Baby, Would I Lie?

19

While Sara was off having fun in Forsyth, fooling around with murder trials, Jack devoted himself to the real subject: the Weekly Galaxy. He was hampered by the fact that most of the Galaxians knew him from the old days and would have no reason to trust him, having no reason to trust anyone, since every man’s hand would quite naturally be raised against them, along with the hands of most women and all the more perspicacious children. Still, there was work that could be done. And the first thing was to find their nest, the private home the Galaxy would have rented and turned into headquarters for this operation.

To do that. Jack in his anonymous rental car hung around the parking lot of Jjeepers! — the family restaurant just outside the guarded entrance to Porte Regal, the golf course Ray Jones called home — and waited for a Galaxian to try to get in. Surely they’d be bugging the Jones manse and photographing its bedrooms, or at least trying to get onto the property for such purposes, so all Jack had to do was sit here, listen to a fishing program on the car radio, and wait for a Galaxian to go in.

Except that the one he saw, about 10:30 in the morning, was coming out. Gloomy Don Grove it was whom Jack recognized, one of the reporters from his own team in the old days, now attached like a bad cold to Binx. Don was at this moment at the wheel of a diaper-service truck.

Really? Jack had heard that cloth diapers and therefore diaper services were coming back, for ecological reasons, but at Porte Regal? It seemed unlikely, almost impossible.

But then he looked more closely and saw the company name printed in flowing logo on its side was Empower Adult Diaper Service, and all became clear. And when Don Grove, at the wheel of the truck, and the guard in his guard shack gave one another surreptitious nods and waves, even more became clear. Suborning employees — the Galaxy’s prime business, really.

Jack snapped a picture of the guard, to remember him later, and followed the diaper truck out onto the highway and to the right toward town. The truck stopped a quarter of a mile later, at a convenience store and gas station on the right, where Don pulled up beside the building and stopped. Himself halting a discreet distance away. Jack watched as Don climbed out. He was shucking out of his blue jacket with Empower on the back when a worried-looking guy in a white shirt and blue trousers approached him. While Jack took many photos of the occurrence, the guy clearly asked Don if everything had gone well, and Don assured him that it had. Then Don gave the guy the jacket and the guy put it on, and it fit him just as badly as it had fit Don. Then Don took off his blue Empower cap and handed it to the guy, who put it on, pulling it low over his eyes. Then Don took money from his pocket and gave it to the guy, who looked all around with the most guilty expression you’ve ever seen and then, establishing his criminal intent, put the money in his pocket. All of which was memorialized in virtually continuous photos in Jack’s two cameras.

At last, the guy got into his diaper truck and drove it away, and Don got into a rental as anonymous as Jack’s and headed down a secondary road that skirted the chaos of central Branson. Jack, making himself tiny in Don’s rearview mirror, followed.

And jackpot. Don drove straight to a side street called Cherokee, in the old residential part of town, and parked in front of a low brown ranch house that had exactly the appearance of a place that later turns out to have been the terrorists’ bomb factory. It was the only house in the neighborhood, for instance, with butcher paper over the windows; and several cars parked in the driveway and on the lawn; and a lot of furniture partially under a tarp in the carport; and enough new phone lines going in for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This, Jack told himself, watching Don Grove trudge up from his rental to the front door and on in, must be the place.

How to proceed. Frontally; why not? Having reloaded his smaller camera. Jack got out of the rental, took a few preliminary shots from a distance, then walked boldly across the lawn and directly to the front door, which he knew would be unlocked. (Too many people would be going in and out for everybody to have a key.) He turned the knob, pushed the door open, and went in with a big smile on his face. “Hi! How’s everybody doing? Pumping out those sidebars?”

Startled faces turned his way. He kept moving forward into the nest, still talking, waving his right hand prominently at everybody and anybody, while his left hand held the camera low, snapping, snapping, snapping. To be able to take useful pictures at hip level, without direct visual aim, is a skill well worth the learning for any investigative reporter, and Jack had learned it thoroughly.

Everything here would be on his film: the maps on the walls, the people at the banks of phones, the photographers with their cameras and many bags, the rented office furniture piled every which way, the wastebasket in the fireplace — a nice touch — even the people posed in front of the blown-up life-size color photo of the courtroom at Forsyth that had been nailed to one wall. (These people, “realies” hired for the occasion because they looked so horribly like the actual readership of the Galaxy, had been practicing expressions of nausea and horror when Jack walked in, so that the photo being taken of them would seem to show spectators in the courtroom appalled by the gruesome details of the murder. Kid stuff.)

These realies switched their attention from their photographer to this noisy newcomer but went on looking nauseated. Meanwhile, the regular staff was getting its wits about it. The fact that Jack looked so familiar had given him some lovely extra time. People lifted their heads and saw a face they’d very often seen in the past in circumstances like this, and it was only a few seconds later they remembered that was Jack Ingersoll and Jack Ingersoll doesn’t work here anymore! And it was an additional few seconds after that before they saw the little camera snapping away like a tortoise at his left hip (but faster). And by then. Jack was done.

Most of the faces now staring at Jack were familiar ones, it’s true, but that didn’t mean any of them were friendly. In fact, the four or five guys who jumped to their feet seemed absolutely threatening in their body language as they hurried through the obstacle course of desks and tables and chairs and sleeping photographers, aiming their hands and shouts in Jack’s direction.

As rapidly as he’d entered, that’s how rapidly he exited, and just as amiably, too. Still shouting hellos to old comrades, still waving the sucker hand without the camera in it, still shooting away with the other. Jack backpedaled, crying, “Well, I won’t keep you; I know you’re busy. We’ll be in touch!” And he was out the door, proceeding at a dead run for the rental.

Two of them actually pursued him out of the house, though they hadn’t a hope in hell of catching him before he was in the car and on his way. When last he looked in his mirror, one of them, a true fantasist apparently, was running toward another car as though to turn this into a movie scene, while the other, more sensible, legged it back to the nest to make phone calls.

“Shake in your boots, boys,” Jack told the receding figures in the mirror. “Trend is on the case. And I do mean your friend and mine, Jack Ingersoll, the All-American Boy.”