Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (12 page)

 
          
“He—”
The girl gulped, unable to cry and talk at the same time. Fists firmly to eyes,
she shook her head back and forth. “He doesn’t want me,” she managed to say, in
a broken half whisper.

 
          
“Whoever
he is,” Sara told her, “he isn’t worth it. No man is worth it.”

 
          
Now
the girl sighed, a long shuddering sound that shook her frame and made Sara
truly sympathize, truly feel for this poor baby, the victim of her own lush
looks and the short attention span of men. She patted the poor baby’s shoulder,
the tissues remaining crumpled in her other hand, and the girl turned her head
slightly, right eye peering woundedly past her knuckles at Sara as she
whispered,
“He’s
worth it. I love
him!”

 
          
“Oh,
poor baby, and he’s no good, is he? He doesn’t love you the way you love
him
.”

           
“He says it’s
oooover!”

 
          
“Oh,
poor girl, poor girl. Go ahead and cry. Get it all out.”

 
          
Accepting
the wad of Kleenex at last, the girl also accepted Sara’s willing shoulder. The
head she bent there seemed terribly hot and feverish, the delicate earlobe rosy
with infused blood. Sara patted her quivering back, and the girl mumbled
against her clavicle, “I gave him the best weeks of my life.”

 
          
“Of
course you did, I know you did.”

 
          
“If
he wants that Felicia,” she wailed, her cry of defiance belied by copious tears
and broken gasps, “he can have her!”

 
          
“Felicia,
did you say?” Sara asked, listening with all her ears. “Tell me about her.”

 
          
^“
Out!”
bellowed a male voice,
trembling with rage.

 
          
Sara
and the girl both jumped, separating, and turned to stare at the doorway,
filled now with the menacing infuriated form of John Michael Mercer. “Johnny!”
squealed the girl. “You can’t come in
here!”

 
          
“Out,
you idiot!” Mercer yelled, advancing into the room. “That’s a reporter from the
Galaxy!”

 
          
The
girl stared at Sara in shock and betrayal, then at Mercer in shock and fear.
“Johnny! I didn’t—”

 
          
With
one last wide-eyed wet-eyed panicky stare at Sara, the girl fled. Sara stood
her ground, trembling slightly, as Mercer turned his attention her way, looming
over her, raising one knobble-knuckled fist, shaking it in her face. “I’ve
warned you people,” he breathed, low-voiced and savage, controlling himself
with obvious difficulty. “I said, if you ever bothered me again—”

 
          
“Sara!”
cried Jack’s voice. “Flinch!”

 
          
She
flinched, an automatic reaction, then looked over to see Jack in the doorway, a
tiny camera to his face.
Click-whirr
,
click-whirr
,
click-whirr
, the high-speed shutter hit and hit, as Mercer
swiveled, roaring in his fury. Then Jack was gone, the door slapping closed
after him, and Mercer swung back to Sara, fists clenched, face distorted with
rage, and this time Sara flinched for real.

 
          
But
then, as he must have suddenly realized his former girlfriend was out and about
on her own in a world newly
full
of
reporters from the
Weekly Galaxy
,
Mercer spun away again, toward the door, blundering through it, hitting one
shoulder against the frame on the way by, bellowing, “Fluffy!” And the door
swung shut behind him, leaving Sara limp and shaken.

 
          
And
what a first date
this
turned out to
be! Of all the restaurants in the world, they’d have to pick just the one where
John Michael Mercer was breaking up with a girlfriend. And what was happening
to Jack right now, in the outside world? Sara supposed she should go out and
see, offer support or a witness or a calming influence or whatever seemed best,
but somehow she was just in no hurry to leave this room. So she spent another
three or four minutes there, soothing her own shattered nerves, fussing with
her hair and makeup, half expecting the door to burst open and almost anybody
come in: Mercer to pulverize her, Fluffy (Fluffy? Was that possible?) to give
her another look of heartbroken betrayal, or even Jack to tell her the coast
was clear.

 
          
But
nobody came in at all, not even an innocent bystander. When at last boredom
overcame tension, and when the face looking back at her in the mirror had
finally lost its expression of just having heard a major explosion very nearby,
Sara cautiously pulled open the ladies’ room door, looked both ways, saw
nothing that seemed to threaten, and made her way back to the table, where the
red-boleroed waiter was seated in
her
chair,
talking to Jack and a small cassette tape recorder.

 
          
Astonished—she’d
never had her seat taken by a waiter before—Sara just stood there beside the
table, not knowing what else to do, while the waiter continued to speak slowly
and ploddingly to Jack in heavily accented English. After a minute, Jack looked
up, acknowledged her presence, and said, “There you are. Pull up a chair.”

 
          
Pull
up a chair; now
there's
the benchmark
of the gentleman for you. Of course Jack was deeply involved in this unexpected
interview with the waiter, but still. Oh, well; Sara looked around, saw that
both John Michael Mercer and his Fluffy had left the restaurant and the busboy
was clearing that table, and so she pulled over the chair Fluffy had been
seated in and settled herself at the side of the table as Jack said to the
waiter, “As a family man yourself, would you say— Hold it a second.” To Sara he
said, “Write down everything that happened, so you don’t forget it.”

 
          
“I
won’t forget it. Believe me.”

 
          
“Write.”
To the waiter, as Sara shrugged and dragged out of her bag her memo pad and
pen, Jack said, “Again. As a family man yourself, would you say it shocked you
when John Michael Mercer made that girl cry?”

 
          
“Oh,
yeah,” the waiter said.

 
          
Sara
wrote a quick and simple narrative of events while Jack continued to question
the waiter: “As you were serving the meal, did you observe the conversation
that took place between John Michael Mercer and that young lady?”

 
          
“Oh,
sure, I did.”

 
          
“Was
the young lady happy at the beginning of the meal?”

 
          
“Oh,
yeah, sure.”

 
          
“Would
you say that she was very noticeably in love with John Michael Mercer?”

 
          
“Oh,
sure,” the waiter said, with a dirty little grin. “She was all over him.”

 
          
“You
would say she was making no effort to conceal her happiness, is that right?”

 
          
“She
wasn’t concealing
nothing
, man.”

 
          
Crinkle,
crinkle; greenbacks rusded in Jack’s left hand, in the waiter’s sight but not
within his reach. Calmly Jack said, “Would you say she was making no effort to
conceal her happiness?”

           
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Very happy
girl.”

           
“So would you say it was a shock to
her when—”

 
          
“Say!”
Sara, having in her narrative reached the point where Mercer had come barging
into the ladies’ room, looked up frowning and said, “Wait a minute. How’d he
know I was from the
Galaxy?”

 
          
“I
told him,” Jack said, and returned his attention to the waiter. “Would you say
it was a shock—”

 
          
“You
told him!”

 
          
“All
part of the story,” he said. “Now, hush, we’ll talk later. I want to get
Pedro’s story here, while it’s fresh in his mind.”

 
          
Sara
looked at the little tape recorder in the middle of the table. And Jack had
brought a camera along, too. They’d just
happened
to sit one table away! “You
knew
about this!” she cried. “That’s when— When
Ida
called! At
Binx’s
house! You knew
then!”

 
          
“Sara,
I’m
working
Jack snapped at her, with
a look of real anger.

 
          
“When
aren’t you working?” she asked, understanding him at last.

 
          
“We’ll
talk later, all right?”

 
          
“There’s
nothing to talk about,” she assured him, and got to her feet, and dragged the
chair back to the former Mercer table, and sat there to finish the narrative in
her memo pad, while behind her the drone of Jack’s and the waiter’s voices
continued, Jack leading the man inch by inch through the version of tonight’s
events he needed for the story in the paper.

           
It was herself Sara was mad at,
mostly, for having thought in the first place that there could be anything on a
personal level between herself and Jack. Hadn’t he made it clear he would have
no personal entanglements? Hadn’t he made it
abundantly
clear that his job was all that mattered to him? Hadn’t
she already realized—and thought she’d accommodated herself to the idea—that
the only way to get along with Jack Ingersoll was to be a very efficient and
very faceless little reporter, and not to take personally his bouts of bad
humor and bad manners? So how had she allowed him to sucker her into thinking—

 
          
No.
How had she allowed
herself
to sucker
herself
into thinking there might be
anything at all other than business in his asking her to the barbecue, asking
her out to dinner? True, Jack Ingersoll was a lout and a boor, but she’d
already known that, hadn’t she? So if she was going to get mad, if she was
going to decide she’d been used, if she was going to make a fuss because the
only reason he’d brought her along tonight was as protective coloration and as
someone to throw at John Michael Mercer’s head to make the story better, if all
of that was going to upset her, the only person she could possibly blame—and
this made her grit her teeth in embarrassment and anger and frustration—was,
goddamn it to hell and back and hell again and back again, herself.

 
          
The
busboy brought, after a while, the coffee she’d ordered before all the
excitement. She drank it, she finished her narrative, and she started a
self-pitying letter to her mother at home up in Great Barrington that she knew
she would never finish and never send, and then Jack came over to the table,
carrying his half-full coffee cup, and took the chair that had been Mercer’s.
He was clearly trying very hard to look concerned, maybe even a little abashed,
but his true feeling of self-satisfaction glistened on him like oil. “Listen,
Champ,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”

 
          
“Forgot
my name again?” But she didn’t feel like playing games; before he could answer,
she shook her head, ripped the pages containing the narrative out of her memo
pad and pushed them over to him. “I’m not mad,” she said. “Mostly, I’m just
tired. Here’s the story. Can we go home now?”

 
          
“Sure.
Listen, I probably should have told you about the setup ahead of time, but
you’re new, you know?”

 
          
“I
know,” she said. She really was very tired, though part of her tiredness, she
knew, was simply depression.

 
          
“I
didn’t know how you’d handle it,” he explained. “I figured you’d probably do
best if you didn’t know anything else was going on. You could be more natural.”

 
          
“It’s
really all right, Jack,” she told him. “I
was
mad, but I figured it all out for myself, everything you want to say. I’m so
completely not mad anymore, I even included the name.” And she gestured at the
pages of narrative