Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  “He fired our other spy,” Phyllis said.

  Sara didn’t get it. “Fired? Spy?”

  “John Michael Mercer,” Phyllis explained. “Massa’s in love with John Michael Mercer, he wants stories about him all the time, but Mercer doesn’t like the Galaxy. So we keep a spy in his house, and then he fmds the spy and fires him, and then we have to plant another one. The last one was terrific, he worked for the security service, he was a guard right on the property, he knew everything ”

  Sara said, “A private guard, working for him? And he was a spy?”

  “The security company got all upset when they found out,” Phyllis said, laughing as though it were some sort of college prank she was talking about. “So now we’re going to try to go through his gardener, if we can find his gardener. Excuse me.” And she went back to the phone.

  I should leave, Sara thought. I should quit this crazy place, I should walk out right now. Oh, if only the Courier-Observer hadn’t been merged! I liked working there. I’ll never like this place. I should stand up this instant and walk out and never come back.

  But she didn’t. She picked up the phone and called a tame nutritionist.

  Seated at his typewriter, Jack typed. He typed:

  Does sex cure gallstones? Go to macro, then back to micro. Does sex cure anything? Well, wait, wait, wait, a healthy sex life— What about acne? Regular sexual activity tones the body, removes wastes— Forget that part. Tones the body. Regular non-kinky sex tends toward mental and physical health. Can we get into it that way? Doctor, would you say a normally active sex life would tend to increased mental and physical health? Would there be some physical illnesses, Doctor, such as acne, various hormonal imbalances, that are improved by regular sexual activity? Doctor, I’m begging you here. Is it possible that certain disorders of the internal organs might be prevented or alleviated by regular normal sexual activity? The prostate, for instance. My God, the prostate! We may be onto

  The new one approached the squaricle, a grim smile on her mouth and several sheets of paper in her hands. Jack tried to concentrate on the problem, but she was insistent, passing right by Mary Kate, stepping across the squaricle, slapping the pages onto Jack’s desk, next to the typewriter. “The potato chip quote,” she announced.

  “Good, good, give it to Mary Kate.”

  something here

  “Don’t you want to read it?”

  Jack gave her a look that would have burned through a vault door. “I am busy,” he said. “You’re a hotshot reporter, as I understand it. You understood the assignment, as I understand it. You say you have completed the assignment, as I understand it. I understand. Give it to Mary Kate.”

  Doctor, the prostate gland in men may be affected by frequency and manner of sexual activity. Now, is it possible

  “Wait!” Jack called after her as, heavily miffed, having given Mary Kate her potato chip wisdom, the new one was about to march away. “I’ll have another assignment for you in just a minute.”

  “As you understand it,” she said.

  He didn’t have time to respond to that. The future of mankind itself hung in the balance.

  that other inner organs in the human body can also be affected, for good or ill, by sexual activity? Doctor, is it at all possible that a combination of mental and physical wellbeing, brought on by normal healthy sexual activity, might reduce the danger of developing gallstones, for example?

  “Oh-kay!” Jack yanked the sheet of paper from the typewriter, and turned grinning to Mary Kate. “Give her the internists,” he said. “Once again, we are snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.”

  “Feels more like the stomach of defeat,” Mary Kate said, opening a file drawer.

  “Very humorous,” Jack agreed, and turned to the new one. If he admitted he’d forgotten her name she’d just get all snippy again. “Now, Champ,” he said, smoothing the sheet of paper neady on his desk, “let me describe our next money quote.”

  During lunch in the employees’ commissary on the second floor, a broad beige room that combined all the most charming qualities of a bus depot in Newark with those of a minimum security prison, Phyllis suggested Sara move in and share her apartment. “It’s huge ,” Phyllis assured her. “My salary’s so ridiculous, I just went out and splurged, and there I am, stuck with the lease. It’s just too large for me. Come on, Sara, it’ll be fun.”

  “I’d love to,” Sara said, having spent last night in the Holiday Inn back in the city and beginning to wonder when she’d have time to go apartment hunting for herself. So it was decided, and Sara went back to eating lunch, which was pretty good despite the surroundings, and very cheap.

  Lunch happened between her successful capturing of the gallstone quote—the awful Ingersoll actually smiled when she brought it to him, or rather brought it to Mary Kate, whose comment was, “Holy shitsky!”—and her unsuccessful effort to learn which of Florida’s many swimming pool care services tended to the swimming pool of John Michael Mercer. “One of these people is lying,” Phyllis said darkly at one point, still failing to connect with John Michael Mercer’s gardener. “The question is, which one? And the problem is, being service industries, they’re used to lying on the phone anyway.”

  The question turned out to be unanswerable, at least for today, but in the process Sara learned about the reference section, an area of library stacks in a remote comer of the floor. In addition to dictionaries, encyclopedias, Who's Whos, almanacs and atlases, the reference section also contained what was apparently every phone book published in America, filed alphabetically by state and then by city. Sara and Phyllis alternated visits to this section, bringing back Florida phone books two at a time, calling the pool services and the gardening services, failing again. Then, at about ten to four, the workday nearly done, Sara returned to her desk space to find the white light on her phone flashing. Holding the latest phone books protectively to her chest, she said, “Why is it doing that?”

  “Someone’s calling you,” Phyllis told her. “These phones don’t ring, they just flash. Otherwise, could you imagine what this place would be like?”

  “In a million years,” Sara said, putting the phone books down, “I couldn’t begin to imagine what this place already is.” Picking up the receiver, holding it gingerly to her face as though it might have teeth and be of a mind to bite, she said, “Hello?”

  “This is your master’s voice.”

  She looked over toward the editors’ world, and there he was way over by a window, waving at her, holding his own phone to his ear.

  No. She was still angry, and she was justified. Her voice as cold as she could make it, she said, “Yes?”

  “I just want to tell you,” the now cheerful voice said in her ear, “you made my day with the gallstone quote. A very good beginning, Champ.”

  Sara knew it was risky, but she didn’t care, she was still extremely irritated. “As you understand it,” she said.

  “Aw, come on,” he said, being downright boyish now. “A little tension early in the day, that’s all. Forgive and forget, Champ.”

  “My name,” Sara said, “which you have obviously forgotten, is Sara Joslyn. And I’m sorry, Mr. Ingersoll, but you can’t be both the good cop and the bad cop.” And she hung up.

  Next to her, Phyllis sighed. “Well, there goes a roommate,” she said.

  Will I be fired? Sara wondered, but couldn’t guess. Do I want to be fired? She couldn’t work out the answer to that one, either.

  “She hung up on me,” Jack told Mary Kate, as he replaced the receiver.

  “Tough guy,” Mary Kate commented.

  “Me or her?”

  “Both of you.”

  “But I’m the boss,” Jack complained. “Why does some still small voice deep within me say, ‘Fire the broad’?”

  “You want to save her from corruption,” Mary Kate suggested.

  Jack shook his head. “No, that can’t be it.”

  “You’ll follow me,” Phyllis said, outs
ide the front door, at just a few minutes past four. “I’m in a white Corvette.”

  “See you,” Sara said, and headed for the Visitor’s parking lot while the hundreds of other employees all streamed the other way.

  She hadn’t bothered to lock the car, it being a rental with nothing personal in it, and now the glove compartment hung open. Had she left it like that? Of course not; so we have petty thieves here at the Weekly Galaxy, do we? There had been nothing in there but the rental agreement and the rental company’s map of Florida, both of which were still present. Shutting the glove compartment, Sara drove across to the exit and waited there, watching the stream of Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars, Triumphs and Thunderbirds go past the guard booth, headed for the empty highway. Several white Corvettes went by before one appeared with Phyllis’s smiling face and waving arm framed in its low window. Sara waved back, slipped the Chevette into the line behind her, and drove past the guard booth. A different guard was on duty now, a short round black man who observed the passing fleet with utter boredom.

  This was one of the two times a day, five days a week, when this twelve-mile superhighway was put to any kind of use. The pocket rush hour from the Weekly Galaxy tore along the road eastward toward the city like a mechanized tidal wave, raising pale dust, leaving emptiness in its wake.

  An investigative reporter, Sara thought, could have a lot of fun digging into the history of this road, doping out what political ties, what debts and favors, had led to the construction of a twelve- mile major highway for the use and enjoyment essentially of one man: Bruno DeMassi. Pity, she thought, Pm not working on a paper that would be interested in that story.

  The blue Buick Riviera was gone, and so was the body. Sara knew the precise spot where it had stood, the whole picture etched into her brain, and now it was gone, as though it had never been. So at least the local police were taking the crime seriously, even if it was beneath the consideration of the Weekly Galaxy.

  I’ll read about it, she thought bitterly, in my local hometown rag.

  Phyllis’s apartment was in a tall white box standing on end right at the water’s edge. Out the broad windows of her seventh-floor living room, the Atlantic Ocean rolled and ran, grayish blue with foamy highlights in white. Her forehead against the cool glass—the apartment was sternly air-conditioned—Sara looked down at the beach, now in the building’s shadow. “That’s ours?” she asked.

  “It’s all ours,” Phyllis told her. “The whole world is ours. Everything you can see is ours. Isn’t it fabulous?”

  It was. The name of the building, one of an apparently endless row of apartment buildings and condos along the oceanfront, was the Sybarite, displaying a cultural striving combined with a historical shakiness not infrequent among the namers of names along the Florida coasts. Phyllis’s apartment contained, in addition to the huge stepdown living room, three large bedrooms, each with its own elaborate bath, a separate dining room with crystal chandelier at chin height, and an astonishingly large and well-furnished kitchen. Everything was a little too glittery for Sara’s taste, but there surely was no appliance or mechanical convenience the builder had neglected to install.

  In her few months here, Phyllis had done little by way of furnishing the place. Her own bedroom contained a king-size bed and a couple of mismatched antique dressers, plus a twelve-foot-long wall of closets stuffed to bursting with clothes. The living room featured a long sofa in white crushed velvet, a TV and VCR and stereo equipment and compact discs and videotapes all lying around on the floor amid a mass of wires, and a couple of bargain-shop lamps and end tables. The dining room was empty; Sara walked into the chandelier her first time through. One bedroom was also empty, but the other was outfitted with a double bed mattress on the floor. “You can use that until you get your own stuff,” Phyllis said.

  “I think I’ll get my own stuff now,” Sara decided. “The stores are still open.”

  “Good idea. Do you want to bring back a couple TV dinners, or should we order out tonight?”

  I’m back in college, Sara thought, and the idea was so amusing that for the first time that day she relaxed and thought the immediate future might be fun after all. “I’ll bring back a pizza,” she said.

  THE FIRST WEEK

  One

  The Peugeot smelled so new. Driving out to work on Friday morning, the last day of her first week on the job, the first day without the rental car, Sara reveled in the newness of the Peugeot, the slight stiffness in the steering wheel, the darkly gleaming modem look of the dashboard. Other cars, new and shiny and expensive, passed her as she drove, or she passed them, and it was almost as though this were a normal highway after all; until you noticed the absolute absence of traffic on the other side of the divider.

  There. That’s where the Buick Riviera had been stopped, with the murdered man. Sara saw and noticed that spot every morning, and the further spot where she’d made her U-tum. In fact, until Wednesday night’s rain, it had still been possible to see the Chevette’s tire marks on the shoulder where she’d thrown gravel in spinning around.

  She wondered what had happened next, with the murdered man. Had they found his killer? She hadn’t seen anything about it in the local paper, but she’d been so busy with her job, and furnishing her share of Phyllis’s apartment, that she hadn’t much read the local papers anyway, so it might have been in there and she’d missed it. But probably Jack Ingersoll had been right, that first morning; the murdered man had most likely been involved in the drug world—his face had been a tough one, she remembered, even in death —and his killing would have been only marginally more interesting to a normal newspaper than to the Weekly Galaxy.

  “the people, yes!” The sign reared up ahead of her, making her wonder yet again how many people besides Phyllis hadn’t realized the quote was from Sandburg. How many Galaxy staffers, not to even' think about Galaxy readers, would recognize the name Carl Sandburg at all?

  It’s a strange world I’m in, Sara thought, wondering how long she’d want to stay in it, and angled toward the single lane passing the guard booth on the right. But as she approached, the guard stepped out and held up his hand, surprising her; she’d just driven through with everybody else the other mornings this week. She stopped, wondering what was wrong.

  The usual black guard was on duty at the gate, she not having seen that original white guard since she’d first arrived here and reported the murder to him. As he approached the car, she pushed the button that rolled her new window down and permitted the usual invisible blanket of hot dull air to roll in and cover her face. “Hi,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  No recognition touched his features: “Help you, miss?”

  “I work here,” Sara told him. “Sara Joslyn.”

  “I don’t think I know you, miss,” the guard said, his round black face carefully polite and impersonal, but at the same time watchful.

  “I’ve been working here since Monday,” Sara told him, feeling helpless and for some reason a little scared.

  The guard transferred his careful frown from her face to the comer of the windshield. In Sara’s rearview mirror, a line had formed and was lengthening; she was holding everybody up from getting to work. The guard said, “Miss? Where’s your sticker?”

  Then she remembered. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, I forgot. That was a rented car, I bought this—”

  More and more disapproving, the guard said, “You left your sticker on a rented car?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  Horns honked somewhere back in the line. The guard glowered in that direction, then glowered more specifically at Sara. “This isn’t good,” he said.

  “I’m really sorry, I completely—”

  “Park in the Visitors’ lot today,” the guard told her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said humbly. What a way to finish my first week, she thought.

  Jack sat at his desk, eating a pencil. Beside him, Binx Rad well, sweating gently, sat on the comer
of the desk and morosely squeezed a pink rubber ball. Nearby, Mary Kate typed. Jack took the pencil from his mouth, gazed somberly across the room, shook his head, took a breath, squared his shoulders, and announced, “The Galaxy Challenge. Who will make a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis and fly it to Paris?”

  Binx considered him. He squeezed, squeezed, squeezed the pink ball. “The Galaxy sponsors, you mean?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “The prize is three French lessons at Berlitz.”

  “Insurance,” Binx said.

  “I hate a nay-sayer,” Jack said, and put the pencil back in his mouth.

  Louis B. Urbiton, at fifty-one the oldest Australian reporter on the staff and frequendy the drunkest, came through the black lines, entered Jack’s squaricle through the door space, and said, “A stringer in Spokane says their panda died.” Jack looked up, unmouthed the pencil. “Did it leave a grieving mate?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Louis admitted.

  “Ask,” Jack advised him.

  Louis went away. Jack gnawed pencil. Binx squeezed the pink ball. Mary Kate stopped typing and yawned. Speaking around the pencil, Jack said, “Binx, listen, would you feel I was stealing if I did ‘Legionnaires’ Disease: It Was Guilt’?” “Mine was suicide, and Massa didn’t like it,” Binx pointed out. “What do you mean, guilt?” “Psychosomatic.”