Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Read online

  Trust Me On This

  Donald E. Westlake

  In this hilarious send-up of tabloid journalism, cub reporter Sara Joslyn trades her position at a respectable New England newspaper — and her professional standards — for a tripled salary at a notorious Florida- based supermarket tabloid. On the way to her first day of work at the Weekly Galaxy, Sara discovers a bloody body in an abandoned Buick. The body— and its disappearance a short time later—are of little interest to her new editor, handsome Jack Ingersoll. Instead, he has Sara and eccentric Galaxy colleagues covering more worthy stories — like a birthday bash for 100-year-old-twins, and a television stars secret wedding. Still, Sara can't help but remember the corpse in the Buick. In her pursuit of sensational headlines, Sara finds murder, mystery, and romance among the scandals.

  G. K. HALL & CO.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  1989

  Copyright © 1988 by Donald E. Westlake.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Large Print by arrangement with Warner Books Inc. and The Mysterious Press.

  G.K. Hall Large Print Book Series.

  Set in 16 pt Plan tin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Westlake, Donald E.

  Trust me on this / Donald E. Westlake.

  p. cm.—(G.K. Hall large print book series) ISBN 0-8161-4740-X (lg. print)

  1. Large type books. I. Tide.

  [PS3573.E9T78 1989]

  813'.54—dcl9

  For Paul Corkery, who is as amused by fact as I am by fiction, and for Dean and Richard, who first sent us kids out to play.

  A Word in Your Ear

  Although there is no newspaper anywhere in the United States like the Weekly Galaxy, as any alert reader will quickly realize, were there such a newspaper in actual real-life existence its activities would be stranger, harsher and more outrageous than those described herein. The fictioneer labors under the restraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no such limitation. Were there a factual equivalent to the Weekly Galaxy, it would be much worse than the paper I have invented, its staff and ownership even more lost to all considerations of truth, taste, proportion, honor, morality or any shred of common humanity. Trust me.

  Contents

  THE FIRST DAY

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  THE FIRST WEEK

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  FELICIA

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  THE WEDDING

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  THE BODY IN THE BOX

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  THE WAY WE LIVE THIS INSTANT

  One

  THE FIRST DAY

  One

  Sara drove out into the wilderness. The clean new road stretched ahead, empty and white, four lanes of sun-baked concrete divided by a low gray cement barrier curled into the surfer’s dream of the perfect wave. In the rented Chevette’s rearview mirror, tinted slightly blue, the same empty road unreeled backward toward the city, shimmering far off in the heat-rise like a clumsily swaying backdrop.

  It was nine-forty on a Monday morning. The twelve-mile-long highway cut across flat tan scrubland under a pale blue sky, absolutely alone and unused except for the maroon Chevette with glittering windows, racing west at eighty miles an hour, containing its pocket of air-conditioning and the person of Sara Joslyn. Out ahead, still far off, the building gradually appeared, sand-colored, rising up at the point of the highway. On the dashboard, the digital clock’s green numbers read 9:42. I won’t be late after all, Sara thought.

  Jack Ingersoll said, “How long since I had a cancer?”

  Mary Kate Scudder flipped through her Rolodex. “Three weeks next Tuesday.”

  Jack shook his head, regretful. “Too soon,” he said. “Too soon.” He paced his squaricle, thinking.

  Sunlight glinted on an object far ahead, then not far ahead at all. Sara had time to register the dark blue car on her side of the road, parked way off on the slanting shoulder, white light fragmenting from rear window and bumper. Then her own little Chevette had shot past that place and it was only in memory that she filled in the picture: The car was tilted, right side lower than left because the shoulder fell away there toward the level of the surrounding plain. The right front door hung open. A person was lying half in and half out of the car.

  A what? Sara’s foot lifted from the accelerator, the Chevette slowed, she looked in the rearview mirror. But she could barely see the parked car back there, it was already no more than a tiny dark lump in all this flat world of beige and whiteness.

  What should she do? Was the person hurt? Had she actually seen a person at all?

  What if it’s a story, she thought, and her foot moved to the brake. My first day, and I walk in with a story. How’s that for starting with a bang?

  But how could she get through the central barrier into the eastbound lanes? She slowed and slowed, still alone on the highway, and then it occurred to her she didn’t have to get into the eastbound lanes. She had the road to herself. Even the parked car was no longer visible in her mirror.

  Fine. A quick U-turn, spewing gravel when her tires slewed across the shoulder, and Sara accelerated back the way she’d come, the morning sun now hot and painful in her eyes as she pushed the little car up again to eighty. Be some joke if another vehicle came along after all.

  But none did. The parked car grew ahead of her, increasingly distinct, and she decelerated, seeing that it definitely was a person over there, half in and half out of the car, dressed in dark clothing, head and shoulders and one arm spread on the ground like an oil spill.

  She stopped just beyond the car, and when she opened her door a bundle of hot dry air rolled in and lay on Sara like a wool blanket. “Jeez!” she said, and climbed out of the car with movements that were all at once sluggish, heat-oppressed. She moved under the sun, her clothes turning to wood, her shoes making dry gritty sounds on the gravel.

  The car was a dark blue Buick Riviera, a year or two old, with Dade County plates; or plate, since Florida cars don’t have a license plate in the front. The rear seat was empty. A stocky man in his fifties lay sprawled face down over the front seat and out onto the ground. The engine was off, but the key was in the ignition. The car radio played salsa music, sounding like crickets on coke.

  The man was dead. Sara hunkered down beside the body and touched his neck, and even though the sun had warmed that flesh, it still felt dead. Then she noticed a kind of soft-looking mound at the back of the man’s head, under thin gray hair, and when she touched it she was repelled; it felt squishy under the skin. I’m a reporter, she reminded herself, swallowing bile. I’m a reporter, I’m supposed to do these things.

 
Hating it, she put both hands on his shoulder, stiff under the dark gray polyester jacket, and lifted enough to see his face. Gravel had embossed the skin. The face was round, tough-looking, pale, not very well shaved. The mouth was slack, the eyes closed. Above the left eye was a bruised hole, black and gray and red, with tendrils of blood.

  That’s where the bullet went in. The squishy place in back is where the bullet broke the skull but didn’t come out.

  Oh, jeepers, Sara thought.

  Intrepid editor Jack Ingersoll stopped pacing. “Legionnaires’ Disease,” he announced. “It was guilt.” Secretary Mary Kate stared at him in repugnance.

  “Guilt?”

  “Sure.” Jack waved his arms about, fingers fluttering for handholds in the air. “They were all vets, did things in the war, never can forget, bad dreams, can’t forgive themselves ...”

  Mary Kate said, “Isn’t that like when Binx tried ‘Legionnaires’ Disease—It Was Suicide’?”

  Jack frowned. “Too close? You think so?”

  Mary Kate said, “Massa didn’t like that other one.”

  Turning away, grimacing, Jack ran ink-stained

  fingers through thinning hair. “If only I could find the ice cream diet, the pressure would be off.”

  The highway funneled to a finish at the building, which bulked four stories high in the middle of nothing. Atop the structure, a monster two-story sign in red and blue neon informed the Parking lots and the surrounding wasteland:

  THE WEEKLY GALAXY

  “the people, yes!”

  Here the four lanes became two, which passed to either side of a stucco-and-glass guard shack. stop said the red hexagonal on the front of the shack, and Sara stopped, rolling her window down as a brown-uniformed guard emerged, a clipboard in his hand. The Florida heat lay on Sara’s face. “Hot!” she said.

  The guard, an older man with dark sunglasses and a deep tan, nodded agreement. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I already knew that.”

  “Do you know about the dead man?”

  The clipboard quivered slightly. Behind the sunglasses, the guard did something distancing. “Which dead man would that be?” he asked.

  “The one back there on the road”—she checked the odometer—“exactly two point three miles, westbound side, in a dark blue Buick Riviera, Florida license plate, Dade County 277 ZRQ. He’s been shot!”

  That last part sounded more excited than she’d wanted, her effort having been to be dispassionately professional throughout the entire report; still, she was pleased with her overall delivery.

  The guard seemed less pleased. After frowning out at the empty road for a few seconds, he said, “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure! Sure about what? That he’s there? That he’s dead? That he was shot?”

  Slowly, the guard shook his head. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m not questioning your accuracy.”

  “It sure sounded like it,” Sara said. This wasn’t the reaction she’d expected.

  “Only,” the guard went on, “I don’t seem to know you, ma’am. How do you happen to be out here?”

  “I work here,” Sara told him. “That is, I do now. I’m starting today.” With a meaningful glance at his clipboard, she said, “The name’s Sara Joslyn.”

  Back on familiar territory, the guard relaxed into routine, consulting the clipboard and saying, “Yes, ma’am, here you are.”

  “My first day on the paper,” Sara said, unable entirely now to keep the excitement out of her voice, “and my first story!”

  “This dead man,” the guard said, sounding dubious again.

  “He’s there,” Sara said, sternly.

  “Okay, okay.” The guard held the clipboard up as a shield. “He’s there, and he’s dead, and he’s shot.”

  “In a Buick Riviera.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I suppose you should be the one to call the police,” Sara said, “but I’ll report it inside.” “Good idea,” the guard agreed. “But just hold on here.” Taking a decal from the clipboard, he put the clipboard atop the Chevette, peeled the back from the decal and, saying, “Excuse me,” leaned his head and upper torso in through the open window.

  “Anytime,” Sara said, watching him slide the decal onto the lower left comer of the windshield.

  Withdrawing from the automobile, the guard collected his clipboard and explained, “That’s the temporary, so you get to park in the Visitors’ lot there. Once your tryout’s over and you’re a regular staffer you’ll get the permanent sticker.”

  “The permanent sticker,” Sara said. “It even sounds romantic.”

  Jack paced, while Mary Kate sat watching him, fingers poised over typewriter keys. Bob Sangster, one of Jack’s reporters, an Australian with a very large nose, came through the door space into the squaricle and Jack flashed him a look of mingled hope, despair, rage and submission. “Senator,” Bob said. “With a nose job.”

  Jack frowned. “North or south?”

  “Nose,” Bob repeated, pointing to his own large one.

  “What part of the country?”

  “Would I know? I’m a simple Aussie.” Consulting a small piece of paper crumpled in his left fist, Bob said, “Where’s Nebraska?”

  “Nowhere,” Jack told him. “Forget it.”

  There were no other Visitors. Sara circled through the empty space, thick white lines on blacktop defining where Visitors should park, beyond the jammed lots for staff parking, and carefully placed the Chevette between the two white lines closest to the main building.

  There was such a strange feeling here, even apart from the dead man in the Buick. Not a feeling of exclusivity, exactly, but of . . . apartness. Alien. As though that building over there, seeming to hunch turtlelike in its wasteland setting as though it found the two-story-tall sign on its head painful, it was as though that building were actually a spaceship, from some universe far away. And she about to enter.

  A spaceship, and a turde, all at once. “Block that metaphor,” Sara told herself, and laughed, and got out of the car.

  Because Jack was in good odor at the moment— his team had done some excellent arthritis stories recendy—he had a squaricle with a window, out which he now stared, contemplating the idea of flinging himself through the immovable plate glass.

  Down below, in the Visitors’ parking lot, a pretty girl got out of a maroon Chevette. Her short-sleeved blouse was dark blue, her linen skirt was wheat, her hair was dark blonde, long and straight. So were her legs, long and straight. In sunglasses she looked, as all women do, like Jacqueline Kennedy. She moved toward the building, and Jack liked her walk. They have ball bearings in their hips, he thought. He turned to Mary Kate, whose white rat face under the yellow Gabor wig looked alert, competent, ready. If he would speak words, she would type them.

  He looked again out the window, having no words to speak. The girl was almost beyond his line of sight. “Does sex,” he said, “cure gallstones?”

  “Well, I’ve never had any,” Mary Kate said.

  Jack turned to look at her.

  “Gallstones,” Mary Kate explained.

  Sara pulled open a tinted glass door and entered a small bare room like a check-cashing operation in a bad neighborhood, except that this place was icy cold. In the opposite wall was a wide glass window with a receptionist behind it. Both side walls were hung with framed Weekly Galaxy front pages in bright primary colors: annual predictions, drug deaths of television stars, invasions from outer space.

  Sara crossed to the interior window and looked through at the receptionist, a rawboned hillbilly woman with black hair teased into a feathery explosion. When this person spoke, her amplified voice came from a speaker grille several feet away to the right: “Help ya?”

  It was disconcerting to talk with someone whose voice came from eight feet off to one side. “I’m Sara Joslyn, I’ve just been hired here.”

  The receptionist had her own clipboard, which she consulted. “Yes, here you are,” said the
disembodied voice, while the receptionist’s lips moved. “Take this badge,” it went on, as a metal drawer below the window slid open, “and take the elevator to the third floor. Ask for Mr. Harsch.” The badge was a red and blue rectangle with many words on it, the most prominent being visitor.

  Sara took it and said, “Thank you,” as a strident buzzing sound came apparently from the receptionist; that is, from the same grid that had been producing her voice. Startled, Sara looked around, noticed the door beyond that grid, and headed toward it. Pushing the door open as the buzzing stopped, she found herself wondering: Who would visit this place?

  Jack watched Mary Kate type. He watched her stop typing. He said, “How many is that?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  A skinny pessimistic young reporter named Don Grove entered through the door space into Jack’s squaricle, saying, “I don’t suppose you want a two-headed calf.”

  Jack considered him. “With photos?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Where is this thing?”

  “Brazil,” Don said.

  “Oh, yeah? Then I want the photos signed by a priest.”

  “If any,” Don said, and exited.

  Jack stared at the window, at the ceiling, at his own clenched left fist, at Mary Kate: “The Galaxy clones a rat!”

  “Ugh!” she said. “A rat?”

  “What time is it?”

  She looked at her watch—a massive intricate timepiece that could tell you everything from the time anywhere on the globe to the fifteen proofs of the existence of God—and said, “Nine fifty- eight and eleven seconds.”

  “Screw it. A man!”

  Typing, Mary Kate said, “The Galaxy clones a human being.”

  “There are alligators in New York City sewers!”

  “Oh, bushwah.”

  “Type, type.”

  She typed, she typed, though with a superior look on her face. All about them, movement had begun. Editors and assistants and researchers and secretaries erupted from their squaricles, striding or skipping or jogging along the hall-lanes, converging toward the elevators. Mary Kate still typed, as Jack yanked the paper from her machine, grabbed up his pads and pencils, and joined the nervous flow.