Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

“I don’t intend to.”

  “Anyway, I’ll call Mary Kate as soon as we get to the command center. Maybe Binx can play hooky today.”

  “I appreciate this, Jack,” she said. “I really do.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing,” he assured her. “Besides, you’re a good enough reporter, valuable enough member of the team, if there’s a chance to keep you alive, what the hell, I say go for it.”

  She smiled at him. “You are a nice boss, after all,” she said.

  “After ah what?”

  “Wait right there,” she told him, “while I go brush my teeth.”

  Six

  Copy poured from the house on Edger Street, messengered swiftly to Massa down in Florida. UFO sightings at both Johnny Crawfish’s death and birth; premonitions; reminiscences from suspiciously articulate jailbirds; incredible parallels drawn with the lives of Mozart, Thomas Jefferson and John Lennon; thoroughly bogus romances with three television series stars; a little known (because nonexistent) tale of Johnny’s service as a Peace Corps volunteer; other odds and ends of detritus. Some of this sludge would be summarily dealt with by Massa’s own true red pencil, some would fail to make it through the fact checkers or Rewrite or the evaluators, some would actually appear in the paper. But none of it mattered, one way or the other, just so long as they got the body in the box.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Virginia state police patrolled the only public highway that went past the compound, and they’d already been rather aggressive with Don Grove when he innocently stopped his car beside the fence to clean bugs from his windshield. Within the compound, the cutthroats and brigands with whom Johnny Crawfish had liked to idle away his free hours were belligerently on guard, having already hospitalized three ordinary fans of the late great man who had in their innocence thought they might be forgiven for sneaking in to say goodbye.

  The main hope was the cousins. Johnny Crawfish had risen from a teeming and scrofulous family, any one of whom would have sold his sister to orangutans if the price were right. (“Don’t worry, Sis, they promised you’ll get your own fur coat.”) Singly and in groups, the cousins were approached, coated with a promissory sprinkling of money, trained in the operation of the simple and concealable cameras, and promised vast additional moneys should they return with a usable photo of their dead departed relative, entire, recognizable, in focus, and in the box.

  There would be two viewings, neither public; both were meant for family (cousins), friends (thugs) and showbiz peers exclusively. Printed invitations were jealously guarded and eagerly sought after. (Chauncey Chapperell’s visit to the printer of these invitations produced, instead of the duplicate ducats hoped for, a fresh swelling under Chauncey’s left eye and a little difficulty with his voice for a few days.) The two viewings —Wednesday, 5:00 till 10:00 p.m., Thursday, 6:00 till 9:00—were democratically divided among the various categories of invitees, so that cousins and thugs could hobnob with the great and near-great on both occasions.

  The idea of buying invitations from a couple of cousins, and sending Don Grove or somebody to pretend to be a Crawfish, was scotched, much to Don’s relief, when it was learned there would always be a relative or two on duty at the entrance, looking out for just that sort of substitution. With the obsequies taking place indoors, there was nothing for a Galaxy air force to do. With the Crawfish fleet at the ready, the Galaxy navy must needs stay in port. And with razor- wire-topped walls and armed thugs in jeeps to contend with, there was no thought of the cavalry this time coming to the rescue.

  It was all up to the cousins.

  Wednesday, 4:30 p.m. The first camera-equipped cousins had been sent off, but no result as yet was known. Sara sat as quietly as everybody else, at her desk in the command center, and when the white light on her phone began to flash she couldn’t at first think why on earth anybody would call her at this particular moment. Then she picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?” half expecting a wrong number, and it was Binx:

  “Is that the lovely and charming Sara Joslyn?”

  “Binx! How are you?”

  “Reasonably well,” he said. “Sitting up, taking nourishment.”

  “Did you want Jack?”

  “I don’t think so,” Binx said, “I never have before. Actually, it’s you I’m calling. I’ve got your Buick, I think.”

  Heart quickening, Sara reached for pen and paper. “You do? Great!”

  “Mary Kate was pretty closemouthed about the purpose of all this,” Binx said, complaining gendy, “so I’m not sure exactly what you need, so I just got whatever I could.”

  “That’s great,” Sara said, being just as closemouthed as Mary Kate. “That’s fine, whatever you can get is exacdy what I need.”

  “Okay. The Buick was rented from A-Betta Car Rental, out near the airport.” Binx spelled the name of the rental company. “The renter, who used an American Express card, gave the name Michael Hanrahan.”

  “Irish?” Sara said, surprised. The salsa music, the toughness of that face, all had made her think he was Latin in some way. Dope dealers, something like that. So what was this? Gun-running?

  “If Hanrahan is an Irish name,” Binx said, “and if he wasn’t fibbing when he gave it, then I guess he’s Irish. Is this significant?”

  “I have no idea,” Sara told him truthfully. “What else do we have? Anything?”

  “Mr. Hanrahan gave a corporate address in Los Angeles,” Binx said. “On Sunset Boulevard.” He reeled off the address, and said, “I think from the number it’s way east, out of the good section. And the company is called Western States Investigations. ”

  Sara absorbed that one, then said, “Private detectives?”

  “I think so.” Binx said, “I called there, and they said Michael Hanrahan doesn’t work for them anymore.”

  “Did they say when he left, or why, or any—”

  “Sara, Sara,” Binx said. “I am only human. In fact, barely that.”

  “Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry.”

  “I can tell you when the car was turned in, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like,” Sara said.

  “July twelfth.”

  The same day she’d found the dead man; the car was turned in the same day. “Ah hah,” Sara said.

  “The interesting thing,” Binx said, “anyway I guess it’s interesting, is, that was the second day of a one-week rental. They hadn’t expected it back until the weekend.”

  “Well,” Sara said, “I guess Hanrahan didn’t need it anymore.”

  “And that,” Binx said, “is all I could learn. I hope it helps, with whatever you’re doing.”

  “Thank you, Binx, I’m sure it will,” Sara said. “I really appreciate this.”

  “De nada. See you when you get back.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh, and Sara ...”

  Sara listened. “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking, you know,” Binx said, hemming and hawing and sounding very nervous and embarrassed, “and I’m pretty sure the time has come and I’ve just got to leave Marcy. I mean, for everybody’s sake. And I was thinking, uh, uh, when you come back, uh, maybe you and I could have dinner or something, uh, talk about it, you know, and, uh, you could give me the woman’s point of view.”

  ‘“Uh huh,” said Sara.

  “I think maybe you like understand my situation,” Binx said. “You know, a sympathetic ear.”

  “Uh huh,” said Sara.

  “A shoulder to cry on, you know, kind of thing.”

  “Uh huh,” said Sara.

  “Well,” Binx said, and cleared his throat, and said, “See you, then.”

  “Uh huh,” said Sara.

  Seven

  If a man from California is murdered in Florida, won’t someone in California notice his absence?

  Yes. The Los Angeles Police Department, Missing Persons Bureau, confirmed to Sergeant Helen Sonoma, Dade County sheriffs office, that one Michael Xavier Hanrahan had been reported missing on August third by hi
s brother, Nicholas Hanrahan, of 27500 Banetree Drive, Northridge, California, home phone 818-555-6904, work phone 818-959-9999. It being just on five o’clock in the afternoon in Norfolk, Virginia, and therefore just on 2:00 p.m. in Northridge, California, a distant Los Angeles suburb on the north side—as the name suggests—of the San Fernando Valley, Sara immediately phoned Nicholas Hanrahan’s work number, where a woman’s voice answered, saying, “All-Day Parking.”

  “Nicholas Hanrahan, please.”

  “Nick doesn’t come in till later. Try after six.” So she called his home number, and got his answering machine, a pleasantly gravelly voice, suggesting a middle-aged tough guy with a sense of humor: “This is Nick Hanrahan, and I’m out somewhere. Leave your message after the beep.” “This is Helen Sonoma,” Sara told the machine, after the beep, “of A-Betta Car Rental, Norfolk, Virginia. We’re trying to locate Michael Hanrahan because of property left in a vehicle rented by him from our Miami location on July eleventh of this year.” She gave the number of the phone she was calling from, and said, “Please call collect.”

  As she hung up, the first two Crawfish cousins came bursting into the house, both laughing and excited, adrenaline flowing, unable to stop talking and crowing about their success, waving their cameras around, crying, “We got it! We got it! You can forget about it, we got it, we got it, we got it right here!” And on and on like that, while a couple of dispassionate technicians plucked the cameras from the cousins’ waving hands and carried them away to the darkroom. The cousins were persuaded to wait on the front porch, and things got very quiet, everybody looking toward the former kitchen.

  Another cousin, this one as nervous and jittery as a rat in a dog pound, sidled in and produced another camera, which Jack took from him, saying, “You got the picture?”

  “Yeah. Gimme my money and I’ll go.”

  “First we look at the picture.”

  “It’s there, it’s there, don’t worry.”

  “I like to worry,” Jack told him. “Wait outside.” Ten minutes later, a technician came from the darkroom/kitchen with word on the fust cousins’ pictures: “No.”

  “No?” Jack said. “What do you mean, no?”

  “The in-focus pictures are mosdy of an ear,” the technician said, “and the rest are of the casket lid. I think one of those guys turned the camera the wrong way and it’s his ear we’re getting.”

  “Give me the pictures,” Jack said, and took the wet smelly things and went outside and dropped them in the lap of the cousins, who cried, “This isn’t our stuff! You’re trying to cheat us!”

  “If you’re on this porch one minute from now,” Jack told them, “large men will come out with baseball bats and turn you people into dog food.”

  The cousins flung the pictures of ears and lids onto the porch floor and stalked off in dignified disgust. The rat-faced cousin stood by and smoked a cigarette cupped with total secrecy in the palm of his hand. He watched Jack without blinking.

  Jack went back inside, and a few minutes later two more cousins arrived. These didn’t have pictures or even cameras anymore, but they were bleeding from various parts of their heads and hands, and they insisted the Galaxy pay their cab fare. While Don Grove, shaking his head, went out to give money to the cabbie, Jack listened to the cousins’ story. Through all the defensive verbiage and unnecessarily graphic descriptions of physical mayhem practiced upon their bodies by the guards at The Shack, the basic story was a simple one: The cousins had been careless. They had let other people see them wave their cameras around in the same room with the remains. Jack gave them one hundred dollars and directions to a hospital with an emergency room.

  The rat-faced cousin’s pictures were extremely out of focus, every one.

  Worse was to come. Two giggling female cousins seemed to have been unable to concentrate on anything but their departed relative’s crotch: seventy-two pictures of gray folded hands with pinky rings. An elderly cousin had managed to obtain five excellent, clear, in-focus pictures of the casket from the other side of the room, with not one hair of Johnny Crawfish in sight. A teenage cousin had taken pictures of the exterior of the house—floodlit for exclusive taped ABC television coverage and a Crawfish Productions filmed documentary—as well as pictures of the grounds, the guards, several attending celebrities, the sideboards loaded with food and drink in the main entrance hall of The Shack, the built-in organ in the Music Room where Johnny Crawfish had penned such monstrous hits as “Bedroll Woman” and “My Semi-Drivin’ Heart’s in a Demihemiquaver Over You,” the breakfast nook where Johnny died, and that was that: By the time he got to the remains, he’d run out of film.

  And he was the last to have any chance at all. Enough cousins had been ineptly showing their cameras by then to alert the pluguglies guarding the entrance that something was afoot, and from then on every cousin was searched upon arrival. The discovery of a camera produced an immediate beating as well as revocation of the entry card. Soon, the highway outside The Shack was littered with abandoned cameras, the hospital emergency rooms of Hampton and Newport News and Norfolk were awash in battered Crawfishes, and Galaxy-inspired traffic through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel connecting Hampton with Norfolk was all one way: south, away from the Shack. Retreat had become rout.

  “Screw it,” Jack told Sara. “Let’s go have dinner.”

  “The problem is,” Jack said, over scungilli and a side order of spaghettini in butter-and-cheese sauce, “too many of these celebs now are aware of the body in the box, and they don’t like it, and they try not to let it happen.”

  “How?” Sara asked, over scampi fra diavolo and zucchini.

  “Cremation’s one way,” Jack said, and sipped Chianti. “There are actual no-fooling legit movie stars in Hollywood right now that have instructions in their wills that when they die they want no viewing, no publicity, and cremation within twenty- four hours. That’s on account of us.”

  “But the fact that they know about it,” Sara said, surprised.

  “Sure they know about it. Celebs are among our most fanatic readers. We guarantee their fame and importance. The more bullshit they read about themselves in the Galaxy, the more assured they are that they still have that audience.”

  “And they don’t want themselves, dead, looked at by eight million people.”

  “Very narrow point of view,” Jack said. “One that does make life tough for us at times.” He grinned. “But it has its high points, too.”

  “It does? Like what?”

  “Like a little piece of videotape I’ve kept,” Jack said. “I’ll play it for you sometime. It shows me dressed as a priest, being interviewed on network news in front of the Bel Air mansion of a very famous singer that just went down. I’m Father Mulroney, and I say—” Looking pious but impish at the same time, Jack folded his hands over his scungilli and said, “At a time like this, speaking as an old family friend as well as spiritual counselor, I believe it is so important that the family be left alone by the media, your good selves included. Leave them to the privacy and dignity of their grief.” Jack laughed and sat back. “I had that bastard so ashamed of himself for being a reporter on their lawn he was practically in tears. And I’d just come out of the house with the camera in my pocket.”

  “The body in the box.”

  “The very same.”

  “Didn’t we send somebody up to The Shack dressed like a priest?”

  “We did,” Jack said. “And they tried to turn his head around to match his collar. They aren’t very religious up there.”

  “What are some other things you’ve done?”

  “You mean, to get the body in the box?” Jack looked thoughtful and reminiscent. “Ida was an unwed mother once,” he said, “clutching in her arms the deceased’s bastard child. She was determined the infant would get to gaze upon his daddy just once.”

  “Oh.”

  “Another time,” Jack said, “Chauncey was the long-dead son of the family who it turned out didn't die after al
l when he disappeared in that Swiss avalanche but made his way home after all these years just in time for Dad’s funeral.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah, that one got a little hairy afterward,” Jack agreed.

  “I should think so.”

  “Then there’s Ida’s fire,” Jack said, “when I was the fireman.”

  “No way to burn The Shack, though,” Sara said.

  “Unfortunately not.”

  Sara said slowly, “Jack? What if we don’t get it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The body in the box. Sometimes we fail, don’t we?”

  “Never!” Jack sat up straight over his scungilli. “If there’s one thing Massa wants more than anything else on this planet—or any of the near planets, either—it’s the body in the box. Every time. The twenty-four-hour cremation is the only acceptable excuse.”

  “Gosh,” Sara said.

  Jack shrugged. “Ida says she’s got something,” he said. “She tends to come through. We’ll find out when we get back.”

  The gray station wagon parked in front of 147 Edger Street was surmounted by an official red flasher light, not at the moment in use. The licensed plates were official, and the white lettering above the seal on both side doors read commonwealth OF VIRGINIA, BOARD OF HEALTH. “By golly,” Jack said, “they’re closing us down.”

  “I can’t find it in my heart to blame them,” Sara said.

  Inside, they found Ida dressed like a Gray Lady or something; a round gray pillbox hat with some sort of brass symbol on the front, a severely tailored pearl-gray suit with high-lapelled white blouse, black stockings and disgustingly sensible black shoes. “There you are,” she said to Sara, and gestured at a plastic dry cleaner’s bag draped over a chair. “Your uniform. Try it on.”

  Jack said, “Ida? Is that car out there yours?”

  “It’s the real thing,” Ida told him. “It cost us.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “Not if you have a way to get in.”