Fletch’s Moxie f-5

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “And Koller?”

  “Three years ago Sy Koller and Steve Peterman had a fist fight outside a Los Angeles restaurant. Koller had Peterman on the sidewalk and was strangling him when the police arrived. Peterman did not press charges.”

  “Everybody loved Peterman. For sure. What were they fighting about?”

  “A woman, they said.”

  “By the way, Koller says Peterman and Dan Buckley knew each other. That there was some tension between them.”

  “You see? You have the makings of a good earwig. Buckley was losing money in some investment Peterman had gotten him into.”

  “A lot of money?”

  “How do I know what’s a lot of money to these people? I live in a yellow bungalow six miles from the beach.”

  “Okay. Point two. This morning Sy Roller said the set for The Dan Buckley Show could have been rigged. That is, the knife could have been made to fall from somewhere, could have been propelled from somewhere, mechanically. You know what I mean?”

  “We’ve thought of it.”

  “I mean, isn’t that the way stages work? The stage set itself creates the illusion. Anything can be built into it. Anything can be made to happen.”

  “We’ve looked.”

  “The fact that nothing shows up on the tapes and films so far sort of substantiates his theory, doesn’t it? I mean, this thing would have to be rigged by someone who knew where the cameras would be.”

  “It’s a good theory.”

  “And Roller points out really the only person who would have the time, the expert knowledge, enough control over the set to rig such a thing would be Dan Buckley himself.”

  “You notice something?”

  “What?”

  “Koller seems very anxious to pin Dan Buckley.”

  “Maybe so. But maybe he’s right.”

  “Last night and again this morning we went over that set millimeter by millimeter.”

  “Come on, Chief. What does your average cop know about stage sets? Your average citizen can be fooled by an eight-year-old magician wearing French cuffs.”

  “Which is why we have three set designers flying down from New York.”

  “Experts.”

  “More experts. This case is going to wreck our budget for this year, and next. Of course, having to call Key West long distance doesn’t help the budget any, either.”

  “You have film experts coming in and stage set experts.”

  “We have.”

  “You know what this means…”

  “It means property taxes will have to go up in this district. Because a bunch of rich film people visited us, and one of them got murdered.”

  “If you need theater experts to solve this crime, then it means this crime must have been committed by a theater expert.”

  “Very good, earwig. Especially seeing you’re the only person involved who has nothing to do with theater.”

  People were shouting in the front hall of The Blue House.

  “I didn’t kill Peterman,” Fletch said. “You should have asked.”

  “We’re hiring experts by the planeload, Mister Fletcher,” Chief Roz Nachman said. “And I intend to listen to them. I also intend to keep my mind open to the simple explanation.”

  “Which is?”

  “I wish I knew. Someone put a knife in Steven Peterman’s back. Granted, it happened under most unusual and complicated circumstances. But it is still a simple crime of violence.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Yeah. Next time I call answer the phone.”

  There was another shout from the front hall. It sounded like Sy Koller.

  “I’ll answer the phone.”

  “Nice talking with you,” Roz Nachman said. “Maybe sometime I’ll come down.”

  “You might as well,” Fletch said. “Everyone else has.”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  Fletch hurried through the billiard room and along the corridor to the front hall.

  Sy Koller stood halfway down the stairs, facing downward.

  Gerry Littleford stood just below him on the stairs, facing upward. He was naked. In his right hand was a carving knife.

  Gerry was sexually aroused. Every muscle in his lean body was taut. His skin shone with sweat. He was moving like a panther about to pounce.

  He was beautiful.

  Koller took a step backward, up the stairs.

  “What are you all doing to me?” Gerry asked, softly.

  “Gerry, you’ve been working hard,” Koller said. “There’s been strain.”

  At the top of the stairs, leaning on the bannister, Geoff McRensie watched. Something in his eyes was turning over like a reel of film.

  On the floor of the front hall were Gerry’s red bikini underpants.

  “No, no,” said Gerry. “It’s not that. I know it’s not that. I’m black. You all think I’m black.”

  Koller laughed nervously. “Gerry, you are black.”

  Gerry plunged the knife at Roller’s fat, white legs. Roller jumped up another step. His face was wet with sweat, too.

  Mrs Lopez was in the diningroom door. “He’s got my knife,” she said to Fletch.

  “Say man, Sy. Go ahead. Say man. Say boy.”

  “I never called you boy in my life. I never would.”

  Gerry lunged again. Roller stepped sideways on the stair.

  “You’re insulting me,” said Roller.

  “I’m a twenty-seven-year-old professional actor!” Gerry screamed.

  “Good one, too,” Roller said mildly.

  “I’m a man!”

  “Gerry, that’s obvious. If you’d just put down the knife. Give it to Fletcher…”

  “Gerry,” Fletch said quietly. “This is not a good day for you to be threatening someone with a knife. It doesn’t look good. You know what I mean?”

  Gerry pivoted on the stair to look down at Fletch fully.

  “Don’t call me boy.”

  “Who called you boy?”

  Mrs Lopez said, “That’s my good knife.”

  Sy Koller laughed. “Come on, Gerry. You can’t expect to be asked to play Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest.”

  “Everyone’s always beatin’ up on me,” Gerry said.

  “That’s in the movies, Gerry,” Sy Koller said. “You’re a well-paid professional actor. At home you drive a Porsche. No one beats you up.”

  “Goddamn it!” He slashed at Sy Koller’s legs.

  Koller jumped back, up another stair. His green T-shirt flapped.

  Fletch heard Moxie walk along the upper corridor. She, or something like her, appeared at the top of the stairs. They were her legs between white shorts and white sneakers. The torso was her’s, in a light blue sport shirt. The head was wrapped in a red kerchief. The face was matted with rouge and powder. Bright red lipstick enlarged her mouth ridiculously. The eyes were covered by giant sunglasses in white plastic frames.

  Koller said, as if threatening, “Gerry, I’m not going to jump another stair.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” Moxie started down the stairs.

  “Be careful,” Fletch said.

  She passed Koller and stood on the stair with Gerry. She ignored the knife. She took his erect penis in her hand and shook it as if she were shaking hands. “You need something else to think about, boy.”

  “You called him boy,” Koller said. “She called him boy.”

  “I should call him girl?” asked Moxie. “With his prick in my hand?”

  Mrs Lopez climbed the steps, reached around Gerry, and took the knife from his hand. “My good knife,” she said. She started back to the kitchen.

  “Get Mrs Littleford, will you?” Fletch asked Mrs Lopez.

  “They’re all against me.” Gerry confided to Moxie. “You should see what they’re doin’ to me.”

  Moxie put her hands on his wet, shining shoulders. “It’s just the coke, honey. No one’s doing anything to you. Everything’s fine. You’re fine. It’s a nice d
ay.”

  “It’s not the coke. It’s what they’re doin’ to me.”

  “It’s that little white powder you keep puttin’ up your nose, sweetheart,” Moxie said. “Drugs do funny things to your mind. Have you heard that?”

  Gerry was studying Sy Koller’s legs. They were unscratched.

  Stella came into the front hall. She had a bath towel in her hands.

  “Gerry needs an airing,” Fletch said to her. “Why don’t you walk him any direction from here until you come to water. And throw him in. He needs a swim.” Her eyes had heavy lids. “You need a swim, too.”

  “I’m the one who needs the airing,” Moxie said to Fletch. “Get me out of here.”

  “Dressed like that? You’ll attract flies.”

  “No one will look at me,” Moxie said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  On the stairs Stella was wiping down Gerry’s whole body with the towel.

  Looking at them, Fletch said, “Maybe a swim isn’t a good idea.”

  “Who cares?” Moxie took Fletch by the hand.

  “Don’t swim out too far,” Fletch said to Stella and Gerry.

  He pulled Moxie sideways a moment and looked into the living room.

  Edith Howell and Frederick Mooney were together on a Victorian loveseat. She had a gin and tonic in hand. His drink was in a short brandy glass.

  “Revivals,” Mooney was opining, “are anti-progress. Been far too many of ’em, lately. We must get ourselves out of the way, and let the young people create anew.”

  “But, Freddy,” Edith said, “Time, Gentleman, Time was a great musical. It still is.”

  “Come on.” Fletch tugged Moxie’s hand. “We’ll go see the sunset. Out the back way. Through the Lopezes’ yard.”

  17

  “So,” Fletch said. They were walking along Whitehead Street. Moxie’s beautified head made Fletch feel he was walking along with a gift-wrapped package on a stick. “Gerry Littleford’s mind runs to stabbing people with knives.”

  “That was nothing,” Moxie said. “Forget about it.”

  “Your usual domestic incident? I thought things were getting rather serious there.”

  “You should never believe an actor,” Moxie said. “It’s not what’s said that counts. It’s the delivery.”

  “Including what you just said.”

  “I am lying, the liar said,” Moxie said. “I wish he wouldn’t use that stuff all the time.”

  “You mean you wish he would use it some of the time?”

  “Sure. When he has an angry scene to play. He can become really frightening on the stuff.”

  “I saw that. But that’s not acting, is it? I mean, it’s just reacting to a drug.”

  “Acting is a drug, Fletcher. All art is. A distortion of perspective. A heightening of concentration. But when Gerry’s just doing an ordinary hard scene the stuff works against him. Sets his timing off. Makes him overact.”

  “Do you use that stuff, Moxie? Like, for an ‘angry scene’?”

  “’Course not. I’m a better actor than Gerry.” She looked across the street, at the big sign on the brick wall. “Wish I could go in there,” she said. “I’d love to see Hemingway’s bedroom. Also the room where he wrote. That was cute, what we did when we were playing pool. You have a good enough memory to be an actor.”

  “Moxie, do you think there are different rules for creative people?”

  “Sure. There have to be special rules for being that alone.”

  “Something your father said this afternoon. Something about the obligations of talent being primary. We were talking about his relationship with you, and your mother, I guess. He said: ‘Many men can love a woman and have a child; only a few can love the world and create miracles’.”

  “Dear O.L. Always the pretty turn of phrase.” She walked in silence a moment. “I guess he’s right.”

  “How can there be different rules for different people?”

  “You just said it yourself, Fletch. I just said it. At the house you just said I couldn’t go out—it wouldn’t be safe. I just said I wished I could tour Hemingway’s house. I wish I would be one hundred percent efficient as a creative person and one hundred percent efficient as a business person. I wish I didn’t have to have a Steve Peterman living many of the normal aspects of my life for me.” She turned him sideways on the sidewalk. “Look at me.”

  “I can’t.” He put his free hand over his eyes to shield himself from the sight of the kilograms of rouge, powder, lipstick, those foolish huge sunglasses on her face. “It’s too ’orrible.”

  “I’m standing on a street in Key West,” she said. “A marvelous live and let-live town. But, if you observe closely, I have to stand here observing different rules.”

  “There’s been a murder.”

  He walked forward again.

  “Sure.” She walked with him. “If Jane Jones were involved in a murder, she could walk down the street without disguising herself as Miss Piggy. I can’t.” Crossing a sidestreet, the sun was warm on his face. “It’s a question of energies, really,” Moxie said. “Where do creative energies come from? If one has them, how does one best use them? When they wear down, how does one refurbish them? It’s a joyous problem. It’s also a responsibility, you see, all by itself. An extra responsibility. I guess, as Freddy says, a primary responsibility. And one just can’t be totally responsible for everything. Few chefs take out the garbage. The day just isn’t that long. No one’s energies are that great.”

  Hand in hand, they walked through the long shadows of the palm trees on Whitehead Street.

  After a while she dropped her hand.

  “I know what your question is,” she said in a low voice. “Your question is: do different rules for creative people give them the right to commit murder?”

  “Don’t cry,” Fletch said. “It will make gulleys in your face powder.”

  “I did not murder Steve Peterman,” Moxie said. “It’s important that you believe me, Fletch.”

  Fletch said, “I know.”

  “Wow!” Moxie said. “What’s all this about?”

  “Sunset.”

  There were hundreds of people on the dock. Spaced to keep out of each other’s sounds, there was a rock band, a country band, a string ensemble. There was a juggler juggling oranges and an acrobatic team bouncing each other into the air. There was a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin doing the funny walk through the crowd. There was an earnest young man preaching The Word of The Lord and a more earnest young man in a brown shirt and swastika armband preaching racial discrimination, and a most earnest young man satirizing them both, exhorting the people to believe in canned peas. Each had an audience of listeners, watchers, cheerers, and jeerers.

  Across the water, the big red sun was dropping slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.

  The people milling around on the dock, ambling from group to group, looking at each other, listening to each other, taking pictures of each other, were of every sort extant. One hundred miles of Florida Keys hang from continental U.S.A., like an udder, and to the southernmost point drip the cream and the milk and the scum of the whole continent. There are the artists, the writers, the musicians, young and old, the arrived, the arriving, and the never-to-arrive. There are numbers of single people of all ages, sometimes in groups, the searchers who sometimes find. There are the American families, with children and without, the professional and the working class, the retired and the honeymooners. There are the drug victims and the drug smugglers, the filthy, mind blown, and the gold-bedecked, corrupt, corrupting despoilers of the human being.

  “Wow,” said Moxie. “What a fashion show.”

  The people there were dressed in tatters and tailor-made, suits and strings, rags and royal gems.

  “You should talk,” Fletch said, grinning into her huge plastic glasses.

  “So many people for a sunset.”

  “Happens every night. Even cloudy nights.”

  “What an event. Someone should se
ll tickets. Really. Think what you have to do to get this many people into a theater.”

  After touring the crowd, listening to the music, watching the performers, Fletch and Moxie found an empty place on the edge of the dock and sat down. Their legs dangled over the water.

  “What an outer reality,” Moxie said.

  “Which reminds me,” Fletch said. “Simple enough question: who is the producer of Midsummer Night’s Madness?”

  “Steve Peterman.”

  “I thought you said he was executive producer, or something.”

  “He is. Sort of. There is another producer, Talcott Cross. I never met him. His job is finished, for now. He worked at setting things up. Casting. Most of the location work. You know, hiring people.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Los Angeles, I suppose. I think he lives in Hollywood Hills. Steve intended to be the line-producer on this film. That is, stay with it during shooting, and all that.”

  “So which of them hired Geoff McKensie and which hired Sy Koller?”

  “Cross hired McKensie. Peterman fired him.”

  “And Peterman hired Koller.”

  “Right.”

  “So Peterman is more powerful than Cross? I mean, one of the co-producers is more equal than the other?”

  “Sure. Cross is more of an employee. Hired to do the production stuff Steve didn’t want to do, or didn’t have time to do.”

  “Does Cross get a share of the profits?”

  “I suppose so. But probably not as big a share as Steve… would have gotten.”

  Down the dock, also sitting on the edge, a girl in cut-off jeans was staring at Moxie.

  “What makes Steve Peterman as a producer more powerful than his co-producer, what’s-his-name Cross?”

  “Talcott Cross. Everything in this business, Fletch, comes down to one word: the bank. Where the money comes from.”

  “Okay. That’s my question. I thought a producer was someone who raises money for a film.”

  “A producer does an awful lot more than that.”

  The girl in cut-off blue jeans nudged the boy sitting next to her. She said something to him.

  “But it was Steve Peterman who raised the money for this film.”

  “Yes. From Jumping Cow Productions, Inc.”

  “What’s that?”