Fletch Won (18 page)

“There was no honesty in Donald Habeck.”

“You’re living in squalor here,” said Fletch. “Your father-in-law was a multimillionaire.”

“Did I murder my father-in-law?” The short, pudgy man turned around from the kitchen sink and dried his hands on a piece of newspaper. “There would have been no irony in it.”

“No?”

“No. It’s the innocence of victims which makes a poetry of what happens to them. And I’m a poet.”

“Did you know he intended to give almost his entire fortune to a museum?”

“No.”

“If he had died without a will, as I understand lawyers are apt to do, your wife might have inherited enough for you to take up poetry full-time. That is, if his fortune were still intact. Are you saying poets aren’t practical people?”

“Some are.” Tom Farliegh smiled. “Those who get published in
The Atlantic
and win the Pulitzer Prize. They might be practical enough to do murder. But, surely, you’re not accusing the most unpopular published poet in the country, of practicality?”

Nancy Farliegh reentered the room. She was wearing ballet slippers, a hotter-looking full skirt, and a once-white blouse gray from repeated washing. An effort had been made to brush her hair.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked.

Not knowing where he was going, Fletch stood up.

“Morton Rickmers, the book editor of the
News-Tribune
, might like to do an interview with you, Mr. Farliegh. Would you be available to him?”

“See?” Tom Farliegh grinned at his wife. “I’m reaping the benefits of my father-in-law’s sensational murder already.” To Fletch, he said: “Sure, I’m available to him. I do anything to deepen my unpopularity.”

“Is it all right to leave him with the children?” Fletch buckled himself into the driver’s seat.

“Why do you ask?” Nancy Farliegh found her seat belt.

“Your husband sees beauty in violence. Those kids are beatin’ up on each other in front of him.”

“He’s better with the kids than I am. He has much more patience.”

“Much more tolerance.” He turned the ignition key. “Where are we going?”

“The Monastery of St. Thomas, in Tomasito.”

“Tomasito!” Fletch looked at her. “That’s a hundred kilometers from here!”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

“I thought I was just dropping you off downtown.”

“My brother is in the monastery.” Nancy stared at the
unmoving landscape through the windshield. “It is a cloistered monastery. I don’t think he yet knows Father is dead. I feel I must go talk to him. I have no other way to get there.”

“Your brother is a monk?”

“A monk, a monk,” she said. “I suppose Tom could make a vicious nursery rhyme from that.
A monk, a monk/ hiding in a trunk/ to have nothing to do/ with his father, the punk
. Not very good.”

“Not very.”

“Guess I’ll leave poetry to my husband. I’ll just keep birthing his little monsters.”

Fletch put the car in gear. “Sorry,” he said. “There’s a hole in the muffler.”

“I don’t hear it.”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Me? God, no. Bob’s going into the monastery was his own thing. It had nothing to do with the family, I mean, our upbringing, at all. I suspect he’s trying to atone for the sins of his father. Aren’t they supposed to be visited on the son? He’s got his job cut out for him.”

Across from the university, Fletch drove up the ramp to the freeway and accelerated.

He said, “Someone who talked with your father just last week told me your father said he intended to enter a monastery.”

Nancy gasped. “My father?” She laughed. “I knew newspapers print nothing but fiction.”

“It’s true,” Fletch said. “At least it’s true that somebody said it.”

“Maybe my father would enter a monastery if he heard the Judgment Day Horn. It would be just like him. A clever legal defense.”

“He was getting older.”

“Not that old. About sixty.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t well?”

“Hope so. If anyone deserved leprosy of the gizzard, he did.”

“Were you never close?”

“Emotionally? I don’t know. I never saw him that much, growing up. Black suit and black shoes coming and going in the driveway. Intellectually? After I grew up, I realized how he’d been screwing the system all his life. A real destroyer of values. For profit. He never believed in good, or evil, or justice; any of the things we have to believe in, to center our lives, to focus. He believed in having his own way, despite the social consequences; in lining his own pockets. He was the most completely asocial and amoral man I ever knew. If he weren’t educated as a lawyer, he probably would have been a psychopathic killer himself.” After a moment, she laughed wryly. “My father, a monk!”

“Your husband,” Fletch said, “extolls violence.”

“You don’t see a difference?” Nancy asked. “My husband is a teacher. A poet. At sacrifice to himself, he’s pointing out the beauty in violence, and there is beauty in violence. We are attracted to it. He’s making us confront the violence in ourselves. He’s teaching us about ourselves. His poetry wouldn’t be so damned effective, if it weren’t true.”

“What sacrifice to himself?”

“Come on. People cross the street when they see him coming. They won’t even talk to me. We haven’t been invited to a faculty cocktail party in three years. Most of the faculty want to get rid of him. He could never get another job teaching. We’re going to end up in Starvation Lane. Just so Tom can make this statement, not about the nature of violence, but about the nature of you and me. Don’t you understand?”

“Anyway.” Fletch stretched in his car seat. “This man, who should know, told me your father intended to give five million dollars to the museum. The money was to be spent on contemporary religious art. He was going to give the
rest of his wordly goods to a monastery, which he was going to enter.”

Nancy shrugged. “He had an angle somewhere. I’d guess someone had the goods on him. The Justice Department. The Internal Revenue Service. The American Bar Association. I expect that after the dust settled, you would have found my father living luxuriously somewhere with his sexy, pea-brained young wife behind the facade, the protection of some religious or cultural foundation, all brilliantly, legally established, and funded, by himself.”

“Maybe. But did you know your father had stated the intention of disposing of his worldly goods?”

“I read something of the sort in the newspaper. This morning’s newspaper. After he was murdered.”

“No one had told you before?”

“No.”

Fletch said, “It’s always hard to prove that you don’t know something.”

They rode without speaking for a while. They listened to The Grateful Dead on the radio.

Finally, Fletch said, “At your father’s house yesterday, I met a woman who was about sixty years old, white-haired, or blue-haired, whatever you want to call it, wearing a colorful dress and green sneakers. I asked her if she was Mrs. Habeck, and she said she was. All she’d say about your father was that he wore black shoes and wandered away. She referred to Habeck, Harrison and Haller as
Hay, Ha, Haw.”

“Ummm,” Nancy said.

“That your mother?”

“Um.” Nancy shifted in her seat. “What it says on your shorts is correct. You can be a friend, I guess.”

“That’s not quite what the legend means.” Fletch had changed T-shirts. He had hoped his own, pure T-shirt, left outside his shorts, had covered the advertisements.

“You put your finger on it,” Nancy said. “Growing up, my father and I ignored each other. He wasn’t interesting. When I got older, I learned contempt for him. ‘Brilliant legal practitioner.’ Bullshit. He was a crook. When he put Mother away, had her legally committed to a home for the mentally unwell, I absolutely despised him. I never spoke to him again, or voluntarily saw him again. Sorry. I didn’t tell the exact truth, before. I hate the son of a bitch.”

“Oh.”

“Mother didn’t need to be thrown out of her home. Confined to an institution, however swank and gentle. She’s just pixilated.”

Fletch remembered Mrs. Habeck looking down at her green sneakers and saying,
I don’t have any privacy
.

“Pixilated,” Nancy repeated. “Year after year, Dad left her alone in that house. No one wanted to know her. At first, she tried to get out, go do things, you know, join the Flower Club. The other ladies didn’t want her. Some sensational case of my father’s would be in the newspaper, a small editorial outcry about Donald Habeck getting a not-guilty verdict for some rapist. And Mother’s flower arrangements wouldn’t get into the show. Her phone wouldn’t ring. Once, when I was a teenager and getting independent, Mother marched downtown and got herself a job behind the counter in a florist’s shop. My father put a stop to that, quick enough. Poor, damned soul. She moldered alone in that house. Talked to herself. She began setting the dining-room table for luncheon and dinner parties, for six people, eight people, a dozen. There were no people.” Tears streamed down Nancy’s face. Her voice sounded dry. “What could I do? I went home as much as possible. She used to go to six different hairdressers in one day, just to have people to talk to. Her hair was getting burned out. Then she took to spending all day in the shopping malls, buying everything in the world, lawn mowers, washing machines, towels. There were about
twenty washing machines delivered to the house one week. When she was being packed up to go to the Agnes Whitaker Home, it was discovered she had over two thousand pairs of shoes! She liked to talk to the salespeople, you see.”

Fletch took the turning for Tomasito. “Does she escape from the home often?”

“Almost every day. At first the institution staff would be alarmed and call me, I suppose call my father. Scold her when she came back. But she’s harmless. She has no money, no credit cards. I have no idea how she gets around. Have never been able to figure that out. On nice days, I guess she goes and sits in the park, walks around the stores pretending she’s buying things, goes back to her old home and sits by the pool.”

“Yeah. That’s where she was yesterday.” “She must appear to Jasmine as sort of the Ghost of the First Wife.” Nancy laughed. “So what. She turns up at my house two or three times a week. Sits and watches the television. Sits and watches the children. Tells them absolutely crazy things, like about the time she made friends with a great black bear in the woods, and the bear taught her how to fish. The children adore her.”

“And she loves the children?”

“How do I know? She keeps showing up.”

“And you don’t think this woman should have been confined?”

Nancy’s jaw tightened. “I don’t think she should have been left in isolation for years. I don’t think she should have been socially ostracized. No. I don’t think she should have been thrown out of her home. When strange symptoms began appearing, I don’t think my father needed to continue what he was doing. They could have retired, started another life somewhere. Or, if it was too late, some sort of a paid housekeeper-nurse could have been hired to stay with her, give her some company.”

Nancy was silent for a long moment, the muscles in her jaw working. Then she said, “My father got rid of her through some legal trickery, divorce and confinement, because he wanted to marry pea-brained Jasmine.”

“You don’t like Jasmine, of course.”

“Like her?” Nancy looked across the car at Fletch. “I feel sorry for her. The same thing is happening to her as happened to my mother.”

They went down a ramp from the freeway onto a two-lane road through fairly decent farmland.

Nancy said, “I heard on the television this morning that someone confessed to my father’s murder.”

“Yes,” Fletch said. “Stuart Childers. A client of your father’s. Accused of murdering his brother. Acquitted two or three months ago.”

“So?” Nancy said.

“He was released by the police immediately. I don’t know why.”

Nancy said, “What are you getting at, friend?”

“I don’t think it was a gangland slaying,” Fletch said, “despite the suggestion in this morning’s
News-Tribune”

“You think I did it?”

“Someone in the family heard your father intended, or said he intended, to dispose of all his worldly goods, for reasons sacred or profane. Incidentally, my source reported that your father said, last week, that no one gave ‘a tin whistle’ for him. His words.”

Nancy snorted. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Someone decided to do him in before he decided to do the family out. You, your husband. Your mother, for your sake or the sake of your kids. Your father’s second wife.”

“You don’t understand Tom.”

“He may be the important poet, the intellectual you say he is. But where was he Monday morning?”

“At the university.”

“What time is his first class on Mondays?”

Nancy hesitated. “Two in the afternoon.”

“Okay.”

“Poverty is important to Tom. The fact that he, his work is being scorned. It makes the sacrifice more real, the poetry,” she stuttered, “more significant, monumental.”

“You weren’t brought up in squalor,” Fletch said. “Your daddy may not have bounced you on his knee, but you had a stocked refrigerator in a clean home, with a swimming pool in the garden. Plus a lot of washing machines.”