Fletch's Fortune

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Don Gibbs had taken several steps backward. He continued to look as if tons of lava were flowing toward him.

  Freddie said, “Ms. Hatch, I’m Fredericka Arbuthnot. I work for Newsworld magazine.”

  “Nonsense,” sniffed Leona. “No one works for Newsworld magazine.”

  “Ah, here’s the beautiful young couple!” Arms extended to embrace the whole world, Helena Williams entered the group. “Hello, Leona. Everything all right?”

  Helena looked at Gibbs and Englehardt curiously.

  They took several more steps backward.

  “Fletch and uh.…” She was looking at Freddie. “I forget your name.”

  “So does she,” said Fletch.

  “Fredericka Arbuthnot,” she said. “For short, you may call me Ms. Blake.”

  “You know, Leona, I offered these young people the Bridal Suite. But they insist They’re not married! What’s the world coming to?”

  “Great improvement,” said Leona Hatch. “Great improvement.”

  Fletch said, “Helena, I haven’t seen Jake around much.”

  “Well, you know. He’s trying to spend as much time with Junior as he can. And with Walter gone.… Well, someone has to make the decisions. Junior isn’t quite up to it yet.” She gave the back of her hair a push. “I’m afraid Jake isn’t enjoying this convention, much. None of us is, I suppose.”

  “In case I don’t see Jake, be sure and say hello to him for me,” Fletch said.

  Helena put her arms out again, to flap to another group. “I surely will, Fletch.”

  There was a hoarse whisper in Fletch’s right ear. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Fletch turned, to face Don Gibbs and Robert Englehardt.

  He said, “Have you ever tried to lie to someone like Leona Hatch?”

  “She’s crocked,” Gibbs said.

  “Have you ever tried to lie to someone like Leona Hatch—even when she’s crocked?”

  Englehardt was looking exceedingly grim.

  “She’d pin your wings to a board in one minute flat,” Fletch said. “In fact, if you noticed, that’s exactly what she did do.”

  Crystal Faoni came through a crowd to them, casting quite a bow wave.

  “Ms. Crystal Faoni,” Fletch intoned, “allow me to introduce you to Mister Robert Englehardt and Mister Donald Gibbs, both of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  Englehardt’s eyes closed and opened slowly.

  Gibbs’ sweaty upper lip was quivering.

  Crystal said, “Hi.” She turned to Fletch. “I stayed in my room to watch Lewis Graham on the evening news show. You know what he did?”

  “You tell me.”

  “He did a ninety-second editorial on the theme that people should retire when they say They’re going to, regardless of how much they have to give up, using Walter March as an example.”

  “We wrote that for him at lunch,” Fletch said.

  “I think we can say we contributed to it.”

  “Did he use the same biblical quotes?”

  “Identical.”

  “Well,” said Fletch, “at least one always knows Lewis Graham’s sources. May I escort you to the dining room, Ms. Faoni?”

  “Oh, goody! Will we be the first ones there? I so like having a perfect record, at the things I do.”

  “Ms. Faoni,” Fletch said, crossing through the cocktail party, her arm in his. “I’ve just figured something out.”

  “Who murdered Walter March?”

  “Something much more important than that.”

  “What could be more important than that?”

  “The reverse. Death in the presence of life; life in the presence of death.”

  Crystal said, “Funny the way riddles have always made me hungry.”

  “Crystal, darling, this afternoon you were trying to get pregnant.”

  Immediately, she said, “Think we succeeded?”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “If you remember, I always was very good at math.”

  They were in the dining room.

  “Crystal, sit down.”

  “Oh, nice. He’s taking care of me already.” She sat in the chair he held out for her. “Not to worry, Fletcher.”

  “I promise.”

  “There’s just no way I can be unemployed nine months from now. Good heavens! I’d starve!”

  He was sitting next to her, at the empty, round table. “Crystal, you lost a job before, this way. It’s an unfair world. You said yourself nothing has changed.”

  “Oh, yes, it has,” she said. “Walter March is dead.”

  Twenty-four

  7:30 P.M. Dinner

  Main Dining Room

  “Frankly, I think you’re all being dreadfully unfair.” Eleanor Earles put her napkin next to her coffee cup. “I’ve never heard so many spiteful, vicious remarks about one man in all my life as I’ve heard about Walter March since coming here to Hendricks Plantation.”

  Fletch was at the round table for six with three women—Eleanor Earles, Crystal Faoni, and, of course, Freddie Arbuthnot. No Robert McConnell. No Lewis Graham.

  “You all act and talk like a bunch of nasty children in a reformatory, gloating because the biggest boy among you got knifed, rather than like responsible, concerned journalists and human beings.”

  Crystal burped.

  “What have we said?” asked Freddie.

  In fact, their conversation had been fairly neutral, mostly concerning the arrival of the Vice-President of the United States the next afternoon, discussing who would play golf with him (Tom Lockhart, Richard Baldridge, and Sheldon Levi; Oscar Perlman had invited him to a strip poker party to prove he had nothing to hide) and whether his most attractive wife would accompany him.

  Freddie had just mentioned the memorial service for Walter March to be held in Hendricks the next morning.

  “Oh, it’s not you.” Eleanor looked resentfully around the dining room. “It’s all these other twerps.”

  Eleanor Earles was a highly paid network newsperson, attractive enough, but resented by many because she had done commercials while working for another network—which most journalists refused to do—and, despite that, now had one of the best jobs in the industry.

  Many felt she would not have been able to overcome her background and be so elevated if she had not been seized upon by the networks as their token woman.

  Nevertheless, she was extremely able.

  “Walter March,” she said, “was an extraordinary journalist, an extraordinary publisher, and an extraordinary human being.”

  “He was extraordinary all right,” Crystal said into her parfait.

  “He had a great sense of news, of the human story, of trends, how to handle a story. His editorial sense was almost flawless. And when March Newspapers came out for or against something, it was seldom wrong. I doubt Walter March was ever wrong.”

  “Oh, come now,” Fletch said.

  “What about the way he handled people?” Crystal asked. “What about the way he treated his own employees?”

  “Let me tell you,” Eleanor said “I would have considered it a privilege to work for Walter March. Any time, any place, under any circumstances.”

  “You never worked for him,” Crystal said.

  Eleanor said, “You know about the time I was stuck in Albania—when I was working for the other network?”

  Fletch remembered, vaguely, an incident several years before—one of those three-day wonder stories—concerning Eleanor Earles in a foreign land. He was a teenager when it happened. It was the first he had ever heard of Eleanor Earles.

  “It was just one of those terribly frightening things.” Eleanor sat forward, her hands folded slightly below her chin. “I and a producer, Sarah Pulling, had spent five days in Albania, shooting one of those in-country, documentary-type features for the network. Needless to say, we’d had to use an Albanian film crew, and, needless to say, we could film only what they wanted us to, when they wanted us to, and ho
w they wanted us to. However, getting any film, any story out of Albania was considered a coup; it had taken months of diplomatic back-and-forth. Of course they had to accept me as an on-camera person, and I figured if I kept my eyes and ears open I’d be able to add plenty of material and additional comments to the sound track once we got back to New York.

  “Despite their ordering us this way and that and putting us up in their best hotel, which had the ambience of a chicken coop, I think they tried to be kind to us. They offered us so much food and drink so continuously, Sarah said she was sure it was their way of preventing us from doing any work at all.

  “So things went along fairly well, under the circumstances. We hadn’t much control over what we had on film, but we knew we had something.

  “The night we were leaving, we packed up and were driven to the airport by some of the people who had been assigned to be our hosts and work with us. It was all very jolly. There were even hugs and kisses at the airport before they left us to wait for the plane.

  “Then we were arrested.

  “After we had gone through all the formalities of leaving Albania, most of which we didn’t even understand, and were actually at the gate, ready to board, two men approached us, took us out of the line, said nothing until everyone else had passed us boarding the plane, until all the airlines personnel had gone about other business—all those eyes carefully averted from the two American women standing silent and somewhat scared with two Albanian bulldogs.

  “After everyone had left, they took us by our elbows, marched us through the airport, and into a waiting car.

  “We were brought back into the city, stripped, searched, dressed in sort of short, loose cotton house-dress kinds of things that allowed us to freeze, and put in individual, rank, filthy jail cells. Fed those things that look like whole wheat biscuits in pans of cold water, three a day, for three days. No one official ever saw us. No one spoke to us. We were never questioned. Our protests and efforts to get help, get something official happening, got us nowhere. The people who brought us our biscuits and removed our pails just shrugged and smiled sweetly.

  “Three days of this. Have you ever been in such circumstances? It’s an unreasonable thing. And you find yourself reasoning if they can do it for a day, they can do it for a month. Two days, why not a year? Three days, why not keep you in jail the rest of your life?

  “I was sure the network would be yelling at the State Department, and the State Department doing whatever one does under such circumstances and, yes, all that was happening. It was a big news item in the United States and Europe. The network made plenty of hay out of it. They pulled their hair and gnashed their teeth on camera; they made life miserable for several people at the State Department. However, they didn’t do whatever was necessary under the circumstances to get us out of jail.

  “The afternoon of the fourth day, two men showed up in the corridor between Sarah’s and my cells. One of them was an Albanian national. The other was the chief of the Rome bureau of March Newspapers. You know what he said? He said, ‘How’re ya doin’?’

  “Someone unlocked our cells. The two men walked us out of the building, without a word to anyone, and put us, shivering, filthy, stinking into the backseat of a car.

  “At the airport the two men shook hands.

  “The March Newspapers bureau chief sat in the seat behind us, on the way to Rome, never saying a word.

  “At the airport in Rome, all the other passengers were steered into Customs. An Italian policeman took the three of us through a different door, into a reception area, and there, seated in one chair, working from an open briefcase in another chair, was Walter March.

  “I had never met him before.

  “He glanced up when we came in, got up slowly, closed his briefcase, took it in one hand, and said, ‘All right?’

  “He drove us into a hotel in Rome, made sure we were checked in, saw us to a suite, and then left us.

  “An hour later, we were overcome by our own network people.

  “He must have called them, and told them where we were.

  “I didn’t see Walter March again for years. I sent him many full messages of gratitude, I can tell you, but I was never sure if any got through to him. I never had a response.

  “When I finally did meet him, at a reception in Berlin, you know what he said? He said, ‘What? Someone was impersonating me in Rome? That happens.’”

  Freddie said, “Nice story.”

  Crystal said, “It brings a tear to my eye.”

  “Saintly old Walter March,” Fletch said. “I’ve got to go, if you’ll all excuse me.”

  During dinner he had received a note, delivered by a bellman, written on hotel stationery, with Mr. I. Fletcher on the envelope, which read: “Dear Fletch—Didn’t realize you were here until I saw your name in McConnell’s piece in today’s Washington paper. Please come see me as soon after dinner as you can—Suite 12. Lydia March.”

  He had shown the note to no one. (Crystal had expressed curiosity by saying, “For someone unemployed, you sure get interrupted at meals a lot. No wonder you’re slim. When you’re working, you must never get to eat.”)

  Eleanor Earles said, “I take it you’ve worked for Walter March?”

  “I have,” said Crystal.

  “I have,” said Fletch.

  Freddie smiled, and said, “No.”

  “And he was tough on you?” Eleanor asked.

  “No,” said Crystal. “He was rotten to me.”

  Fletch said nothing.

  Eleanor said, to both of them, “I suspect you deserved it.”

  Twenty-five

  9:00 P.M.

  THERE’S A TIME AND A PLACE FOR HUMOR:

  WASHINGTON, NOW

  Address by Oscar Perlman

  The door to Suite 12 was opened to Fletch by Jake Williams, notebook and pen in hand, looking drawn and harassed.

  “Fletcher!”

  They shook hands warmly.

  Lydia, in a pearl-gray house gown, was standing across the living room, several long pieces of yellow Teletype paper in one hand, reading glasses in the other.

  Her pale blue eyes summed up Fletch very quickly and not unkindly.

  “Nice to see you again, Fletch,” she said.

  Fletch was entirely sure they had never met before.

  “We’ll be through in one minute,” she said. “Just some things Jake has to get off tonight.” Leaving Fletch standing there, she put her glasses on her nose and began working through the Teletype sheets, talking to Jake. “I don’t see any reason why we have to run this San Francisco story from A.P. Can’t our own people in San Francisco work up a story for ourselves?”

  “It’s a matter of time,” Jake said, making a note.

  “Poo,” said Lydia. “The story isn’t going to die in six hours.”

  “Six hours?”

  “If our people can’t come up with our own story on this within six hours, then we need some new staff in San Francisco, Jake.”

  “Mrs. March?” Fletch said.

  She looked at him over the frame of her glasses.

  “May I use your John?”

  “Of course.” She pointed with her glasses. “You have to go through the bedroom.”

  “Thank you.”

  When he came back to the living room she was sitting on the divan, demitasse service on the coffee table in front of her, not a piece of paper, not even her glasses, in sight.

  She said, “Sit down, Fletch.”

  He sat in a chair across the coffee table from her.

  “Has Jake left?”

  “Yes. He has a lot to do. Would you care for some coffee?”

  “I don’t use it.”

  He was wondering if his marvelous machine was picking up their conversation. He supposed it was.

  He wondered what Mrs. March would say if he began singing Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as he had promised the machine he would.

  “Fletch, I under
stand you’re not working.”

  She was pouring herself coffee.

  “On a book.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “The journalist’s pride. Whenever a journalist hasn’t got a job, he says he’s working on a book. How many times have I heard it? Sometimes, of course, he is. What’s keeping the wolf from the door?”

  “My ugly disposition.”

  She smiled, slightly. “I’ve heard so much about you, from one source or another. You were one of my husband’s favorite people. He loved to tell stories about you.”

  “I understand people like to tell outrageous stories about me. I’ve heard one only lately. Highly imaginative.”

  “I think you and my husband were very much alike.”

  “Mrs. March, I met with your husband for five minutes one day, in his office. It was not a successful meeting, for either of us.”

  “Of course not. You were too much alike. He had a lot of brashness, you know. Whenever he was presented with alternatives, he always thought up some third course of action no one else had considered. That’s about what you do, isn’t it?”

  Instead of saying “Yes” or “No,” Fletch said, “Maybe.”

  “My point is this, Fletch. Walter is dead.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say you have my sympathy.”

  “Thank you. March Newspapers will need a lot of help. Everything now falls on Junior’s shoulders. He’s every bit the man his father was, of course, even better, in many ways, but.…” She fitted her coffee cup to its saucer. “… This death, this murder.…”

  “It must be a great shock to Junior.”

  “He’s lived so much in his father’s.… They were great friends.”

  “Mrs. March, I’m a working stiff. I’m a reporter. I know how to get a story and maybe how to write it. In a pinch I can work on a copydesk. I know a good layout when I see one. I know nothing about the publishing side of this business, how you attract advertising and what it costs per line, how you finance a newspaper, buy machinery.…”