Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  At the main entrance to the compound, Jack clambered from his car and was escorted to a State Police captain identified as Ogilvie. Beyond Ogilvie, The Shack stood out starkly against the night, floodlit. Everyone was back here out of that light, pressed to the perimeter of the estate. Nothing could be seen to move up there; it was as though life itself ended at that doorway.

  Captain Ogilvie, a put-upon harried man, stood arms akimbo, fists pressed into hips, jaw thrust forward, as he glared at this new interruption. “Yes?” he demanded. “Just who are you, and just what do you want?”

  Jack opened his mouth. Over the captain’s shoulder, the house gleamed and glistened, empty except for Ida and Sara. Am I wrong? Am I crazy? The body in the box! Right now, right this minute, those two are getting the body in the box. Do I lose that? If I open my mouth, the Galaxy does not get the Crawfish cover. Am I right? Or am I wrong?

  “Well?” the captain insisted, leaning closer.

  “The, the-the-the-the-the-the, the Board of Health women!” Jack said.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re— They’re phonies! They’re really from the Weekly Galaxy, they’re not Board of Health at all!”

  The captain stared. “Are you out of your mind? They’ve got ID, court orders, they—”

  “Phony! Phony!” Jack clawed out his own ID, the real ID, and pushed it at the captain. “I’m their editor! I sent them there!”

  The captain didn’t want to believe any of this, and he certainly didn’t want to believe anything said by a self-confessed editor of the Weekly Galaxy. Brushing Jack’s ID aside like a pesky moth, he said, “We’ll verify all that when they come out.”

  “You have to go in there!” Jack yelled. “One of them’s a killer!”

  Half a dozen cops now stood about and gazed at Jack, certain he was crazy. Ogilvie leaned backward slighdy, no longer thrusting his jaw out. “Killer, is she? And you’re their editor. And we’re supposed to go in and—”

  The sound of the shot silenced the entire world.

  It couldn’t have been anything else. It cracked out from that big empty light-struck house, and flattened everything in its path like a sonic boom. Captain Ogilvie, slack-jawed, turned to stare. Jack, a great agony pouring through his body, tottered and clutched at the nearest trooper for support. Leaning on that smoothly uniformed arm, staring through grit-covered eyeballs at the house, he said, through a throat gone closed, “I loved her, goddamnit, and I never told her. Goddamnit! Goddamnit!”

  CRACK!

  The sound of the second shot caused a dozen moving bodies to freeze, just at the edge of the zone of light. In the motionless silence, Jack lifted his head. Two shots. “There’s hope,” he whispered.

  Eleven

  When Ida said, “Go through that door over there. Walk,” Sara thought: She wants to take me to a basement or somewhere, where the shot won’t be heard. Then she’ll walk out and say she left me to guard the body, and she’ll drive away, and go become somebody else with that cleverness of hers, and they’ll never find her. And I’ll be dead, in the basement of The Shack. In these shoes!

  That was when she took Ida’s picture. Not to take Ida’s picture, but to shine the sudden flash in Ida’s eyes, and run!

  Ida fired the gun, a terribly loud and shocking sound in this room, and a vase full of flowers behind Sara shpackled into an infinity of wet shards and spraying water and collapsing lilies.

  The noise of the gun must have startled Ida, too, that and the flash in her face, because she didn’t fire again until Sara was leaping deerlike through the door. Sara heard the chuk of lead into wood, and she cried out, losing her balance, flailing around, losing the camera, waving her arms, her feet skittering in all kinds of directions until at last she righted herself and ran across this anteroom Uttered with an obstacle course of Lucite folding chairs. She slapped at chairs as she passed, knocking them over in her wake, trying to slow someone who could merely send a bullet flying over every obstacle and direcdy into her shrinking back.

  Even if there’d been time to look behind her, she wouldn’t have done it; something was gaining on her. Through the next doorway, and the next, and leftward down an endless marble-floored haUway that stretched away to infinity, as in a dream where something’s chasing you and you can’t run fast enough and the door keeps receding farther and farther away.

  CRACK! CRACK!

  A bee stung her left shoulder, and her knees wobbled, aU strength draining away into the marble floor. The door rushed toward her, an ally at last, and she burst through it, the heavy sensible shoes dragging at her feet, the bee sting goading her shoulder, the LIGHT a hot slap in the face when she spewed across the threshold, stripping away her shadow, stealing her balance, sucking her strength. “Oh, God!" she cried, tripping over her own self, and fell sprawling on the gray grass beyond the curving path.

  She rolled onto her back, frantic, and Ida came out, all gray and white and remorseless and caring about nothing in this world but the death of Sara Joslyn. Ida raised the pistol, and forty people with handguns cut her to ribbons.

  Twelve

  In the ambulance, Jack kept talking, because the doctor on the scene had said to “keep her engaged,” that although the bullet graze on her shoulder was unimportant she was “in trauma” and Jack should not let her “go all the way into shock.” Fm the one all the way into shock, Jack thought, but he kept talking. “I read your letter,” he said, “the one you had under your underwear.”

  She lay on the stretcher, the scratchy blue blanket stretched over her as she stared at him, silent, unblinking. The ambulance swayed, and Jack swayed with it, and the silent state trooper beside Jack on the other stretcher swayed with it, but Sara just lay there and stared at Jack and didn’t blink and didn’t even sway when the ambulance swayed.

  “See, what you had wrong,” Jack told her, “was that Phyllis was the only person in your apartment, so she had to be the one to take the piece of paper from over your desk. But Ida was in there. I put Ida on the job when I found out Boy had a spy on our team. Ida checked everybody, she found out about Phyllis and Trend, she checked you out, too, she was all over that apartment you two had. Ida was better at searching places than anybody I ever met. She came out of there knowing your clothing sizes and your shoe size. She came out of there with your piece of paper. Sara, do you know why she killed the man beside the road? Because I don’t.”

  Sara stared at him, not blinking, not bracing herself when the ambulance swung around a long curve.

  Jack nodded, licking his lips. “What I figure,” he said, “she was riding out to the Galaxy with him, for whatever reason, she got him to stop, she shot him. You drove by. She was ducked down in the car. She saw your brake lights, she figured you’d come back, she moved while you were turning around. She went and hid on the other side of that concrete divider in the middle of the road. What the hell, there wasn’t any other traffic. You came back and she watched you. All the time you were there with the dead man, she was watching you from the other side of the divider.”

  Sara didn’t react, didn’t move.

  “She didn’t know you,” Jack said. “She didn’t see a Galaxy sticker on your car, she figured you’d go somewhere else to report it. You left, she put the body in the trunk and drove on to the Galaxy and the guard there told her you’d just reported somebody killed in that car. She told him it was just one of our stunts, and why wouldn’t he believe it? Everything is just one of our stunts.”

  Sara swallowed. She licked her lips. That was the only change.

  Jack said, “She told him she’d need his help with the stunt later, and she parked in the regular parking lot even without the right sticker because the guard knew her, she was a long-term valued employee. Then she came in and established her presence with all that stuff about Keely Jones, and made sure nobody was making a big thing out of your story. Then she went back out and got the guard to come with her, and took them both out in that scrub land out there and
buried them. And returned the rental car. And all she wanted was to keep you from doing any follow-through.”

  Jack gave a bitter laugh, shaking his head. “At the Galaxy ” he said, “that should have been easy. Who does follow-through on anything real there? And you were forgetting it, too, weren’t you? Until she started shooting into hotel rooms. All she had to do was wait, trust the Galaxy to degrade you, make you forget. She didn’t have enough patience, that’s all.”

  The ambulance braked, slowed, stopped. Doors slammed.

  Sara sighed, a long susurration. “Hanrahan,” she said.

  Jack leaned forward. “The dead man? He’s Hanrahan? What about him?”

  “He thought you set the fire,” she said, in a small faraway voice. “He was coming to talk to you. Ida knew you’d both figure it out she was the one. Since you didn’t set the fire, she did. And the dead mother was murder.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Jack said, and nodded. “I never wanted to look too closely at that particular piece of good luck. I never wanted to be sure.”

  The ambulance doors opened, and busy medics were there, ready to slide Sara away. “Just a second,” the state trooper said, speaking for the first time since the start of the ride. “Before you take her,” he told the medics.

  Sara’s wide eyes turned toward the trooper. Jack said, “Yes?”

  The trooper leaned closer to Sara. “After the first shot,” he said, in his colorless uninflected voice, “when Mr. Ingersoll here believed you were dead, he said, and I quote, ‘I loved her, goddamn it, and I never told her.’ I just thought I should report that to you.”

  Sara’s eyes had somehow grown even wider. She looked at Jack. “Did you? Did you say that?”

  Jack gave the blank-faced trooper a look. “Shit,” he said. “Now everybody’ll know.”

  THE WAY WE LIVE THIS INSTANT

  One

  In his private office at Trend, The Magazine for the Way We Live This Instant, special projects editor David Levin had a high view westward over the calculated rubble of the West Forties, and over the broad Hudson River, to the Jersey side with its solitary graceless rectangular high rises here and there at the water’s edge as though, county by county and town by town and shire by shire, New Jersey was doing its feeble best to give New York the finger. Beyond these examples of the shame of the architecture schools lay America itself, beneath an ever-changing sky, and to the north a glimpse of the Palisades, and to the south a peek at New York Harbor. It was an enviable view, well earned by David Levin’s exertions on behalf of Trend, and he liked to stand at his broad windows, hands clasped behind his back, and view that view every chance he got.

  He was doing so today, when Myra his secretary came in looking doubtful and said, “Two people out here who want to talk to you. The man says his name is John R. Ingersoll, and you know him from the Weekly Galaxy.”

  The blood drained from David Levin’s face. The Weekly Galaxy! That astonishing, repellent woman! She’d stolen those tapes, he knew she had but he could never prove it, and he could never find her again, and he would never be able to admit to anybody what had happened. So all he’d been able to do was make an editorial decision to the effect that the Weekly Galaxy story was too crude after all to be of interest to Trend readers, and kill it. Much to poor Phyllis Perkinson’s disgust, by the way, only slighdy assuaged by his immediately assigning her to the John Michael Mercer wedding (thus giving her a vacation and getting her out of David Levin’s hair—or scalp; he was rather bald—in one fell swoop).

  And John R. Ingersoll—Jack Ingersoll—had been Phyllis’s editor down at that scurrilous rag, Levin remembered that name. What was the man doing here? “Certainly not,” he said.

  Myra extended a tape cassette toward him, saying, “He said I should give you this.”

  Levin accepted it, with fingers that suddenly shook. It was one of the tapes the woman had stolen, he recognized his own cryptic pen markings. What are they up to? For my own protection, he thought, I’d better find out. And if they want my assurance that Trend is not going to blow the whisde on them after all, by God, I’ll be happy to give it. “All right,” he said. “Send him in.”

  Myra ushered in a couple, both reasonable looking, the woman young and quite attractive, the man jaunty, with a rolled newspaper under his arm. “Hi,” said the man, grinning. “I’m Jack Ingersoll, and this is my partner, Sara Joslyn.”

  “Hi,” said Sara Joslyn, also grinning.

  Levin nervously tapped the cassette against the knuckles of his other hand. “Yes? You wanted to talk to me about the Weekly Galaxy?”

  “Oh, no,” Ingersoll said, beaming broadly. “We quit that place.”

  “Then I don’t under—”

  “We came to talk,” Ingersoll said smoothly, “about going to work for you”

  “Me? No, really, there isn’t the slightest—”

  “Just a second,” Ingersoll said. Something about the man’s calm self-assurance was unsettling. “Sara and I are excellent investigative reporters,” he went on, “I can pretty well assure you of that.”

  “Nevertheless, I—”

  “Just to give you an example,” Sara Joslyn said, withdrawing another tape cassette from her bag and holding it up for him to see, “Here’s our first exclusive, just for you, if we’re working for the magazine.”

  Levin peered at the cassette. Unwilling, but helpless, he said, “What is it?”

  “You,” Ingersoll told him, “in conversation with a woman named Ida Gavin, a former reporter on the Galaxy. You appear to be in bed together. Ida keeps describing what you’re doing.”

  Levin leaned back against the plate glass of his view. He could remember that woman’s voice, remember her running commentary. Good God! “In fact,” Sara Joslyn said, with an incongruously sweet smile, “you make a couple of requests on that tape, at one point.”

  “You may not remember Ida Gavin,” Ingersoll said, “at least not under that name. This might help your memory.” And he unfolded the New York Post he’d been carrying, open to page five, and handed it to Levin.

  No! The madwoman at the Johnny Crawfish wake! Weekly Galaxy reporter, multiple murderess. The cold eyes in the standard publicity photo looking out at him were familiar indeed. Levin was so engrossed in gazing back at those eyes that he didn’t notice Ingersoll look approvingly around the office with the air of a man who expects to move into it in, oh, say, no more than four years.

  When Levin at last tore his eyes away from the dead eyes of the dead woman in the newspaper, he looked instead at the tape in Sara Joslyn’s hand. “How can I know—” he began, and his voice failed, and he started again: “How can I know that’s the only copy?”

  “What does it matter,” Ingersoll asked pleasantly, “as long as we’re working for you?”

  “Special projects for Trend ” Sara Joslyn said, and smiled like an angel. “We’ll do wonderful work. You’ll see.”

  They would. They could. They had no reason not to. There was a small table handy; Levin put the newspaper on it. He extended his hand, and Sara Joslyn put the cassette in it. His fingers closed on the litde plasuc box.

  Jack Ingersoll, expression serious, said, “None of us will ever mention this again. That’s a promise.

  Levin looked from one to the other. The scene shifted; he saw them in a different light. These people— These people really were investigative reporters! The crew he’d been working with were grade schoolers in comparison. With these people, David Levin could . . . rule Trend!

  A sudden honest smile lit Levin’s face. He shifted the cassette, extended his hand, and said, “Welcome aboard!”

  Jack Ingersoll took the hand in a manly and trustworthy grasp. “You won’t regret this, Mr. Levin,” he said.

  Sara Joslyn’s eyes shone. “Clean journalism,” she breathed, “at last.”

 

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