Fletch's Moxie (16 page)

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.

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
Yellow 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.”

“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.

“Look at the children,” Stella said.

Some men were passing demonstration signs down from the trucks. The signs were passed along from hand to hand. The signs said KEEP AMERICA WHITE, HOLLYWOOD SELLS U.S. SOUL, NO RACIAL MIX. One sign, carefully handprinted, read NO MONGURILIZATION! And these signs came to be held by the men in white hooded robes, and by the women, and by the children.

“I guess they mean me,” Gerry Littleford said.

“No,” Stella Littleford said. “They mean me.”

To the left, the thirty Neo-Nazis were trying to appear military. A man with a red band around his hat was yelling at them as they were lining up. They all had beer bellies they were sucking in while tucking their chins in to show they all had dewlaps.