Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  “Let’s see if I’ve got it,” Binx said. “Sara and Ida, not sure how you’d take the news, came to me for advice and I told them not to make any waves, not to tell anybody else. So they didn’t. But now that I’m gone anyway, I might just as well come clean and tell Harsch what’s happening to those two poor girls in his workplace.”

  “Gosh, Binx,” Jack said, “if you could do that, we’d all be so grateful. It has been rough on the girls.”

  “Do Sara and Ida know about this yet?”

  Jack gaped at his friend. “Didn’t you hear me? They're the ones with the problem!”

  Binx took a deep breath. “Jack,” he said, “I don’t ask for much honesty in this old world, but unless you are straight with me on at least one miserable detail I will not carry your shit bucket to Harsch’s office for you, and that’s that.”

  “Binx, I can’t believe you’d—”

  “I’m leaving,” Binx said, picking up his briefcase and shopping bag. “Goodbye.”

  Jack glared at him. “They’ll know!” he yelled. “All right? If they have to know, they’ll know!”

  Binx put his briefcase and shopping bag down again and said to the guard, “I just have to go upstairs for a minute.” To Jack, he said, “I’m sure glad you didn’t forget why you came over here.”

  Seven

  When Sara walked into the apartment at the end of that day, she passed Phyllis’s bedroom, and through the doorway saw Phyllis standing in the middle of the large room, hands on hips, frowning at her wall of closets. All the doors were open, revealing a soft, colorful, jam-packed miscellany of clothing, enough to initially stock any new boutique in a suburban mall. More cloth billowed from open-sagging dresser drawers. The room looked as though it had just had an orgasm; Phyllis, however, looked like someone with a problem. “Hi,” Sara said. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, hi,” Phyllis said. “Listen, could I borrow your suitcases a couple days? I’ll ship them right back United Parcel, I promise.”

  “Sure,” Sara said, bewildered. “How come?”

  “I had all that money,” Phyllis said, with a pretty shrug, “I bought all these clothes, I never bought suitcases. You don’t think about suitcases when you buy clothes. Listen, I won’t stiff you on the apartment.”

  “You won’t?” Sara said. She was beginning to get it.

  “It’s just barely the beginning of August,” Phyllis said, “so you wouldn’t expect me to pay my share of the whole month, but I’ll split it with you, okay? Give you half.”

  “You quit,” Sara said.

  “Oh, no,” Phyllis said, with a perky laugh. “I was definitely fired, by Mr. Harsch himself. You would have thought I was the undead or something, the way he looked at me.”

  “Fired? But why?”

  “Well, they must have found out about Trend ,” Phyllis told her, then frowned as perkily as she had laughed. “But how? Boy wouldn’t have told them.”

  “Phyllis, none of this is—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Phyllis said, “I’m just all caught up in my own problems here, and I’m not making sense at all. The fact is, I’ve been doing undercover work.”

  “Well, we all have,” Sara said.

  “No, not for the Galaxy, for Trend.” Phyllis stood straighter, pride showing through. “I’m a staffer with Trend,” she announced. “And I was sent down here to do an inside story on the Weekly Galaxy, and just wait till it comes out!”

  “Oh oh,” Sara said. “Poor Jack.”

  Phyllis raised an eyebrow. “Poor Jack? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, you’re on Jack’s team,” Sara pointed out, “or you were, and the editor’s responsible for his team.”

  “Oh, pooh,” Phyllis said, dismissing that with a wave of her slender hand. “The best thing that could happen to Jack would be to get fired.”

  “But that isn’t up to you, Phyllis,” Sara said. Anger and tension were making her neck hurt.

  “Personalities can’t enter into this,” Phyllis said, as though repeating a lesson she’d learned in a Social Sciences class.“We’re talking about a very serious First Amendment issue here.”

  “We are? Which First Amendment issue?”

  “Well, the Galaxy, of course,” Phyllis said. “The very existence of gutter journalism like that is a threat to decent news media everywhere, you surely don’t disagree with that”

  “You mean,” Sara said, “the existence of Hostess Twinkies and Froot Loops is a threat to sirloin steak.”

  ‘“Oh, now you’re being silly,” Phyllis told her.

  “One of us is,” Sara agreed. “You tell me one thing we could do down here, the Galaxy could do down here, or even any combination of things, that would threaten the existence or reputation of, for instance, the New York Times”

  With a pitying smile, Phyllis said, “So the Galaxy is just a harmless enterprise?”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” Sara said. The memory of Binx Radwell leaving the office this afternoon, briefcase and shopping bag hanging from his arms, brown-uniformed armed guard trailing him, employees along his route turning their backs and studying reference books and doing anything they could not to meet poor Binx’s eye, was still fresh in her mind. “The Galaxy is very harmful in one way,” she said. “It eats its young. That part scares me sometimes, but I think maybe I’m smarter and tougher, and it’ll come out all right. But our arthritis cures and our interviews with people from outer space don’t hurt the First Amendment, for Pete’s sake!”

  “We have a difference of opinion,” Phyllis said, shrugging again.

  Sara said, “What it comes down to is, you want to do the same kind of muckraking we do, but you want to feel holy while you’re having your fun. Like television movies about the evils of teenage prostitution.”

  “Isn’t teenage prostitution evil?”

  “So are the crotch shots on TV.”

  “Oh, really,” Phyllis said airily, “if you can’t see the difference between the Weekly Galaxy and Trend—”

  “That’s right, I can’t.”

  “—then there’s really nothing more to be said.”

  “You’re right.” Sara turned away, leaving the bedroom, but then reversed and said, “Wait a minute. What was that about Boy?”

  Phyllis had already returned her attention to her major holdings in recent styles. “Mmm?” she said.

  “You said something about Boy before, about him not telling on you.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t,” Phyllis said, “so Mr. Harsch must have found out some other way.”

  “You mean, Boy knew about it.”

  “He’s very forceful, Boy is,” Phyllis said, with admiration in her voice. “I kept this little cassette recorder in my bag, going all the time, and I’d always go to a stall in the ladies’ to switch tapes. One of his reporters heard a click in there— I thought I was alone, stupid me—and she thought she recognized the sound, and she told Boy, and do you know what he did?”

  “He didn’t go to Mr. Harsch,” Sara said. The full extent of the infamy here was unfolding itself to her.

  “Not Boy,” Phyllis said, laughing. “He arranged with the girls on his team to cover for him, and he came right into the ladies’ and into the stall just when I unlatched the door and he just overpowered me. He sat on me on the toilet, and listened to some of the tape, and went through my bag, and found my Trend ID, and then he told me if I didn’t tell him the absolute total truth he would send photos to David Levin of me doing oral sex on him in the stall in the ladies’, and he had a girl in there with a camera, and he was serious.”

  Shocked, outraged, Sara said, ‘“He couldn’t do that! You should have screamed, you should have refused, you should have bit him!”

  “Too bad,” Phyllis said dryly, “you weren’t there to offer moral support. As it was, I told him the truth, I told him everything. And then he said all right, he’d let me alone on two conditions.

  First, that nobody on his team ever showed up
on a tape or in the story, that he wasn’t connected with me in any way. And second ...” Phyllis finally wavered, and looked away toward her closets, and cleared her throat.

  Sara couldn’t imagine what enormity might be coming next. “Second?” she urged.

  “All I had to do,” Phyllis said, not meeting Sara’s eye, “was tell him anything interesting that Jack’s team might find out about anything.”

  Sara stared. “You mean, spy on Jack’s team for Boy?”

  “I was already doing it for Trend ” Phyllis pointed out, “so it hardly seemed to make much difference.”

  “What a nasty little bitch you are,” Sara said.

  Offended, Phyllis said, “Oh, now, no need to get personal!”

  “That’s why Boy got the Mercer wedding!”

  “Actually,” Phyllis said thoughtfully, nodding, “you’re probably right about that.”

  “You can just go to Mr. Harsch right now,” Sara announced, pointing vaguely westward, “you can destroy that Boy Cartwright for good and—”

  “‘Well, no,” Phyllis said delicately. “Boy insisted on insurance. There are pictures. I’m sorry about Jack, of course, but you’ll never get a word out of me against Boy.”

  “Then I’ll stop him,” Sara said, filled with a clear white flame. “Jack’s life is tough enough without being betrayed by a smug, self-righteous, mental lightweight little snip like you!” Then, astonished at herself, she reared back and said, wonderingly, “Snip. I never used that word before in my life.”

  “I am nor a snip,” Phyllis said, deeply insulted.

  “That’s just the beginning of what you are,” Sara told her, and pointed a trembling finger at the girl’s nose. “You owe me the entire month of August rent, and if you don’t pay me, I’ll see you in Small Claims Court, and I’ll bring a photographer, and I’ll just casually mention the tricks you were turning in this place. As for loaning you my suitcases, ask me again, why don’t you, what you should do with your clothing! I’m going to make a phone call now, and if you spy on me, you snip snip snip, I’ll make you regret it every time you look in the mirror the rest of your life.”

  “That’s a horrible threat!”

  “And you’re a horrible person,” Sara told her, and went away to save Jack Ingersoll. And she was so intent on the phone call she had to make, she never noticed that the sheet of memo paper containing the license plate number of the murdered man’s car was no longer amid the clutter on the wall over her desk.

  Eight

  In his small and messy kitchen, Jack Ingersoll, wearing an apron and a fine dusting of flour over his jeans and polo shirt, baked a cake. It was Wednesday, the fourth of August, and yet he was not at work, and fuck it. Humming a slow and erratic version of “Moanin’ Low,” Jack stood at his kitchen counter and combined flour and eggs and sugar and butter and, oh, just lots of good things. White flour floated in the air. And fuck it.

  The doorbell rang. Jack frowned in that direction. “More good news,” he muttered and reached for the measuring cup, and the doorbell rang again. “Life calls,” he told himself. Grabbing up a floury dish towel, he made his way through the house, drying his hands, while the doorbell rang yet a third time. “Very impatient, this life,” Jack told himself, and opened his front door, and Sara was standing there, looking awfully goddamn chipper, under the circumstances. “Yeah?” he said.

  She looked him up and down, apron and flour and dish towel and all. “Which one are you?” she asked. “Laurel or Hardy?”

  “I gave at the office,” he told her.

  “So did I.” Unbidden, she entered the house past him, saying, “Mary Kate said you took the day off because you were gloomy.”

  “That Mary Kate,” Jack said. “She just talk and talk and talk.” Accepting the inevitable, he shut the front door.

  “She wanted to phone you the good news,” Sara said, “but I said no, I wanted to tell you myself, in person.”

  “Good news?”

  “We have a free vacation,” she said, grinning at him.

  He looked at her. “A free vacation. I’m fired? That’s the good news?”

  “To Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of New Bedford, Massa—”

  “I know where Mar—” he said, then woke up. “Martha’s Vineyard? The Mercer Wedding?”

  “You got it.”

  “But— But Boy's doing the Mercer wedding!”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “The Jack Ingersoll team is running that story now.”

  Jack stared at her. “You did this thing?”

  “It is true, she said modestly,” she said modestly.

  “Next,” he said, rubbing his hands on his apron, “you’ll tell me you got Binx his job back.”

  “No, sorry, my powers don’t reach that far. I wish they did. Binx is still fired. On the other hand, so is Phyllis.”

  “Ah, well, the living must go on. Tell me what you did, Sara.”

  Reaching into her shoulder bag, she brought out a manila envelope, saying, “First, there’s a little story we must get into the paper. And we’ve really got to get this one in there, Jack.”

  “Tell me,” he said cautiously.

  “Twenty-four years ago,” Sara said, opening the manila envelope, “a Mrs. Kathleen Harrigan was about to have her fourth child, when in a dream she saw that she would have a daughter, which was all right, but then in the dream it seemed to her she could see that daughter hanging from a pole, which was less all right.”

  “Discomfiting,” Jack agreed.

  “Twenty-four years later,” Sara said, “that dream has come true in the nicest possible way. Mrs. Harrigan did have a daughter, named Elizabeth, called Betsy by family and friends, of whom she has many, being such a sweet and sunny girl—”

  “My my,” Jack said. “Sign me up.”

  “And Betsy Harrigan,” Sara said, taking a number of eight-by-ten glossy photos from the envelope and handing them to Jack, “became a telephone company repairperson.”

  Jack looked at the pictures. “Mmmm,” he murmured. “Baby, baby, fix my phone.”

  “Enjoy the pictures,” Sara told him, with a faint edge in her voice. “Take your time.”

  Jack looked up from the pictures, comprehension dawning. “Telephone repairperson,” he said. “You tapped Mercer’s phone!”

  “My own extension,” she corrected, “in a car out on the street. I can now tell you”—she checked each item off on her fingers—“what date the lovebirds are flying out over the ocean, what hotel they’re staying at, the wedding date, the name and religious affiliation of the person who will perform the—”

  “Sara!” Jack cried, knees buckling. “Don’t make jokes!”

  Plucking the photos of Betsy Harrigan from his nerveless fingers, Sara said, “You want more? I phoned the minister. We have an exclusive interview with him right after the wedding, and all we have to do is publish a little piece he’s written about the Irish question.”

  “Taking which side?”

  “Does it matter?” Sara asked. “But I’ve got the date and the hotel. It turned out Boy already had Martha’s Vineyard, but that doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve got the exclusive with the minister, and I’m your reporter, and that means we are going to Martha’s Vineyard!”

  His look of delight dimmed, as a cloud passed over. “The interview,” he said.

  “It’s in the bag,” she assured him. “He’s the darlingest old minister you ever—”

  “Not that one. Massa, remember? He decided already what the wedding story is. The interview with John Michael Mercer on why he finally after all these years decided to get married. The exclusive interview with us.”

  “Oh,” Sara said, going under the same cloud. “When John Michael Mercer sees the Galaxy ’’ Jack pointed out, “he doesn’t give interviews. He calls the dogs.”

  “I remember,” Sara agreed. But then that pesky cloud passed on from her face and she brightened again, saying, “One day at a time, right? We got t
his far, didn’t we? So we’ll get the rest.”

  Jack looked at her. “You really think so?”

  “What I really think is,” she told him, “this is fun. This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life. Absolutely nothing in this world matters except that we beat Boy Cartwright to the John Michael Mercer wedding.”

  Grinning crookedly, Jack said, “Not even your murdered man beside the highway?”

  Sara laughed. “On what series is he a regular?”

  “None.”

  “Then forget him! We’re on our way to Martha’s Vineyard, that’s all, and whatever Massa wants from us, we’ll get it!”

  “By golly, Sara,” Jack said, gazing upon her in wonder, “you are not the girl who walked into the Galaxy office last month and told me you were a real professional reporter.”

  “You’re damn right I’m not,” she said. “I don’t have a serious bone in my body.”

  “I want to put my arms around you,” he said, looking down at himself, “but I’d get you all over flour.”

  “Flour from a gentleman is always nice,” she said.

  Hours later, in bed, in the semidark, he said, “Tell me one thing. Were those twins legit?”

  “Of course they were,” she said.

  THE WEDDING

  One

  Have you ever tried to find a hotel room on Martha’s Vineyard in August? Martha’s Vineyard, be it explained, is not a vineyard and doesn’t belong to Martha, but is a twenty-mile by ten-mile island in the Atlantic, off the Massachusetts coast, four miles south of Cape Cod, with a year-round population of fewer than twelve thousand souls. The moneyed literary, showbiz and other celebrity sorts of the American Northeast, or at least those of them too dignified for the Hamptons, invade the Vineyard every spring, quintupling its population, only to be driven back into the sea every fall, and August is the absolute height of their incursion. Every ferry making the three- quarter-hour trip across from Falmouth Heights or Woods Hole carries another forty or fifty cars and as many people as the law will allow. Most of these people have made their housing arrangements months or years before, but now and again an innocent disembarks, asks where a room might be found, and is answered with rolling eyes and pitying smiles.