Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01

by Trust Me on This (v1. 1)

  Combine the two methods? Holding the page, now grayed by pencil lines, up in the glare of the gooseneck lamp, Sara peered close again, and this time it began to come clear. “Dade” first, the word “Dade,” that being the county shown on the license plate, Dade County meaning Miami. Then the words “Buick Riviera.” Harder was the scrawl “dk blu,” meaning dark blue, the color of the murdered man’s car. Hardest of all was the license plate number. It began with “2,” but the next two numbers baffled her until she realized they were as simple as they looked, that they were both the number “7.” And the letters? The first was “Z,” just as she’d thought. Then “R.” And at last one she simply couldn’t be sure about, “G” or “Q” or “O.”

  Well, I’ve got it, she thought, looking at the numbers and letters written on a page from the Galaxy's notepad, the one she kept on this desk. 277-ZR(G/Q/0). And now what do I do with it? Returning her own notebook to the shoulder bag under her chair, it occurred to her that almost anyone could have come over here sometime while she was in the reference section or the ladies, and tom that page out.

  Had someone done that? Or had she absent- mindedly thrown it away herself, noticing only the appointment with Mr. Harsch on that page? Which was more improbable?

  Well, why would anyone throw that page away? She’d already reported the murder, hadn’t she?

  Hadn’t she?

  She was working on that question, thinking about Monday’s taciturn guard and gazing at the license plate numbers she’d just written, when her telephone’s white light began to flash, and she thought, with a sudden thrill of fear, I'm being watched! She almost didn’t want to answer, but of course that was silly. Holding her breath, she reached out, picked up the phone, said, “Hello?” in a small and guarded voice, and Jack’s voice in her ear said, “A special treat.”

  Relief made her limp, boneless. “Oh, yes?” she said.

  “Because you’re such a good girl,” his practically cheerful voice told her, “you are being invited to a barbecue tomorrow.”

  “I am?”

  “Binx Radwell and his wife are throwing it,” Jack said, with just the most delicate added emphasis on the word “wife”; to suggest this was to be a respectable outing.

  “Well, that sounds like fun,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Binx said I should invite you,” he said, spoiling it a bit, “so thank him.”

  “I will, then.”

  “Pick you up at noon tomorrow?”

  “Fine. See you then.”

  She hung up, obscurely pleased; a break in the routine, and some social contact in this strange new world. But now, if she was such a good girl, she should go to work. Reaching for her new assignments, she noticed the license plate numbers and car info on the pad, and hesitated. What should she do with that? Did- it matter whether she kept it or not?

  Feeling faintly ridiculous (but also still with that same irrational feeling: I’m being watched), she tore that page out of the Galaxy's notepad and put it in her skirt pocket.

  Three

  Phyllis wasn’t going to the barbecue. She was out all Friday night—the first time she’d been away at all, and the only indication so far that there was a man in her life—and came by briefly late Saturday morning to change, throw swimsuit and cosmetics and some clothes and a paperback novel about the French Revolution into her bright red vinyl bag, and cheerfully say, “See you manana, my dear. You ought to try to get out.”

  “I am getting out,” Sara told her, but Phyllis was gone in a flash of long legs, uninterested. Sara, irritated at being put unjustly in the position of country mouse, but at the same time just as pleased to have the apartment to herself for a while, went back to her room and her desk.

  Sara’s secret vice was that she was a novelist; or, that is, that she was not a novelist and was determined to become one. Just exactly which novelist she would eventually turn out to be she wasn’t yet entirely sure—a problem which she felt was hampering her development—but she was resolutely at every opportunity practicing the craft she hoped someday to learn. That’s why a desk and chair had been her third and fourth purchases for the apartment, immediately after a double bed and a tall roomy dresser.

  At times it seemed to her unrealistic that a young woman in her mid-twenties like herself, with no extraordinary experiences of life, should even think about trying to be a novelist, but then she placed against that the force of her desire, and it all seemed possible. One of the reasons, in fact, that she’d taken this job after the Courier-Observer was merged, was that it would surely be an experience outside what she already knew; and it was definitely working out that way.

  This was the first real chance she’d had to look at her works in progress and organize her thoughts since the move to Florida. Neatly stacked atop the desk were the four large manila envelopes containing the four novels she was currendy more or less working on, each envelope neatly labeled: college; spy; civil war; newspaper. One of these would become her project now; with luck, until it was finished.

  college (working title I For Incomplete) was the thickest envelope, but she hadn’t worked on that one for over a year, having lost sympathy with the characters. The thinnest envelope was newspaper (no title yet), which she’d started when the word had come down about the merging of the Courier- Observer and on which she’d worked furiously until realizing she didn’t herself much believe the villains.

  This morning, she’d awakened to find herself thinking about the spy novel for the first time in months; the idea of intrigue, suspense, hidden truths, suddenly appealed to her. After her first- ever sunlit morning swim in the Adantic, she brought out that envelope (working tide Time of the Hero), put up on the wall the maps of Bulgaria and Costa Rica, and was just settling down to re-read what she’d already done on that book when Phyllis flashed through. That distracted her for a while, and she spent some time arranging and rearranging the other things she had up on the wall over the desk; a Polaroid shot of her mother’s white clapboard house with dark green trim, up there in Great Barrington; another Polaroid, this of her mother’s living room at Christmas; two favorite cartoons from The New Yorker; a photo of Bill Hunnicutt, the boy she’d gone steady with the last two years of college; the notepad sheet with the murdered man’s car description and license plate; the letter from New England Newspapers announcing the termination of her services; a few other small things. She placed all of that to her satisfaction, read the completed pages of Time of the Hero, making corrections and notes to herself along the way, and then it was nearly noon, and time to change into jeans and a sleeveless blouse; appropriate wear for a barbecue, she hoped.

  And who, she wondered, was Jack Ingersoll when he wasn’t at work?

  Four

  Binx bobbled the ball. He recovered, dribbled the basketball left, dribbled it right, faked out an entire squadron of imaginary defenders, struck di- recdy in toward the broad white garage door, went up with beautiful grace for an easy lay-up into the orange hoop, missed, and scrambled for the rebound.

  “Bii-inx!”

  That was Marcy. Binx took the rebound, leaped straight up like a Masai warrior or whoever it is, made a lovely one-hand push shot, and the basketball arced over and fell straight through the center of the hoop. “Swish!” cried Binx, though the net had rotted away from that hoop three years ago.

  “Bii-inx! It’s your party!”

  There was something to be said for that point of view, Binx had to admit. Over there to the right was the party, and it was his, and he was expected to do something about it.

  The Binx Radwell castle was a split-level ranch in a development of split-level ranches southwest of the city, half an hour from work. Here Binx lived with his Marcy and some children and a dog and probably a cat, two cats, maybe a hamster, possibly a parakeet. The plots here were half acre, the developer had left many of the scrub pines and had done other planting of his own, the roads curved and the bulldozers in their clearing had created low hills and shallow
dales, and with the developer’s three different models and virtually infinite capacity for options the place looked hardly like a development at all.

  To the left of Binx’s blindingly white house was his bottomless black driveway leading up to his blindingly white two-car garage with orange basketball hoop. Behind the garage and almost as big was his prefab metal storage shed from Sears, and behind the house was the broad expanse of rich green lawn under the Florida sun, sloping back and down to a rock garden, a trellis, some wooden fence, some metal fence and some shrubbery, all hiding the neighbor back there and all in need of work.

  Here and there on the lawn were a playground slide, a set of swings, a monkey bars, a very large above-ground pool, two cabanas, and a large expensive wheeled grill, at which Marcy stood, chatting with a neighbor wife and poking sometimes with a wooden spoon at the grilling spare-ribs, and crying out Binx’s name from time to time with that peculiarly ravenlike caw of a voice. Beyond all that, another neighbor’s garage and shed and shrubs flanked the lawn on the far side, creating privacy al fresco. Lovely place for a party.

  Binx’s party. About twenty-five adults, a few of them neighbors, but mostly people from work, moved around the lawn, glasses or bottles in their hands, talking together and waiting for food. In among them, under their elbows and between then- knees and behind their backs, several thousand children scampered, like cockroaches when the light is turned on, but louder. A smell of burning meat was in the air.

  “Bii- inx!”

  “Coming, my love!”

  Here came Binx, with basketball. It was tough to dribble on grass, but when the going gets tough, the tough dribble harder. Approaching the grill, Binx yelled, “Yo, Chuck!” at a neighbor, and tried to bounce-pass the ball away, but it hit a rock or a toy or Satan’s knuckle or some damn thing, and instead of going over to the waiting grinning Chuck, hands held out, one with a beer bottle in it, the basketball took a bad hop, caromed to the right, made a direct hit on the grill— scattering ribs—and bounded away toward the swimming pool.

  “Bii-inx!”

  “Sorry, Marcy,” Binx said, with his sheepish grin, and trotted after the ball.

  To the neighbor wife, Marcy said, “I never would have married him except my mother hated him so.”

  A car engine sounded on the driveway beside the house, then stopped. Car doors slammed. Binx turned, with basketball, to gaze bright-eyed toward the corner of the house. More people. A bigger party.

  Sara wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but somehow nothing quite as normal as this. The clean upper-middle-class suburb from the television commercials, complete with boys on bicycles, sprinklers spit-spit-spurrrting, station wagons stopped on sunny driveways. Riding through it all, Sara felt displaced, dislocated. Partly that was because Jack’s car turned out to be an elderly red Honda Civic, the seediest, oldest vehicle she’d yet seen any employee of the Galaxy drive. (Jack had volunteered no explanation for the Honda, nor had she figured out a polite way to satisfy her curiosity. And at least he was appropriate to national type; she’d noticed that the Americans on the Galaxy*s staff tended to drive glamorous or exotic foreign cars, while the Brits and Australians preferred large boatlike American vehicles.)

  But mostly Sara’s sense of dislocation was caused by the person they were going to see. The sweating, panicky, endlessly striving Binx Rad- well ought to live up some long steep flight of stairs somewhere. This was a neighborhood that cried out success.

  As did Binx’s house, complete with basketball hoop over the garage door. Getting out of the Honda, Sara grinned quizzically across its top at Jack, saying, “Is this the real Binx?”

  “There is no real Binx,” he told her. His weekend manner was exacdy like his work manner; brusque, impatient, distracted. “Come on,” he said.

  They walked together toward the party noises around the rear comer of the house, and there was the yard, the people, the party, the stuff. And Binx, grinning manically at them, holding something. “Yo, Jack!” he cried, and shot a basketball in a line drive pass.

  Jack wasn’t ready. Before he could react, the basketball hit his chest and bounced off, leaving in its wake a reddish brown sticky stain that looked a lot like barbecue sauce. “Well, thanks, Binx,” Jack said.

  “Oh, wow!” Binx cried, stupendously contrite, hurrying over. “Jack, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” Jack said, “it’ll wash off.” To Sara he said, “I’ll be right out,” and he went away toward the rear door of the house, waving along the way at an irritable-looking woman with a wooden spoon over by the grill.

  “Jeepers,” Binx said, looking after Jack. Then, abrupdy cheerful, he took Sara’s arm, saying, “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

  She allowed him to lead her out over the yard. The woman next to the grill kept glaring in his direction. Noticing Sara noticing her, Binx explained, “Over there, that’s some woman I’m married to. She’s mad at me right now.”

  “Did you hit her with a basketball?”

  “Worse,” he said, shaking his head. “Far worse. Comere, lemme show you stuff.”

  Behind the garage was a large prefab shed. Its door stood open, revealing a full and cluttered interior. Stopping in front of this structure, gesturing, Binx rattled off, as though fulfilling a duty, “That’s my power mower, that’s my roto tiller, that’s my tractor, that’s my seeder, that’s my golf cart, that’s my moped, that’s my shredder, that’s my table saw, that’s my rubber raft.”

  “And this is your shed.”

  He grinned, and pointed. “And this is my grass and that’s my house and these are my friends.”

  “This is your life,” Sara finished.

  Showing alarm, Binx said, “Gee! You think so?”

  Looking at the shed and its contents, somehow depressed by it all, Sara said, “All these things you own.”

  “You ought to own something, too,” Binx said, taking her arm again. “I’ll give you a beer.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked back toward the house. The woman by the grill—she probably was Binx’s wife, actually—had gone back to her cooking now, was no longer glaring at anybody.

  The house provided a narrow swath of shade across the back, in which a long folding table stood, bearing three open coolers filled with beer bottles floating in ice water. Approaching this, Binx explained, “They pay me too much, so what am I gonna do? Buy this.”

  “The salaries here ...” Sara said, and shook her head, thinking of her own ridiculous income.

  “You show me yours,” Binx suggested, “I’ll show you mine.”

  Startled, she said, “What?”

  “Salary,” Binx said. Opening a beer, he said, “Actually, I know your salary. Here.”

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the beer. “Thirty-five,” he said, opening one for himself.

  “That’s right.”

  Binx shook his head, grinning at her. “Honey,” he said, “nowhere on earth does a starter try-out reporter get thirty-five grand a year. You know what I get?”

  Sara didn’t. “Sixty?” she guessed.

  “Ha ha,” Binx said, without humor. “I am paid eighty-five thousand U.S. dollars per annum.”

  “Wow.”

  “I say exactly that same thing,” Binx told her, “every week. Wow, Mr. DeMassi, I say, I’m not worth half this. I know, he says, but take it and be happy. The Galaxy sells five million copies every week. We got the largest editorial budget in the world. You see these people?”

  “Yes,” Sara said.

  “We’re all overpaid by the Galaxy,” Binx said, gesturing at the partygoers with his beer bottle, slopping a litde on his hand, not nodcing. “You know why? You get a little scared someday, a little depressed about yourself, you think maybe you’d like to go back to the real world, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t afford the real world,” Binx said, and looked up cheerfully as Jack came out of the house and walked over, the stain on the front of
his shirt somewhat paler and streakier. “Oh, good,” Binx told him. “It came right off.”

  “Mmm,” Jack said, reaching for a beer.

  “You two play,” Binx said. “I have to grovel with Marcy a minute.”

  Binx wandered off toward the grill and the woman with the wooden spoon. Watching him go, Sara said, “Binx isn’t really happy, is he? Under all the joking, he’s really kind of desperate.”

  Jack took a long swig of beer, then said, “He tried to get another job a couple years ago. Soon as people saw Weekly Galaxy on the resume, that was the end of it.”

  Startled, thinking about her own career, Sara said, “Is that true?”

  “The rest of the world of journalism looks with disapproval on the Galaxy ” he said.

  “Then he’s—” Looking over at Binx, theatrically apologetic to the woman with the spoon (who was not relenting), Sara said, “He’s like a slave.”

  “He enslaved himself,” Jack commented, and shrugged.

  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.”