Дональд Уэстлейк - Baby, Would I Lie?

There was no way not to believe that protestation. Cal is who he seems to be, and if this whole situation is weird, so what? Most situations are weird, if you stop to look at them. “I apologize,” Sara said with absolute sincerity. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I just wasn’t sure.”

“I imagine,” Cal said as the red sea receded from his face and he tried a tentative smile, “you get a lot of fellas expressing interest.”

“Some,” Sara admitted. “I’d like to see Ray’s house this afternoon. Very much. Thank you.”

And what has Jack Ingersoll been up to all this time? Plenty. Plenty.

For one thing, he’s been on the phone a lot with Hiram Farley, his boss at Trend back in New York, explaining that while everything is all right here and Sara Joslyn has not lost her marbles after all, nevertheless it seems to Jack that he ought to stay a little longer in Branson, just a little longer, to nail this story down here. Going to be an interesting story, maybe two stories.

“What two stories?” Hiram, on the phone, sounded just as dour and unimpressed as he looked in person.

“Time will tell, Hiram,” Jack said, breezy but serious nonetheless. “I think we may have a little something to say about our friends on the Weekly Galaxy . I don’t want to spoil it for you—”

“Go ahead, I don’t mind.”

“But I do, Hiram. I don’t want to promise what I can’t deliver. Just give me a couple days here to be sure I’ve got what I think I’ve got.”

“We have a reporter on the scene.”

“And she’s doing the job, she’s doing fine. Hiram, you’d be proud of her, she’s linked up with Ray Jones’s best friend , his actual real-life best friend, she’s on the inside , she’s going to bring us so much meat !”

“Then leave her to it. I believe you have one or two things on your desk back here in New York.”

“I’m taking care of all that, Hiram, I’m taking care of everything. I just need a couple more days here to—”

“You and Sara have an extracurricular association, do you not?”

“Hiram! What are you saying? Do you think I’d stay away from the office for nothing better than sack time ? Hiram, we know each other!”

“Oh, very well,” Hiram said, because, in fact, he did know Jack. “A couple more days.”

“You’re going to be so happy, Hiram.”

“Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”

“Okay. You won’t be un happy. You won’t be too unhappy. You won’t be any more unhappy than you can stand, how’s that?”

“See you next week. Jack. In New York.”

So that was part of Jack’s adventures on the telephone. The rest of his phone surfing concerned his other projects for Trend , those items that were, as Hiram had so delicately mentioned, on his desk back in New York. With an encouraging call here, an apologetic call there, an explanatory call somewhere else. Jack managed to keep all his current Indian clubs in the air by long distance, and then he grabbed his cameras and went outside.

To take pictures. Many pictures. Pictures, for instance, of Louis B. Urbiton at lunch in a Forsyth diner with the prosecution team of Buford Delray and Fred Heffner. Pictures of various scalawags entering and leaving the Galaxy nest on Cherokee. Pictures of Harry Razza, drunk with various other drunks, all of them members of the fourth estate, including pictures of Harry handing great wads of money to bartenders to keep the other drunks drunk.

And this morning, pictures of a very disheveled Don Grove and Chauncey Chapperrell being transported in handcuffs from the holding cells in the back of the Branson police station and around to the Branson municipal court, where there was no problem of overcrowding in the spectator seats. And even, illegal though it might be, pictures (taken when nobody was looking) of Don and Chauncey in court itself, being tongue-lashed by a judge while a black-suited Galaxy lawyer who looked remarkably like a ferret stood silently to one side, eyes darting this way and that, searching for rats.

This sequence was followed by further pictures of Don and Chauncey looking abashed in the city hall parking lot with the ferret attorney, after that creature had paid their fine and agreed they would be out of the state of Missouri by the end of this calendar day. And these were followed by pictures of Don and Chauncey snickering together in that same parking lot, once the company ferret attorney had left. And the last in the series, just a split second before Jack went away from there to seek for greener pastures, was of Don staring open-mouthed directly into the telephoto lens — lovely tonsil shot.

Jack knew the Binx Radwell reporter team, or most of them. They’d been his own team, once upon a time, in those happily dead bygone days of yore when he himself had been a Weekly Galaxy editor. The few additional members of the team, added since his reign, had been easy for him to pick out and become familiar with. He was determined to get each and every Galaxian in Branson on film, to get each and every one of them doing something he or she shouldn’t.

It was working, too. Still, as Jack drove away from the gaping-mouthed Don Grove, it occurred to him there was one member of the team he hadn’t seen for some little while. One-third of the Down Under Trio, the indomitable Aussies. Louis B. Urbiton and a photographer were hanging out with the prosecutors. Harry Razza was continuing to ply the world’s press with drinks.

But where was the lanky, laconic Aussie with the big nose? Where was Bob Sangster?

The automobile that Sara and Cal shared, he driving, as he took her out to see Ray Jones’s house, was a maroon Jaguar town car with the steering wheel on the right instead of the left. So the car had been built for use in Britain and its Commonwealth, or maybe Japan or some other part of the world where traffic keeps to the left, and it had either originally been driven in that country or had been bought this way by Ray Jones to show off. Whichever the case, Sara found it unsettling to be in the driver’s seat, looking out through the windshield at the uneven and nerve-racking traffic of southern Missouri in tourist season, and have neither steering wheel nor foot controls for comfort. Her foot kept stabbing for the brake, her hands kept twitching in her lap, and it wasn’t until they were in Hollister, where everybody had to slow down a bit, that she could divert enough attention from the road to say, “This is a nice car. How come Ray happens to own it?”

“He bought it from Jeremy Irons,” Cal said, laconic and open, both eyes on the road.

Pursue that? No. Clearly, it was one of those facts that was best left alone. The whole story, even if she managed at last to mine it out of Cal, would have as its connecting core something commonplace like a shared agent or a booking manager’s mother’s next-door neighbor. Leave it where it is: A country singer in Branson, Missouri, owns a right-wheel Jaguar that he bought from Jeremy Irons.

All of which led Sara to remember the first rule of life, a rule that all reporters and many other people are well aware of. The first rule of life is: Everything is either mysterious or boring — that is, either unknown or known. The unknown is mysterious and the known is boring. This postulate explains everything and is therefore boring. (The corollary is that insecure people prefer to be bored because it’s safe.)

Everywhere you go in the vicinity of Branson, Missouri, the vehicle driving ahead of you is either a cement mixer (because of the massive amount of cheap construction going on) or a Ride the Ducks open-top bus. This time, as they drove from Hollister around to Table Rock Dam, just down to the right from which Belle Hardwick had been so furiously murdered, it was a Ride the Ducks bus leading the way. Tourist children leaped and bounced on top of the thing as though it were a popcorn maker and they the corn, while their parents excitedly jabbed one another and pointed at trees.