Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (36 page)

 
          
Tuesday
afternoon, in the command center. The meeting around Jack had ended
inconclusively —where’s the story, what’s the story, give us our story, who’s got
the goddamn STORY?—and everybody was now on the phone:

 
          
“Doctor,
this is Maurice Fischback of
Psychology
Today.
Do you anticipate mass suicides as a result of the recent death of
popular idol Johnny Crawfish?”

 
          
“Would
you say Johnny was a source of comfort to the other prisoners? Did you fellas
all sort of look up to him, is that your memory of that period?”

 
          
“Can
I quote you as saying you’re glad he’s dead? Well, can I quote you as saying
you wouldn’t bring him back if you could? Well, can I quote you as saying you
feel a certain relief?”

 
          
“When
he was a little boy, did the rest of the family
know
somehow the greatness that was in him? Are there incidents
from that period you would like to share with our readers at
Modem Maturity?”

 
          
Amid
them all, Sara was also on the phone, but not in precisely the same way. On
Galaxy
time, using the
Galaxy's
long-distance phone service,
she was selfishly not plugging along in the

 
          
Galaxy’s
best interest, but was
egocentrically trying to save her own life. It wasn’t enough to surround
herself with envelopes to be opened in the event of her death. It was time to
take steps to avoid having those envelopes opened. It was time to
counterattack. “Theft Record Transcript?” she asked the lazy voice that
answered her most recent call, and when assured that Theft Record Transcript of
the Dade County, Florida, sheriffs office was indeed what she had reached she
said, “This is Officer Helen Sonoma, Norfolk, Virginia, Public Safety Division.
We’re trying for verification on a suspect’s story here.”

 
          
“You’re
Norfolk Police? What was that name again?”

 
          
Sara
repeated the same false information, spelling the last name and saying, “Like
the wine county in
California
.” She had learned that unusual names create for some reason an aura of
believability, as though anyone who claimed to be called Helen Sonoma was
unlikelier to lie about other things than someone who said her name was Helen
Smith.

 
          
“Okay,”
Sara said briskly, when her credentials had been accepted, “what we’ve got here
is somebody claiming a kidnap in a stolen rental or leased vehicle,
Florida
plates.
Dade
County
.”

           
“Kidnapping?”

           
“That’s the claim, but it’s a weird
story, and we’re not sure we want to follow through on it. We need
verification.”

 
          
“What
kind of verification?”

 
          
“Okay,”
Sara said, still being brisk and a little irritated, as though if she’d been a
man
she’d be out on patrol or stakeout
somewhere, and not stuck in this police headquarters making these dumb phone
calls. “The vehicle description is a dark blue four-door Buick, two or three
years old, with a Z plate. The complainant doesn’t know anything more than
that, but she states it was a stolen vehicle. And it would have been stolen
within the last four weeks.”

 
          
The
voice said, “So you want to know, do we have a listing for a dark blue
four-door Buick, a lease or rental vehicle, on the sheet in July or August?”

 
          
“Right,”
Sara said. It had taken her four phone calls, beginning with the
Florida
state police, to finally get to the place
where such records were kept, so the slight edge of irritation in her voice
wasn’t at all difficult to maintain.

 
          
“Hold
on,” the voice said. “Or do you want me to call you back?”

 
          
“Either
way. I can give you my number. How long’s it gonna take?”

 
          
“If
I do it now—”

 
          
“Let’s
do it now,” Sara said, sounding peeved and being peeved.

 
          
“Two,
three minutes,” the voice said. “Hold on.”

 
          
So
Sara held on, and when Jack walked past she said into the silent phone, “But on
that first date, if you could sense the power he was going to have someday, why
didn’t you sleep with him?”

 
          
“Huh?”
said the voice.

           
“Talking to somebody here,” Sara
said, Jack having moved on out of earshot. “You got it?”

           
“The answer’s no,” the voice said.

           
Sara was surprised. “No? No stolen
Buick?”

           
“Fantasy kidnappings,” the voice
said. “They happen all the time. It’s something with the full moon.”

           
“Okay, fine,” Sara said. “Thanks.”

           
She hung up and sat there a moment,
hand on the phone. So the murderer—or somebody— had returned the Buick to the
renter, after getting rid of'the body. Or, if it was leased, the murderer—or
somebody—still had it. And this time, Sara had no way to recapture the car’s
license number.

 
          
So
what next?

           
Night on
Edger Street
. The house at number 147 remained brightly
lit, crackling with activity. Aerial photos of The Shack, Johnny Crawfish’s
compound on
Chesapeake
Bay
, taken earlier
today and blown up to monstrous size, were taped and tacked to the living room
walls. In one of the upstairs bedrooms, photographers and stringers and various
deeply dubious individuals tried on any number of costumes and uniforms,
becoming serially policemen, nuns, ambulance drivers, mail- persons, priests,
nurses, United Parcel deliverymen, Girl Scouts (with cookies) and U.S. Navy
frogmen. In the former kitchen, now a nascent darkroom, any number of small and
easily con-

 
          
cealable
cameras were being loaded with very fast film. At the dining room table,
artists sat and forged a variety of identity documents. On the front porch, the
Down Under Trio chatted and drank with a scabrous assortment of Crawfish
cousins, all of whom listened with their mouths open.

 
          
Since
all soundings had failed to indicate any Crawfish story worthy of the name,
meaning the body in the box was probably all they’d be able to set at Massa’s
altar at the end of this expedition, and since the body in the box was
not
going to be easy to get this time,
it was the aerial photos of the Crawfish estate that mostly held Jack and the
key members of his team. “Look at those guys,” he said, tapping the large color
picture yet again. Sara, Ida, Don Grove, Chauncey Chapperell and a couple of
photographers (one dressed as a Washington Redskin, with his camera in the
helmet under his arm) all obediently looked. “Those are armed guards in jeeps,”
Jack said, “buddies of Crawfish, patrolling die perimeter.”

 
          
“They’re
violating their parole, those guys,” Don Grove said. “Carrying guns like that.”
He sounded aggrieved.

 
          
Jack
considered him. “You want to go tell them that, Don?”

 
          
“I
don’t think so, no.”

 
          
“Good.”

 
          
Jack
contemplated the photo again, without love. “This is razor wire, all along
here,” he said. “See that whip antenna on the jeep? They’re in constant contact
with each other.”

 
          
“From
the sea,” Ida suggested.

 
          
Jack
shook his head. “Like in
Martha’s Vineyard
? It didn’t work there, and those people weren’t homicidal. These are.”
He pointed to spots along the shore. “In the big double boathouse here, a
cigarette boat, big and fast and mean, with a reinforced prow, it’s already
been used twice to ram strangers who got too close. And a big twenty- six-foot
inboard in there too, they can put an
army
on that, chase us across to
Cape
Charles
,
maim
us. And they’d do it, too.”

 
          
“Parachute,”
Chauncey Chapperell offered.

 
          
“They’d
shoot you out of the air,” Jack told him.

 
          
“I
wasn’t thinking of doing it myself, actually,” Chauncey said.

 
          
“The
problem is,” Jack said generally, “in life, Crawfish surrounded himself with
thugs and killers, and they’re all still there. And the cousins are the same
thing, only dumber.”

 
          
Ida
said, “Why don’t Sara and I go up there tonight, look it over?”

 
          
“He
isn’t laid out yet, Ida,” Jack pointed out. “If you
did
get in there tonight, what’s the point? You can’t get the body
in the box until tomorrow anyway.”

 
          
“Excuse
me,” Sara said.

 
          
Politeness?
Jack upraised an eyebrow and looked out at Sara from under it. “Yes, Sara?”

 
          
“I
hate to sound dumb,” she said, “but people keep talking about the body in the
box, and I don’t know what it is.”

 
          
Jack
stared at her. “You don’t know what we’ve been talking about all this time?”

 
          
“True,”
she said.

 
          
A
fleeting memory came to him, of his night of fretfulness concerning the descent
into the maelstrom of this young woman. Okay, here’s another step down; let’s
see how she handles it. “The body in the box,” he explained, “is exactly what
it sounds like. It is a photograph of a dead person in his or her casket.”

 
          
Sara
looked at him, waiting for more. “And?”

 
          
“No
and. When a celeb goes down,
Massa
wants the body in the box, and we go get
it.”

 
          
“But—
But
why?”

 
          
“Because
America
wants it,” Jack told her. “Don’t ask me to
explain, I’m just telling you the way it is. When a major pop figure dies,
particularly if they’re fairly young and still at the height of their success,
America
wants to see a photograph of that person in
the casket. Never mind pictures of the guy at the White House, pictures of him
dancing, laughing, eating pizza, fucking beautiful women. What
America
wants is the dead body, on its back, hands
folded over shriveled balls, lips sewed shut, eyelids with that special
caved-in
look, puffy silk casket lining
all around.”

 
          
“That’s
disgusting,” Sara said. “Who could want something like that? Why would anybody
want that?”

 
          
“Ask
them, next time you’re in the supermarket,” Jack suggested. “Every week, the
Galaxy
sells about five million copies.
When the front cover’s a body in the box, a major star that just went down, we
sell six or seven million. When Elvis went down, we sold eight million. We’d
still
be selling that one, only they had
to replate the presses for the next week’s paper.”

 
          
“It’s
like—” Sara floundered, hands moving vaguely. “I don’t know what it’s like.
Something primitive, tribal. It’s like cavemen. It’s like the missing
link,
for God’s sake.”