Fletch turned.
Standing where he was when Fletch first entered the room, Radliegh said, “One moment please.” He paused. “Mister Fletcher, I am about to have a massive coronary occlusion.”
“What?”
Radliegh fell forward. His chest, head hit the edge of the side of the desk. He continued falling sideways. As he fell to the floor, the globe of the world fell over.
He lay on his back between the desk and the toppled globe.
Fletch said, “My God!”
He rushed forward.
Lifting the globe aside, he knelt on one knee beside Radliegh.
Radliegh’s eyelids fluttered. Then were still.
Fletch felt for pulse in Radliegh’s neck, then his left wrist.
Aloud, Fletch said, “You were right again, Radliegh.”
21
“Jack?”
Leaving the door open, Fletch had entered Jack’s half of the cottage in the dark and turned on the bedside lamp.
Jack sat up straight on the bed and squinted at Fletch.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Quarter to one.”
Jack shook his head. “I was asleep.”
Fletch said, “That’s a good way to spend time in bed, too.”
“What’s the matter?” Jack asked. “You’re still in black tie.”
“Radliegh’s dead.”
“Doctor Chester Radliegh?”
“The one and only.”
“Who killed him?”
“I did.”
“What?”
Fletch said, “I killed Chester Radliegh.”
“Tell me the one about why the turtle crossed the road.”
“To get to the Shell station.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding.”
“You killed him with what? How?”
“Talk. You asked me to talk with him. I talked with him. I think you were right: no one has ever really talked with, at Chester Radliegh before. It was a stressful conversation. In retrospect, I realize I questioned his entire modus vivendi. I called him a dictator. I even called him an idiot.”
“You called Doctor Chester Radliegh an idiot?”
“It just slipped out. An obdurate man, no matter how brilliant, is an idiot.”
“Calling him an idiot killed him?”
“He had a massive coronary occlusion. He said no one had ever called him an idiot before.”
“A heart attack.”
“Yes.”
“He was poisoned.”
“No. I was alone in the room with him. We drank from the same bottle of cognac. He had a heart attack. Even he knew it was a heart attack. His own doctor was at the party. He has said Radliegh died of a heart attack.”
“He died of a heart attack.”
“You’re getting it.”
“You didn’t kill him.”
“I hate obduracy.”
Jack said, “I hate French fries that look like pubic hair.”
Fletch said, “That’s real interesting. A detective named Corso has arrived from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.”
“Already?”
“He’s not here to investigate Radliegh’s death. I gather he was handpicked by Radliegh to investigate the murder of Doctor Jim Wilson.”
“What good is it to handpick a detective?”
“Well, suppose the detective discovers the murderer is a member of the family, or whoever. Given enough power and influence, a deal can be made whereby that person is spirited away into a sanatorium, for example, and never brought to trial…”
“That’s possible?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“Why would Radliegh want to protect anyone who tried to kill him?”
“I’ve just conversed with the late Doctor Radliegh.”
“I know. I’ve already sworn to myself to be less obdurate with you.”
“That’s good.”
“I learn fast.”
“He was highly protective of his family, no matter what they did. They could do no wrong, at least as far as the public was concerned. He insisted all their crimes and misdemeanors, including many alleged efforts to do him in, were just growing pains, signs of youthful rebelliousness.”
“They weren’t.”
“He seemed to deny their true natures. Or believe they would overcome their true natures, given time.”
“Didn’t saints believe that?”
“His pride went so far as to believe they, no one, would succeed in hurting him. And his evidence, derived by what he called scientific method, was that none had succeeded, yet.”
“He felt that because they hadn’t succeeded in killing him they didn’t really, deeply intend to kill him? All these attempts were just Freudian slips??”
“Something like that.”
“And then you came along.”
“To succeed where others fail….” Fletch cleared his throat. “At his last moment, if he was using anything like the scientific method I learned, he may have seen the light.”
Jack said, “Pride cometh before a fall.”
“Amen.”
“He fell.”
“Onto the globe of his world.”
Through the soft lamplight surrounding the bed, Jack was squinting toward the open door of his quarters.
Barefoot, wearing only boxer shorts with horses’ heads stamped on them in red, Peppy stood there. “What’s happened?” he asked. “Who’s this?”
Jack said, “My father.”
Peppy looked at the older man in black tie and white summer formal jacket beside the bed and then at the naked young man in the bed. “Oh.”
Baldly, Jack said, “Doctor Radliegh died of a heart attack.”
“A heart attack?”
“Natural causes,” Fletch said.
“Are you sure?” Peppy asked.
“I’m sure.”
“Oh, shit,” Peppy said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Amen,” Fletch said.
“Now the shit hits the fan,” Peppy said.
•
“Who—?”
Lying in bed on his side in the pitch black room, Jack awoke startled. Fingers were laced behind his neck. In his sleep his right knee had moved forward and discovered a smooth thigh.
He worked his hips and legs backward in the bed. “Alixis?”
“Alixis?” Shana asked.
“Shana.”
“Chester’s dead.”
“I know.” The tips of his fingers touched her cheeks wet with tears. “I’m sorry.”
“Just hold me, Jack. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Hold me tight.”
“Okay.”
•
“Hello?”
“Fletch?”
“Yes, Crystal.”
“I’m sorry to call you at such an ungodly hour.”
“I’m awake.” Sitting on the edge of his bed, Fletch looked around at the walls of the bedroom of the Monkey Grass Suite on the third floor of the main house at Vindemia. The walls were papered with the ground cover.
“Jack all right?”
“He’s fine. He’ll call you in the morning.”
“Fletch?”
“Yes, Crystal?”
“I think I’m hungry.”
“Oh.”
“I’m lying in the corner of this huge gym in the dark. For some reason, the reading lamp doesn’t work. I think Mister Mortimer rigged it. Do you suppose he might have rigged it?”
“He’s a mean man.”
“I can’t even read.”
“So try sleeping, for once.”
“All he left me to get through the night was a tall glass of skim milk.”
“So take a sip and go to sleep.”
“I drank it.”
“All of it?”
“Hours ago.”
“I see.”
“Fletch, instead of sheep, I was counting plates of pasta. You know
, tomato sauce. Tomato, meat sauce. Cheese. Garlic bread. When I began substituting broiled lobsters with drawn butter, I thought I had better call you.”
“Right. They’re more expensive.”
“Baked lobsters stuffed with crab.”
“Enough. You’re making me hungry.”
“Sorry. Misery proliferates.”
“Believe it or not, you’ll get through the night.”
“Tell me again what I’m really feeling.”
“It’s not hunger.”
“It feels like hunger.”
“It’s what you’ve always recognized as hunger, responded to as hunger.”
“So what is it?”
“Digestive pangs.”
“I’m feeling digestive pangs, not hunger pangs?”
“Believe it.”
“Is it true?”
“How do I know? It’s just an idea of mine. For now, I suspect you’re better off believing it.”
“Okay. I believe. Why are you awake so late?”
“Doctor Radliegh died after dinner.”
“How? Did someone kill him?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“How did you do that?”
“Just by talking to him.”
“Mister Mortimer said no one should ever listen to you.”
“He’s right, I guess.”
“Digestive pangs, not hunger pangs,” she scoffed. “Who ever heard of such a thing? That’s okay, Fletch. You can still talk to me.”
Fletch couldn’t help yawning. “Try to sleep, Crystal.”
“Digestive pangs means I’ve eaten. That right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” she sighed. “I guess I have. Good night, Fletch.”
“Sleep tight. Don’t let the lobsters bite.”
“Thanks, Fletch.”
Fletch yawned again. “Thanks died at Hialeah, or something.”
•
“Jack?”
The full lengths of their bodies were on their sides facing each other tight together. He had held Shana through the night.
As still as something inanimate, she had wept silently.
At some point, not moving, Jack had fallen back asleep.
Now dawn light was in the windows.
“Jack? Make love to me gently? Softly? Slowly?”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
“Yes. Please.”
•
It was full light when Jack was shaving in his little bathroom.
Shana’s face appeared beside his left shoulder in the bathroom mirror.
Her eyes narrowed and turned hard.
She was looking at the scar on his back.
She said: “Alixis.”
She disappeared from the mirror.
To his surprise, he heard his cottage door close before he had the soap off his face.
22
“This place will go to ruin in no time,” Mrs. Houston said to Jack.
He could not disagree with her.
Vindemia was already ruined.
Confused, concerned, curious, Jack had bicycled around the estate after he had cooked and eaten a large breakfast alone in his cottage.
Although it was early Sunday morning there were cars coming and going on Vindemia’s roads. And they were not maintaining the sedate speed limit. Nor were they all vehicles that belonged to the people who worked and lived on the estate. A few honked at him impatiently to get himself and his bike out of their way, off the road. An approaching car passing another sent him and his bike into a ditch.
The gates of Vindemia were open.
The guardhouse, which had stone walls a foot thick and sat in the middle of the double road, was empty. The telephone had been pulled from the wall and taken. When Jack had entered Vindemia he thought he had seen a small television in the guardhouse. There was none there now.
The gatehouse itself appeared empty. A first floor window had been smashed. Curtains flapped through an open second story window. The screen on the back door had been broken.
From there, Jack looked back at the main house, a mile away.
The ten huge blue and white flags were not waving from the roof of the house. No one had raised the flags, even to half mast.
Jack realized he had missed the sound of the flags snapping in the wind.
He rode to the village.
In the streets around the village cars were parked in front of nearly every house. A few cars were parked on the lawns immediately in front of houses. There were more children’s toys scattered in the yards than there were children playing with them.
There were many cars and pickup trucks parked in front of the General Store. The woman who had been clerking the store stood on the porch in a housedress and slippers. She glanced at Jack when he pulled up on his bike. She had a coughing fit. Two men came out of the store carrying cases of groceries, passed her on the porch, went down the steps and packed the cases in the trunk of a small car.
On the sidewalk in front of the Recreation Center had been spray painted: GIMME SOME SUGAR, SANDY.
At the end of the street the digital clock in the tower whirred silently. The flag on the tower had not been raised.
Deducing easily, Jack rode to the vehicle compound.
The chain locking the gate had been cut through. The chain-link gate was open. The door to the shed had been kicked in.
Almost all the cars, except Jack’s, were gone.
In the shed Jack found his own car keys hanging on a peg and pocketed them.
Only a few airplanes, the two small jets marked RADLIEGH MIRROR, the ancient two-seater, and another small corporate jet were still there. Jack had been hearing the planes of party guests taking off much of the morning, even before dawn.
There were no cars in the parking lot of the office building.
He rode around the country club. There were many cars parked there. Sunday midmorning it sounded as if a party were raging. Jack smelled pork barbecue smoking. Golf carts were lined up at the first tee like toll booth traffic. There were more brightly clad people stirring around the country club than Jack knew were on Vindemia.
He watched teen-agers racing golf carts. The youngsters were trying to brake and spin the golf carts simultaneously to cut up the lawn. One racing golf cart nearly tipped over on the slope surrounding the swimming pool. That caused a laugh.
Biking back toward the main house, Jack found Mrs. Houston walking on the green verge along the side of the road. She carried a thick brown walking stick. She was not using it to walk.
Jack stopped his bike to talk with her. They were in the shade of the deciduous trees spaced along the sides of the road.
“You know,” she said, “when we first came here, when Chester was first beginning to build Vindemia, he tried to run a garden of his own. I guess I talked him into it.
“He couldn’t do it.
“He built a tight fence around it that went down three feet into the ground and six feet into the air, put a gate on it, and locked it. I asked him if he thought rabbits and deer and groundhogs have degrees in engineering.
“He watered it twice a day. Every day he gave it fertilizer. There was no such thing as a weed in that garden. As soon as I knew what he was doing, I told him to stop, leave it alone. Every time a plant looked peakish, he replaced it.
“He spoiled it. He killed it with care.”
While they talked, a pickup truck came along the road. Two men rode in front. A third stood in back.
There were two rifles in a rack in the truck’s rear window.
The truck was going slowly.
The two men in front waved at them.
As the truck passed, the man standing in back smiled down at them. He said to them, “Sure is a pretty place you have here.”
Neither Mrs. Houston nor Jack waved, smiled, or answered.
As the truck went around the curve an empty beer can thrown from it hit the pavement and rattled until it ran out of momentum.
Glancing at Mrs. Houston, Jack saw her cheeks wet with tears.
“Chester was that way,” Mrs. Houston said. “He thought about what people wanted, to be happy and healthy, needed, to fulfill themselves and be useful, and he provided it with an open hand. He protected them, even from themselves, if you know what I mean. And instead of getting back pleasure in their strength, happiness, accomplishments, some respect, appreciation, all he got back was envy, resentment, anger, hatred, everybody’s desire to destroy him or see him destroyed.
“He had to give up on his flower garden.
“Why didn’t he learn from it?”
23
“Here he is now,” Fletch said.
As Jack rode his bike under the oriole of Vindemia’s main house, he found Fletch and another man strolling the driveway from the other direction. Jack did not recognize the other man.
“Jack,” Fletch said, “this is Lieutenant Corso of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.”
Straddling his bike in the shade of the oriole, Jack shook hands with the man.
“I’ve been telling the Lieutenant everything I know about what’s been going on here.” Fletch looked up from lowered eyebrows at Jack. “I told him you would do the same.”
Corso studied Jack’s shorts. “You work here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Blue and white, blue and white: everything around here is blue and white.” He looked down at his trousers. “I’m glad I wore my green suit.”
Jack said, “The flags aren’t up.”
“I’ve never seen such a place as this. Didn’t know such a place existed.”
“I have,” Fletch said. “Several. The man who builds such a place thinks he’s building it for his family to enjoy forever.”
“The gates are open,” Jack said.
Vehicles were passing the house slowly.
“I’ve been telling the Lieutenant about the lethal gas,” Fletch said. “That there wasn’t supposed to be any such thing in the laboratory. It must have come from somewhere, put there by someone. We’ve just come back from the lab.”
“Who knows?” Corso squinted. “Big lab like that. I don’t recognize anything that’s in it. All this paraphernalia. Who knows what’s supposed to be there? It’s all just junk to me. Anybody could have put anything in there at any time. The guy himself—what’s his name, Wilson?—could have drug it in himself. I used to have a chem teacher in high school, he’d take a few whiffs of something during the lunch hour. I saw him do it.”
Fletch Reflected Page 15