The Talisman

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 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 toward 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 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. ‘Electricity – 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 tampered