Line of Succession

“Uh-huh. Well Mr. DeFord said she was your agent. Do you want the details by phone or would you like to come down and see for yourself? I’m afraid they made a mess of her.”

“Definitely a homicide, then?”

“You could say that. They ripped out her tongue with a pair of pliers and they dug out her heart with a hammer and chisel.”

The door opened and Bev walked naked across the room, sat down in the chair and lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the match. She didn’t look at him: she stared at the floor.

Lime said, “Sweet Jesus.”

“Yes, sir. It was pretty God damned vicious.”

“Where did this happen, Lieutenant?”

“An alley off Euclid. Near Fourteenth Street.”

“What time?”

“About six hours ago.”

“What have you got?”

“Next to nothing, I’m afraid. No handbag, no visible evidence except the body itself. No evidence of sexual molestation. We found a junkie searching the body but he claims he found her that way and the evidence supports his story. I’ve had people combing the neighborhood but you know the way things are in those parts of town—nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything.”

“Any possibility she was killed somewhere else and dumped there?”

“Not likely. Too much blood in the alley.”

Bev stood up and padded to the bed. She handed him a freshly lighted cigarette and an ashtray and went back to her chair. Lime dragged suicidally on the cigarette. Choked, coughed, recovered, and said, “Do you need me down there to identify her? I seem to recall she had no next of kin.”

“Mr. Hill here gave us a positive identification on her. It won’t be necessary. But if you can give us a lead—if I knew what she’d been working on.…”

Lime ducked it: “She was on a security case—I can’t give it to you. But if we come across evidence that might help in a criminal prosecution we’ll pass it on to you.”

“Sure, that’s okay.” A voice of resignation: the lieutenant had known the answer before he’d asked the question. But you had to go through the motions. Everybody has to go through the motions, Lime thought.

“Tell Chad Hill I’ll be in the office as soon as I get dressed.”

“I will. Goodbye, sir.”

Lime rolled over on his side to cradle the phone. Light in the room was weak, splashing in through the open door of the bathroom. He thought about the dead girl and tried to remember her alive; he smashed out the cigarette and climbed off the bed.

Bev said, “I don’t know about the other guy. But your end of that conversation was right out of a rerun of Dragnet.”

“Somebody got killed.”

“I gathered.” Her soft contralto was deepened by the hour and the cigarette. “Anyone I know? Knew?”

“No.”

“Now you’re being strong and silent.”

“Just silent,” he said, and climbed into his drawers. He sat down to pull on his socks.

She got back into bed and pulled the sheet and blanket up over her. “It’s fu

“Is that right.” He went into the bathroom and washed his face with cold water. Used her toothbrush and glanced at the lady-electric shaver on the shelf, but decided against it; he had a shaver in the office. In the mirror there were bags pendant under his eyes. I can’t possibly be as old as I look. He looked like a big sleepy blond Wisconsin Swede gone over the hill and a little seedy. A little bit of office paunch, a fishbelly whiteness about the upper chest and arms. He needed a couple of weeks on a beach in the Virgin Islands.

He gargled mouthwash and went out into the bedroom and reached for his shirt.

Bev looked as if she had gone back to sleep but then her eyes drifted open. “I thought you’d got yourself out of the dagger end of things and confined yourself to cloaks.”

“I have. All I do is keep the papers moving.”

“I see. You send girls out to get killed for you.”

He cinched up his trousers and reached for his tie. Bev sat up, making a face, the good breasts lying a bit askew. “You’d better have a bite of breakfast, I suppose. It wouldn’t do to go ogling corpses on an empty stomach.”

“I could do with toast and coffee.”

She wasn’t tall but she stood tall: a straight-up girl with long legs and high firm hips and a fair amount of mischief in her face. Playful, tawny, good-tempered.

She was the woman he would love if he could love.

She went out to the kitchenette, belting a terrycloth robe around her. She wanted to be useful to him: it was part of her character to be useful; she was a widower’s daughter.

He got into his hairy brown sports jacket and his cordovan loafers and went into the kitchenette after her. Kissed the back of her neck: “Thanks.”

10:35 A.M.Continental European Time There was a knock at the door and Clifford Fairlie looked up from his newspaper. His eyes took a moment to focus on the room—as if he had forgotten where he was. The sitting room of the suite was quite grand in its fin-de-sieècle elegance: the Queen A

Knuckles again; Fairlie shambled to the door. He was a man who opened his own doors.

It was his chief aide, Liam McNeely, slim in a Dunhill suit. Behind him the Secret Service men in the anteroom looked up, nodded, and looked away. McNeely came in and pushed the door shut behind him. “Morning, Mr. President.”

“Not quite yet.”

“I’m practicing.”

The smell of expensive aftershave had come into the room with McNeely. Clifford Fairlie settled on the Queen A

“I spent a winter in Paris once, a long time ago. I can’t remember the sun shining once in the five months from October to early March.” That had been the year he’d lost the Senate race for reelection from Pe

McNeely uncrossed his legs with a getting-down-to-business sigh. The notebook came out of his pocket. “It’s about a quarter to eleven now. You’ve got the Common Market people at noon and lunch here in the hotel at one forty-five with Breucher.”

“Plenty of time.”

“Yes sir. I only mentioned it. You don’t want to show up at the meeting in that outfit.”

Fairlie’s jacket had leather patches at the elbows. He smiled. “Maybe I ought to. I’m Brewster’s emissary.”

McNeely laughed at the joke. “Press conference at four. They’ll mainly be asking about the plans for the trip to Spain.”

That was the nub, the trip to Spain. The rest was window dressing. The vital thing was those Spanish bases.

McNeely said, “And they’ll want your reactions to Brewster’s logorrhea last night.”

“What reactions? For Brewster it was damned mild.”

“You going to say that? Pity. It’d be a good chance to get in a few digs.”

“No point being inflammatory. Too much anger in the world already.”

“A lot of it incited by that pisspot Napoleon in the White House.” McNeely had a Yale Ph.D., he had been an Oxford fellow, he had written eight volumes of political analysis, he had served two Administrations—one in the Cabinet—and he persisted in calling the incumbent President of the United States “this flimflam fuehrer” and “the schmuck on Pe