Meanwhile, as Sara was confirming her impotence to herself, the faithless Urbiton had departed and the gulled Del-ray was giving Sara a politician’s appreciative leer, until the secretary said, “Buford, this is a lady from some New York magazine.”
Talk about the kiss of death. Buford Delray’s face closed up like a Parker House roll. The first name of all New Yorkers, as the whole world knows, is Smartass, as in, “Some Smartass New Yorker tried to put something over on me today, but us country boys ain’t as dumb as they think.” And meantime, an Australian from Florida was even now waltzing out of town with Buford Delray’s jock.
Frantic beneath, calm on the surface, Sara said, “I’m from Trend magazine, Mr. Delray, and I—”
She’d been moving forward, intending just naturally to ease on by him into his office, but he rolled like a beach ball into her path, a cold little pursy smile on the front of his Parker House roll. “I’m sorry, Miss, but I—”
“Sara Joslyn,” Sara said, and stuck her right hand out.
Which he did not take: “—have very little time for the press at this juncture, as I’m sure you can understand. Perhaps after the verdict.”
He was rolling slowly backward into his office, hand on the doorknob. Sara pursued, trying to look as though she weren’t in pursuit. “Sir,” she said, desperation getting the best of her, “The Economist won’t print anything about the case, certainly not in this country, but Trend—”
“I’m looking forward to the series of stories The Economist plans to run. Miss,” Delray interrupted, with his smug smile. “And to The Economist’s photographer, as well. If you’ll excuse me.” And he shut his office door in Sara’s face.
Louis was long gone, of course. Sara circled the courthouse like a cat girdling a chipmunk hole, but Louis B. Urbiton was nowhere to be found.
A photographer! That’s what the scam was all about. If it were possible to put out a newspaper for the illiterate, the Weekly Galaxy would be it; nowhere on earth do pictures so literally take the place of thousands of words as in the supermarket tabloids, and none more so than in the Galaxy. While Louis B. Urbiton would spend the next week or so listening attentively, admiringly, even slavishly, at the feet of the dimwitted Delray, Weekly Galaxy photographers would be the only photographers permitted unlimited access to the courthouse (or court house), the murder scene, the witnesses, and anything else that struck their magpie interest, because, of course, the main point in Buford Delray’s tiny mind would be the appearance of Buford Delray’s words, not his fat face, in the pages of one of the world’s most distinguished news journals.
I’m gonna get em, Sara promised herself as she marched to her car for the angry ride back to Branson. I’m gonna nail em to the barn door, and Buford Delray is the barn door.
And that’s a promise.
11
Jack Ingersoll stood on the sidewalk outside Sara’s hotel and watched the families ooze by in their station wagons, campers, vans, pickup trucks. I’m going to get the Weekly Galaxy, he thought as he watched his onetime readers seep past. This time, I’m gonna get em.
Jack Ingersoll at thirty-three had already lived too many lives. A counterculture journalist to begin with, he’d gone straight from college to the St. Louis Massacre, an anti-establishment weekly newspaper fawningly modeled on New York City’s Village Voice. Though it was great fun at first, the fact had eventually become clear, even to the dewiest-eyed among the Massacrees, that they were accomplishing nothing. They were preaching to the (very few) converted, and it didn’t matter what wonderful exposes their industrious digging produced. Human beings know only what they want to know, and if they don’t want to know the facts, the data, the truth, this wonderful truth you have just unearthed for them at great risk and with uncommon brilliance, they just won’t listen. Won’t listen.
Jack’s contemporaries didn’t sell out, exactly. They just moved on to better-paying jobs (after all, they had families now) with more careful publications. Jack stayed longer, until in fact the Massacre was shot out from under him; that is, bought by a conglomerate that turned it into a youth-oriented music and movie paper. Before the Massacre’s massacre was complete. Jack underwent a sea change, a total conversion of all the atoms of his body and brain into their opposites. He didn’t sell out a little; he sold out a lot. The biggest salary bucks in the world of journalism were to be collected at the Weekly Galaxy and its supermarket sisters, and that was because, of pride and prestige and self-esteem and the knowledge of a good job well done there was fuck-all at the Galaxy. They made up for the lack, quite handsomely, with money.
This second Jack was as skeptical and faithless as the first had been engage. While his co-Galaxians squandered their lavish incomes as fast as the bucks rolled in. Jack spent as little as possible, hoarding it all away in expectation of the winter ahead. “Sooner or later,” he would say in those days, “they fire everybody.”
And it is true that they would have fired Jack as well, eventually, if it hadn’t been for the arrival at the Galaxy of Sara Joslyn, girl reporter. Not cynical and burnt-out like himself, she was still fresh from journalism school, with just a touch of employment on an old-fashioned New England local paper to give her a false sense of professionalism.
There’s something seductive about life at the Galaxy; it’s The Front Page without redeeming social significance. Always nosing after a scoop, always a fire engine to chase. Sara had taken to it like a buzzard to entrails. Though Jack had been unable to drag himself out of his mire of unbelief, he had nevertheless staggered at last into action to save Sara. In the nick of time, they’d managed their escape from that particular Pleasure Island, before the donkey ears became too noticeable.
And now Trend. “The Magazine For The Way We Live This Instant.” It’s true the magazine devoted too much of its space and attention to listing the fourteen best real estate agents in Manhattan and the seven best shortcuts to the Hamptons, but in with the service slop for the trendoids and wannabes there was also good investigative journalism, of politics both local and national, of crime both financial and melodramatic, and of chicanery both public and private.
All of which made Trend the perfect place for a Weekly Galaxy exposé, if Jack — and Sara, bless her, wherever she was at the moment while Jack paced the sidewalk out here in front of the hotel — if the two of them could nail down the particulars. The new owners, the old scams. The old felonies: bribery, theft, false representation. Oh, get them.
Not get them for those people out there in the slower-than-molasses traffic. Those were the Galaxy readers, and they would not want to know the truth about their favorite reading matter, and therefore would not listen.
No, the better way to put it to the Galaxians was to make them figures of scorn and obloquy in the eyes of the movers and shakers of their own world, the communications business, combiz: press people, TV people, ad agency people, music biz people, all that vast ebb and flow of ideasmiths who among them create the Zeitgeist, the view of reality in which we all swim. Most of them live at least some of the time in New York, and most of them read Trend.