Fletch's Fortune (6 page)

Fletch said, “Life is hard.”

“Walter March was a pretty important man?”

“Yes.”

“He ran a newspaper or something?”

“He owned a lot of them.”

“He was very courteous,” she said. “Courtly. Tipped good.”

“I’ve got it about the tip,” Fletch said.

She finished his left arm.

Suspending her breasts over his face, she rubbed his stomach and chest muscles vigorously.

“Oh, God,” he said.

“What?”

“These are not ideal working conditions.”

“I’m the one who’s doing the work. Turn over.”

Face down, nose in the massage table’s nose hole, Fletch said, “Walter March.” He couldn’t get himself up to asking specific questions in a sequence. He blew the bunched-up sheet away from his mouth. “Tell me what you told the eight other reporters.”

“I didn’t tell them much. Not much to tell.”

She lifted his lower left leg and, with a tight grip, was running her hand up his calf muscle.

“Oh,” he said.

“Are you Jewish?”

“Everyone who’s being tortured is Jewish.”

“Mister March said nice day, he said he loved being in Virginia, he said they’d had nice weather the last few days in Washington, too, he said he wanted a firm rub, like you, with oil.…”

“Not so firm,” Fletch said. She was doing the same thing to his right calf muscles. “Not so firm.”

“He asked if I was Swedish, I said I came from Pittsburgh, he asked how come I had become a masseuse, I said my mother taught me, she came from Newfoundland, he asked me what my husband does for a living, I said he works for the town water department, how many kids I have, how many people I massage a day on the average, weekdays and weekends, he asked me the population of the town of Hendricks and if I knew anything about the original Hendricks family. You know. We just talked.”

Fletch was always surprised when publishers performed automatically and instinctively as reporters.

Old Walter March had gotten a hell of a lot of basic information—background material—out of the “little old lady rubbing bones in the basement.”

And, Fletch knew, March had done it for no particular reason, other than to orient himself.

Fletch would be doing the same thing, if he could keep his brain muscles taut while someone was loosening his leg muscles.

She put her fists into his ass cheeks, and rotated them vigorously. Then she kneaded them with her thumbs.

“Oof, oof,” Fletch said.

“You’ve even got muscle there,” she said.

“So I’m discovering.”

She began to work on his back.

“You should be rubbed more often,” she said. “Keep you loose. Relaxed.”

“I’ve got better ways of keeping loose.”

He found himself breathing more deeply, evenly.

Her thumbs were working up his spinal column.

He gave in to the back rub. He had little choice.

Finally, when she was done, he sat on the edge of the table. His head swayed.

She was washing the oil off her hands.

“Was Walter March nervous?” he asked. “Did he seem upset, in any way, afraid of anything? Anxious?”

“No.” She was drying her hands on a towel. “But he should have been.”

“Obviously.”

“That’s not what I mean. I had a reporter in here earlier today. I think he could have killed Walter March.”

“What do you mean?”

“He kept swearing at him. Calling him dirty names.
Instead of asking about Mister March, the way the rest of you did, he kept calling him that so-and-so. Only he didn’t say so-and-so.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I could look up the charge slip. He was a big man, fortyish, heavy, sideburns and mustache. A Northerner. A real angry person. You know, one of those people who are always angry. Big sense of injustice.”

“Oh.”

“And then there was the man in the parking lot yesterday.”

She put her towel neatly on the rack over the wash basin.

“When I drove in yesterday morning, he was walking across the parking lot. He came over to me. He asked if I worked here. I thought he was someone looking for a job, you know? He was dressed that way, blue jeans jacket. Tight, curly gray hair although he wasn’t old, skinny body—like the guys who work down at the stables, you know? A horse person. He asked if Walter March had arrived yet. First I’d ever heard of Walter March. His eyes were bloodshot. His jaw muscles were the tightest muscles I’d ever seen.”

“What did you do?”

“I got away from him.”

Fletch looked at the big, muscular blond woman.

“You mean he frightened you?”

She said, “Yes.”

“Did you tell the other reporters about him?”

“No.” She said, “I guess it takes nine times being asked the same questions, for me to have remembered him.”

“Hi,” Fletch said cheerfully. He had stuck his head around the corner of the hotel’s switchboard.

Behind him, across the lobby, people were gathering in the Amanda Hendricks Room.

The telephone operator nearer him said, “You’re not supposed to be in here, sir.”

Both operators looked as startled as rabbits caught in a flashlight beam.

“I’m just here to pick up the sheet,” he said.

“What sheet?”

He popped his eyes.

“The survey sheet. You’re supposed to have it for me.”

The further operator had gone back to working the switchboard.

“The sheet for us to take the surveys.”

“Helen, do you know anything about a survey sheet?”

The other operator said, “Hendricks Plantation. Good evening.”

“You know,” Fletch said. “From Information. The sheet that says who’s in which room. Names and room numbers. For us to take the surveys.”

“Oh,” the girl said.

She looked worriedly at the sheet clipped onto the board in front of her.

“Yeah,” Fletch squinted at it. “That’s the one.”

“But that’s mine,” she said.

“But you’re supposed to have one for me,” he said.

She said, “Helen, do we have another one of these sheets?”

Helen said, “I’m sorry, sir. That room does not answer.”

Fletch said, “She has another one.”

“But I need mine,” the girl said.

“You can Xerox hers.”

“We can’t leave the switchboard. It’s much too busy.”

She connected with a flashing light. “Hendricks Plantation. Good evening.”

“Give me yours,” Fletch said. Helpfully, he slipped it out of its clip. “I’ll Xerox it.”

“I think the office is locked,” she whispered. “I’ll ring, sir.”

“All you have to do is move Helen’s.” He reached over and put Helen’s information sheet between them. “And you can both see it.”

The operator said, “I’m sorry, sir, but a cocktail reception is going on here, and I don’t think many people are in their rooms.”

Helen scowled angrily at him, as she said, “The dining room is open for breakfast at seven o’clock, sir.”

“Tell me.” Fletch was looking at the sheet in his hands. “Lydia March and Walter March, Junior, aren’t still in the suite Walter March died in this morning, are they?”

“No,” the operator said. “They’ve been moved to Suite 12.”

“Thanks.” Fletch waved the telephone information sheet at them. “ ’Preciate it.”

Fletch had saw-toothed seven edges of two credit cards letting himself into over twenty rooms and suites at Hendricks Plantation before he got caught.

He had just placed bug Number 22 to the back of the bedside lamp in Room 42 and was recrossing the room when he heard a key scratching on the outside of the lock.

He turned immediately for the bathroom, but then heard the lock click.

An apparent burglar, he stood in the middle of Room 42, pretending to be deeply concerned with the telephone information sheet, wondering how he could use it to give some official explanation for his presence in someone else’s room.

Next to each room number and occupant’s name was the number of the bug he had planted in the room.

The door handle was tinning.

“Ahem,” he said to himself. No official frame of mind was occurring to him.

“Ahem.”

The door was being pushed open unnaturally slowly.

In the door, swaying, breathing shallowly, thin red hair splaying up from her head, an aquamarine evening
gown lopsided on her, was the great White House wire service reporter, Leona Hatch.

Watery, glazed eyes took a moment to focus on him.

Her right shoulder lurched against the door jamb.

“Oh,” she said to the apparent burglar. “Thank God you’re here.”

And she began to fall.

Fletch grabbed her before she hit the floor.

Dead-weight. She was totally unconscious. She reeked of booze.

Gently, he put her head on the floor.

“Zowie.”

He turned down her bed before carrying her to it and putting her neatly on it.

He put on the bedside lamp.

She was wearing a tight necklace—a choker he thought might choke her—so he lifted her head and felt around in the seventy-odd-years-old woman’s thin hair until he found the clasp. He left the necklace on her bedside table.

He took off her shoes.

Looking at her, he wondered what else he could do to loosen her clothes, and realized she was wearing a corset. His fingers confirmed it.

“Oh, hell.”

He rolled her onto her side to get at the zipper in the back of her gown.

“Errrrrrr,” Leona Hatch said. “Errrrrrrrr.”

“Don’t throw up,” he answered, with great sincerity.

Pulling her gown off her from the bottom, he had to keep returning to the head of the bed and pulling her up toward the pillows by the shoulders. Or, before the gown was off her, she would have been on the floor.

He tossed the gown over a side chair, and realized he had to repeat the process with a slip.

The corset took great study.

In his travels, Fletch had never come across a corset.

In fact, he had never come across so many clothes on one person before.

“Oh, well,” he said. “I suppose you’d do it for me.”

“Errrrrrrrr,” she protested every time he revolved her to get her corset off. “Errrrrrrrr!”

“How do I know? Maybe you already have.”

Finally he left her in what he supposed was the last level of underclothes, loosened as much as he could manage, and flipped the sheet and blanket over her.

“Good night, sweet Princess.” He turned out the bedside lamp. “Dream sweet dreams, and, when you awake, think kindly on the Bumptious Bandit! ‘Daughter, did you hear hoofbeats in the night?’” He left a light on across the room, to orient her when she awoke. “‘Father, Father, I thought it were the palpitations of my own heart!’”

Letting himself out, the telephone information sheet firmly in hand, Fletch said, “‘It were, Daughter. Booze does that to you.’”