Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (5 page)

 
          
“Someone’s
calling you,” Phyllis told her. “These phones don’t ring, they just flash.
Otherwise, could you imagine what this place would be like?”

 
          
“In
a million years,” Sara said, putting the phone books down, “I couldn’t begin to
imagine what this place already is.” Picking up the receiver, holding it
gingerly to her face as though it might have teeth and be of a mind to bite,
she said, “Hello?”

 
          
“This
is your master’s voice.”

 
          
She
looked over toward the editors’ world, and there he was way over by a window,
waving at her, holding his own phone to his ear.

 
          
No.
She was still angry, and she was justified. Her voice as cold as she could make
it, she said, “Yes?”

 
          
“I
just want to tell you,” the now cheerful voice said in her ear, “you made my
day with the gallstone quote. A very good beginning, Champ.”

 
          
Sara
knew it was risky, but she didn’t care, she was still extremely irritated. “As
you understand it,” she said.

 
          
“Aw,
come on,” he said, being downright boyish now. “A little tension early in the
day, that’s all. Forgive and forget, Champ.”

 
          
“My
name,” Sara said, “which you have obviously forgotten, is Sara Joslyn. And I’m
sorry, Mr. Ingersoll, but you can’t be both the good cop and the bad cop.” And
she hung up.

 
          
Next
to her, Phyllis sighed. “Well, there goes a roommate,” she said.

 
          
Will
I be fired? Sara wondered, but couldn’t guess. Do I
want
to be fired? She couldn’t work out the answer to that one,
either.

 
          
“She
hung up on me,” Jack told Mary Kate, as he replaced the receiver.

 
          
“Tough
guy,” Mary Kate commented.

 
          
“Me
or her?”

 
          
“Both
of you.”

 
          
“But
I’m the boss,” Jack complained. “Why does some still small voice deep within me
say, ‘Fire the broad’?”

 
          
“You
want to save her from corruption,” Mary Kate suggested.

 
          
Jack
shook his head. “No, that can’t be it.”

 
          
“You’ll
follow me,” Phyllis said, outside the front door, at just a few minutes past
four. “I’m in a white Corvette.”

 
          
“See
you,” Sara said, and headed for the Visitor’s parking lot while the hundreds of
other employees all streamed the other way.

 
          
She
hadn’t bothered to lock the car, it being a rental with nothing personal in it,
and now the glove compartment hung open. Had she left it like that? Of course
not; so we have petty thieves here at the
Weekly
Galaxy,
do we? There had been nothing in there but the rental agreement and
the rental company’s map of
Florida
, both of which were still present. Shutting
the glove compartment, Sara drove across to the exit and waited there, watching
the stream of Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars, Triumphs and Thunderbirds go past
the guard booth, headed for the empty highway. Several white Corvettes went by
before one appeared with Phyllis’s smiling face and waving arm framed in its
low window. Sara waved back, slipped the Chevette into the line behind her, and
drove past the guard booth. A different guard was on duty now, a short round
black man who observed the passing fleet with utter boredom.

 
          
This
was one of the two times a day, five days a week, when this twelve-mile
superhighway was put to any kind of use. The pocket rush hour from the
Weekly Galaxy
tore along the road eastward
toward the city like a mechanized tidal wave, raising pale dust, leaving
emptiness in its wake.

 
          
An
investigative reporter, Sara thought, could have a lot of fun digging into the
history of this road, doping out what political ties, what debts and favors,
had led to the construction of a twelve- mile major highway for the use and
enjoyment essentially of one man: Bruno DeMassi. Pity, she thought, Pm not
working on a paper that would be interested in that story.

 
          
The
blue Buick
Riviera
was gone, and so was the body. Sara knew
the precise spot where it had stood, the whole picture etched into her brain,
and now it was gone, as though it had never been. So at least the local police
were taking the crime seriously, even if it was beneath the consideration of
the
Weekly Galaxy.

 
          
I’ll
read about it, she thought bitterly, in my local hometown rag.

 
          
Phyllis’s
apartment was in a tall white box standing on end right at the water’s edge.
Out the broad windows of her seventh-floor living room, the
Atlantic Ocean
rolled and ran, grayish blue with foamy
highlights in white. Her forehead against the cool glass—the apartment was
sternly air-conditioned—Sara looked down at the beach, now in the building’s
shadow. “That’s ours?” she asked.

 
          
“It’s
all ours,” Phyllis told her. “The whole world is ours. Everything you can see
is ours. Isn’t it fabulous?”

 
          
It
was. The name of the building, one of an apparently endless row of apartment
buildings and condos along the oceanfront, was the Sybarite, displaying a
cultural striving combined with a historical shakiness not infrequent among the
namers of names along the
Florida
coasts. Phyllis’s apartment contained, in addition to the huge stepdown
living room, three large bedrooms, each with its own elaborate bath, a separate
dining room with crystal chandelier at chin height, and an astonishingly large
and well-furnished kitchen. Everything was a little too glittery for Sara’s
taste, but there surely was no appliance or mechanical convenience the builder
had neglected to install.

 
          
In
her few months here, Phyllis had done little by way of furnishing the place.
Her own bedroom contained a king-size bed and a couple of mismatched antique
dressers, plus a twelve-foot-long wall of closets stuffed to bursting with
clothes. The living room featured a long sofa in white crushed velvet, a TV and
VCR and stereo equipment and compact discs and videotapes all lying around on
the floor amid a mass of wires, and a couple of bargain-shop lamps and end
tables. The dining room was empty; Sara walked into the chandelier her first
time through. One bedroom was also empty, but the other was outfitted with a
double bed mattress on the floor. “You can use that until you get your own
stuff,” Phyllis said.

 
          
“I
think I’ll get my own stuff now,” Sara decided. “The stores are still open.”

 
          
“Good
idea. Do you want to bring back a couple TV dinners, or should we order out
tonight?”

 
          
I’m
back in college, Sara thought, and the idea was so amusing that for the first
time that day she relaxed and thought the immediate future might be fun after
all. “I’ll bring back a pizza,” she said.

 
          
The
Peugeot smelled so
new.
Driving out
to work on Friday morning, the last day of her first week on the job, the first
day without the rental car, Sara reveled in the newness of the Peugeot, the
slight stiffness in the steering wheel, the darkly gleaming
modem
look of the dashboard. Other cars,
new and shiny and expensive, passed her as she drove, or she passed them, and
it was almost as though this were a normal highway after all; until you noticed
the absolute absence of traffic on the other side of the divider.

 
          
There.
That’s where the Buick Riviera
had been stopped, with the murdered man. Sara saw and noticed that spot every
morning, and the further spot where she’d made her U-tum. In fact, until
Wednesday night’s rain, it had still been possible to see the Chevette’s tire
marks on the shoulder where she’d thrown gravel in spinning around.

 
          
She
wondered what had happened next, with the murdered man. Had they found his
killer? She hadn’t seen anything about it in the local paper, but she’d been so
busy with her job, and furnishing her share of Phyllis’s apartment, that she
hadn’t much read the local papers anyway, so it might have been in there and
she’d missed it. But probably Jack Ingersoll had been right, that first
morning; the murdered man had most likely been involved in the drug world—his
face had been a tough one, she remembered, even in death —and his killing would
have been only marginally more interesting to a normal newspaper than to the
Weekly Galaxy.

 
          
“the people, yes!”
The sign reared up
ahead of her, making her wonder yet again how many people besides Phyllis
hadn’t realized the quote was from Sandburg. How many
Galaxy
staffers, not to even' think about
Galaxy
readers, would recognize the name Carl Sandburg at all?

 
          
It’s
a strange world I’m in, Sara thought, wondering how long she’d want to stay in
it, and angled toward the single lane passing the guard booth on the right. But
as she approached, the guard stepped out and held up his hand, surprising her;
she’d just driven through with everybody else the other mornings this week. She
stopped, wondering what was wrong.

 
          
The
usual black guard was on duty at the gate, she not having seen that original
white guard since she’d first arrived here and reported the murder to him. As
he approached the car, she pushed the button that rolled her new window down
and permitted the usual invisible blanket of hot dull air to roll in and cover
her face. “Hi,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

 
          
No
recognition touched his features: “Help you, miss?”

           
“I work here,” Sara told him. “Sara
Joslyn.”

 
          
“I
don’t think I know you, miss,” the guard said, his round black face carefully
polite and impersonal, but at the same time watchful.

 
          
“I’ve
been working here since Monday,” Sara told him, feeling helpless and for some
reason a little scared.

 
          
The
guard transferred his careful frown from her face to the comer of the
windshield. In Sara’s rearview mirror, a line had formed and was lengthening;
she was holding everybody up from getting to work. The guard said, “Miss?
Where’s your sticker?”

 
          
Then
she remembered. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, I forgot. That was a rented car, I bought
this—”

           
More and more disapproving, the
guard said, “You left your sticker on a rented car?”

           
“I’m sorry, I—”

 
          
Horns
honked somewhere back in the line. The guard glowered in that direction, then
glowered more specifically at Sara. “This isn’t good,” he said.

 
          
“I’m
really sorry, I completely—”

 
          
“Park
in the Visitors’ lot today,” the guard told her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 
          
“Thank
you,” Sara said humbly. What a way to finish my first week, she thought.

 
          
Jack
sat at his desk, eating a pencil. Beside him, Binx Rad well, sweating gently,
sat on the comer of the desk and morosely squeezed a pink rubber ball. Nearby,
Mary Kate typed. Jack took the pencil from his mouth, gazed somberly across the
room, shook his head, took a breath, squared his shoulders, and announced, “The
Galaxy
Challenge. Who will make a
replica of the Spirit of St. Louis and fly it to
Paris
?”

 
          
Binx
considered him. He squeezed, squeezed, squeezed the pink ball. “The
Galaxy
sponsors, you mean?”

 
          
“Sure,”
Jack said. “The prize is three French lessons at Berlitz.”

 
          
“Insurance,”
Binx said.

 
          
“I
hate a nay-sayer,” Jack said, and put the pencil back in his mouth.

 
          
Louis
B. Urbiton, at fifty-one the oldest Australian reporter on the staff and
frequendy the drunkest, came through the black lines, entered Jack’s squaricle
through the door space, and said, “A stringer in Spokane says their panda
died.” Jack looked up, unmouthed the pencil. “Did it leave a grieving mate?”

 
          
“I
didn’t ask,” Louis admitted.

 
          
“Ask,”
Jack advised him.

 
          
Louis
went away. Jack gnawed pencil. Binx squeezed the pink ball. Mary Kate stopped
typing and yawned. Speaking around the pencil, Jack said, “Binx, listen, would
you feel I was stealing if I did ‘Legionnaires’ Disease: It Was Guilt’?” “Mine
was suicide, and
Massa
didn’t like it,” Binx pointed out. “What do you mean, guilt?”
“Psychosomatic.”

 
          
The
phone flashed. Mary Kate answered, spoke softly. Nodding, Binx said,
“Psychosomatic Illness Is All in Your Mind, Scientists Say. I tried that one
once;
Massa
didn’t get it.”

 
          
“You’re
lucky. Okay if I take?”

           
Binx tossed the ball into the air,
then had to scramble to catch it. “Blessings on you both,” he said, and sat on
the comer of the desk again.

 
          
Hanging
up the phone, Mary Kate told Jack, “Mr. Harsch wants Sara when she comes in.”

           
“Here she comes,” Jack said,
watching Sara approach through the maze.

           
“Fired?” Binx asked. “Her first
week?”

           
“No,” Jack said. “Harsch only fires
on Tuesdays, so your last two days you don’t get paid for.”

 
          
“Maybe,”
Binx said, squeezing the pink ball with both hands, “maybe that’s the answer.
Maybe if I never come in on Tuesdays—”

 
          
In
the last few days, Sara’s opinion of Jack Ingersoll had softened, but she still
remained wary. When Phyllis had explained at length the kind of pressure Jack
and the other editors operated under, it did make his initial bad temper more
understandable—“As I understand it”—though it had still been damned unfair of
him to take it out on somebody arriving here for her very first day of work.
Jack himself perhaps agreed with that, since he’d been much more friendly ever
since; or maybe it was simply her success in getting the gallstones quote that
first morning, which she now understood—“As I understand it”—had been a real
coup. Not matched since, unfortunately.

           
Still, here was another day, another
chance. Coming to Jack’s squaricle, seeing Binx Rad- well there with his
perpetual look of terror, she told herself she’d be
much
worse off if she’d been assigned to Binx’s team. He had, in
the rough phraseology of Jack Minter, her former editor on the
Courier-Observer
, loser sweat all over
him.

 
          
A
few squaricles away, a nuclear family, Mother and Dad and Sis and Junior,
loitered aimlessly, dressed in homemade spacesuits, all shiny aluminum foil,
with their helmets under their arms. Looking at those people, Sara almost
missed the door space to Jack’s squaricle, but recalled herself just in time,
made an awkward little hop to one side, and entered without breaching local
etiquette. “Good morning,” she said generally. “More John Michael Mercer?”

 
          
“Not
yet,” Jack told her. “The Lord Harsch wants you in his office, up on four.”

 
          
“Then
I’d better go,” Sara said, wondering what this could be about. Harsch hadn’t
spoken to her since the first morning’s pep talk. Gesturing at the astronaut
family, she said, “What’s with Lost in Space?”

 
          
“No
idea,” Jack said.

 
          
Binx
said, “Something of Boy’s, I think.”

 
          
“That
limey bastard,” Jack said, his chronic bad temper suddenly resurfacing. With a
gloomy glower at Sara, he said, “I’m not holding you here, you know.”

 
          
It
isn’t personal, Sara told herself, but wanted to kick him in the balls anyway.
“See you later,” she said sweetly.

 
          
They
watched her follow the black lines toward the elevators. “Nice,” Binx
suggested.

           
“Very nice,” Jack agreed.

 
          
Binx
tossed the pink ball from hand to hand, dropped it, caught it on the bounce.
“Listen,” he said. “Don’t tell her I’m married, okay?”

 
          
“I’m
listening,” Mary Kate said.

 
          
“Don’t,”
Binx told her.

 
          
Ida
Gavin came striding into the squaricle. “Keely Jones,” she said.

 
          
“I
remember her,” Jack admitted. “Three- timing her husband and her manager with
the ex- con swimming pool salesman.”

 
          
Binx
looked up, clutching the ball. “Ex-con swimming pool salesman?”

 
          
“This
one’s mine,” Jack warned him. “All mine. And we have Mr. X—”

 
          
“The
swimming pool salesman,” Binx guessed.

 
          
“—on
tape.”

 
          
“We
are now,” Ida said, “running the Mr. X tape on a loudspeaker truck in front of
Keely’s house in Bel Air.”

 
          
“Nice,”
Jack said.

 
          
“I’ll
keep you up-to-date,” Ida said, and departed.

 
          
Binx
sighed. He put the ball in the crook of his elbow, bent the arm to squeeze the
ball, grimaced with pain, put the ball back in his right hand, considered it
like Puck considering the globe.

           
“Invite her to our barbecue, why
don’t you?” he said.

 
          
Jack
stared at him. “
Ida?”

 
          
Binx
looked at Jack more in sorrow than in anger. “Sara,” he said.

 
          
“She’ll
notice you’re married.”

 
          
“I’ll
be going for sympathy,” Binx said, and dropped the pink ball. He watched it
roll away across a black line into somebody else’s squaricle. “What do you
suppose Harsch wants with her?” he asked. “Give a demonstration, do you think,
on sexual technique with college professors?”

 
          
“No,”
Jack said. “Harsch gave up sex years ago, when he found something he really
liked.” Binx waited, watching his ball at rest under the comer of someone
else’s desk. The silence grew. Mary Kate stopped typing. Binx sighed and
accepted the inevitable. “All right,” he said. “What did Harsch find that he
really
liked?”