Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (35 page)

 
          
I
have no proof of any of this.

 
          
I
am a staffer on the
Weekly Galaxy
,
and I have no proof of any of this.

 
          
I
am a staffer on the
Weekly Galaxy
,
and I have no proof of any of this, so it would be a mistake to go to any
police department about this.

 
          
Does
Phyllis still have her key to this apartment?

 
          
She
spent the night at a motel out by the airport.

 
          
The
death of Johnny Crawfish stunned the civilized world. The thirty-eight-year-old
country singer who had risen from poverty and squalor as the child of migrant
farm workers, the gravel-voiced balladeer who had found both God and his muse
in a Tennessee prison where he’d been sentenced for manslaughter, the
self-taught millionaire songwriter/businessman who by his thirty-fifth birthday
had appeared in command performances before both Queen Elizabeth and President
Reagan, died that Saturday morning of at first unknown causes in The Shack, his
palatial thirty-room waterfront estate on Chesapeake Bay north of Newport News,
Virginia, and when the news was flashed round the globe it was as though four
billion human beings had just lost their best friend.

 
          
The
media—most of the media—were not informed for more than twenty-four hours after
the abrupt darkening of this star in the firmament, first because of the
extraordinary attempts being made by the world-class team of Crawfish doctors
to bring their patient back to life, and then because the family and business
partners wanted to know exactly what had caused Johnny’s demise before the news
was released. As a result, though Johnny Crawfish passed from his reward on
Monday morning, it wasn’t till Tuesday evening that his death became the lead
story on the network newscasts. Wednesday’s
New
York Times
began its coverage on page one, below the fold, with a photo of
Crawfish performing at the White House, and included a second photo—an early
Crawfish concert—with the bulk of the obit deeper in the paper. Photos of
Crawfish—not identical photos, but identically smiling—made that week’s covers
of
Time
and
Newsweek.

 
          
Official
statements were made in response to the awful news. “A great American, a fine
musician and a source of inspiration to rich and poor alike,” said President
Ronald Reagan, Archbishop John J. O’Connor of
New York
, motion picture and television producer
David Wolper, fellow artist Frank Sinatra, Virginia Senator John Warner and
evangelist Billy Graham, in separate press releases.

 
          
The
Weekly Galaxy's
primary spy at The
Shack was a carpenter named Moe Kerlie, employed to make some necessary repairs
and expansion on the boathouse and docks along the property’s bay frontage.
Almost no one was allowed inside the razor-wire-topped walls of the grounds
around The Shack other than Johnny Crawfish’s extensive family and his ex-con
old pals, who served him as chauffeurs, bodyguards, executive producers and
pinochle partners. But carpentry was not a skill any of Crawfish’s cronies had
picked up in the pen, so an outside man from time to time had to be called in.

 
          
Moe
Kerlie had worked off and on for Johnny Crawfish for nearly seven years, and
every time he did so he was simultaneously on the payroll of the
Weekly Galaxy.
Early indications of
Crawfish’s travel plans were sometimes picked up from Moe, and changes of girlfriend
or the occasional falling-out among the buddies and hangers-on, but until the
Monday morning when Johnny Crawfish said, “This coffee tastes like shit,” and
toppled forward into his apple-and-Jarlsberg-cheese omelette, Kerlie’s
information had been barely worth the rather modest retainer the
Galaxy
gave him. On that Monday morning,
though, Moe did his suborners proud.

 
          
Hearing
a fuss of some sort up at the main house, seeing maids (cousins) and butlers
(parolees) running back and forth and in and out of the many French doors, Moe
moseyed on up there, ostensibly to say he needed somebody to drive the pickup
into town to pick up some more A/C plywood, and he found the household so
distracted and unaware of his presence that he wandered freely and heard the
whole thing. Crawfish dead; doctors sent for; Crawfish
dead;
carried to his bed;
Crawfish
dead.

 
          
“I
gotta go to town,” Moe told a former mob enforcer, “get me some more A/C
plywood.”

 
          
“Go,
go,” the enforcer said, looking old and gray and worried, hurrying off on
errands of his own.

 
          
Which
is how the
Weekly Galaxy
became the
first to know.

 
          
In
Norfolk
,
Virginia
, at number
147 Edger Street
, not terribly far from the Naval Station
but several blocks from the sea, stands a small yellow clapboard house, two
stories high, in a depressed area of similar small houses, vacant lots,
concrete block buildings containing auto body shops, and liquor stores. This
particular house, with full basement and cramped triangular attic, with one
bathroom, three bedrooms (upstairs), living room, dining room and kitchen
(downstairs), had stood empty for not quite two months since the last tenants,
a family in desperate need of birth control information, had skipped out owing
three and a half months’ rent.

 
          
Now,
however, to the landlord’s bemused delight, a new tenant had been found, a
shortterm tenant who was paying,
in cash
,
for one month’s occupancy, the equivalent of ten months’ rent. The landlord, a
retired Polish pipe fitter living out near Richmond on the income from
twenty-seven rental properties in depressed parts of Norfolk and Portsmouth,
had asked only two questions on the Monday afternoon the deal was cut: “Is it a
whorehouse?” “Is it gambling?” Being assured the tenants had neither prospect
in mind, and being given half his rent in advance—five months’ worth!—the
landlord had been pleased to withdraw back to his home near Richmond and think
no more about it.

 
          
Much
activity immediately ensued at number 147. A professional cleaning service
swept through like the sorcerer’s apprentice on a good day, followed by trucks
from an office furniture rental place up in D.C. delivering desks,
wastebaskets, filing cabinets, library tables, bulletin boards and a
refrigerator. Simultaneously, the phone company arrived to install fifteen
telephones with fifteen separate lines (and
lights;
no bells), a beverage distributor brought in cases of beer and soft drinks and
a water cooler with large blue jugs of bottled water, and electricians came to
add two new circuits to the first floor. These were meant to accommodate the
rented air conditioners and copiers and television set also being delivered at
that time. Meanwhile, teams of plumbers and carpenters were hard at work
converting the kitchen to a photographic darkroom.

 
          
And
while all that was going on, the
Weekly
Galaxy
was on its way.

 
          
From
Dulles International, they took a chartered bus down Interstate 95 from the
nation’s capital through
Richmond
and then on 1-64 toward
Norfolk
. It was Tuesday morning, the team having
left Martha’s Vineyard early in the day, spending the previous day and night
cleaning up after themselves, distributing bribes and reparation money, cooling
out the victims where possible, eliminating the traces of their presence where
more blatant felonies might be involved. Now, with yesterday’s news already
forgotten, with the
New
England
stringers
returned to their dusty ivory towers, the team looked forward to the challenges
ahead.

 
          
Jack
sat by himself behind the driver, yellow pad on lap, considering approaches;
the body in the box was never an easy goal. A few miles below
Richmond
, Ida joined him, dropping into the aisle
seat to say, “Sara Joslyn.”

 
          
“A
trusted assistant,” Jack said. “Who shall rendezvous with us later today.”

 
          
“She
wasn’t in the john when her bed was shot up,” Ida said.

 
          
Jack
looked at his mad dog carefully. “She wasn’t?”

 
          
“I
checked the room last night, after she left,” Ida said. “There’s a ventilation
space under the john door. With the door closed, you can see from outside when
the light’s on in there.”

 
          
“Ah,”
Jack said. Ever the investigative reporter, this Ida. “What does this say to
you, Ida?”

 
          
“If
she was in the john, whoever fired the shots would know it,” Ida said. “And
with the lightspill under the door, they’d know there wasn’t anybody in the
bed.”

 
          
Jack
nodded. “Maybe that was the point,” he suggested. “Maybe they did it as a
warning, some kind of a warning, and didn’t want to kill anybody.”

 
          
Ida
gave that the look it deserved.
“One
shot is a warning,” she said. “You don’t empty a gun into a hotel room unless
you’re trying to be sure the person you’re shooting is really dead. You don’t
take the extra time, make the extra noise, for a
warning.
And you don’t take the chance she’ll come out of the john
and see you and identify you later.”

 
          
“Hmm,”
Jack said. “So what are you suggesting, Ida?”

 
          
“She
was in bed with
you ”
Ida said.

 
          
“Ah,”
Jack said. “‘That would explain it, all right.”

 
          
“The
he’s because
Massa
’d fire you,” Ida said, “if it went public that she was in bed with
you.”

 
          
“Moral
turpitude,” Jack agreed. “Are you handing this story to me as your editor,
Ida?”

 
          
“For
myself,” Ida said, “I don’t care if you fuck goats, just so it doesn’t change
anything on the team.”

 
          
“Ida,”
Jack said, in absolute sincerity, “I would never never
ever
alter my editorial judgment for the sake of a piece of ass. I
hope you know me better than that. I hope you know my values are higher than
that.”

 
          
Ida
said, “She
was
in bed with you,
wasn’t she?”

 
          
Jack
gave her another long considering look. “Ida,” he said, “are you taping this
little conversation?”

 
          
“Yes,”
Ida said.

 
          
“In
case you ever feel badly treated later on?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“Sara
was in bed with me, Ida,” Jack said, clearly and distinctly. “We lied.”

 
          
“Thank
you,” Ida said, and went back to her own seat.

 
          
It
almost looked like home. Sara walked into the house on
Edger Street
, and it was a definite
Weekly Galaxy
command center, full of photographic equipment, empty
bottles, paper plates, people on phones, manic conversations. Presiding over it
all, impersonating an unexploded bomb in the front room, was Jack.

 
          
He
probably doesn’t want to hear about Binx, Sara thought as she crossed to where
he was in tense conversation with the regular members of the team. As she
arrived, Jack was saying, “No, that isn’t a story, we don’t have— Hello, Sara.
Sit.—a story, we have a load of horseshit.” “Horseshit cousins,” Harry Razza
said.

 
          
“That’s
one of our problems,” Jack agreed. “Johnny Crawfish’s family and friends are as
scuzzy a lot as we’ve ever come across.”

 
          
“There’s
a couple of them around,” Don Grove said, “trying to sell Crawfish’s
hair,
saved from four years of
haircuts.”

 
          
“Swept
from four dozen barbershops,” Jack suggested.

 
          
Nodding,
Don said, “From what they showed me, Johnny did grow hair in quite a variety of
colors.”

 
          
Louis
B. Urbiton said, “I wonder. Could the very awfulness of these people be our
story? The incredible muck that Johnny Crawfish rose out of to become the so on
and so forth we drop our trousers for today.”

 
          
“I’ll
tell you what’s wrong with that, Louis,” Jack said, shaking his head
regretfully. “Look at it from
Massa
’s point of view, and you’ll see those
creeps and cruds around Crawfish act just exactly the way the
readers
would if they suddenly found they
had a rich and famous cousin. The reader identification is going to be with the
scumbags, so we’ll never be able to call them by their rightful name.”

 
          
“Which
is Cretin,” Louis said.

 
          
“Very
true.”

 
          
“They
do all have their little stories to sell us,” Bob Sangster said. “So far, I’ve
got three completely different sets of last words, all sworn to and vouched for
by different cousins.”

 
          
“I
saw Johnny enter heaven,” Harry Razza said, “up through a big white cloud,
Elvis leading him by the hand. I have a cousin who’ll swear to it.”

 
          
Chauncey
Chapperell, stretching his long legs up and over a desk, said, “I’ve got a UFO
sighting over
Chesapeake
Bay
just before he
died.”

 
          
“More
horseshit.”

 
          
Ida
said, “What about cause of death?”

 
          
“Sorry,
Ida,” Jack said. “In the first place,
Massa
’s a Johnny Crawfish fan, he doesn’t
want
to hear Johnny OD’d, or had AIDS,
or committed suicide because he couldn’t read music, or anything with juice in
it. And in the second place, they’ve had half the American Medical Association
up in that place. If it
wasn't
an
embolism, they’ve had all the time and talent in the world to rig it so we’ll
never prove a thing.” Spreading his hands, he said, “Come on, gang, where’s my
story?"

 
          
Baffled,
Sara said, “He’s
dead.
Isn’t that the
story?”

 
          
“It
is not,” Jack told her. “What’s our headline? Crawfish Dead. Our paper hits the
supermarket Saturday, we’re a
weekly.
By then, unborn
Ubangi
tribesmen will already have the news. The
Galaxy
needs to go beyond that simple
fact, into the realm of excitement, romance, adventure and the totally
fantastically unexpected.”

 
          
“The
body in the box,” Sara suggested, hoping at last to find out what that could
be.

 
          
“That,
too,” Jack agreed. “But that’s just the cover, the front page. We still need a
headline.” He made a sweeping arm gesture, to suggest headlines: “Crawfish Was
Victim of Foul Play. Except he wasn’t. Crawfish Had Premonition of Own Death.
Except he didn’t. Crawfish Was in the CIA. Except he wasn’t.”

 
          
“Well,”
Sara persisted, “what
about
the body
in the box?”

 
          
“We’ll
get to that,” Jack assured her, “once they lay him out. One problem at a time.”

 
          
Ida
said, “Sara and I can get that, when the time comes.”

 
          
Looking
surprised and hopeful, Jack said, “You think so? Fine, it’s all yours.”

 
          
Oh,
good, Sara thought, I don’t even know what it is, and I’ve just been
volunteered for it.