Plan B (33 page)

“What are you saying?” Alison asked, pulling herself off the couch and turning to face me.

“We meant well,” I said. “We meant to help him. But he wasn’t ours to help. Not anymore.”

Alison lifted the remote off the coffee table and turned off the television. She stood there for a moment, looking at the blank screen and then with a quick movement hurled the remote across the room, where it hit the wall with a hollow thunk just below a framed Monet poster and burst into pieces. In the instant of impact the television went on again, the remote managing to send out one last electronic signal before its annihilation.

“Hey!” Chuck yelled, jumping up from the couch. We watched her apprehensively, but throwing the remote seemed to have assuaged whatever tension that had been building up inside of her. She turned to me with a weary expression, and I found myself wondering again how much of a toll all of this was taking on her. “You’re only half right,” she said. “The question isn’t which Jack is the real one. They’re both real and that’s the problem. There are two Jacks, and if you find that confusing, imagine how he must feel. He doesn’t know who to be anymore.”

We considered that for a moment. “Which one’s doing the drugs?” Chuck asked stupidly.

“Shut up, Chuck,” Lindsey said. “Alison, have you talked to Jack about this?”

“We used to talk about it,” Alison said. “Before …”

The picture on the television was once again the front of the Scholling house, as Sally Hughes earnestly summed up her report.
“Once again, we are live in Carmelina, New York, in front of the house where it is now believed that Jack Shaw had been taken. Whether or not he was brought here of his own free will, and whether or not he is even still here, are questions to which we still have no answers. Town records show that the house is owned by
one Leslie Scholling, although we do not know what connection if any she has to Jack Shaw …”

The notion that this was going on right outside the house was somewhat unreal to me. I stared at the television, wondering if somewhere within the grainy image of the house was a group of electrons that represented me. I waved my arm, but it had no visible effect on the screen. Alison walked across the living room and drew the curtains, and on the screen I saw them move across the window. “Cool,” Chuck said quietly, but then gasped as the screen suddenly showed him, standing in the doorway and smiling at Sally Hughes. “Shit!” he shouted, jumping up and pointing at the screen, as if we couldn’t see it. They were showing the footage from Chuck’s earlier interview, but they’d muted the sound so that Sally could speak over it.
“This man, who declined to give his name, is one of the people staying in the house, suspected by the police of having something to do with Jack Shaw’s disappearance. “

“She can’t do that!” Chuck said. “I’ll lose my job!”

“Oh, relax,” Lindsey said. “If you didn’t want to be on television you shouldn’t have jumped to open the door before.”

“He was jumping at the reporter,” I said. “Not the camera.”

“Damn straight!” Chuck said, staring dumbstruck at his image on the screen. Then he quieted down and, running his fingers through his scalp said, “Man, is that how I look? I’m getting seriously bald.” Suddenly, Sally Hughes was back on the screen, looking directly out at us. “We’ll stay here as events develop. For Fox News, in Carmelina, New York, I’m Sally Hughes.” I noticed that she had once again avoided rhyming Hughes and news. Chuck watched the screen intently until they cut back to the studio in Manhattan, and then sat back thoughtfully on the couch. “She’s not going to get away with that,” he said.

“Umm, she just did,” Alison said. Chuck’s beeper went off. He
grabbed it off of his belt and frowned at the screen “Shit,” he said, thumbing the button. “My mother.” It went off again and he threw it across the floor, where it skidded into the debris of the remote control, scattering black plastic across the carpet. Not a good day for electronic appliances in the Scholling home.

“I’m hungry,” Lindsey suddenly said, apropos of nothing. “Is anyone else hungry?”

“I could eat,” I said.

“Me too,” said Alison.

“Let’s go out,” Lindsey said.

“Out?” Chuck repeated, glancing skeptically through the blinds. “What will they do if we go out?”

“Probably follow us,” I said.

“Who cares?” Lindsey said. “We’re not prisoners.”

“What about the cops?” Chuck asked. “We’re not supposed to go anywhere.”

“We’ll be going right into the center of town,” I said. “Surrounded by the paparazzi. What more could they ask for?”

“A white Bronco and a suicide note?” Lindsey offered.

Alison disappeared for a second and returned having thrown a bomber jacket over her sweatshirt. We all looked at her, smiling in the doorway. “Let’s go,” she said.

Jack once told me the trick to handling the paparazzi when they swarmed was simple. “Never back up.” This way, he explained, they can’t pin you down. “If you’re walking, you keep walking. If you’re standing, you keep your spot. It not only keeps you in control of the situation, but you look better in the magazines and on television.”

The minute we stepped outside, the reporters and cameramen, as if responding to some invisible cue, charged as one, all discipline and adherence to the police barricades forgotten. We moved
quickly toward Chuck’s rental, but the mob was upon us. I stood my ground as per Jack’s philosophy, only to get my toes stepped on and nearly smashed in the face by a television camera. Lindsey hustled me into the back seat with her, slamming the door on someone’s overhead sound boom, which broke with a satisfying snap. Chuck and Alison made it into the front seats, and all the while the questions never stopped, the flashing lights and cameras circling us like gnats. “Have you been formally charged?” “Where’s Jack Shaw?” “Which one of you is Alison Scholling?”

The cameras surrounded us, banging on the windows as the reporters clamored around the car. I saw Sally Hughes immediately to the left of a fat cameraman by my window. “Jesus,” Lindsey muttered.

“Hey,” Chuck yelled. “Watch the car!” He turned the ignition and threw it into gear. The reporters failed to back away in fear. Chuck rolled down his window halfway. “Can you please clear out there?” he asked.

His request was met with a frenzy of queries. “Are you leaving for good?” “Where’s Jack Shaw?” “Are you going to see him?” “What are your names?”

Chuck stuck his arm out the window and waved his hand in a gentle up and down gesture, like someone waving an audience to silence before giving a speech. The reporters, sensing their evening sound byte, converged roughly on Chuck’s window, pushing and squirming as they jockeyed for position. “What are you doing, Chuck?” Alison asked him through a false smile.

“Don’t worry,” Chuck said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“That doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing.”

Chuck flashed her a devilish grin and then looked out at the reporters. “I know you have many questions and we want to answer them all,” Chuck said. “You want to know where Jack Shaw is. So do we. We have not been charged with anything
because we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re here because we’re worried about our friend.” There was another furious spate of questions, but Chuck waved them away. “From this point on,” he declared, “I will speak only with Sally Hughes.”

There was an angry, confused murmur from the crowd. “Why her?” someone asked.

“Because of her personal relationship with Jack Shaw,” Chuck said matter-of-factly. “They were an item. I thought that was common knowledge.”

There was a collective gasp from the crowd, and suddenly they all turned to face Sally Hughes. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. In the sudden lull, Chuck found the break in the crowd he was looking for and with tires screeching he peeled out of the driveway, leaving the reporters in a cloud of dust.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Chuck said proudly, as he turned onto Route 57. On our left I saw Deputy Dan running toward his car at full speed while attempting to unholster his radio at the same time. The radio suddenly flew out of his hands and went skittering across the dirt shoulder of Route 57. Yet another electronic appliance biting the dust. I briefly searched for some significance in that observation and, finding none, returned to the matter at hand. “I’m not familiar with this particular technique, Chuck,” I said from the back seat. “What did we actually accomplish back there?”

“
We
accomplished nothing,” Chuck remarked, glancing at me in his rear view mirror. “
I
, on the other hand, accomplished a great deal.”

“And that would be?”

“Foreplay,” Chuck said.

“Pissing off Sally Hughes was foreplay?” Alison asked.

“You betcha.”

“How so?”

“It’s a thin line between anger and lust,” Chuck said.

“Oh my god,” Alison said. “And you believe what you’re saying, don’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Chuck said. “You have to admit, she’s thinking about me now.”

“She’s thinking about how she’d like to strangle you.”

“Strangle me, mount me. It’s all a question of sublimation.”

“And I thought men didn’t care about foreplay,” Lindsey remarked wryly.

“Hey!” I said.

“Present company excluded, of course.”

“Look,” Chuck said, slowing down to take a curve. “Right now she’s thinking about me and she’s feeling something, right? Maybe it’s negative, but it’s still something. She’s no longer indifferent to me. Now I’ve got something to work with. Between anger and indifference, I’ll take anger every time.”

“The saddest thing about this whole theory,” I said, “is that on some level I actually agree with it.”

“This sounds like a
Seinfeld
episode,” Alison remarked.

“A bad one,” Lindsey said.

“Hey, slow down,” I said. We were passing the bend in the road where I’d hit the deer. There were black streaks that indicated the path of the Beamer’s tires where they’d skidded off the road, and a jagged set of tire tracks cut deep into the grass all the way down to the shallow gully where I’d finally come to a stop. Here and there was a smattering of shattered orange and clear plastic from the front lights of the car. I’m not sure if I was steeling myself for a cinematic flashback, or hoping for one, but none came and we rounded the curve, leaving the site of my accident behind.

“A jelly jar … a garden hose,” Chuck murmured thoughtfully. “A cheerleader’s baton.”

“No way,” said the girl above the breasts Chuck was addressing. She was dressed in tight black slacks and an even tighter blue polyester shirt, the bottom three buttons opened to reveal her flat, tanned belly. She seemed very skinny for the breasts she was carrying.

“I’m telling you,” Chuck said. “It’s more common than you’d think.”

“What else?”

“Cucumbers, an electric toothbrush.”

“Shut up!”
the girl squealed in delight.

The topic was
Things I’ve Pulled Out of People’s Asses in the Emergency Room
, one in a handful of popular conversational gambits Chuck employed when flirting in bars. I was often skeptical that scatological talk could work as an aphrodisiac, but Chuck had proven the method successful on more than one occasion.

“I’m serious,” he said, catching the bartender’s eye and indicating the two shot glasses sitting in front of him. As the bartender filled them with Glenfiddich, Chuck straightened his back and rocked on his stool as he stretched, a move that expertly moved him a few inches closer to the girl he was talking to.

“He’s good,” Lindsey said appreciatively. We were watching from our vantage point a few stools down, eating a meal of grilled steak sandwiches and mashed potatoes.

“She can’t be older than eighteen!” Alison said.

“She got in,” I said, pointing to the bouncer, who sat on a stool by the door checking ID’s. “She’s at least twenty-one.”

“A Cookie Monster finger puppet,” Chuck said, tossing back the whiskey.

“No!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Alison groaned.

We were in a pub called McAvoy’s, eating the house specials while we watched Chuck work on the girl. It was a dimly lit, wood-paneled room, with tables off to one side, and a recessed floor that had the bar, a small dance floor, and a pool table. The walls were adorned with framed, autographed pictures of aging celebrities and politicians, with nothing in common except that they all fit into the category of
People Who Would Never Be Caught Dead In Carmelina
. Frank Sinatra, Ed Koch, Marlon Brando, George Bush, Muhammad Ali, Buddy Hackett, and a host of others. Two lazy ceiling fans, installed ostensibly to disperse the thick smoke coming from the grills in the kitchen, seemed instead to be weaving the smoke into something thicker that hung suspended above us, creating a murky sense of intimacy. We’d been momentarily concerned that our notoriety would cause us some problems, but, if anything, the clientele seemed excited to have some quasi-celebrities to gawk at. It certainly wasn’t hurting Chuck any. Walking
in he’d slipped the guy at the door a fifty and said, “Please keep out the cameras, okay?” A quick nod, the money disappeared, and we went inside to eat. The dinner crowd was just beginning to taper off but the place was still full, and we’d only been able to get seated at the bar.