Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (7 page)

           
DeMassi grunted, shut the
refrigerator door, opened the bottle. “Good for your figure,” he said. “We got
a story coming up on that.”

 
          
“I
worked on it,” Sara told him.

           
That brightened him right up. “Yeah?
Then you know. Great story. You know why this is my office?”

 
          
“No,
sir,” Sara admitted.

 
          
“Watch.
This is your floor.”

 
          
Sara
felt the elevator stop. DeMassi pushed the button on his desk and the paneled
wall receded with its hunting prints, revealing the conference table and,
beyond it, the editorial land of the black lines. DeMassi leaned forward,
glowering suspiciously, glaring left and right at his domain out there. Then he
relaxed a bit, looked at Sara, winked, and said, “They never know where I am,
never know when I’ll see ’em! Keeps ’em working, keeps ’em on their toes.”

 
          
“I
guess it would,” Sara agreed. “Well, thanks a lot.” Exiting the elevator,
edging past the conference table, she said, “I better get to work. The boss is
watching.”

 
          
“You
bet!” DeMassi shouted, laughing, and pushed the button again. As the elevator shut,
he was drinking deeply from the beer bottle.

 
          
Jack
was on the phone, helpless with rage. “Whadaya mean,” he demanded, “incest
isn’t interesting? Incest has
always
been interesting. So what if they’re giraffes?”

 
          
The
tinny voice in his ear said, “No.”

 
          
Jack
slammed down the phone, as Sara Joslyn entered the squaricle. Not noticing her
troubled expression, thinking about his own troubles, he glared at her and
yelled, “Evaluators!”

           
She looked at him without
comprehension. “Yes?”

 
          
“They
hate me,” Jack told her, “just out of the evil in their hearts.”

 
          
“Amen,
brother,” Mary Kate said, not pausing in her typing.

 
          
“Evaluators?”
Sara echoed. “What’s that?”

 
          
Brimming
over with sarcasm, punching and chopping the air in front of his stomach, Jack
said, “What a happy carefree existence you do lead, Missy Sara. A life without
evaluators!”

 
          
“So
far,” Sara said.

 
          
“You
know what our bottom line is here?” Jack demanded. “What gets into the paper!
And you know who carries the ball on that, every
goddamn
down? The editors.
Me”

 
          
“I
know that.”

 
          
“You
know that.” Jack glared at the telephone as though it had just laughed at him.
“Let me tell you what I do.”

 
          
“Oh,
good,” Mary Kate said, typing and typing. “Now he’s gonna tell her what he do.”

 
          
“You
be quiet,” Jack told her, “or I’ll tell everybody
your
secret. Underneath that wig, you’re Pee-Wee Herman.”

 
          
“Take
it out on everybody, why don’t you,” Mary Kate suggested.

 
          
Turning
back to Sara, Jack said, “I make up the story, or I find it in some local
newspaper from East Nowhere, I sell it to
Massa
, that’s the
first
hurdle. Then I give it to you, you check it, make it work,
write it up, you give it back to me, you’re done, happy as a pig at the
Galaxy
. Am I done?”

           
“I don’t know,” Sara said. “Are
you?”

 
          
“In
a word, I am not at
all
done.”

 
          
“That’s
six words,” Mary Kate said.

 
          
Ignoring
her, Jack said, “My
next
task is to
push the goddamn story through the fact checkers. Devil’s advocate time. Do we
have the quotes, the pictures, the proof? If it holds up with them, it should
hold up in court.
Then
I take it up
to Rewrite. You know what the cute gimmick is with Rewrite?”

 
          
Mary
Kate said, “She doesn’t yet, but she’s going to.”

 
          
“The
cute gimmick with Rewrite—Mary Kate, don’t you have a sick mother to visit or
something?”

 
          
“She
died.”

 
          
“Well,
that’s good. Too late to keep her from having you, but still.” Turning back to
Sara, Jack said, “
Massa
likes individual initiative, so therefore the boys and girls of Rewrite
get to decide
what
they will rewrite.
Your story, my story, it sits there till the pages crumble. I go up, I shmooze,
I cry a tear, sometimes two tears,
please
write my story!”

 
          
“Oh,
my gosh,” Sara said, looking shocked and sympathetic.

 
          
“Neady
put,” Jack told her. “
Then
, once
Rewrite has deigned to re-goddamn-write,
then
we got the evaluators. They sit up there on four, practically in Jock
Harsch’s left nostril, up on top of the whole shebang, they read the story,
they decide is it
interesting.
It has
to be interesting, and it has to be interesting to
them.
If we bore an evaluator, me and you and the fact checkers and
the boys and girls of Rewrite, if all our combined efforts make an evaluator
yawn, the story’s dead. It does not get in the paper.”

 
          
“I
had no idea,” Sara said. The girl’s eyes were round with awe.

 
          
“A
happy life.” Pointing toward the conference table and the bank of elevators,
Jack said, “Every week, on
Massa
’s desk there comes the box score. This editor had six stories in the
paper, this editor had nine, Boy Cartwright had fifty-seven and keeps the only
comer squaricle in the known world, this editor had
two
, and that means this editor went wee wee wee all the way out of
a job.”

 
          
“Well,
the beer and potato chip story’s going in,” Sara said, apparendy trying to
encourage him.

 
          
Jack
was not of a mood to be encouraged. “One drop,” he said, “in one bucket. A new
bucket every week. Speaking of which—” and he picked up from his desk a
paper-clipped stack of paper; Sara’s first assignment this morning.

 
          
But
she said, “I’m sorry.”

 
          
He
looked at her, not understanding. “What? You mean you were fired? On a Friday?”

 
          
“Not
exacdy,” Sara said. He thought she was acting a litde guilty, a litde shifty.

 
          
Now
what, he wondered, and put the papers on his desk again so he could give her
his full attention. He said, “Who, what, when, where, why.”

 
          
Sara
sighed. She said, “It seems I left my parking sticker on the rented—”

 
          
“Oh,
jeez,” Jack said.
He
was going to get
blamed again. They give him all the dimwits, and then it’s
his
fault when they do something stupid. Too weighed down even to
give voice, he merely sat and looked at her.

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” she said again, which helped a whole hell of a lot. “Mr. Harsch said I’m
supposed to go get it back.”

 
          
“But
here we are,” Jack pointed out, “having this nice chat.”

 
          
Offense
closed her face. Lips clenched, she turned without a word and stalked away,
left and right through the squaricles. Watching her go, Jack said, “Maybe I
hate women.”

 
          
Mary
Kate shook her head. “You’re not that selective,” she said.

 
          
They
hadn’t re-rented the Chevette. Walking with the skinny young black mechanic in
white coveralls through the rows of cars out behind the rental office, Sara
noticed that “Z” was the first letter of every license plate back here, and she
asked him about it. “State system,” he told her. “Every rental, every leased
car in
Florida
, they all got the Z plate.”

           
The murdered man’s car had had a Z
plate, hadn’t it? She’d jotted the details into her notebook at the time. A
larger and more expensive car than her Chevette, though; some sort of Buick.
Maybe he’d leased it. But that idea somehow seemed more businesslike than the
murdered man’s tough dead face had suggested; so maybe he stole it.

 
          
Using
a single-edge razor blade, the mechanic carefully peeled her
visitor
sticker from the Chevette’s
windshield. “Big outfit like the
Galaxy ”
he commented as he worked, “you’d think they could afford more than one of
these.”

 
          
“Wouldn’t
you,” agreed Sara. “Do you read the
Galaxy?”

 
          
“Oh,
sure,” he said, and grinned. “Every time. They’re a gas.”

 
          
Did
the dread evaluators have this fellow in mind, Sara wondered, when they read
each story to see if it was interesting enough to be published in the paper?
Did Jack have him in mind? Am I supposed to?

 
          
At
last he gave her the wrinkled but still intact sticker, and she gave him five
dollars for his trouble, along with her sunniest smile. “I really appreciate
this,” she told him.

 
          
Shrugging,
pocketing the five, he said, “I’da had to take it off anyways, before we rented
it out again. Can’t release no cars got a lotta stuff on the windows.” And so
much for Jacob Harsch’s security.

           
It was barely lunchtime, and here
she already had the sticker, so she got herself a ham and cheese sandwich on
rye and a container of coffee from a takeout place near the rental agency, and
ate it all in the Peugeot on the drive back out to the
Galaxy.
Presumably she could take the whole day off, since Harsch
had given her till tomorrow to return, but this would demonstrate what a good
and willing worker she was, and how heartily sorry she was to have forgotten
the sticker, and all that nonsense. Maybe Jack would even lose some tiny bit of
his bad temper. Besides, what else would she do with herself? She didn’t know
anybody yet in this part of the world except the people at work. The beach she
had access to through the apartment she was sharing with Phyllis would already
be in the building’s shadow, and she had no interest in just hanging around the
big empty apartment all day.

 
          
There.
The place where she’d found the
murdered man. When she’d written to her mother in Great Barrington on Wednesday
night she’d described that incident, and said it was “the most exciting thing
that ever happened to me,” but even when writing the words she’d felt their
falseness. The moment had been scary, eerie, strange, but not exacdy exciting;
and there’d been no follow-through. The unreality that had been in the incident
from me beginning had grown and spread to cover the entire event; as though it
had never been.

 
          
But
there was the spot; it had happened. She looked at it on the way by, looked at
it again in the rearview mirror. She was alone out here on the highway now, the
same as that day, the circumstances the same as then for the first time since
it had happened. Her other trips along this road had all been in the midst of
the
Galaxy’s
twice daily traffic jam.

 
          
Not
quite the same time of day, though. It was now just about one o’clock in the
afternoon, and she’d found the murdered man at quarter to ten in the morning,
her first-day appointment with Mr. Harsch having been set at ten o clock.

 
          
Hmmm.
The employees all arrived at nine, some a little earlier, some a little later.
There’s always a few stragglers, so it probably would have been ten past before
the morning rush hour was done. Then, sometimes between ten past nine and
quarter to ten—no, make it twenty to ten, since she hadn’t seen the killer’s
car ahead of her—the murdered man had come driving out, had stopped beside the
road, and had been murdered.

 
          
Well,
wait. This was the first she’d actually thought about the murder since Monday,
when Jack Ingersoll had so brutally disabused her of the notion that she’d
brought him a useful story. But, now that she did start to think about it,
driving along the empty pale road beneath the huge
midday
sun, there were several things she knew or
could assume about the murdered man, beginning with the fact that he must have
been
going to the Galaxy
. There was
nothing else on this road, nothing to either side of it. So the murdered man
was on his way to the offices of the
Weekly
Galaxy
.

           
Why? To bring proof of some expose?
But the
Galaxy
wasn’t that kind of
paper. What she’d suspected before, she now knew for certain, after one week on
the job. The
Galaxy
didn’t touch real
scandal at all, only marital problems of television stars, sexual peccadilloes
of jet-setters, medical weirdnesses. Anything involving the mob, say, or
crooked politicians, anything involving true investigative hard news, would
have led the murdered man to some other newspaper, almost any other newspaper.
Even the poor old
Courier-Observer
would have been a better potential place for such information.

 
          
Well,
whatever the reason, the
Galaxy
must
be where the murdered man had been going. So his having been killed might very
well have something to do with the reason he was going to the
Galaxy.

 
          
Unless
he actually worked for the paper, of course. Maybe he was an employee. From
Jack’s description of evaluators, the murdered man could have been one of
those.

 
          
So
maybe Jack killed him, out of bad temper. Driving along, the
Galaxy
building and sign becoming
visible far ahead, she grinned at that idea. The evaluator evaluated.

 
          
Well,
whoever killed him . . .

 
          
Whoever
killed the murdered man, he or she or they had most likely then gone on to the
Galaxy
themselves.

 
          
That’s
right. The body had still been warm, not yet terribly stiff. He had to have
been killed no more than half an hour before she’d found him, or staffers going
to work would have seen it happen. It was
possible
the killer had driven on from there to the next break in the central
divider—there were such breaks every two miles— and had then turned around and
driven back to the city, leaving the road at the city end a few minutes before
Sara had started out on it; possible, but awfully tight. The likelihood—not
definite yet, but likely—was that the killer had gone straight on to the
Galaxy
, had been waved past the guard
booth because of the
employee sticker
on his car (her Chevette had been the only car in the visitors’ parking lot
that morning), and had simply gone to work.

 
          
Which
meant the probabilities were, the killer worked for the
Weekly Galaxy.

 
          
Had
there been an employee sticker on the murdered man’s car? Frowning as the
Galaxy
building loomed up ahead of her,
Sara tried to remember the Buick’s windshield, tried to picture it in her mind,
see whether or not there had been anything on the left lower comer of the
glass; but she just wasn’t sure. That hadn’t been part of her attention at the
time, and now she could visualize the Buick’s windshield just as readily with
the sticker as without.

 
          
The
guard was pleased when she appeared and handed him the wrinkled sticker. “Mr.
Harsch sent a memo down,” he told her, “said you probably wouldn’t be around
with this till tomorrow.”

           
“I work fast.”

 
          
“Usually,”
the guard said, “you wouldn’t get your permanent sticker till next week, but
there’s no point giving you the temporary for just one more day, so . . .
Excuse me.”

 
          
Once
again, as the white guard had done on Monday, this one took a sticker from his
clipboard, put the clipboard atop her car, peeled off the sticker’s backing,
and leaned in through her open window to fasten it to the lower left comer of
her windshield.

 
          
The
permanent sticker.

 
          
Massa
had liked a magnificent eleven of Jack’s
ideas this morning. If it weren’t for the new one and her goddamn sticker,
Jack’s world would be a reasonably all right place today, considerably less
Hieronymus Bosch than usual. And the ice cream diet, which continued to elude all
search parties; those were the two clouds on Jack’s horizon.

 
          
And
here came one of those clouds now, a lot closer than the horizon. “Well, looka
that,” Mary Kate said in mild amazement, and Jack looked up, and here came Sara
Joslyn herself, quartering her way through the squaricles. “Well, well,” Jack
said. “In fact, well, well, well.”

 
          
“I’d
say so,” said Mary Kate.

 
          
Sara
Joslyn. She went left, she went right, she advanced, she went off at an oblique
angle, she turned sharply, she came straight to Jack’s squaricle and entered
through the door space. “I got it,” she said. “Everything’s fixed.”

           
Jack smiled upon her, he couldn’t
help himself. “And you came back today, rather than tomorrow.”

 
          
“Well,
I felt bad about making trouble.”

 
          
“And
quite rightly, too,” Jack said, as Ida Gavin entered the squaricle and said,
“Keely Jones.”

           
“Ah, yes,” Jack said, swiveling
around to face her. “We are playing the tape of the swimming pool salesman’s
story from a loudspeaker truck in front of Miss Jones’s house.”

           
“Not anymore,” Ida said. “She came
out and fired a shotgun at our truck.”

 
          
“Oh,
nice!”
Jack said, and Mary Kate
looked up with a sunny smile.

 
          
“Our
attorneys,” Ida said, “are right now negotiating with her attorneys.”

 
          
“Be
prepared, Ida,” Jack said, “to sky LAward soonest.”

 
          
“My
fuck-you suit is already packed,” Ida said. “I’ll keep you informed.” And she
marched from the squaricle.

 
          
Jack
turned again to the new one. Was it possible things would be going
well
now for a little while? Was it
possible this Sara Joslyn would eventually become part of the solution, instead
of part of the problem? “Your attitude is commendable, Sara,” he told her. “And
I shall reward it by overworking you.” He selected two sets of papers from his
desk and handed them to her. “I like to think of these as self-explanatory.”

 
          
“I
hope
I
think of them that way,” she
said, accepting the papers.

           
But first, there was the unresolved
Case of the Murdered Man. What had happened there, finally? The
Galaxy's
extensive research library did
not include back issues of the local paper, so it wouldn’t be easy to go back
and find whatever had been reported on it, if anything. Sara believed now that
Jack’s first dismissive summation of the incident had been wrong, that it
hadn’t merely been a drug dealer story, or that if it
was
a story about drugs the trail nevertheless led here somehow to
the
Galaxy
, but she had been aware of
absolutely ho investigation of the incident; no police presence at the
Galaxy
, none at the scene of the crime.
No one had approached to question her. Were the police also dismissing the
murder as unimportant? Was there such a thing as an unimportant murder?