“Doctor, this is Maurice Fischback of Psychology Today. Do you anticipate mass suicides as a result of the recent death of popular idol Johnny Crawfish?”
“Would you say Johnny was a source of comfort to the other prisoners? Did you fellas all sort of look up to him, is that your memory of that period?”
“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?”
“When he was a little boy, did the rest of the family know somehow the greatness that was in him? Are there incidents from that period you would like to share with our readers at Modem Maturity?”
Amid them all, Sara was also on the phone, but not in precisely the same way. On Galaxy time, using the Galaxy's long-distance phone service, she was selfishly not plugging along in the
Galaxy’s best interest, but was egocentrically trying to save her own life. It wasn’t enough to surround herself with envelopes to be opened in the event of her death. It was time to take steps to avoid having those envelopes opened. It was time to counterattack. “Theft Record Transcript?” she asked the lazy voice that answered her most recent call, and when assured that Theft Record Transcript of the Dade County, Florida, sheriffs office was indeed what she had reached she said, “This is Officer Helen Sonoma, Norfolk, Virginia, Public Safety Division. We’re trying for verification on a suspect’s story here.”
“You’re Norfolk Police? What was that name again?”
Sara repeated the same false information, spelling the last name and saying, “Like the wine county in California.” She had learned that unusual names create for some reason an aura of believability, as though anyone who claimed to be called Helen Sonoma was unlikelier to lie about other things than someone who said her name was Helen Smith.
“Okay,” Sara said briskly, when her credentials had been accepted, “what we’ve got here is somebody claiming a kidnap in a stolen rental or leased vehicle, Florida plates. Dade County.”
“Kidnapping?”
“That’s the claim, but it’s a weird story, and we’re not sure we want to follow through on it. We need verification.”
“What kind of verification?”
“Okay,” Sara said, still being brisk and a little irritated, as though if she’d been a man she’d be out on patrol or stakeout somewhere, and not stuck in this police headquarters making these dumb phone calls. “The vehicle description is a dark blue four-door Buick, two or three years old, with a Z plate. The complainant doesn’t know anything more than that, but she states it was a stolen vehicle. And it would have been stolen within the last four weeks.”
The voice said, “So you want to know, do we have a listing for a dark blue four-door Buick, a lease or rental vehicle, on the sheet in July or August?”
“Right,” Sara said. It had taken her four phone calls, beginning with the Florida state police, to finally get to the place where such records were kept, so the slight edge of irritation in her voice wasn’t at all difficult to maintain.
“Hold on,” the voice said. “Or do you want me to call you back?”
“Either way. I can give you my number. How long’s it gonna take?”
“If I do it now—”
“Let’s do it now,” Sara said, sounding peeved and being peeved.
“Two, three minutes,” the voice said. “Hold on.”
So Sara held on, and when Jack walked past she said into the silent phone, “But on that first date, if you could sense the power he was going to have someday, why didn’t you sleep with him?”
“Huh?” said the voice.
“Talking to somebody here,” Sara said, Jack having moved on out of earshot. “You got it?”
“The answer’s no,” the voice said.
Sara was surprised. “No? No stolen Buick?”
“Fantasy kidnappings,” the voice said. “They happen all the time. It’s something with the full moon.”
“Okay, fine,” Sara said. “Thanks.”
She hung up and sat there a moment, hand on the phone. So the murderer—or somebody— had returned the Buick to the renter, after getting rid of'the body. Or, if it was leased, the murderer—or somebody—still had it. And this time, Sara had no way to recapture the car’s license number.
So what next?
Night on Edger Street. The house at number 147 remained brightly lit, crackling with activity. Aerial photos of The Shack, Johnny Crawfish’s compound on Chesapeake Bay, taken earlier today and blown up to monstrous size, were taped and tacked to the living room walls. In one of the upstairs bedrooms, photographers and stringers and various deeply dubious individuals tried on any number of costumes and uniforms, becoming serially policemen, nuns, ambulance drivers, mail- persons, priests, nurses, United Parcel deliverymen, Girl Scouts (with cookies) and U.S. Navy frogmen. In the former kitchen, now a nascent darkroom, any number of small and easily con-
cealable cameras were being loaded with very fast film. At the dining room table, artists sat and forged a variety of identity documents. On the front porch, the Down Under Trio chatted and drank with a scabrous assortment of Crawfish cousins, all of whom listened with their mouths open.
Since all soundings had failed to indicate any Crawfish story worthy of the name, meaning the body in the box was probably all they’d be able to set at Massa’s altar at the end of this expedition, and since the body in the box was not going to be easy to get this time, it was the aerial photos of the Crawfish estate that mostly held Jack and the key members of his team. “Look at those guys,” he said, tapping the large color picture yet again. Sara, Ida, Don Grove, Chauncey Chapperell and a couple of photographers (one dressed as a Washington Redskin, with his camera in the helmet under his arm) all obediently looked. “Those are armed guards in jeeps,” Jack said, “buddies of Crawfish, patrolling die perimeter.”
“They’re violating their parole, those guys,” Don Grove said. “Carrying guns like that.” He sounded aggrieved.
Jack considered him. “You want to go tell them that, Don?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Good.”
Jack contemplated the photo again, without love. “This is razor wire, all along here,” he said. “See that whip antenna on the jeep? They’re in constant contact with each other.”
“From the sea,” Ida suggested.
Jack shook his head. “Like in Martha’s Vineyard? It didn’t work there, and those people weren’t homicidal. These are.” He pointed to spots along the shore. “In the big double boathouse here, a cigarette boat, big and fast and mean, with a reinforced prow, it’s already been used twice to ram strangers who got too close. And a big twenty- six-foot inboard in there too, they can put an army on that, chase us across to Cape Charles, maim us. And they’d do it, too.”
“Parachute,” Chauncey Chapperell offered.
“They’d shoot you out of the air,” Jack told him.
“I wasn’t thinking of doing it myself, actually,” Chauncey said.
“The problem is,” Jack said generally, “in life, Crawfish surrounded himself with thugs and killers, and they’re all still there. And the cousins are the same thing, only dumber.”
Ida said, “Why don’t Sara and I go up there tonight, look it over?”
“He isn’t laid out yet, Ida,” Jack pointed out. “If you did get in there tonight, what’s the point? You can’t get the body in the box until tomorrow anyway.”
“Excuse me,” Sara said.
Politeness? Jack upraised an eyebrow and looked out at Sara from under it. “Yes, Sara?”
“I hate to sound dumb,” she said, “but people keep talking about the body in the box, and I don’t know what it is.”
Jack stared at her. “You don’t know what we’ve been talking about all this time?”
“True,” she said.
A fleeting memory came to him, of his night of fretfulness concerning the descent into the maels
trom of this young woman. Okay, here’s another step down; let’s see how she handles it. “The body in the box,” he explained, “is exactly what it sounds like. It is a photograph of a dead person in his or her casket.”
Sara looked at him, waiting for more. “And?”
“No and. When a celeb goes down, Massa wants the body in the box, and we go get it.”
“But— But why?”
“Because America wants it,” Jack told her. “Don’t ask me to explain, I’m just telling you the way it is. When a major pop figure dies, particularly if they’re fairly young and still at the height of their success, America wants to see a photograph of that person in the casket. Never mind pictures of the guy at the White House, pictures of him dancing, laughing, eating pizza, fucking beautiful women. What America wants is the dead body, on its back, hands folded over shriveled balls, lips sewed shut, eyelids with that special caved-in look, puffy silk casket lining all around.”
“That’s disgusting,” Sara said. “Who could want something like that? Why would anybody want that?”
“Ask them, next time you’re in the supermarket,” Jack suggested. “Every week, the Galaxy sells about five million copies. When the front cover’s a body in the box, a major star that just went down, we sell six or seven million. When Elvis went down, we sold eight million. We’d still be selling that one, only they had to replate the presses for the next week’s paper.”
“It’s like—” Sara floundered, hands moving vaguely. “I don’t know what it’s like. Something primitive, tribal. It’s like cavemen. It’s like the missing link, for God’s sake.”
“Sara,” Jack said mildly, “who did you think our readership was? The senior class at MIT?”
Five
Sara sat up in bed, watching the red numerals on the television/radio/clock slowly slowly change. 7:08. 7:09. 7:10.
She had been awake for well over an hour, as the light grew and changed in this spacious but anonymous hotel room and her mind teemed with a confusion of thoughts. The untraceable dark blue Buick. The ugliness of the body in the box. The idea of Phyllis Perkinson as a person who empties pistols into hotel rooms.
As to that last, this hotel room was surely safe. It was on the seventh floor, with no balcony outside the drape-covered windows. Every possible means of locking the door had been used and then double-checked by Sara last night. She was, as well, registered in a different room on a different floor, and she’d made sure last night to go in there and muss the bed, leave some clothing and spare bits of makeup around, to give the impression she was really in residence there.
As to the body in the box, why had that shocked her so? Weddings, funerals, wasn’t it all the same? The picture of the event. What do family and friends do, as their last interaction with the deceased? They view the remains.
So the body in the box was merely the great American public wanting to be treated like family; the outsiders pressing their noses to the window- pane, trying to see what the insiders see. If the body in the box was a little more ghoulish than a wedding album or a hundred-year-old birthday, wasn’t it nevertheless still merely another element in that great cycle of happenings among the select Few at which the Many stand outside the ropes and pay obeisance by their gawking?
I wonder, Sara thought, unwillingly, what picture Massa wants when a major female star gives birth. She averted her gaze from that question, to consider another, being the question of Jack’s attitude toward her. It seemed to Sara that, in some way, Jack was testing her, had been doing so for some time. When he’d told her about the body in the box last night, she could sense the intensity with which he’d watched her, as though still wondering, after everything she’d already done, if she were up to this. She’d deliberately done what she could to hide her revulsion, to show how quickly she could adapt to whatever he might choose to throw at her. She’d even joined enthusiastically in the final part of the discussion about just how to get into the Crawfish viewing.
Had he appreciated that? It was hard to tell. He hadn’t raised the subject again in here afterward, had made no further comment at all. But Sara found herself, rather against her will, wanting Jack Ingersoll’s good opinion, and if that meant being cool about the taking of pictures of dead bodies, so be it. As cool and capable and unaffected as he'wanted, that’s who she was.
She peeked at him, still asleep in the bed beside her. It was awfully early—7:17, 7:18—but she wanted to talk to him. She couldn’t go back to sleep herself, and she didn’t want to just sit here and brood forever. She needed to talk to Jack. Not about the body in the box, about the dark blue Buick.
How do I find it now?
Wake up, Jack.
Awake, Jack studied Sara’s profile through slitted eyes. What is she thinking about? The body in the box? Christ, she took to that quick enough. She had the normal first reaction—ooo, that’s disgusting, all that—but then immediately she was with it, helping to think up ways to get into the Crawfish compound, get next to the Crawfish bier, get above the open Crawfish casket.
What’s the problem here? Why do I want this
girl to fail at her job? I look inside my heart and I wonder if I’m simply making her a surrogate for myself, giving her all my unused innocence and pushing her out to sea on this small thin cake of ice here, just to prove to myself yet again how far innocence will take you. But why her? If I like the girl—and I do, I do, let’s let it go at that—so if I like her, why do I keep measuring her for the sackcloth and ashes?
Particularly since she’s shown not the slightest interest in wearing them. So what’s it all about? Sometimes I don’t understand me.
Sara was growing restless, sitting there beside him, shifting around, readjusting her pillows, occasionally as though by accident kicking him in the shin. She wants companionship, he thought, and decided it was time to awaken. With a huge yawn, he thrashed about in the bed, managing to kick her once, half opening his eyes, peering up at her and saying, “Is it morning?”
“Yes,” she said.
He lifted himself a bit and looked across the room at the red numerals above and to the right of the dead television screen. 7:23. “Sara,” he said. “It’s awfully early”
“I want to ask you about something,” she said.
He propped himself up beside her, blinking fuzz out of his eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful, too,” she commented offhandedly. “I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”
“Neither have I.”
“I know. Listen, I have a question.”
“Okay,” he said. His hand, under the covers, rested on her thigh. “Ask away.”
“How do I find a car,” she said, “if I know it’s a rental, and I have a description of the car, and I know it’s registered in Dade County, but I don’t know the license number?”
“Hmmmm,” he said. He thought about the question. He also thought about the question behind the question, or: Why does she want to know? He said, “Would this have anything to do with the dead man you found beside the road, your first day on the job?”
“I’m not asking for the job,” she told him. “I’m asking for me.”
“I understand that. Do I take it, then, you think the gunfire in Martha’s Vineyard is connected with that dead man?”
“It’s possible,” she said.
“How come you didn’t say anything? When it happened, I mean.”
She gave him a clear-eyed look. “Why should I? On what series am / a regular?”
“Oh, come on, Sara,” he said, pulling his hand away from her thigh as though it had burned him. He sat up straighter and said, “If somebody’s trying to shoot you?”
“I should try to do something about it,” she said. “I know, I agree with you. But I should. Not you. Not the Galaxy.”
“How about the cops?”
“Do you know how interested in the case they were in Martha’s Vineyard,” she asked, “when I told them I worked for th
e Galaxy? My attempted murder just wasn’t a crime they could get all that excited about.”
“The down side of being beneath notice,” he said. “We’re also beneath contempt. All right, tell me about this car.”
“A dark blue Buick, I think a Riviera. Two or three years old. Lease or rental, Dade County plate. I checked with the Dade sheriff, and it wasn’t stolen.”
He frowned at the gray TV screen, thinking about it. “Two or three years old,” he said. “And a Buick, at that. Clean, good-looking?”
“Kind of scruffy, actually,” she said.
“Okay. Probably not a long-term lease, then, that’s mosdy new cars, this one’s beyond most lease agreements. And not one of the big regular rental outfits like Hertz. Some kind of Rent-A-Wreck outfit, local company with cheaper rates. How many of them could there be?”
“In Dade County?” she asked him. “In Miami? Thousands.”
“Well, no. Hundreds, maybe. I tell you what, I’ll call Mary Kate, have her collect an IOU from somebody, put a reporter on it, call every off-brand rental outfit in the Miami yellow pages.”
“That would be terrific, Jack.” She was looking perkier and perkier.
“Too bad Binx got himself fragged,” Jack said, musing. “He was always good for crap like this.”
“Uh,” Sara said.
Jack frowned at her. “Was that a noise of prerevelation?”
“Binx is back,” Sara said.
Jack was astonished, delighted and depressed. “Back? That’s amazing! Massa never brings them back from the dead. Back in his old squaricle, is he, cheerful as ever?”
“Well, no,” Sara said. “He was hired as a reporter, at starting salary.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Assigned to Boy Cartwright.”
“And he took it?”
Sara just let that one he there. Jack looked at it, sighed, nodded, and said, “We work for an evil empire, darling. Don’t ever forget that.”
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 28