Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (8 page)

 
          
Leaving
Jack Ingersoll’s squaricle, carrying the paperwork of her new assignment, Sara
was distracted by this unfinished story, this unanswered question: What about
the murdered man beside the road? True, it was none of her business. True, she
already had too much to think about. True, there was nothing she could
do
about the problem. But it still
existed, nagging at her.

 
          
For
instance. Even though her next assignment was right here, clutched in her hand,
she found herself wondering again about the murdered man’s car’s license plate;
did its letters, or did they not, start with a “Z”? Making her intricate way
out of the squaricles, Sara crossed to the reporters’ tables, where Phyllis
flashed her a bright welcoming smile while continuing to talk seriously and
earnestly into the phone: “And when you met Cleopatra,” she was asking, “in
your previous life, did she happen to mention anything about snakes?” To the
left of Sara’s desk space—Phyllis being on her right—sat Harry Razza, another
of Jack’s eight reporters and another of the many stakers from Australia. An
aging matinee idol type, with thickly sculptured auburn hair and a roguish
smile, he apparently thought of himself as being from the Douglas Fairbanks
mold, and Sara had been forced to put him quite firmly in his place several
times on Monday and Tuesday; since when, he’d been friendly and calm. Now, he
was speaking with dogged patience on the phone, saying, “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?”

 
          
Bob
Sangster, the Aussie with the large nose, had the desk space directly in front
of Sara, where he was saying into his phone, “Now, didn’t the
United States
government
pay
for these frogs?” And Don Grove, the pessimistic young reporter
who had so far this week failed to produce both a two-headed calf from
Brazil
and a Martian wedding from
Marin County
,
California
, in his position at the desk space direcdy behind Sara was also on the
phone, saying, “And how old was the victim? And this midget: just how short
is
he?” Sara had already become so used
to this new work environment that she was distracted by none of these
conversations. Seating herself at her desk space, putting Jack’s new work
assignments to one side, she rested her shoulder bag on the typewriter—there
wasn’t room for it anywhere else— removed her spiral notebook, and then placed
the shoulder bag, as usual, under her chair. Now, the page with the murdered
man’s car . . .

 
          
.
. . wasn’t there.

 
          
She
leafed through the notebook twice. Had she tom it out? She occasionally did
that, when a page contained only items of the most transitory interest, like
shopping lists, but surely she wouldn’t have tom out the page containing the
information on the murdered man’s car.

 
          
That
would be the same page with the details of her appointment that morning with
Mr. Harsch: his name, directions to the
Galaxy
,
time of the meeting. But that was gone, too.

 
          
Well,
yes. That she
might
have thrown out,
once the meeting was over. Had she done so without noticing what else was on
that page? It was goddamn unlikely.

 
          
All
right. Here’s the page with the money quote about potato chips, which would be
the page immediately after the one with the appointment and the car. Switching
on the gooseneck lamp on her desk space, Sara held the notepad angled up so the
light flooded onto the potato chip quote. Leaning in close, eyes low to the
edge of the pad, she tried to look
across
the page, hoping to see the indentations pressed there by her having written on
the page above it. That sometimes worked, though it was much easier when the
next page hadn’t already been written on. Staring, squinting, Sara could see
that there were such identations, but she couldn’t read them.

 
          
Well,
sometimes it helped to stroke a pencil very lighdy back and forth over the page,
the indentations coming up paler than the rest. Sara tried that, and again she
could see the evidence of lines, but they were just too slight, and too
fragmented by the potato chip quote, to be legible.

 
          
Combine
the two methods? Holding the page, now grayed by pencil lines, up in the glare
of the gooseneck lamp, Sara peered close again, and this time it began to come
clear. “Dade” first, the word “Dade,” that being the county shown on the
license plate,
Dade
County
meaning
Miami
. Then the words “Buick
Riviera
.” Harder was the scrawl “dk blu,” meaning
dark blue, the color of the murdered man’s car. Hardest of all was the license
plate number. It began with “2,” but the next two numbers baffled her until she
realized they were as simple as they looked, that they were both the number
“7.” And the letters? The first was “Z,” just as she’d thought. Then “R.” And
at last one she simply couldn’t be sure about, “G” or “Q” or “O.”

 
          
Well,
I’ve got it, she thought, looking at the numbers and letters written on a page
from the
Galaxy's
notepad, the one
she kept on this desk. 277-ZR(G/Q/0). And now what do I do with it? Returning
her own notebook to the shoulder bag under her chair, it occurred to her that
almost anyone could have come over here sometime while she was in the reference
section or the ladies, and tom that page out.

 
          
Had
someone done that? Or had she
absent- mindedly thrown it away herself, noticing only the appointment with Mr.
Harsch on that page? Which was more improbable?

 
          
Well,
why
would anyone throw that page
away? She’d already reported the murder, hadn’t she?

 
          
Hadn’t
she?

 
          
She
was working on that question, thinking about Monday’s taciturn guard and gazing
at the license plate numbers she’d just written, when her telephone’s white
light began to flash, and she thought, with a sudden thrill of fear,
I'm being watched!
She almost didn’t
want to answer, but of course that was silly. Holding her breath, she reached
out, picked up the phone, said, “Hello?” in a small and guarded voice, and
Jack’s voice in her ear said, “A special treat.”

 
          
Relief
made her limp, boneless. “Oh, yes?” she said.

 
          
“Because
you’re such a good girl,” his practically cheerful voice told her, “you are
being invited to a barbecue tomorrow.”

 
          
“I
am?”

 
          
“Binx
Radwell and his wife are throwing it,” Jack said, with just the most delicate
added emphasis on the word “wife”; to suggest this was to be a respectable
outing.

           
“Well, that sounds like fun,” she
said. “Thank you.”

 
          
“Binx
said I should invite you,” he said, spoiling it a bit, “so thank him.”

 
          
“I
will, then.”

 
          
“Pick
you up at
noon
tomorrow?”

 
          
“Fine.
See you then.”

 
          
She
hung up, obscurely pleased; a break in the routine, and some social contact in
this strange new world. But now, if she was such a good girl, she should go to
work. Reaching for her new assignments, she noticed the license plate numbers
and car info on the pad, and hesitated. What should she do with that? Did- it
matter whether she kept it or not?

 
          
Feeling
faintly ridiculous (but also still with that same irrational feeling: I’m being
watched), she tore that page out of the
Galaxy's
notepad and put it in her skirt pocket.

 
          
Phyllis
wasn’t going to the barbecue. She was out all Friday night—the first time she’d
been away at all, and the only indication so far that there was a man in her
life—and came by briefly late Saturday morning to change, throw swimsuit and
cosmetics and some clothes and a paperback novel about the French Revolution
into her bright red vinyl bag, and cheerfully say, “See you manana, my dear.
You ought to try to get out.”

           
“I
am
getting out,” Sara told her, but Phyllis was gone in a flash of
long legs, uninterested. Sara, irritated at being put unjustly in the position
of country mouse, but at the same time just as pleased to have the apartment to
herself for a while, went back to her room and her desk.

 
          
Sara’s
secret vice was that she was a novelist; or, that is, that she was
not
a novelist and was determined to
become one. Just exactly which novelist she would eventually turn out to be she
wasn’t yet entirely sure—a problem which she felt was hampering her
development—but she was resolutely at every opportunity practicing the craft
she hoped someday to learn. That’s why a desk and chair had been her third and
fourth purchases for the apartment, immediately after a double bed and a tall
roomy dresser.

 
          
At
times it seemed to her unrealistic that a young woman in her mid-twenties like
herself, with no extraordinary experiences of life, should even think about
trying to be a novelist, but then she placed against that the force of her
desire, and it all seemed possible. One of the reasons, in fact, that she’d
taken this job after the
Courier-Observer
was merged, was that it would surely be an experience outside what she
already knew; and it was definitely working out that way.

 
          
This
was the first real chance she’d had to look at her works in progress and
organize her thoughts since the move to
Florida
. Neatly stacked atop the desk were the four
large manila envelopes containing the four novels she was currendy more or less
working on, each envelope neatly labeled:
college;
spy; civil war; newspaper.
One of these would become her project now; with
luck, until it was finished.

 
          
college
(working title
I For Incomplete)
was the thickest envelope,
but she hadn’t worked on that one for over a year, having lost sympathy with
the characters. The thinnest envelope was
newspaper
(no title yet), which she’d started when the word had come down about the
merging of the
Courier- Observer
and
on which she’d worked furiously until realizing she didn’t herself much believe
the villains.

 
          
This
morning, she’d awakened to find herself thinking about the spy novel for the
first time in months; the idea of intrigue, suspense, hidden truths, suddenly
appealed to her. After her first- ever sunlit morning swim in the Adantic, she
brought out that envelope (working tide
Time
of the Hero),
put up on the wall the maps of Bulgaria and Costa Rica, and
was just settling down to re-read what she’d already done on that book when
Phyllis flashed through. That distracted her for a while, and she spent some
time arranging and rearranging the other things she had up on the wall over the
desk; a Polaroid shot of her mother’s white clapboard house with dark green
trim, up there in Great Barrington; another Polaroid, this of her mother’s
living room at Christmas; two favorite cartoons from
The New Yorker;
a photo of Bill Hunnicutt, the boy she’d gone
steady with the last two years of college; the notepad sheet with the murdered man’s
car description and license plate; the letter from New England Newspapers
announcing the termination of her services; a few other small things. She
placed all of that to her satisfaction, read the completed pages of
Time of the Hero
, making corrections and
notes to herself along the way, and then it was nearly noon, and time to change
into jeans and a sleeveless blouse; appropriate wear for a barbecue, she hoped.

 
          
And
who, she wondered, was Jack Ingersoll when he wasn’t at work?