Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 (39 page)

 
          
“I
can’t find it in my heart to blame them,” Sara said.

 
          
Inside,
they found Ida dressed like a Gray Lady or something; a round gray pillbox hat
with some sort of brass symbol on the front, a severely tailored pearl-gray
suit with high-lapelled white blouse, black stockings and disgustingly sensible
black shoes.
“There
you are,” she
said to Sara, and gestured at a plastic dry cleaner’s bag draped over a chair.
“Your uniform. Try it on.”

 
          
Jack
said, “Ida? Is that car out there yours?”

           
“It’s the real thing,” Ida told
him. “It cost us.”

           
“Doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “Not
if you have a way to get in.”

           
“We’ll get in,” Ida said.

 
          
Sara
picked up the plastic bag by its wire hanger and saw inside what appeared to be
a uniform identical to Ida’s. A package of black stockings and another round
hat and a pair of those tugboat shoes were also on the chair. “I’m supposed to
wear this stuff?”

 
          
“We
don’t have much time,” Ida pointed out. “It’s after eight, and the viewing
stops at ten.”

           
“All right.” Sara wandered off into
the empty dining room to change. While transforming herself into something as
repelling and bloodless as Ida, she wondered what Ida’s idea was, and whether
or not it would work. The people guarding The Shack; were they capable of
beating up women who looked like
this?
Feeling excited, but also a bit queasy with apprehension, Sara went back out to
the living room, clomping along in shoes that actually fit. In fact, all the
clothes fit, and so did the hat.

 
          
“Ravishing!”
Jack said. “My darling, fly with me! You’ve never looked lovelier.”

 
          
“Thank
you, Jack,” Sara said.

 
          
Don
Grove called over from his desk, “Sara? Did Ida tell you about your phone
call?”

 
          
“Phone
call?” Before leaving, Sara had Scotch-taped to the receiver of her phone the
names “Helen Sonoma” and “A-Betta Car Rental,” so that anyone answering the
phone if its light flashed would know which scam was being pulled. Now she said
to Ida, “Who was it?”

 
          
Impatient,
Ida said, “The info’s on your pad there, you can take care of it when we get
back.”

           
“Just let me look,” Sara said,
moving toward her desk.

           
Ida said, “Jack, we don’t have much
time.”

           
“This’ll only take a couple
minutes,” Sara promised.

           
“Go ahead,” Jack told her, while Ida
looked
very
impatient.

 
          
The
message was from Nick Hanrahan at his home number. Sara called, identified
herself as the person from A-Betta, and Nick Hanrahan’s pleasantly raspy voice
said, “You’re not the only one looking for Mike. I’m looking for him, too. His
landlord called me the first of August. When did he rent that car from you
people?”

 
          
“He
returned it the twelfth of July.”

           
“Yeah, he flew to
Miami
the eleventh,” Nick Hanrahan said. “That
was on his desk calendar when I went into the place. But I got nothing on him
after then. What did he leave in the car?”

 
          
“A
gun,” Sara said.

           
“Oh,” Nick Hanrahan said. “Jesus.
Yeah, I guess you people could get a little uptight, something like that.”

 
          
“It
would help,” Sara said, “if we knew why Mr. Hanrahan might have been carrying
that gun.”

           
“Well, he’s a private eye,”
Hanrahan said, and then laughed self-consciously and said, “Not like it sounds.
Not like in the movies.”

           
“I’m not sure I understand,” Sara
told him.

           
“See,” Hanrahan said,“where he
works—Well, let me start with me. I’m a partner in a bunch of parking garages.”

 
          
“All-Day
Parking.”

 
          
“That’s
us. We got a bunch of locations around the greater
Los Angeles
area. Now, you’ve got a lot of cash
operations, a business like that, you’ve got guys sometimes try a little
hustle, so we hire a company like Western States—that’s who Mike works for—”

 
          
“Yes,”
Sara said, “that’s what he listed on the rental form. Western States
Investigations.”

 
          
“Right.
They’re mostly industrial security, like for people like us. Put in undercover
people, whatever, anytime we think we’re getting a short count. And with stuff
like this, you don’t go to court, you know? So Western States, they make the
point for us, you know?”

 
          
“We
have similar situations in our business,” Sara said.

 
          
“Yeah,
I suppose you do,” Hanrahan said, “a car rental place, so you know what I’m
talking about. So anyway, Mike works for them, through me recommending him when
he moved out here, and when they’ve got these occasional regular
investigations, not this employee scam stuff, he usually does it.”

 
          
“So
he really is a private detective,” Sara said, being careful to speak of Michael
Hanrahan in the present tense.

 
          
Hanrahan
laughed. “More than Western needs, sometimes. He’s only supposed to go through
the motions, you know? Keep the client happy. But like this trip to
Miami
, he told Klein—Klein’s his manager, at
Western—he told Klein he had to show some expenses anyway, for this rich
client—”

 
          
“Which
client?”

 
          
“I
dunno,” Hanrahan said, “some rich woman, some star’s widow or something.
Anyway, Mike said he had to show expenses anyway, and he’d like a couple days
out of town, so he flew to
Miami
. And now he’s disappeared, and you tell me there was a gun in the car.
What gun, do you have a description?”

 
          
Sara
had made herself ready for this one. She read off a description she’d culled
from a firearms magazine: “A .38 Special Colt Cobra.”

 
          
“Huh,”
Hanrahan said. “A concealment gun. I dunno, maybe, doesn’t sound like any
weapon I’ve ever seen around him. But could be. Leave anything else?”

 
          
“No,
sir.”

 
          
“What
local address’d he give?”

 
          
“None,”
Sara said. “Only Western States, on Sunset Boulevard.”

 
          
“Okay,
look,” Hanrahan said. “I’ve reported Mike missing to the
L.A.
police. I’ll tell them about this new
thing, they’ll get in touch with the
Miami
cops, they’ll come pick up the gun. Okay?”

 
          
“Fine,”
said Sara. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Hanrahan.”

 
          
When
she hung up, Ida was standing there looking bad-tempered. “That was more than
two minutes,” she said.

 
          
“Sorry,
I’m ready now.”

 
          
Jack
said, “I wish you both every success.”

           
“Thanks,” Sara said. “I just wish I
had jeans or something to change into when I get back.”

           
“I’ll get you some stuff from the
hotel,” Jack promised, and turned to Ida to say, “Ida, is it permissible to
know what you’re doing?”

 
          
Ida
picked up from her desk a black leather old-fashioned doctor’s bag. ‘“We’re
shutting the viewing down,” she said.

 
          
‘“Why?”

           
“The corpse has AIDS,” Ida said.

 
          
The
Shack flamed white, a great colonnaded columned antebellum plantation house
gleaming alabaster in the black depths of space. White lights flared at it,
banks and walls and towers of light, washing the tall broad structure with
color- destroying glare. Within that light, wood turned to porcelain and paint
to frozen milk. Windows could show nothing against that blaze; they stood black
within the ivory walls, reduced to the architect’s idea of windows.

 
          
Grass
surrounding the main house was gray, the winding path to the front door black,
the mourners moving slowly on that path both black and bent. Within the dazzle
of the lights, it seemed there was no sound, no color, barely any movement
possible. But beyond them, in the gray ordinary night of the world behind the
lights, thousands moved, tens of thousands moved, alive with color and noise.

 
          
The
manifold mourners of Johnny Crawfish, uninvited, unneeded, crowded the highway
along the edge of the compound, trembled close to the razor-wire, and called
out the names of still-living celebrities they saw step out into the field of
light and make their bent way under that brilliance up to the main house and
their farewell to “the troubled troubador of our troubled times”
(Newsweek).
Uniformed police, on foot
and on horse and by car, patrolled the outer perimeter, keeping the highway
open, keeping the Unwashed from the Elect, maintaining order in this “hour of
national grief’
(Time).
Old compadres
of the deceased, rough and ready men, served as ushers within the grounds,
escorting the “peers of the peerless”
(People).
Tape cameramen for ABC and film cameramen for Crawfish Productions turned the
ghastly lunar landscapes they saw inside their machines into images of somber
beauty, filled with famous faces thinking long thoughts about “the Prodigal Son
America
took to its heart”
(
USA
Today).
And all around was
the hubbub of life, the surge and swell of the crowd, the murmurs of the
invited guests, the brief comments and directions of the ushers, the halloos
back and forth among the cousins.

 
          
At
first, in all that shifting and sonorous throng, the sound of the oncoming
siren could barely be heard at all. First one police officer, then another,
looked up from his endless chore of crowd control to see that flashing red
light coming, and to realize at once it wasn’t just another ambulance. (There
had been several ambulances already this evening, for those overcome by emotion
or the ushers, and for a few who had mistaken their footing and fallen beneath
the crowd.) But this was something else, official, and moving fast.

 
          
“Back
there! Back there! Keep clear! Clear this area! Get out of the
way!”

 
          
The
gray station wagon roared into sight, and past the gaping mob, who had no idea
what to make of the two grim-faced women they just barely saw within it. The
station wagon flashed by, screaming, strained into a hard tight rubber-
shredding turn at the entrance, and jolted to a stop just inches from the side
of a Crawfish jeep blocking the drive.

 
          
Officials
and guards and television producers came running from everywhere, as the two
women stepped from their car, as gray and grim as the backspill that lit them.

 
          
‘“What’s
going on?” screamed a State Police captain. “Who are you people?”

 
          
“Court
order,” Ida snapped, slapping onto the hood of the station wagon documents it
would take hours to prove false. “This place is shut
down”

 
          
In
the hotel room they shared, while looking for clothes for Sara to change into
later, Jack found beneath her underwear an envelope marked
to be

 
          
OPENED IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH.

           
What? Jack fingered this envelope,
trying to decide if it was a gag or not. Was Sara the kind of person to hide in
a drawer an envelope like this containing itching powder or some sort of joke
remark or something like that? No; it wasn’t her style.

 
          
So
what was this? Jack thought it over, and came to the conclusion that it
probably had something to do with Sara’s dead man again. Also, he told himself,
as her editor and companion, he had certain rights and privileges in a
situation like this. And finally, realizing he was aflame with curiosity, he
stopped arguing with himself and ripped the damn thing open.

 
          
He
read slowly, with mounting surprise and then mounting unease. Something was
wrong here. When he finished, he read the paper again, and this time he saw
where Sara had made her mistake. Phyllis Perkinson wasn’t the killer of the
dead man beside the road, or the shooter of bullets through the hotel room
window. There was one assumption Sara had made in this letter that was
absolutely wrong.

 
          
Which
meant—

 
          
“Good
God!” Jack cried aloud, and ran from the room.