Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (34 page)

 
          
Oh,
somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. The band is playing
somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light. And somewhere men are laughing and
little children shout. But there is no joy in the Oak Bluffs command center on
Monday morning; the
Weekly Galaxy
has
struck out.

 
          
Boy,
who had been beaten soundly twice yesterday afternoon by the large, bluff, hearty,
healthy crew of a ship called
Big Daddy
,
once for trying to swim to shore after his dinghy sank and the other for
protesting this treatment in an English accent, sat at his table in the command
center sullen and silent and more puffy-faced than ever, while his lieutenants
and Jack’s disheartened team kept bringing in further gobbets of bad news. The
helicopter had been traced to the
Galaxy
,
and several lawsuits were being threatened. An extelephone receptionist
employee of the Katama Bay Country Club had gone to the police with a story of
blackmail and intimidation on the part of a

 
          
Galaxy
staffer which was unfortunately
supported by a tape recording surreptitiously made by the litde bitch. And, in
the confusion and disorganization of yesterday’s rout, they’d lost the Mercers,
who had apparently been spirited away on one of those damn ships anchored
offshore. They could be anywhere in the world by now, and no one the wiser.

 
          
The
Galaxy
had nothing. The
Galaxy
could not produce one word, one
picture, one
inference
about the John
Michael Mercer wedding that a reader couldn’t find just as easily in
Time
or
People
or even the goddamn
New
York Times!

 
          
In
the general gloom of last night, Jack had been a solitary mourner, lamenting a
tragedy other than that being bewailed all around him. It wasn’t the loss of
Sara’s innocence, such as it had been, that so touched him with melancholy, but
the loss of his own corruption. How
pure
Sara’s fury had burned, as she had stared down at the bedraggled wedding party,
and how weak had been his own yielding to shame and pity. What did John Michael
Mercer care about Jack Ingersoll, eh? Eh? Keep
that
in mind, can’t you?

 
          
He
can’t. He couldn’t. That the Mercer marriage was trivial and unimportant in
itself didn’t bother him, since he’d accepted that idea from the beginning. But
that there might still be in this life, and on this earth, things that
did
matter, that
were
important, was disturbing and deeply unsettling. Have I become
spoiled for this job, he wondered? And if the answer was yes, he was in serious
trouble, because he was already spoiled for everything else.

           
Late last night, rash with drink, he
had tried to broach these thoughts to Sara, but every reminder of the Mercer
nuptials just set her raging again, so much so that fortunately she never did
hear what it was Jack had been trying to say. She was already up and gone when
he’d rolled, sodden and remorseful, from the sack late this morning, and he
hadn’t yet seen her today, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed last night
his separate reasons for despondency.

 
          
The
light flashed on the phone on Boy’s table. He looked at it as though it were
hemlock. It flashed again. Everybody in the room looked at it, as though it
were Alfred Hitchcock’s glass of milk. It flashed again. Amid a general sigh,
as of the sound of the unshriven departed moving through the upper branches
just before sunrise, Boy picked up the receiver and said, with simple unwonted
honesty, “Boy Cartwright here.”

 
          
“Yes,
Mr. DeMassi.”

 
          
Another
general sigh.

 
          
“No,
Mr. DeMassi, I’m afraid we—”

 
          
“We
tried, Mr. DeMassi, we—”

 
          
“Yes,
sir, we did try that. And a helicopter.” Sara’s voice, loud and confident,
grabbed everyone’s attention: “Just a minute.”

           
Jack gaped at her. Everybody gaped
at her. She marched in from the front door, head held high, eyes clear, tread
firm. Calling to Boy, she said, “Is that Mr. DeMassi?”

 
          
Boy,
too stunned to do otherwise, nodded. Other people murmured confirmation and
tried to hush her, but Sara marched by them all. “Let me speak to him,
^,,
she said, and on her way by she dropped a bulky envelope on the table in front
of Jack. It was white, with blue and orange sections.

 
          
Boy
stared, unable to believe it.
Reporters
don’t talk to
Massa
, not directly, not unless
Massa
initiates the conversation. Reporters do
not interrupt conversations between
Massa
and
editors.
Reporters do not make their presence felt in any way when
Massa
is in conversation with an editor other
than their own. Sara was violating so many conventions that when she reached
out and plucked the phone receiver from Boy’s nerveless hand, he didn’t even
make an attempt to stop her.

 
          
“Mr.
DeMassi? Mr. DeMassi, this is Sara Joslyn, a reporter on Jack Ingersoll’s
team.”

 
          
Jack
pressed a hand to his hot dry forehead. “Yes, sir, that’s what I want to tell
you. I have just this minute given to
my
editor, to Jack Ingersoll, the official wedding album of the John Michael
Mercer marriage.”

           
Jack stared at the envelope. He tore
it open. “Yes, sir, Mr. DeMassi, the photos taken by Lady Beatrice
Romneysholme. We may have to negotiate with her, but
we
have the pictures, so it shouldn’t be impossible.”

           
Onto Jack’s table, out of the
envelope, spilled four black plastic film containers with gray plastic caps.
Inside each was a roll of 35mm film.

 
          
“Yes,
sir, Jack Ingersoll has the film now. He’ll be bringing it back to
Florida
with him. Thank
you
, Mr. DeMassi.” She extended the phone toward Boy: “He wants to
talk to you again.”

 
          
As
Boy began to stutter and whimper into the phone, Sara crossed to Jack, smiling,
nodding, accepting the silent signals of congratulation and joy from her
co-workers. Jack whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer, “What did you
do?
How did you—”

 
          
“It
was easy,” she said. She was a good three inches taller than yesterday. “Lady
Bee’s an amateur photographer. Where do amateur photographers get their film
developed? At the drugstore.”

 
          
Jack
gazed at the torn white-orange-blue envelope on his desk.

 
          
“So
I waited for her this morning,” Sara went on, “and I followed her when she was
driven away from her house in one of her limos, and I watched which drugstore
in Edgartown she went into, and twenty minutes later I went in and said I was
there from the lab to make the film pickup.”

 
          
“Sara,”
Jack said, and stopped, at a loss for words. He shook his head in wonder.

 
          
“Oh,
Jack,” called Boy, looking more and more like something that should have been
given decent burial a week ago, “Jack, Mr. DeMassi would have a word with you.”

 
          
Jack
blundered to his feet, painfully bumping a knee and sending the film containers
rolling. Sara slapped a hand over them, and Jack limped quickly across the room
to take the phone from Boy’s decaying hand. “Yes, Mr. DeMassi?”

 
          
Jack
smiled modestly. “Thank you, Mr. DeMassi, but you know me. I think my whole
team’s special.”

 
          
Jack’s
eyes shone.
“Thank
you, Mr. DeMassi!
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” Grabbing a pen from Boy’s jacket pocket, a piece of paper
from under Boy’s elbow, Jack made quick notes. “Yes, sir. Right away. Thank
you,
Mr. DeMassi.”

 
          
Jack
hung up. He turned his back on the moldering Boy, and smiled upon his team. “We
have been given our reward,” he said.

 
          
“Yes?
Yes?”

 
          
Doubt
was vanquished, certainty triumphant. “We have been given,” Jack said, “a body
in the box.”

 
          
There.
The dead man beside the road,
that’s where she’d found him. Sara glanced in the rearview mirror at the spot,
realizing how long it had been since she’d even thought about that incident,
and then she looked forward again, through the windshield at the
Weekly Galaxy
building, rushing closer.

 
          
Late
afternoon, Monday. While Jack and the rest of the team had gone on to Norfolk,
Virginia, to set up the next command center, something to do with this
mysterious body in the box, the
Galaxy
had chartered a plane to fly Sara and the precious rolls of Mercer wedding film
to JFK, where a commercial flight for Orlando had been held for her—she merely
accepted this sort of thing as her due by now—and at Orlando another chartered
plane had waited to bring her down here, where she’d reclaimed her Peugeot from
the airport parking lot and was now zipping out Massa’s road to the
Galaxy,
well ahead of closing time.

 
          
She
nodded to the regular guard, parked as close to the employee entrance as
possible, and went first to the Picture Department on the second floor, where
the staffers fell on the rolls of film with cries of joy. Sara then went on up
to Editorial to get whatever material Mary Kate might have for her to bring to
Jack.

 
          
It
was while she was talking with Mary Kate that she glanced across the squaricles
and saw Binx Radwell walking by, looking sadder and more hopeless than ever.
“Isn’t that— Isn’t that Binx?”

 
          
“The
very same,” Mary Kate agreed.

 
          
“But—
So he wasn’t fired, after all?”

 
          
“Sure
they fired him,” Mary Kate said. “The story is, he begged
Massa
for a second chance. Wept real tears, and
like that. So
Massa
hired him back, as a reporter.”

 
          
“A
reporter!”

 
          
“At
reporter’s starting salary.”

 
          
“Ow!”

 
          
“And
assigned him to Boy Cartwright,” Mary Kate said dryly.

 
          
“Oh,
poor Binx,” Sara said, watching the slopeshouldered booby settle himself at one
of the long reporters’ tables on the far side of the room.

 
          
“They
fired him as an example,” Mary Kate said, “and then hired him back as a
long-term example.”

 
          
“And
he can’t afford the real world,” Sara said.

 
          
It
was amazing how large and deserted the apartment seemed. It was only last
Tuesday that Phyllis had moved out, and only last Thursday that Sara herself
had left on the trip to
Martha’s Vineyard
, and yet the big cold place felt like a mausoleum that had been
deserted for years. Sara moved through it, lowering the air-conditioning,
looking out at the restless
Atlantic Ocean
, at the beach in the building’s shadow, and the silence in the
apartment just went on making her uncomfortable.

 
          
Yet,
there was nothing to do but stay the night here, as planned, and take the
morning flight to Washington, D.C., as planned, where a commuter flight would
bring her back down to Norfolk. It was too far to drive overnight, and if she
looked for a flight heading north now there wouldn’t be a place for her tonight
in
Norfolk
. And how would she explain it to Jack? “I
didn’t like my apartment.”

 
          
There
was food in the freezer. The television set worked. She could make it through
the night. And in any event, here was a chance to go look at her
novels-in-progress. She had the feeling she was still too keyed up from the
Mercer wedding to settle down to any serious work, but at least she could touch
the manuscripts, glance at them, remind herself that
here
was what she wanted from life, the real goal.

 
          
The
business in
Martha’s
Vineyard
had been
exciting, had caught her up in the rush and flow of it, but she could see how
that sort of high could become dangerous. What if
all
you wanted in life was the pictures of the Mercer wedding, or
the party for the hundred-year-old twins, or the body in the box, whatever that
turned out to be? No; the rush and the high were fun, but the novels were real
life.

 
          
It
was while seated at the desk with
Time of
the

 
          
Hero
spread out in front of her, but
really while she was not actually paying close attention to the manuscript,
that she noticed the empty space among the items taped and tacked to the wall
above her desk. The information about the dead man’s car was gone.

 
          
She
stared at that space while a chill of fear spread through her body. She
remembered taping it there. She remembered the parentheses around the uncertain
final letter of the license plate (G/O/Q). She remembered putting it there, but
she couldn’t remember the last time she’d
seen
it there.

 
          
Am
I alone in this place?

 
          
She
was. Of course she was. Hesitantly at first, but then more rapidly, she moved in
silence through the apartment, whipping open closets, peeking around doorways,
terrified but willing herself to be brave, and of
course
she was alone in the apartment. The piece of paper must have
been removed some time ago from above her desk.

 
          
By
Phyllis.

 
          
That’s
right. Who else was there? No one else had ever been in this place.

 
          
Phyllis
had been at
Martha’s
Vineyard
.

 
          
Phyllis
had been seated next to her at the reporters’ table when the first sheet about
the dead man’s car had disappeared.

 
          
Hurrying
back to her own bedroom, Sara pulled open her closet door, pushed skirts and
blouses out of the way, and saw the two boxes of Jimmy Taggart’s papers still
back in there, on the floor, where she’d left them. So Phyllis hadn’t found
those.
But Phyllis had been gone from
here only two days after Sara had brought those papers in, and Sara
had—luckily—hidden Taggart’s papers, while the license number had been left
right out in plain sight. For Phyllis to see, and understand.

 
          
Did
Phyllis try to kill me, shooting through that window? Or was she warning me
off, because she’d seen that piece of paper in this apartment, over my desk?

 
          
What’s
the connection between Phyllis Perkinson of
Trend
magazine and the dead man beside the road?

 
          
Sara
hurried back to her desk, cleared the manuscripts out of the way, readied the
typewriter, rolled in a sandwich of two sheets of paper and a carbon, and began
to type:

 
          
On
July 12th, on my way to work the first day at the
Weekly Galaxy,
I found
a dark blue Buick beside the empty road, with a dead man lying on the ground
beside it. He had been shot once in the forehead. I reported this to the guard
on duty at the
Weekly Galaxy
gate. That guard, whose name is or was
James Taggart, disappeared that same day and has not been seen either at work
or at his home ever since. So far as I have been able to determine, no official
report was ever made to any police department about the murdered man I found
beside the road.

 
          
The
data on the murdered man’s car was on a sheet of paper in a notebook I keep at
all times in my bag. After I was introduced to my editor that first morning, I
took a place at one of the reporters’ tables, next to a young woman named
Phyllis Perkinson. (She called me over; it wasn’t coincidence.) I did not meet
Phyllis Perkinson until some time after I arrived at the
Weekly Galaxy
building. It is absolutely possible that she arrived at the building after I
did that morning.

 
          
That
day, Phyllis Perkinson invited me to share her apartment in the city, and I
agreed, and continue to live there.

 
          
On
Friday of that first week, four days later, I discovered that the page with the
information about the murdered man’s car had been ripped from my notebook. I
make it a habit to leave my bag under my chair when I am away from my place at
the reporters’ table, either in the research section or the ladies’ room. It
would have been very easy for Phyllis Perkinson to have removed that
information from my bag.

 
          
With
some trouble, I reconstructed the information, which I put on a sheet of paper
taped to the wall over my desk at home; that is, in the apartment I shared with
Phyllis Perkinson.

 
          
One
week ago, on Tuesday, August 3rd, Phyllis Perkinson was fired from the Weekly
Galaxy, it having been learned she was actually working for
Trend
magazine on under-

 
          
cover
assignment to do a smear article on the
Galaxy.
While at the
Galaxy,
her secret had been learned by an editor named Boy Cartwright, who had not
exposed her but had forced her to be a spy for him against other editors at the
Galaxy.

 
          
Last
week, while I was on assignment in
Martha’s Vineyard
, somebody fired a pistol several times through my hotel room window
into my bed. Fortunately, I was in the bathroom at the time.

 
          
I
have now discovered that the dead man’s car information has disappeared again,
this time from the apartment.

 
          
1)   
It would have been easy for Phyllis Perkinson to take the information from my
bag at the
Galaxy.

 
          
2)   
Phyllis Perkinson was in
Martha’s Vineyard
, on assignment for
Trend,
when the shots were fired into my
room.

 
          
3)   
Only
Phyllis Perkinson could have taken the information from the wall
over the desk in the apartment we shared. No one else has been in here.

 
          
I
have no idea who the murdered man was or what his link was to Phyllis
Perkinson. I do know she seems at all times to be living some sort of double
life. Every weekend while we shared this apartment she went off by herself, as
though to spend time with a boyfriend, but she never said anything about this
person, so I have no idea where she was really going.

 
          
I
think it’s clear that Phyllis Perkinson murdered the man beside the road, that
she did something to or about the guard named James Taggart to keep him from
reporting the crime, that she removed the information from my bag in hopes that
I wouldn’t be able to do any follow-up on the case, and that when she saw I’d
reconstructed the information she (a) removed it again, and (b) fired into my
hotel room either deliberately to kill me or to scare me off.

 
          
I
am determined now to find out who the dead man was, and what his link was with
Phyllis Perkinson.

 
          
She
signed and dated both the original and the copy, and then—feeling
self-consciously melodramatic and yet determined—she typed
to be OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH on two
envelopes, put the two
copies of her statement in the two envelopes, put the envelope with the carbon
copy inside the large manila envelope marked i
for incomplete
(college novel), put the other envelope with her
luggage, to take with her to Norfolk, and then sat in the living room to think
things over.