Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (26 page)

 
          
In
his small and messy kitchen, Jack Ingersoll, wearing an apron and a fine
dusting of flour over his jeans and polo shirt, baked a cake. It was Wednesday,
the fourth of August, and yet he was not at work, and fuck it. Humming a slow
and erratic version of “Moanin’ Low,” Jack stood at his kitchen counter and
combined flour and eggs and sugar and butter and, oh, just lots of good things.
White flour floated in the air. And fuck it.

 
          
The
doorbell rang. Jack frowned in that direction. “More good news,” he muttered
and reached for the measuring cup, and the doorbell rang again. “Life calls,”
he told himself. Grabbing up a floury dish towel, he made his way through the
house, drying his hands, while the doorbell rang yet a third time. “Very
impatient, this life,” Jack told himself, and opened his front door, and Sara
was standing there, looking awfully goddamn chipper, under the circumstances.
“Yeah?” he said.

 
          
She
looked him up and down, apron and flour and dish towel and all. “Which one are
you?” she asked. “Laurel or Hardy?”

 
          
“I
gave at the office,” he told her.

 
          
“So
did I.” Unbidden, she entered the house past him, saying, “Mary Kate said you
took the day off because you were gloomy.”

 
          
“That
Mary Kate,” Jack said. “She just talk and talk and talk.” Accepting the
inevitable, he shut the front door.

 
          
“She
wanted to phone you the good news,” Sara said, “but I said no, I wanted to tell
you myself, in person.”

 
          
“Good
news?”

 
          
“We
have a free vacation,” she said, grinning at him.

           
He looked at her. “A free vacation.
I’m fired? That’s the good news?”

 
          
“To
Martha’s Vineyard
, an island off the coast of
New Bedford
,
Massa
—”

 
          
“I
know
where Mar—” he said, then woke
up. “
Martha’s
Vineyard
?
The Mercer Wedding?”

 
          
“You
got it.”

 
          
“But—
But
Boy's
doing the Mercer wedding!”

           
“Not anymore,” she said. “The Jack
Ingersoll team is running that story now.”

           
Jack stared at her.
“You
did this thing?”

 
          
“It
is true, she said modestly,” she said modestly.

 
          
“Next,”
he said, rubbing his hands on his apron, “you’ll tell me you got Binx his job
back.”

 
          
“No,
sorry, my powers don’t reach that far. I wish they did. Binx is still fired. On
the other hand, so is Phyllis.”

 
          
“Ah,
well, the living must go on. Tell me what you did, Sara.”

 
          
Reaching
into her shoulder bag, she brought out a manila envelope, saying, “First,
there’s a little story we
must
get
into the paper. And we’ve really got to get this one in there, Jack.”

 
          
“Tell
me,” he said cautiously.

 
          
“Twenty-four
years ago,” Sara said, opening the manila envelope, “a Mrs. Kathleen Harrigan
was about to have her fourth child, when in a dream she saw that she would have
a daughter, which was all right, but then in the dream it seemed to her she
could see that daughter hanging from a pole, which was less all right.”

           
“Discomfiting,” Jack agreed.

 
          
“Twenty-four
years later,” Sara said, “that dream has come true in the nicest possible way.
Mrs. Harrigan
did
have a daughter,
named
Elizabeth
, called Betsy by family and friends, of
whom she has many, being such a sweet and sunny girl—”

 
          
“My
my,” Jack said. “Sign me up.”

 
          
“And
Betsy Harrigan,” Sara said, taking a number of eight-by-ten glossy photos from
the envelope and handing them to Jack, “became a telephone company
repairperson.”

 
          
Jack
looked at the pictures. “Mmmm,” he murmured. “Baby, baby, fix my phone.”

 
          
“Enjoy
the pictures,” Sara told him, with a faint edge in her voice. “Take your time.”

 
          
Jack
looked up from the pictures, comprehension dawning. “Telephone repairperson,”
he said. “You tapped Mercer’s phone!”

 
          
“My
own extension,” she corrected, “in a car out on the street. I can now tell
you”—she checked each item off on her fingers—“what
date
the lovebirds are flying out over the ocean, what
hotel
they’re staying at, the wedding
date, the name and religious affiliation of the person who will perform the—”

 
          
“Sara!”
Jack cried, knees buckling. “Don’t make jokes!”

 
          
Plucking
the photos of Betsy Harrigan from his nerveless fingers, Sara said, “You want
more? I phoned the minister. We have an exclusive interview with him right
after the wedding, and all we have to do is publish a little piece he’s written
about the Irish question.”

           
“Taking which side?”

 
          
“Does
it matter?” Sara asked. “But
I’ve
got
the date and the hotel. It turned out Boy already had
Martha’s Vineyard
, but that doesn’t matter anymore.
I’ve
got the exclusive with the
minister, and I’m
your
reporter, and
that means
we
are going to
Martha’s Vineyard
!”

 
          
His
look of delight dimmed, as a cloud passed over. “The interview,” he said.

 
          
“It’s
in the bag,” she assured him. “He’s the darlingest old minister you ever—”

 
          
“Not
that one.
Massa
, remember? He decided already what the
wedding story is. The interview with John Michael Mercer on why he finally
after all these years decided to get married. The exclusive interview with
us.”

 
          
“Oh,”
Sara said, going under the same cloud. “When John Michael Mercer sees the
Galaxy ’’
Jack pointed out, “he doesn’t
give interviews. He calls the dogs.”

           
“I remember,” Sara agreed. But then
that pesky cloud passed on from her face and she brightened again, saying, “One
day at a time, right? We got this far, didn’t we? So we’ll get the rest.”

 
          
Jack
looked at her. “You really think so?”

           
“What I really think is,” she told
him, “this is
fun.
This is the most
fun I’ve ever had in my entire life. Absolutely nothing in this world matters
except that we beat Boy Cartwright to the John Michael Mercer wedding.”

           
Grinning crookedly, Jack said, “Not
even your murdered man beside the highway?”

 
          
Sara
laughed. “On what series is he a regular?”

           
“None.”

           
“Then forget him! We’re on our way to
Martha’s Vineyard
, that’s all, and whatever
Massa
wants from us, we’ll
get
it!”

 
          
“By
golly, Sara,” Jack said, gazing upon her in wonder, “you are
not
the girl who walked into the
Galaxy
office last month and told me you
were a real professional reporter.”

 
          
“You’re
damn right I’m not,” she said. “I don’t have a serious bone in my body.”

 
          
“I
want to put my arms around you,” he said, looking down at himself, “but I’d get
you all over flour.”

 
          
“Flour
from a gentleman is always nice,” she said.

 
          
Hours
later, in bed, in the semidark, he said, “Tell me one thing. Were those twins
legit?”

           
“Of
course
they were,” she said.

 
          
Have
you ever tried to find a hotel room on
Martha’s Vineyard
in August? Martha’s Vineyard, be it
explained, is not a vineyard and doesn’t belong to Martha, but is a twenty-mile
by ten-mile island in the Atlantic, off the Massachusetts coast, four miles
south of Cape Cod, with a year-round population of fewer than twelve thousand souls.
The moneyed literary, showbiz and other celebrity sorts of the American
Northeast, or at least those of them too dignified for the Hamptons, invade the
Vineyard every spring, quintupling its population, only to be driven back into
the sea every fall, and August is the absolute height of their incursion. Every
ferry making the three- quarter-hour trip across from
Falmouth
Heights
or Woods Hole carries another forty or
fifty cars and as many people as the law will allow. Most of these people have
made their housing arrangements months or years before, but now and again an
innocent disembarks, asks where a room might be found, and is answered with
rolling eyes and pitying smiles.

 
          
There
are three airfields on the island, only one of them normally open to commercial
aircraft, and the visitors who arrive there also sometimes amuse the local
cabbies by asking to be taken to “a nice hotel, not too expensive, but on the
water.”
Everything
on
Martha’s Vineyard
is too expensive, but then again,
everything is on the water. And everything is booked solid until Labor Day.

 
          
Just
after four o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, August the fourth—not very
long after Sara Joslyn, fifteen hundred miles away in Florida, put Jack
Ingersoll’s mind at rest in re those hundred-year-old twins—a small charter
plane from Boston landed at the main airport on the Vineyard, and its three
passengers not only wanted rooms for themselves starting today, they also
wanted rooms for
twenty-four people
starting tomorrow. In addition, for purposes other than accommodation, they
wanted a house. They also wanted a number of rental cars and telephones and
other things. And they wanted everything
now.

 
          
Most
people would have gotten nowhere with such a quixotic quest, but most people
are not Ida Gavin. She was accompanied, as the advance guard of the
Galaxy
invasion, by Harry Razza and by a
Boston
stringer of the
Weekly Galaxy
called Sherman Sheridan. Ida left the plane moving
fast, and when she returned to the airport at one o’clock the next afternoon,
to meet the larger charter plane containing Jack and Sara and the entire
Ingersoll team, plus several photographers and a lot of equipment, it was with
only the faintest edge to her voice—residue of combats won—that she greeted
Jack with the words “All set.”

 
          
All
set. Through bribes, bluff, blandishments and browbeating, Ida had managed to
secure nine rooms in the motels along
Main Street
and
West Chop Road
in Vineyard Haven, the town where the ferry
comes in. Three more rooms—these very expensive, and exceedingly tough to get
hold of—had been obtained in inns down around Edgar- town, the posh heart of
the island. The house they also needed for their nefarious purposes had been
found and rented, and was even now being adapted for their use, over in Oak
Bluff, the other side of
Vineyard
Haven
Harbor
. (Oak Bluff is—I’ll have to say this
quiedy, and away from the children, because of course such things don’t exist
anymore —the black neighborhood on the island.
Rich
black, but black.)

 
          
To
be put into all these rooms, assembled with such grim determination, a motley
crew indeed had now descended on the Vineyard. There was, to begin with, Jack
Ingersoll and his team: the eager Sara Joslyn, the arid Ida Gavin, the
pessimistic Don Grove, the irrepressible Down Under Trio and even the team’s
resident spaceman, Chauncey Chapperell, who this time had been called back from
Port Radium on Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, where he had
been sent in pursuit of the North American cousin of the Himalayan yeti. (A
tall, cadaverous, wild-haired, huge-eyed creature who appeared to have been put
together with low-quality rubber bands, Chauncey Chapperell might readily have been
mistaken for a yeti himself, if he would wear a fur coat and if anyone knew the
sound of the yeti’s mating cry.)

 
          
Supplementing
this core group were eighteen more Galaxians of various sorts. There were nine
photographers, two of them full-time employees of the paper from Florida, the
other seven sometime contract workers from New England, all nine of such a
level of disreputability and disorganization as to make Sara’s bag lady
photographer of Indianapolis look like Meryl Streep playing Greer Garson. Also
from Florida were four secretaries from the secretary pool, known for their
efficiency and silence and loyalty and low self-esteem and miserable sex lives,
while also from New England were five more stringers, or local pieceworkers for
the
Galaxy
and other publications,
these last all similar to Sherman Sheridan, the stringer who’d flown in with
Ida and Harry Razza yesterday. That is, all were hairy, sloppy, distracted, and
probably infested with bugs; all were themselves failed scientists or
philosophers or mathematicians, whose occasional work for the
Galaxy
consisted of speaking about
Galaxy
-type scientific concerns
—extraterrestrials, cancer cures, unlikely pregnancies—with members of that
vast unworldly technocracy of professors and scientists and engineers in the
greater Boston/Cambridge area; and not a one of them knew
the slightest thing
about American popular culture of the second
half of the twentieth century. They could describe the theory behind the
invention of television—if television hadn’t already been invented, they could
probably invent it—but none of them ever actually
watched
anything on it. To them, “John Michael Mercer” and “
Breakpoint
’ were words in some foreign
language they had no desire to learn. So they stood about, scratching and
blinking, and waited to obey orders they already knew they would not comprehend.

 
          
Once
all these stray molecules had deplaned and were standing around amid their
discreditable luggage, Jack gestured at them and said to Ida, “You’ve looked
the area over. Will they have any trouble blending in?”

 
          
Ida
considered the question. “K-Mart,” she decided, “meets J. Press.”

 
          
Four
p.m.
Jack and Sara, having reassured themselves
that their rooms at the inn in Edgartown were adjoining, with a connecting
door, drove over to Oak Bluffs to look at the house Ida had found. Jack’s
rental car was a maroon Chevette, the same model and color as the car Sara had
driven that very first day in
Florida
, when she’d gone out to the
Galaxy
to find work, so new and naive
she’d thought the people there would give a damn about a murdered man beside
the road. That seemed so long ago! She’d learned so much, she’d done so much,
she’d even managed the hundred-year-old twin con under the very eyes of Jack
and the fact checkers and Mr. Harsch and
everybody.
This maroon Chevette on Martha’s Vine-

 
          
yard
was a symbol. It said to her: “You’ve come a long way, baby. By golly, you’re
good”

 
          
Driving
across the island, remembering, Sara said, “Do you know what Henry Reed said to
me?”

 
          
“Huh?
Who?”

 
          
“The
man who does John Michael Mercer’s hiring.”

 
          
“Oh,
him. He said no, didn’t he?”

 
          
“When
I told him I was new, he said, ‘You’ll be something when you get your growth.’
”

 
          
Jack
laughed, and looked at her, and then looked thoughtful, and then grinned. “He
was right,” he said.

 
          
Sara
returned the grin. She felt he was proud of her. “I
am
good,” she said.

 
          
In
front of the address in Oak Bluffs were parked three phone company trucks, a
rental furniture company van, a Land Rover, a few more rented cars and a
chrome-quilted small truck blazoned with the name
cadet catering.
Phone company linemen, none as pretty as Betsy
Harrigan, worked on the roof. Two burly bruisers carried a long table into the
house. Jack parked among all the other vehicles, and paused to sing, “Just b
efore
the battle, Mother.” Then they got
out of the car.

 
          
The
house itself was a small two-story gray-shingled place with white trim, in a
very
New England
fishing village style; appropriate enough.
Oak Bluffs having originally been a fishing village, and the whole island still
being in
New England
. The house was among the less desirable
properties roundabout, however, being a good seventy feet from the ocean and
less than a mile from the public state beach.

 
          
The
little house had a narrow porch, with gray floor and white railing. Jack and
Sara followed the bruisers with the table across this, Jack held open the
charming old front door with beveled- glass lights, and they entered the
stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’
A
Night at the Opera.

 
          
The
original living room furniture, down to the carpet, had been removed, toted
upstairs and stored in the bedrooms up there. The rented furniture replacing
it, and still in the process of being delivered, consisted mostly of long plain
tables and innumerable folding chairs, plus a few tall metal filing cabinets
and a number of large clunky wooden wastebaskets. More of these items had been
rented than could fit into the house, but that was all right; they shoehomed
everything in anyway.

 
          
And
among the furniture moved the people. To one side, at the moment, Ida was
nailing a large map of
Martha’s Vineyard
to the wall with huge common nails. Beyond her, two men wearing silver
warm-up jackets that made them look like the Cadet Catering truck outside—and
that even said
cadet catering
on the
back—were dealing out onto one of the long tables plates and trays of
sandwiches and doughnuts and other inedibles. At the other tables, reporters
and stringers and photographers and secretaries sat and ate or typed or drank
coffee out of cardboard cups or played with their photographic equipment or
talked to one another or (in Chauncy Chapperell’s case) slept snorily, sprawled
forward with one cheek pressed to the table. Three phone company installers
crawled around on the floor as though looking for any number of lost contact
lenses. The furniture rental bruisers opened table legs that kept bumping into
people who were either too intimidated or too disassociated to complain. And
Bob Sangster, thoughtfully scratching his big nose, sidestepped his way through
it all to say to Sara, “There’s a priest for you next door, in what was once
the dining room.”

 
          
“A
priest? You mean a minister?”

           
“How would I know?” Bob asked. “I’m
just a simple Aussie.”

           
“Don’t you have ministers in
Australia
?”

“Certainly not,
they’re all poofters. Yours is a very clean old body, though.”

           
“My minister,” decided Sara, nodding
at Jack. Jack said, “The officiator at the wedding?”

           
“And solver of the Irish question.
See you.” Sara went away to the other room, and Jack crossed through the
scumble and flux to a long table bearing a dozen identical black rotary-dial
telephones.

           
He picked one up, and spoke into
it: “Watson, come here, I want you.” Then he did it to the second: “Watson,
come here, I want you.” Then the third: “Watson, come here, I want you.” Then,
with grim patience, a man wanting to know the worst, insisting on knowing the worst,
demanding to know the worst, he went on through the rest, telephone by
telephone: “Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you.
Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come
here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you.
Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, come here, I want you.” Then, rather
than hang up this last phone, he waggled it at the nearest kneeling installer,
saying, shouting over the general hubbub, “Why all this peace and quiet?”