Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (18 page)

 
          
Jack
also glanced at Mary Kate, and nodded his head at her, and said to Ida, “Have
you cleared her?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“Then
you can talk in front of her.”

 
          
Mary
Kate gave Jack a long slow look, as Ida said, “I have found no one who has a
special relationship, or a relationship at all, with Cartwright.” She never
called Boy “Boy.” “As for people potentially in a position to be blackmailed, I
have nothing solid, but there’s one area that might be explored further.”

           
“Which area is that?”

           
“Phyllis Perkinson.”

           
Jack looked away across the room
toward the banks of reporters. Phyllis was visible over there, lying on the
phone, with gestures, throwing herself into it. Jack looked back at Ida.
“Tell.”

 
          
“She
worked two years on
Trend
magazine.”
Trend
magazine was a glossy yuppie
magazine based in New York, one that had put together a successful formula
composed mostly of lists of the best sixty places to get a pizza in the United
States and high-finance real estate scandals; a howto magazine for young MBAs,
in other words.

           
Nodding, Jack said, “I knew that.”

 
          
“She
was on special projects there, under David Levin.”

 
          
“That
I didn’t know,” Jack admitted. “What next?”

 
          
“She
left,” Ida said. “She didn’t get fired, there was no suggestion of trouble. She
finished a piece on ham in kosher hot dogs, turned it in, quit, came down
here.”

 
          
“At
an increase in salary?”

           
“Of course,” Ida said.

           
“And better weather.” Jack shrugged.
“Everybody’s story, Ida. What bothers you about it?”

           
“I’m not sure yet.”

           
“You want to pursue?”

           
“Yes.”

           
“Pursue, then,” Jack said. “You know
I trust your instincts.”

 
          
“Thank
you.” Jack might have turned away then, but Ida wasn’t finished. “John Michael
Mercer,” she said.

 
          
Jack
gave her
all
of his attention.
“Speak, Ida,” he said.

 
          
“Yesterday
he flew to
Boston
, on the network’s jet.”

 
          
“Alone?”

 
          
“According
to our contact at
Logan
, he was with a woman named Felicia Nelson,” Ida said, with no change in
tone or expression.

 
          
Jack
lit up like a video game. “Felicia
Nelson!
Oh, Ida! Where are they staying?”

 
          
“This
morning,” Ida reported, “they both returned from
Boston
and closed themselves once again in
Mercer’s house in
Palm Beach
.”

 
          
Mary
Kate half turned at her desk to look searchingly at Ida. Jack viewed Ida
through narrowed eyes. “Up there yesterday?” he asked. “Back today? What is our
reading on this, Ida? What is this telling us?”

 
          
“So
far,” Ida said, “we have no line into the Hall of Records, there in the state
capital of
Massachusetts
. We’re working on it.”

 
          
“A
marriage certificate, Ida? Is that what’s at the end of this rainbow? Or is
that just wishful thinking?”

 
          
“We’ll
know,” Ida said, “very soon. You want me to follow up on Felicia Nelson, or on
Trend?”

           
Jack thought.
“Trend.”
he said. “But mention nothing about Felicia Nelson to our
co-workers.”

          
“Right.”

           
“Nor
Boston
.”

           
“Never heard of the place,” Ida
said.

 
          
It
was because she was getting nowhere with
Time
of The Hero
, and couldn’t even look at the manuscripts of the three other
partial novels buzzing away reproachfully at her in their desk drawer, that
Sara was reading the wall over the desk in her bedroom at the Sybarite Saturday
morning, and came again upon the license number and description of what, if she’d
been writing it up, she would surely have called “the death car.”

 
          
After
yesterday’s failure at Henry Reed Personnel—gosh, that fellow was good; how
had
he caught on so fast?—Sara had
phoned Jack from Miami, feeling very brought down, particularly so after the
heights she’d been flying on the impetus of the twins coup. He must have heard
it in her voice because, when she’d asked him what she should start on next,
he’d said, “Nothing. It’s Friday. Go home, Champ, take it easy for the weekend.
Monday morning, we’ll meet at the coalface.”

 
          
That
had been handsome of him, but by the time she got home from Miami it was
midafternoon and the beach she had access to was already in her building’s
shadow, so that was when she’d gone off to the local library to do some
necessary research for
Time of the Hero.
There were so many spy-novel details she didn’t know; descriptions of guns,
names of airports and railroad stations, histories of remoter Eastern European
provinces.

 
          
Sara
had spent a few absorbed hours in the fairly adequate library, then had
returned home to find Phyllis back from the paper, changing into cutoffs and a
T-shirt, packing pretty weekend clothes into her overnight bag. With a cheery
inconsequential word tossed in Sara’s direction, off she had blithely gone,
leaving the apartment to Sara for the weekend. (Phyllis had never said a word
about the man she was presumably going away with each of these weekends, nor
had Sara ever seen him, so she took it as given he was married.)

 
          
Friday
evening was spent alone with frozen food and television, but Saturday morning
dawned sunny and hot and with less of summer’s humidity than usual, so Sara at
last logged in some beach time, swimming away the muscle stiffness brought on
by travel and by sitting so long at desks. On the beach she met a guy named
Bob, a goodlooking stockbrokerage employee from Boston, down visiting his
grandparents for a week, they having an apartment at the Sybarite (most of the
Sybarite’s residents were considerably older than Sara and Phyllis), and they
were getting along very well until, at his question, she told him what she did
for a living, and he made fun of it.

           
It wasn’t so much his infantile
humor, as it was his assumption that she would
agree
with his simpleminded put-downs. Did he think working at the
Galaxy
didn’t take
brains?
didn’t take cleverness and quick thinking? didn’t take
nerve? Over five milhon copies of the
Galaxy
were sold every week, so they must be doing something right. She tried to say
all this, in fact even tried to tell him the story of the hundred-year-old
twins—her greatest triumph so far, by God—but his scorn had simply become more
and more mixed with incomprehension. “You’re putting me on!” he said, so many
times that she finally answered, “Oh, no, I’m not. Not even for a test drive.”
And she cut her swim-and-sun session short, leaving him gaping and openmouthed
on the beach.

 
          
Back
in the apartment, she made an early lunch, half muttering various deadly
remarks she should have thought to say to that Boston half-baked bean, and she
was about to settle at her desk with the results of yesterday’s research
session at the library when the doorbell rang.

 
          
Could
it possibly be
him
, the Wit of the
Beach? It was extremely unlikely, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a second shot
at him, to actually
deliver
all those
killer lines she’d thought of too late? Mind swirling with deliciously snide
remarks, she hurried to the living room, pulled open the door, and confronted a
telephone repairperson.

 
          
Yes,
that’s right, a woman. She was as young as Sara, and stunningly beautiful, with
great masses of red hair around a perfect oval face. She wore a T-shirt, cutoff
jeans, green-striped tube socks, heavy brown work boots and a broad work belt
laden with tools. “Sorry about this,” she said. “We’ve got a little problem one
flight up, and I need to get at the wire outside your kitchen window.”

 
          
“Oh,
sure,” Sara said. “Come on in.” And, because when a deskful of work calls, any
distraction will do, Sara followed the repairperson into the kitchen to see
what would happen next.

 
          
What
happened next was that they got into conversation. Sara’s curiosity got the
better of her, and she just simply had to ask it: “How did you wind up with a
job like
this?”

 
          
“Oh,
I love it,” the repairperson said. “My father and my brother both work for
Bell
, too. I hate offices and all that, and this
is interesting, it gets me out, I meet people, have all different kinds of
things to do.”

 
          
Sara
watched the girl perch on the kitchen windowsill and do things with a junction
box on the outer wall of the building. “I can’t quite think of the angle,” she
said, “but there’s got to be a story in you.”

 
          
The
repairperson grinned quizzically at her. “A story?”

 
          
“Well,
I work for a paper, you see, and—”

 
          
“A
paper? Which one, the
County?”

 
          
“No.”
Half embarrassed, sorry she’d even started this, Sara said, “The
Weekly Galaxy
, as a matter of—”

           
“No kidding! I
love
that paper!”

 
          
Sara
stared. “You do?”

 
          
“I
read it every week! You really work for them?”

 
          
“Well,
yeah,” Sara said, making the adjustment from embarrassment to a kind of weird
pride.

 
          
The
repairperson glowed, inside her forest of red hair. “And you think you could
get
me
in the
Galaxy?”

 
          
“Well,
I’m not sure, I don’t have the angle yet, the specific—Maybe we could talk a
little, uh . . .”

 
          
“Sure!
Just let me take care of this thing.”

 
          
“I’ll
get my camera.”

 
          
The
repairperson’s work on the junction box was brief, and during it Sara took
three or four pictures. As a woman and a feminist, she was opposed to cheesecake
on general principles, but this girl with the long bare legs ending in heavy
work boots, the slender body encased in a thick belt hung with all kinds of
tools, somehow raised the genre above itself. How to be a sex object while not
being a sex object.

 
          
Then
they sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and talked for fifteen or
twenty minutes, while Sara tried to find the hook that would turn this girl
into a
Weekly Galaxy
story; that is,
into a story she could sell Jack Ingersoll, which
he
could sell Massa, and which all of them could then sell to
Rewrite and the evaluators. Not easy.

           
In fact, not at all, at least not
right now. The girl—Betsy Harrigan, her name was—was somehow just too cheerful
and sunny and
competent
to be good
copy. She had no problems, she didn’t get hit on by the customers or resented
by her co-workers, she had no manifesto she wished to share with the world, and
no miracles had helped her attain her present position in life. “There’s
something”
Sara finally said, “I know
there’s a story in you somewhere, but I just can’t seem to figure out what it
is. Let me think about it and call you, okay?”

 
          
“Sure,”
Betsy said. “Anytime at all.”

 
          
“In
the meantime, I’ll get these pictures developed and talk it over with my
editor, and see what I can come up with.”

 
          
“I’m
real excited,” Betsy admitted, with a huge sparkly smile. “If I was in the
Weekly Galaxy,
my mom would just about
flip like a pancake.”

 
          
“I
imagine she would,” Sara agreed. “I’ll call you, I hope, in the next few weeks.”

 
          
Then
Betsy left, and Sara went back to her desk and did a brief memo about Betsy
Harrigan, telephone repairperson, in order to have
something
on paper while it was all still fresh in her head. And
then, at long last, she turned to her novel,
Time of the Hero.

 
          
And
it just wouldn’t come. The damn book simply refused to happen.

 
          
Is
there anything more frustrating? Here on paper was the book so far. Here on
other papers were the research items, the data, the factules out of which to
construct the rest of the story. Here in her brain lay the rest of the story,
awaiting, at least in broad outline. But she just couldn’t
concentrate,
couldn’t think about the book for more than a few
seconds at a time, couldn’t seem to compose sentences that would push the story
further into existence. Everything distracted her, as of course Betsy Harrigan
had distracted her; now it could be a stray passing cloud beyond the window, or
merely the blue of the cloudless sky; the sharpness of her pencils; the various
cartoons and messages and photos tacked to the wall over her desk. And at last
she found herself reading once again about the dark Blue Buick
Riviera
, Dade county license 277-ZR(G/Q/0)).

 
          
What
had ever happened in that situation? Why hadn’t the police interviewed her? It
had been nearly two weeks now; was the murder solved?

 
          
Here
was a distraction worthy of the name. With hardly any guilt feelings at all,
Sara reached for the phone directory, looked up the number for the local
newspaper, dialed, asked for Editorial, and got nowhere. No one she talked to
knew anything about anything, and when the third person suggested she call back
during business hours on Monday—the sentence “There’s nobody here right now”
suggested a pretty miserable level of self-image—she gave up, went back to the
phone directory, and called the police.

 
          
Here
the problem was one of too much eagerness, rather than the newspaper’s too
little. Sara had the hardest time convincing the man she wasn’t trying to
report
a murder. “It happened twelve
days ago,” she insisted. “It’s
been
reported.” Not, however, to the town police. When Sara finally made her
question clear, the answer was that there was no record in that department of
the crime.
“Where
did this take
place?” the man at last asked her, and when she described the location, out on
the highway leading to the
Weekly Galaxy
,
he said, with obvious relief, “Oh,
we
wouldn’t
have that anyway. That’s not our jurisdiction. Try the state police.” And he
hung up before she could thank him.

 
          
But
the state police didn’t have it either, and suggested the county sheriff, who
also didn’t have it. “I really don’t understand this,” Sara said to the man at
the sheriff’s number.
“Somebody
has
to know about a dead man beside the highway.”

           
“Did you call
Shore
Hospital
? Sometimes they—”

 
          
Knowing
instantly that calls to all the area hospitals would
really
be a waste of time, Sara said, “The man was shot in the
head
. He was
dead.
A hospital would have reported a gunshot homicide without—”

 
          
“Gunshot?”
A faint echo of disbelief twanged through the phone wires and into Sara’s ear.
“Are you absolutely sure of that, ma’am?”

 
          
“Of
course I am,” Sara said, being calm with an effort, displaying her professional
poise. “He was shot once in the forehead. The bullet broke the skull in back,
but didn’t come all the way through.”