“I don’t know,” Sara said. “Are you?”
“In a word, I am not at all done.”
“That’s six words,” Mary Kate said.
Ignoring her, Jack said, “My next task is to push the goddamn story through the fact checkers. Devil’s advocate time. Do we have the quotes, the pictures, the proof? If it holds up with them, it should hold up in court. Then I take it up to Rewrite. You know what the cute gimmick is with Rewrite?”
Mary Kate said, “She doesn’t yet, but she’s going to.”
“The cute gimmick with Rewrite—Mary Kate, don’t you have a sick mother to visit or something?”
“She died.”
“Well, that’s good. Too late to keep her from having you, but still.” Turning back to Sara, Jack said, “Massa likes individual initiative, so therefore the boys and girls of Rewrite get to decide what they will rewrite. Your story, my story, it sits there till the pages crumble. I go up, I shmooze, I cry a tear, sometimes two tears, please write my story!”
“Oh, my gosh,” Sara said, looking shocked and sympathetic.
“Neady put,” Jack told her. “Then, once Rewrite has deigned to re-goddamn-write, then we got the evaluators. They sit up there on four, practically in Jock Harsch’s left nostril, up on top of the whole shebang, they read the story, they decide is it interesting. It has to be interesting, and it has to be interesting to them. If we bore an evaluator, me and you and the fact checkers and the boys and girls of Rewrite, if all our combined efforts make an evaluator yawn, the story’s dead. It does not get in the paper.”
“I had no idea,” Sara said. The girl’s eyes were round with awe.
“A happy life.” Pointing toward the conference table and the bank of elevators, Jack said, “Every week, on Massa’s desk there comes the box score. This editor had six stories in the paper, this editor had nine, Boy Cartwright had fifty-seven and keeps the only comer squaricle in the known world, this editor had two, and that means this editor went wee wee wee all the way out of a job.”
“Well, the beer and potato chip story’s going in,” Sara said, apparendy trying to encourage him.
Jack was not of a mood to be encouraged. “One drop,” he said, “in one bucket. A new bucket every week. Speaking of which—” and he picked up from his desk a paper-clipped stack of paper; Sara’s first assignment this morning.
But she said, “I’m sorry.”
He looked at her, not understanding. “What? You mean you were fired? On a Friday?”
“Not exacdy,” Sara said. He thought she was acting a litde guilty, a litde shifty.
Now what, he wondered, and put the papers on his desk again so he could give her his full attention. He said, “Who, what, when, where, why.”
Sara sighed. She said, “It seems I left my parking sticker on the rented—”
“Oh, jeez,” Jack said. He was going to get blamed again. They give him all the dimwits, and then it’s his fault when they do something stupid. Too weighed down even to give voice, he merely sat and looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, which helped a whole hell of a lot. “Mr. Harsch said I’m supposed to go get it back.”
“But here we are,” Jack pointed out, “having this nice chat.”
Offense closed her face. Lips clenched, she turned without a word and stalked away, left and right through the squaricles. Watching her go, Jack said, “Maybe I hate women.”
Mary Kate shook her head. “You’re not that selective,” she said.
Two
They hadn’t re-rented the Chevette. Walking with the skinny young black mechanic in white coveralls through the rows of cars out behind the rental office, Sara noticed that “Z” was the first letter of every license plate back here, and she asked him about it. “State system,” he told her. “Every rental, every leased car in Florida, they all got the Z plate.”
The murdered man’s car had had a Z plate, hadn’t it? She’d jotted the details into her notebook at the time. A larger and more expensive car than her Chevette, though; some sort of Buick. Maybe he’d leased it. But that idea somehow seemed more businesslike than the murdered man’s tough dead face had suggested; so maybe he stole it.
Using a single-edge razor blade, the mechanic carefully peeled her visitor sticker from the Chevette’s windshield. “Big outfit like the Galaxy ” he commented as he worked, “you’d think they could afford more than one of these.”
“Wouldn’t you,” agreed Sara. “Do you read the Galaxy?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, and grinned. “Every time. They’re a gas.”
Did the dread evaluators have this fellow in mind, Sara wondered, when they read each story to see if it was interesting enough to be published in the paper? Did Jack have him in mind? Am I supposed to?
At last he gave her the wrinkled but still intact sticker, and she gave him five dollars for his trouble, along with her sunniest smile. “I really appreciate this,” she told him.
Shrugging, pocketing the five, he said, “I’da had to take it off anyways, before we rented it out again. Can’t release no cars got a lotta stuff on the windows.” And so much for Jacob Harsch’s security.
It was barely lunchtime, and here she already had the sticker, so she got herself a ham and cheese sandwich on rye and a container of coffee from a takeout place near the rental agency, and ate it all in the Peugeot on the drive back out to the Galaxy. Presumably she could take the whole day off, since Harsch had given her till tomorrow to return, but this would demonstrate what a good and willing worker she was, and how heartily sorry she was to have forgotten the sticker, and all that nonsense. Maybe Jack would even lose some tiny bit of his bad temper. Besides, what else would she do with herself? She didn’t know anybody yet in this part of the world except the people at work. The beach she had access to through the apartment she was sharing with Phyllis would already be in the building’s shadow, and she had no interest in just hanging around the big empty apartment all day.
There. The place where she’d found the murdered man. When she’d written to her mother in Great Barrington on Wednesday night she’d described that incident, and said it was “the most exciting thing that ever happened to me,” but even when writing the words she’d felt their falseness. The moment had been scary, eerie, strange, but not exacdy exciting; and there’d been no follow-through. The unreality that had been in the incident from me beginning had grown and spread to cover the entire event; as though it had never been.
But there was the spot; it had happened. She looked at it on the way by, looked at it again in the rearview mirror. She was alone out here on the highway now, the same as that day, the circumstances the same as then for the first time since it had happened. Her other trips along this road had all been in the midst of the Galaxy’s twice daily traffic jam.
Not quite the same time of day, though. It was now just about one o’clock in the afternoon, and she’d found the murdered man at quarter to ten in the morning, her first-day appointment with Mr. Harsch having been set at ten o clock.
Hmmm. The employees all arrived at nine, some a little earlier, some a little later. There’s always a few stragglers, so it probably would have been ten past before the morning rush hour was done. Then, sometimes between ten past nine and quarter to ten—no, make it twenty to ten, since she hadn’t seen the killer’s car ahead of her—the murdered man had come driving out, had stopped beside the road, and had been murdered.
Well, wait. This was the first she’d actually thought about the murder since Monday, when Jack Ingersoll had so brutally disabused her of the notion that she’d brought him a useful story. But, now that she did start to think about it, driving along the empty pale road beneath the huge midday sun, there were several things she knew or could assume about the murdered man, beginning with the fact that he must have been going to the Galaxy. There was nothing else on this road, nothing to either side of it. So the murdered man was on his way to the offices of the Weekly Galaxy.
Why
? To bring proof of some expose? But the Galaxy wasn’t that kind of paper. What she’d suspected before, she now knew for certain, after one week on the job. The Galaxy didn’t touch real scandal at all, only marital problems of television stars, sexual peccadilloes of jet-setters, medical weirdnesses. Anything involving the mob, say, or crooked politicians, anything involving true investigative hard news, would have led the murdered man to some other newspaper, almost any other newspaper. Even the poor old Courier-Observer would have been a better potential place for such information.
Well, whatever the reason, the Galaxy must be where the murdered man had been going. So his having been killed might very well have something to do with the reason he was going to the Galaxy.
Unless he actually worked for the paper, of course. Maybe he was an employee. From Jack’s description of evaluators, the murdered man could have been one of those.
So maybe Jack killed him, out of bad temper. Driving along, the Galaxy building and sign becoming visible far ahead, she grinned at that idea. The evaluator evaluated.
Well, whoever killed him . . .
Whoever killed the murdered man, he or she or they had most likely then gone on to the Galaxy themselves.
That’s right. The body had still been warm, not yet terribly stiff. He had to have been killed no more than half an hour before she’d found him, or staffers going to work would have seen it happen. It was possible the killer had driven on from there to the next break in the central divider—there were such breaks every two miles— and had then turned around and driven back to the city, leaving the road at the city end a few minutes before Sara had started out on it; possible, but awfully tight. The likelihood—not definite yet, but likely—was that the killer had gone straight on to the Galaxy, had been waved past the guard booth because of the employee sticker on his car (her Chevette had been the only car in the visitors’ parking lot that morning), and had simply gone to work.
Which meant the probabilities were, the killer worked for the Weekly Galaxy.
Had there been an employee sticker on the murdered man’s car? Frowning as the Galaxy building loomed up ahead of her, Sara tried to remember the Buick’s windshield, tried to picture it in her mind, see whether or not there had been anything on the left lower comer of the glass; but she just wasn’t sure. That hadn’t been part of her attention at the time, and now she could visualize the Buick’s windshield just as readily with the sticker as without.
The guard was pleased when she appeared and handed him the wrinkled sticker. “Mr. Harsch sent a memo down,” he told her, “said you probably wouldn’t be around with this till tomorrow.”
“I work fast.”
“Usually,” the guard said, “you wouldn’t get your permanent sticker till next week, but there’s no point giving you the temporary for just one more day, so . . . Excuse me.”
Once again, as the white guard had done on Monday, this one took a sticker from his clipboard, put the clipboard atop her car, peeled off the sticker’s backing, and leaned in through her open window to fasten it to the lower left comer of her windshield.
The permanent sticker.
Massa had liked a magnificent eleven of Jack’s ideas this morning. If it weren’t for the new one and her goddamn sticker, Jack’s world would be a reasonably all right place today, considerably less Hieronymus Bosch than usual. And the ice cream diet, which continued to elude all search parties; those were the two clouds on Jack’s horizon.
And here came one of those clouds now, a lot closer than the horizon. “Well, looka that,” Mary Kate said in mild amazement, and Jack looked up, and here came Sara Joslyn herself, quartering her way through the squaricles. “Well, well,” Jack said. “In fact, well, well, well.”
“I’d say so,” said Mary Kate.
Sara Joslyn. She went left, she went right, she advanced, she went off at an oblique angle, she turned sharply, she came straight to Jack’s squaricle and entered through the door space. “I got it,” she said. “Everything’s fixed.”
Jack smiled upon her, he couldn’t help himself. “And you came back today, rather than tomorrow.”
“Well, I felt bad about making trouble.”
“And quite rightly, too,” Jack said, as Ida Gavin entered the squaricle and said, “Keely Jones.”
“Ah, yes,” Jack said, swiveling around to face her. “We are playing the tape of the swimming pool salesman’s story from a loudspeaker truck in front of Miss Jones’s house.”
“Not anymore,” Ida said. “She came out and fired a shotgun at our truck.”
“Oh, nice!” Jack said, and Mary Kate looked up with a sunny smile.
“Our attorneys,” Ida said, “are right now negotiating with her attorneys.”
“Be prepared, Ida,” Jack said, “to sky LAward soonest.”
“My fuck-you suit is already packed,” Ida said. “I’ll keep you informed.” And she marched from the squaricle.
Jack turned again to the new one. Was it possible things would be going well now for a little while? Was it possible this Sara Joslyn would eventually become part of the solution, instead of part of the problem? “Your attitude is commendable, Sara,” he told her. “And I shall reward it by overworking you.” He selected two sets of papers from his desk and handed them to her. “I like to think of these as self-explanatory.”
“I hope I think of them that way,” she said, accepting the papers.
But first, there was the unresolved Case of the Murdered Man. What had happened there, finally? The Galaxy's extensive research library did not include back issues of the local paper, so it wouldn’t be easy to go back and find whatever had been reported on it, if anything. Sara believed now that Jack’s first dismissive summation of the incident had been wrong, that it hadn’t merely been a drug dealer story, or that if it was a story about drugs the trail nevertheless led here somehow to the Galaxy, but she had been aware of absolutely ho investigation of the incident; no police presence at the Galaxy, none at the scene of the crime. No one had approached to question her. Were the police also dismissing the murder as unimportant? Was there such a thing as an unimportant murder?
Leaving Jack Ingersoll’s squaricle, carrying the paperwork of her new assignment, Sara was distracted by this unfinished story, this unanswered question: What about the murdered man beside the road? True, it was none of her business. True, she already had too much to think about. True, there was nothing she could do about the problem. But it still existed, nagging at her.
For instance. Even though her next assignment was right here, clutched in her hand, she found herself wondering again about the murdered man’s car’s license plate; did its letters, or did they not, start with a “Z”? Making her intricate way out of the squaricles, Sara crossed to the reporters’ tables, where Phyllis flashed her a bright welcoming smile while continuing to talk seriously and earnestly into the phone: “And when you met Cleopatra,” she was asking, “in your previous life, did she happen to mention anything about snakes?” To the left of Sara’s desk space—Phyllis being on her right—sat Harry Razza, another of Jack’s eight reporters and another of the many stakers from Australia. An aging matinee idol type, with thickly sculptured auburn hair and a roguish smile, he apparently thought of himself as being from the Douglas Fairbanks mold, and Sara had been forced to put him quite firmly in his place several times on Monday and Tuesday; since when, he’d been friendly and calm. Now, he was speaking with dogged patience on the phone, saying, “Can I quote you as saying you’re glad he’s dead? Well, can I quote you as saying you wouldn’t bring him back if you could? Well, can I quote you as saying you feel a certain relief?”
Bob Sangster, the Aussie with the large nose, had the desk space directly in front of Sara, where he was saying into his phone, “Now, didn’t the United States government pay for these frogs?” And Don Grove, the pessimistic young reporter who had so far this week failed to produce both a two-headed calf from Brazil and a Martian wedding from Marin County, California, in
his position at the desk space direcdy behind Sara was also on the phone, saying, “And how old was the victim? And this midget: just how short is he?” Sara had already become so used to this new work environment that she was distracted by none of these conversations. Seating herself at her desk space, putting Jack’s new work assignments to one side, she rested her shoulder bag on the typewriter—there wasn’t room for it anywhere else— removed her spiral notebook, and then placed the shoulder bag, as usual, under her chair. Now, the page with the murdered man’s car . . .
. . . wasn’t there.
She leafed through the notebook twice. Had she tom it out? She occasionally did that, when a page contained only items of the most transitory interest, like shopping lists, but surely she wouldn’t have tom out the page containing the information on the murdered man’s car.
That would be the same page with the details of her appointment that morning with Mr. Harsch: his name, directions to the Galaxy, time of the meeting. But that was gone, too.
Well, yes. That she might have thrown out, once the meeting was over. Had she done so without noticing what else was on that page? It was goddamn unlikely.
All right. Here’s the page with the money quote about potato chips, which would be the page immediately after the one with the appointment and the car. Switching on the gooseneck lamp on her desk space, Sara held the notepad angled up so the light flooded onto the potato chip quote. Leaning in close, eyes low to the edge of the pad, she tried to look across the page, hoping to see the indentations pressed there by her having written on the page above it. That sometimes worked, though it was much easier when the next page hadn’t already been written on. Staring, squinting, Sara could see that there were such identations, but she couldn’t read them.
Well, sometimes it helped to stroke a pencil very lighdy back and forth over the page, the indentations coming up paler than the rest. Sara tried that, and again she could see the evidence of lines, but they were just too slight, and too fragmented by the potato chip quote, to be legible.
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