“We’ll know,” Ida said, “very soon. You want me to follow up on Felicia Nelson, or on Trend?”
Jack thought. “Trend.” he said. “But mention nothing about Felicia Nelson to our co-workers.”
“Right.”
“Nor Boston.”
“Never heard of the place,” Ida said.
Two
It was because she was getting nowhere with Time of The Hero, and couldn’t even look at the manuscripts of the three other partial novels buzzing away reproachfully at her in their desk drawer, that Sara was reading the wall over the desk in her bedroom at the Sybarite Saturday morning, and came again upon the license number and description of what, if she’d been writing it up, she would surely have called “the death car.”
After yesterday’s failure at Henry Reed Personnel—gosh, that fellow was good; how had he caught on so fast?—Sara had phoned Jack from Miami, feeling very brought down, particularly so after the heights she’d been flying on the impetus of the twins coup. He must have heard it in her voice because, when she’d asked him what she should start on next, he’d said, “Nothing. It’s Friday. Go home, Champ, take it easy for the weekend. Monday morning, we’ll meet at the coalface.”
That had been handsome of him, but by the time she got home from Miami it was midafternoon and the beach she had access to was already in her building’s shadow, so that was when she’d gone off to the local library to do some necessary research for Time of the Hero. There were so many spy-novel details she didn’t know; descriptions of guns, names of airports and railroad stations, histories of remoter Eastern European provinces.
Sara had spent a few absorbed hours in the fairly adequate library, then had returned home to find Phyllis back from the paper, changing into cutoffs and a T-shirt, packing pretty weekend clothes into her overnight bag. With a cheery inconsequential word tossed in Sara’s direction, off she had blithely gone, leaving the apartment to Sara for the weekend. (Phyllis had never said a word about the man she was presumably going away with each of these weekends, nor had Sara ever seen him, so she took it as given he was married.)
Friday evening was spent alone with frozen food and television, but Saturday morning dawned sunny and hot and with less of summer’s humidity than usual, so Sara at last logged in some beach time, swimming away the muscle stiffness brought on by travel and by sitting so long at desks. On the beach she met a guy named Bob, a goodlooking stockbrokerage employee from Boston, down visiting his grandparents for a week, they having an apartment at the Sybarite (most of the Sybarite’s residents were considerably older than Sara and Phyllis), and they were getting along very well until, at his question, she told him what she did for a living, and he made fun of it.
It wasn’t so much his infantile humor, as it was his assumption that she would agree with his simpleminded put-downs. Did he think working at the Galaxy didn’t take brains? didn’t take cleverness and quick thinking? didn’t take nerve? Over five milhon copies of the Galaxy were sold every week, so they must be doing something right. She tried to say all this, in fact even tried to tell him the story of the hundred-year-old twins—her greatest triumph so far, by God—but his scorn had simply become more and more mixed with incomprehension. “You’re putting me on!” he said, so many times that she finally answered, “Oh, no, I’m not. Not even for a test drive.” And she cut her swim-and-sun session short, leaving him gaping and openmouthed on the beach.
Back in the apartment, she made an early lunch, half muttering various deadly remarks she should have thought to say to that Boston half-baked bean, and she was about to settle at her desk with the results of yesterday’s research session at the library when the doorbell rang.
Could it possibly be him, the Wit of the Beach? It was extremely unlikely, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a second shot at him, to actually deliver all those killer lines she’d thought of too late? Mind swirling with deliciously snide remarks, she hurried to the living room, pulled open the door, and confronted a telephone repairperson.
Yes, that’s right, a woman. She was as young as Sara, and stunningly beautiful, with great masses of red hair around a perfect oval face. She wore a T-shirt, cutoff jeans, green-striped tube socks, heavy brown work boots and a broad work belt laden with tools. “Sorry about this,” she said. “We’ve got a little problem one flight up, and I need to get at the wire outside your kitchen window.”
“Oh, sure,” Sara said. “Come on in.” And, because when a deskful of work calls, any distraction will do, Sara followed the repairperson into the kitchen to see what would happen next.
What happened next was that they got into conversation. Sara’s curiosity got the better of her, and she just simply had to ask it: “How did you wind up with a job like this?”
“Oh, I love it,” the repairperson said. “My father and my brother both work for Bell, too. I hate offices and all that, and this is interesting, it gets me out, I meet people, have all different kinds of things to do.”
Sara watched the girl perch on the kitchen windowsill and do things with a junction box on the outer wall of the building. “I can’t quite think of the angle,” she said, “but there’s got to be a story in you.”
The repairperson grinned quizzically at her. “A story?”
“Well, I work for a paper, you see, and—”
“A paper? Which one, the County?”
“No.” Half embarrassed, sorry she’d even started this, Sara said, “The Weekly Galaxy, as a matter of—”
“No kidding! I love that paper!”
Sara stared. “You do?”
“I read it every week! You really work for them?”
“Well, yeah,” Sara said, making the adjustment from embarrassment to a kind of weird pride.
The repairperson glowed, inside her forest of red hair. “And you think you could get me in the Galaxy?”
“Well, I’m not sure, I don’t have the angle yet, the specific—Maybe we could talk a little, uh . . .”
“Sure! Just let me take care of this thing.”
“I’ll get my camera.”
The repairperson’s work on the junction box was brief, and during it Sara took three or four pictures. As a woman and a feminist, she was opposed to cheesecake on general principles, but this girl with the long bare legs ending in heavy work boots, the slender body encased in a thick belt hung with all kinds of tools, somehow raised the genre above itself. How to be a sex object while not being a sex object.
Then they sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and talked for fifteen or twenty minutes, while Sara tried to find the hook that would turn this girl into a Weekly Galaxy story; that is, into a story she could sell Jack Ingersoll, which he could sell Massa, and which all of them could then sell to Rewrite and the evaluators. Not easy.
In fact, not at all, at least not right now. The girl—Betsy Harrigan, her name was—was somehow just too cheerful and sunny and competent to be good copy. She had no problems, she didn’t get hit on by the customers or resented by her co-workers, she had no manifesto she wished to share with the world, and no miracles had helped her attain her present position in life. “There’s something” Sara finally said, “I know there’s a story in you somewhere, but I just can’t seem to figure out what it is. Let me think about it and call you, okay?”
“Sure,” Betsy said. “Anytime at all.”
“In the meantime, I’ll get these pictures developed and talk it over with my editor, and see what I can come up with.”
“I’m real excited,” Betsy admitted, with a huge sparkly smile. “If I was in the Weekly Galaxy, my mom would just about flip like a pancake.”
“I imagine she would,” Sara agreed. “I’ll call you, I hope, in the next few weeks.”
Then Betsy left, and Sara went back to her desk and did a brief memo about Betsy Harrigan, telephone repairperson, in order to have something on paper while it was all still fresh in her head. And then, at long last, she turned to her novel, Time of the Hero.
/> And it just wouldn’t come. The damn book simply refused to happen.
Is there anything more frustrating? Here on paper was the book so far. Here on other papers were the research items, the data, the factules out of which to construct the rest of the story. Here in her brain lay the rest of the story, awaiting, at least in broad outline. But she just couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think about the book for more than a few seconds at a time, couldn’t seem to compose sentences that would push the story further into existence. Everything distracted her, as of course Betsy Harrigan had distracted her; now it could be a stray passing cloud beyond the window, or merely the blue of the cloudless sky; the sharpness of her pencils; the various cartoons and messages and photos tacked to the wall over her desk. And at last she found herself reading once again about the dark Blue Buick Riviera, Dade county license 277-ZR(G/Q/0)).
What had ever happened in that situation? Why hadn’t the police interviewed her? It had been nearly two weeks now; was the murder solved?
Here was a distraction worthy of the name. With hardly any guilt feelings at all, Sara reached for the phone directory, looked up the number for the local newspaper, dialed, asked for Editorial, and got nowhere. No one she talked to knew anything about anything, and when the third person suggested she call back during business hours on Monday—the sentence “There’s nobody here right now” suggested a pretty miserable level of self-image—she gave up, went back to the phone directory, and called the police.
Here the problem was one of too much eagerness, rather than the newspaper’s too little. Sara had the hardest time convincing the man she wasn’t trying to report a murder. “It happened twelve days ago,” she insisted. “It’s been reported.” Not, however, to the town police. When Sara finally made her question clear, the answer was that there was no record in that department of the crime. “Where did this take place?” the man at last asked her, and when she described the location, out on the highway leading to the Weekly Galaxy, he said, with obvious relief, “Oh, we wouldn’t have that anyway. That’s not our jurisdiction. Try the state police.” And he hung up before she could thank him.
But the state police didn’t have it either, and suggested the county sheriff, who also didn’t have it. “I really don’t understand this,” Sara said to the man at the sheriff’s number. “Somebody has to know about a dead man beside the highway.”
“Did you call Shore Hospital? Sometimes they—”
Knowing instantly that calls to all the area hospitals would really be a waste of time, Sara said, “The man was shot in the head. He was dead. A hospital would have reported a gunshot homicide without—”
“Gunshot?” A faint echo of disbelief twanged through the phone wires and into Sara’s ear. “Are you absolutely sure of that, ma’am?”
“Of course I am,” Sara said, being calm with an effort, displaying her professional poise. “He was shot once in the forehead. The bullet broke the skull in back, but didn’t come all the way through.”
“And this was—I’m sorry, when was this?”
“Monday, the twelfth of July. I reported it to the gate guard at the Galaxy, and I suppose—”
“You reported it where?"
“The guard on the gate at the Weekly Galaxy,” she repeated, remembering that she hadn’t seen that guard since that morning. A stray wisp of question in her mind wondered if the guard’s disappearance were meaningful, but the thought was interrupted by the sheriffs office man’s next question: “What were you doing there?”
“I work there. I’m a reporter, that’s why I’m so certain of my—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the voice said, in sudden disgust. “Don’t you people know better than to set up your bullshit with us?”
“What?” Sara was too astounded to be insulted, at least not at first.
“We tape all incoming calls, Ms. Joslyn,” the voice said, dripping with scorn. “If we hear from you again, you’re in trouble.” And he slammed the receiver real loud.
Phyllis, looking troubled, entered Jack’s squaricle at 10:45 on Monday morning. “About Felicia Nelson,” she said.
Jack was feeling moderately human at the moment, having had nine yesses at this morning’s editorial conference and having been singled out for public praise by Massa for the large number of items he had generated in last Friday’s Galaxy. Therefore, he neither snarled at Phyllis nor moaned in despair at the sight of her, but merely said, “Tell me everything, Phyllis dear, tell me everything about Felicia Nelson.”
“There isn't everything,” Phyllis said. “That’s the trouble. There’s almost nothing, in fact.”
“Everybody’s somebody, Phyllis,” Jack told her. “That’s a rule of philosophy. So tell me, now. Who is Felicia Nelson, what is she?”
“Well,” Phyllis said, “she was born and raised in Whittier, California.”
“There, see?” Jack said. “Already, we’re filling in the picture. I don’t suppose there’s any Nixon connection.”
“What?” Phyllis looked deeply lost.
“Never mind,” Jack told her. “Probably wouldn’t fly anyway, not past Massa’s red pencil.” Generally speaking, Massa preferred Republicans among politicians, except for reform Republicans, whom he thought of as unnatural and loathsome, like hermaphrodites. “Go on, Phyllis,” Jack said. “Give me background.”
“There is none, that’s the trouble,” Phyllis said. “That girl’s led the emptiest life since Princess Di. Never been married, no recorded abortions, never been fired from a job, never been sued.” “What a tedious existence,” Jack said. “I quite feel for the girl. But something must have happened to her prior to that singular day when she met John Michael Mercer.”
“Not that I can find out,” Phyllis said. “She went to secretarial school. She works for an insurance agent.”
Mary Kate looked over, raising an eyebrow. “Wears white underwear all the time,” she commented.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Phyllis said.
“All right,” Jack said. “Time, place and circumstances of the aforesaid singular day.”
Phyllis did the blank look again. “What?”
“Where and when did she and Mercer meet?”
“I don’t know,” Phyllis said.
“That is unfortunate,” Jack told her, “because if you don’t know, then I don’t know, and Massa is going to want to know.”
“I’m doing my best,” Phyllis said, looking and sounding harried.
“I’m sure you are, dear. Do we happen to know the name of the lucky Miss Nelson’s employer?”
“Feingold and Robinson Insurance in Fort Lauderdale,” Phyllis said, with excellent promptness.
“Very good,” Jack said. “Perhaps Mr. Mercer had a claim to be adjudicated. What does Miss Nelson do for Messrs. Feingold and Robinson?”
“She’s a secretary.”
“Hmmm.” Jack considered various of his options, then said, “All right, Phyllis. Continue to dig for background on Nelson. Something. Does she subscribe to Hustler? Is she in analysis? Find me something that will make Felicia Nelson as fascinating to me as she is to John Michael Mercer. Can you do that?”
“Do you want me to find out how they met?” Phyllis asked.
“No, we’ll put another of our tireless researchers on that one,” Jack told her. “Be off with you, Phyllis, and consider yourself lucky. Had you brought me this little news on a Friday, you’d be leaving here with toothmarks.”
Phyllis attempted a light laugh, but it didn’t quite make it past her harried look. “I’ll do my best,” she said, and hurried away.
Jack watched her go. When she was out of earshot, he muttered, “As Massa says, don’t do your best, do my best. I wish I had the brass to actually tell somebody that.
Mary Kate paused in her typing to look at him. “When I think,” she commented, “of all the things you can bring yourself to say.”
“Oh, pish and tush, Mary Kate,” Jack said, reaching for the phone. “I’m
just a jocular type, everybody knows that.” He punched out a number, and far away across the room Sara reacted to the white light flashing on her phone. When she answered—“Hello?”—Jack told her, “This is your master’s voice. And guess what? You’re going to love Fort Lauderdale.”
On her way out from the Galaxy, Sara braked the Peugeot to a stop at the guard shack, even though she’d been waved through. As her window slid down, defeating the air conditioner she’d just turned on, the guard came over to see what the problem was. It was the usual round-bodied black man. He said, “Yes, miss?”
“Remember me?” Sara asked him. “Week before last, I’m the one left her temporary sticker on the rental car.”
The guard smiled faintly, saying, “Yeah, I remember. And you come back on Friday ’stead of Saturday.”
“That’s right,” Sara agreed, nodding, smiling at him to thank him for remembering. “But here’s the thing,” she said. “You weren’t the one who gave me that temporary sticker in the first place.”
He looked at her, having no idea where she was going. “I wasn’t?”
“No. That was another guard on duty here that Monday morning. “Two weeks ago today, it was.”
The guard offered another faint smile, this one subtly different, this one suggesting Sara was up to something and he was seeing through it. He said, “You mean, he should have told you about holding on to that sticker? It’s his fault, is that it?”
“No, no,” she said, reassuring him, “I’m not blaming anybody but myself for that, honest. It’s forgotten anyway, I’m not in trouble anymore.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said, his manner neutral.
“It’s just that, when I came here that first morning, there’s a fact I told that guard, and I want to talk to him to be sure I got it straight. I know this sounds weird,” she added, rushing on, meaning that she knew it sounded counterfeit and false and untrue, “but he’ll know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I keep waiting to see him again, but it seems like it’s always either you or that tall skinny fellow—”
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