by Jon Cleary
At the end of the second week she made her first suggestion. She chose to make it to Lintas himself in his office rather than to the editorial conference.
“You can run the paper when I depart,” Jake Lintas said. “Till then things stay as they are.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Lintas.” He had not asked her to call him Jake and she stuck stiffly to the formal. “I hoped you would be open to a suggestion or two. I don’t think my ideas will mean changing the paper’s policy too much.”
“Getting rid of Bill Brenner would mean a change of policy, at least to most of our readers. He has been our editorial cartoonist for almost forty years. If you knew anything about American newspapers, you’d know that cartoonists are probably the longest surviving of all of us who work on them.”
“I do know that. But Bill Brenner is still drawing 1930s cartoons—his style is old-fashioned and so’s his humour. And he never concedes that we have women readers, that the things he comments on affect them as much as they do men. I think it’s time we had someone with more bite. There’s a girl who does freelance work for the Denver Post—”
“A woman cartoonist?” It was as if Cleo had suggested a woman quarterback or, worse, a woman President. “What makes you think the public would take note of a woman’s comment on the political scene? That her stuff would have more bite, as you call it, than Brenner’s?”
“You’re a bachelor, Mr. Lintas. Maybe you haven’t come up against a woman’s bite. No, I take that back. I’m sure you’ve had your experiences with Mrs. Roux. If she could draw, don’t you think her cartoons would have plenty of bite?”
Lintas had no answer to that other than to say, “There’ll be no woman cartoonist or political columnist on this paper while I run it.”
He’s medieval, she thought. “You never read Dorothy Thompson or Rebecca West?” He didn’t answer and she stood up. “I’m not going to give up offering suggestions, Mr. Lintas. I’m here to stay.”
She went back to her own office and a little later Hal Rainer wandered in. “I miss you down at the police shack, Miss Spearfield.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rainer. Now cut out the bull. You’re the only friend I have around here, Hal. No one comes into this office unless it’s pure business. And then they only come in because Jake is tied up and they’re in a hurry.”
“It’s heavy going, I can see that.”
“Do people know how or why I got the job?” As far as she knew, Jack’s name was not known around the office. Unless Alain, out of spite, had spread the word.
“There are rumours,” Hal said, but didn’t elaborate. “You going to stick it out?”
“What’s the alternative? How’s crime—still paying?”
“Better than newspapers do. You remember your friend Tony Rossano? I got the word in from Kansas City. He’s popped up out there and guess what? He’s taken over Frank Apollo’s territory. He’s the front man for the Chicago top Family. Mafia family.”
“So he did set up the Apollo killing?”
“He also set up you and me.”
“Would you like to follow him up? Go out to Kansas City and see what you can make out of him?”
“Jake Lintas and Carl Fishburg would never agree to that. The expense, for one thing—you know what they’re like about that. Any day now I’m expecting them to sell all the company cars and put us on bicycles.”
“Leave it with me.”
At the editorial conference that afternoon she waited till the make-up of the paper had been decided, then she said, “There’s a story out in Kansas City that I think Hal Rainer should be sent to cover.” She explained the re-emergence of Tony Rossano and the implications of his new status. “I think we should run a series on how the Syndicate, or the Families, whatever we like to call them, still go their own way, putting their front men wherever they choose. It makes a mockery of all those crime commissions.”
Jake Lintas said nothing, sitting at the head of the table and looking coldly at her, certain that the lesser executioners around the table would deal with her. One of them, Carl Fishburg, said, “That’s a story for the Kansas City papers, not ours. Forget it.”
“I think it’s a national story.” Cleo looked directly at Joe Hamlyn, the national news editor. She knew that he had a wife and four daughters and, by circumstances and subjugation, was less a male chauvinist than any of the others at the table. He was, however, a man who had never been known to rock Jake Lintas’s boat. “What do you think, Joe?”
He looked at Lintas and her heart sank: she knew she was going to get the brush-off she had come to expect. Then surprisingly he said, “It’s a good idea. Let’s send Hal out there for a week and see what he can dig up. Every paper in the country but us is running an exposé of some sort. Maybe we can try for a Pulitzer.” He laughed to show everyone it was a joke, but Cleo noticed he was no longer looking at Jake Lintas. “We haven’t won one since the 1950s.”
The editor’s boat had indeed been rocked: he looked seasick. “Prizes aren’t the yardstick of a paper’s true worth.”
“Maybe not,” said Joe Hamlyn, “but the guys like to win ‘em.”
Cleo was doodling on her notepad with the gold pen the St. Martin sisters had given her. It was a moment before she realized she had drawn a stout man with a knife sticking out of his back. She screwed up the piece of paper before her pen drew a homburg on the man. She sat forward, glancing at Hamlyn to thank him for his support, then looked directly at Jake Lintas. It was the first time she had seen a crack in that bland, sleek exterior. His boat had not only been rocked, it had run onto rocks.
“Give Hal Rainer a week out there, no more.” He stood up, ending the day’s conference; but also ending any further rebellion. “That’s it for today.”
Cleo followed Joe Hamlyn out of the room. “Joe, could you come into my office for a moment?”
“I have to get my guys started—”
“It will take only a moment.”
She went into her office and sat down behind her desk. He did not sit, but stood with one foot in front of the other, as if about to run, the notes in his hand held out like a relay baton about to be passed on. She smiled at him.
“Relax, Joe. Jake isn’t going to have your head, I’ll see to that. I’m on the board, remember.”
He tried to look relaxed and succeeded only in looking as if he might fall over. He was a balding, unathletic man who peered out at the world through thick glasses; he no longer had any drive, any ambition, but he had once been a very good reporter. “Cleo, he’s still editor. I don’t really know why I spoke up for your idea—”
“Because you know it’s a good story, if Hal handles it right. And I’m sure he will. How old are you, Joe?”
“Forty-eight. What’s that got to do with it?”
“You’ve got another ten or twelve years here, maybe more. Between you and me and no one else, I’ll be editor of the paper before then. When Jake retires, I intend to take over. You and I and one or two others could make the Courier as good as it used to be back in the Twenties. I’ve looked up old copies in the morgue. It was a good newspaper then, one of the best.”
He sat down, took off his glasses and absent-mindedly cleaned them with his notes. Then he put them back on and looked at her carefully. “You sound just like my wife, only you think bigger. Are you asking me to be on your side against Jake?”
“No, I don’t want the paper divided like that. It would get nowhere if that happened. But I want any ideas I have to be considered on their merits and for you to back them if you think they are any good. I don’t want to be ignored because I’m a woman and because you all resent my having been jumped over the top of you. That happens all the time in America. General Eisenhower was the classic example. If it’s good enough for men to be promoted that way, it’s good enough for a woman.”
“It’s not just that. The men see you as the thin end of the wedge of women’s lib.”
“Dammit, I’m not a women’s
libber!” She slapped her desk. “I support some of the things they want, things we should have had years ago. But I’m not interested in all their petty flag-waving. Burning bras, calling themselves Ms., insisting on non-sexist terms like spokesperson—that’s juvenile stuff. I am against the double standard and you men here had better face up to it. The point you all have to accept is something I’ve already told Jake—I’m here to stay!”
He stared at her through the thick glasses, then he stood up. “I’ve never seen you excited before. I’m seeing a new side to you.”
“No, Joe, it’s always been there. Not the excitable bit, the standing up for what I think is right. You men just never let yourselves notice it.”
“I feel sorry for Jake.”
“Don’t. I’ve never yet cut the balls off a man.” She had never spoken as crudely as that to him before, but it was the best way of saying it. It sometimes paid not to be a lady. “If and when Jake goes, I’ll be fairer to him than he’s been to me.”
Hal Rainer went out to Kansas City and rang Cleo after three days. “I’ll need more time. But there’s a story here.”
“Call me at the end of the week and I’ll see Jake then. I’ll see you get the extra time.”
When she came into the newsroom next afternoon Jake Lintas was waiting at the door of his office. He gestured to her as soon as he saw her come in at the far end of the huge room. Cleo walked down between the long rows of desks, aware at once that everyone had stopped work and was watching her. She felt a sudden apprehension and she thought at once of Jack Cruze. Had something happened to him, was Jake Lintas about to take advantage of it and put her in her place? It was not common knowledge that Jack was a real, if not nominal, stockholder in the Courier, but she knew that Jake Lintas knew who had put her on the board and in the room next to his own.
She went into his office and he nodded. “Shut the door.” She did so, then sat down across from him at his desk. “The Kansas City Star has just called me. Hal Rainer’s body has been fished out of the Missouri River. He had two bullets in his head.”
She thought for a moment that she was going to vomit. Then the queasiness passed and she felt faint. She leaned back in her chair and then Jake Lintas did the first considerate thing he had done since she had joined the paper. He pushed his water jug and a glass towards her.
She drank some water, waited till she felt a little better. “Any details on who killed him?”
“None.”
She waited a little longer, then said, “We should follow it up. We can’t let whoever did it get away with it. He told me yesterday he was on to something.”
“It’s the Kansas City police’s job. Let them do it.”
“It’s the Courier’s story, for God’s sake! We owe it to Hal—”
“We’ve lost Hal. I’m not going to let the same thing happen to another of our men.”
“I’ll go out there myself—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. I’m sorry Hal has been murdered—I’ll miss him as much as you. I’m not going to risk anyone else from the Courier, and that includes you. I’ll tell A.P. and the Star why he was out there and they can follow it up if they want to. From now on we’ll stick to New York and Washington stories. We’ll run an obit, on Hal. I’ll write it.”
“Has anyone told his wife yet?”
“I thought you could do that. A woman would do it better.”
You bastard. “Naturally.”
She went out of his office hating him, convinced now that the time could not come soon enough for him to retire or be retired. She went to the personnel office, got Hal Rainer’s home address and rang down to the garage for one of the office cars to meet her at the front door. Then she was driven out to Long Island, to a tree-lined street in Great Neck. She told the driver of the car why she was making the journey and he, a young black, sensed she was upset and kept his remarks to a minimum.
The Rainer house was an old one, built before World War One but still in good repair. A big elm stood in the yard at the side and Cleo remembered Hal’s telling her that he liked to spend his summer weekends beneath it, reading all the books he could find on the Twenties, a golden decade, as he called it, that he had been too young to know. She rang the front doorbell and a pretty grey-haired woman opened it.
She was smiling and friendly, the sort of trusting woman who opened doors to salesmen, evangelists, muggers and rapists: she still trusted the world. Oh God, thought Cleo; and dealt her a far worse blow than any mugger or rapist could have. Liz Rainer retreated into her home weeping, shaking her head at the one news story she had never wanted to hear.
“I shouldn’t be shocked,” she said when she had regained some control of herself. “I was always telling him to be careful. He knew some dreadful characters, he’d been threatened half a dozen times—”
“I sent him on the story, Mrs. Rainer. I’ll never forgive myself for that. I was the one who started this whole chain of events.”
“Hal would never let you say that, if he could hear you. He believed that so long as a reporter was on a story, it was his story. Where is his—his body?”
“Still out in Kansas City. We’ll bring it home. If you could let me know where you’d like it taken to—I mean, what undertaker—”
Liz Rainer smiled and it struck Cleo that there was something of Hal in the smile. This couple had been very close. “We call them funeral homes here. Hal used to say that anyone who worked in a funeral home had never known what a real home was.”
Cleo stayed till the Rainers’ elder daughter, on a phone call from her mother, came over from Roslyn. Then she left, taking a last look back at the old house and the elm tree that would never throw its shade over Hal Rainer again.
“Back to the office, Miss Spearfield?”
“Please, Henry.” She would work late tonight, putting off going home to the apartment on Second Avenue. She often felt lonely there and, though Hal had never been her closest friend, she knew she would feel lonely tonight. In his own cynical way he had been her only supporter on the Courier.
II
Claudine was troubled. She was still adjusting herself to Alain’s abrupt departure for Europe when she was given the news of Hal Rainer’s murder. Then, a little later, that man Carter was elected President. To cap it all Louise had left Roger in Washington and moved back to their home at Sands Point. She was not accustomed to her well-ordered mind being jolted off its tracks so often in such a short period. A crisis, preferably a small one, a year was enough test for anyone.
Uninvited, a breach of manners she would never expect anyone to inflict on her, she went out to see Louise. The dark blue Rolls-Royce went over the Queensboro Bridge and out along Queens Boulevard to pick up the Long Island Expressway. Her chauffeur, a black man as old as herself, drove cautiously; like his mistress, he was not a regular traveller on Long Island. Claudine sat upright in the back and glanced out at the shabby stores and apartment buildings in Long Island City; but her imagination did not run to impressions of what lay behind the windows and walls that bordered the streets through which she was being driven. She was travelling through a foreign country only a few miles from her home; she knew that most of the population had to struggle to live and she was generous with her donations to charities, but all her life she had been insulated against the reality of other people’s deprivation. She looked at people standing at bus queues, staring resentfully at her as she was driven past them, and she knew that neither she nor they would ever understand each other. She was not heartless, just rich.
Roger and Louise’s house had been built at the beginning of the century by Louise’s grandfather. Teddy Roosevelt and his family had come across here from Sagamore Hill for tea on Sunday afternoons; it suggested a world of slower motion than today’s. It was a big white-painted timber house that sat on a slope looking out towards the Sound; it reminded Claudine of photographs of stout matrons of the period who looked as if they could never rise from the chairs in which they
lolled. It had a dignity of its own and she always looked for that in houses as well as people.
Louise was not surprised to see her sister-in-law. “I wondered how long it would take you to come out here.”
There was an independent note in Louise’s voice that surprised Claudine. “I did wait to be invited, but nothing was forthcoming.”
“Forthcoming? I must see in future that all my invitations are forthgoing. That is, when I send them.”
“Are you telling me this is none of my business, you and Roger separating?”
“Well, is it, Claudine?”
She led the way into a sitting-room that, to Claudine’s eye, looked like a junk store about to have a jumble sale. She wondered how a person could live in such disorder. It was no wonder Louise’s life was such a mess.
“I came to help, Louise, not to interfere.” It was the same thing, since her helping meant her taking over.
“How can you help? Would you like tea or coffee or what?”
“Tea. Perhaps I can bring Roger to his senses. I presume the blame is his and not yours?”
“What do you think?” There was a calm resignation about Louise that Claudine had not expected; she had come anticipating tears and hand-wringing. Perhaps even the hurling of some of the bric-a-brac. “He’s always had his affairs, I’ve known of them for years. But he never flaunted his women, not like he is now.”
“I don’t believe he would flaunt them. He has more discretion and breeding than that.”
“Oh Claudine—” It was the first time in her life Louise had ever sounded patronizing; it shocked even herself that she should sound that way towards Claudine of all people. “The world has changed. Shacking up is a way of life now.”
