“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.”
Five
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.
Surprised, Jack said, “You touched it? The back of his skull?”
“I’m a reporter,” she said, trying to toss off the remark as though she were being merely matter- of-fact, and not arch at all.
He let that go. “Okay. What else?”
“The car was a dark blue Buick Riviera, Dade county plate. A rented or leased car.”
“How do you know that? You looked in the glove compartment?”
“No, it had a Z plate.”
“Ah.” He hadn’t known a Z plate meant a rented or leased car, but if this ace reporter said so, he was prepared to accept it. “But did you look in the glove compartment?”
“No. Also, the radio was on, playing salsa music.”
“Did the dead man look Hispanic?”
“Not particularly,” she said. “Just tough.”
“As though he might be somebody who’d get himself shot in the course of drug business?”
“I suppose so,” she said, but reluctantly. Clearly, she wanted a more interesting mystery out of this.
“But you think,” Jack said, “he had something to do with somebody at the Galaxy ”
“I know he did.”
“Because he was on that road? They took him there because it’s empty. At night, kids do drag races on that road.”
“No,” she said, pretending patience. “Because he was on that road at that time”
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