Fletch's Moxie

by Gregory Mcdonald

  And sitting in the corner, the object of everyone’s attention, sat and spoke Frederick Mooney. With his gray hair, stubble of beard, broad face and big eyes, he easily could have been the reincarnation of the person whom the people in Key West would most like to see reincarnated—Ernest Hemingway. Mooney was Papa, all right, and these were his children gathered around him.

  Sipping his beer, Fletch leaned against the door jamb and listened.

  “… not glorious, not glamorous at all,” Mooney was saying. “Anyone who thinks so knows nothing. Anyone who thinks acting is simply a matter of popping the eyes in surprise…” Mooney popped his eyes in surprise at the crowd; there was a titter of admiration. “… of doing a double-take …” Mooney did a doubletake; the people laughed. … “quivering the chin …” Mooney’s chin quivered apparently uncontrollably; the people laughed harder. “… to weep…” Tears swelled in Mooney’s eyes and dribbled down his cheeks; the people applauded. “… don’t know what acting is.” The virtuoso wiped his instrument dry and thrust it forward at his audience. “An actor must learn his craft. And his skill is not just in learning to control every muscle of his face. Not just in learning how to set his shoulders expressively. Not just in learning that how he places his feet—even when they are out of sight, off-camera—invariably is more important than anything he does with his face, because how you place your feet, how you balance yourself, how you posture yourself says more about who you are, your attitudes than anything else.”

  Sitting back in his chair in the attitude of a grandfather at the end of a full meal, Mooney reached for the bottle of cognac on the table, brought it to his lips, and took a good-sized swallow. “Thirsty work, this.” He anticipated a burp, worked it up from his innards, gave full sound to it. He blinked and smiled in happy relief at his audience, and they applauded.

  “The craft, the skills,” Mooney said. “Barrymore once said, he’d rather have straight legs than know how to act. Of course, Barrymore had straight legs.” He paused to allow his audience to laugh, and they did. “An actor must learn how to move in his clothes. You know that a man moves differently in a toga than he does in blue jeans… than he does in medieval hose… than he does in black tie. But do you know an actor must learn these skills? Even if an actor does not smoke those dirty weeds…” Disdainfully, Frederick Mooney waved his hand at a woman smoking a cigarette, “… he must learn to handle a cigarette as if he were addicted. One handles a cigarette differently than one handles a cigar. Few actors are, in themselves, violent people. No acting schools I’ve heard of have pistol firing ranges. Yet when an actor handles a gun, he must have learned to do so… so naturally that the gun seems an extention of his hand—not something strange and foreign to him, but something so much a part of his being, so necessary to his mental attitudes that the audience knows he can use it and will use it. My training was such, having been dragged up through the music halls of England and the carnivals of America as well, I not only learned the rhythms of Shakespeare, but how to handle a sword and fence with it as if my life depended upon it. I learned to ride a horse both like a Guardsman and an American Indian. John Wayne once said that he didn’t know much about method acting, but he sure knew how to stop a horse on the mark. Of course, John Wayne could stop a horse on the mark.” Again his audience chuckled. Looking at his audience, tying them all together by his gaze, Mooney saw Fletch. In his eyes there was only the barest flicker of recognition. He continued his lecture. “It may not seem it to you—oh, you who watch an actor act and think you can judge him, but who haven’t the slightest knowledge or appreciation of the skills he employs to entertain you—but an actor must learn to ride a horse and a motorcycle, to use a rope, a lariat, to drink from a wine flagon, and open a bottle of champagne, to hold a violin, and to perform a right uppercut to the jaw—perfectly.”

  Mooney stopped talking. He moved his eyes over the surface of the small table before him like a farmer looking for first signs of a crop. He seemed to find no growth, and his look was sad.

  Finally, sensing his lecture was over, the people began asking him questions.

  Mister Mooney, how did you enjoy playing opposite Elizabeth Taylor?

  What’s the greatest role you’ve ever played?

  Is it true you actually took heroin to play the jazz pianist in Keyboard?

  Mooney folded his arms over the table and dropped his head. “Nothing’s true,” he muttered. “Nothing’s true. It’s all a lie.”

  Fletch worked forward through the crowd. He stepped over some people sitting on the floor.

  What’s your next picture going to be?

  “Nothing’s true.”

  You think you could ride a horse now, the state you’re in?

  Fletch picked up Mooney’s flight bag. Mooney raised his head slowly and looked Fletch in the eye a long moment.

  “Ah, Mister Paterson.”

  “Came to carry your bag,” Fletch said.

  “Kind of you.” Widely, he pointed at the bottle on the table and at the bag. “That bottle goes in that bag,” he said.

  Fletch put the cork in the bottle and the bottle in the flight bag.

  Did you really get malaria making Jungle Queen?

  “Yes,” Mooney answered, standing up, “and I’ve still got it.”

  You’ve just got the shakes, Mooney. The sweats.

  Mooney stumbled a few times picking his way through the crowd but never actually fell. Fletch did not hold onto him. At that moment, Mooney was far from being the graceful, competent person he was just describing, with all the skills of an actor.

  The people who were most kind in getting out of his way, letting him pass, were those most apt to reach out to him, touch him, touch his clothes as he passed.

  “I want to say good night to the dog,” Mooney said to Fletch. “Dog?”

  “The black dog.”

  Again, when they were in the less congested bar area, Mooney said, “I really would like to say good night to that dog.”

  “I don’t see a dog, Mister Mooney.”

  “Big, black dog,” Mooney said. “Name of Emperor.”

  Fletch looked around. “I don’t see any dog, Mister Mooney.”

  “He’s on the other side of the bar,” Mooney said.

  “Why don’t we go this way? It’s quicker.”

  “All right.” He smiled wonderfully at Fletch. “I’ve given that lecture ten thousand times,” he said. “Know it as well as the ravings of Richard III. It’s all nonsense, of course.”

  At the entrance to the alley, Mooney looked back into the bar. “A clean, well-lighted place,” he said.

  24

  The phone rang and Fletch was off the bed and across the room answering it before he really knew what he was doing.

  “Hello?”

  “Fletch?” It was Martin Satterlee ready to dispense information.

  “Good morning, Martin.” Fletch sat in the chair next to the telephone table. “What time is it in New York?”

  Through the windows to the balcony first light was in the sky.

  “Five fifteen a.m.”

  “Then it must be here, too.” Moxie was not in his bed. She had chosen to spend the night in a hammock on the balcony. “Find anything?”

  “Not as much as we could have found if we hadn’t been interrupted. An hour ago, the authorities swooped into Peterman’s office, where we were working, and laid claim to all Ms. Mooney’s financial records. Asked us politely but firmly to leave.”

  “They were quick. Did you show them Moxie’s authorization?”

  “Of course. It was not my scheme to be thought a burglar in the night. They had papers from a higher authority.”

  “Their piece of paper beat your piece of paper, huh?”

  “Their piece of paper was signed by a judge. My piece of paper was signed by a movie star.”

  “So you’re going to tell me everything is all right, and Moxie was just having a bad dream about all this…”

  “Does Y
ellow Orchid mean anything to you, as a film title?”

  “No.”

  “In Ramon’s Bed?”

  “No.”

  “Twenty Minutes to Twelve?”

  “No, don’t think so.”

  “Midsummer Night’s Madness?”

  “Of course. That’s the film Moxie is making now.”

  “Are they actually making it?”

  “I’m not sure. They have been.”

  “Sculpture Garden?”

  “No.”

  “These are all films supposedly being made—I should say, financed—by Jumping Cow Productions.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “The sole proprietor of Jumping Cow Productions is Ms Marilyn Mooney.”

  “Holy Cow.”

  “Chief Executive Officer and Treasurer is, or was, Steven Peterman.”

  “Wave that in front of me again, Marty. Moxie owns Jumping Cow Productions?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “I know she doesn’t know that. She keeps referring to Jumping Cow as ‘them’ and ‘they.’ In fact, I think she’s been waiting word from someone at Jumping Cow as to whether filming on Midsummer Night’s Madness is to continue.”

  “She’s waiting to hear from herself.”

  “Wow.”

  “You can say she didn’t know about it, Fletch, but her signature is in all the appropriate places. The Delaware incorporation papers, loan agreements—”

  “Talk to me about the loan agreements, Marty.”

  “I wish I could tell you everything. I can’t. Cops interruptus. We were able to discover there are huge sums of money floating around for no reason we were able to discover. Millions of dollars. Some of the monies seem to have been raised to produce these films—but we can’t find any evidence that any of these films exist in any form whatsoever, except Midsummer Night’s Madness which, by the way, seems to have a remarkably low budget. There are loans from Swiss banks and Columbian banks and Bolivian banks. Some of these loans seem to have been used to repay loans to banks in Honduras, Mexico, the Bahamas. Thoroughly confusing. On some loans, we couldn’t find schedules of repayment, or that anything at all had been repaid. On other loans, which were being repaid, we couldn’t find the pieces of paper which said the loans had actually been taken out in the first place.”

  Fletch had drawn his knees up and put his feet in the chair. He was warmer that way. “All this under the banner of Jumping Cow Productions?”

  “No. A huge, huge amount of this activity is under her own name, personally.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “I think so.”

  “Marty, how would you say she stands in general, financially, ahead or behind?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? Tons of money which exist on paper under her name, and under Jumping Cow Productions, Inc., don’t seem to be anywhere.”

  “Stolen.”

  “Disappeared.”

  “Then, financially, she is behind.”

  “I’d say so. If you were looking for a motive for murder, you found one. A big one.”

  “I wasn’t, actually.”

  “I can’t see how she can ever get out of trouble. No matter how young she is. Millions are missing. Of course, maybe if we had another three weeks with the books, we could find some of it.”

  “Can’t she claim bankruptcy?”

  “It’s not just money I’m talking about, Fletch. A lot of baffling financial activity has been happening under her name. Again, I wasn’t able to spend enough time with her financial records to use the word fraud advisedly—”

  “Ow.”

  “And her tax filings have been negligent. I mean negligible. Negligent and negligible. Minimum filings, maximum extentions. There were I.R.S. pieces of paper among her records, but no real reportings of income, outgo, profit, loss.”

  “Jail.”

  “Well. For next year she shouldn’t plan too big a New Year’s Eve party.”

  “But she wasn’t doing all that bad stuff. She didn’t even know about it.”

  “It was going on under her name, and she signed things.”

  “Marty. What about her personal assets?”

  “Well, she owns a cooperative apartment in New York—mortgaged to the maximum. Also a very expensive property in Malibu, California, also mortgaged to the maximum. Her ownership of common stock follows a very distinct pattern. She would purchase at fifty and sixty dollars a share and sell at twelve and sixteen dollars a share.”

  “Always?”

  “Few exceptions.”

  “Tax losses? Do you think Peterman was trying to create tax losses?”

  “He was creating losses, all right. Huge losses. No preferred stock, no bonds. And the companies in which she was invested were foreign companies no one ever heard of. I mean, like a chain of bakeries in Guatemala.”

  “Must be dough in that.”

  “A Mexican trucking company. A restaurant in Caracas, Venezuela.”

  “Caramba!”

  “An unrelieved tale of woe, Fletch. The only other thing she seems to own in this country is half interest in a horse farm in Ocala, Florida.”

  “Oh.”

  “That mean something to you? Five Aces Farm.”

  “Oh.” Fletch counted his toes. “The alleged owner of that farm, Ted Sills, was a friend of Peterman’s. I guess. That is, I met Sills at a party at Moxie’s apartment once in New York. Peterman introduced us.”

  “Well, your friend Moxie has paid for the shipment of an awful lot of race horses between here and Venezuela.”

  “Oh. But, Martin, Moxie didn’t even recognize Ted Sills’ name when I mentioned him yesterday. We’re even staying in Ted Sills’ house. Right now.”

  “Small world.”

  “Even I’ve invested in some of the son of a bitch’s race horses.”

  “Maybe I should go through your papers, too.”

  “Maybe you should. Hell’s bells, Marty, what does all this add up to?”

  “I don’t know. Wasn’t able to spend that long with her papers. On the face of things, it looks like your Moxie Mooney had an excellent motive for killing Steven Peterman. The best. Not once, but several times.”

  “That’s what the police will say, isn’t it?”

  “I expect so. Of course, they could always find a factor which makes everything come out all right. But I doubt it. Experience has taught me, Fletch, that honest people do not bury their honesty in dishonest-seeming records.”

  “Martin, is there anyway all this shifting of money about, taking loans, losing money could be thought to benefit Moxie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, isn’t it pretty clear from the papers she’s the victim here?”

  Martin Satterlee thought a short moment. “The presumption is, Fletch, that when a person goes in for sharp practices, he is doing so with some idea of personal benefit in mind.”

  “But, Marty, everything’s such a mess!”

  “People who go in for sharp practices usually make a mess. They usually lose. Losing, Fletch, is no evidence of virtue.”

  “Oh.”

  “I must also point out to you—seeing you sought my advice—the very real possibility that your friend, Moxie Mooney, is lying to you from start to finish.”

  “She’d have to be a pretty good liar.”

  “Isn’t that what an actor is—a pretty good liar?”

  “Come on, Marty.”

  “Consider it as a very real possibility, Fletch. I’m not sitting in judgment of your friend. Sooner or later someone will, I expect. Consider the possibility that she was in this financial razzle-dazzle with Steve Peterman, and that she murdered him only when she discovered she was being swindled, too. My early judgment would be—if I were making a judgment—that your friend, Moxie Mooney, is either awfully guilty or awfully stupid.”

  “She’s just in trouble.”

  “And she knew it, right?”

  “Why do you say that?�
�

  “Why else would you have asked me to go look at Peterman’s books?”

  “Moxie-the-murderess is a concept I’m having difficulty wrapping my mind around.”

  Martin Satterlee said: “I’m pretty sure most people who commit murder have a friend somewhere.”

  25

  “You don’t look like you slept well,” Moxie said. She was looking up at him from a hammock on the second storey of The Blue House.

  “Up to a point, I did.” Fletch had gone back to bed at a quarter to six, but he had not slept. He listened to the quiet house. He got out of bed again at eight-thirty only because he heard the Lopezes come into the house. He also heard the grinding gears and squeaking brakes of trucks and buses.

  In the hammock, Moxie stretched and yawned.

  “Thought we’d go sailing today,” Fletch said. “We can rent a catamaran on one of the beaches.”

  “That would be nice.”

  Somewhere in the house, a window smashed. In the street in front of the house, someone was yelling.

  “Stay here,” Fletch said.

  On the balcony, he walked around the corner to the front of the house. Gerry and Stella Littleford were already there. They were looking out onto the street. As Fletch approached, they looked at him. On their faces were shock, confusion, anger, hurt, amazement. They said nothing.

  In the street in front of The Blue House were two old, rickety yellow school buses, three trucks big enough to carry cattle, a few vans, and some old cars. On the sides of the yellow schoolbuses in big black letters was written SAVE AMERICA.

  People from these vehicles were milling in the street. And some of these people wore white hooded robes with eye and nose holes cut in their faces. And others wore brown shirts and brown riding britches and black jackboots and black neckties and black arm bands with red swastikas on them. And some of these people were women in cheap house dresses. And some were children.