face. She was losing her appetite.
Martin put down his cup and came to her, taking her by the shoulders and turning her to face him.
“Ashley, listen to me. It was my case. I was assigned to protect your father, and now he’s dead. Capo was seriously injured and almost died. You may not like what Dillon said earlier today, but there is some truth in it. I’m not letting them take this case away from me.”
“I don’t think you’ll have anything to say about it,” Ashley replied, alarmed by his tone.
“I’m going to get the guy who did this personally,” Martin concluded almost to himself, as if she hadn’t spoken.
Ashley didn’t respond. She looked away, her whole being flooding with fear.
He took her by the chin and turned her to face him. “What?” he asked softly.
“I’m afraid for you. My father is already dead. I couldn’t bear to lose you too. Not now.”
He pulled her into his arms. “You’re not going to lose me. A dozen crooks behind bars at this very moment thought they had my name on a bullet. I’m lucky. I’ve always been lucky.”
Ashley was silent, her eyes filling with tears. He sounded just like her father.
“Will you change your plans and stay the night?” she whispered, clinging to him, blinking rapidly to dispel the tears before he saw them. “Please?”
Martin hesitated. He wanted to get things straightened out with Rourke as soon as possible, but the invitation to spend the night with her was far too alluring to refuse. And he could sense how much she needed him.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll drive back to the city in the morning.”
Ashley curled her arms around his neck and held him as tightly as she could.
For the moment, she would have to be satisfied with that.
* * * *
Ransom sat in the airport lounge, waiting for his flight. It was the middle of the night, and the other travelers were scattered about the waiting area, napping or reading. He consulted the schedule monitor again, and it showed that his plane to Switzerland was still on time.
There were several hideouts he used after a hit; he changed them frequently for variety as well as safety. This time he was going to Lucerne, to ski in the mountains where there was snow year round and to check personally on his bank account in town.
He wanted to make certain that his clients had paid promptly and in full.
He propped his feet on his overnight case and unzipped his jacket restlessly. He had ditched the clothes he’d worn in Millvale and changed after his unsatisfactory motel shower, but he still felt grimy and unsettled. He was waiting for the letdown, the sense of peace and relief that usually followed a successful hit, but it would not come.
Meg weighed heavily on his mind.
He couldn’t dismiss her, as he had all the others. Several times he’d found himself thinking that in six months or a year, after the furor had died down, he could find her again. He would invent some explanation for his disappearance and pick up where they had left off, try to become what she thought he was.
Ransom shifted in the stiff-backed chair and took out his cigarettes, shaking one loose from the pack. He knew, of course, that such an idea was insane. He could never reenter the lives of those he had used for a hit and left behind; to them he had to be dead. But he kept teasing himself with the possibility, even though he was aware that the issue was academic: Meg wouldn’t love him if she knew the truth.
Ransom registered the No Smoking sign over his head and dropped his unused cigarette into a standing ashtray next to him in disgust. He didn’t want to attract attention, so he wasn’t going to violate any rules.
He looked around the lounge in boredom.
The lone ticket agent behind the airlines desk was watching a black-and-white portable television. The airwaves were filled with stories about the assassination, and Ransom had heard the same facts parroted over and over again during the trip to the airport on the cab radio. Now an announcer concluded a recap of the Senator’s life and accomplishments by saying, “This exemplary public servant will be sorely missed. And of course the hunt is still on for Fair’s assassin, and that search has taken a turn for the better in recent hours. It has been reported that the Senator’s daughter, Ashley Fair, is an eyewitness with a complete description of the man who so brutally ended her father’s life. The authorities are pursuing all avenues...”
Ransom straightened, his feet dropping from the bag to the floor. He picked up the satchel and stood in one smooth movement. His expression had not changed, but his mind was racing.
So the daughter had seen him; the cops must have let that slip. He had known that he was in view too long, but thought that for once in his solitary, friendless life, luck had been with him.
He wasn’t going to Switzerland or anywhere else. The first rule of his business was to leave no witnesses to identify him in court. The police might have a description or a sketch, but if they didn’t have a warm body to sit in the big chair and tell a jury he was the killer, the whole picture changed.
He had to silence Ashley Fair. Her father’s murder was a capital crime with a prominent, wealthy, and politically connected victim. The case would receive priority attention; the FBI would never stop looking for him.
Ransom shoved his unused boarding pass into his pocket and strode toward the terminal door.
* * * *
When Ashley awoke in the morning and found Martin gone, she was disappointed but not surprised.
He had left no note, and she hadn’t expected one.
She went back to her own room to shower and dress. She was contemplating going downstairs to face her stepmother over the breakfast table when the telephone rang.
It was Meg.
“How are you?” Ashley asked quickly. She felt a sudden stab of remorse about spending the night in her lover’s arms. Meg had spent it doing her job, certainly a better memorial to the Senator than his daughter’s behavior.
Martin made Ashley forget everything.
“All right,” Meg said. She sounded tired.
“How’s Tony?”
“Better. They’ve taken him off the critical list, and he’s been moved from intensive care to a private room. His wife called me just a few minutes ago.”
“What does his doctor say?”
“His doctor is so afraid of a malpractice suit that he won’t say grass is green. I don’t know who to dismember first, that closemouthed quack or the people who colorized Casablanca.”
“But if they took him off the critical list, that should be good news, shouldn’t it?”
“I’m sure it is, but you wouldn’t know it from the medical staff. When I was there, they were all creeping around like moles from the Pentagon. But Lorraine was reassured; she’s gone home to see the kids. Her mother stayed with them while she was at the hospital.”
“Meg, please send out the word to make sure Tony has everything he needs. Bill it all to me.”
“I will. Don’t give it a second thought,” Meg said. “I’ll take care of everything.”
“Do you think if I called Tony I would get through? These gorillas here won’t let me move, but I’d like to talk to him. Is he up to a phone conversation?”
“Maybe a short one. It’s worth a try.”
“Okay, I’ll call.” Ashley sighed. “How are things with the staff there?”
“You can imagine,” Meg replied shortly. “Everybody’s just stunned or crying, staring into space.”
“I can’t cry,” Ashley said dully. “I don’t know why, but I can’t.”
“Shock,” Meg said.
“Is the press giving you a hard time?” Ashley asked.
“Roger’s trying to handle them, but you wouldn’t believe how boorish they can be. The biggest request is for pictures and old bios. It’s gruesome.”
Ashley swallowed, unable to reply.
There was a silence before Meg said in a controlled voice, “Have they set the funeral arrangements yet?”
“They’ll be finalized today,” Ashley said. “I was just about to go down and get the details from Sylvia.”
“I guess you’re letting her run the show, huh?” Meg said sympathetically, aware of the situation.
“I don’t care what kind of a service they plan,” Ashley said wearily. “The man is dead. What does it matter?” She bit her lip hard, fighting tears.
“I know how you feel,” Meg murmured.
“Do you think you could come out to the house soon?” Ashley inquired, feeling childish for asking. “I could certainly use the moral support.”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” Meg promised. “I want to wait until I’m sure everything is under control here.”
“Are you really okay, Meg?” Ashley asked. “You’ve been a rock through all of this.”
“I guess I’m numb,” Meg replied. “It hasn’t really sunk in yet. The loss, I mean.”
Fair Game Page 23
