“Now you’re a philosopher?” I said.
“Fuck you. It was a good metaphor.”
“Simile.”
“Whatever. I might as well take up philosophy. Once the FBI arrests me for kidnapping I’m not going to be a doctor anymore.”
We all looked up at an approaching Buick, wondering if it was our cab, but it passed us to pull into the Sunoco station. A teenage boy got out and worked the pump while studying his reflection in the car window.
“Jack’s dead,” Alison said quietly. We all looked at her.
“You don’t know that,” Lindsey said. “There’s barely a reason to even think it.”
“I just wanted to say it,” she said. “To see how it sounded.”
“It sounded fucking grim, that’s how it sounded,” Chuck retorted. “Jesus, Alison!”
“Come on,” she said. “We’re all thinking it.”
“I don’t think he’s dead,” I said.
“Why not?” Alison asked me.
“I just can’t be bothered,” I grumbled, wondering if it was too soon for another codeine pill. Another approaching car slowed down, and this time I could see the plastic sign attached to the roof. “That’s our ride,” I said.
We all climbed in, Chuck in the front seat and the rest of us in the back. “Where are you all headed?” asked the driver, extinguishing his cigarette.
“Well, that’s the question isn’t it?” Chuck said.
At about three in the afternoon we got our first reporter. Her cameraman waited below while she knocked on the door.
“Who’s there?” I asked, although we’d all watched her approach from the living room window, an attractive woman in her late twenties, with silky blond hair and a chocolate suit cut to show off her long, shapely legs. She strode up the lawn with a practiced air of confident indifference, and although she looked familiar, none of us was sure if it was because we’d seen her on television or because she just looked like we should have.
“My name is Sally Hughes, from Fox News,” she said, the words carefully modulated so as to avoid being a rhyming couplet.
I opened the door, casually standing at an angle that kept me out of camera range. “Hi,” I said. “Can I help you?”
“Is this 32 Crescent Lake Road?”
“What gave it away?” I said, looking pointedly at the gold numbers on the outside of the door.
“This is the Scholling residence, correct?”
“No,” I said, doing my best to look perplexed. “The Schollings are in 42, around the other side of the lake.”
“Really?” she said, annoyed. She pulled a folded sheet of note paper out of her jacket pocket and glanced at it, her brow furrowed. “They told me 32.”
“Well, they were wrong then, weren’t they?” I said, offering up an apologetic smile before closing the door. We watched her storm down the front walk, cameraman in tow, and into the blue van parked on the shoulder of the road. They pulled out fast, leaving tire marks on the road. “They’re in an awful hurry,” Lindsey remarked.
“Just looking to scoop the competition,” Chuck said. “She’ll be back.”
And she was, ten minutes later, with a fresh coat of lipstick over a smile that seemed even more fake than it had the first time. She didn’t even wait for her cameraman, but came walking hurriedly up to the front door while he was still climbing out of the van. This time Chuck went to the door. “Hello,” Sally Hughes said to him. “I wonder if you’d care to be interviewed.”
“For what show?” Chuck asked. At this point the cameraman caught up and she made a quick, practiced gesture for him to start filming.
“Fox News.”
“Fox News,” Chuck repeated. “Is this live?”
“No, it’s for a segment we’ll be doing live in a little while.”
“What’s the subject?”
“The disappearance of Jack Shaw.”
“The movie star?”
She cracked a cynical grin. “Are you going to deny that you and the other people in this house are friends of Jack Shaw?”
“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “Are you going to accuse me of it?”
“I recently spoke with Jack Shaw’s agent, Paul Seward, who is convinced that a group of Jack’s friends kidnapped him and brought him to this house,” Sally Hughes declared smartly. “Would you care to comment?”
“That’s a lovely blouse you’re wearing,” Chuck said. “It shows off your breasts to great advantage.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your breasts,” Chuck said, speaking louder and exaggerating every syllable as he leaned into her microphone. “Your blouse shows them off well.”
She made a frustrated signal at her cameraman, who stopped filming and lowered the camera, while unsuccessfully trying to hide his grin. “What are you doing?” she asked Chuck.
“You asked for a comment.”
She was about to say something else when another van appeared on the road, pulling in behind the parked Fox van. “Hey,” I said to Chuck. “NBC is here.”
“Cool,” Chuck said.
“Shit,” Sally Hughes muttered, turning on her heel and storming back to the road.
“Oh man,” Chuck said, watching her go before closing the front door. “That is one hot reporter. Did you see the legs on her?”
“This is getting interesting.” Alison called to us from the living room. We all ran to the couch to watch the commotion outside. Sally Hughes and her legs were arguing with the man who’d climbed out of the NBC van, pointing to the house and then back down the road. Meanwhile, a white van with the ABC logo drove up from the other direction and parked across the street from the other two vans. The ABC van had a woman reporter as well as two men, who jumped out of the van and began hurriedly fiddling with the satellite machine on their roof.
“I’m having an OJ flashback,” Chuck said.
“We’d better lock the gate,” I said.
“We don’t have a gate,” Alison said.
“Oh. Don’t bother then.”
“Man,” Chuck said, indicating Sally Hughes again. “Is it just me or is she seriously hot?”
“Are you ever not thinking about sex?” Lindsey said.
“Sex is like air,” I said. “It isn’t important unless you aren’t getting any.”
“Point taken,” Lindsey said, patting Chuck sympathetically on the shoulder.
“Screw the both of you,” Chuck said.
Within an hour there were six vans and a number of cars crammed onto the shoulders of Crescent Lake Road, and twenty or so news people and cameramen scurrying back and forth. All of the major networks seemed to be accounted for, as well as some of the tabloid television shows. Deputy Dan, who’d been parked down the road ever since our visit to the Sheriff’s Office, couldn’t help but be drawn into all the excitement. He parked his cruiser on our side of the road, blocking off the Schollings’s driveway, and radioed for a pickup truck to come and deliver blue police barricades, which he used to cordon off the reporters on the opposite shoulder. Once he had the media penned in, Deputy Dan stood in the road, waving along the rare passing car and chatting with the reporters.
Pretty soon there were live broadcasts going out on all the networks, news correspondents earnestly telling the masses that Jack Shaw’s wallet had been found in a creek not far from this house, in which four of his friends were staying under suspicious circumstances. That was pretty much all anyone knew, but they knew how to tell it over and over again, adding irrelevant bits of stray data and cautious speculation, as well as the occasional interview with an overly eager Deputy Dan.
“Does the Sheriff’s Department believe that Jack Shaw was abducted?” asked Sally Hughes from Fox News.
“I can’t comment on that at this time,” Deputy Dan answered enthusiastically, staring directly into the camera as if searching for the millions of viewers he was addressing.
“Isn’t it true that Sheriff Sullivan obtained a search warrant for this house?”
“I’m afraid I can’t comment on that, either,” he answered, although it was clear he was dying to. Sullivan had obviously had a session with him, telling him to keep his mouth shut or else.
“We have information that after finding Jack Shaw’s wallet in a nearby river, Sheriff Sullivan searched this house, and subsequently questioned the four people staying here, people known to be friends of Jack Shaw’s.”
Deputy Dan stared at her uncertainly. “Urn, was that a question?”
You could see the exasperation in Sally’s eyes. “Can you confirm any of these facts?”
“Oh,” said Deputy Dan, relieved to have located the question mark. “No comment.”
“Will the FBI be interviewing the occupants of this house?”
“I assume so,” Dan said.
“So the Sheriff’s Department has notified the FBI?”
Deputy Dan looked positively crestfallen at his screw-up. “Now wait a minute …”
“You just said they would be questioning the occupants of this house, which means there has to be at least a suspicion of wrongdoing on a federal level, isn’t that right?”
“You said that,” Dan said defensively and you could see the fear in his eyes. “I never said that . . .”
“She is good,” Chuck said appreciatively from the couch, where we were all spread out to watch the news.
“She’s not a bad news correspondent either,” Lindsey teased.
“I’d give her an exclusive,” Chuck remarked salaciously.
“It’s only an exclusive if you’re offering something no one else has had,” I said.
“True,” Chuck admitted.
“I would almost welcome the FBI,” Alison said. “At least then we’ll know someone is out looking for Jack who’s more competent than this loser.”
The television was now showing stock footage of Jack from Blue Angel, standing in a restaurant with a cocky expression on his face as he addressed a mob boss who was eating there. The mob boss was played by a character actor whose name I couldn’t remember, but I knew I’d seen him on Broadway in something or other. On TV Jack seemed fake, a product of Hollywood, like those computer image dinosaurs they used in Jurassic Park. The unreality of the whole situation suddenly hit me. Who was Jack Shaw? Was it this man on the screen, neatly sidestepping a lunging attacker and kicking him into the salad bar? Because that person was a stranger to me. And yet I recognized him as my friend Jack. We thought we knew the real Jack, that we could help him because he was our friend, but seeing him on television now, for the first time I found myself considering that this was the real Jack Shaw, and that our friend was just a piece of his past, left behind like the rest of us.
“We made a mistake,” I said.
“What?” Alison asked, turning to look at me.
“We were so sure we were right,” I said. “We were sure that we knew the real Jack, and that the famous Jack Shaw was just a job, or a persona, but it wasn’t.” I pointed to the screen, where Jack was now riding a motorcycle into the desert. “That’s the real Jack Shaw,” I said. “The person we knew isn’t the real Jack, it’s the old Jack, and he’s gone.”
“What are you saying?” Alison asked, pulling herself off the couch and turning to face me.
“We meant well,” I said. “We meant to help him. But he wasn’t ours to help. Not anymore.”
Alison lifted the remote off the coffee table and turned off the television. She stood there for a moment, looking at the blank screen and then with a quick movement hurled the remote across the room, where it hit the wall with a hollow thunk just below a framed Monet poster and burst into pieces. In the instant of impact the television went on again, the remote managing to send out one last electronic signal before its annihilation.
“Hey!” Chuck yelled, jumping up from the couch. We watched her apprehensively, but throwing the remote seemed to have assuaged whatever tension that had been building up inside of her. She turned to me with a weary expression, and I found myself wondering again how much of a toll all of this was taking on her. “You’re only half right,” she said. “The question isn’t which Jack is the real one. They’re both real and that’s the problem. There are two Jacks, and if you find that confusing, imagine how he must feel. He doesn’t know who to be anymore.”
We considered that for a moment. “Which one’s doing the drugs?” Chuck asked stupidly.
“Shut up, Chuck,” Lindsey said. “Alison, have you talked to Jack about this?”
“We used to talk about it,” Alison said. “Before …”
The picture on the television was once again the front of the Scholling house, as Sally Hughes earnestly summed up her report. “Once again, we are live in Carmelina, New York, in front of the house where it is now believed that Jack Shaw had been taken. Whether or not he was brought here of his own free will, and whether or not he is even still here, are questions to which we still have no answers. Town records show that the house is owned by one Leslie Scholling, although we do not know what connection if any she has to Jack Shaw …”
The notion that this was going on right outside the house was somewhat unreal to me. I stared at the television, wondering if somewhere within the grainy image of the house was a group of electrons that represented me. I waved my arm, but it had no visible effect on the screen. Alison walked across the living room and drew the curtains, and on the screen I saw them move across the window. “Cool,” Chuck said quietly, but then gasped as the screen suddenly showed him, standing in the doorway and smiling at Sally Hughes. “Shit!” he shouted, jumping up and pointing at the screen, as if we couldn’t see it. They were showing the footage from Chuck’s earlier interview, but they’d muted the sound so that Sally could speak over it. “This man, who declined to give his name, is one of the people staying in the house, suspected by the police of having something to do with Jack Shaw’s disappearance. “
“She can’t do that!” Chuck said. “I’ll lose my job!”
“Oh, relax,” Lindsey said. “If you didn’t want to be on television you shouldn’t have jumped to open the door before.”
“He was jumping at the reporter,” I said. “Not the camera.”
“Damn straight!” Chuck said, staring dumbstruck at his image on the screen. Then he quieted down and, running his fingers through his scalp said, “Man, is that how I look? I’m getting seriously bald.” Suddenly, Sally Hughes was back on the screen, looking directly out at us. “We’ll stay here as events develop. For Fox News, in Carmelina, New York, I’m Sally Hughes.” I noticed that she had once again avoided rhyming Hughes and news. Chuck watched the screen intently until they cut back to the studio in Manhattan, and then sat back thoughtfully on the couch. “She’s not going to get away with that,” he said.
“Umm, she just did,” Alison said. Chuck’s beeper went off. He grabbed it off of his belt and frowned at the screen “Shit,” he said, thumbing the button. “My mother.” It went off again and he threw it across the floor, where it skidded into the debris of the remote control, scattering black plastic across the carpet. Not a good day for electronic appliances in the Scholling home.
“I’m hungry,” Lindsey suddenly said, apropos of nothing. “Is anyone else hungry?”
“I could eat,” I said.
“Me too,” said Alison.
“Let’s go out,” Lindsey said.
“Out?” Chuck repeated, glancing skeptically through the blinds. “What will they do if we go out?”
“Probably follow us,” I said.
“Who cares?” Lindsey said. “We’re not prisoners.”
“What about the cops?” Chuck asked. “We’re not supposed to go anywhere.”
“We’ll be going right into the center of town,” I said. “Surrounded by the paparazzi. What more could they ask for?”
“A white Bronco and a suicide note?” Lindsey offered.
Alison disappeared for a second and returned having thrown a bomber jacket over her sweatshirt. We all looke
d at her, smiling in the doorway. “Let’s go,” she said.
Jack once told me the trick to handling the paparazzi when they swarmed was simple. “Never back up.” This way, he explained, they can’t pin you down. “If you’re walking, you keep walking. If you’re standing, you keep your spot. It not only keeps you in control of the situation, but you look better in the magazines and on television.”
The minute we stepped outside, the reporters and cameramen, as if responding to some invisible cue, charged as one, all discipline and adherence to the police barricades forgotten. We moved quickly toward Chuck’s rental, but the mob was upon us. I stood my ground as per Jack’s philosophy, only to get my toes stepped on and nearly smashed in the face by a television camera. Lindsey hustled me into the back seat with her, slamming the door on someone’s overhead sound boom, which broke with a satisfying snap. Chuck and Alison made it into the front seats, and all the while the questions never stopped, the flashing lights and cameras circling us like gnats. “Have you been formally charged?” “Where’s Jack Shaw?” “Which one of you is Alison Scholling?”
The cameras surrounded us, banging on the windows as the reporters clamored around the car. I saw Sally Hughes immediately to the left of a fat cameraman by my window. “Jesus,” Lindsey muttered.
“Hey,” Chuck yelled. “Watch the car!” He turned the ignition and threw it into gear. The reporters failed to back away in fear. Chuck rolled down his window halfway. “Can you please clear out there?” he asked.
His request was met with a frenzy of queries. “Are you leaving for good?” “Where’s Jack Shaw?” “Are you going to see him?” “What are your names?”
Chuck stuck his arm out the window and waved his hand in a gentle up and down gesture, like someone waving an audience to silence before giving a speech. The reporters, sensing their evening sound byte, converged roughly on Chuck’s window, pushing and squirming as they jockeyed for position. “What are you doing, Chuck?” Alison asked him through a false smile.
“Don’t worry,” Chuck said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Plan B: A Novel Page 24
