“We’ll get in,” Ida said.
Sara picked up the plastic bag by its wire hanger and saw inside what appeared to be a uniform identical to Ida’s. A package of black stockings and another round hat and a pair of those tugboat shoes were also on the chair. “I’m supposed to wear this stuff?”
“We don’t have much time,” Ida pointed out. “It’s after eight, and the viewing stops at ten.”
“All right.” Sara wandered off into the empty dining room to change. While transforming herself into something as repelling and bloodless as Ida, she wondered what Ida’s idea was, and whether or not it would work. The people guarding The Shack; were they capable of beating up women who looked like this? Feeling excited, but also a bit queasy with apprehension, Sara went back out to the living room, clomping along in shoes that actually fit. In fact, all the clothes fit, and so did the hat.
“Ravishing!” Jack said. “My darling, fly with me! You’ve never looked lovelier.”
“Thank you, Jack,” Sara said.
Don Grove called over from his desk, “Sara? Did Ida tell you about your phone call?”
“Phone call?” Before leaving, Sara had Scotch-taped to the receiver of her phone the names “Helen Sonoma” and “A-Betta Car Rental,” so that anyone answering the phone if its light flashed would know which scam was being pulled. Now she said to Ida, “Who was it?”
Impatient, Ida said, “The info’s on your pad there, you can take care of it when we get back.”
“Just let me look,” Sara said, moving toward her desk.
Ida said, “Jack, we don’t have much time.”
“This’ll only take a couple minutes,” Sara promised.
“Go ahead,” Jack told her, while Ida looked very impatient.
The message was from Nick Hanrahan at his home number. Sara called, identified herself as the person from A-Betta, and Nick Hanrahan’s pleasantly raspy voice said, “You’re not the only one looking for Mike. I’m looking for him, too. His landlord called me the first of August. When did he rent that car from you people?”
“He returned it the twelfth of July.”
“Yeah, he flew to Miami the eleventh,” Nick Hanrahan said. “That was on his desk calendar when I went into the place. But I got nothing on him after then. What did he leave in the car?”
“A gun,” Sara said.
“Oh,” Nick Hanrahan said. “Jesus. Yeah, I guess you people could get a little uptight, something like that.”
“It would help,” Sara said, “if we knew why Mr. Hanrahan might have been carrying that gun.”
“Well, he’s a private eye,” Hanrahan said, and then laughed self-consciously and said, “Not like it sounds. Not like in the movies.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Sara told him.
“See,” Hanrahan said,“where he works—Well, let me start with me. I’m a partner in a bunch of parking garages.”
“All-Day Parking.”
“That’s us. We got a bunch of locations around the greater Los Angeles area. Now, you’ve got a lot of cash operations, a business like that, you’ve got guys sometimes try a little hustle, so we hire a company like Western States—that’s who Mike works for—”
“Yes,” Sara said, “that’s what he listed on the rental form. Western States Investigations.”
“Right. They’re mostly industrial security, like for people like us. Put in undercover people, whatever, anytime we think we’re getting a short count. And with stuff like this, you don’t go to court, you know? So Western States, they make the point for us, you know?”
“We have similar situations in our business,” Sara said.
“Yeah, I suppose you do,” Hanrahan said, “a car rental place, so you know what I’m talking about. So anyway, Mike works for them, through me recommending him when he moved out here, and when they’ve got these occasional regular investigations, not this employee scam stuff, he usually does it.”
“So he really is a private detective,” Sara said, being careful to speak of Michael Hanrahan in the present tense.
Hanrahan laughed. “More than Western needs, sometimes. He’s only supposed to go through the motions, you know? Keep the client happy. But like this trip to Miami, he told Klein—Klein’s his manager, at Western—he told Klein he had to show some expenses anyway, for this rich client—”
“Which client?”
“I dunno,” Hanrahan said, “some rich woman, some star’s widow or something. Anyway, Mike said he had to show expenses anyway, and he’d like a couple days out of town, so he flew to Miami. And now he’s disappeared, and you tell me there was a gun in the car. What gun, do you have a description?”
Sara had made herself ready for this one. She read off a description she’d culled from a firearms magazine: “A .38 Special Colt Cobra.”
“Huh,” Hanrahan said. “A concealment gun. I dunno, maybe, doesn’t sound like any weapon I’ve ever seen around him. But could be. Leave anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“What local address’d he give?”
“None,” Sara said. “Only Western States, on Sunset Boulevard.”
“Okay, look,” Hanrahan said. “I’ve reported Mike missing to the L.A. police. I’ll tell them about this new thing, they’ll get in touch with the Miami cops, they’ll come pick up the gun. Okay?”
“Fine,” said Sara. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Hanrahan.”
When she hung up, Ida was standing there looking bad-tempered. “That was more than two minutes,” she said.
“Sorry, I’m ready now.”
Jack said, “I wish you both every success.”
“Thanks,” Sara said. “I just wish I had jeans or something to change into when I get back.”
“I’ll get you some stuff from the hotel,” Jack promised, and turned to Ida to say, “Ida, is it permissible to know what you’re doing?”
Ida picked up from her desk a black leather old-fashioned doctor’s bag. ‘“We’re shutting the viewing down,” she said.
‘“Why?”
“The corpse has AIDS,” Ida said.
Eight
The Shack flamed white, a great colonnaded columned antebellum plantation house gleaming alabaster in the black depths of space. White lights flared at it, banks and walls and towers of light, washing the tall broad structure with color- destroying glare. Within that light, wood turned to porcelain and paint to frozen milk. Windows could show nothing against that blaze; they stood black within the ivory walls, reduced to the architect’s idea of windows.
Grass surrounding the main house was gray, the winding path to the front door black, the mourners moving slowly on that path both black and bent. Within the dazzle of the lights, it seemed there was no sound, no color, barely any movement possible. But beyond them, in the gray ordinary night of the world behind the lights, thousands moved, tens of thousands moved, alive with color and noise.
The manifold mourners of Johnny Crawfish, uninvited, unneeded, crowded the highway along the edge of the compound, trembled close to the razor-wire, and called out the names of still-living celebrities they saw step out into the field of light and make their bent way under that brilliance up to the main house and their farewell to “the troubled troubador of our troubled times” (Newsweek). Uniformed police, on foot and on horse and by car, patrolled the outer perimeter, keeping the highway open, keeping the Unwashed from the Elect, maintaining order in this “hour of national grief’ (Time). Old compadres of the deceased, rough and ready men, served as ushers within the grounds, escorting the “peers of the peerless” (People). Tape cameramen for ABC and film cameramen for Crawfish Productions turned the ghastly lunar landscapes they saw inside their machines into images of somber beauty, filled with famous faces thinking long thoughts about “the Prodigal Son America took to its heart” (USA Today). And all around was the hubbub of life, the surge and swell of the crowd, the murmurs of the invited guests, the brief comments and directions of the ushers, the halloos
back and forth among the cousins.
At first, in all that shifting and sonorous throng, the sound of the oncoming siren could barely be heard at all. First one police officer, then another, looked up from his endless chore of crowd control to see that flashing red light coming, and to realize at once it wasn’t just another ambulance. (There had been several ambulances already this evening, for those overcome by emotion or the ushers, and for a few who had mistaken their footing and fallen beneath the crowd.) But this was something else, official, and moving fast.
“Back there! Back there! Keep clear! Clear this area! Get out of the way!”
The gray station wagon roared into sight, and past the gaping mob, who had no idea what to make of the two grim-faced women they just barely saw within it. The station wagon flashed by, screaming, strained into a hard tight rubber- shredding turn at the entrance, and jolted to a stop just inches from the side of a Crawfish jeep blocking the drive.
Officials and guards and television producers came running from everywhere, as the two women stepped from their car, as gray and grim as the backspill that lit them.
‘“What’s going on?” screamed a State Police captain. “Who are you people?”
“Court order,” Ida snapped, slapping onto the hood of the station wagon documents it would take hours to prove false. “This place is shut down”
In the hotel room they shared, while looking for clothes for Sara to change into later, Jack found beneath her underwear an envelope marked to be
OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.
What? Jack fingered this envelope, trying to decide if it was a gag or not. Was Sara the kind of person to hide in a drawer an envelope like this containing itching powder or some sort of joke remark or something like that? No; it wasn’t her style.
So what was this? Jack thought it over, and came to the conclusion that it probably had something to do with Sara’s dead man again. Also, he told himself, as her editor and companion, he had certain rights and privileges in a situation like this. And finally, realizing he was aflame with curiosity, he stopped arguing with himself and ripped the damn thing open.
He read slowly, with mounting surprise and then mounting unease. Something was wrong here. When he finished, he read the paper again, and this time he saw where Sara had made her mistake. Phyllis Perkinson wasn’t the killer of the dead man beside the road, or the shooter of bullets through the hotel room window. There was one assumption Sara had made in this letter that was absolutely wrong.
Which meant—
“Good God!” Jack cried aloud, and ran from the room.
Nine
It was so strange to be alone in this entire huge house with all the light glaring in from outside, distorting the shapes, turning the furniture into science-fiction versions of itself. Sara walked wonderingly through it all, sensible shoes clacking, echoing in all the empty rooms.
Ida, armed only with ruthlessness and forged documents and a black leather doctor’s bag, had emptied this house as though with a machine gun, had sent people backing away from all this light with shocked faces and twitching hands. AIDS? Johnny Crawfish? Here was horror compounded; no one wanted to be anywhere near the merciless killer disease. And no one wanted to believe that Johnny Crawfish had carried it.
“Contagious disease,” Ida had said to the State Police captain, her tone cold and official and just slighdy contemptuous, as Sara had stood beside her, trying to make her own face that cold and impenetrable. “Death from contagious disease,” Ida had said. “State law prohibits public viewing, prohibits any services of any kind until after the autopsy. This property is closed by law until the deceased can be removed. Miss Twitchell and I will secure the building. You, Captain— Captain—?”
“Ogilvie,” the captain had said, wide-eyed.
“You will keep the general public back. Come, Miss Twitchell.”
And Ida had marched out into all that light, followed by Sara, suffering madly from stage fright all along the whole route under the lights, all the way to the black front door and through it. Only inside, away from the light, could she begin to relax, to shakily laugh and say, “Did I have to be Miss Twitchell?”
“We don’t have much time,” Ida said, humorless and determined as ever.
So they marched through the house, recognizing the route from the teenager’s photographs, and there was the right room at last, there were the great peach and coral pillows of floral bouquets, giving off their own muted glow and cloying smell. There was the casket on its bier, upper half of the lid standing open like a cubist’s idea of a grand piano. And there was Johnny.
They were far from the lights now, deep within The— Shack, absolutely alone. Ida opened the doctor’s bag atop a small side table and withdrew a camera from it. “You take the first batch,” she said.
“Batch?”
“He isn’t going anywhere,” Ida said. “Just keep taking pictures.”
Sara took the camera with its self-contained flash and went over to stand at the foot of the casket and look up its gleaming ebony slope to the open portion, the white silk puffed over the padding, the body in the box. Oh, God, she thought, looking at that helpless castoff husk. I’m not sure I can do it. Look how gray the jaw is. I’m not sure I can do it.
I have to do it. Ida’s right here, Jack’s waiting back on Edger Street, I’ve come this far, I have to do it. Let my hands not shake, she thought, and slowly raised the camera.
Conversationally, Ida said, “I suppose you’ve figured it out that Jack killed Hanrahan.”
Sara nearly dropped the camera. She turned her head and stared at Ida, still standing there by the side table, hand on the doctor’s bag. “What was that? What did you say?”
“I was hoping you’d let it alone,” Ida said. “That’s why I shot the gun into your bed.”
“You did?”
“I knew you were in the other room with Jack,” she said. “I hoped he’d convince you then to lay off.”
“He didn’t— He never—”
“That’s because I couldn’t ever say anything to him, that was the problem,” Ida said. She could have been talking about a missed lunch date. “I didn’t want him to know I knew he’d killed Hanrahan, because then maybe he wouldn’t be sure he could trust me. But he can. Absolutely.” “But—” The whole world was melting around Sara, going in and out of focus like the cousins’ photographs, slipping and sliding. “But why would he?”
“Hanrahan was a private detective.”
“I know that.”
“Sybille Hamler hired him.”
Sara shook her head. “I don’t know who ... I don’t know that name.”
“George Hamler’s widow,” Ida said, naming a major rock star who’d died last year.
The name at last made a connection for Sara, who said, “The fire!”
“When we got the body in the box,” Ida agreed. “Jack went in as a fireman. Sybille Hamler’s mother was in there, she was a cripple in a wheelchair, they didn’t get her out in time, she died.”
‘“Oh, Ida,” Sara said, feeling as though her heart would break. “What are you saying?”
“Jack set the fire.”
“No!”
“Jack set it,” Ida said implacably. “It was the only way to get the picture. Sybille believed it was arson, and then her mother’s death would be murder. She hired Hanrahan. Hanrahan thought he had the goods on Jack. He went to Florida to be absolutely sure, and Jack didn’t have any choice. You can see that, can’t you? Why you and I have to stick with him, no matter what? Because he just didn’t have any choice.”
Sara tried to think, tried to absorb all this, tried to make it make sense. Jack—Hanrahan— Ida firing through the hotel room window to scare her off. The dead man beside the road . . .
“No,” she said.
Ida watched her, very carefully. “No? What do you mean, no?”
“Jack was already there that morning, when I arrived,” Sara said. “He was there all day. He couldn�
��t have gotten rid of the car. He couldn’t have gotten rid of the guard. Yes, Taggart, him, too!”
Ida said, “Sara, this is very important. For Jack’s sake. He did what he had to do, and we have to stand by him.”
“No. It wasn’t him, because he ran into me when I stepped off the elevator, he was there all along. And the only other person who knows about it, Ida ...” Sara looked at this cold and ruthless woman “. . .is you.”
Ida’s hand came out of the doctor’s bag again. This time, it held a gun.
Ten
They wouldn’t let him through. He honked and honked, leaning on the horn, sticking his head out the window to scream, and the slow tidal waves of people barely noticed him at all, moved only when the bumpers and fender of his car brushed their bodies, blinked resentfully in his headlights, moved with that underwater slowness of dreams. “Life and death!” he screamed. “Life and death!” And what did they care? They were barely alive, and death was merely the excitement of Johnny Crawfish.
A state trooper, looking like a man who’s gone far too long without the opportunity to exert some authority, pushed his way to the side of the car, lowering at Jack like an incoming storm front, saying, “What do you think you're doing? You can’t drive through here.”
“The Board of Health women!” Jack yelled at him. “I’ve got to get to them!”
“Why?” the trooper demanded, noting the total civilianness of the car, the lack of identifying uniform on its driver. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“This is life and death, dammit! I’ll give you my resume later! Get me through this fucking crowd!”
Jack’s intensity had its effect, that and his utter disregard for the trooper’s authority, suggesting that Jack’s own authority was too supreme even to need mentioning. “Follow me,” the trooper said, pretending he was the one giving the order, and stepped out in front of the car to yell at people to clear this area, keep back there, move it. A mounted policeman soon joined him, and they all made their way through the surging billows of denim and polyester and elaborate bas-reliefs of hair, followed by vaguely curious eyes. Is this interesting? It doesn’t look interesting, but is it interesting after all?
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 30
