Fletch and the Man Who (3 page)

“Don’t tell Fletch to do anything the way ol’ James did it. One thing might lead to another.”

“A copying machine and a quick wit,” Walsh said. “That’s all you need to be a press representative, right?”

“He’s got a quick wit,” the governor said. “He makes me laugh.”

“Oh, yeah.” Walsh sat next to the best reading lamp. He made himself look comfortable, legs crossed, drink in hand, papers in lap. “How do you guys like each other so far?”

The governor looked at Fletch and Fletch looked at the governor.

“Don’t know how the press will accept him,” the governor said. “Fletch looks like breakfast to someone with a hangover.”

Smiling, Walsh looked up at Fletch. “What do you think, Fletch?”

“Well,” Fletch drawled, “I think Governor Caxton Wheeler can get this country moving again.”

“I believe it!” Walsh laughed.

“I’ll say one thing,” the governor chuckled. “There’s been so much cow dung on the floor since he came into the room, I had to take off my store-bought shoes!”

Fletch looked from one to the other. “Where
are
your shoes?” he asked.

Father and son continued their moment of easy, genuine admiration, love for each other, enjoyment in each other.

Fletch sat down.

“Okay, Dad, let’s go over your schedule for tomorrow, just quickly. We’ve only got a few days before the primary in this state. We’ve got a real chance to win, but we haven’t won yet. Without killing you, we’ve got to make the best use of your time.”

Slowly, the governor sat up and took the schedule in his hands. He yawned. His cigar stub was burned out in the ashtray.

“Seven forty-five,” Walsh said, “you’ll be at the main gate at the tire factory. These guys are worried about two things: foreign import of
tires, of course; and they’re afraid their union bosses will call a strike sometime in April.”

“Union boss name?” the governor asked.

“Wohlman. By the way, Wohlman’s wife has just left him, and some of the membership say this is making him act meaner and tougher toward management than they want.”

Dully, the governor said: “Oh.”

“At eight-thirty, you’re having coffee with Wohlman, first name Bruce, and …”

Only glancing at the items on the governor’s schedule for next day, Fletch listened. Walsh seemed the perfect aide. He had the answers to most questions the governor asked. “
Where’s breakfast?” “There will be a breakfast box on the bus
.” He made notes to get the answers he did not know. “
How far does a farm family have to go to get to a medical facility ’round there?” “I’ll find out
.” Walsh did not balk at taking anything on himself. And he was not insistent, but gently urging when the governor began to balk. “
Why am I at Conroy School at ten o’clock? I keep telling you, Walsh, ten-year-olds don’t vote. Isn’t there some better use of my time this close to the primary?” “Their parents do, Dad, and so do the teachers, and all their relatives. And they’re all more interested in the future generation and education than they are in bank failures in Zaire. That’s what they’re living and working for.” “I’ll be late for the downtown rally in Winslow. Then I’ll have to do more I-couldn’t-find-my-toothbrush jokes.” “We’ll have a band playing until you get there
.” Sitting on the divan, the governor seemed to get more old, fat, and tired as the session went on.

Walsh, on the other hand, seemed to have attained some level of nirvana. His tone of voice did not alter. His speech pace, even with the governor’s interruptions, was consistent. His concentration was as steady as an athlete’s in midgame.

Walsh had changed since his days in uniform, of course. He was heavier by twenty pounds; his hair was thinner. His skin was gray. There was something in Walsh’s eyes that had not been there before. Instead of being just ordinary human eyes, looking around casually, seeing and not seeing things, Walsh’s eyes now seemed overfocused, too bright, rather as if whatever he was looking at was getting his full concentration. Fletch wondered whether in fact Walsh was seeing anything.

“If all goes well,” Walsh concluded, “we’ll have you at the hotel in Farmingdale by six. The mayor of Farmingdale is throwing a dinner for you. Well, he’s throwing a dinner for himself, a fund-raiser, but you’re the main attraction.”

“What do I have to do the next morning?”

“Thought you might like to catch up with the newspapers. Bed rest.”

“Put a hospital visit in there,” the governor said. “Farmingdale must have a hospital. Special attention on any kids with burns.”

“Yes, sir.” Walsh made a note.

The governor rubbed his eyes. “Okay, Walsh. Anything else I’m supposed to know?”

Walsh glanced at Fletch. “There’s something you’re not suppose to know.”

The governor looked at each of them. “What am I not supposed to know?”

“A girl jumped off the roof of this motel about an hour and a half ago.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah.”

“How old?”

“Twenties. They say.”

“Damned shame.”

“Apparently she jumped from the roof right over your windows.”

The governor looked at Fletch. “So that’s why you showed up at my door tonight? Checked the balcony. The door.” He looked at Walsh. “Turned off the phone. You guys are working together already.”

“People had been on your balcony,” Fletch said quietly. “Your front door was unlocked.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Walsh said.

“In fact, I do,” the governor said. “I heard the sirens. Saw the ambulance lights flashing. How can I pretend it didn’t happen?”

“I guess she actually jumped just as you were coming into the hotel.”

“No one said she jumped,” Fletch said. “Someone told me the girl was naked and had been beaten before she hit the sidewalk.”

“Anyone we know?” the governor asked.

Walsh shrugged. “A political groupie, best I can find out.”

“No.”

“A political
groupie?”
asked Fletch.

“Yeah,” Walsh said. “There are people who think political campaigns are fun. They follow the campaign—literally. They travel from town to town with the candidate’s party, try to get into the same hotels—generally just hang around. Women mostly, girls; but men too. Sometimes they turn into useful volunteers.”

“Was this girl a volunteer?” the governor asked.

“No. Dr. Thom saw the body. Said he thinks she’s been with us less than a week. Never saw her doing anything for the campaign.”

“Name?”

“Don’t want you to know her name, Dad. When reporters ask you about her, I don’t want the expression on your face that you’d ever heard her name before.”

“Okay. Can we do something nice? Send flowers—?”

“Nothing, please. She was just someone who happened to be in the motel. Fletch has the job, as of right now, of denying this girl had anything to do with the campaign. And without making an issue of it.”

Fletch said, “You said the woman had been trailing this campaign for almost a week.”

Walsh said: “That’s the problem.”

A thin man in an oversized sport coat, carrying a little black bag, entered the suite. He too did not knock.

The governor said to him, “Want to go to sleep, Dr. Thom.”

“Go to sleep you will,” said the doctor. “You’re not getting eight hours every night.”

“I will tomorrow night,” the governor said. “If all goes well.”

“Come on,” Walsh said to Fletch. “We’ve got one or more things to do.”

As Walsh and Fletch were leaving the suite, Dr. Thom was saying, “You’ve got to get eight hours every night, Governor. Every night. If Walsh can’t work it out for you, we’ll have to get someone else to run your campaign.”

“Listen, Bob. I got real tired around four o’clock today. Couldn’t think. Started repeating myself.”

“Okay,” Dr. Thom said. “Okay. I’ll give you something after lunch tomorrow….”

“Got to leave Mother’s schedule in her suite for her,” Walsh said as they walked down the corridor. His jaw was particularly tight.

“Does this Dr. Thom travel with the campaign?” Fletch asked.

“Shut up.”

The door to Suite 758 was unlocked. Walsh seemed to know it would be.

They entered a suite identical to the one they had just left. The chips on the gold paint seemed identical. The painting of the ship was oil on canvas. Even the bottles on the bar seemed identical, with identical quantities missing.

The lights in the room were low.

Walsh dropped a schedule on the coffee table. “Close the door,” he said to Fletch. “Let’s sit down a minute.”

Fletch closed the door.

Walsh did not brighten the lights. He sat in an armchair identical to the one he had just left in his father’s suite, at the side of the room next to a reading lamp turned low. “Mother isn’t due in on the plane from Cleveland until after one. We can talk a little.”

“Didn’t know your parents were separated,” joked Fletch. He sat in the same chair he had just been in. At least it looked and felt the same.

Carrying on at his regular pace, Walsh said: “Yes. Dr. Thom travels with the campaign. He is available to the candidate and his wife, the staff, members of the press, volunteers, bus drivers, pilots, whoever else. Have ringing in the ears? See Dr. Thom. Intestinal problems? Line forms at the rear.”

“That’s not what the question meant, Walsh.”

“No. That wasn’t what your question meant.” Walsh took a deep breath. “My parents are not separated. On the campaign trail mostly they stay in separate suites because their schedules are different. Their sleep is important. They have different staffs, for the most part.”

“Have you lost your sense of humor?” Fletch asked.

“I don’t like stupid questions in the corridor of a public hotel.”

“There was no one in the corridor, Walsh. It’s past midnight.”

“Don’t care. Someone could have heard you.”

Fletch noticed that across the dark living room, the door to the bedroom was closed.

“You either understand what I’m saying, Fletch, or you can go back to Ocala, Florida, and play the horses, or whatever you were doing.”

“So what are you saying, Lieutenant? Give it to me in small words, simple sentences.”

“Loyalty, Fletch. Absolute loyalty. We’re on a campaign to get my father, Governor Caxton Wheeler, elected President of the United States. I want you to be the campaign’s main press representative. As such, you will see things and know things you will question. When this happens, you are to ask me, but you are to ask me in private. You just saw Dr. Thom carry his little black bag into Dad’s room after midnight. And you were going to ask me about it in the corridor of a public hotel.”

“That’s a no-no,” Fletch said.

“That’s a no-no. Maybe you’re going to see and hear things that surprise you, things you don’t like. You don’t have to be very old in this world to lose your idealism. Nothing and no one is perfect. When that happens, you shut up about it.”

“You mean like when your mother cancels a visit to a children’s burn center to play indoor tennis with some old cronies—”

“You sure don’t point it out to the press. And if the press happens to pick it up, you put the best face on it possible.”

“Walsh, I hate to break your cadence, but I think I know all this. I even accept most of it.”

“And you watch the jokes you make. America wants to go to bed at night thinking of the candidate and his wife doing the same things they’re doing: vying with each other for the bathroom sink to brush their teeth, sharing a reading lamp in bed, saying little good-night words to each other. Their actually staying in separate suites is logistically necessary, but the public doesn’t want to know that. It disturbs the image. It gives certain sick minds the thought that having separate suites gives Dad the opportunity to have other ladies in his room, and therefore they leap to the conclusion that he does.”

“I made that joke to you. Privately.”

“You see, Fletch, there’s always the difference between the image and the reality.”

“Really?”

“We put out this image that the governor and his wife are campaigning for the presidency, and that they can take everything in stride, be everywhere at once, make speeches, give interviews, pat children on the head, travel constantly, stand up for hours at a time—yet live, eat, and sleep like normal people. Of course they don’t. Of course they can’t.”

“Dr. Thom is controlling your dad with pills. Or shots. Or something.”

“Dr. Thom puts my father to sleep at night, wakes him up in the morning, gives him one or two energy boosters during the day. This is a fact of a modern campaign. It’s being done with medical knowledge and medical control.”

“And it doesn’t affect him?”

“Sure it does. It keeps him going. It permits him to get more out of himself, over longer periods of time, than is humanly possible.”

“The world’s on a chemical binge.”

“Take your eighteenth-century man. Fly him through the air at nearly the speed of sound. Walk him through crowds of screaming, grabbing people, any one of whom might have a gun and the intent to use it. Have sirens going constantly in the ears. Put him in front of a television camera and have him talk to a quarter of a million people at
the same time, his every word, his every facial expression being weighed, judged, criticized. Do this for weeks, months at a time. See what happens to him. The basic constitution of the human being hasn’t changed that much, you know.”

“What about you, Walsh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your dad indicates to me you’re under even more stress than he is.”

“I’m a little younger than he is.”

“Is Dr. Thom helping you out, too?”

“No.” Walsh looked into his lap. “I just keep going. What else can’t you accept?”

“That young woman, Walsh.”

“What about her?”

“It’s entirely possible she was thrown from the balcony of your dad’s suite. The snow on the balcony had been messed up. Including on the railing. Apparently these principal suites—your parents’—are not locked.”

“What of it?”

“A death? A murder?”

“Do you know how many people in this world die every day because of bad governments?”