Baby, Would I Lie?

42

It took Jack nearly five minutes to attract the secretary’s undivided attention, but once he got it, he had it. “Oh my goodness,” she said, her typing forgotten, her filing forgotten, her phones forgotten, all her standoffish busy work forgotten. Looking at the photographs, pale beneath her makeup, rattled beneath her former display of competence, she said, “This is terrible.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jack agreed, as serene as a monk on a mountaintop.

“None of us had the slightest idea.”

“I didn’t think you had.”

“Buford has to be told,” she said, staring at Jack with watery blue eyes. She was a decent lady of forty-something, and though she worked in a lawyer’s office, she had been till now essentially unfamiliar with the depths of human depravity.

“Yes, he must be told,” Jack said, agreeable as ever. “Privately,” he suggested. “Quietly. Don’t you agree?”

“Let me call over to the courthouse,” she said, and reached for the phone. Her finger trembled like a whip antenna as she punched the number, but apparently she hit all the right buttons, because she spoke briefly, in a hushed voice, with somebody named Janie, then cupped the mouthpiece to say to Jack, “The jury’s just gone out.”

“Ah,” Jack said, having timed himself to that event.

“So he should be able to come right — Buford?” she asked the telephone. “It’s Del, Buford. I think you ought to come over to the office right away.”

“By himself,” Jack suggested.

“Yes! By yourself, Buford. Don’t bring — don’t bring anybody with you. I don’t want to tell you on the phone, Buford! All right.” Hanging up, she said to Jack, “He’ll be here in five minutes.”

“Eight minutes,” Jack said, nodding at her desk clock. “See if I’m not right.”

It was seven minutes, actually, so Jack was closer, not that it mattered. Buford Delray the butterball rolled into the front office of his law firm, down the street from the courthouse, looking both worried and irritated, hating to be taken away from what was beginning to look like a really major feather in his cap, a tremendous victory in a capital case — the fact that Fred Heffner from upstate had done all the work wouldn’t matter a rap around Taney County, where Buford Delray had his private practice — but at the same time having to take seriously the undoubted sound of alarm, even panic, in his secretary’s voice. “Yes?” he asked. “What the heck’s so important, Del?”

Mute, Del pointed at Jack, who came forward, smiling amiably, and held up a photo for Delray to look at. “His name,” Jack said, “is Louis B. Urbiton. He’s Australian originally, and he’s a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy.”

“What?” Delray blinked but clung to previous certainties. “He is not. His name is Fernit-Branca. He’s with The Economist; that’s an English magazine.”

Jack held up a second photo. “Here’s Louis B. Urbiton with his Weekly Galaxy editor, a man named Boy Cartwright.” Another photo. “Here are Louis B. and Boy entering the house on Cherokee the Galaxy rented for the duration of the Ray Jones trial. Here’s another picture of the house; that’s a fellow named Bob Sangster, also a reporter with the Galaxy. Here’s a picture of the shadow jury the defense has been using. I guess you know about that. Recognize that fellow there?”

“Let me see that!”

While Delray stared at damning photo after damning photo, many of them with his own dumb and happy face clearly identifiable. Jack took from his inner jacket pocket a slender document, which he dropped on Del’s desk: “Here’s an affidavit from a maid at the Mountain Greenery Motel in Branson, named Laverne Slagel, stating that she was paid bribes by Bob Sangster and by a woman employee of the Weekly Galaxy named Erica Jacke to pass on to Miss Jacke from Mr. Sangster the audiotapes he was making at the shadow-jury sessions. She was told they were love letters. You have pictures there of the two women exchanging tape and money in the motel parking lot.”

“My God!” Delray spread photos out on his secretary’s desk, then leaned on the desk, the better to hold himself up while studying them. “What were these people doing?”

“Going too far, I hope,” Jack said. “By the way, I’m Jack Ingersoll. I’m an editor with Trend. We’re a magazine up in New York. You’ve heard of us?”

Delray, too late suspicious, frowned at Jack. “I’d like,” he said, “to see some identification.”

“Louis B. showed you identification,” Jack said, grinning cheekily at him. “You don’t want identification; you want to know what’s going to happen next.”

“All right,” Delray said, being guarded and wary now that it was all over. “What’s going to happen next?”

“One of two things,” Jack told him. “As you can see from those pictures, all the other people the Weekly Galaxy dealt with were completely taken in. Either I write the story that way, that everyone was taken in, or it turns out that you knew what was up the whole time and were just stringing them along until the time was right to make a number of arrests.”

“I see.” Delray turned and leaned his butt on his secretary’s desk. He thought a while. “There are certainly some misfeasances here,” he decided.

“Mmm.”

Delray squinted at Jack. “When am I going to think the time is right to close in on these people?”

“Trend publishes on Friday. My deadline is nine A.M. Thursday, tomorrow morning. If you planned some predawn raids and arrests, I could have Trend staffers and photographers ready to accompany your men.”

“You want an exclusive.”

“Oh, I’ve got an exclusive,” Jack said, “one way or the other.”

Delray pondered, scratching some of his chins. “We’ll need a judge tonight, give us the warrants. We’ll need to do a bunch of paperwork between now and then, without letting the word get out.”

“I stand ready to assist in any way I can,” Jack assured him.

Suddenly decisive, Delray rose from his secretary’s desk and said, “Come into my office.”

“I’ll bring the pictures,” Jack said, starting to gather them up.

“God yes! And Del?”

“I know,” Del said. “Mum’s the word.”

“Double mum,” Delray told her. “And hold all my calls.”

He was already going through into his inner office, Jack following, when Del called after him, “You’ll want me to tell you if the jury comes back, won’t you?”

Delray couldn’t have cared less about any jury. Pausing in the doorway for a fraction of a second, he said, “Uh... uh... yes, of course. Come on in,” he said to Jack. “What did you say your name was?”

“Jack.”

“I’m Buford.” And the door closed.