Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  “Are you English?” Mercer asked, getting into the rear of the black stretch Caddy.

  “Australian sir,” Bob Sangster told him. “I’m just a simple Aussie.”

  As they left the airport, the driver expertly steering them out to West Tisbury Road and turning east, Mercer said, “So far, so good.”

  “This is a beautiful place,” Felicia said, this being her first time on the island.

  “And private,” Mercer said, relishing the word, stretching his long legs out in the roomy car, relaxing. “And secluded. And remote.”

  “Sir?” said the Australian driver.

  Mercer looked at the face in the rearview mirror. The eyes in that face were firmly fixed on the well-traveled road. “Yeah?”

  “I don’t mean to intrude, sir,” the driver said, with a little stiffening of the shoulders to indicate the distance he knew he was expected to keep, “but if at some point you wouldn’t mind to give me just a little autograph for my daughter, it would be the thrill of her life.”

  “Of course,” Mercer said, smiling, while Felicia squeezed his hand. “What’s her name?”

  “Fiona,” the driver said. “She’s your biggest fan.”

  “Is she?”

  “But we all are, sir, if truth be told. The whole family, we wouldn’t miss a thing you do. Not just Breakpoint, you know, but everything. That blind rodeo rider in the movie for television, Study in Courage was it? That was beautiful, sir, if you don’t mind. Beautiful.”

  “I am proud of that one,” Mercer agreed, nodding in manly acknowledgment.

  “Not to intrude, sir.”

  “Not at all, not at all.”

  Of the exclusive hostels on Martha’s Vineyard, the Katama Bay Country Club is perhaps the most exclusive, limiting its clientele almost totally to the friends and guests of island residents. Over the years, these friends and guests have included a full range of the famous, from politicians to rock singers, from Pulitzer playwrights to movie stars, and as a result, the management and staff of Katama Bay have had long practice at developing the style and substance of their relationship with the media. To journalists of print and picture alike, as well as the putative biographers and other camp followers, the face Katama Bay turned was unfailingly polite, and unfailingly unforthcoming. Never to be rude, yet never to give them a goddamn thing, that was the unstated motto of Katama Bay, always honored.

  Even in the presence of the Weekly Galaxy. The manager, a smooth sleek man named Ferguson, looked at the card this fellow had given him—John R. Ingersoll, Weekly Galaxy—moved it delicately between his fingers as though unobtrusively looking for slime, and with perfect politeness said, “Just how may we be of assistance, Mr. Ingersoll?”

  “Well, I doubt you read the Galaxy, Mr. Ferguson,” Ingersoll said, with an understanding smile. Ferguson bowed, admitting the charge, and Ingersoll went on, “Probably very few people on this entire island read the Galaxy. A place like this—the Vineyard, Katama Bay—this is a fantasy world to our readership.”

  Faintly surprised at Ingersoll’s frankness, wondering what deviousness it concealed, Ferguson said, “I suppose that must be true.”

  “A part of the Galaxy’s appeal,” Ingersoll said, “is that we take our readers, in fantasy, into places like Katama Bay that they’ll never see in real life.”

  “You want to do a piece on the hotel, is that it?”

  With another self-deprecating smile, Ingersoll said, “I realize it won’t be the kind of publicity that can do you any real good, but it can’t harm you either, and of course we would clear all text and pictures with you for approval before going to print.”

  They know about Mercer, Ferguson thought, nodding thoughtfully, turning Ingersoll’s card over and over in his hand, between his long fingers. “No personalities, in other words,” he said.

  Ingersoll gave the alert look of a man who didn’t understand the question: “I beg your pardon?”

  “No . . . stars, or famous names. Just the hotel itself?”

  “Oh, of course!” Ingersoll beamed with happy relief, clearly seeing that the only possible objection had now been surmounted. Dropping his right hand into his jacket pocket in order to take an insouciant stance, confident, smiling, he said, “We wouldn’t dream of bothering any of your guests. You’d set the ground rules, and we would absolutely abide by them.” In taking his hand from his pocket, to make an all-inclusive gesture, Ingersoll pulled from the pocket, as though accidentally, a thick banded wad of money, which fell with a padded sound to the terra-cotta tile floor of the lobby. “Woops!” Ingersoll cried, and stooped at once to pick it up.

  Ferguson’s faint sense of amusement abrupdy left him, and he became very angry. Nothing changed on his face. He waited till Ingersoll had straightened again, and stuffed the money back into his pocket, and was once again meeting Ferguson’s eye. Then, as Ingersoll was just about to say something else, Ferguson said, very quietly,

  “Mr. Ingersoll, if you have some idea of offering me that cash, do let me assure you I have any number of bellmen who would be pleased to tear you limb from limb.”

  Ingersoll looked shocked, stunned. “What?” he cried. “A bribe? From the Galaxy?”

  Turning his head, Ferguson caught the eye of Eddie, the dark-green-uniformed doorman on duty at this moment. Eddie, in response to that glance, strode rapidly across the quiet lobby from the door, saying, “Yes, sir?”

  Ferguson gestured at Ingersoll with the hand holding the fellow’s card. “This,” he said, “is Mr. John Ingersoll of the Weekly Galaxy.”

  Eddie turned a fish eye on Ingersoll. “Yes, sir?”

  “He’s just leaving now,” Ferguson said, “but if he comes back . . . hurt him.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Eddie.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Ingersoll,” Ferguson said.

  “I hope someday, Mr. Ferguson,” Ingersoll said, “you’ll know just how deeply you’ve wronged me.” But Ferguson was finished with Ingersoll; leaving the fellow to Eddie, he went off to concern himself with hotel business.

  “Goodbye,” Eddie said.

  Ingersoll gave Eddie an irritated look. “Don’t play tough guy, okay?”

  “I was eleven years a cop in Boston,” Eddie said. “I used to tell people the same thing. Don’t play tough guy. Not unless you really know the part.”

  Ingersoll considered Eddie briefly, then turned his head, looking around the large discreet lobby. Eddie, following the guy’s thought processes as though they were a schematic printed on his forehead, said, “Not a one of us. You won’t find one employee in this whole place to give you the time of day.”

  Ingersoll turned back, and gave Eddie a pitying smile. “Now there ” he said, “you’re wrong.”

  The man from the Weekly Galaxy went out the front entrance of the Katama Bay Country Club under his own steam, and walked around the curving entrance driveway toward his waiting maroon Chevette, just as a long black stretch Cadillac arrived, purring in around the curve toward the entrance. The driver of the Cadillac, involved in deferential but friendly conversation with his passengers, and the man from the Galaxy walking away from his rout and defeat, didn’t so much as glance at one another. The man from the Galaxy did smile, though, when he saw the florist’s delivery van turning in at the hotel entrance; he it was who had composed the effusive greeting to Mr. Mercer and Ms. Nelson accompanying the six dozen roses that were about to be delivered to the happy couple.

  Welcome, John and Felicia! May all go well with thee!

  “No,” Mercer said, and hung up the phone.

  “What was that, Johnny?”

  “Nothing,” Mercer said, and prowled the large sitting room saying, “What do you think of it?”

  “The place? It’s beautiful.”

  And it was. At the very end of the curving brick path through trellises of climbing vines and flowers, this separate little shingled structure managed to combine all the charm of the eighteenth century with all the comforts of the twentieth. In addi
tion to the large and pleasantly beige sitting room, there were two cosy bedrooms, each with its own bath, one including an indoor-outdoor hot tub. The front of the cottage was all small- paned windows and gray shingles, but the rear was open, with sheets of plate glass commanding the view from Chappaquiddick on the left to Norton Point on the right and the Atlantic beyond. Sliding glass doors led out to a brick patio and a narrow brick path down to their own private bit of beach.

  Here they would spend the next two nights. Today there was nothing much for them to do but settle in, and have dinner this evening with friends who had a small rental house over by Gay Head, at the other end of the island. Tomorrow was the rehearsal at the church in Edgartown, and the next day, Sunday, the wedding. Just under one hundred guests had been invited, most of them flying or driving in for the day, a few staying on at the Vineyard. After the wedding, all would return here to Katama Bay, where the banquet room had been reserved for the reception. Then, at seven on Sunday evening, just in time to fly off

  into the sunset—a touch Mercer liked—their chartered plane would take them away to their honeymoon far down the coast on Hilton Head.

  A lovely plan, a lovely setting, lovely people, lovely church, lovely weather. And only the press was vile.

  The main room in the Galaxy house in Oak Bluffs no longer looked like the primary staging area for the evacuation of the planet Earth. Order had been obtained; a noisy, sloppy, messy order, but order nevertheless. All the installers and deliverers had departed, the rented furniture had been arranged so as to leave twisty trails and pathways through the room, and a sheet of acetate tacked over the map of the island nailed to the wall was beginning to fill up with grease pencil remarks. The photographers and all their equipment had been banished to one of the bedrooms upstairs, the stringers were all out looking for local color, and most of the regular reporters were off in search of employees—hotel employees, laundry employees, utility employees, all kinds of employees—to suborn. The dozen telephones were now distributed to key points around the room, and all featured lights that flashed politely to indicate an incoming call. At one of these, Sara, seated on a folding chair, elbows on the table, made an outgoing call, to but not through the switchboard at the Katama Bay Country Club: “Ms. Nelson, please.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?” the switchboard person answered, already sounding snotty.

  “This is Ms. Blanchard of Mademoiselle ” Sara told her. “Our interviewer, Countess Marguerite Orvieto, would like to make an appointment with Ms. Nelson at her earliest—”

  “I’m sorry, they’ve asked not—”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Not to be disturbed. Could they call you back?”

  “Of course they can,” Sara said. “That was Ms. Blanchard of Mademoiselle,” she repeated, then spelled both “Blanchard” and “Mademoiselle” and read the number off her phone. “I’ll be here for the rest of the business day.”

  “I’ll pass the message on,” the cynical voice said in Sara’s ear, as Jack loped in from the outer world, looking like a carnivore trapped in a produce market.

  “Please explain,” Sara said, shaking her head at Jack as he loped in her direction, “that this is Mademoiselle calling, and we do have a deadline.”

  “I’ll pass the message on,” the uninterested voice said, and the connection was broken.

  Hanging up her phone, Sara said, “They won’t call back.”

  Jack nodded. “Stonewalling us, eh?”

  The white light flashed on Sara’s phone. Raising a surprised eyebrow at Jack, Sara picked up the receiver and said, “Ms. Blanchard here.”

  A hasty hushed whisper sounded in her ear: “Lemme talk to Jack Ingersoll.”

  “Hold on.” Sara extended the phone to Jack: “It’s a breather, for you.”

  “Oh, good.” Into the phone he said, “Tell me.” He nodded, listening hard. “TheyTe on their way to Edgartown? Anybody mention a hotel? Good.” Hanging up, he looked around the room, saying, “Where’s the Down Under Trio?”

  “Well, Bob Sangster’s still being Mercer’s driver.”

  “They haven’t scoped him yet?” Jack asked in surprise. “Beautiful.”

  “I think Louis and Harry are in the kitchen. No, here they are.”

  Louis and Harry, carrying coffee and Danish, strolled into the room, talking Austriylian at each other. Jack called, “Men!” and they stopped their conversation to look around in mild curiosity, not seeing any.

  “Comere, comere, comere,” Jack told them, and they came over, eyes full of mischief and mouths full of Danish. Jack said, “Our friend at the airport just called, and the world’s press has arrived.”

  “Ah,” said Harry Razza, patting his matinee idol hair.

  “Stop them,” Jack said.

  “Duty calls,” Louis B. Urbiton said. He shook his Styrofoam coffee cup, frowned at it when he didn’t hear any ice tinkling, and handed the cup to Jack. “Ever ready,” he announced, “ever willing, and ever able.”

  “Good men. Green’s Hotel in Edgartown was mentioned. When Bob’s cover gets blown, I’ll send him along for reinforcements.”

  “We’ll hold the fort,” Harry said, and beamed at Sara. “As lovely as ever, Sara,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Come, Harry,” Louis said, “there’s work to be done.”

  Harry winked at Sara, and the two Australians left, moving at what for them was a fairly rapid pace. Sara said, “What was that all about?”

  “We have an employee out at the airport,” Jack told her, “who will tell us interesting events. Two planeloads of press just reached the island.”

  “And?”

  “The Down Under Trio—or the Down Under Duo, I guess—will stop them, hold them off while we get our work done.”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t get it. How do they do that?”

  “Mostly,” Jack said, “by getting everybody drunk.”

  A number of cabloads of press arrived at Green’s Hotel simultaneously. Both large and garish by island standards, Green’s Hotel was the sort of place that would have corporate rooms and suites reserved on a standby basis for the convenience of executives passing through. Given the cat’s cradle of interlocking corporate structure in today’s free-enterprise America, most of the media had access to this mothball fleet of rooms in an emergency, and so it was to Green’s Hotel that the nation’s press repaired when it became necessary for just a moment to set aside thoughts of nuclear winter, municipal corruption, African famine, rampant inflation, the eroding American industrial base, urban crime, racial violence and presidential aspirations to turn their attentions to the wedding of a TV star.

  It was probably this sense of momentary respite from the weighty problems of nation, species and planet that made the assembled journalists seem so jovial as they tumbled from their taxis and flooded into the lobby, cheering and chortling and calling out to one another. Perhaps a score of them were there, both male and female, gathered around the desk, calling out good-natured gibes at the hardworking registration staff, when Harry Razza wandered aimlessly by, drink in hand, amused smile on face, and viewed the rear elevation of his fellows of the press. “Chester?” he called. “Chester, is that you? And Bullock, you old sod!”

  A couple of the reporters turned around, to see who and what this was, and then a few more turned, and then a few more. “Why, it’s the Razzer,” said the one who’d been called Chester. “What do you say, Harry?”

  “Nobody’s safe now,” a woman reporter said accurately, “with the Galaxy here.”

  Harry smiled upon his compeers, more and more of whom had diverted their attention from the flustered hotel staff to his own person. Innocently, he said, “And what news brings you all out, boys and girls?”

  Laughing, the reporter called Bullock said, “Forget it, Harry, we all know about John Michael Mercer.”

  With a dismissive shake of his drink, Harry said, “Oh, that. There’s no story in it.”
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  Hoots and catcalls.

  “No, you’re welcome to it,” Harry told them. “He’s at the Katama Bay right now with the girl. Felicia Nelson, from Whittier, California. A registered nurse.”

  The woman reporter who’d announced the end of safety said, “A registered nurse? I didn’t get that.”

  “They met in Africa, you know,” Harry said airily, throwing the information away. “Come on in the bar, I’ll tell you all about it, some of the other chaps are here.”

  Bullock, looking alert, looking like a man set to start memorizing things, said, “Africa? When was she in Africa?”

  Unobtrusively shepherding his charges toward The Nineteenth Hole (what else would you call the bar in a tacky hotel called Green’s?), Harry said, “Oh, there’s nothing in it, the whole thing’s a poor lame excuse for a story, but the editors don’t care, do they? Send us out to the rubbish tips of the world. Then it’s up to us to prove them right. Come along, come along, first round’s on me.”

  “Ho ho!” cried Chester. “Harry Razza’s buying!”

  And so they all receded into the bar, where Louis B. Urbiton was lying in wait.

  Eddie the bellman walked out the front entrance of the Katama Bay Country Club, carrying a Polaroid camera. He walked stolidly and unhurriedly around the curving drive to where the stretch limo was parked, engine off, windows open, with its driver absorbed in a paperback of Middlemarch. Eddie tapped on the windshield. The driver immediately closed his book, looked alert, reached for the ignition and gazed past Eddie for his charges back by the entrance, but Eddie shook his head, waved his hand, and said, “No, no, no, I just want to take your picture.”