Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (25 page)

 
          
“Not
actually in a line,” Binx said, and paused in his packing to say, “I’m trying
to figure out what to put on my resume.”

 
          
“Ah.”

 
          
“Eight
years at the
Galaxy.
Not a selling
idea.”

 
          
“A
real problem,” Jack agreed.

 
          
“I
was thinking, maybe I’ll claim I was in an asylum the last eight years, but Fm
better now. What do you think?”

 
          
“It’s
even almost the truth,” Jack said.

 
          
“Fm
looking at it from the employer’s point of view,” Binx explained. “A man can be
cured from being crazy, but there’s no cure for sailing with the
Galaxy
.”

 
          
“I’m
glad to see you’re taking this in a positive upbeat manner,” Jack said, then
stopped again, struck by some sort of incredible idea that caused him to go,
“Ah!” and smack himself on the forehead.

 
          
Binx
looked at him mildly. “Square root of two?”

 
          
“You
could—” Jack started, hope in his face, but then abruptly changed his mind and
turned away, saying, “No, forget it, I don’t know what’s the matter with me,
thinking about my own problems when you’ve got, oh, hell, this is really rough,
Binx.”

           
“What?” Binx asked.

 
          
“You
being fired!”

 
          
“No.
What can I do for you?”

 
          
“No,
don’t even think about it, I’m sorry I even mentioned it. Listen, this weekend,
why don’t we get together, do a list of people we know in the business, papers
and magazines, I bet we could find people who’d back you up here and there, so
you could put together a real nice resume, worked this place, worked that—”

 
          
“What,”
Binx said.

 
          
“Huh?
No, forget it, Binx, I mean it.”

 
          
“I
don’t have much energy today, Jack,” Binx said. “Let’s just go to it, okay?
What is it I can help you with?”

 
          
“Well—
If you’re
sure”

 
          
Binx,
energy level low, didn’t respond, but merely waited.

 
          
Jack
shrugged hugely, spreading his arms, shaking his head, absolving himself of
responsibility. “Okay,” he said. “
Okay
.
If you insist. I got a problem, and it’s Phyllis Perkinson, and if I try to
fire a member of my own team it’ll give me a black mark with Massa, so I don’t
know what to do. But you’re leaving
anyway
”

 
          
“So?”

 
          
Jack
took a deep breath, clearly reluctant to wash this dirty linen in public.
“Phyllis Perkinson made lesbian overtures to two members of my team. Now, you
know how
Massa
feels about—”

           
“Who?”

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“Which
two members of the team?”

 
          
“Ida
and Sara. Now, this is going to have a bad effect on—”

 
          
“That’s
the story you want me to bring to Harsch,” Binx said. “What’s the real story?”

 
          
Jack
stared at him in utter innocence.
“That’s
the real story! Jesus, Binx, do you think it’s
easy
for me to talk about this, under any circumstances at
all,
much less with my best friend being
kicked out on his ass? Holy shit, Binx!”

 
          
“Let’s
see if I’ve got it,” Binx said. “Sara and Ida, not sure how you’d take the
news, came to me for advice and I told them not to make any waves, not to tell
anybody else. So they didn’t. But now that I’m gone anyway, I might just as
well come clean and tell Harsch what’s happening to those two poor girls in
his
workplace.”

 
          
“Gosh,
Binx,” Jack said, “if you could do that, we’d all be so grateful. It
has
been rough on the girls.”

 
          
“Do
Sara and Ida know about this yet?”

 
          
Jack
gaped at his friend. “Didn’t you hear me?
They're
the ones with the problem!”

 
          
Binx
took a deep breath. “Jack,” he said, “I don’t ask for much honesty in this old
world, but unless you are straight with me on at least
one
miserable detail I will not carry your shit bucket to Harsch’s
office for you, and that’s that.”

 
          
“Binx,
I can’t believe you’d—”

           
“I’m leaving,” Binx said, picking up
his briefcase and shopping bag. “Goodbye.”

 
          
Jack
glared at him. “They’ll
know!”
he
yelled. “All right? If they have to know, they’ll know!”

           
Binx put his briefcase and shopping
bag down again and said to the guard, “I just have to go upstairs for a
minute.” To Jack, he said, “I’m sure glad you didn’t forget why you came over
here.”

 
          
When
Sara walked into the apartment at the end of that day, she passed Phyllis’s
bedroom, and through the doorway saw Phyllis standing in the middle of the
large room, hands on hips, frowning at her wall of closets. All the doors were
open, revealing a soft, colorful, jam-packed miscellany of clothing, enough to
initially stock any new boutique in a suburban mall. More cloth billowed from
open-sagging dresser drawers. The room looked as though it had just had an
orgasm; Phyllis, however, looked like someone with a problem. “Hi,” Sara said.
“What’s up?”

 
          
“Oh,
hi,” Phyllis said. “Listen, could I borrow your suitcases a couple days? I’ll
ship them right back United Parcel, I promise.”

 
          
“Sure,”
Sara said, bewildered. “How come?”

           
“I had all that money,” Phyllis
said, with a pretty shrug, “I bought all these clothes, I never bought
suitcases. You don’t think about suitcases when you buy clothes. Listen, I
won’t stiff you on the apartment.”

           
“You won’t?” Sara said. She was
beginning to get it.

 
          
“It’s
just barely the beginning of August,” Phyllis said, “so you wouldn’t expect me
to pay my share of the whole
month,
but I’ll split it with you, okay? Give you half.”

 
          
“You
quit,” Sara said.

 
          
“Oh,
no,” Phyllis said, with a perky
laugh. “I was definitely fired, by Mr. Harsch himself. You would have thought I
was the undead or something, the way he looked at me.”

 
          
“Fired?
But why?”

 
          
“Well,
they must have found out about
Trend ,”
Phyllis
told her, then frowned as perkily as she had laughed. “But how? Boy wouldn’t
have told them.”

 
          
“Phyllis,
none of this is—”

 
          
“Oh,
I’m
sorry,” Phyllis said, “I’m just
all caught up in my own problems here, and I’m not making sense at all. The
fact is, I’ve been doing undercover work.”

 
          
“Well,
we all have,” Sara said.

 
          
“No,
not for the
Galaxy,
for
Trend.”
Phyllis stood straighter, pride
showing through. “I’m a staffer with
Trend,”
she announced. “And I was sent down here to do an inside story on the
Weekly Galaxy,
and just
wait
till it comes out!”

 
          
“Oh
oh,” Sara said. “Poor Jack.”

 
          
Phyllis
raised an eyebrow. “Poor Jack? What’s that supposed to mean?”

           
“Well, you’re on Jack’s team,” Sara
pointed out, “or you were, and the editor’s responsible for his team.”

 
          
“Oh,
pooh,” Phyllis said, dismissing that with a wave of her slender hand. “The best
thing that could happen to Jack would be to get fired.”

 
          
“But
that isn’t up to you, Phyllis,” Sara said. Anger and tension were making her
neck hurt.

 
          
“Personalities
can’t enter into this,” Phyllis said, as though repeating a lesson she’d
learned in a Social Sciences class.“We’re talking about a very serious First
Amendment issue here.”

 
          
“We
are? Which First Amendment issue?”

           
“Well, the
Galaxy
, of course,” Phyllis said. “The very existence of gutter
journalism like that is a threat to decent news media everywhere, you surely
don’t disagree with
that”

           
“You mean,” Sara said, “the
existence of Hostess Twinkies and Froot Loops is a threat to sirloin steak.”

 
          
‘“Oh,
now you’re being silly,” Phyllis told her.

           
“One of us is,” Sara agreed. “You
tell me one thing we could do down here, the
Galaxy
could do down here, or even any combination of things, that
would threaten the existence or reputation of, for instance, the
New York Times”

 
          
With
a pitying smile, Phyllis said, “So the
Galaxy
is just a harmless enterprise?”

 
          
“No,
I don’t mean that,” Sara said. The memory of Binx Radwell leaving the office this
afternoon, briefcase and shopping bag hanging from his arms, brown-uniformed
armed guard trailing him, employees along his route turning their backs and
studying reference books and doing anything they could not to meet poor Binx’s
eye, was still fresh in her mind. “The
Galaxy
is very harmful in one way,” she said. “It eats its young. That part scares me
sometimes, but I think maybe I’m smarter and tougher, and it’ll come out all
right. But our arthritis cures and our interviews with people from outer space
don’t hurt the First
Amendment
, for
Pete’s sake!”

 
          
“We
have a difference of opinion,” Phyllis said, shrugging again.

 
          
Sara
said, “What it comes down to is, you want to do the same kind of muckraking we
do, but you want to feel holy while you’re having your fun. Like television
movies about the evils of teenage prostitution.”

 
          
“Isn’t
teenage prostitution evil?”

 
          
“So
are the crotch shots on TV.”

 
          
“Oh,
really,” Phyllis said airily, “if you can’t see the difference between the
Weekly Galaxy
and
Trend—”

 
          
“That’s
right, I can’t.”

 
          
“—then
there’s really nothing more to be said.”

           
“You’re right.” Sara turned away,
leaving the bedroom, but then reversed and said, “Wait a minute. What was that
about Boy?”

           
Phyllis had already returned her
attention to her major holdings in recent styles. “Mmm?” she said.

 
          
“You
said something about Boy before, about him not telling on you.”

           
“Well, he wouldn’t,” Phyllis said,
“so Mr. Harsch must have found out some other way.”

           
“You mean, Boy knew about it.”

           
“He’s very forceful, Boy is,”
Phyllis said, with admiration in her voice. “I kept this little cassette
recorder in my bag, going all the time, and I’d always go to a stall in the
ladies’ to switch tapes. One of his reporters heard a click in there— I thought
I was alone, stupid me—and she thought she recognized the sound, and she told
Boy, and do you know what he did?”

 
          
“He
didn’t go to Mr. Harsch,” Sara said. The full extent of the infamy here was
unfolding itself to her.

 
          
“Not
Boy,” Phyllis said, laughing. “He arranged with the girls on his team to cover
for him, and he came right into the ladies’ and into the stall just when I
unlatched the door and he just overpowered me. He sat on
me
on the toilet, and listened to some of the tape, and went
through my bag, and found my
Trend
ID, and then he told me if I didn’t tell him the absolute total truth he would
send photos to David Levin of me doing oral sex on him in the stall in the
ladies’, and he had a girl in there with a camera, and he was
serious
.”

           
Shocked, outraged, Sara said, ‘“He
couldn’t do that! You should have screamed, you should have refused, you should
have
bit
him!”

 
          
“Too
bad,” Phyllis said dryly, “you weren’t there to offer moral support. As it was,
I told him the truth, I told him everything. And then he said all right, he’d
let me alone on two conditions.

           
First, that nobody on his team ever
showed up on a tape or in the story, that he wasn’t connected with me in any
way. And second ...” Phyllis finally wavered, and looked away toward her closets,
and cleared her throat.

 
          
Sara
couldn’t imagine what enormity might be coming next. “Second?” she urged.

 
          
“All
I had to do,” Phyllis said, not meeting Sara’s eye, “was tell him anything
interesting that Jack’s team might find out about anything.”

 
          
Sara
stared. “You mean, spy on Jack’s team for Boy?”

 
          
“I
was already doing it for
Trend ”
Phyllis pointed out, “so it hardly seemed to make much difference.”

 
          
“What
a nasty little bitch you are,” Sara said.

 
          
Offended,
Phyllis said, “Oh, now, no need to get personal!”

 
          
“That’s
why Boy got the Mercer wedding!”

 
          
“Actually,”
Phyllis said thoughtfully, nodding, “you’re probably right about that.”

 
          
“You
can just go to Mr. Harsch right now,” Sara announced, pointing vaguely
westward, “you can
destroy
that Boy
Cartwright for good and—”

 
          
“‘Well,
no,” Phyllis said delicately. “Boy insisted on insurance. There
are
pictures. I’m sorry about Jack, of
course, but you’ll never get a word out of
me
against Boy.”

 
          
“Then
I’ll
stop him,” Sara said, filled
with a clear white flame. “Jack’s life is tough enough without being betrayed
by a smug, self-righteous, mental lightweight little
snip
like you!” Then, astonished at herself, she reared back and
said, wonderingly, “Snip. I never used that word before in my life.”

 
          
“I
am nor a snip,” Phyllis said, deeply insulted.

           
“That’s just the beginning of what
you are,” Sara told her, and pointed a trembling finger at the girl’s nose.
“You owe me the entire month of August rent, and if you don’t pay me, I’ll see
you in Small Claims Court, and
I’ll
bring a photographer, and I’ll just casually mention the tricks you were
turning in this place. As for loaning you my suitcases, ask me again, why don’t
you, what you should do with your clothing! I’m going to make a phone call now,
and if you spy on
me,
you snip snip
snip
, I’ll make you regret it every time
you look in the mirror the rest of your life.”

           
“That’s a
horrible
threat!”

 
          
“And
you’re a horrible person,” Sara told her, and went away to save Jack Ingersoll.
And she was so intent on the phone call she had to make, she never noticed that
the sheet of memo paper containing the license plate number of the murdered
man’s car was no longer amid the clutter on the wall over her desk.