Plan B (32 page)

Sullivan finished his speech and put his hat back on his head in a practiced motion designed not to upset the carefully arranged remnants of his hair. The rest of us just stared at him, somewhat taken aback by the venom in his voice. He was probably sincere in his reluctance to call in the FBI, but not, I guessed, for the reasons he’d stated. Sullivan had wanted to crack the case himself, wanted to be the hero who discovered Jack Shaw’s whereabouts. If he had pulled that off, I don’t think he would have minded a media invasion. He’d be waiting for them with a smile and a freshly pressed uniform, standing so that the cameras caught his better side. If he had one.

“Can we go?” Lindsey asked him, sitting up in her seat.

“You’re free to go,” Sullivan responded bitterly. “But I wouldn’t leave town. Like I said, the FBI’s going to want to talk to you.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said.

“I’m going to see to that. I’m going to have a deputy watching the house. And I’d appreciate it if you’d all give Rhoda your driver’s licenses on the way out for a quick photocopy so that I can include it in my report. Unless,” he flashed Alison a humorless grin, “your lawyer has a problem with that.”

We emerged a few minutes later to wait for the car service Rhoda had ordered for us. The sun was high overhead, but the air hadn’t warmed up much since that morning. We stood around in the parking lot, a subdued bunch, our thoughts filled with Jack and what possible string of events could have led to his wallet being found in the creek. I came up with a number of scenarios, some more imaginative than others, none very positive.

“Well, that tears it,” Chuck said with a frown. “I guess I’m not going home after all.”

Lindsey put her hands in her pockets and bounced lightly up and down, trying to resist the chill. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Chuck said. “You know, when you operate on someone, the surgery can go perfectly, or you can have some rough moments. Either way you do the best you can and you sew ’em up, but you never know, not right away, whether you’ve solved the problem or not. There can always be post-op complications. You learn not to pat yourself on the back until you’ve seen the patient come out of it okay.”

We all stared at Chuck, wondering what the hell he was talking about. “And this is related to our situation how?” I said.

“What we did was like surgery. We operated on Jack,” Chuck said. “We did our best. We just don’t know yet if he came out of it okay or not.”

“Now you’re a philosopher?” I said.

“Fuck you. It was a good metaphor.”

“Simile.”

“Whatever. I might as well take up philosophy. Once the FBI arrests me for kidnapping I’m not going to be a doctor anymore.”

We all looked up at an approaching Buick, wondering if it was our cab, but it passed us to pull into the Sunoco station. A teenage boy got out and worked the pump while studying his reflection in the car window.

“Jack’s dead,” Alison said quietly. We all looked at her.

“You don’t know that,” Lindsey said. “There’s barely a reason to even think it.”

“I just wanted to say it,” she said. “To see how it sounded.”

“It sounded fucking grim, that’s how it sounded,” Chuck retorted. “Jesus, Alison!”

“Come on,” she said. “We’re all thinking it.”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” I said.

“Why not?” Alison asked me.

“I just can’t be bothered,” I grumbled, wondering if it was too soon for another codeine pill. Another approaching car slowed down, and this time I could see the plastic sign attached to the roof. “That’s our ride,” I said.

We all climbed in, Chuck in the front seat and the rest of us in the back. “Where are you all headed?” asked the driver, extinguishing his cigarette.

“Well, that’s the question isn’t it?” Chuck said.

At about three in the afternoon we got our first reporter. Her cameraman waited below while she knocked on the door.

“Who’s there?” I asked, although we’d all watched her approach from the living room window, an attractive woman in her late twenties, with silky blond hair and a chocolate suit cut to show off her long, shapely legs. She strode up the lawn with a practiced air of confident indifference, and although she looked familiar, none of us was sure if it was because we’d seen her on television or because she just looked like we should have.

“My name is Sally Hughes, from Fox News,” she said, the words carefully modulated so as to avoid being a rhyming couplet.

I opened the door, casually standing at an angle that kept me out of camera range. “Hi,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“Is this 32 Crescent Lake Road?”

“What gave it away?” I said, looking pointedly at the gold numbers on the outside of the door.

“This is the Scholling residence, correct?”

“No,” I said, doing my best to look perplexed. “The Schollings are in 42, around the other side of the lake.”

“Really?” she said, annoyed. She pulled a folded sheet of note paper out of her jacket pocket and glanced at it, her brow furrowed. “They told me 32.”

“Well, they were wrong then, weren’t they?” I said, offering up an apologetic smile before closing the door. We watched her storm down the front walk, cameraman in tow, and into the blue van parked on the shoulder of the road. They pulled out fast, leaving tire marks on the road. “They’re in an awful hurry,” Lindsey remarked.

“Just looking to scoop the competition,” Chuck said. “She’ll be back.”

And she was, ten minutes later, with a fresh coat of lipstick over a smile that seemed even more fake than it had the first time. She didn’t even wait for her cameraman, but came walking hurriedly up to the front door while he was still climbing out of the van. This time Chuck went to the door. “Hello,” Sally Hughes said to him. “I wonder if you’d care to be interviewed.”

“For what show?” Chuck asked. At this point the cameraman caught up and she made a quick, practiced gesture for him to start filming.

“Fox News.”

“Fox News,” Chuck repeated. “Is this live?”

“No, it’s for a segment we’ll be doing live in a little while.”

“What’s the subject?”

“The disappearance of Jack Shaw.”

“The movie star?”

She cracked a cynical grin. “Are you going to deny that you and the other people in this house are friends of Jack Shaw?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “Are you going to accuse me of it?”

“I recently spoke with Jack Shaw’s agent, Paul Seward, who is
convinced that a group of Jack’s friends kidnapped him and brought him to this house,” Sally Hughes declared smartly. “Would you care to comment?”

“That’s a lovely blouse you’re wearing,” Chuck said. “It shows off your breasts to great advantage.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your breasts,” Chuck said, speaking louder and exaggerating every syllable as he leaned into her microphone. “Your blouse shows them off well.”

She made a frustrated signal at her cameraman, who stopped filming and lowered the camera, while unsuccessfully trying to hide his grin. “What are you doing?” she asked Chuck.

“You asked for a comment.”

She was about to say something else when another van appeared on the road, pulling in behind the parked Fox van. “Hey,” I said to Chuck. “NBC is here.”

“Cool,” Chuck said.

“Shit,” Sally Hughes muttered, turning on her heel and storming back to the road.

“Oh man,” Chuck said, watching her go before closing the front door. “That is one hot reporter. Did you see the legs on her?”

“This is getting interesting.” Alison called to us from the living room. We all ran to the couch to watch the commotion outside. Sally Hughes and her legs were arguing with the man who’d climbed out of the NBC van, pointing to the house and then back down the road. Meanwhile, a white van with the ABC logo drove up from the other direction and parked across the street from the other two vans. The ABC van had a woman reporter as well as two men, who jumped out of the van and began hurriedly fiddling with the satellite machine on their roof.

“I’m having an OJ flashback,” Chuck said.

“We’d better lock the gate,” I said.

“We don’t have a gate,” Alison said.

“Oh. Don’t bother then.”

“Man,” Chuck said, indicating Sally Hughes again. “Is it just me or is she seriously hot?”

“Are you ever not thinking about sex?” Lindsey said.

“Sex is like air,” I said. “It isn’t important unless you aren’t getting any.”

“Point taken,” Lindsey said, patting Chuck sympathetically on the shoulder.

“Screw the both of you,” Chuck said.

Within an hour there were six vans and a number of cars crammed onto the shoulders of Crescent Lake Road, and twenty or so news people and cameramen scurrying back and forth. All of the major networks seemed to be accounted for, as well as some of the tabloid television shows. Deputy Dan, who’d been parked down the road ever since our visit to the Sheriff’s Office, couldn’t help but be drawn into all the excitement. He parked his cruiser on our side of the road, blocking off the Schollings’s driveway, and radioed for a pickup truck to come and deliver blue police barricades, which he used to cordon off the reporters on the opposite shoulder. Once he had the media penned in, Deputy Dan stood in the road, waving along the rare passing car and chatting with the reporters.

Pretty soon there were live broadcasts going out on all the networks, news correspondents earnestly telling the masses that Jack Shaw’s wallet had been found in a creek not far from this house, in which four of his friends were staying under suspicious circumstances. That was pretty much all anyone knew, but they knew how to tell it over and over again, adding irrelevant bits of stray data and cautious speculation, as well as the occasional interview with an overly eager Deputy Dan.

“Does the Sheriff’s Department believe that Jack Shaw was abducted?” asked Sally Hughes from Fox News.

“I can’t comment on that at this time,” Deputy Dan answered enthusiastically, staring directly into the camera as if searching for the millions of viewers he was addressing.

“Isn’t it true that Sheriff Sullivan obtained a search warrant for this house?”

“I’m afraid I can’t comment on that, either,” he answered, although it was clear he was dying to. Sullivan had obviously had a session with him, telling him to keep his mouth shut or else.

“We have information that after finding Jack Shaw’s wallet in a nearby river, Sheriff Sullivan searched this house, and subsequently questioned the four people staying here, people known to be friends of Jack Shaw’s.”

Deputy Dan stared at her uncertainly. “Urn, was that a question?”

You could see the exasperation in Sally’s eyes. “Can you confirm any of these facts?”

“Oh,” said Deputy Dan, relieved to have located the question mark. “No comment.”

“Will the FBI be interviewing the occupants of this house?”

“I assume so,” Dan said.

“So the Sheriff’s Department has notified the FBI?”

Deputy Dan looked positively crestfallen at his screw-up. “Now wait a minute …”

“You just said they would be questioning the occupants of this house, which means there has to be at least a suspicion of wrongdoing on a federal level, isn’t that right?”

“You said that,” Dan said defensively and you could see the fear in his eyes. “I never said that . . .”

“She is good,” Chuck said appreciatively from the couch, where we were all spread out to watch the news.

“She’s not a bad news correspondent either,” Lindsey teased.

“I’d give her an exclusive,” Chuck remarked salaciously.

“It’s only an exclusive if you’re offering something no one else has had,” I said.

“True,” Chuck admitted.

“I would almost welcome the FBI,” Alison said. “At least then we’ll know someone is out looking for Jack who’s more competent than this loser.”

The television was now showing stock footage of Jack from
Blue Angel
, standing in a restaurant with a cocky expression on his face as he addressed a mob boss who was eating there. The mob boss was played by a character actor whose name I couldn’t remember, but I knew I’d seen him on Broadway in something or other. On TV Jack seemed fake, a product of Hollywood, like those computer image dinosaurs they used in
Jurassic Park
. The unreality of the whole situation suddenly hit me. Who was Jack Shaw? Was it this man on the screen, neatly sidestepping a lunging attacker and kicking him into the salad bar? Because that person was a stranger to me. And yet I recognized him as my friend Jack. We thought we knew the real Jack, that we could help him because he was our friend, but seeing him on television now, for the first time I found myself considering that this was the real Jack Shaw, and that our friend was just a piece of his past, left behind like the rest of us.

“We made a mistake,” I said.

“What?” Alison asked, turning to look at me.

“We were so sure we were right,” I said. “We were sure that we knew the real Jack, and that the famous Jack Shaw was just a job, or a persona, but it wasn’t.” I pointed to the screen, where Jack was now riding a motorcycle into the desert. “That’s the real Jack Shaw,” I said. “The person we knew isn’t the real Jack, it’s the old Jack, and he’s gone.”