Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (30 page)

 
          
After
the police left, Mercer and Felicia looked at one another in wordless silence
until yet another goddamn discreet tap at the suite door announced the return
of
Ferguson
, the manager, behind a sad and apologetic
smile. “I couldn’t really keep the authorities out,” he said.

 
          
“No,
of course not,” Mercer agreed, and gave the man a comradely pat on the arm.
“I’m not blaming you, believe me I’m not. It’s my own big mouth I blame,
mostly.”

 
          
Felicia,
clearly troubled, said, “Johnny, nobody believes you shot at that person.”

 
          
“I
have been quoted, and not inaccurately,” Mercer reminded her, “as having
threatened the life and limb of
Galaxy
reporters before. As the cops just now pointed out.”

 
          
“Nevertheless,”
Ferguson
the manager said, “as Miss Nelson says, no
one actually
believes
it was you.”

 
          
“And
nevertheless right back at you,” Mercer told him, “the cops have just requested
I not leave this goddamn island until they say it’s okay.”

 
          
“Oh,
dear,”
Ferguson
said. “And I imagine, at this point, you would
very much like to leave.”

           
“You’re damn right I would. Nothing
against your place here.”

           
“Oh, I realize that. I know what the
problem is.” Looking past Mercer, out the living room’s picture window,
Ferguson
said, “I see that yacht is still there.”

 
          
“They
won’t give up,” Mercer said grimly, not looking toward the damn yacht. “Which
is only one of the fifteen or so reasons why I wouldn’t actually take a gun to
the sons of bitches. On the other hand, I can see why somebody else might, and
I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not that happy they missed.”

 
          
“Johnny!”

           
Mercer patted the air in Felicia’s
direction. “This is just between us,” he assured her. “These particular walls
don't
have ears.”

 
          
“Well,
as to that...”
Ferguson
said, delicately. Mercer frowned at him. “As to what?”

           
“Unfortunately,”
Ferguson
said, “so far this morning I have had to
let two employees go. The maid who would have cleaned this suite was found to
have come to work with a tape recorder, and one of the night girls on the
switchboard offered one of the day girls five hundred dollars to record any
phone calls either of you two might make.”

           
“That’s crazy!” Felicia said,
staring at them both.

 
          
“You
see?” Mercer said, with an angry shrug. “They don’t give up.”

           
“And the suborning of employees,”
Ferguson
said, his lip curling a bit, “seems as
natural to them as breathing. I feel confident of perhaps ninety-five percent
of my people here, including the girl who refused to be bribed, but there’s no
doubt the
Galaxy
will find the other
five percent. And if they don’t, others will. I’m reliably informed that
Green’s Hotel has now filled up with members of the press.”

 
          
“Locusts,”
Mercer said.

 
          
“Oh,
Johnny,” Felicia said faintly. “And we were going to have such a nice, quiet
wedding.”

           
“If I may make a suggestion,”
Ferguson
said, and waited.

           
They both looked at him. “Go ahead,”
Mercer said. “Make it.”

 
          
“I
feel quite badly,”
Ferguson
told them, “that I cannot guarantee the privacy and security you should
have at
Katama
Bay
. I wouldn’t at all blame you for leaving.”

 
          
“But
the cops say we can’t.”

 
          
“You
can’t leave the island, at least not yet. But you could leave the hotel, much
as I would consider that a personal defeat.”

 
          
Mercer
shook his head. “Leave the hotel?
This
is
the most secure place on the island.”

 
          
“Actually,
it isn’t,”
Ferguson
said. “And this morning I took the liberty
of phoning the person I thought might be able to help you, if she would. She
has agreed. May I bring her in?”

 
          
Mercer
and Felicia looked at one another, then back at
Ferguson
. Mercer said, “You’ve got somebody outside
there? Sure, bring her in.”

 
          
“Thank
you.”
Ferguson
turned toward the door, then looked back to
say, “Let me explain first, she is not exactly au courant on current affairs. I
don’t believe she even has a television set. She has no idea who you are,
except a nice young couple I’ve vouched for, who merely want a simple private
marriage and are being hounded by the gutter press.”

 
          
“Won’t
know who I am, eh?” Mercer said, with a half-disbelieving smile. “Well, that
ought to be a breath of fresh air. Bring her on in.”

 
          
Sara
was still scared.
Could
it have been
some goon hired by John Michael Mercer? Shades of Keely Jones and the
shotgunning of the sound truck! But that had been the passion of the moment,
and the destruction was aimed at property, not at lives. And in any event, why
would John Michael Mercer pick on
her
in particular? It didn’t make any sense.

 
          
But
if the attack didn’t have anything to do with Mercer, what did it have to do
with? Someone had come around to the back of the inn at three in the morning,
had come to the glass doors leading to the ground-floor terrace off Sara’s
room, had aimed through the glass and the closed curtains—she’d never drawn the
heavy opaque drapes in there last night—and had emptied some sort of handgun
into the bed she was supposed at that moment to be asleep in.

 
          
Was
it meant to be a warning, made by somebody who knew the bed was empty? But how
could anyone have been sure she wasn’t asleep there? The room was dark, the
curtains not easy to see through. And
what
warning would it have been, anyway, and from whom?

 
          
Somebody
tried to kill me, Sara thought, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable
to even think about the activity swirling all around her here in the Oak Bluffs
command center. Jack, galvanized by the thought of Boy Cartwright coming up to
take over this campaign with a new and different concept of the lead story, was
madly still trying to make the initial concept fly. If there was anything to be
done to save the situation, Jack would do it.

 
          
So.
All day today, the Mercer suite at Katama Bay Country Club was being buried
beneath a cornucopia of largesse, an amplitude of gifts; every red rose from
every florist on the island, cases of champagne, original watercolors by local
artists, the finest fishing equipment. The hotel, clearly at Mercer’s orders,
was intercepting every gift and turning it away before Mercer even got to see
it, but Jack continued anyway, manic, driven, feeling the dusky wings of Boy
Cartwright on the back of his neck.

 
          
And
that wasn’t all. Every employee of Katama Bay Country Club was being
researched, all the way back to high school and all the way out to first
cousins; where there were handles, they would be grasped. The Down Under Trio,
gray-faced and red-eyed but game as ever, continued to hold forth in the
Nineteenth Hole at Green’s Hotel. The
Princess
Pat
, bearing its load of telephoto-lensed photographers, continued in the
offing beyond
Katama
Bay
. Sophisticated long- range microphones
purchased some time ago from a disaffected CIA ex-agent and just expressed up
from
Florida
were being beamed at the Mercer suite from
every possible direction and were recording nothing but the cricker and ghee of
insects, punctuated by the occasional slamming of a telephone.

 
          
And
through it all Sara sat, haunted, hunted, hunched, thinking only about the
eight bullets that had fluffed her bed into the soft-sculpture equivalent of a
psychotic interlude. Who had done it? Why? What would they do next?

 
          
There
was no reason why she should think of the dead man beside the road, nearly four
weeks ago, fifteen hundred miles away in
Florida
. So she didn’t.

 
          
“We
really appreciate this, Lady Beatrice,” John Michael Mercer said, while Felicia
clung to his arm and beamed in delight on their benefactor, and
Ferguson
the hotel manager stood to one side washing
his hands together and smiling on one and all like a lesser saint on a good
day.

 
          
“Think
nothing of it,” Lady Beatrice said, with an accent Mercer and Felicia
recognized as English, but which any normal class-conscious Brit would have
known right away was certainly county, definitely landed, and probably from
within thirty miles of Banbury. A gnarled and ageless ancient in an outdated
but excellent riding habit, Lady Beatrice appeared to have been fashioned long
ago out of fine old leather, well oiled and still sound. “My late husband,” she
went on, “General Sir Eustace Romneysholme, Earl of Romney, believed all
journalists should be horsewhipped on sight.”

 
          
“Your
late husband and I would have got along, ma’am,” Mercer told her, unconsciously
countering her British accent by becoming more Western than he had ever been.

 
          
“My
late husband,” Lady Beatrice said, her agate eyes glinting, “used to say there
were three extraneous classes of life on this planet: tsetse flies, male ballet
dancers and journalists. An enemy of any of those three is a true friend of
mine.”

 
          
“Lady
Beatrice,” Felicia said, “this is really the nicest thing that ever happened. I
was so unhappy before you came in.”

 
          
“I
too have had romance in my life, young lady,” Lady Beatrice told her. “How
could I stand by and see it spoiled? Of course I have to take you into my
heart, and my home.”

 
          
“If
we’re puttin’ you out, ma’am—”

 
          
“Nonsense,”
Lady Beatrice told him. “If you were putting me out, Mr. Murphy, I wouldn’t—”

 
          
“Mercer,”
Mercer said gently, with a little pained smile.

 
          
“Mercer,
then,” she agreed impatiently. “And if you were putting me out, I wouldn’t
permit you to. It’s as simple as that. Now clearly, however unfortunate it may
be, your original thought of a church wedding here is just not on, so of course
we’ll have the wedding at my home.”

 
          
“But—”
Mercer said.

 
          
Felicia
said, “Lady Beatrice, we have
one hundred
'people
coming!”

 
          
“Well,
no, they can’t all stay the night,” Lady Beatrice agreed. “Possibly, with
doubling up, we could house perhaps half of them, but the others would have to
make their own arrangements. You’ll give me your A and B lists.” A sudden and
surprisingly girlish smile creased her morocco-bound face. “It will be just
like house parties in the old days,” she said, a lilt in her voice.