Lady of Fortune Read Free

which made him look oddly vulnerable. Effie reached across the pale blue tablecloth and touched his hand. He put down his forkful of egg and maple syrup, unwound his eyeglasses, and smiled at her. She said, ‘You are somebody quite considerable, Mr Sabatini. I hope I’m not falling in love with you.’
    They kissed goodbye on the steps outside. George’schauffeur was waiting beside the car, patient and smart. He could afford to be both, when you considered what he was being paid to betray him.
    George reached up and wound one ringlet of her fair hair around his finger. ‘I don’t want to say much,’ he told her. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to leave you without saying thank you. I’m not an easy guy to like, you know; and I guess that must make me even harder to love. But you’ve been willing to listen, ever since the beginning. You’re real special, Effie. One in a million.’
    The butler, Bolton, appeared from the hallway. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, madam. But there’s a telephone call for you. Mr Walter Winchell, from the
Evening Graphic
.’
    Effie squeezed George’s hand. ‘There you are,’ she smiled, ‘We’re famous lovers already. First, Antony and Cleopatra. Then, Romeo and Juliet. Now, George Sabatini and Effie Watson.’
    She looked over her shoulder at Bolton and said, ‘Tell Mr Winchell that he can print whatever he cares to; provided that he lets me sue him for as much as I want to.’
    Effie watched George’s Hudson disappear around the curving driveway, her hands clasped in front of her; too happy and too content even to think of waving. He would soon be back, and waving had always seemed to her to be the saddest and most hopeless way of saying goodbye. She turned back into the house, still smiling and she smiled even more when she saw how rigidly Bolton was keeping in check any hint of disapproval.
    â€˜It’s all right, Bolton,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind if you express your objections out loud. Everybody else has, including my attorney.’
    â€˜I’m only thinking of your personal safety, madam,’ said Bolton. ‘Mr Sabatini is, after all, a hoodlum.’
    Effie nodded. ‘I know. He’s a very tough one, too. And that’s why I always feel safe when I’m with him.’
    â€˜Yes, madam,’ said Bolton, with the kind of pursed-up face he always put on whenever one of their guests picked up the wrong fork, or sneezed into the caviare.
    Effie said, ‘You can make me another Silver Stallion, while I dress,’ and then she went upstairs, singing
Night After Night
    â€˜
Night after night
…
    You’re near me
.
    Night after night
    You endear me
…’

CHAPTER TWO
    The news arrived with the late afternoon papers. A limousine had been found abandoned in Massapequa State Park, about a mile off the Merrick Road, containing the headless body of George Marcello ‘Spats’ Sabatini, the 41-year-old crime boss. It was understood that he had been returning to New York City after visiting Mrs Effie Watson, America’s only woman bank chairman, the ‘golden fist in the velvet glove.’ A friendship between the two of them had long been hinted at in the gossip columns, despite the fact that Sabatini was a known racketeer and extortionist. Dorothy Dey in the Morning
Telegraph
had called it, ‘the love that knows no law’.
    Sabatini, surmised the newspapers, had probably tried to push himself too far and too fast into the dockside territory of Giancarlo Eustachio, a scarred old walrus of a Sicilian who had once said that he had never murdered anybody, at least not during Lent. Sabatini had not, thankfully, been tortured. His murderers had simply taken his head off with a garrotte of very fine steel wire.
    Effie was unavailable for interviews. The Saturday after the killing, she was taken by seaplane from Long Island to