Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (21 page)

 
          
Around
back?

 
          
Tire
marks and an oil stain showed where a car was usually parked on the packed
earth beside the house, amid a scraggle of weeds. Sara walked around that side
to the back, seeing every blind lowered and shut, and in frustration more than
hope she rattled the knob of the back door, which yawned silently open at her
touch.

 
          
The
kitchen was beyond, in dim gray light, like a cave beneath shallow water. Sara
extended one foot forward, touching the old pre-Mondrian linoleum lightly, as
though expecting alarm whistles or a trapdoor. When nothing happened, she
shifted her weight slowly to that foot, and then she was inside, and it was all
right.

 
          
Well,
not all
right;
but at least she was
successfully within. She brought the other foot along, and stood in the
entrance with her hand still on the doorknob as she leaned forward slightly to
call, “Hello?”

 
          
No
answer. The spoken word sank into the house as into black cotton. There was a
kind of fuzziness in the silence that suggested a long-empty house. “Mr. Taggart?”
Sara called, getting more personal, and when that produced no response as well,
she released the knob, committing herself to the invasion, and took another
step into the kitchen.

 
          
Should
she close the door? No, leave it open; otherwise, it could make her look like a
burglar.

 
          
To
whom? To anybody. Pushing mythical interrogators from her mind, Sara looked
around at the kitchen, which was plain and ordinary and old-fashioned. A white
plastic table and four chairs, the usual appliances, a small portable electric
fan atop the refrigerator. Closed Venetian blinds over the double window above
the sink. No dirty dishes, no messes. An oval-arched doorway on the other side
showed parts of a dark hall.

 
          
Sara
crossed the innocent kitchen and stood in the oval doorway. The hall was plain,
with dull blue walls, bare wood floor, pale sound-absorbent squares on the
ceiling, and the front door at the far end. No furniture, no pictures, no hooks
for coats. A broad doorway on the left, with rounded upper comers to echo this
oval doorway, showed a comer of living room. Three gray wooden doors were
closed on the right.

 
          
A
combination of the silence in the house and a lifetime of movies and television
led Sara to expect a dead body behind every door she opened, which made her
move very slowly indeed; but there were no dead bodies here. The first door on
the right led to a narrow bathroom with old white china fixtures and a black
and white tile floor. The second led to a Spartan bedroom, with clothing in the
closet and in the bureau drawers, all of it well used and shabby, but neat. A
sweater and shirt were tossed over the chair, a pair of slippers leaned
together on the worn small mg, and an empty glass stood on the bedside table
with last month’s
Penthouse
. Clearly,
Taggart had not moved out.

 
          
The
remaining door on the right led to a tiny front bedroom with drawn shades and
no furniture, but crammed with cartons, suitcases and bits and pieces of junk,
including one automobile tire and an empty aluminum beer keg. On the other side
of the hall, the living room’s used and mismatched furniture was grouped around
a large console television set.

 
          
There
was nowhere else to look, no basement, no garage, no sheds. Taggart was not
home. He was at work, or on vacation, or in a nearby bar, or at the movies.
Somewhere with his car, in fact. Sara went back to the kitchen and copied down the
number from the wall phone beside the refrigerator before departure, so she
could call from time to time until she found him in, then took one last look
around that room, and opened the refrigerator door.

 
          
Still
no bodies. Several jars—ketchup, pickles, things like that—a package of
All-Bran kept in here to protect it from the prevailing humidity, a
blue-fuzz-covered half lemon on a saucer, and a quart carton of milk.

 
          
It
was the rotted lemon that made Sara pick up the milk to see if that had gone
bad, too, but she didn’t have to bring it all the way to her nose to tell. Just
squeezing the carton in lifting it released a putrescence strong enough to close
her throat. She quickly put it down and slammed the refrigerator door, and
stood there feeling sick.

 
          
How
long had it been since Taggart—or anyone—had looked in there? Sara turned away
and ran her fingertip across the white plastic tabletop and left a new bright
road in the dust. She crossed to the sink and turned on the cold water, and
orange rust ran for a second or two before the water turned clear.

 
          
Taggart
hadn’t been home in a couple of weeks. He hadn’t moved out, but he hadn’t come
home either, not since— Probably, not since the day Sara had reported the
murder.

 
          
Had
he run away? Was it because he was the guilty party after all, had she actually
done the absurd thing of reporting a murder to the murderer? Or did he have
reason to believe he too was in danger? Had Sara’s report of the dead man in
the dark blue Buick
Riviera
been the signal to Taggart that trouble was coming his way? Or had
someone bribed him to disappear?

 
          
It
did seem certain by now, one way or another, that Taggart had
some
sort of knowledge of what was going
on. Now more than ever, Sara wanted to talk to him. But where had he run?

 
          
There
was no indication in the house, not in a cursory lookthrough; no notes on a pad
by the phone, nothing like that. In his employee file back at the paper there’d
be more information on Taggart, at the very least a listing of next of kin;
surely there was a way she could get a look at that. Deciding to check into
that tomorrow, Sara left the house by the kitchen door—pulling it shut but
leaving it unlocked behind her, as it had been —walked around to the front, and
found there a woman in running shoes, blue jeans, a faded apron, a cartoon
T-shirt and dark sunglasses, who was leaning against the fender of the Peugeot,
arms folded in a declaration of grim and implacable determination. “Hello,”
Sara said, when it seemed certain the eyes hidden behind the sunglasses were
focused on her.

 
          
“Hello,
yourself,” the woman said. “And where’s Jimmy Taggart?” She was probably about
forty, stringy and bony as range cattle, and with a cigarette-and-whiskey
hoarseness in her voice.

 
          
“Well,
I—” Sara said, nonplussed. “Who are you?”

 
          
“The
landlady,” the woman said. She continued to lean on the Peugeot, arms folded,
making it clear Sara would not leave here until given permission. The woman
said, “What are you, a daughter or something?”

 
          
“That’s
right,” Sara agreed. “Sara Taggart. How do you do?”

 
          
“Pissed
off, that’s how I do,” the woman said. “Carol Bridges is my name, and your
father owes me two weeks rent, thirty dollars cash loan, and one hell of an
explanation.”

 
          
He
was sleeping with this woman, Sara thought. It always astonished her to run
across evidence that people more than a few years older than herself still
engaged in sex. And still made a mess of it, too. “I really don’t know where,
uh, Pop is,” she said, the hesitation caused by her realization at the last
second that any child of Taggart’s would surely call him Pop rather than the
Dad she’d been about to say. Hurrying on, she said, “He didn’t know I was
coming, in fact I didn’t know myself until just, uh, I’m just driving through,
just thought I’d take a chance, and, uh . . .” I’m just babbling, is what I’m
just, she told herself. You do this for a living, you he to people seven hours
a day at the
Galaxy;
get back into
gear. So she clamped her mouth shut, having already said too much.

 
          
The
woman’s manner was suspicious, certainly, but it seemed a generic unfocused
suspicion rather than one specifically aimed at Sara. Squinting behind her
sunglasses, “Maybe you should give me your phone number,” she said. “In case I
have to get in touch.”

           
“In touch? For what?”

 
          
“You
want to pay the back rent,” the woman suggested, “bring us up to date, that’s
okay, too. Otherwise, there’s gonna come a point when Jimmy’s stuff goes
out
, and I rent this place to somebody
else.”

 
          
“Oh,
sure, of course,” Sara said, thinking there might be some advantage to having
this link with Taggart’s last known address. “And you can give me your number,
too.”

 
          
“Sure.”
The woman unfolded her arms, reached into her apron, and brought out a Holiday
Inn memo pad and Sheraton Hotel pen. “I just live down the block here,” she
said.

 
          
And
you’re keeping an eye on the house, Sara thought. She said, “I’ll only be
around a couple of days, I’m actually working up in
Charleston
now, but I can give you the number where
I’m staying.”

 
          
“That’s
fine.” Her expression behind the sunglasses was alert, but not dubious. She
quickly wrote her own name and address and phone number, ripped that sheet off
the memo pad, and handed it to Sara, who said, “My friend is Sara Joslyn, you
could ask for either of us.” She reeled off her home number, which the woman
wrote down, and then said, “If Da—Pop does come back, would you give me a
call?”

 
          
“Well,
I’ll tell
him
to,” she said. “He’s
your father.”

           
“Yes, but you know how he is,” Sara
said, smiling, trying to make them co-conspirators. “A little forgetful, a
little flaky sometimes.”

 
          
“That’s
your father, all right,” the woman agreed, falling in with the conspiracy at
once. “All right, I’ll call the minute I see him.”

 
          
“Thanks
a lot,” Sara said, and started around the Peugeot toward the driver’s side.

 
          
The
woman turned, facing Sara, no longer leaning on the car. “But,” she said. “If
he doesn’t come back by this weekend, you be prepared on Sunday to come get his
junk, or I’ll just dump it in the street. I got bills of my own, you know. I
got to rent this place.”

 
          
“Oh,
I’m sure he’ll be back by then,” Sara said. “You know Pop.”

 
          
Ever
since his divorce, David Levin, special projects editor at
Trend
, The Magazine for the Way We Live This Instant, had lived in
a fine little apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village, on a quiet block
of small brick houses and slate sidewalks, all so yeastily authentic that
movies were being shot there all the time, which was just about the only
drawback the place had. That, and the fact that David was not himself living in
one of the charming old nineteenth-century brick houses, but in one of the
mid-twentieth-century postwar apartment buildings the old brick houses were
being torn down for before the Landmarks Commission had come along. Still, when
he
looked out his window it was charm
he saw; if the people who actually lived in the charming houses were .reduced
to having his dull apartment building in their view that was just tough
patooties.

 
          
The
mail was delivered on David’s block every morning between nine-thirty and ten,
and his position at
Trend
was
sufficiently powerful that he could more or less define his own hours, so he
left the house every morning at about ten-fifteen, picked up his mail, took the
7th Ave IRT up to midtown, and was in the office before eleven, leaving plenty
of time to deal with all phone messages and other problems before lunch.

 
          
This
particular Friday morning at the end of July, with the temperature and humidity
both hovering around 86, and it’s still
morning
,
for Christ’s sake, David was a bit later than his usual routine, which annoyed
someone he didn’t even know yet, and which he would pay for in ways he would
never understand. It was after ten-thirty before he took the elevator down from
his top— sixth—floor apartment, keyed open his mailbox, withdrew his daily
clump of mail, tossed in the wastebasket kept here in the lobby for that purpose
all the throwaways and pitches and catalogs and CAR-RT SORTs that flesh is heir
to, and stepped outside onto quiet Bank Street, looking at his remaining mail
so intendy that he never saw her coming, on her bicycle, on the sidewalk, until
a horrible squawling voice scrawked, “Watch it!” and she smashed into him hard
enough to bounce him into the air and send him sprawling over the ranked masses
of garbage cans lining the building front. (That was his punishment for being
late. Originally, Ida Gavin had meant merely to bump him a little.)

 
          
The
garbage cans toppled, and dumped David to the quaint but nevertheless hard
slate sidewalk. The bicycle, riderless and on its own, wobbled an amazingly
long time before it fell on him. His mail was strewn far and wide. And some
woman, sitting splay-legged on the sidewalk in front of him, was yelling, “Why
don’t you watch where you’re going?”

 
          
David
stared at her in stunned surprise, battered and confused and totally unable to
catch up. “What?” he managed. “But I was—”

 
          
“How
long you been in
New York
, you idiot?” the woman shrieked. What a loud and grating voice she had.
“Are you a
tourist?”
she yelled.

 
          
Like
most New Yorkers, David was from
Omaha
,
Nebraska
, but was a real New Yorker now. (All together: “Oh, he’s from O-ma-ha
Ne- bras-ka, But he’s a real New Yaw-kuh now.”) An accusation of being a
tourist, therefore, struck at the very core of his most deeply hidden and most
powerful insecurity. (All together: “Oh, Man-hattan’s in his vision, But
Ne-bras-ka’s in his blood.”) Pushing the bicycle off himself so he could sit up
and affect a bit of dignity, “Certainly not!” he cried. “I live here, that’s my
buil—”

 
          
“Are
you looking up my
skirt?”

           
Astonished, David looked up her
skirt. That color is called peach, isn’t it? “No!”

 
          
“Well?”
she yelled, sitting there on the slate, legs wide, hands on hips, voice
bouncing and echoing off the building fronts, “are you going to help me up or
what?
You knock me over, you sneak looks
at—”

 
          
“Never!”
Embarrassed, frightened, in physical pain, wanting only for this horrible
experience to be
over,
David
struggled to his feet vaguely aware of surprise that all his parts seemed to be
working. “I’ll be happy to help you,” he said, clambering through her bicycle,
praying she wouldn’t yell anymore, “I certainly never intended to—”

 
          
“Watch
that!” she yelled, as he slid his hands under her armpits to help her up.
“Don’t get grabby!”

 
          
Oh,
enough was enough. Releasing her, “Madam,” David said (a deadly insult, that),
“you
asked
me to—”

 
          
“Wait
a minute,” she snapped, utterly selfabsorbed, twisting around. “You broke
something, I know you did. You live here?”

 
          
Bewildered
again, thrown off balance yet
again,
“Yes,”
he said, pointing vaguely upward, “on the top—

 
          
“Okay,
okay, carry me in,” she ordered, still as loud as ever, bossy, self-important,
paying attention to nothing but herself, “carry me in, we’ll see what— Carry me
in/”

 
          
He
reached for her again, not knowing what else to do, anything to shut her up,
and she glared hot rage at him, yelling, “And
don't
get grabby!

           
Recoiling, he said, “I don’t see how
you expect me to—”

 
          
But
she never listened to a word he said, never. Staring upward, she said, “You’re
on the top floor? All right, we’ll make it. There’s an elevator in there?”

 
          
“You
want me to carry you to my
apartment?”

 
          
“So,”
she yelled, volume and outrage both reaching new peaks,
“that’s
the way it is! You knock me down, now you’ll just leave me
here for muggers and rapists and white slav—”

 
          
“All
right, all right, all right,” he said, desperate to stop that awful voice,
lunging forward again to help her to her feet. And this time he managed it
without any more shrieks and squawks about his being grabby, even though his
right hand did inadvertently touch her right breast for one second before he
hurriedly shifted position.

 
          
Take
her inside, that was the plan, sit her down, get her away from the public
street and calm her down, give her some coffee—or a drink, if she wanted one at
this time of the morning— phone the office, get rid of her as soon as possible,
wait a good five minutes—no, a good ten, maybe even fifteen minutes—after she
left before essaying another departure, and
still
get to the office in plenty of time for lunch. (Lunch today, he remembered, was
with their Mafia specialist reporter, a man always full of wonderfully
unprintable stories. He was looking forward to it.)

           
The woman leaned heavily on him, and
they staggered to the building entrance, and were halfway through the outer
door when she started screaming and shrieking again, yelling, “Don’t leave my
bike!
Now you’re gonna get my
bike
stole!”

 
          
Take
the dreadful harridan’s
bicycle
up to
the apartment? Oh, anything, anything, just let this terrible sequence be over,
let it be something to laugh about with Nick at lunch. “I’ll get your
bike”
he said, exasperated but
flummoxed, and propped her against the inner door while he went out for the
damn thing.

 
          
What
a way to start the day.

 
          
What
a way to start the day, Jack thought in no little satisfaction.
Nine
yesses from
Massa
and his red pencil,
six
stories from the mighty Jack Ingersoll team in this week’s
brand-new
Galaxy
just arrived here on
his desk, and an actual smile from Jacob Harsch this morning as the man
murmured, “Well done,” in connection with the John Michael Mercer/Felicia
Nelson meeting-and- romance story. Back in his squaricle, basking in unfamiliar
contentment, Jack dictated a letter to the rapid and nearly cheerful Mary Kate:
“I have reassured myself that there is no reporter by that name at the
Weekly Galaxy.
We of the
Galaxy
maintain the highest standards of
journalistic integrity, and would never stoop to the . . .”

 
          
Jack
trailed off and looked up as Binx entered the squaricle, holding the new
Galaxy
in his hand and looking troubled.
“Hello,” Binx said.

           
“Morning, Binx,” Jack said. “Rough
this morning.” Only three of Binx’s story ideas had survived
Massa
’s red pencil.

 
          
“Well,
that’s what happens,” Binx said, shrugging it off with uncharacteristic calm.
Had Binx given in at last to his despair? It would certainly be restful for
him.

 
          
“Next
week,” Jack promised him, and moved a hand vaguely.

 
          
“Sure.”
Binx held up the new
Galaxy.
“Jack,”
he said, “this romance story about John Michael Mercer and Felicia Nelson.”

 
          
“Isn’t
it nice? The Harsch smiled upon me, it was quite an experience.”

 
          
“It’s
a real coup,” Binx agreed. “But when I was reading it, something kept bothering
me.”

 
          
“It
went through the fact checkers like prune juice,” Jack assured him. “I’ve got a
best friend on tape.”

 
          
“Sure
you do. But I was reading it, you know,” Binx said, holding the paper up,
frowning at it as though he might read it again in Jack’s presence, to show him
what the process looked like, “I was reading it, and I kept thinking, this is
familiar, I
know
this story. And then
I got it.”

 
          
Jack
gave him a careful look. “Yeah?”

 
          
“It’s
me”
Binx said, staring at Jack
wideeyed, like the steer in the stockyard just after it’s been given the
stunning blow. “This is
my
meeting
with Marcy,” Binx said, rattling the paper, “the mix-up with the car keys, and
getting the street wrong, and all the rest of it. Jack, you sold the paper my
life story!”

 
          
Jack
took a deep breath and faced Binx honestly and squarely. He was aware, in the
periphery of his vision, of Mary Kate, not looking at him. “Binx,” he said,
“ask yourself this question: Would my best friend do a tiling like that to me?”

 
          
Binx
nodded. “I have, Jack,” he said. “I have asked myself that question.”
Poker-faced, he dropped the
Galaxy
on
Jack’s desk and left the squaricle.

 
          
Jack
watched him go. He sighed. This too will pass. Turning to Mary Kate, he said,
“Where were we?”

 
          
Mary
Kate leaned forward over her typewriter and read: “We of the
Galaxy
maintain the highest standards of
journalistic integrity, and would never stoop to the.” She settled back into
her chair and looked at Jack. “You stopped there,” she said.

 
          
Ida
Gavin, in a big blue terry-cloth robe, poked and pried around David Levin’s
apartment, ignoring the view out the living room windows of charming old
nineteenth-century redbrick houses. Much of this living room was lined with
bookcases. The furniture, low and pale and bulky, had been chosen by the
consultant at Bloomingdale’s to suggest a nonaggressive but self-confident
masculinity, but in fact it made the room look as though self-indulgent
Munchkins lived here. Ida opened drawers and leafed through magazines and

 
 
          
looked
in cabinets, casual but relentless, and continued to poke and pry when David
Levin walked in, one towel wrapped around his waist while he briskly rubbed his
hair with another. She was aware of him, but ignored him, and kept on
searching.