Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (41 page)

 
          
When
Ida said, “Go through that door over there. Walk,” Sara thought: She wants to
take me to a basement or somewhere, where the shot won’t be heard. Then she’ll
walk out and say she left me to guard the body, and she’ll drive away, and go
become somebody else with that cleverness of hers, and they’ll never find her.
And I’ll be dead, in the basement of The Shack. In these shoes!

 
          
That
was when she took Ida’s picture. Not to take Ida’s picture, but to shine the
sudden flash in Ida’s eyes, and
run!

 
          
Ida
fired the gun, a terribly loud and shocking sound in this room, and a vase full
of flowers behind Sara
shpackled
into
an infinity of wet shards and spraying water and collapsing lilies.

 
          
The
noise of the gun must have startled Ida, too, that and the flash in her face,
because she didn’t fire again until Sara was leaping deerlike through the door.
Sara heard the
chuk
of lead into
wood, and she cried out, losing her balance, flailing around, losing the
camera, waving her arms, her feet skittering in all kinds of directions until
at last she righted herself and ran across this anteroom Uttered with an
obstacle course of Lucite folding chairs. She slapped at chairs as she passed,
knocking them over in her wake, trying to slow someone who could merely send a
bullet flying
over
every obstacle and
direcdy into her shrinking back.

 
          
Even
if there’d been time to look behind her, she wouldn’t have done it; something
was
gaining on her. Through the next
doorway, and the next, and leftward down an endless marble-floored haUway that
stretched away to infinity, as in a dream where something’s chasing you and you
can’t run fast enough and the door keeps receding farther and farther away.

 
          
CRACK!
CRACK!

 
          
A
bee stung her left shoulder, and her knees wobbled, aU strength draining away
into the marble floor. The door rushed toward her, an ally at last, and she
burst through it, the heavy sensible shoes dragging at her feet, the bee sting
goading her shoulder, the LIGHT a hot slap in the face when she spewed across
the threshold, stripping away her shadow, stealing her balance, sucking her
strength. “Oh,
God!"
she cried,
tripping over her own self, and fell sprawling on the gray grass beyond the
curving path.

 
          
She
rolled onto her back, frantic, and Ida came out, all gray and white and
remorseless and caring about nothing in this world but the death of Sara
Joslyn. Ida raised the pistol, and forty people with handguns cut her to
ribbons.

 
          
In
the ambulance, Jack kept talking, because the doctor on the scene had said to
“keep her engaged,” that although the bullet graze on her shoulder was
unimportant she was “in trauma” and Jack should not let her “go all the way
into shock.”
Fm
the one all the way
into shock, Jack thought, but he kept talking. “I read your letter,” he said,
“the one you had under your underwear.”

 
          
She
lay on the stretcher, the scratchy blue blanket stretched over her as she
stared at him, silent, unblinking. The ambulance swayed, and Jack swayed with
it, and the silent state trooper beside Jack on the other stretcher swayed with
it, but Sara just lay there and stared at Jack and didn’t blink and didn’t even
sway when the ambulance swayed.

 
          
“See,
what you had wrong,” Jack told her, “was that Phyllis was the only person in your
apartment, so she had to be the one to take the piece of paper from over your
desk. But
Ida
was in there. I put Ida
on the job when I found out Boy had a spy on our team. Ida checked everybody,
she found out about Phyllis and
Trend
,
she checked you out, too, she was all over that apartment you two had. Ida was
better at searching places than anybody I ever met. She came out of there
knowing your clothing sizes and your shoe size. She came out of there with your
piece of paper. Sara, do you know why she killed the man beside the road?
Because I don’t.”

 
          
Sara
stared at him, not blinking, not bracing herself when the ambulance swung
around a long curve.

 
          
Jack
nodded, licking his lips. “What I figure,” he said, “she was riding out to the
Galaxy
with him, for whatever reason,
she got him to stop, she shot him. You drove by. She was ducked down in the
car. She saw your brake lights, she figured you’d come back, she moved while
you were turning around. She went and hid on the other side of that concrete
divider in the middle of the road. What the hell, there wasn’t any other
traffic. You came back and she watched you. All the time you were there with
the dead man, she was watching you from the other side of the divider.”

 
          
Sara
didn’t react, didn’t move.

 
          
“She
didn’t know you,” Jack said. “She didn’t see a
Galaxy
sticker on your car, she figured you’d go somewhere else to
report it. You left, she put the body in the trunk and drove on to the
Galaxy
and the guard there told her
you’d just reported somebody killed in that car. She told him it was just one
of our stunts, and why wouldn’t he believe it?
Everything
is just one of our stunts.”

 
          
Sara
swallowed. She licked her lips. That was the only change.

 
          
Jack
said, “She told him she’d need his help with the stunt later, and she parked in
the regular parking lot even without the right sticker because the guard knew
her, she was a long-term valued employee. Then she came in and established her
presence with all that stuff about Keely Jones, and made sure nobody was making
a big thing out of your story. Then she went back out and got the guard to come
with her, and took them both out in that scrub land out there and buried them.
And returned the rental car. And all she wanted was to keep you from doing any
follow-through.”

 
          
Jack
gave a bitter laugh, shaking his head. “At the
Galaxy ”
he said, “that should have been easy. Who does
follow-through on anything
real
there?
And you were forgetting it, too, weren’t you? Until she started shooting into
hotel rooms. All she had to do was wait, trust the
Galaxy
to degrade you, make you forget. She didn’t have enough
patience, that’s all.”

 
          
The
ambulance braked, slowed, stopped. Doors slammed.

 
          
Sara
sighed, a long susurration. “Hanrahan,” she said.

 
          
Jack
leaned forward. “The dead man? He’s Hanrahan? What about him?”

 
          
“He
thought you set the fire,” she said, in a small faraway voice. “He was coming
to talk to you. Ida knew you’d both figure it out she was the one. Since you
didn’t set the fire, she did. And the dead mother was murder.”

 
          
“Oh,
Christ,” Jack said, and nodded. “I never wanted to look too closely at that
particular piece of good luck. I never wanted to be sure.”

 
          
The
ambulance doors opened, and busy medics were there, ready to slide Sara away.
“Just a second,” the state trooper said, speaking for the first time since the
start of the ride. “Before you take her,” he told the medics.

 
          
Sara’s
wide eyes turned toward the trooper. Jack said, “Yes?”

 
          
The
trooper leaned closer to Sara. “After the first shot,” he said, in his
colorless uninflected voice, “when Mr. Ingersoll here believed you were dead,
he said, and I quote, ‘I loved her, goddamn it, and I never told her.’ I just
thought I should report that to you.”

 
          
Sara’s
eyes had somehow grown even wider. She looked at Jack. “Did you? Did you say
that?”

           
Jack gave the blank-faced trooper a
look. “Shit,” he said. “Now everybody’ll know.”

 
          
In
his private office at
Trend,
The
Magazine for the Way We Live This Instant, special projects editor David Levin
had a high view westward over the calculated rubble of the West Forties, and
over the broad Hudson River, to the Jersey side with its solitary graceless
rectangular high rises here and there at the water’s edge as though, county by
county and town by town and shire by shire, New Jersey was doing its feeble
best to give New York the finger. Beyond these examples of the shame of the
architecture schools lay
America
itself, beneath an ever-changing sky, and
to the north a glimpse of the
Palisades
,
and to the south a peek at
New York
Harbor
. It was an enviable view, well earned by
David Levin’s exertions on behalf of
Trend,
and he liked to stand at his broad windows, hands clasped behind his back, and
view that view every chance he got.

 
          
He
was doing so today, when
Myra
his secretary came in looking doubtful and said, “Two people out here
who want to talk to you. The man says his name is John R. Ingersoll, and you
know him from the
Weekly Galaxy
.”

 
          
The
blood drained from David Levin’s face. The
Weekly
Galaxy!
That astonishing, repellent woman! She’d stolen those tapes, he
knew she had but he could never prove it, and he could never find her again,
and he would never be able to admit to
anybody
what had happened. So all he’d been able to do was make an editorial decision
to the effect that the
Weekly Galaxy
story was too crude after all to be of interest to
Trend
readers, and kill it. Much to poor Phyllis Perkinson’s
disgust, by the way, only slighdy assuaged by his immediately assigning her to
the John Michael Mercer wedding (thus giving her a vacation and getting her out
of David Levin’s hair—or scalp; he was rather bald—in one fell swoop).

 
          
And
John R. Ingersoll—Jack Ingersoll—had been Phyllis’s editor down at that
scurrilous rag, Levin remembered that name. What was the man doing
here?
“Certainly not,” he said.

 
          
Myra
extended a tape cassette toward him,
saying, “He said I should give you this.”

 
          
Levin
accepted it, with fingers that suddenly shook. It was one of the tapes the
woman had stolen, he recognized his own cryptic pen markings. What are they up
to? For my own protection, he thought, I’d better find out. And if they want my
assurance that
Trend
is not going to
blow the whisde on them after all, by God, I’ll be happy to give it. “All
right,” he said. “Send him in.”

 
          
Myra
ushered in a couple, both reasonable
looking, the woman young and quite attractive, the man jaunty, with a rolled
newspaper under his arm. “Hi,” said the man, grinning. “I’m Jack Ingersoll, and
this is my partner, Sara Joslyn.”

           
“Hi,” said Sara Joslyn, also
grinning.

           
Levin nervously tapped the cassette
against the knuckles of his other hand. “Yes? You wanted to talk to me about
the
Weekly Galaxy?”

 
          
“Oh,
no,” Ingersoll said, beaming broadly. “We quit that place.”

 
          
“Then
I don’t under—”

 
          
“We
came to talk,” Ingersoll said smoothly, “about going to work for
you”

 
          
“Me?
No, really, there isn’t the slightest—”

           
“Just a second,” Ingersoll said.
Something about the man’s calm self-assurance was unsettling. “Sara and I are
excellent investigative reporters,” he went on, “I can pretty well assure you
of that.”

           
“Nevertheless, I—”

           
“Just to give you an example,” Sara
Joslyn said, withdrawing another tape cassette from her bag and holding it up
for him to see, “Here’s our first exclusive, just for you, if we’re working for
the magazine.”

 
          
Levin
peered at the cassette. Unwilling, but helpless, he said, “What is it?”

 
          
“You,”
Ingersoll told him, “in conversation with a woman named Ida Gavin, a former
reporter on the
Galaxy.
You appear to
be in bed together. Ida keeps describing what you’re doing.”

 
          
Levin
leaned back against the plate glass of his view. He could remember that woman’s
voice, remember her running commentary. Good God! “In fact,” Sara Joslyn said,
with an incongruously sweet smile,
“you
make a couple of requests on that tape, at one point.”

 
          
“You
may not remember Ida Gavin,” Ingersoll said, “at least not under that name.
This might help your memory.” And he unfolded the
New York Post
he’d been carrying, open to page five, and handed it
to Levin.

 
          
No!
The madwoman at the Johnny Crawfish wake!
Weekly
Galaxy
reporter, multiple murderess. The cold eyes in the standard
publicity photo looking out at him were familiar indeed. Levin was so engrossed
in gazing back at those eyes that he didn’t notice Ingersoll look approvingly
around the office with the air of a man who expects to move into it in, oh,
say, no more than four years.

 
          
When
Levin at last tore his eyes away from the dead eyes of the dead woman in the
newspaper, he looked instead at the tape in Sara Joslyn’s hand. “How can I
know—” he began, and his voice failed, and he started again: “How can I know
that’s the only copy?”

 
          
“What
does it matter,” Ingersoll asked pleasantly, “as long as we’re working for
you?”

 
          
“Special
projects for
Trend ”
Sara Joslyn
said, and smiled like an angel. “We’ll do wonderful work. You’ll see.”

 
          
They
would. They could. They had no reason not to. There was a small table handy;
Levin put the newspaper on it. He extended his hand, and Sara Joslyn put the
cassette in it. His fingers closed on the litde plasuc box.

 
          
Jack
Ingersoll, expression serious, said, “None of us will ever mention this again.
That’s a promise.

           
Levin looked from one to the other.
The scene shifted; he saw them in a different light. These people— These people
really were
investigative reporters!
The crew he’d been working with were grade schoolers in comparison. With these
people, David Levin could . . . rule
Trend!

 
          
A
sudden honest smile lit Levin’s face. He shifted the cassette, extended his
hand, and said, “Welcome aboard!”

 
          
Jack
Ingersoll took the hand in a manly and trustworthy grasp. “You won’t regret
this, Mr. Levin,” he said.

 
          
Sara
Joslyn’s eyes shone. “Clean journalism,” she breathed, “at last.”