Confess, Fletch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Nothing will happen. My curiosity about Connors is more than casual, Andy. I need to know what sort of a person he is.”

  “Really, Fletch.”

  “Take the Porsche, take the train, fly to Genoa, rent a car, do whatever is easiest for you. You need to get away a day or two, anyway.”

  “Is that what you’re really thinking?”

  “No. I really want to know about Bart Connors.”

  “Your precious villa.”

  “You’ll go?”

  “Of course. How can I say no?”

  “I thought you were saying no.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, darling. I’ll leave my father’s estate to wolf lawyers and vixen Sylvia, and fly to see if your tenant is happy.”

  “I’ll appreciate it.”

  “Anything else I can do, Big Boss?”

  “Yeah. After you look at Connors, come to Boston. Have you ever made love in the fog?”

  “Fletcher, I have to straighten things out here.”

  “Forget it. The whole estate isn’t worth a fart in a gale of wind. We can take care of your precious Ria and Pep.”

  There was a silence on the line.

  “Andy?”

  “I’ll come as soon as I can, Fletch. Until then.”

  V

  A C R O S S the Charles River the Cambridge Electric sign, still lit, looked dull through the fog. Cars going along the highways on both sides of the river used parking lights or headlights.

  After he shaved and took a cold shower, he did his hundred push-ups on the bedroom carpet, a towel spread under him.

  Not dressing, he padded down the corridor.

  The girl had run along here the night before. She had found herself in a situation she had had every right to think playful and fun but which suddenly went wrong, desperately wrong, hopelessly out of her control. She fled. Would she have fled the apartment naked?

  Or was her running down the corridor, perhaps pretending to be frightened, part of her play?

  In the living room, Fletch sat on the stool of the baby grand piano and stared at the spot where she had lain. The dim morning light, the shadows between the divan, beyond the coffee table, did little to alleviate the original shock of her presence, her smooth, sun-touched skin, the youthful fullness, leanness, shape of her body, the queer angle of her head, the discomfort in her face, her being dead.

  Ruth Fryer. Ms. Fryer. Fletch knew more about her. She was about twenty-three. She had been brought up in health and self-confidence by loving parents. Boys, men had loved her. She had loved them, loved her freedom. She trusted. She had always been treated gently, considerately. Until last night.

  Last night she had been murdered.

  He went through the dining room, pushed open the swing door to the kitchen, and snapped on the light.

  There was no milk or cream in the refrigerator, but there were five eggs and some butter. He would scramble eggs with water. Instant coffee was in a cupboard.

  While he was scrambling the eggs he heard the old iron grille of the elevator door clang shut. Then he heard a key in a lock.

  To his surprise, the swing door from the front hall opened.

  In the door stood a woman, carrying a plastic shopping bag by its handles. Her eyes were wide-set and huge, her cheekbones high, her lips curiously long and thin. Her raincoat was open, loose. Around her hair was a red, blue and black bandanna. She was in her mid-fifties.

  “Good morning,” Fletch said, staring from the stove.

  “I’m Mrs. Sawyer. I clean here Wednesdays and Saturdays.”

  “I’ll try to remember.”

  “That’s all right.” Her smile was directed more at Fletch’s confusion than his nakedness. “I run naked around my place, too.”

  “You arrive early.”

  “Don’t apologize. I don’t buy those magazines, but I’m not so old I don’t enjoy seeing a naked man. ‘Course, you aren’t black, Honey.”

  Fletch took the fork out of the frying pan.

  When he turned, she was standing directly before him, searching his eyes.

  “Before I do anything,” she said, “you answer me.”

  Fletch was not about to back against the stove.

  “You kill that girl last night?”

  Fletch answered her eyes. “No.”

  “You ever kill anybody, anytime?”

  Fletch could not answer her eyes. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “In a war.”

  “All right.” She put her shopping bag on the table. “Your eggs are burning.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “It’s in this morning’s Star. Mister Connors said to expect a Mister Fletcher.”

  “Do you still have the newspaper?”

  “No. I left it in the subway.” She took off her coat and laid it neatly across the table. “Here, give me that pan.”

  Fletch looked down at himself.

  She said, “So old Anne Sawyer can still do that to young men. My, my. I’ll remember that, Saturday night.”

  “Does Connors like women, too?”

  “Oh, yes. Especially after his wife left him for another woman. There’s been a parade through here. Everything but the brass bands and the fire trucks.”

  Fletch said, “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Your eggs are ready. From your tan marks, I’d say you’re not too used to wearing all that many clothes anyway, regular.”

  “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Your eggs will get cold.”

  Fletch said, “I’m cold.”

  “All right.”

  VI

  T H E eggs were cold. They were also watery.

  Mrs. Sawyer had set a place for him at the dining room table.

  He presumed the telephone was for Bart Connors.

  Mrs. Sawyer pushed open the kitchen door.

  “It’s for you. A Mister Flynn.”

  Fletch took his coffee cup with him, across the dining room, through the living room, through the hall, to the den. He also took the hotel room key.

  “Good morning, Inspector.”

  “Now who would this be?”

  “Fletcher. You called me.”

  “Oh, yes. Mister Fletcher. I forgot who I was calling.”

  “Inspector, you’ll be glad to know I passed a lie detector test this morning.”

  “Did you indeed?”

  “Administered by a Mrs. Sawyer, who comes in to clean twice a week. She arrives very early.”

  “How did she administer it?”

  “She asked me if I killed the girl.”

  “And I daresay you had the gall to say you didn’t?”

  “She stayed to do her work.”

  Flynn said, “I was reasonably startled when a live woman answered your phone this morning. I said to myself, ‘What is this boyo we have here?’ I thought of giving the woman some warning.”

  “Which makes me think, Inspector. Did your men find a key to this apartment among the girl’s possessions?”

  “Only a Florida driver’s licence. And that was in her left shoe.”

  “No key? Mrs. Sawyer had a key.”

  “Cleaning ladies are apt to have keys. Girl friends aren’t. But I take your meaning, Mister Fletcher. Other people might have keys to that apartment.”

  “Mrs. Sawyer found a key this morning. Just off the carpet in the corridor.”

  “A key to your apartment?”

  “No. A hotel key.”

  “How very interesting.”

  Fletch looked at it in his hand.

  “The tag on it says ‘Logan Hilton—223’. How could your men have missed it?”

  “How, indeed? It’s possible, of course, they didn’t miss it—that it wasn’t there at all. The suicide note hasn’t been found yet, either.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that the theory you’re working on this morning, Mister Fletcher? That the young lady let herself into your apartment with her own key, undressed i
n your bedroom, went into the living room, and hit herself over the head?”

  “I’m not working on any theory this morning, Inspector.”

  “I know you’re not. You’re just trying to be helpful. Even your defensive theories are peculiarly lame. I’ve never known a man so indifferent to a murder he might have committed.”

  “What did the driver’s licence say?”

  “That Ruth Fryer lived in Miami, Florida.”

  “That all? Is that as far as you’ve gotten this morning?”

  “Plodding along, Mister Fletcher, plodding along. Today should turn up some interesting facts.”

  “I’ll keep this key for you.”

  “We have turned up one curious fact already. I called customs officials this morning. You did arrive from Rome yesterday at about three-thirty. Trans World Airlines flight number 529.”

  “What’s curious about that?”

  “Your name isn’t Peter Fletcher. The name on your passport is Irwin Maurice Fletcher.”

  Fletch said nothing.

  Flynn said, “Now, why would a man lie about a thing like that?”

  “Wouldn’t you, Inspector, if your first names were Irwin Maurice?”

  “I would not,” said Flynn. “My first names are Francis Xavier.”

  VII

  F L E T C H hesitated at the corner of Arlington Street before turning left.

  Walking along the brick sidewalk he turned up the collar of his Burberry. Lights were on in the offices of the brownstones to his right. After months of sun, the cool October mist felt good against his face.

  He did not hesitate under the canopy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He had seen the sign from a block and a half away. He went through the revolving door, across the lobby to the newstand and bought a map of Boston and a Morning Star.

  Turning away from the counter, he saw there was a side door and went through it. He was on Newbury Street.

  He turned the pages of the newspaper as he walked. The story was on page five. It was only three paragraphs. No picture. He was identified in the second paragraph as “Peter Fletcher” and was attributed with calling the police. The third paragraph said, according to police sources, he had been alone in the apartment with the murdered girl.

  The bare facts made it seem he was guilty. And the Boston press did not care much about the story.

  He knew. The only follow-up expected from such facts would be the indictment of Peter Fletcher. Not much of a story. No mystery.

  Classified advertisements were in the back of the paper, just ahead of the comics page. He tore out the strip concerning “Garages For Rent” and stuffed the rest of the newspaper into a small rubbish basket attached to a post at the corner. He put the piece of newspaper and the map in his coat pocket.

  In the next block was the Horan Gallery. Of course, there was no sign. A building, an old town house, a thick, varnished wood garage door to the left, a recessed door with a doorbell button, two iron grilled windows to the right. The windows on the second, third and fourth floors were similarly grilled. The place was a fortress.

  The brass plate under the bell button gave the address only—no name.

  The door opened as Fletch pushed the button.

  The man, in his sixties, wore a dark blue apron from his chest to his knees. He also wore a black bow tie with his white shirt, black trousers, and shoes. A butler interrupted while polishing silver?

  “Fletcher,” Fletch said.

  To the right of the hall, in what had once been a family living room, was no furniture other than objects of art. Passing the door, Fletch saw a Rossetti on an easel. On the far wall was a Rousseau, over a standing glass case. On a pedestal was a bronze Degas dancer.

  Going up the stairs, Fletch realized the house was entirely atmosphere-controlled. With thermostats every five metres along the walls, the temperature was absolutely even. The air was as odourless as if man had never existed. Few of the world’s major museums afforded such systems.

  The man, remaining wordless, showed Fletch into a room on the second floor and closed the door behind him.

  Facing the door was a Corot, on an easel.

  Horan rose from behind a Louis Seize desk, made a slight nod of his head which would have passed in Europe for an American bowing, and strode across the soft Persian carpet with his hand extended.

  “I understand now,” he said. “You’re younger than I expected.”

  Horan hung Fletch’s damp coat in a tight closet.

  A Revere coffee service awaited them on a butler’s table between two small, comfortable, upholstered divans.

  “Cream or sugar, Mister Fletcher?”

  “Just the coffee will be fine.”

  “I spent a pleasant half hour reading you this morning—your monograph on Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior. I should have read it before this, of course, but it was unknown at the Athenaeum until I requested it.”

  “You do your homework.”

  “Tell me, was it originally done as a doctoral thesis? It had no university imprimatur on it.”

  “I did it originally about that time in life, yes.”

  “But you’ve only printed it recently? Of course, you’re still not much older than the average graduate student. Or are you one of these people blessed by the eternal appearance of youth, Mister Fletcher?”

  Horan was a far more attractive man than Fletch had expected. In his early fifties, he was slim but heavily shouldered. His features were perfectly even. Without wrinkles, his complexion had to have been cosmetically kept. Over his ears, his hair, brushed back, was silver, not grey. Hollywood could have sold tickets to films of him dancing with Audrey Hepburn.

  “Of course,” he continued after Fletch’s silence, “I haven’t yet gotten my enthusiasm up for the bulk of American artists. Cassatt, Sargent, all right, but your Winslow Homers and Remingtons and Tharp all seem so indecently robust.”

  “Michelangelo and Rubens you would not call robust?”

  “The action in the work is what I mean. The action, the moment, in the bulk of American work seems so existential. It is overwhelmed by its own sense of confinement. It does not aspire.” Horan tasted his coffee. “I shall leave my lecturing for my class at Harvard, where I am due at twelve o’clock. About this Picasso?”

  Fletch said, “Yes.”

  Being offered a seat was one thing; being put in his place another.

  “What is there to say about the work I haven’t already said?” Horan asked the air. “It may not exist. Then again it may. If it exists, where is it? And can it be authenticated? Believe it or not, the job of authentication is easier, now that the old boy is dead. He was prone to claim works he liked, whether he did them or not, and to deny works he probably did do, if he didn’t like them. Then, after we find it, there is the question of whether whoever owns the work is willing to sell, and for how much. You may have come a long way for nothing, Mister Fletcher.”

  Fletch said nothing.

  “Or did you really come to Boston to expand upon your work on Tharp?”

  “Actually, I did,” Fletch said. “I’m thinking of trying his biography.”

  Horan’s forehead creased.

  “Well,” he said. “If I can be of any help…. Introduction to the Tharp Family Foundation….”

  “Thank you.”

  “You want the Picasso purely for your private collection?”

  “Yes.”

  “You represent no one else?”

  “No one.”

  “There is the question of credit, Mister Fletcher. Most of the people I deal with, I’ve dealt with for years, you understand. Other than your monograph, privately printed….”

  “I understand. The Barclough Bank in Nassau will establish whatever credit for me you require.”

  “The Bahamas? That might be very useful.”

  “It is.”

  “Very well, sir. You mentioned you have a photograph of the Picasso?”

  Fletch removed the envelope from his inside jacke
t pocket. He placed the photograph on the table.

  “The photograph was made from a slide,” he said.

  “As I thought,” Horan said, picking it up. “Cubist. And Braque did not do it.” He tapped the photograph against his thumbnail. “But we don’t know if Picasso did.”

  Fletch stood up.

  “You’ll make enquiries for me?”

  “By all means.”

  “How long do you think it will be before you know something?”

  Horan was following him.

  “I’ll get on the phone this afternoon. It may take twenty minutes, or it may take twenty days.”

  On a little table next to the closet door was a copy of the New York Times. Fletch’s notoriety had not penetrated the Horan Gallery. He looked at the front page.

  “I never bother with the Boston newspapers,” Horan said.

  “Not even the society pages?”

  Horan held his coat for him.

  “I believe anything of sufficient importance to warrant my attention will appear in the New York Times”

  Horan opened the door. The houseman, still in his apron, waited on the landing to show Fletch out.

  Fletch said, “I’m sure you’re right.”

  VIII

  A P P A R E N T L Y doing nothing but consulting his map, Fletch stopped across the street and looked at the Horan building.

  On each side of the roof, along the lines where the building joined with roofs of buildings to its left and right, ran a high, spiked iron fence. Its forward ends curved over the edge of the roof, fanning halfway down the fifth storey. The windows on the third, fourth and fifth storeys were barred, too.

  Ronald Horan liked his security.

  Using his map, Fletch crossed to Boylston Street and walked into Copley Square.

  There, at the State Street Bank and Trust Company—after long, albeit courteous, delays, interviews with everyone except the most junior teller, proving his identity over and over again, including showing his passport, listening five times to the apologetic explanation that “all this is for your own protection, sir”—he picked up the twenty-five thousand dollars in cash he had had sent ahead. He took the money in fifty and one hundred dollar denominations.

  He observed how much easier it always is to put money into a bank than it is to take out. Even one’s own money.