Confess, Fletch f-2

by Gregory Mcdonald

  He advised her to see a doctor.

  After standing in line for forty-seven minutes at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles at 100 Nassau Street before being able to present his driver’s license, purchase agreement marked “Cash—Paid,” and application for insurance, he was given his vehicle registration (for a light blue Chevrolet caravan) and two license plates.

  They attached his license plates for him at the used car lot in North Cambridge.

  Driving back into Boston, he stopped at a corner variety store and bought twenty-five issues of that evening’s Boston Globe. The curiosity of the storekeeper and his wife made Fletch wonder if indeed he was mentioned in that evening’s newspaper. In the van, he went through one newspaper quickly. He wasn’t.

  He also stopped at a hardware store and bought a quart of black paint, a cheap, brush, and a bottle of turpentine.

  It was dark when he returned to River Street. Leaving the garage door open and the van outside with its lights on, he spread the Globe all over the cement floor.

  Then he, drove the van into the garage, onto the paper, and closed the door.

  Being careful of his clothes, doing a purposefully messy job by the headlights reflected from the front wall, he climbed on top of the van and wrote, “YOU MUST BE HIGH” on the roof. Climbing down, again over the windshield, he wrote, in huge, dripping letters, on the left panel, “FEED THE PEOPLE.” On the right panel, “ADJUST!”

  As the truck was wet from the mist before he began, the mess he created was perfect.

  After cleaning his hands with the newspapers and turpentine, he locked the garage.

  Then he taxied to the Sheraton Boston Hotel and rented a two-door, dark blue Ford Ghia, which he drove to his apartment and parked on the street.

  Nine

  Lights were on in the apartment.

  Taking off his coat, Fletch went directly into the den. He flung the coat over an arm of a chair.

  On the desk was a note for him.

  It read, “Call Countess de Grassi at Ritz-Carlton—Mrs. Sawyer.”

  Aloud, Fletch said, “Shit!”

  “Would,, it be more bad news for you, Mister Fletcher?”

  Inspector Flynn was looking is at him from the hall.

  “I fear we must add to it.”

  Grover joined Flynn from the living room.

  “Your Mrs. Sawyer allowed us to remain after she left,” Flynn said, “after we had fully proven ourselves not only Boston Police officers but fully virtuous men as well.”

  Fletch left the note upside down on the desk.

  “If you want to talk to me, let’s not sit in here,” he said. “I got sort of tired of this room last night.”

  “Precisely why we were waiting for you in the living room.” Flynn stood back to let Fletch pass. “It’s airier.”

  “Do you gentlemen want a drink?”

  “Don’t let us spoil your pleasure.”

  Fletch abstained.

  He sat in one, of the divans at the fireplace—the one nearer where the corpse had lain, and therefore not is view of the site.

  “You’ve led us a merry chase,” Flynn said, letting himself down in the opposite divan. “After you disappeared this morning, you would have found it impossible to leave the City of Boston—at least by public transportation.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Now you can’t tell us you went in one door of the Ritz-Carlton and out the side door in a flash, thereby dropping our tail on you, out of the purest of all innocence!”

  “Actually, I did,” Fletch said. “I just stopped in to buy a newspaper.”

  “Such an innocent man, Grover. Have we ever met such a blissfully innocent man? Here, stalwart men of the Boston Police have been staking out all the terminals all the day, the airport, the train stations, the bus stations, armed with the description of our murder suspect here, and our Mister Fletcher pops up at the cocktail hour like a proper clubman with the entirely reasonable explanation that he went in one door of a hotel and out another simply to buy a newspaper!”

  “I bought a map of Boston, too.”

  “We were just about to leave,” Flynn said, “having heard you rented a car a half hour ago. A blue Ford Ghia, whatever that is—I suppose it’s got wheels—license number what-is-it; Grover?”

  “R99420,” Grover read from his notebook.

  “By the by, Grover. Go call off that all-points bulletin on that car. Let the troopers on the Massachusetts Turnpike relax tonight. Mister Fletcher is at home.”

  Grover returned to the den to use the telephone.

  Flynn said, “Is that turpentine I smell?”

  “It’s a new men’s cologne,” Fletch answered. “Eau Dubuffet. Very big in France at the moment.”

  “I’d swear it’s turpentine.”

  “I can get you a bottle of it,” Fletch said.

  “Ach, no, I wouldn’t put you to the trouble.”

  “No trouble,” Fletch said. “Honestly.”

  “Is it expensive stuff?”

  “Depends,” Fletch said, “on whether you buy it by the ounce or the quart.”

  “No offense intended,” Flynn said, “but I’m not sure I’d want to smell that way. I mean, like a housepainter coming home. Supposed to be manly, is it?”

  “Don’t you think it is?”

  “Well, noses play funny tricks on people. Especially the French.”

  Grover came back into the living room.

  “Inspector, I smell turpentine,” he said. “Do you?”

  Flynn said, “I do not.”

  Grover stood in the middle of the, room, white at the wrists, wondering how he should settle.

  “Do you want me to take the conversation down, Inspector?”

  “In truth, I don’t want you to take anything down, ever. I have a very peculiar talent, Mister Fletcher. Being a writer-on-art you must have a heightened visual sense. I gather you have a more refined olfactory sense as well, as you pay a fancy price for a French cologne which smells remarkably like turpentine to me. My talent is I never forget a thing I’ve heard. It’s these wonderful Irish ears.” The green eyes gleamed impishly as the big man pulled up on his own ears. “Ears of the poets.”

  Grover was in a side chair, his notebook and pen in his lap at the ready.

  In his soft voice, Flynn said, “Grover gave me quite a scolding last night, Mister Fletcher, on the drive home. For not arresting you, you understand. He’s convinced we have enough evidence to make a case.”

  “You’re not?” Fletch asked.

  “We have evidence,” Flynn said, “which is getting thicker by the minute. I explained to Grover I’d rather leave a man his own head and follow him. It’s easier to get to know a man when he’s free and following his own nature than it is when he’s all scrunched up and defensive with his lawyers in a jail cell. A terrible scolding I had. And then this morning you slip our tail, all quite innocently, of course, and fritter away the day doing we know not what.”

  Fletch did not accept the invitation to report his day.

  “In the meantime,” he said, “aren’t you afraid I might murder someone else?”

  “Exactly!” blurted Grover from the side of the room.

  Flynn’s look told Grover he was a necessary evil.

  Softly, Flynn said, “It’s my argument that Irwin Maurice Fletcher, even alias Peter Fletcher, would not murder a gorgeous girl in a closed apartment—at lest not sober—and then routinely, almost professionally, call the police on himself. He could have wiped things clean, repacked his suitcases, gone back to the airport and been out of the country in the twitch of a rabbit’s nose.”

  “Thank you,” said Fletch.

  “Even better,” Flynn continued his argument with the side of the room, “he could have dressed the body, taken her down the back stairs in the dark of the night;, and left her anywhere in the City of Boston. It wouldn’t have disturbed his plans at all.”

  Fletch had thought about that.<
br />
  “Instead, what does our boyo do? He calls the police. He doesn’t precisely turn himself in, but he does call the police. He deserves some credit, Grover, for his remarkable and demonstrated faith in the institution of the public police.”

  Grover’s ears were red. For a single, impetuous word in argument with his superior he was receiving a considerable chewing out.

  “However,” said Flynn in a more relaxed manner, “evidence developed today adds considerable weight to Grover’s argument. Are you interested in it at all, Mister Fletcher?”

  “Of course.”

  “First of all, what’s your understanding as to when Mister Bart Connors went to Italy?”

  “I don’t know,” Fletch answered. “He had occupancy of the villa as of last Sunday.”

  “And this is Wednesday,” Flynn said. “Mrs. Sawyer confirms that Connors was here with her on Saturday, and that he asked her to come in Monday night for a few hours and do a special clean-up because of your arrival Tuesday, yesterday. She did so. Therefore, wouldn’t it be natural to assume Connors left for Italy sometime between Saturday night and Monday night?”

  Fletch said, “I guess so.”

  “To this point, we have not been able to establish that he actually did so,” Flynn said. “A check of the airlines turned up no transatlantic reservations in the name of Bartholomew Connors.”

  “He could have flown from New York.”

  “He didn’t,” Flynn said. “And as Mister Connors is a partner in an important Boston law firm, I can’t believe he would travel under a false passport, unless there is something extraordinary going on here at which we can’t even guess.”

  Fletch said, “I suppose I could call the villa in Italy and see if he’s there.”

  “We may come to that,” said Flynn, “But let’s not roust the quail until its feathers are wet.”

  “What?”

  “Next we come to Mrs. Sawyer. A widow lady with two grown daughters. One teaches school in Mattapan. She does not live with her mother. The other is in medical school in Oregon. Mrs. Sawyer confirms she has a key to this apartment, but that no one had access to it other than herself. She spent Sunday with a gentleman friend, who is a sixty-year-old divorced accountant, visiting his grandchildren in New Bedford.”

  Fletch said, “Would you believe I never did suspect Mrs. Sawyer?”

  “She had a key,” Flynn answered. “Never can tell what bad man might have been taking advantage of her, for reasons of his own. She says that six months ago Connors suffered a particularly—I might even say, peculiarly—painful separation from his wife. There will be a divorce, she says, and I don’t doubt it. She says there have been one or more women in this apartment since the separation. She finds their belongings around when she comes to clean. As clothes have never been left, in closets and drawers, she believes she can say no woman has actually lived here since the separation. It substantiates her belief that there has been ‘a parade of women through here.’ It also substantiates her belief that none of them was ever given, or had, a key.”

  Grover sneezed.

  “As there appear to be paintings in this apartment of great value—is that not right, Mister Fletcher?—we may suppose even further towards certainty that Mistier Connors did not dispense keys to this apartment like jelly beans.”

  “Great value,” said Fletch. “Very great value.”

  He had not toured the paintings to his own satisfaction yet, but he had seen enough to be impressed. Besides the Brown in the den, there was a Matisse in the bedroom, a Klee in the living room (on the wall behind Grover), and a Warhol in the dining room.

  “The last thing to say about access to the apartment is that there is a back door, in the kitchen. The rubbish goes out that way. There is no key to it. It is twice a bolted from the inside. Mrs. Sawyer tells us she is most faithful about bolting it. In fact, when we arrived last night, both bolts were in place. No one could have gone out that way.”

  “But someone could have come in that way,” said Fletch, “bolted the door behind him and gone out the front way.”

  “Absolutely right,” said Flynn. “But how would they, without having known the back door was unbolted?”

  “By chance,” said Fletch.

  “Aye. By chance.” Clearly Flynn did not think much of chance.

  “Now we come to you,” said Flynn.

  Grover sat up and clicked his ballpoint pen.

  “Washington was good enough to send us both your photograph and your fingerprints.” Flynn smiled kindly at Fletch. “Ach, a man has no privacy, anymore.”

  The kindly smile increased Fletch’s discomfort.

  “A man is many things,” said Flynn. “A bad check charge. Two contempt of court charges. Non-payment-of-alimony charges longer than most people’s family trees…”

  “Get off it, Flynn.”

  “…All charges dropped. I do not mean to act as your lawyer,” said Flynn, “although I seem to be doing a lot of that. May I recommend that as all these charges were mysteriously dropped, you do something to get them off your record? They’re not supposed to be there. And you never know when an official, such as myself, might come along and view them with extreme prejudice. On the principle, you know, that where there’s a hatrack there’s a hat.”

  “Thanks for your advice.”

  “I see you also won the Bronze Star. What the notation ‘not delivered’ means after the item, I can’t guess.”

  Grover looked around at Fletch with a drill sergeant’s disdain.

  Flynn said, “You’re a pretty dodgy fellow, Irwin Maurice Fletcher.”

  Fletch said, “I bet you wouldn’t even want your daughter to marry me.”

  “I would resist it,” Flynn said, “under the prevailing circumstances.”

  “You guys don’t even like my cologne.”

  “None of the gentlemen who drive the taxis in from the airport have identified you so far.”

  “Why do you care about that?”

  “We’d like to know if you came in from the airport alone, or with a young lady.”

  “I see.”

  “Even the driver who delivered someone from the airport to 152 Beacon Street yesterday afternoon can’t identify you. Nor is his record clear on whether he was carrying one passenger or two.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Those fellows who work the airport are and independent lot. Fearful independent. And four taxis went from this area last night to the Café Budapest. None of the drivers can identify you or say whether you were alone or not.”.

  “I’m greatly indebted to them all.”

  “Not everyone is as cooperative as you, Mister Fletcher.”

  “The bastards.”

  “Nor did the waiters at the Café Budapest recognize you at all. For a man who wears such an expensive cologne, the fact that you can spend an hour or two in a fashionable restaurant and have no one—not even the waiters—recognize you the next day must cut.”

  “It slashes,” said Fletch. “It slashes.”

  “You’d think waiters would remember a man eating alone, taking up a whole table, even for two, all by himself, wouldn’t you? It affects their income.”

  It was ten minutes to eight.

  “That we discovered with your photograph. From your fingerprints we also found out some interesting.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “You touched two things in this room—middle-A on the piano keyboard, with your right index finger. I had no idea you are musical.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Did I say two things in this room other than the light switches? I meant to. I would guess when you came into this apartment and were looking around, you turned on the wall switch in the living room, went to the piano, hit middle A, went into the dining room and then the kitchen, leaving the lights on like a 1970 electric company executive.”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “The only other things your fingerprints were on in this room were the
whiskey bottle and the water decanter.”

  “That would be right.”

  “It was a fresh bottle. You opened it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mister Fletcher. The whiskey bottle was the murder weapon.”

  The green eyes watched him intensely. Fletch felt them in his stomach. To his side he had the impression of Grover’s white face, watching him.

  “There were no other fingerprints on the bottle, Mister Fletcher. It had been dusted. Liquor bottles are apt to be dusted while being set out.”

  “What other fingerprints were in this room?” Fletch asked. “I mean, whose others?”

  “Mrs. Sawyer’s, the gal’s—that is, Ruth Fryer’s—and the prints of one other person, a man’s, we presume to belong to Bartholomew Connors.”

  “Were there many of the girl’s?”

  “A few. Enough to establish she was murdered here. They were the fingerprints of a live person.”

  Fletch considered his wisdom in saying nothing. At the moment he doubted he could say anything, anyway.

  “The disconcerting thing is, Mister Fletcher,” continued Flynn with a nerve-shattering gentleness, “that if you remember your laws of physics, the whiskey bottle, would be a far more reliable, satisfactory, workable murder weapon when it is full and sealed than after it has been uncapped and a quantity has been poured out.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “By opening the whiskey bottle and pouring, a quantity out, you meant to remove the whiskey bottle from suspicion, as the murder weapon.”

  “It didn’t work,” said Fletch.

  “Ah, that’s where my inexperience comes in. A more experienced police officer might have discounted the whiskey bottle completely. I remember having to persuade Grover to send it along. It took a few words, didn’t it, Grover? Not having come up through the ranks myself, and never having had the benefits of a proper education, I insisted. The boyos in the police laboratory were very surprised the murder weapon was an unbroken, open bottle.”