Fletch's Fortune

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Crystal,” Fletch said.

  “What?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No, thanks. I’m having lunch.”

  “Get on with the story, please.”

  “Anyway, Walter March was to make one of those wowee, whizbang, look at our new plant, look at us, what an accomplishment speeches, and he did. But he also took the occasion to announce his retirement. He said he was sixty-five and he had instituted and enforced the retirement age of sixty-five throughout the company and although he understood better how people felt reaching sixty-five, being forced to retire, when he felt in the prime of his life, years of experience behind him, years of energy ahead of him, wasted, blah, blah, he was no exception to his own rules, he was retiring himself.”

  “I guess, ultimately, he considered himself an exception to his own rules,” Freddie said.

  “He always did,” said Lewis Graham.

  “He even said he was having his boat brought around to San Diego and was looking forward to sailing the South Pacific with wife of umpty-ump years, Lydia. He painted quite a picture. Sailing off into the sunset, hand in hand with his childhood sweetheart, sitting on his poop or whatever it is yachts have.”

  “He owned a big catamaran, didn’t he?” Freddie asked.

  “A trimaran,” said Lewis Graham. “Three hulls. I chartered it once.”

  “You did?” Fletch said.

  “A few years ago. The Lydia. I used to consider Walter March sort of a friend.”

  “What happened?” Fletch said. “Boat spring a leak?”

  Lewis Graham shrugged.

  “I don’t see anything unusual in this,” Freddie Arbuthnot said. “Lots of people get cold feet when it comes time to retire.”

  Fletch said, “Did he say when he was going to retire, Crystal? I mean, did he give any definite time?”

  “In six months. The new plant was opened in December, and I clearly remember his saying he and Lydia were westward-hoing in June.”

  “He was definite?”

  “Definite. I reported it. We all did. It’s in the files. ‘WALTER MARCH ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT’. And he said the greatest joy of his life was that he was leaving March Newspapers in good hands.”

  “Whose?” Freddie asked.

  Crystal said, “Guess.”

  “The little bastard,” Lewis Graham said. “Junior.”

  “I saw him this morning,” Crystal said. “In the elevator. Boy, does he look awful. Dead eyes staring out of a white face. You’d think he’d died, instead of his father.”

  “Understandable,” said Fletch.

  “Junior looked like he was going somewhere to lie down quietly in a coffin,” Crystal said. “Everyone in the elevator was silent.”

  “So,” Fletch said, “why didn’t Walter March retire when he said he was going to? Is that the question?”

  “Because,” Lewis Graham said, “the bastard wanted to be President of the American Journalism Alliance. That’s the simple reason. He wanted it badly. I can tell you how badly he wanted it.”

  Graham saw the three of them staring at him again, realized how forcefully he had spoken, and relaxed in his chair.

  He said, “I’m just saying he wanted to cap his career with the presidency of the A.J.A. He spoke to me about it years ago. He was canvassing for support, eight, ten years ago.”

  “Did you offer him your support?” Fletch asked.

  “Of course I did. Then. He had a few years to go before retirement, and I had a whole decade. Then.”

  The waiter was pouring the coffee.

  “Two or three times,” Lewis Graham continued, “he got his name placed in nomination. I never did. And he never won.” Graham pushed the coffee cup away from him. “Until last year. Both our names were placed in nomination.”

  “I see,” Fletch said.

  “Well,” Graham said, “I don’t have the advantage Walter March had—I don’t own my own network.” Graham looked a little abashed. “I have to retire the first of this year. There’s no way I can hang on.”

  Crystal said, “And the A.J.A. bylaws say our officers have to be working journalists.”

  “Right,” Graham said with surprising bitterness. “Not retired journalists.”

  “Is that why you stopped considering Walter March a friend?” asked Freddie. “Because you opposed each other in an election?”

  “Oh, no,” said Graham. “I’m an old man, now, with much experience. Especially political. There are very few things in the course of elections I haven’t seen. I’ve witnessed some very dirty campaigns, in my time.” Graham deferred to the younger people at the table. “I guess we all have. One just never expects to be the victim of such a campaign.”

  A bellman was having Fletch pointed out to him by the headwaiter.

  Graham said, “I guess you all know Walter March kept a whole barnyard full of private detectives?”

  Crystal, Freddie, Fletch said nothing.

  Graham sat back in his chair.

  “End of story,” he said.

  The bellman was standing next to Fletch’s chair.

  “Telephone, Mister Fletcher,” he said. “Would you come with me?”

  Fletch put down his napkin and rose from his seat.

  “I wouldn’t bother you, sir,” the bellman said, “except they said it’s the Pentagon calling.”

  Eighteen

  “One moment, sir. Major Lettvin calling.”

  Fletch had been led to a wall phone down the corridor from the entrance to the dining room.

  Leaving the dining room, he had seen (and ignored) Don Gibbs.

  Through the plate glass window at the end of the corridor, a couple of meters away, he could see the midday sunlight shimmering on the car tops in the parking lot.

  “How do,” the Major said. “Do I have the honor of addressing Irwin Maurice Fletcher?”

  The drawl was thicker than Mississippi mud.

  “Right,” said Fletch.

  “Veteran of the United States Marine Corps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Serial Number 1893983?”

  “It was. I retired it. Anyone can use it now.”

  “Well, sir, some sharp-eyed old boy here in one of our clerical departments, reading about that murder in the newspaper, you know, what’s his name? where you at?”

  The drawl was so steeped in courtesy everything sounded like a question.

  After a moment, Fletch said, “Walter March.”

  “Walter March. Say, you’re right in the middle of things again, aren’t ya?”

  Fletch said, “Middle of lunch, actually.”

  “Anyway, this here sharp-eyed old boy—he’s from Tennessee—I suspect he was pretty well-known around home for shooting off hens’ teeth at a hundred meters—well, anyway, reading this story in the newspaper about Walter March’s murder, he spotted your name?”

  Again, it sounded like a question.

  Fletch said, “Yes.”

  “Say, you aren’t a suspect or anything in this murder, are ya?”

  “No.”

  “What I mean to say is, you’re not implicated in this here murder in any way, are ya?”

  “I wasn’t even here when it was committed. I was flying over the Atlantic. I was coming from Italy.”

  “Well, the way this story is written, it makes you wonder. Why do journalists do things like this? Ask me, take all the journalists in the world, put ’em in a pot, and all you’ve got is fishbait.” Major Lettvin paused. “Oops. Sorry. You’re a journalist, aren’t ya? I forgot that for a moment. Sportswriters I don’t mind so much.”

  “I’m not a sportswriter.”

  “Well, he recognized your name—how many Irwin Maurice Fletchers can there be?” (Fletch restrained himself from saying, “I don’t know.”) “And checked against our files here at the P-gon, and, sure enough, there you were. Serial Number 1893983. That you?”

  “Major, do you have a point? This is long distance. You never can tell. A taxpaye
r might be listening in.”

  “That’s right.” The Major chuckled. “That’s right.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Major?”

  “Point is, we’ve been lookin’ for ya, high and low, these many years.”

  “Why?”

  “Says here we owe you a Bronze Star. Did you know that?”

  “I heard a rumor.”

  “Well, if you knew it, how come you’ve never arranged to get decorated?”

  “I.…”

  “Seems to me, if a fella wins a Bronze Star he ought to get it pinned to his chest. These things are important.”

  “Major, it’s nice of you to call.…”

  “No problem, no problem. Just doin’ my duty. We got so many people here at the P-gon, everybody doin’ each other’s lazying, it’s a sheer pleasure to have something to do—you know what I mean?—to separate breakfast from supper.”

  There was a man ambling across the parking lot, hands in the back pockets of his jeans.

  “You going to be there a few days, Mister Fletcher?”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you are. Hendricks Plantation, Hendricks, Virginia.”

  “Yes.”

  The man in the parking lot wore a blue jeans jacket.

  “Well, I figure what I’ll do is dig up a general somewhere—believe me, that’s not difficult around the P-gon—we’ve got more generals in one coffee shop than Napoleon had in his whole army—we could decorate the Statue of Liberty with ’em, and you’d never see the paint peel—and move his ass down to Hendricks, Virginia.…”

  “General? I mean, Major?”

  The man in the parking lot also had tight, curly gray hair.

  “I figure a presentation ceremony, in front of all those journalists—decorating one of their own, so to speak, with a Bronze Star.…”

  The man who had accosted Mrs. Leary in the parking lot.

  “Major? I’ve got to go.”

  “The Marine Corps could use some good press, these days, you know.…”

  “Major. I’ve got to go. An emergency. My pants are on fire. Call me back.”

  Fletch hung up, turned around, and headed down the corridor at high speed.

  He found a fire door with EXIT written over it, pushed through it, and ran down the stairs.

  He entered the parking area slowly, trying not to make it too obvious he was looking for someone.

  No one else was in the parking lot.

  The man had been walking toward the back of the area.

  Fletch went to the white rail fence and walked along it, looking down the slope to his right.

  He caught a glimpse of the man crossing behind two stands of rhododendrons.

  He sprung over the fence and ran down the slope.

  When he ran through the opening in the rhododendrons, and stopped, abruptly, to look around, he saw the man standing under some apple trees, hands in back pockets, looking at him.

  Slowly, Fletch began to walk toward him.

  The man took his hands out of his pockets, turned, and ran, further down the slope, toward a large stand of pine. Behind the pine trees were the stables.

  Fletch noticed he was wearing sneakers.

  Fletch ran after him, and when he came to the pine trees, his shoes began to slip on the slope. To brake himself from falling, he grabbed at a scrub pine, got sap on his hands, and fell.

  Looking around from the ground, Fletch could neither see nor hear the man.

  Fletch picked himself up and walked through the pines to the stable area, trying to scrape the sap off his hands with his thumbnails.

  In the midday sun, the stables had the quiet of a long lunch hour typical of a place where people work early and late. No one was there.

  For a few minutes Fletch petted the horse he had ridden that morning, asking her if she had seen a man run by (and answering for her, “He went thet-away”), and then walked back to the hotel.

  Nineteen

  2:00 P.M.

  VARIOUS USES OF COMPUTERS IN JOURNALISM

  Address by Dr. Hiram

  Parlor

  From TAPE

  Station 1

  Suite 12 (Mrs. Walter March and Walter March, Jr.)

  “Bandy called from Los Angeles, Junior. Some question he can’t deal with. And Masur called asking if he should put that basketball scandal on the wires from New York.…”

  There was no answer.

  “Are you having lunch?” Lydia asked her son.

  No answer.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Junior. Buck up! Your father’s dead, and someone has to make the decisions for the newspapers. They can’t run themselves. They never have.”

  Another silence.

  “I’m ordering you lunch,” she said. “You can’t Bloody Mary yourself to death.…”

  From TAPE

  Station 9

  Room 36 (Rolly Wisham)

  “If you’ll permit me a question first, Captain Neale.…”

  “I don’t know. Once you journalists start asking questions, you never stop. I’ve had enough opportunity to discover that.”

  “Very simply: Why are you questioning me?”

  “We understand you might have had a motive to murder Walter March.”

  “Oh?”

  Rolly Wisham’s voice did not have great timbre, for a man nearly thirty, but there was a boy’s aggressiveness in it, mixed with an odd kindliness.

  Listening to the tape, sitting on his bed, picking at the sap on his hands, Fletch kept expecting Wisham to say, “This is Rolly Wisham, with love”—as if such meant anything to anybody, especially in journalism.

  “What motive do you think I would have for murdering the old bastard?”

  “I know about the editorial that ran in the March newspapers calling your television feature reporting—have I the term right?—let’s see, it called it ‘sloppy, sentimental, and stupendously unprofessional.’ That’s precise. I had the editorial looked up and read to me over the phone this noon.”

  “That’s what it said.”

  “I also know that this editorial was just the beginning of a coast-to-coast campaign to put you in disgrace and get you fired from the network. Every March newspaper was to follow up with articles punching holes in your every statement, every report, day by day.”

  “I didn’t know that, but I guessed it.”

  “Walter March had begun a smear campaign against you. Frankly, Mister Wisham, I didn’t know such things happen nowadays.”

  “Call me Rolly.”

  “I think of that kind of smear campaign as being from back in the old days. Dirty journalism. Yellow journalism. What do you call it?”

  “It still happens.”

  “On this assignment,” Captain Neale said, “I’m learning a lot of things I didn’t particularly want to know.”

  “Is the campaign against me going to continue? Are the March newspapers going to continue to smear me now that Walter March is dead?”

  “I understand it’s been called off. Mister Williams—Jake Williams—has called it off.”

  “Good.”

  “Not for your sake. He thinks it might hurt the image of the recently departed. Leave a bad taste in the mouths of people regarding Walter March.”

  “If that’s their reasoning, I wish they’d continue with it. Walter March tasted like piss and vinegar.”

  “Interesting to see how decisions are made in the media. You people are feeding a thousand facts and ideas into human minds a day and, I see, sometimes for some pretty wrong reasons.”

  “Very seldom. It’s just that in every woodpile there’s a Walter March.”

  “Anyway, Mister Wisham, Walter March had begun a campaign to destroy you; he was murdered; the campaign was called off.”

  “Captain Neale, who tipped you?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Who told you about the editorial, and the campaign?”

  “I’m not a journalist, Mister Wisham. I don�
��t have to give my sources—except in a court of law.”

  “I’ll have to wait, uh?”

  “I intend to bring this case into court, Mister Wisham. And get a conviction.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seems a funny thing for you to say. I mean, of course you intend to bring it into court. There was a murder. You’re a cop.”

  “Well.…”

  “Could it be that you’ve heard some not-very-nice things about Walter March?”

  “I’ve been on the case only twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours investigating Walter March would be enough to make anyone puke.”

  “Mrs. March assures me he hadn’t an enemy in the world. And there is the fact that Walter March was the elected President of the American Journalism Alliance.”

  “Yeah. And Attila led the Huns.”

  “Mister Wisham, any man with that much power.…”

  “… has to have a few enemies. Right. Everyone loved Walter March except anyone who ever had anything to do with him.”

  “Mister Wisham.…”

  “I have one more question.”

  “Mister Wisham, I.… I’ll ask the questions.”

  “Have you ever seen me on television?”

  “Of course.”

  “Often?”

  “Yes, I guess so. My working hours.… I don’t have any regular television-viewing hours.”

  “What do you think of me? What do you think of my work?”

  “Well. I’m not a journalist.”

  “I don’t work for journalists. I work for people. You’re a people.”

  “I’m not a critic.”

  “I don’t work for critics, either.”

  “I find your work very good.”

  “‘Very good’?”

  “Well, I haven’t made a study of it, of course. Somehow or other I never thought I’d be asked by Rolly Wisham what I think of his television reporting. Mostly, of course, I look at the sports.…”

  “Nevertheless. Tell me what you think of my work.”

  “I think it’s very good. I like it. What you do is different from what the others do. Let me see. I have more of a sense of people from your stories. You don’t just sit back in a studio and report something. You’re in your shirtsleeves, and you’re in the street. Whatever you’re talking about, dope addicts, petty criminals, you make us see them as people—with their own problems, and fears. I don’t know how to judge it as journalism.…”