Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (22 page)

 
          
David
wrapped the second towel around his neck. His expression was satisfied, even
smug. “Hello,” he said.

 
          
“You,
too,” Ida said. She opened an end table drawer, pushed and prodded with busy
fingertips at the book matches, playing cards, pencils, obsolete credit card,
and other junk within, and shut that drawer again.

 
          
“What
are you doing?” David asked her.

 
          
“I’m
nosy,” Ida told him, and turned to give him a challenging stare. “Suppose I’d
make a good reporter?”

 
          
“You
just did.” David smirked.

 
          
She
turned away, ignoring that, and opened another drawer. He crossed the room, put
his arms around her from behind, and kissed her hair. She studied the junk in
the drawer. “I’m glad you’re not hurt,” David said.

 
          
She
shrugged him off, and shut the drawer. “It’ll take a bigger man than
you
, fella,” she said, and picked up a
copy of last week’s
Galaxy
from the
coffee table. “I thought you worked for
Trend”

 
          
“I
do.”

 
          
She
waggled the
Galaxy
at him. “You
read
crap like this?”

           
Simpering, David said, “That’s a
secret.”

 
          
Ida
dropped the paper on the coffee table and considered him, looking him up and
down.
“You
don’t have any secrets
from
me
,” she said.

 
          
James
Taggart had no secrets; at least, none Sara was likely to care about.

           
Taggart, the runaway guard, had for
a while gone out of Sara’s mind as though he’d never been. She’d been to his
house last Tuesday, had gone to work on Wednesday morning planning to find some
way to get a look at the man’s employment record, and had been given by a
harried Jack the urgent and all-consuming assignment of finding out just
exactly where in Massachusetts John Michael Mercer and his Felicia planned to
marry. “We need this, Sara,” Jack had said, looking like a man with tapeworms.
“Boy Cartwright is on the trail.”

 
          
“But
we
got
Boston
.”

 
          
“That
was yesterday,” he’d said, and so the race was on, and Taggart was forgotten
completely until
ten o’clock
on Sunday morning, when Sara, home alone for another weekend and already
plotting the phone calls she would arrow Massachu- settsward on the morrow,
received a phone call from an angry-sounding woman who said her name was Carol
Bridges.

 
          
Which
meant nothing to Sara at first; she was too deep in
Massachusetts
to remember much about
Florida
. But then the woman said, “Well, Miss
Taggart? Have you heard from your father?”

           
“Oh! No, I haven’t. You neither,
huh?”

           
“Today is August first,” Carol
Bridges said. “I have a chance to rent the house, and I’m taking it. I just
wanted you to know that.”

 
          
“Oh,
well, I guess ... I guess you’ve been pretty patient. I don’t blame you.”

 
          
“Unless
you want to bring the rent up to date?”

           
“Oh, I couldn’t afford that. And I
don’t know what, uh, what Pop would want, exactly.”

           
“Well, if you want his
things ”
Carol Bridges said, with angry
emphasis, “you’ll find them on the curb. You can come get them, or the trash
collector can take them away.”

 
          
The
trash collector can take them away, Sara was thinking, when all at once she
interrupted her own thought with a realization: Some clue to Taggart’s
whereabouts, or to his motive for disappearing, might very well be in his
possessions from that house.

 
          
“Except
the TV,” Carol Bridges went on. “I’ll take that in lieu of back rent, and if
Jimmy wants it back, he knows where to find me.”

 
          
Remembering
that large console TV set dominating the living room—the only expensive item
she’d seen in the whole house—Sara said, “That sounds fair. I don’t see how Pop
could complain about that.”

 
          
“I
don’t see how your father could complain about
anything
, Miss Taggart,” the rejected Carol Bridges said.

 
          
Carol
Bridges was nowhere in sight when Sara, at just after
noon
, stopped the Peugeot beside the pile of
shabby goods in front of Jimmy Taggart’s former home. There were a number of
items here she remembered from her earlier walk through the house: the
automobile tire, the aluminum beer keg, the window fan that had been atop the
refrigerator. (But not the refrigerator itself, which apparently belonged to
the house.) The white plastic table from the kitchen was here, surmounted by
stacks of unmatched plastic plates and cups, chipped glasses, and an assortment
of tired flatware, all looking like the world’s most hopeless yard sale. The
bureau from the bedroom stood here, its drawers full of shirts and socks. The
mattress and box spring leaned against the table legs and the back of the
bureau, with their metal frame folded on the ground beside them. A few lamps
lay about like a surrealist’s version of ninepins. A couple of sagging
armchairs bore loads of suitcases and cartons and the small worn rug from the
bedroom floor.

 
          
What
could there be, within this shabby postmodern sculpture, to tell her anything
about the present whereabouts of Jimmy Taggart? Climbing from the Peugeot,
which looked almost indignant to find itself next to such a display, Sara stood
a minute looking at the piles of junk, and was half ready to turn right around
and go home, without touching a thing.

           
But what if there
was
a clue somewhere in here? Wouldn’t a
man’s possessions inevitably say something about the man? Possibly something
about where he went, or who he was, or why he ran?

 
          
Well,
if she was going to take any of this stuff she ought to get started. She wasn’t
anxious for another conversation with Carol Bridges, who was probably watching
out some window right now. But where to begin?

 
          
She
couldn’t take it all, certainly. For one thing, the Peugeot wouldn’t hold half
of this pile. For another, she was here in search of clues, not furniture, so
the bed and chairs and lamps and all that sort of stuff could be left for the
trash collector, or whatever neighborhood scavenger would follow her here.
Ditto the tire and beer keg and other weirdnesses. Which left cartons and
suitcases, and possibly the nonclothing contents of bureau drawers.

 
          
Feeling
she shouldn’t start a search right out here on the sidewalk, Sara briskly
opened the Peugeot’s trunk and side doors and started loading. The bottom bureau
drawer appeared to be filled mainly with papers and documents of some kind, so
she removed the drawer entire and put it in the trunk, leaving the bureau with
a wide blank across the bottom that gave it an expression of disgrun- ded
surprise.

 
          
Was
that all? Looking around, Sara nouced a small table lamp with a delicate narrow
glass base and clean pale linen shade; somewhat nicer- looking, in fact, than
its companions. I could use a lamp on my dresser, Sara thought. She squelched a
little pang of guilt by remembering Carol Bridges and the TV set. Besides, this
way she was saving the lamp from the trash collector.

 
          
As
she was slamming the trunk and right side doors, preparatory to departure, the
Peugeot as jam-packed as a circus car full of clowns, she looked up to see
Carol Bridges crossing the street toward her, looking grim. Oh, dear, Sara
thought, and moved toward the Peugeot’s driver’s door, a friendly smile pasted
to her face. “Hi,” she said.

 
          
“That’s
all you’re taking?”

 
          
“Well,
I can’t ... I don’t have ...” Sara gestured vaguely at the encumbered Peugeot
and the remaining pile of property.

 
          
“Well,
that’s strictly up to you,” Carol Bridges said. “I talked with my lawyer, and
Fm
absolutely within the law. If this
stuff is thrown away, it’s not my reponsibility. I’ve had no word from the
tenant, and I’ve informed his representative that I’m putting his things out on
the street.”

 
          
“You
did?” Sara asked, thinking, a clue, someone who might know where Taggart’s
gone. “Who?”

 
          
“You,
of course,” Carol Bridges said. “You’re his daughter.”

 
          
“Oh,”
Sara said. She looked at Taggart’s possessions, piled on the curb, about to be
lost forever. Her responsibility. “I really wish,” she said honesdy, “I knew
where Pop was.”

           
This was one time Sara was just as
glad Phyllis disappeared every weekend; there would be no awkward questions
about the pile of near-trash she was introducing into the apartment.
Conversely, another pair of hands would have been nice, to help move all this
stuff from the Peugeot first to the lobby of the Sybarite, and from there to
the elevator, and from there to the apartment entrance, and from there at last
to her own bedroom. When she finally lugged the last two suitcases in and
plopped them on the floor, her overcrowded bedroom looked like the bus station
in a Depression movie. And now, to sort through it all.

 
          
It
felt so odd to be this close to an older male’s private property. In college,
and since then with roommates like Phyllis, Sara had grown more or less used to
the idea of being around the personal possessions of other young women—and here
and there a young man—but this stuff was
different.
It was as though she’d brought it back from some other planet, or an
earlier civilization.

 
          
Her
first move was to open every box and every suitcase, to see what sort of thing
she’d caught, and so her first deduction about Jimmy Taggart was that he was a
man who never threw anything away. (Which increased the oddity of his having
disappeared, thereby putting
all
his
possessions at risk.)

 
          
Clothing.
Despite the bureauful of clothing she’d left behind, here was more and more of
the stuff. One cardboard liquor store carton was full of shoes; all of them old
and battered, most with holes in the soles, all with badly creased uppers, some
without laces. Another carton was full of tattered shirts with missing buttons,
or with ripped pockets; some of these were work shirts, with names sewn on:
hal, jerry, frank.
But no
jimmy.

 
          
Then
there was an old cardboard suitcase with broken locks, which turned out to be full
of radio parts; that is, various parts of a disassembled old- fashioned radio.
And a box of jelly jars full of used nails and screws sorted into their various
sizes. And a box packed with beat-up old games: Mille Bomes, Waterworks,
several dog-eared decks of cards. Time to clear a lot of this
out
of here.

 
          
Down
the hall from Sara’s apartment toward the elevator, a black metal door opened
to a kind of shallow closet containing the hatch to the garbage chute. Items
too large for the chute were to be left in the closet for the super; Sara piled
up boxes and luggage in there, then went back to see what was left.

 
          
Papers;
this was more like it. Feeling like a reporter on the trail at last—a
Galaxy
reporter, in fact—Sara settled
down with James Taggart’s history on paper, his old checkbooks, income tax
statements, correspondence, army records, paid bills, leases, contracts. Now,
she thought, Jimmy Taggart, let’s see who you are, and where you’ve gone.

 
          
By
nine that night, after a break for a quick dinner thawed from the freezer, Sara
was finished at last. She had typed out what she now knew about Jimmy Taggart,
and it looked like this:

 
          
Born
Oct 13, 1931
,
Brandon
,
Missouri
. Graduated Marshallsburg Consolidated High School,
Missouri
, June 1949. US Army, January 1951 till
October 1954. That would be the Korean War, but his army records show he spent
one year in
Italy
and the rest of his tour of duty on army bases in the southern
United States
.

 
          
Suspended
sentence,
Elmford
,
Illinois
Municipal Court, drunken driving, March, 1963.

 
          
Suspended
sentence,
Tulsa
, Oklahoma Municipal Court, drunken driving,
leaving the scene of an accident, August, 1966.

 
          
Divorced
from Ellen Marie (Neustadter) Taggart in
Oklahoma
in 1968.

 
          
A
creased and tattered sentimental Christmas card without its envelope, with
“Dad,” handwritten above the printed message, and “Jill” below, is the only
indication of children.

 
          
Employment
records from the
Galaxy
show he
started there four years ago. Next of kin, Jack Taggart, phone number and address
in
Hagerstown
,
Maryland
. Prior to that, according to copies of tax returns going back ten
years, he’d been employed three months by Gulf Coast Supermarkets,
Fort Myers
,
Florida
; before that for seven months by US Plastic Novelties of Orlando,
Florida; before that for at least six years by Colonial Furniture Company,
Lexington
,
Kentucky
. The tax returns show no dependents.