Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

Sara hurried back to her desk, cleared the manuscripts out of the way, readied the typewriter, rolled in a sandwich of two sheets of paper and a carbon, and began to type:

  On July 12th, on my way to work the first day at the Weekly Galaxy, I found a dark blue Buick beside the empty road, with a dead man lying on the ground beside it. He had been shot once in the forehead. I reported this to the guard on duty at the Weekly Galaxy gate. That guard, whose name is or was James Taggart, disappeared that same day and has not been seen either at work or at his home ever since. So far as I have been able to determine, no official report was ever made to any police department about the murdered man I found beside the road.

  The data on the murdered man’s car was on a sheet of paper in a notebook I keep at all times in my bag. After I was introduced to my editor that first morning, I took a place at one of the reporters’ tables, next to a young woman named Phyllis Perkinson. (She called me over; it wasn’t coincidence.) I did not meet Phyllis Perkinson until some time after I arrived at the Weekly Galaxy building. It is absolutely possible that she arrived at the building after I did that morning.

  That day, Phyllis Perkinson invited me to share her apartment in the city, and I agreed, and continue to live there.

  On Friday of that first week, four days later, I discovered that the page with the information about the murdered man’s car had been ripped from my notebook. I make it a habit to leave my bag under my chair when I am away from my place at the reporters’ table, either in the research section or the ladies’ room. It would have been very easy for Phyllis Perkinson to have removed that information from my bag.

  With some trouble, I reconstructed the information, which I put on a sheet of paper taped to the wall over my desk at home; that is, in the apartment I shared with Phyllis Perkinson.

  One week ago, on Tuesday, August 3rd, Phyllis Perkinson was fired from the Weekly Galaxy, it having been learned she was actually working for Trend magazine on under-

  cover assignment to do a smear article on the Galaxy. While at the Galaxy, her secret had been learned by an editor named Boy Cartwright, who had not exposed her but had forced her to be a spy for him against other editors at the Galaxy.

  Last week, while I was on assignment in Martha’s Vineyard, somebody fired a pistol several times through my hotel room window into my bed. Fortunately, I was in the bathroom at the time.

  I have now discovered that the dead man’s car information has disappeared again, this time from the apartment.

  1) It would have been easy for Phyllis Perkinson to take the information from my bag at the Galaxy.

  2) Phyllis Perkinson was in Martha’s Vineyard, on assignment for Trend, when the shots were fired into my room.

  3) Only Phyllis Perkinson could have taken the information from the wall over the desk in the apartment we shared. No one else has been in here.

  I have no idea who the murdered man was or what his link was to Phyllis Perkinson. I do know she seems at all times to be living some sort of double life. Every weekend while we shared this apartment she went off by herself, as though to spend time with a boyfriend, but she never said anything about this person, so I have no idea where she was really going.

  I think it’s clear that Phyllis Perkinson murdered the man beside the road, that she did something to or about the guard named James Taggart to keep him from reporting the crime, that she removed the information from my bag in hopes that I wouldn’t be able to do any follow-up on the case, and that when she saw I’d reconstructed the information she (a) removed it again, and (b) fired into my hotel room either deliberately to kill me or to scare me off.

  I am determined now to find out who the dead man was, and what his link was with Phyllis Perkinson.

  She signed and dated both the original and the copy, and then—feeling self-consciously melodramatic and yet determined—she typed to be OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH on two envelopes, put the two copies of her statement in the two envelopes, put the envelope with the carbon copy inside the large manila envelope marked i for incomplete (college novel), put the other envelope with her luggage, to take with her to Norfolk, and then sat in the living room to think things over.

  I have no proof of any of this.

  I am a staffer on the Weekly Galaxy, and I have no proof of any of this.

  I am a staffer on the Weekly Galaxy, and I have no proof of any of this, so it would be a mistake to go to any police department about this.

  Does Phyllis still have her key to this apartment?

  She spent the night at a motel out by the airport.

  Two

  The death of Johnny Crawfish stunned the civilized world. The thirty-eight-year-old country singer who had risen from poverty and squalor as the child of migrant farm workers, the gravel-voiced balladeer who had found both God and his muse in a Tennessee prison where he’d been sentenced for manslaughter, the self-taught millionaire songwriter/businessman who by his thirty-fifth birthday had appeared in command performances before both Queen Elizabeth and President Reagan, died that Saturday morning of at first unknown causes in The Shack, his palatial thirty-room waterfront estate on Chesapeake Bay north of Newport News, Virginia, and when the news was flashed round the globe it was as though four billion human beings had just lost their best friend.

  The media—most of the media—were not informed for more than twenty-four hours after the abrupt darkening of this star in the firmament, first because of the extraordinary attempts being made by the world-class team of Crawfish doctors to bring their patient back to life, and then because the family and business partners wanted to know exactly what had caused Johnny’s demise before the news was released. As a result, though Johnny Crawfish passed from his reward on Monday morning, it wasn’t till Tuesday evening that his death became the lead story on the network newscasts. Wednesday’s New York Times began its coverage on page one, below the fold, with a photo of Crawfish performing at the White House, and included a second photo—an early Crawfish concert—with the bulk of the obit deeper in the paper. Photos of Crawfish—not identical photos, but identically smiling—made that week’s covers of Time and Newsweek.

  Official statements were made in response to the awful news. “A great American, a fine musician and a source of inspiration to rich and poor alike,” said President Ronald Reagan, Archbishop John J. O’Connor of New York, motion picture and television producer David Wolper, fellow artist Frank Sinatra, Virginia Senator John Warner and evangelist Billy Graham, in separate press releases.

  The Weekly Galaxy's primary spy at The Shack was a carpenter named Moe Kerlie, employed to make some necessary repairs and expansion on the boathouse and docks along the property’s bay frontage. Almost no one was allowed inside the razor-wire-topped walls of the grounds around The Shack other than Johnny Crawfish’s extensive family and his ex-con old pals, who served him as chauffeurs, bodyguards, executive producers and pinochle partners. But carpentry was not a skill any of Crawfish’s cronies had picked up in the pen, so an outside man from time to time had to be called in.

  Moe Kerlie had worked off and on for Johnny Crawfish for nearly seven years, and every time he did so he was simultaneously on the payroll of the Weekly Galaxy. Early indications of Crawfish’s travel plans were sometimes picked up from Moe, and changes of girlfriend or the occasional falling-out among the buddies and hangers-on, but until the Monday morning when Johnny Crawfish said, “This coffee tastes like shit,” and toppled forward into his apple-and-Jarlsberg-cheese omelette, Kerlie’s information had been barely worth the rather modest retainer the Galaxy gave him. On that Monday morning, though, Moe did his suborners proud.

  Hearing a fuss of some sort up at the main house, seeing maids (cousins) and butlers (parolees) running back and forth and in and out of the many French doors, Moe moseyed on up there, ostensibly to say he needed somebody to drive the pickup into town to pick up some more A/C plywood, and he found the household so distracted and unaware of his presence that he wandered freely and he
ard the whole thing. Crawfish dead; doctors sent for; Crawfish dead; carried to his bed; Crawfish dead.

  “I gotta go to town,” Moe told a former mob enforcer, “get me some more A/C plywood.”

  “Go, go,” the enforcer said, looking old and gray and worried, hurrying off on errands of his own.

  Which is how the Weekly Galaxy became the first to know.

  Three

  In Norfolk, Virginia, at number 147 Edger Street, not terribly far from the Naval Station but several blocks from the sea, stands a small yellow clapboard house, two stories high, in a depressed area of similar small houses, vacant lots, concrete block buildings containing auto body shops, and liquor stores. This particular house, with full basement and cramped triangular attic, with one bathroom, three bedrooms (upstairs), living room, dining room and kitchen (downstairs), had stood empty for not quite two months since the last tenants, a family in desperate need of birth control information, had skipped out owing three and a half months’ rent.

  Now, however, to the landlord’s bemused delight, a new tenant had been found, a shortterm tenant who was paying, in cash, for one month’s occupancy, the equivalent of ten months’ rent. The landlord, a retired Polish pipe fitter living out near Richmond on the income from twenty-seven rental properties in depressed parts of Norfolk and Portsmouth, had asked only two questions on the Monday afternoon the deal was cut: “Is it a whorehouse?” “Is it gambling?” Being assured the tenants had neither prospect in mind, and being given half his rent in advance—five months’ worth!—the landlord had been pleased to withdraw back to his home near Richmond and think no more about it.

  Much activity immediately ensued at number 147. A professional cleaning service swept through like the sorcerer’s apprentice on a good day, followed by trucks from an office furniture rental place up in D.C. delivering desks, wastebaskets, filing cabinets, library tables, bulletin boards and a refrigerator. Simultaneously, the phone company arrived to install fifteen telephones with fifteen separate lines (and lights; no bells), a beverage distributor brought in cases of beer and soft drinks and a water cooler with large blue jugs of bottled water, and electricians came to add two new circuits to the first floor. These were meant to accommodate the rented air conditioners and copiers and television set also being delivered at that time. Meanwhile, teams of plumbers and carpenters were hard at work converting the kitchen to a photographic darkroom.

  And while all that was going on, the Weekly Galaxy was on its way.

  From Dulles International, they took a chartered bus down Interstate 95 from the nation’s capital through Richmond and then on 1-64 toward Norfolk. It was Tuesday morning, the team having left Martha’s Vineyard early in the day, spending the previous day and night cleaning up after themselves, distributing bribes and reparation money, cooling out the victims where possible, eliminating the traces of their presence where more blatant felonies might be involved. Now, with yesterday’s news already forgotten, with the New England stringers returned to their dusty ivory towers, the team looked forward to the challenges ahead.

  Jack sat by himself behind the driver, yellow pad on lap, considering approaches; the body in the box was never an easy goal. A few miles below Richmond, Ida joined him, dropping into the aisle seat to say, “Sara Joslyn.”

  “A trusted assistant,” Jack said. “Who shall rendezvous with us later today.”

  “She wasn’t in the john when her bed was shot up,” Ida said.

  Jack looked at his mad dog carefully. “She wasn’t?”

  “I checked the room last night, after she left,” Ida said. “There’s a ventilation space under the john door. With the door closed, you can see from outside when the light’s on in there.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. Ever the investigative reporter, this Ida. “What does this say to you, Ida?”

  “If she was in the john, whoever fired the shots would know it,” Ida said. “And with the lightspill under the door, they’d know there wasn’t anybody in the bed.”

  Jack nodded. “Maybe that was the point,” he suggested. “Maybe they did it as a warning, some kind of a warning, and didn’t want to kill anybody.”

  Ida gave that the look it deserved. “One shot is a warning,” she said. “You don’t empty a gun into a hotel room unless you’re trying to be sure the person you’re shooting is really dead. You don’t take the extra time, make the extra noise, for a warning. And you don’t take the chance she’ll come out of the john and see you and identify you later.”

  “Hmm,” Jack said. “So what are you suggesting, Ida?”

  “She was in bed with you ” Ida said.

  “Ah,” Jack said. “‘That would explain it, all right.”

  “The he’s because Massa’d fire you,” Ida said, “if it went public that she was in bed with you.”

  “Moral turpitude,” Jack agreed. “Are you handing this story to me as your editor, Ida?”

  “For myself,” Ida said, “I don’t care if you fuck goats, just so it doesn’t change anything on the team.”

  “Ida,” Jack said, in absolute sincerity, “I would never never ever alter my editorial judgment for the sake of a piece of ass. I hope you know me better than that. I hope you know my values are higher than that.”

  Ida said, “She was in bed with you, wasn’t she?”

  Jack gave her another long considering look. “Ida,” he said, “are you taping this little conversation?”

  “Yes,” Ida said.

  “In case you ever feel badly treated later on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sara was in bed with me, Ida,” Jack said, clearly and distinctly. “We lied.”

  “Thank you,” Ida said, and went back to her own seat.

  It almost looked like home. Sara walked into the house on Edger Street, and it was a definite Weekly Galaxy command center, full of photographic equipment, empty bottles, paper plates, people on phones, manic conversations. Presiding over it all, impersonating an unexploded bomb in the front room, was Jack.

  He probably doesn’t want to hear about Binx, Sara thought as she crossed to where he was in tense conversation with the regular members of the team. As she arrived, Jack was saying, “No, that isn’t a story, we don’t have— Hello, Sara. Sit.—a story, we have a load of horseshit.” “Horseshit cousins,” Harry Razza said.

  “That’s one of our problems,” Jack agreed. “Johnny Crawfish’s family and friends are as scuzzy a lot as we’ve ever come across.”

  “There’s a couple of them around,” Don Grove said, “trying to sell Crawfish’s hair, saved from four years of haircuts.”

  “Swept from four dozen barbershops,” Jack suggested.

  Nodding, Don said, “From what they showed me, Johnny did grow hair in quite a variety of colors.”

  Louis B. Urbiton said, “I wonder. Could the very awfulness of these people be our story? The incredible muck that Johnny Crawfish rose out of to become the so on and so forth we drop our trousers for today.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that, Louis,” Jack said, shaking his head regretfully. “Look at it from Massa’s point of view, and you’ll see those creeps and cruds around Crawfish act just exactly the way the readers would if they suddenly found they had a rich and famous cousin. The reader identification is going to be with the scumbags, so we’ll never be able to call them by their rightful name.”

  “Which is Cretin,” Louis said.

  “Very true.”

  “They do all have their little stories to sell us,” Bob Sangster said. “So far, I’ve got three completely different sets of last words, all sworn to and vouched for by different cousins.”

  “I saw Johnny enter heaven,” Harry Razza said, “up through a big white cloud, Elvis leading him by the hand. I have a cousin who’ll swear to it.”

  Chauncey Chapperell, stretching his long legs up and over a desk, said, “I’ve got a UFO sighting over Chesapeake Bay just before he died.”

  “More horseshit.”

&nb
sp; Ida said, “What about cause of death?”

  “Sorry, Ida,” Jack said. “In the first place, Massa’s a Johnny Crawfish fan, he doesn’t want to hear Johnny OD’d, or had AIDS, or committed suicide because he couldn’t read music, or anything with juice in it. And in the second place, they’ve had half the American Medical Association up in that place. If it wasn't an embolism, they’ve had all the time and talent in the world to rig it so we’ll never prove a thing.” Spreading his hands, he said, “Come on, gang, where’s my story?"

  Baffled, Sara said, “He’s dead. Isn’t that the story?”

  “It is not,” Jack told her. “What’s our headline? Crawfish Dead. Our paper hits the supermarket Saturday, we’re a weekly. By then, unborn Ubangi tribesmen will already have the news. The Galaxy needs to go beyond that simple fact, into the realm of excitement, romance, adventure and the totally fantastically unexpected.”

  “The body in the box,” Sara suggested, hoping at last to find out what that could be.

  “That, too,” Jack agreed. “But that’s just the cover, the front page. We still need a headline.” He made a sweeping arm gesture, to suggest headlines: “Crawfish Was Victim of Foul Play. Except he wasn’t. Crawfish Had Premonition of Own Death. Except he didn’t. Crawfish Was in the CIA. Except he wasn’t.”

  “Well,” Sara persisted, “what about the body in the box?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Jack assured her, “once they lay him out. One problem at a time.”

  Ida said, “Sara and I can get that, when the time comes.”

  Looking surprised and hopeful, Jack said, “You think so? Fine, it’s all yours.”

  Oh, good, Sara thought, I don’t even know what it is, and I’ve just been volunteered for it.

  Four

  Tuesday afternoon, in the command center. The meeting around Jack had ended inconclusively —where’s the story, what’s the story, give us our story, who’s got the goddamn STORY?—and everybody was now on the phone: