Confess, Fletch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “Now, Frank,” said Fletch. “Would you do me a favour?”

  “It seems I owe you one.”

  “Get your goons off my back.”

  “I will, indeed. Grover, order Mister Fletcher’s tail removed immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And will you be at home later tonight, Mister Fletcher?”

  “I expect to be. Later.”

  “Perhaps I’ll give you a call to tell you how things turn out.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “I’m sure you will, Mister Fletcher. I’m sure you will.”

  XXXVI

  B O T H Andy and Sylvia marvelled when Fletch donned blue jeans, boots, a dark blue turtle neck sweater, Navy windbreaker, and a Greek fisherman’s cap, and said he was going out for a while.

  He said he would be back for dinner.

  He wouldn’t.

  Although free of his police tail, out of habit he went through the kitchen and down the service stairs of the apartment house. Going through the alley to his garage on River Street was a short cut, anyway.

  In the black truck, Fletch put himself on Newbury Street and headed west. (The two top storeys of 60 Newbury Street were lit.) He crossed Massachusetts Avenue, down the ramp, and continued west on the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension.

  Lolling along, singing to himself while munching pretzels, he took the Weston exit, went left at a light, and curved right up a grade after a second light. The moon was out. Climbing, after he passed the golf course, he had a better view of the antique farmhouses, close to the road, and the well-separated estate houses, set back.

  Passing the Horan house, he noted it showed no light.

  He continued on into Weston Centre.

  Next to a drugstore on the main road was a lit telephone booth. Fletch parked at an angle, next to it, and checked his watch.

  It was five minutes past nine Monday night. He had been in Massachusetts about six days and six hours.

  Despite the dim light emanating from the drugstore, he knew it was closed.

  In the phone booth, he dialled the Boston number of Ronald Risom Horan.

  The man answered immediately.

  Chewing gum in mouth, thumb pressed against his left nostril, Fletch said, “Mister Horan? Yeah. This is the Weston police. Your burglar alarm just went off. Yeah. The light just lit on the console here.”

  “Is someone at the house now?”

  “Yeah! A burglar is, I guess.”

  “Are the police there?”

  “Oh, yeah. We’re sending the car over. As soon as we can locate it.”

  “What do you mean, as soon as you locate it?”

  “Yeah, they’re not answering the radio just now.”

  “Jesus! Listen, you jerk! Get someone to the house right away!”

  “Yeah. I’ll do what I can.”

  “I’ll be out right away.”

  “Yeah. Okay. You know where the police station is?”

  “I’m not going to the police station, you jerk! I’m going to the house!”

  The phone slammed down.

  Taking his time, Fletch drove back to Horan’s house, down the driveway.

  He drove behind the house to the garage. His headlights picked up the dirt track around the right of the garage. He drove around the garage. His headlights swept the area as he turned.

  He backed the black truck into the tractor shed and turned out the headlights.

  Walking back around the garage, he saw that the back and side of the house were bathed in moonlight. It was easy to find a big enough stone.

  On the back porch, being careful to lay his bare fingers nowhere but on the stone, he re-examined the alarm system carefully. There were six small panes of glass in the back door. Each pane had two wires of the alarm system zigzagging through it, from left to right, top and bottom.

  Very carefully, with the stone, he smashed the pane of glass nearest the door handle, knocking out both wires.

  The alarm went off—a high, excited, shrill, piercing, truly frightening ringing.

  His mind’s eye saw a light beginning to flash at a console at the Weston police station.

  As he went down the porch stairs, he pitched the stone into the woods.

  He crossed the driveway to the bushes. In the bright moonlight, he stood, silently, further back in the bushes than he wanted to, but he still had clear views of the driveway, the side and back of the house.

  Soon he saw the huge lights of the Rolls-Royce travelling north on the road. It braked as it approached the driveway.

  The lights streamed down the gravel.

  Horan turned the car so the headlights flooded the back porch of the house. He dashed across the gravel and up the steps. His feet crunched on the broken glass. He stooped to examine the window. Using his key, he let himself into the house.

  The kitchen light went on.

  In a moment, the burglar alarm was turned off.

  No lights went on in the front of the house.

  Dim lights, as from a stairwell, mixed with the moonlight on the window surfaces at the back of the house, both downstairs and upstairs.

  Then lights went on in an upstairs room at the back of the house. Light poured through its two windows.

  Other than the kitchen, the room in the centre of the second storey was the only room fully lit.

  There was a noise from the road to Fletch’s left.

  Blue lights rotating on the top of a police car came down the driveway. There was no sound of a siren.

  The policemen parked behind the Rolls. Going around it, one of the policemen brushed his fingers along a fender.

  Horan appeared at the back door.

  “You Mister Horan?”

  “What took you guys so goddamned long?”

  “We came as soon as we got the call.”

  “Like hell you did. I got out from Boston sooner.”

  “Is this your car?”

  “Never mind about that. What the hell am I paying taxes for, if this is the kind of protection I get?”

  The policemen were climbing the steps, their wide belts and holsters making them look heavy-hipped.

  “You pay your taxes, Mister Horan, because you have to.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Officer Cabot, sir. Badge number 92.”

  The other policeman said, “The glass is smashed, Chuck.”

  “Christ,” said Horan.

  “Anything missing?” asked Cabot.

  “No.”

  “The alarm must have scared them off.”

  “The alarm had to scare them off,” said Horan. “Nothing else would.”

  “We can patch that up with a piece of plywood and some tacks.”

  Cabot said, “Let’s look around, anyway.”

  Lights went on and off throughout the whole house as Horan showed them around.

  The ground was cold. Fletch began to feel it in his boots.

  The three men were fiddling about the back door. The policemen were helping Horan tack a piece of plywood on the inside of the door, over the window frames.

  “You live here, or in Boston?”

  “Both places.”

  “You should get this window fixed first thing in the morning.”

  “You’re no one to tell me my business,” said Horan.

  The policemen came down the steps and ambled towards their car.

  From the porch, Horan said, “Get here a little faster next time, will you?”

  Turning, the car reversed and headed up the driveway. Its rotating blue lights went out.

  Horan returned to the house and turned out all the lights.

  He closed and locked the back door.

  Moving slowly, he came down the porch steps, got into the car, reversed it a few metres, and drove up the driveway.

  As soon as the Rolls’ tail-lights disappeared around the curve, Fletch hurried across the driveway and up the porch steps.


  Using his handkerchief over his hand, he pressed in on the plywood through the broken window. The tacks pushed free easily. The wood clattered on to the kitchen floor.

  Stooping a little, at an angle, he reached his arm through the window as far as his elbow. He released the locks and opened the door from inside.

  Quickly, he snapped on the kitchen light.

  Anyone roused by the alarm and still watching the house would think they were seeing a continuation of the previous action, Fletch hoped. The house had been completely dark for only a minute or two.

  Turning on lights as he went, he ran up the back stairs, along a short corridor, and into the centre back room. The light revealed what was obviously an antiseptic, unlived-in guest bedroom with a huge closet.

  The closet door was unlocked.

  Light from the bedroom caused shadows from what appeared to be three white, bulky objects—each leaning against a wall of the closet.

  He pulled a chain hanging from a bare light bulb in the centre of the closet.

  In the centre of the closet, on the floor, was a Degas horse.

  He lifted it into the bedroom.

  Gently, he tugged the dust sheets away from the paintings stacked neatly, resting against each other’s frames, against the closet walls.

  He lifted two paintings out of the closet.

  One was the smaller Picasso.

  The other was a Modigliani.

  These were the de Grassi collection. Sixteen objects, including the horse.

  He took the Picasso and the Modigliani downstairs with him and left them in the kitchen.

  Then he ran to the tractor shed for the truck.

  He backed it against the back porch and opened its back doors.

  He put the two paintings from the kitchen into it, bracing them carefully, face down, on the tarpaulin.

  It took him half an hour to load the truck.

  Before he left the house, he closed the closet door and wiped his fingerprints off its handle. As he went through the house, he turned off all the lights, giving the switches a wipe with his handkerchief as he did so.

  In the kitchen, he replaced the plywood against the broken window, fitting the tacks into their original holes and pressing them firm.

  Driving along the highway, back into Boston, he maintained the speed limit precisely.

  Fletch continued to have a professionally jaundiced view of the police, but, under the circumstances, there was no sense in taking chances.

  XXXVII

  “M I S T E R Fletcher? This is Francis Flynn.”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  It was quarter to twelve, midnight.

  “Just taking a shower, Inspector.”

  “I am in the process of exercising two warrants. Is that how a real policeman would say it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In any case, I am.”

  “Good.”

  “The first is for the arrest of Ronald Risom Horan for the murder of Ruth Fryer.”

  Fletch kept listening, but Flynn said no more.

  “What?”

  “Horan killed Ruth Fryer. Would you believe that, now?”

  “No.”

  “It’s as true as the devil inhabits fleas.”

  “It’s not possible. Horan?”

  “Himself. He’s in the back of a car now on his way to be booked at headquarters. Sure, and there’s no knowing what’s in a man’s heart. A respectable man like that.” Fletch listened, breathing through his mouth. “We had to wait for the man to get home. He says he took a ride in the country by himself, on this beautiful moonlit night. And, of course, we had to use a pretext to get to see him at all, such an exclusive dealer in art he is, sitting here by himself in this castle. I borrowed a page from your book, if you don’t mind—the book you haven’t written yet—and made an appointment with him by saying I had a small Ford Madox Brown I had to sell. Do I have that name right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I said it was a nineteenth-century English work, to show him I knew my potatoes. Was that right?”

  “Yes, Inspector.”

  “Anyway, it must have worked, because he made the appointment with me. Serving the warrant was the easy matter. I let Grover do it. The lad gets such satisfaction from telling people they’re under arrest, especially for murder.”

  “Inspector, something’s….”

  “The second warrant is to search both this house and the house in Weston for the de Grassi paintings.”

  “Weston? What house in Weston?”

  “Horan has a house in Weston. That’s a little town about twelve miles to the west of us. So Grover says.”

  “There’s no Weston address listed for him in Who’s Who.”

  “I think your Mister Horan keeps his cards pretty close to his necktie, if you know what I mean. He’s not in the telephone book out there, either.”

  “Then why do you think he has a house in Weston?”

  “We have our resources, Mister Fletcher.”

  “Inspector, something’s….”

  “Now what I’m asking is this: seeing you’re such a distinguished writer-on-the arts, and all, and therefore can be counted on to recognize the de Grassi paintings, I wonder if you’d be good enough to join me in my treasure hunt? I’m at the Horan Gallery now.”

  “You are?”

  “I am. We’ll have a look around here, and if we find nothing, we’ll go out to Weston together and have a look around that house.”

  “We will?”

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Inspector, what makes you think Horan has the paintings? He’s a dealer. He works on assignments for other people.”

  “I’ve sent Grover to your address. He’ll be sitting outside your door in a matter of minutes, if he’s not there already. If you’d pull up your braces, however late in the night it is, and let him drive you over here, I’d be deeply in your debt.”

  “Inspector, something’s….”

  “I know, Mister Fletcher. Something’s wrong. Will you come and correct the error in my ways?”

  “Of course, Inspector.”

  “There’s a good lad.”

  Fletch left his hand on the receiver a moment after hanging up. It was sweating.

  In the guest bedroom, he threw his jeans and sweater in the back of a bureau drawer and began to dress quickly in a tweed suit.

  From the bed, Andy said, “Who was that?”

  “The police. Flynn.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “He’s arrested Horan for the murder of Ruth Fryer.”

  She sat up in bed.

  “The girl?”

  “He’s flipped his lid.”

  Sylvia, in a flowing nightdress, was in the corridor.

  Fletch got just a flash of her fenders as he dashed by.

  “What happens? Where you go now? Angela! What happens?”

  Fletch ran down the five flights to the lobby.

  A black four-door Ford was double-parked in front of the apartment building.

  Fletch glanced down the street, at where the black truck was parked in front of the Ford Ghia.

  He got into the front passenger seat.

  Grover turned the ignition key.

  Fletch said, “Hi, Grover.”

  Grover put the car in gear and started down Beacon Street.

  “My name’s not Grover,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No. It’s Whelan. Richard T. Whelan.”

  “Oh.”

  He said, “Sergeant Richard T. Whelan.”

  Going around the corner into Newbury Street, Fletch said, “Quite a man, your boss.”

  Sergeant Richard T. Whelan said, “He’s a bird’s turd.”

  XXXVIII

  T H E street door of the Horan Gallery was open.

  Fletch closed it, aware what an open door would do to the building’s climate control, and ran up the stairs to Horan’s offic
e.

  Flynn was sitting behind Horan’s Louis Seize desk, going through the drawers.

  The Picasso, “Vino, Viola, Mademoiselle”, was still on the easel.

  “Ah, there he is now,” said Flynn. “Peter Fletcher.”

  “This is one of the paintings,” said Fletch.

  “I thought it might be. Lovely desk this, too. Pity I haven’t a touch of larceny in me.”

  Fletch stood between the painting and the desk, hands in his jacket pockets.

  “Inspector, just because Horan has this painting does not mean that he has the other de Grassi paintings.”

  “I think it does.” Reluctantly, Flynn stood up from behind the desk. “Come. We’ll take a quick tour around the house. You’ll recognize anything else that belongs to the de Grassis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then all we need do is walk around.”

  “Inspector, this painting, this Picasso, is here because I asked Horan to locate it and negotiate my purchase of it. A man named Cooney sent it up from Texas.”

  “I see.”

  On the landing, Flynn was stepping into a small elevator.

  “In talking with Horan, he mentioned that he had had ‘one or two other paintings from Cooney the last year or two’.”

  “Hard quote?”

  Flynn was holding the elevator door for him.

  “Reasonably.” Fletch stepped in.

  Flynn pushed the button for the third floor.

  “And you think those two other paintings he had from Cooney were the two de Grassi paintings that showed up in his catalogue?”

  “What else is there to think?”

  “Many things. One might think many other things.”

  On the third floor, they stepped out into a spacious, tasteful living room.

  “Isn’t this lovely?” said Flynn. “I can hardly blame the man for wanting to hold on to his possessions.”

  Flynn turned to Fletch.

  “Now what, precisely, are we looking for?”

  Fletch shrugged. “At this point, fifteen paintings and a Degas horse.”

  “The horse is a sculpture, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a sculpture of a ballerina on the first floor….”

  “Yes. That’s a Degas,” said Fletch.

  “But it’s not a horse. Saturday in your apartment, you said there were nineteen works in the de Grassi collection.”