“My relief man,” the guard said, nodding. “Wasn’t him, huh?”
“No, he was an older man, very tanned, with a very lined face.”
“Oh, that’d be Jimmy,” the guard said, nodding, looking displeased at some memory. “Yeah, he quit just about then. Two weeks ago? Yeah, that’s when he went. Made a real mess for me, let me tell you.”
“He quit?” Sara echoed, then hurriedly asked the reporter’s question: “Jimmy’s his name? Jimmy what?”
“Taggart. But you don’t want to use him to prove anything around here, his name is mud at this paper. Just up and walked off the job. They caught me on the phone just as I was going fishing.”
“And he did that two weeks ago?”
“Yeah, just about— Wait a minute.”
The guard went back into his stucco-and-glass shack, and Sara wrote on the open memo pad on the seat beside her, Jimmy Taggart. Then the guard came back, nodding in satisfaction, and said, “Yeah, I thought so. That was the day. Monday, July twelfth. Monday’s supposed to be my day off, but here you see me, here again on a Monday, we’re still shorthanded. Tough to find reliable people, you know.”
He quit that day, Sara thought. That is not a coincidence. She said, “So I guess I better find some other way to verify this fact of mine. Thanks anyway.”
“Good luck, now,” the guard told her, stepping back from the car. She thanked him again, slid up the window, and drove away to Fort Lauderdale, where she became a brisk young businesswoman named Alice Tucker. Having a used jeans boutique in Boston, she was thinking of expansion, of opening a shop in the Fort Lauderdale area, where she was also looking at homes to buy. She didn’t make her livelihood from the jeans boutique, of course, that was just the fun thing she did; her livelihood came from alimony, and was therefore rock solid and dependable. However, she was very serious about the business side of her life, and so she wanted to discuss both business and personal insurance in Florida at great length, knowing that each state’s insurance laws are unique.
In the course of two hours at Feingold & Robinson Insurance, Sara talked with four bright and helpful employees, fended off two passes, learned an incredible amount about both personal and business insurance in Florida, and neither saw Felicia Nelson nor learned a single thing about her. (The one picture of Felicia Nelson in the Galaxy’s possession, taken from a ship at sea off the John Michael Mercer property in Palm Beach and using a telephoto lens, was blown up to a grainy grayness, but a specific individual was still identifiable there, standing in a light short skirt and dark polo shirt on Mercer’s dock, smiling down at Mercer in his powerful cigarette-style speedboat, the Zoom Lens. If Felicia Nelson had been present at Feingold & Robinson, Sara would have known it.)
Drat. It wasn’t possible in the insurance office to ask about Felicia Nelson or even mention the woman’s name; that would blow her cover for sure. So, when she could stall no longer, when there was no single question left for her to ask and not one possible insurable eventuality left for the folks of Feingold & Robinson to describe to her, Sara smilingly took her leave, promised to keep in touch, and spent the rest of the day in her parked car down the block, the blowup photograph on the seat beside her.
And no Felicia.
Jacob Harsch didn’t often enter Editorial, and when he did, it was always something of a surprise that he obeyed the pattern of black lines on the floor. One would expect Jacob Harsch to walk through walls as a matter of course. And yet, he didn’t; he turned left, he turned right, he followed the walls and corridors indicated by those black lines, quartering across the large open space like any normal human being, and every time he did it everybody in Editorial came that much closer to a heart attack. Because, of course, until the last second, no one could know for sure just which one of them Jacob Harsch intended to visit.
Jack Ingersoll. Today, Jack. “Afternoon, Mr. Harsch,” Jack said, smiling brighdy, blinking hard as Harsch came through the door space into his squaricle. (At her desk, Mary Kate made one of her very few typos.)
“Afternoon, Jack,” Harsch said, in his thin cold voice. He looked out over the writhing mass of Editorial as though he stood on a mountaintop and were about to offer Jack the world. Instead, he said, as though referring to some really complex estate before the probate court, “In the matter of John Michael Mercer.”
Jack rose to his feet, hearing the Galaxy9s national anthem. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“This time,” Harsch said, with a sort of gloomy satisfaction, “he apparently intends to marry the girl.”
“Ida Gavin thinks it’s heading that way, yes, sir.”
“There are other sources of the rumor as well,” Harsch said. “Boy Cartwright has been building a file.”
“So have I,” Jack said quickly, while Mary Kate made a rictus of death and, behind Harsch’s back, pretended to throw up in the wastebasket.
“We’ll want the girl’s bio,” Harsch said, looking away across Editorial again, dissociating himself from the conversation. “And the touching story of how they met, this famous television star and this girl behind the notions counter.”
“You’ll get it,” Jack said.
“We’ll want it in this week’s paper,” Harsch said, with a brief cold glance at Jack. “By next week, everyone will have the story.”
“I’m on top of it, sir.”
“If you’d rather Boy did the backgrounder—”
“Oh, no, sir! We’ve already got most of the material on hand, just need to whip it in shape.”
“Good.” Harsch smiled, never a pretty sight. “Massa wants,” he said, and left the squaricle, and made his way like the Windsurfer of Death out of Editorial.
Jack sat down. His face was greasy with perspiration. “Christ on a bleeding crutch,” he said.
Ida had been waiting some distance away, not wanting to interrupt Harsch, but now she entered the squaricle and said, “Phyllis Perkinson.”
“No,” Jack told her. “John Michael Mercer and Felicia Nelson. Where and how did they meet?” Ida shook her head. “Nobody knows. We’ve bought everybody we can buy, but our people just don’t know that story. One day he didn’t know her, one day he did.”
“I need it,” Jack said. “I really need this one, Ida.”
Ida came as close to looking troubled as her bitter face could manage. “Jack, you know me,” she said. “I don’t give up easy. The origin story just isn’t known by any third party, and that’s it.”
“They gaze in each other’s eyes,” Jack said. “There’s that moment when they know; this time it’s for sure. Ida, do we want to lose this to Boy Cartwright and his Mongolians?”
“He won’t get it either,” Ida said, with a curl of the lip. “Believe me.”
“All right,” Jack said. “All right. Desperate measures time. Find me a best friend for hire.”
“Hers or his?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“There’s a fishing boat guy we’ve used before,” she said. “He and Mercer go deep-sea fishing together sometimes, get drunk, play boys will be boys. We can use him if we don’t give him attribution by name in the paper; just for backup.”
“That’s the guy, then,” Jack said. “Get in touch with him, put him on standby.”
“Will do.”
“I’ll write the meeting and the romance, you have this fisherman read it to you on the phone, then we have the tape, our ass is covered.”
“Easy as falling off a house,” Ida said.
“Good. Now Phyllis Perkinson.”
“She used to work for Trend ”
“I know that.”
“She still works for Trend ”
Jack looked at her. Mary Kate stopped typing and turned slowly in her chair to look at Ida, who stood silent, a killer robot waiting for the word of command.
Softly, Jack said, “What is she doing for Trend, Ida?”
“I don’t know yet. But she draws the salary.”
“In addition to ours? That is gre
edy.”
“On her Sprint bills, she makes calls to a number in Greenwich Village, in New York. That’s David Levin’s home number, and he’s the special projects editor at Trend,”
“What are you suggesting, Ida?”
“I think I ought to go to New York,” Ida said. “I think I ought to squeeze David Levin’s balls, see what happens next. But there’s the Mercer problem.”
“No no, forget that, I can’t get myself blindsided by Phyllis Perkinson. Follow up on that. Do you think this is connected to the Boy leak? That is what you’re looking for.”
“Don’t know yet,” Ida said. “But that’s the only window so far with footprints outside it.”
“So follow those footprints,” Jack said. “As for the Mercer best friend, turn that over to . . .” He considered his available team. “What about Sara Joslyn? She’s rooming with Perkinson, is she part of it?”
“No proof so far,” Ida said. “She and Perkinson definitely didn’t know one another before this. Joslyn has no link I can find with Trend or David Levin. It’s still possible, but not likely.”
“Then give it to her,” Jack said.
“I’ll be a little late getting home,” Sara said, crossing the employees’ parking lot with Phyllis and a lot of other people whose Tuesday work stint was done.
“That’s okay,” Phyllis answered. “I’m in the mood for a real gourmet meal. I’ll stop at the supermarket and get something frozen. Could you bring wine?”
“Red or white?”
“White,” Phyllis decided. “I’m feeling fishy.”
So that was that. They separated at their cars, Phyllis hopping into her white Corvette in a swirl of skirt and flash of leg, Sara entering her Peugeot more staidly, feeling tired and slow.
It had been a strange Tuesday. In the morning she’d talked with a heavyset bad-tempered Italian woman in Lantana who had been Felicia Nelson’s landlady last year; before, unfortunately, the girl had met John Michael Mercer. There was no subterfuge this time, no phony name or background. Sara had simply identified herself as the reporter from the Weekly Galaxy, the one Jack had mentioned to the woman on the phone, and the woman had demanded five hundred dollars. Sara’s budget was two hundred, which she’d fully expected to spend, but the woman was so bad-tempered that Sara haggled more fiercely than she’d ever done in her life before, and forced the woman all the way down to one-fifty. Then they talked, and as far as Sara was concerned, even at one-fifty the woman had been overpaid. No scandal, no juice, no clues to the Mercer connection, nothing. Still, it was further confirmation of the good girl they were all getting to know, and it was solidly down on tape, and she had saved the Galaxy fifty bucks, so everybody should be reasonably happy.
Tuesday afternoon was the telephone call from the best friend. Ida had explained that situation to Sara this morning, before leaving for New York on some mystery mission of her own, so when the fellow calling himself Rusty Scanlan phoned at two o’clock Sara knew she was just supposed to grunt and say yes at the appropriate points. Rusty Scanlan began by saying, “You want to know how my buddy Johnny Mercer and that real nice girl, Felicia, met, is that right?”
“That’s right,” Sara said.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, and did, in a slow and stumbling monotone, while Sara sat and listened and occasionally said, “Uh huh. I see. Right.” There was no point even taking notes, since the whole reason for the phone call was to have the story on tape, verifiable for the fact checkers, and defense evidence against any attorneys who might come along in the future.
After the monologue from the best friend, there had been a miscellaneous series of calls to make, all having to do with Felicia Nelson’s background, all dull stuff—the high school in Whittier, California, that sort of thing—in the middle of which she’d taken time to look in the local telephone directories, where she’d found a James Taggart listed, and copied down his address. That former guard here at the Galaxy was of interest to Sara, more so than the current principal at Whittier High. Why had the man quit so abruptly, the same day Sara had told him about the murder? Why hadn’t he passed the report on to the police?
Was he the murderer himself? Then why had he left the body there to be found, only to become panicked when the discovery was made? And if he wasn’t the murderer, why had he just happened to quit his job with no advance notice on the same day Sara told him about finding the body?
So that’s where she was going now, on her way home, to beard James Taggart in his den, which turned out to be a small house in a dusty poor neighborhood, rather reminiscent of Jack Inger- soll’s house and neighborhood, but in fact miles away. There was no one in sight when Sara parked the Peugeot and stepped out to the late afternoon’s sodden heat.
At 5:30 p.m. in late July, the sun was still halfway up the western sky, glittering on the deadlooking venetian-blinded windows of the Taggart house. Sara could hear the doorbell echo inside the house, but no one came to answer. The sagging floor of the little porch had been painted deck-gray years and years ago, and was now worn and flaky; Sara crossed it to peer in at the windows, but the blinds were closed tight, leaving no gap at all to look through.
Around back?
Tire marks and an oil stain showed where a car was usually parked on the packed earth beside the house, amid a scraggle of weeds. Sara walked around that side to the back, seeing every blind lowered and shut, and in frustration more than hope she rattled the knob of the back door, which yawned silently open at her touch.
The kitchen was beyond, in dim gray light, like a cave beneath shallow water. Sara extended one foot forward, touching the old pre-Mondrian linoleum lightly, as though expecting alarm whistles or a trapdoor. When nothing happened, she shifted her weight slowly to that foot, and then she was inside, and it was all right.
Well, not all right; but at least she was successfully within. She brought the other foot along, and stood in the entrance with her hand still on the doorknob as she leaned forward slightly to call, “Hello?”
No answer. The spoken word sank into the house as into black cotton. There was a kind of fuzziness in the silence that suggested a long-empty house. “Mr. Taggart?” Sara called, getting more personal, and when that produced no response as well, she released the knob, committing herself to the invasion, and took another step into the kitchen.
Should she close the door? No, leave it open; otherwise, it could make her look like a burglar.
To whom? To anybody. Pushing mythical interrogators from her mind, Sara looked around at the kitchen, which was plain and ordinary and old-fashioned. A white plastic table and four chairs, the usual appliances, a small portable electric fan atop the refrigerator. Closed Venetian blinds over the double window above the sink. No dirty dishes, no messes. An oval-arched doorway on the other side showed parts of a dark hall.
Sara crossed the innocent kitchen and stood in the oval doorway. The hall was plain, with dull blue walls, bare wood floor, pale sound-absorbent squares on the ceiling, and the front door at the far end. No furniture, no pictures, no hooks for coats. A broad doorway on the left, with rounded upper comers to echo this oval doorway, showed a comer of living room. Three gray wooden doors were closed on the right.
A combination of the silence in the house and a lifetime of movies and television led Sara to expect a dead body behind every door she opened, which made her move very slowly indeed; but there were no dead bodies here. The first door on the right led to a narrow bathroom with old white china fixtures and a black and white tile floor. The second led to a Spartan bedroom, with clothing in the closet and in the bureau drawers, all of it well used and shabby, but neat. A sweater and shirt were tossed over the chair, a pair of slippers leaned together on the worn small mg, and an empty glass stood on the bedside table with last month’s Penthouse. Clearly, Taggart had not moved out.
The remaining door on the right led to a tiny front bedroom with drawn shades and no furniture, but crammed with cartons, suitcases and bits and pi
eces of junk, including one automobile tire and an empty aluminum beer keg. On the other side of the hall, the living room’s used and mismatched furniture was grouped around a large console television set.
There was nowhere else to look, no basement, no garage, no sheds. Taggart was not home. He was at work, or on vacation, or in a nearby bar, or at the movies. Somewhere with his car, in fact. Sara went back to the kitchen and copied down the number from the wall phone beside the refrigerator before departure, so she could call from time to time until she found him in, then took one last look around that room, and opened the refrigerator door.
Still no bodies. Several jars—ketchup, pickles, things like that—a package of All-Bran kept in here to protect it from the prevailing humidity, a blue-fuzz-covered half lemon on a saucer, and a quart carton of milk.
It was the rotted lemon that made Sara pick up the milk to see if that had gone bad, too, but she didn’t have to bring it all the way to her nose to tell. Just squeezing the carton in lifting it released a putrescence strong enough to close her throat. She quickly put it down and slammed the refrigerator door, and stood there feeling sick.
How long had it been since Taggart—or anyone—had looked in there? Sara turned away and ran her fingertip across the white plastic tabletop and left a new bright road in the dust. She crossed to the sink and turned on the cold water, and orange rust ran for a second or two before the water turned clear.
Taggart hadn’t been home in a couple of weeks. He hadn’t moved out, but he hadn’t come home either, not since— Probably, not since the day Sara had reported the murder.
Had he run away? Was it because he was the guilty party after all, had she actually done the absurd thing of reporting a murder to the murderer? Or did he have reason to believe he too was in danger? Had Sara’s report of the dead man in the dark blue Buick Riviera been the signal to Taggart that trouble was coming his way? Or had someone bribed him to disappear?
It did seem certain by now, one way or another, that Taggart had some sort of knowledge of what was going on. Now more than ever, Sara wanted to talk to him. But where had he run?
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