Sloat invariably remembered at Christmas. Jack had been
small enough to associate the name Jerry with Tom Cat’s eternal adversary, and so imagined that the handyman and Mrs.
Jerry and the little Jerrys lived in a giant mouse-hole, accessi-ble by a curved arch cut into a baseboard.
But who had killed Jerry Bledsoe? His father and Morgan
Sloat, always so sweet to the Bledsoe children at Christmas-time?
Jack stepped forward into the darkness of the Western
Road, wishing that he had forgotten completely about Sawyer
& Sloat’s handyman, that he had fallen asleep as soon as he
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had crawled behind the couch. Sleep was what he wanted
now—wanted it far more than the uncomfortable thoughts
which that six-years-dead conversation had aroused in him.
Jack promised himself that as soon as he was sure he was at least a couple of miles past the last house, he would find
someplace to sleep. A field would do, even a ditch. His legs did not want to move anymore; all his muscles, even his
bones, seemed twice their weight.
It had been just after one of those times when Jack had
wandered into some enclosed place after his father and found that Phil Sawyer had somehow contrived a disappearance.
Later, his father would manage to vanish from his bedroom,
from the dining room, from the conference room at Sawyer & Sloat. On this occasion he executed his mystifying trick in the garage beside the house on Rodeo Drive.
Jack, sitting unobserved on the little knob of raised land
which was the closest thing to a hill offered by this section of Beverly Hills, saw his father leave their house by the front door, cross the lawn while digging in his pockets for money or keys, and let himself into the garage by the side door. The white door on the right side should have swung up seconds
later; but it remained stubbornly closed. Then Jack realized that his father’s car was where it had been all this Saturday morning, parked at the curb directly in front of the house.
Lily’s car was gone—she’d plugged a cigarette into her mouth and announced that she was taking herself off to a screening of Dirt Track, the latest film by the director of Death’s Darling, and nobody by God had better try to stop her—and so the garage was empty. For minutes, Jack waited for something to happen. Neither the side door nor the big front doors opened. Eventually Jack slid down off the grassy elevation, went to the garage, and let himself in. The wide familiar
space was entirely empty. Dark oil stains patterned the gray cement floor. Tools hung from silver hooks set into the walls.
Jack grunted in astonishment, called out, “Dad?” and looked at everything again, just to make sure. This time he saw a
cricket hop toward the shadowy protection of a wall, and for a second almost could have believed that magic was real and some malign wizard had happened along and . . . the cricket reached the wall and slipped into an invisible crack. No, his father had not been turned into a cricket. Of course he had
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not. “Hey,” the boy said—to himself it seemed. He walked
backward to the side door and left the garage. Sunlight fell on the lush, springy lawns of Rodeo Drive. He would have called someone, but whom? The police? My daddy walked into the garage and I couldn’t find him in there and now I’m
scared. . . .
Two hours later Phil Sawyer came walking up from the
Beverly Wilshire end of the street. He carried his jacket over his shoulder, had pulled down the knot of his tie—to Jack, he looked like a man returning from a journey around the world.
Jack jumped down from his anxious elevation and tore to-
ward his father. “You sure cover the ground,” his father said, smiling, and Jack flattened himself against his legs. “I
thought you were taking a nap, Travelling Jack.”
They heard the telephone ringing as they came up the
walk, and some instinct—perhaps the instinct to keep his father close—made Jacky pray that it had already rung a dozen times, that whoever was calling would hang up before they
reached the front door. His father ruffled the hair on his
crown, put his big warm hand on the back of his neck, then
pulled open the door and made it to the phone in five long
strides. “Yes, Morgan,” Jacky heard his father say. “Oh? Bad news? You’d better tell me, yes.” After a long moment of silence in which the boy could hear the tinny, rasping sound of Morgan Sloat’s voice stealing through the telephone wires:
“Oh, Jerry. My God. Poor Jerry. I’ll be right over.” Then his father looked straight at him, not smiling, not winking, not doing anything but taking him in. “I’ll come over, Morgan.
I’ll have to bring Jack, but he can wait in the car.” Jack felt his muscles relax, and was so relieved that he did not ask why he had to wait in the car, as he would have at any other time.
Phil drove up Rodeo Drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel,
turned left onto Sunset, and pointed the car toward the office building. He said nothing.
His father zipped through the oncoming traffic and swung
the car into the parking lot beside the office building. Already in the lot were two police cars, a fire truck, Uncle Morgan’s pocket-size white Mercedes convertible, the rusted old Plymouth two-door that had been the handyman’s car. Just inside the entrance Uncle Morgan was talking to a policeman, who
shook his head slowly, slowly, in evident sympathy. Morgan
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Sloat’s right arm squeezed the shoulders of a slim young
woman in a dress too large for her who had twisted her face into his chest. Mrs. Jerry, Jack knew, seeing that most of her face was obscured by a white handkerchief she had pressed to her eyes. A behatted, raincoated fireman pushed a mess of
twisted metal and plastic, ashes and broken glass into a disorderly heap far past them down the hall. Phil said, “Just sit here for a minute or two, okay, Jacky?” and sprinted toward the entrance. A young Chinese woman sat talking to a policeman on a concrete abutment at the end of the parking lot. Before her lay a crumpled object it took Jack a moment to recognize as a bike. When Jack inhaled, he smelled bitter smoke.
Twenty minutes later, both his father and Uncle Morgan
left the building. Still gripping Mrs. Jerry, Uncle Morgan
waved goodbye to the Sawyers. He led the woman around to
the passenger door of his tiny car. Jack’s father twirled his own car out of the lot and back into the traffic on Sunset.
“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack asked.
“Some kind of freak accident,” his father said. “Electric-
ity—the whole building could’ve gone up in smoke.”
“Is Jerry hurt?” Jack repeated.
“Poor son of a bitch got hurt so bad he’s dead,” said his father.
Jack and Richard Sloat needed two months to really put
the story together out of the conversations they overheard.
Jack’s mother and Richard’s housekeeper supplied other
details—the housekeeper, the goriest.
Jerry Bledsoe had come in on a Saturday to try to iron out
some of the kinks in the building’s security system. If he tam-pered with the delicate system on a weekday, he was sure to confuse or irritate the tenants with the Klaxon alarm whenever he accidentally set it off. The security system was wired into the building’s main electrical board, set behind two large removable walnut panels on the ground floor. Jerry had set
down his tools and lifted off the panels, having already seen that the lot was empty and nobody would jump out of his skin when the alarm went off. Then he went downstairs to the telephone in his basement cubicle and told the local precinct
house to ignore any signals from the Sawyer & Sloat address until his next telephone call. When he went back upstairs to tackle the mare’s nest of wires coming into the board from all
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the contact points, a twenty-three-year-old woman named
Lorette Chang was just riding her bicycle into the building’s lot—she was distributing a leaflet advertising a restaurant which was due to open down the street in fifteen days.
Miss Chang later told the police that she looked through
the glass front door and saw a workman enter the hall from
the basement. Just before the workman picked up his screw-
driver and touched the wiring panel, she felt the parking
lot wobble beneath her feet. It was, she assumed, a mini-
earthquake: a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, Lorette Chang was untroubled by any seismic event that did not actually