Fletch and the Man Who (8 page)

“None at all. I think Willy was to be on an eleven-o’clock flight.”

“You entered the hotel alone?”

“Sure. Presidential candidates aren’t so special. There are a lot of us around. At this point.”

“Go straight to the elevator?”

“Of course. Shook a few hands on the way. When I got to the suite and opened the door, I saw flashing blue lights in the air outside. Through the living room window. I turned on the lights and changed into my robe. I looked through things people had stuffed into that briefcase.”

“You weren’t interested in what caused the flashing blue lights, the sirens?”

“My life is full of flashing blue lights and sirens. I’m a walking police emergency.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t go out onto the balcony, lean over the rail and look down?”

“No.”

“Why weren’t you wearing your shoes when I got there?”

The governor grinned puckishly. “I always take my shoes off before I go to bed. Don’t you?”

“It wasn’t because they were wet from your being out on the balcony?”

“I wasn’t out on the balcony.”

“Someone was. The snow out there was all messed up.”

“As I said, a great many people were in that room earlier. I might have even gone out on the balcony myself earlier. That I don’t remember.”

“You didn’t stop at any point on your way to your suite? On another floor, to see someone? Anything?”

“Nope. What’s the problem?”

“It doesn’t work out, Governor.”

“Why not?”

“Time-wise. Either you passed a mob on the sidewalk gathered around a dead girl …”

“Possible, I suppose.”

“But not likely.”

“No. Not likely.”

“Or, while you were in the lobby, people—including Dr. Thom— rushed out of the bar to the sidewalk to see what had happened.”

“I didn’t see either thing.”

“One thing or the other had to be true, for you to see the flashing police and ambulance lights from your suite when you got there.”

The governor shrugged. “I bored the Chamber of Commerce people to death, but I don’t think I killed anybody after that.”

“How come Flash wasn’t with you last night? Isn’t he sort of your valet-bodyguard?”

“I don’t like having Flash around all the time. Sometimes I like to sneak a cigar. Also, he doesn’t get along too well with Bob.”

“Dr. Thom.”

“Yes. Bob calls Flash a cretin.”

Fletch sat more forward on the edge of the bed. “Hate to sound like a prosecutor, Governor, but did you have personal knowledge of Alice Elizabeth Shields?”

The governor looked Fletch in the eye. “No.”

“Do you know anything at all about her murder?”

Again the steady look. “No.” In an easier tone, he said, “You seem awfully worried. What should I do? Do you think I should make a statement?”

“Not if it looks like this.”

“What should I do? You say we’ve got these two crime writers attached to us. They’re going to write something, sometime …”

Fletch said, “I think it would look politically good for you to make a special request; ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to come in and investigate.”

“God, no.” The governor pressed back in his chair and then forward. He bounced. “F.B.I. crawling all around us with tape recorders and magnifying glasses? No way! Nothing else would get reported. Nothing I say or do. The story of this campaign would become the story of a crime investigation. It would overwhelm everything I’m doing.”

“I’m sure a discreet enquiry—”

“Discreet, my eye. Just one of those gumshoes comes near this campaign … The press would sniff him out before he got off the plane.”

“At some point in the campaign, you get to have Secret Service protection—”

“I’m not going to call for it before anybody else does. I’m in no more danger than any of the other candidates. What would be my
excuse? I saw a man at the Chamber of Commerce dinner last night carrying a gun?”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a man named Flynn, used to this upper-level sort of thing, I think—”

“No, no, no. Aren’t my reasons for not doing so clear?”

“Two women have been murdered—”

“‘On the fringes of the campaign’—your own words.”

“It might happen again.”

“You run a big campaign like this through the country, and everything happens. Advance men fall off bridges into icy rivers—”

Flash stuck his head around the stateroom’s door again. “Coming up to that school, Governor.”

“Okay.”

Flash came in, closing the door behind him.

“You straight-arm this, Fletch. I’m sorry about the whole thing. I do not take it lightly. But we cannot let this campaign get sidetracked by something that is utterly irrelevant to it. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

The governor stood up. Flash had taken the governor’s suitcoat off a hanger on the back of the door, brushed it, and was holding it out for him. “Interesting talking to you,” the governor muttered.

“My privilege,” Fletch said quietly.

The governor had his hands in the pockets of his suit coat. “Got any money?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“I mean coins. Quarters. Nickels. Dimes. Thought I’d try something out at the school. Got any coins, Flash?”

“Sure.” Fletch gave the governor all the coins he had, except for one quarter. Flash gave the governor all his coins.

“And, Fletch, keep those two crime writers away from me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Arbuthnot and Hanrahan.” The governor was smoothing his jacket. “Sounds like a manufacturer of pneumatic drills.”

“Yeah, that made pictures,” Walsh was to say to his father at the end of the Conroy School visit. “Good for local consumption. Nothing compared to Robbins’s dumping himself in the Susquehanna River, though. That will lead the national news. In Winslow you’ve got to come up with something new, Dad. Say something new. You’ve got to.”

Clearly, The Man Who enjoyed his stop at Conroy Regional Primary School.

All the little kids were agog, but not, at first, at The Man Who might be the next President of the United States.

At first they were dazzled by the big buses with fancy antennas and cars and station wagons in the campaign caravan,
all these people from Washington
.

About Stella Kirchner:
Look at that lady’s boots! They got red lines in them! That lady’s boots got veins all on their own!

About Fenella Baker:
Ever see so much face powder? Why don’t she itch? ’Spose she’s dead?

About Bill Dieckmann, Roy Philby, etc.:
Bet not one of those dudes could dribble a basketball a half a whole minute
.

About the photographers, wearing more than one camera around their necks:
What they need so many cameras for? They only got two eyes!

In the school auditorium, while Walsh kept glancing at his watch, the school band played “America” six times, the last no better than the first. The school principal made a speech of introduction, asking the students if they all knew where Washington is. “On the news programs!” The little girl with the gold star on her collar, officially called upon, answered, “There’s one in the upper left by Seattle, and one in the middle right by the District of Columbia.”

And the principal asked how long one can be President of the United States.

“Forever!”

“Six years!”

“No, four years!”

“Until you get shot!”

Governor Caxton Wheeler made a little speech, goal-orienting the children. He said the country needs good people who believe they can make a difference for the good of the world.

The Man Who was slow to leave the school. He stood among the children. He played magic with coins he took from his pocket. First he made a coin disappear somewhere between his hands. Then he found the coin in a child’s shirt pocket, her ear, his mouth. He leaned down and found a vanished coin in the sneaker of a brightly beaming black boy. Instantly the boy searched his other sneaker. To each child he fooled he gave the coin that mysteriously had disappeared from his hands and just as mysteriously reappeared in some unlikely place, such as up the child’s own sleeve.

The children quickly forgot about the cameras and the lights and the “city dudes.” They stood on chairs and piled on top of each other, tumbled over each other, begged to be the next fooled by the presidential candidate. The governor laughed as hard as the children. His eyes were as bright as theirs.

They pressed against him. “Don’t go, sir. You’re better than gym!” He hugged them to him.

The members of the press straggled every which way.

“Hey, Fletch,” Roy Filby stage-whispered. “Want to go to the boys’ room and pull on a joint?”

Fenella Baker was debating the abortion issue in a loud voice with the dry-mouthed school principal.

Andrew Esty was insisting to someone who could have been a math teacher that
Deuteronomy
be tried as a teaching method.

Mary Rice told Fletch that Michael J. Hanrahan was asleep on the press bus.

A photographer terrified little girls by bringing his camera close to their faces and setting off flash bulbs rapidly. “Look at that skin! Awesome! What kind of crèmes do you use, honey?”

Outside the school’s main office, some of the reporters bent over the low wall phones, jabbering rapidly in low voices. Other reporters waited.

What’s the story? Fletch wondered. Today presidential candidate Caxton Wheeler urged children to continue growing up?

Outside it had stopped snowing. But the sky was still gray and heavy.

“That was nice,” Fletch said to Walsh on the driveway in front of the school.

“Yeah. Dad used to play those tricks on me. It was how he gave me my allowance every week.”

“Does he still?”

Walsh grinned. “I still think money should come out of my own nose.” As his father approached, he said, “Yeah, that made pictures….”

Two of the television station wagons already were leaving the school’s parking lot. The rear end of one wagon slid sideways entering the road.

In the driveway, the governor was waving good-bye to the children through the school windows. “I’ve got an idea for the Winslow speech, Walsh,” he said. “Let me work on it.”

“The congressman is supposed to be here.” Walsh turned around to face the compaign bus. Then he said, “My God.”

At the steps of the campaign bus, between the two women volunteers who were to be the reception committee for the congressman, stood a petite, grandmotherly woman.

The governor turned around.

On the steps of the bus, volunteer coordinator Lee Allen Parke raised his hands in futility.

“The congressman,” observed the governor, “appears to be a congressperson. You gave me the name Congressman Jack Snive.”

“That isn’t Jack Snive,” admitted Walsh. “Somebody goofed.”

“What is her name?” the governor asked.

“No idea. What district are we in?” Walsh’s eyes scanned the face of the school building. “Are we at the right school?”

“Oh, yes,” the governor said. “They couldn’t have played ‘America’ that badly without practicing it.” He sighed. “Guess I’ll have to call her ‘Member.’ Strikes me as slightly indecent, but that’s politics.”

Putting his hand out to the congressperson, the candidate trudged through the slush. “Hi ya,” he said happily. “I was looking for you. How are you feeling? Great job you’re doing for your district.”

He helped her aboard the bus. Smiling at his son, he said to her, “I want to hear what your plans are for the next four years.”

“Oooooo,” said Betsy Ginsberg when Fletch stopped at her aisle seat on the bus. “Is it now I get your attention?”

The bus went over a speed bump in the school driveway. Fletch grabbed on to the backs of the seats on either side of the aisle.

“Just wanted to ask you if you want a typewritten copy of the candidate’s profound remarks at Conroy Regional School.”

“Sure.” She smiled puckishly. “You got ’em?”

“No.”

“Pity. Deathless remarks gone with the wind.”

“What kind of a story did some of you find to phone in? I saw you at the phone.”

“You don’t know?”

“No idea.”

“Some press rep. you are. You ever been on a campaign before?”

“No.”

“You’re cute, Fletcher. But I don’t think you should be on this one, either.”

“What happened?”

“Tell me, what happened between you and Freddie in Virginia.”

“Nothing. That’s the trouble.”

“Something must have happened. She’s mentioned it.”

“Just a case of mistaken identity. At the American Journalism Alliance Convention a year or two ago.”

“That the one where Walter March got killed?”

“Yeah.”

“So what happened, besides the old bastard’s getting killed?”

“I told you. Mistaken identity. Freddie thought she was Fredericka Arbuthnot, and I didn’t.”

“But She is Fredericka Arbuthnot.”

“So I was mistaken.”

Andrew Esty rose from his seat at the back of the bus and came forward in a procession of one. He stood next to Fletch. “Mr. Fletcher, that stop at the school raises several issues I’d like to talk to the candidate about.”

“Nice stuff you’re writing these days, Mr. Esty,” Fletch said. “Circulation of the
Daily Gospel
testifies to it.”

“Thank you,” Andrew Esty said sincerely. “About praying in the public schools.”

“I used to pray in school,” Roy Filby said from the seat behind Betsy. “Before every exam. Swear like hell afterward.”

“What about it?” Fletch asked Esty.

“Is the candidate against children being allowed to pray in school?”

“The candidate isn’t against anyone praying anytime anywhere.”

“You know what I mean: the teacher setting the example.”

“My teacher was a Satanist,” Filby said. “She corrected our papers with blood.”

Esty glared at him. “The issue of people praying together on federal property—”

“The governor has a position paper on this issue.” Standing on the bus swaying down the highway, Fletch’s legs and back muscles were beginning to remind him he hadn’t really slept in thirty hours.