Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (10 page)

 
          
Sara
looked at him. His self-sufficiency was like smugness. Wanting to break
through, she said, “And you? Are you a slave?”

           
“I don’t own a Marcy.”

           
“Oh, you’re a tough guy,” Sara said,
vaguely irritated.

 
          
He
returned her look at last, saying, “Am I? I don’t know, I started out the
softest-headed idealist you ever saw. Ever hear of the
St.
Louis
Massacre?”

 
          
“Indians?”

           
“Newspaper, weekly counterculture.
Like the
Berkeley Barb
, the
Village Voice
, all that. We were gonna
change the world.”

 
          
“For
the better,” Sara suggested.

           
“That was the idea. The people
around me, sooner or later every last one of them sold out. And finally I
figured out why.”

 
          
“Why?”

           
“Because we weren’t doing any good.”
Jack drank beer. “Eighty was worse than seventy,” he said. “Ninety should be a
real corker.”

 
          
“You
lost your idealism.”

           
“I lost the baby fat in my head,” he
told her. “I came down here, I took the job for the big bucks and the warm
sunshine, and I am retired from the fray.”

 
          
“Forever?”

           
“They wouldn’t take me back if I
wanted to go. And I don’t want to go.”

 
          
Binx
appeared next to them, looking apologetic. “Knock, knock,” he said.

 
          
Jack
said, “Who’s there?”

 
          
“Ida
Gavin, on the phone. Sorry.”

           
“Drat.” Jack put the half-empty beer
bottle on the table. “Be right back.”

 
          
He
hurried off, and Binx said to Sara, “Sorry about that.”

 
          
“That’s
okay,” Sara assured him, but in fact things had just begun to get interesting.
Looking around, she said, “None of the Englishmen are here.”

 
          
“You
bet,” Binx said, smiling on the assembled guests as though he’d bought them,
too.

 
          
“I’m
always amazed there’s so many Australians and English on the
Galaxy
.”

 
          
“
Massa
likes them,” Binx said. “They get their
training on papers much grungier even than ours.” “But I thought you couldn’t
give a job to an alien if a qualified American wants it. How do they get
permission?”

           
“You mean the green card?” Binx
asked, grinning. “They don’t have green cards.”

 
          
“They
don’t? How do they work that?”

 
          
“The
Galaxy
has a nonpublishing subsidiary
in
Manchester
,” Binx told her, “over in
England
. All the Aussies and Brits work there, are
paid out of that office in sterling, and are on permanent temporary assignment
here.”

 
          
Astonished,
Sara said, “Is that legal?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Binx said. “Do you think it matters?”

 
          
“Well,
of course it— What do you mean?”

           
“Have you ever wondered,” Binx
asked her, “why the state government ran that big road twelve miles out of
town, goes nowhere except
Massa
’s house?”

           
“Sure,” Sara said. “I’ve thought
about it. You mean,
Massa
has the state government in his pocket?”

 
          
Grinning
at her, Binx said, “Is that what you would say?”

 
          
“No,
come on,” Sara said. “Are you saying that’s for real?”

 
          
Bright-eyed,
teasing, Binx said, “Can I quote say as saying?”

 
          
Returning
at that moment, Jack said to Sara, “Admit nothing.”

 
          
“That’s
what I’m doing,” Sara assured him.

 
          
Casually,
Binx said, “Everything okay at the shop?”

 
          
“Just
fine,” Jack told him.

 
          
Binx
looked so intently at Jack that Sara half expected him to start sniffing at
Jack’s clothing like a dog. “Ida had something important she wanted to talk to
you about, huh?”

 
          
“She
thought so,” Jack said indifferently, picking up his beer bottle.

 
          
“Something
more on Keely Jones?”

 
          
Jack
swigged beer, then looked levelly at Binx, saying, “Does Macy tell Gimbel?”

 
          
“Probably,”
Binx said. “It’s all a giant conspiracy anyway. Well—See you two.” And he
sloped off, looking harried and dejected for about seven seconds, then perking
up, getting into a brand- new animated conversation with a couple of other
partygoers.

           
Jack tried very hard not to look at
his watch. There was plenty of time, and no point getting there too early, and
too many of his fellow employees were present. The word that Ida Gavin had
phoned him here would get around, it was bound to; if he were seen looking at
his watch, someone or other would realize he was up to something.

 
          
He
was patient. He pretended to drink two more beers, but switched them
surreptitiously for empty bottles. He downed some of the greasy burned food and
waited till Sara had clearly eaten her fill as well before he walked her
casually out around the perimeter of the party and the lawn. Then, “Listen,” he
said, speaking very softly, looking around for eavesdroppers like a prisoner in
the exercise yard in an escape movie, “what do you think? Had enough?”

 
          
Surprised,
Sara said, “You want to leave?”

 
          
“You’ve
seen it all,” he pointed out, “and it won’t get any better. Or would you rather
stick around and see what they’re like drunk?”

 
          
Driving
away from Binx’s party, sweeping and curving through an endless graceful spread
of middle- class gentility, so neat and wholesome and sun- swept that even
Jack’s Honda purred, Sara couldn’t seem to break herself of that final image of
Binx enslaved, chained invisibly to this green and pleasant salt mine, his soft
face yearning upward, oiled with panic, entreaty smearing his features. Was that
what all of them would come to, eventually? Was she like a newcomer to
Pleasure
Island
in the Pinocchio story, noticing for the
first time a boy with donkey’s ears?

 
          
“A
penny for your thoughts,” Jack said, breaking a long silence.

 
          
Startled,
Sara looked over at his bumpy impersonal profile as he watched the undulations
of the road; no donkey ears there, at least none that she could see. “They
aren’t worth a penny,” she said, then remembered Binx’s comments about not
being worth what the
Galaxy
was
paying him, and added, “I was thinking about our salaries.”

 
          
Jack
laughed, a rather harsh sound, and looked searchingly in the rearview mirror.
“Binx thinks it’s immoral,” he said, “to have a dime left in his pocket at the
end of the day.”

 
          
“I
could see that.”

 
          
“What
I
was thinking about,” Jack said,
slowing but not stopping at a stop sign, then turning right to a straighter,
cruder, more businesslike road, with a busy shopping highway visible at its
farthest end, “was dinner. You got any plans?”

 
          
“Not
in particular,” she said, ignoring the memory of her intention to make some
notes this evening on the next chapter of
Time
of the Hero.

 
          
“There’s
a place in
Miami
that’s supposed to be good. Want to come
along?” He glanced once more at the rearview mirror.

 
          
“Isn’t
that a distance?”

 
          
“Not
much. The roads are good. I just have to stop by my place, pick up a couple
things, we can take right off.”

 
          
“I’m
not
dressed
for dinner, not anywhere
good.”

           
“So we’ll stop by your place, too,”
he told her, apparently having decided she’d already agreed. “But my place
first.”

 
          
Sara
was not surprised by Jack’s neighborhood at all. There were no lawns here, no
elaborate sprinkler systems, only dusty weeds baked lifeless in the sun,
drooping on cracked tan dirt in front of low stucco houses the same defeated
color as the ground. At every intersection stood a bar with maroon aluminum
siding and opaque glass-brick windows. The scattering of slow-paced pedestrians
was multiracial, democratically equal in their hopelessness and their tom
T-shirts promoting beers and raceways.

 
          
Jack’s
house, a tiny stucco square with flat roof slanted rearward, surrounded by hard
bare dirt in front and scruffy brush along the sides, looked like a place where
someone wanted by the police for burglary might go to ground. Only the shiny
new scarlet Jeep Laredo parked in the yard beside the front door, covered with
sheets of clear plastic, seemed out of place. Seeing her look at it as they
pulled to a stop at the curb, Jack said, “My bonus from
Massa
for a body in the box I got.”

 
          
“Bonus?”
Astonished, she looked from the shiny vehicle to Jack, as he started to climb
out of the Honda. “He gave you a
Jeep?”

           
“Massa can be very generous when he
wants.” Out of the car, Jack bent in to look at her, saying, “I’m selling it in
the morning. Come on in while I get my tie.”

 
          
Climbing
out to the cracked uneven sidewalk, Sara tried to remember the strange phrase
Jack had used to explain his bonus—something in a box?—but everything else
about the Jeep was too insistently distracting. “Mr. DeMassi gives away Jeeps
as bonuses,” she said, following him across the hard-packed bare earth to the
front door, there being no walk, “and you’re going to sell it, and keep ...”
Not sure exactly how to describe the Honda, or her reaction to it, she merely
gestured back at the car, parked so appropriately at this particular curb.

 
          
“Absolutely,”
Jack told her, using three keys to unlock his front door. “I’m also not going
to move into that World of Tomorrow Tower with you and La Bella Perkinson.”

 
          
“I
don’t think Phyllis is putting that accent and manner on,” Sara objected. “I
think that really is her background.”

 
          
“I
agree completely,” Jack said, pushing open the at-last-unlocked door and waving
Sara in first. “And she isn’t slumming among us, either. This is her level, all
right. This, or a little lower.”

 
          
Surprised
at this nasty dismissal, Sara barely reacted to the barren squalor of Jack’s
home, turning to say, “What’s wrong with Phyllis? Doesn’t she do her job?”

           
“Almost,” he said, shutting the
door. “The problem with her, the problem with a lot of these silver-spoon
types, they don’t know how to be scared until it’s too late. Be right back.”

 
          
He
went on deeper into the house, and Sara now had leisure to consider both his
home and his attitude toward Phyllis; both of which, she decided, were grubby.
His melodramatic remark about Phyllis not knowing how to be scared simply meant
he believed that people with a wealthy background didn’t worry and get all
sweaty about their jobs, because they weren’t as dependent on their employment
as poor people. Which was probably true, but so what? If Phyllis did her
work—and it seemed to Sara that Phyllis did it very well—what did it matter if
she didn’t pull her forelock from time to time, or go around like Binx Radwell,
exuding agonized uncertainty? That was just reverse snobbism on Jack’s part.

 
          
And
so was the house, as much of it as she could see. The living room was a barren
square, the walls painted pale blue a long time ago, the woodwork painted
off-white somewhat more recently. There were no curtains or shades on the
windows, no rug on the floor, no pictures or other decorations on the walls.
The scanty and mismatched furniture, being a Danish modem sofa, bulky sagging
armchair with ugly big- flowered slipcover, rusty iron floor lamp with
bum-marked shade, and old kitchen table holding the TV and stereo equipment,
were all obviously bought used and with an eye exclusively to practicality, not
to appearance. The room was like a set for a Sam Shepard play.

 
          
So.
Unlike Binx, unlike Phyllis—unlike herself, she had to admit—Jack was not
spending his lush salary, but was stashing it all away somewhere. For what?

 
          
When
he came back to the living room a couple of minutes later, it was both a
surprise and a relief that he was dressed now in a good-quality linen sports
jacket, good slacks and shoes and shirt, and conservative tie; at least his
Scrooge impulses didn’t extend to his clothing. Seeing him dressed like that in
this living room, Sara suddenly felt she understood. “I get it,” she said.

 
          
He
gave her a crooked grin. “You do? Tell me about it.”

 
          
“You
don’t want to be like Binx, enslaved, needing the job. But you don’t want to be
just playing at it either, the way you think Phyllis is. You want to be
serious, but not trapped.”

 
          
“Sounds
good,” he said, watching her brighteyed.

 
          
“You
think someday they’ll fire yaw.”

 
          
He
shrugged, still grinning. “Someday, they’ll fire everybody.”

 
          
“No
possessions,” she said, gesturing at the room. “No debts, no attachments.”
She’d almost said,
no romantic
attachments
, but stopped in time, realizing it might sound to him like an
invitation. “You’ll be ready,” she finished.

           
He nodded. “I
am
ready,” he said. “I’m also hungry. Let’s go.”

 
          
The
restaurant was Spanish, with heavy dark-wood furnishings, gigantic murky formal
paintings of bullfighters posed in all their regalia, and a reputation for
barely cooking its huge slabs of meat before bringing them out to the table.
Sara had arrived needing to visit the ladies’ room, so Jack took the
opportunity to press a question and a twenty-dollar bill on the
pencil-moustached, bulky, tuxedoed headwaiter, who said, “Oh, yes, they are
here, but you know, we guarantee privacy.”

 
          
“I
wouldn’t disturb them for anything,” Jack assured him. “We’d just like to sit
near, but not too near. Maybe we could have one of their waiter’s tables.”

 
          
“I’ll
do what I can,” the headwaiter promised, Jack’s twenty having already
disappeared from his hand, and when Sara returned they were seated at a table
precisely answering his needs. Jack placed Sara with her back to them, so he
could keep an eye on them over her shoulder. Drinks were ordered, menus and
wine list were studied, and they settled down into casual conversation, Jack
glancing past her from time to time, not being obvious about it.

 
          
She
had questions, comments about life at the
Galaxy,
which he answered easily, and then she paused, and said, “Jack, don’t
misunderstand me, but—” She frowned, looking for the right words.

           
“I will not misunderstand you,” he
promised. “Let me have it with both barrels.”

 
          
“No,
no,” she said, smiling, shaking her head to assure him she didn’t mean to
attack. “It’s just that . . . Well, do you ever wish you worked on . . . more
important stories?”

 
          
He
grinned at her, not misunderstanding and not taking offense. “Which ones?” he
asked. “Bank robberies, mayoral elections, or snowstorms?”

 
          
She
considered that. “You mean, they’re all the same?”

 
          
“No.
Arthritis cures pay better.”

 
          
“The
story
I
keep thinking about,” she
said, as the waiter, a short and slender Hispanic with a red bolero jacket and
a pessimistic smile, brought the wine, “is the murder.”

 
          
The
waiter either didn’t hear, or he heard such statements so often they could no
longer affect him. He merely showed Jack the label of the Spanish red for his
agreement that it was indeed the one he’d selected, then smiled sadly and
opened the bottle while Jack returned his attention to Sara (and the couple
just visible through a huge and vulgar floral assortment in hot purples and
scarlets), saying, “Which murder was that?”

 
          
“The
one I told you about Monday; my first day.” She acted as though he really
should have remembered.

 
          
Jack
tasted and approved the wine—it looked like blood, smelled like laundry, tasted
like wood —and said, “Oh, yeah, your famous body beside the road.”

           
“I wonder what happened next,” she
said. “I never saw the police at the
Galaxy,
but they must have come out.”

 
          
“Why
must they? Wait a minute, Senor Wences wants to take our orders.”

 
          
Jack
asked for steak, and Sara shrimp. Then the waiter went away, and Jack said, “I
don’t know why we all don’t come to
Miami
more often. It’s right here.”

 
          
She
gave him a level and considering look. “Is there any special reason why you
don’t want to talk about the murder?”

 
          
Startled,
he splayed a hand to his chest in a gesture of false innocence. By God, he
thought, I’ve forgotten how to be innocent! Aloud, he said, “Don’t want to talk
about— Oh! The waiter distracted me. Of course, your body beside the road, that
has to be on your mind a lot, it’s something that doesn’t happen every day.”

 
          
“It
sure doesn’t,” she said.

 
          
“So
it looms large in your legend. Okay, what about it? Did they get whoever did
it?”

 
          
“I
have no idea,” she said. “I didn’t see anything in the
County
.”

 
          
The
County,
the local newspaper, was one
of those hopeless smalltown amateur gazettes run as a sideline by a
neighborhood printer, who cared more for how words were spelled than what they
said. “I
never
see anything in the
County,”
Jack said. “I hate newspapers,
if you want the truth.”

 
          
“The
thing is,” Sara said, poking at her silverware, “if the police didn’t come out
to the
Galaxy,
and I never saw them
there, I’m wondering if maybe I ought to go talk to them.”

           
He frowned at her, sensing she was
making some sort of mistake but not sure yet which particular mistake it might
be. “Why?” he said.

 
          
“Because
my evidence,” she explained in all seriousness, “proves the killer works for
the
Galaxy ”
Jack felt suddenly very
nervous; not because he thought she thought he was the killer, but because he
could see she was one of those girls willing to march right out over a mine
field without so much as a glance at the warning sign by its entrance. And any
trouble she might make for the
Galaxy
would
refibund horridly on Jack. Not wanting to get caught up in some eager idiot’s
had-I-but- known story, he said, “Sara, don’t make wild statements unless
you’re at work.”

 
          
“It
is not a wild statement,” she insisted. “Would you like to hear my reasoning?”

 
          
Better
me than
Massa
, Jack thought. “Love to hear your
reasoning,” he said.

 
          
She
said, “It was a
quarter to ten
when I found the body.”

 
          
“Describe
this body.”

 
          
“A
man in his fifties,” she said, “toughlooking, in a lightweight gray polyester
jacket. He’d been shot just once that I could see, in the forehead. The bullet
did some damage to the back of his skull, but didn’t break through.” She tapped
the back of her own head to demonstrate.