Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  The trash collector can take them away, Sara was thinking, when all at once she interrupted her own thought with a realization: Some clue to Taggart’s whereabouts, or to his motive for disappearing, might very well be in his possessions from that house.

  “Except the TV,” Carol Bridges went on. “I’ll take that in lieu of back rent, and if Jimmy wants it back, he knows where to find me.”

  Remembering that large console TV set dominating the living room—the only expensive item she’d seen in the whole house—Sara said, “That sounds fair. I don’t see how Pop could complain about that.”

  “I don’t see how your father could complain about anything, Miss Taggart,” the rejected Carol Bridges said.

  Carol Bridges was nowhere in sight when Sara, at just after noon, stopped the Peugeot beside the pile of shabby goods in front of Jimmy Taggart’s former home. There were a number of items here she remembered from her earlier walk through the house: the automobile tire, the aluminum beer keg, the window fan that had been atop the refrigerator. (But not the refrigerator itself, which apparently belonged to the house.) The white plastic table from the kitchen was here, surmounted by stacks of unmatched plastic plates and cups, chipped glasses, and an assortment of tired flatware, all looking like the world’s most hopeless yard sale. The bureau from the bedroom stood here, its drawers full of shirts and socks. The mattress and box spring leaned against the table legs and the back of the bureau, with their metal frame folded on the ground beside them. A few lamps lay about like a surrealist’s version of ninepins. A couple of sagging armchairs bore loads of suitcases and cartons and the small worn rug from the bedroom floor.

  What could there be, within this shabby postmodern sculpture, to tell her anything about the present whereabouts of Jimmy Taggart? Climbing from the Peugeot, which looked almost indignant to find itself next to such a display, Sara stood a minute looking at the piles of junk, and was half ready to turn right around and go home, without touching a thing.

  But what if there was a clue somewhere in here? Wouldn’t a man’s possessions inevitably say something about the man? Possibly something about where he went, or who he was, or why he ran?

  Well, if she was going to take any of this stuff she ought to get started. She wasn’t anxious for another conversation with Carol Bridges, who was probably watching out some window right now. But where to begin?

  She couldn’t take it all, certainly. For one thing, the Peugeot wouldn’t hold half of this pile. For another, she was here in search of clues, not furniture, so the bed and chairs and lamps and all that sort of stuff could be left for the trash collector, or whatever neighborhood scavenger would follow her here. Ditto the tire and beer keg and other weirdnesses. Which left cartons and suitcases, and possibly the nonclothing contents of bureau drawers.

  Feeling she shouldn’t start a search right out here on the sidewalk, Sara briskly opened the Peugeot’s trunk and side doors and started loading. The bottom bureau drawer appeared to be filled mainly with papers and documents of some kind, so she removed the drawer entire and put it in the trunk, leaving the bureau with a wide blank across the bottom that gave it an expression of disgrun- ded surprise.

  Was that all? Looking around, Sara nouced a small table lamp with a delicate narrow glass base and clean pale linen shade; somewhat nicer- looking, in fact, than its companions. I could use a lamp on my dresser, Sara thought. She squelched a little pang of guilt by remembering Carol Bridges and the TV set. Besides, this way she was saving the lamp from the trash collector.

  As she was slamming the trunk and right side doors, preparatory to departure, the Peugeot as jam-packed as a circus car full of clowns, she looked up to see Carol Bridges crossing the street toward her, looking grim. Oh, dear, Sara thought, and moved toward the Peugeot’s driver’s door, a friendly smile pasted to her face. “Hi,” she said.

  “That’s all you’re taking?”

  “Well, I can’t ... I don’t have ...” Sara gestured vaguely at the encumbered Peugeot and the remaining pile of property.

  “Well, that’s strictly up to you,” Carol Bridges said. “I talked with my lawyer, and Fm absolutely within the law. If this stuff is thrown away, it’s not my reponsibility. I’ve had no word from the tenant, and I’ve informed his representative that I’m putting his things out on the street.”

  “You did?” Sara asked, thinking, a clue, someone who might know where Taggart’s gone. “Who?”

  “You, of course,” Carol Bridges said. “You’re his daughter.”

  “Oh,” Sara said. She looked at Taggart’s possessions, piled on the curb, about to be lost forever. Her responsibility. “I really wish,” she said honesdy, “I knew where Pop was.”

  This was one time Sara was just as glad Phyllis disappeared every weekend; there would be no awkward questions about the pile of near-trash she was introducing into the apartment. Conversely, another pair of hands would have been nice, to help move all this stuff from the Peugeot first to the lobby of the Sybarite, and from there to the elevator, and from there to the apartment entrance, and from there at last to her own bedroom. When she finally lugged the last two suitcases in and plopped them on the floor, her overcrowded bedroom looked like the bus station in a Depression movie. And now, to sort through it all.

  It felt so odd to be this close to an older male’s private property. In college, and since then with roommates like Phyllis, Sara had grown more or less used to the idea of being around the personal possessions of other young women—and here and there a young man—but this stuff was different. It was as though she’d brought it back from some other planet, or an earlier civilization.

  Her first move was to open every box and every suitcase, to see what sort of thing she’d caught, and so her first deduction about Jimmy Taggart was that he was a man who never threw anything away. (Which increased the oddity of his having disappeared, thereby putting all his possessions at risk.)

  Clothing. Despite the bureauful of clothing she’d left behind, here was more and more of the stuff. One cardboard liquor store carton was full of shoes; all of them old and battered, most with holes in the soles, all with badly creased uppers, some without laces. Another carton was full of tattered shirts with missing buttons, or with ripped pockets; some of these were work shirts, with names sewn on: hal, jerry, frank. But no jimmy.

  Then there was an old cardboard suitcase with broken locks, which turned out to be full of radio parts; that is, various parts of a disassembled old- fashioned radio. And a box of jelly jars full of used nails and screws sorted into their various sizes. And a box packed with beat-up old games: Mille Bomes, Waterworks, several dog-eared decks of cards. Time to clear a lot of this out of here.

  Down the hall from Sara’s apartment toward the elevator, a black metal door opened to a kind of shallow closet containing the hatch to the garbage chute. Items too large for the chute were to be left in the closet for the super; Sara piled up boxes and luggage in there, then went back to see what was left.

  Papers; this was more like it. Feeling like a reporter on the trail at last—a Galaxy reporter, in fact—Sara settled down with James Taggart’s history on paper, his old checkbooks, income tax statements, correspondence, army records, paid bills, leases, contracts. Now, she thought, Jimmy Taggart, let’s see who you are, and where you’ve gone.

  By nine that night, after a break for a quick dinner thawed from the freezer, Sara was finished at last. She had typed out what she now knew about Jimmy Taggart, and it looked like this:

  Born Oct 13, 1931, Brandon, Missouri. Graduated Marshallsburg Consolidated High School, Missouri, June 1949. US Army, January 1951 till October 1954. That would be the Korean War, but his army records show he spent one year in Italy and the rest of his tour of duty on army bases in the southern United States.

  Suspended sentence, Elmford, Illinois Municipal Court, drunken driving, March, 1963.

  Suspended sentence, Tulsa, Oklahoma Municipal Court, drunken driving, leaving the scene of an
accident, August, 1966.

  Divorced from Ellen Marie (Neustadter) Taggart in Oklahoma in 1968.

  A creased and tattered sentimental Christmas card without its envelope, with “Dad,” handwritten above the printed message, and “Jill” below, is the only indication of children.

  Employment records from the Galaxy show he started there four years ago. Next of kin, Jack Taggart, phone number and address in Hagerstown, Maryland. Prior to that, according to copies of tax returns going back ten years, he’d been employed three months by Gulf Coast Supermarkets, Fort Myers, Florida; before that for seven months by US Plastic Novelties of Orlando, Florida; before that for at least six years by Colonial Furniture Company, Lexington, Kentucky. The tax returns show no dependents.

  Correspondence: A few letters over the years from worried-sounding women, a few letters— none recent—from army friends, two old letters from a counselor in Tulsa telling Taggart his basic problem was low self-esteem, and a notice dated July 8th of this year from Shamrock Liquor Stores saying that James Taggart had won the one hundred dollar third prize in the Lucky Shamrock Drawing; he should present this letter by July 31st at the Shamrock Liquor Store Outlet where he’d filled out his entry, to receive his check.

  Address book, mostly empty: bank, movie houses, take-out restaurants, Carol Bridges, a few local people who are probably co-workers, two neighbors, and a Jack Taggart in Hagerstown, Maryland. No evidence of longterm ongoing friendships with people in other parts of the country.

  Unpaid bills and magazines and other mail from the three weeks since he left, including a notice from Shamrock Liquor Stores that he has only until July 31st to pick up his one hundred dollar check. Which was yesterday.

  Why hadn’t he ever picked up his hundred dollars? The first notice was dated the Thursday before he’d disappeared, so he’d probably received it on the Saturday and would have planned to bring it to the liquor store the next time he went shopping there. Why hadn’t he?

  For the first time, Sara considered the possibility that Taggart hadn’t disappeared on purpose. Either he’d been bribed so lavishly that Shamrock’s hundred dollars no longer mattered, or he’d been forced to leave.

  Was Jimmy Taggart dead?

  The thought was a long time coming, mostly because Sara didn’t want to think it. To begin with, that way lay melodrama, and she had enough of that at work. But there were also the implications, if in fact Jimmy Taggart really and truly was dead.

  What’s going on here, she wondered, feeling the emptiness of the dark apartment all around her. The silence behind her head, the dark silence in the apartment’s other rooms, had a muffled quality, as though something were being concealed. But what?

  Does Taggart’s disappearance have something to do with the dead man beside the road? And if it does, what does that mean for me? Taggart only heard about the dead man; I was there, I saw him.

  There has to be another explanation. It’s been three weeks, nothing else has happened. If Jimmy Taggart . . . disappeared, died, whatever ... because of what I told him, that wouldn’t have been the end of it. Something else would have happened, but nothing has happened. The lost license number doesn’t count, that’s not an event. Nothing has happened.

  Nothing is going to happen.

  All right, all right. Is there another explanation? If there is, by golly, let’s find it. It was still not yet nine-thirty at night; Sara dialed the number of the Jack Taggart in Hagerstown, Maryland. After three rings a gravelly voice said, “Yes?”

  “Mr. Taggart? Jack Taggart?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m looking for a Mr. James Taggart.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said the voice, sounding disgusted. “What’s he done now?”

  “Nothing,” Sara said. “I’m just looking for him. Do you know where he is?”

  “No, I don’t, and I don’t want to,” the voice said, and hung up.

  Five

  Monday afternoon, the second of August. Massa’s office was parked on four at the moment, doors open to Harsch’s larger and more dramatic room, with its desert views. While Massa leaned back in his chair, feet up on his desk as he occasionally sucked on a bottle of beer, Jacob Harsch paced slowly and methodically along an invisible and slightly bowed line between Massa’s desk in the former elevator and his own desk in his own room. Seated on the sofa to Massa’s left, legs casually crossed but pad and (black) pencil alertly at the ready, was Boy Cartwright, smiling like the school snitch in the principal’s office.

  They had been talking, these three, but then a silence had fallen, broken by the glug of Massa’s beer, the faint brush of Harsch’s black shoes on the gray carpet, the creak and twitch of Boy’s smile. Tonk, said the beer bottle when it kissed the desk top. Grugg, gergg, gug-gug-guggle, said Massa’s stomach. “If we only knew when ” said Massa.

  “Well, sir,” Boy said, with that light and airy display of omniscience-now which was his trademark, and which was mostly the effect of his diet of Valium and champagne, “it must be soon, mustn’t it? They do have the license and so on.” “There’s also,” Harsch said, pacing by, “the question of where. Massachusetts is a fairly large place.”

  “We have our people, sir,” Boy said, mostly to Massa, “following them everywhere. They’ll lead us to the place, as soon as they’re ready.” Massa’s hand caressed last Friday’s Galaxy, lying faceup on his desk, containing the story of the meeting and romance between John Michael Mercer and his little Miss Nobody. “Real nice story, there,” Massa said, a sentimental curl passing over his eyebrows. “How they met, and all.” “I was quite touched by it,” Boy said. It was his policy never to denigrate a competitor unless there was a clear and unequivocal immediate gain to be made; thus his reputation for fairness and acumen among those where it mattered, like Massa and Harsch, a reputation that made his occasional slurs and slices doubly potent.

  Massa said, “Suppose Jack Ingersoll has the where and when?”

  “No,” Boy said, and permitted himself a faint smile. “I have a . . . friend on Jack’s team. What he knows, I know.”

  Massa grinned; he loved intrigue, except against himself, and encouraged it among the staff.

  Harsch, returning among them like Halley’s Comet, said, “Whatever the date and place turn out to be, the point is to be ready.”

  “Oh, but of course,” Boy said to Harsch’s back, as the Galaxy*s number-two man receded again into his own office.

  “Jake’s right,” Massa said, turning serious, putting his feet on the floor, replacing them with his elbows on the desk. “What it comes down to is: What’s our story?”

  Surprised, Boy spread his hands and said, “John Michael Mercer gets married.”

  Harsch, circling back, said, “That’s the door, that’s not the house.”

  “That’s right,” Massa said, nodding, shaking the beer bottle. “It’s the door, not the house.”

  “Yes, of course,” Boy said. He drew a little door on his pad, almost got lost in the reverie of a complex doorknob, and pulled himself back to the mundane plane by his shirttail. “We must enter the house,” he said, extending Harsch’s metaphor as far as he dared.

  Massa said, “Who is he marrying? Is that our story?”

  Now that they were talking again, the orbit of Harsch’s pacing had contracted, so he could remain a part of the conversation. Drifting left and right, but never very far away, he said, “Who is Mercer marrying. A nobody from nowhere.”

  “Maybe that’s our story,” Massa said, while Boy looked alert, ready to agree whenever a decision was reached.

  Not yet, though. “She’s a bore, Bruno,” Harsch said, and kept moving.

  “All right, then,” Massa said, accepting that. “Why is he marrying? What do his friends think? What does the network think? Is there a story in any of that?”

  Massa was now staring straight at Boy, who felt constrained to answer. “We’re working those angles, of course, sir,” he said. “So far, not much of intere
st.”

  “Then Mercer is the story,” Massa said, and spread his hands. “Why not?”

  “Interesting,” Harsch said, while through his brave expression Boy looked scared.

  “The exclusive interview with John Michael Mercer!” Massa announced, and read the headline off a giant marquee: “Why I Finally Decided to Tie the Knot!”

  “Ah, yes,” Boy said. All on its own, his pencil drew a great X on the door.

  “You can do it, Boy,” Massa said. “If anyone can.”

  “Ah, yes,” Boy said, and made his sunniest smile. “Yes, indeed.”

  Near the barricaded finish of a four-mile-long dead-end road running parallel to the beach between bay and ocean, within the city limits of Palm Beach, an avenue flanked on both sides by increasingly large and well-protected waterfront houses, a small side road choked by encroaching pine trees was marked with official city signs reading, one way—do not enter. But this was a He, since the road was in fact an entrance as well as an exit, and the only entrance/exit by land to the compound containing the home of John Michael Mercer, star of TV’s Breakpoint.

  A low sprawling white house done in modified Spanish style dominated this compound. It was open on all sides to the breeze and to eye-filling views of the ocean, the pool, the tennis court, the gardens. In the open, airy, comfortable, beautiful main Hving room of this house, John Michael Mercer stood and said, “I want them to suffer.”

  “But there’s really nothing to be gained by suing them, Johnny,” said the lawyer seated on the couch.

  “Oh, yes, there is,” Mercer said. Earlier in the conversation, he had thrown the Weekly Galaxy on the floor, where it had separated into several overlapping sections, on all of which he now stomped as he paced back and forth in front of the low and comfortable sofa where the lawyer and the lawyer’s attache case were seated.