Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (38 page)

 
          
If
a man from
California
is murdered in
Florida
, won’t someone in
California
notice his absence?

 
          
Yes.
The Los Angeles Police Department, Missing Persons Bureau, confirmed to
Sergeant Helen Sonoma,
Dade
County
sheriffs office, that one Michael Xavier
Hanrahan had been reported missing on August third by his brother, Nicholas
Hanrahan, of
27500 Banetree Drive
,
Northridge
,
California
, home phone 818-555-6904, work phone 818-959-9999. It being just on
five o’clock in the afternoon in Norfolk, Virginia, and therefore just on 2:00
p.m.
in Northridge, California, a distant
Los Angeles suburb on the north side—as the name suggests—of the San Fernando
Valley, Sara immediately phoned Nicholas Hanrahan’s work number, where a
woman’s voice answered, saying, “All-Day Parking.”

 
          
“Nicholas
Hanrahan, please.”

 
          
“Nick
doesn’t come in till later. Try after six.” So she called his home number, and
got his answering machine, a pleasantly gravelly voice, suggesting a
middle-aged tough guy with a sense of humor: “This is Nick Hanrahan, and I’m
out somewhere. Leave your message after the beep.” “This is Helen Sonoma,” Sara
told the machine, after the beep, “of A-Betta Car Rental,
Norfolk
,
Virginia
. We’re trying to locate Michael Hanrahan because of property left in a
vehicle rented by him from our
Miami
location on July eleventh of this year.”
She gave the number of the phone she was calling from, and said, “Please call
collect.”

 
          
As
she hung up, the first two Crawfish cousins came bursting into the house, both
laughing and excited, adrenaline flowing, unable to stop talking and crowing about
their success, waving their cameras around, crying, “We got it! We got it! You
can forget about it, we got it, we got it, we got it right
here!”
And on and on like that, while a couple of dispassionate
technicians plucked the cameras from the cousins’ waving hands and carried them
away to the darkroom. The cousins were persuaded to wait on the front porch,
and things got very quiet, everybody looking toward the former kitchen.

 
          
Another
cousin, this one as nervous and jittery as a rat in a dog pound, sidled in and
produced another camera, which Jack took from him, saying, “You got the
picture?”

 
          
“Yeah.
Gimme my money and I’ll go.”

           
“First we look at the picture.”

           
“It’s there, it’s there, don’t
worry.”

           
“I like to worry,” Jack told him.
“Wait outside.” Ten minutes later, a technician came from the darkroom/kitchen
with word on the fust cousins’ pictures: “No.”

           
“No?” Jack said. “What do you mean,
no?”

           
“The in-focus pictures are mosdy of
an ear,” the technician said, “and the rest are of the casket lid. I think one
of those guys turned the camera the wrong way and it’s
his
ear we’re getting.”

           
“Give me the pictures,” Jack said,
and took the wet smelly things and went outside and dropped them in the lap of
the cousins, who cried, “This isn’t our stuff! You’re trying to cheat us!”

           
“If you’re on this porch one minute
from now,” Jack told them, “large men will come out with baseball bats and turn
you people into dog food.”

           
The cousins flung the pictures of
ears and lids onto the porch floor and stalked off in dignified disgust. The
rat-faced cousin stood by and smoked a cigarette cupped with total secrecy in
the palm of his hand. He watched Jack without blinking.

           
Jack went back inside, and a few
minutes later two more cousins arrived. These didn’t have pictures or even
cameras anymore, but they were bleeding from various parts of their heads and
hands, and they insisted the
Galaxy
pay their cab fare. While Don Grove, shaking his head, went out to give money
to the cabbie, Jack listened to the cousins’ story. Through all the defensive
verbiage and unnecessarily graphic descriptions of physical mayhem practiced
upon their bodies by the guards at The Shack, the basic story was a simple one:
The cousins had been careless. They had let other people see them wave their
cameras around in the same room with the remains. Jack gave them one hundred
dollars and directions to a hospital with an emergency room.

 
          
The
rat-faced cousin’s pictures were extremely out of focus, every one.

 
          
Worse
was to come. Two giggling female cousins seemed to have been unable to
concentrate on anything but their departed relative’s crotch: seventy-two
pictures of gray folded hands with pinky rings. An elderly cousin had managed
to obtain five excellent, clear, in-focus pictures of the casket from the other
side of the room, with not one hair of Johnny Crawfish in sight. A teenage
cousin had taken pictures of the exterior of the house—floodlit for exclusive
taped ABC television coverage and a Crawfish Productions filmed documentary—as well
as pictures of the grounds, the guards, several attending celebrities, the
sideboards loaded with food and drink in the main entrance hall of The Shack,
the built-in organ in the Music Room where Johnny Crawfish had penned such
monstrous hits as “Bedroll Woman” and “My Semi-Drivin’ Heart’s in a
Demihemiquaver Over You,” the breakfast nook where Johnny died, and that was
that: By the time he got to the remains, he’d run out of film.

 
          
And
he was the last to have any chance at all. Enough cousins had been ineptly
showing their cameras by then to alert the pluguglies guarding the entrance
that something was afoot, and from then on every cousin was searched upon
arrival. The discovery of a camera produced an immediate beating as well as
revocation of the entry card. Soon, the highway outside The Shack was littered
with abandoned cameras, the hospital emergency rooms of
Hampton
and
Newport News
and
Norfolk
were awash in battered Crawfishes, and
Galaxy
-inspired traffic through the
Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel connecting
Hampton
with
Norfolk
was all one way: south, away from the
Shack. Retreat had become rout.

 
          
“Screw
it,” Jack told Sara. “Let’s go have dinner.”

 
          
“The
problem is,” Jack said, over scungilli and a side order of spaghettini in
butter-and-cheese sauce, “too many of these celebs now are aware of the body in
the box, and they don’t like it, and they try not to let it happen.”

 
          
“How?”
Sara asked, over scampi fra diavolo and zucchini.

 
          
“Cremation’s
one way,” Jack said, and sipped Chianti. “There are actual no-fooling legit
movie stars in
Hollywood
right now that have instructions in their wills that when they die they
want
no
viewing,
no
publicity, and cremation within twenty- four hours. That’s on
account of us.”

 
          
“But
the fact that they
know
about it,”
Sara said, surprised.

 
          
“Sure
they know about it. Celebs are among our most fanatic readers. We guarantee
their fame and importance. The more bullshit they read about themselves in the
Galaxy,
the more assured they are that
they still have that audience.”

 
          
“And
they don’t want themselves, dead, looked at by eight million people.”

 
          
“Very
narrow point of view,” Jack said. “One that does make life tough for us at
times.” He grinned. “But it has its high points, too.”

 
          
“It
does? Like what?”

 
          
“Like
a little piece of videotape I’ve kept,” Jack said. “I’ll play it for you
sometime. It shows me dressed as a priest, being interviewed on network news in
front of the Bel Air mansion of a very famous singer that just went down. I’m
Father Mulroney, and I say—” Looking pious but impish at the same time, Jack
folded his hands over his scungilli and said, “At a time like this, speaking as
an old family friend as well as spiritual counselor, I believe it is
so
important that the family be left
alone by the media, your good selves included. Leave them to the privacy and
dignity of their grief.” Jack laughed and sat back. “I had that bastard so
ashamed of himself for being a reporter on their lawn he was practically in
tears. And I’d just come out of the house with the camera in my pocket.”

 
          
“The
body in the box.”

 
          
“The
very same.”

 
          
“Didn’t
we send somebody up to The Shack dressed like a priest?”

 
          
“We
did,” Jack said. “And they tried to turn his head around to match his collar.
They aren’t very religious up there.”

 
          
“What
are some other things you’ve done?”

 
          
“You
mean, to get the body in the box?” Jack looked thoughtful and reminiscent. “Ida
was an unwed mother once,” he said, “clutching in her arms the deceased’s
bastard child. She was
determined
the
infant would get to gaze upon his daddy just once.”

 
          
“Oh.”

 
          
“Another
time,” Jack said, “Chauncey was the long-dead son of the family who it turned
out
didn't
die after all when he
disappeared in that Swiss avalanche but made his way home after all these years
just in time for Dad’s funeral.”

 
          
“Oh,
my God.”

 
          
“Yeah,
that one got a little hairy afterward,” Jack agreed.

 
          
“I
should think so.”

 
          
“Then
there’s Ida’s fire,” Jack said, “when I was the fireman.”

 
          
“No
way to burn The Shack, though,” Sara said.

 
          
“Unfortunately
not.”

 
          
Sara
said slowly, “Jack? What if we don’t get it?”

 
          
“What’s
that?”

 
          
“The
body in the box. Sometimes we fail, don’t we?”

 
          
“Never!”
Jack sat up straight over his scungilli. “If there’s one thing
Massa
wants more than anything else on this
planet—or any of the near planets, either—it’s the body in the box. Every time.
The twenty-four-hour cremation is the only acceptable excuse.”

 
          
“Gosh,”
Sara said.

 
          
Jack
shrugged. “Ida says she’s got something,” he said. “She tends to come through.
We’ll find out when we get back.”

 
          
The
gray station wagon parked in front of
147 Edger Street
was surmounted by an official red flasher
light, not at the moment in use. The licensed plates were official, and the
white lettering above the seal on both side doors read
commonwealth
OF
VIRGINIA
,
BOARD OF HEALTH.
“By
golly,” Jack said, “they’re closing us down.”