Confess, Fletch

Thirty-six

Both Andy and Sylvia marveled when Fletch donned blue jeans, boots, a dark blue turtle neck sweater, Navy windbreaker, and a Greek fisherman’s cap, and said he was going out for a while.

He said he would be back for dinner.

He wouldn’t.

Although free of his police tail, out of habit he went through the kitchen and down the service stairs of the apartment house. Going through the alley to his garage on River Street was a short cut, anyway.

In the black truck, Fletch put himself Newbury Street and headed west. (The two top storeys of 60 Newbury Street were lit.) He crossed Massachusetts Avenue, down the ramp, and continued west on the Massachusetts Turnpike Extension.

Lolling along, singing to himself while munching pretzels, he took the Weston exit, went left at a light, and curved right up a grade after a second light. The moon was out. Climbing, after he passed the golf course, he had a better view of the antique farmhouses, close to the road, and the well-separated estate houses, set back.

Passing the Horan house, he noted it showed no light.

He continued on into Weston Center.

Next to a drugstore on the main road was a lit telephone booth. Fletch parked at an angle, next to it, and checked his watch.

It was five minutes past nine Monday night. He had been in Massachusetts about six days and six hours.

Despite the dim light emanating from the drugstore, he knew it was closed.

In the phone booth, he dialed the Boston number of Ronald Risom Horan.

The man answered immediately.

Chewing gum in mouth, thumb pressed against his left nostril, Fletch said, “Mister Horan? Yeah. This is the Weston police. Your burglar alarm just went off. Yeah. The light just lit house the console here.”

“Is someone at the house now?”

“Yeah! A burglar is, I guess.”

“Are the police there?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re sending the car over. As soon as we can locate it.”

“What do you mean, as soon as you locate it?”

“Yeah, they’re not answering the radio just now.”

“Jesus! Listen, you jerk! Get someone to the house right away!”

“Yeah. I’ll do what I can.”

“I’ll be out right away.”

“Yeah. Okay. You know where the police station is?”

“I’m not going to the police station, you jerk! I’m going to the house!”

The phone slammed down.

Taking his time, Fletch drove back to Horan’s house, down the driveway.

He drove behind the house to the garage. His headlights picked up the dirt track around the right of the garage. He drove around the garage. His headlights swept the area as he turned.

He backed the black truck into the tractor shed and turned out the headlights.

Walking back around the garage, he saw that the back and side of the house were bathed moonlight. It was easy to find a big enough stone.

On the back porch, being careful to lay his bare fingers nowhere but on the stone, he reexamined the alarm system carefully. There were six small panes of glass in the back door. Each pane had two wires of the alarm system zigzagging through it, from left to right, top and bottom.

Very carefully, with the stone, he smashed the pane of glass nearest the door handle, knocking out both wires.

The alarm went off—a high, excited, shrill, piercing, truly frightening ringing.

His mind’s eye saw a light beginning to flash at a console at the Weston police station.

As he went down the porch staff he pitched the stone into the woods.

He crossed the driveway to the bushes. In the bright moonlight, he stood, silently, further back in the bushes than he wanted to, but he still had clear views of the driveway, the side and back of the house.

Soon he saw the huge lights of the Rolls-Royce traveling north on the road. It braked as it approached the driveway.

The lights streamed down the gravel.

Horan turned the car so the headlights flooded the back porch of the house. He dashed across the gravel and up the steps. His feet crunched on the broken glass. He stooped to examine the window. Using his key, he let himself into the house.

The kitchen light went on.

In a moment, the burglar alarm was turned off.

No lights went on in the front of the house.

Dim lights, as from a stairwell, mixed with the moonlight on the window surface at the back of the house, both downstairs and upstairs.

Then lights went on in an upstairs room at the back of the house. Light poured out of its two windows.

Other than the kitchen, the room in the center of the second storey was the only room fully lit.

There was a noise from the road to Fletch’s left.

Blue lights rotating on the top of a police car came down the driveway. ,There was no sound of a siren.

The light in the room on the second floor went off.

The policemen parked behind the Rolls. Going around it, one of the policemen brushed his fingers along a fender.

Horan appeared at the back door.

“You Mister Horan?”

“What took you guys so goddamned long?”

“We came as soon as we got the call.”

“Like hell you did. I got out from Boston sooner.”

“Is this your car?”

“Never mind about that. What the hell am I paying taxes for, if this is the kind of protection I get?”

The policemen were climbing the steps, their wide belts and holsters making them look heavy-hipped.

“You pay your taxes, Mister Horan, because you have to.”

“What’s your name?”

“Officer Cabot, sir. Badge number 92.”

The other policeman said, “The glass is smashed, Chuck.”

“Christ,” said Horan.

“Anything missing?” asked Cabot.

“No.”

“The alarm must have scared them off.”

“The alarm had to scare them off,” said Horan. “Nothing else would.”

“We can patch that up with of plywood and some tacks.”

Cabot said, “Let’s look around, anyway.”

Lights went on and off throughout the whole house as Horan showed them around.

The ground was cold. Fletch began to feel it in his boots.

The three men were fiddling about the back door. The policemen were helping Horan tack a piece of plywood on the inside of the door, over the window frames.

“You live here, or in Boston?”

“Both places.”

“You should get this window fixed first thing in the morning.”

“You’re no one to tell me my business,” said Horan.

The policemen came down the steps and ambled toward their car.

From the porch, Horan said, “Get here a little faster next time, will you?”

Turning, the car reversed and headed up the driveway. Its rotating blue lights went out.

Horan returned to the house and turned out all the lights.

He closed and locked the back door.

Moving slowly, he came down the porch steps, got into the car, reversed it a few meters, and drove up the driveway.

As soon as the Rolls taillights disappeared around the curve, Fletch hurried across the driveway and up the porch steps.

Using his handkerchief over his hand, he pressed on the plywood through the broken window. The tacks pushed free easily. The wood clattered onto the kitchen floor.

Stooping a little, at an angle, he reached his arm through the window as far as his elbow. He released the locks and opened the door from the inside.

Quickly, he snapped on the kitchen light.

Anyone roused by the alarm and still watching the house would think they were seeing a continuation of the previous action, Fletch hoped. The house had been completely dark for only a minute or two.

Turning on lights as he went, he ran up the back stairs, along a short corridor, and into the center back room. The light revealed what was obviously an antiseptic, unlived-in guest bedroom with a huge closet.

The closet door was unlocked.

Light from the bedroom caused shadows from what appeared to be three white, bulky objects—each leaning against a wail of the closet.

He pulled a chain hanging from a bare light bulb, in the center of the closet.

In the center of the closet, on the flood, was a Degas horse.

He lifted it into the bedroom.

Gently, he tugged the dust sheets away from the paintings stacked neatly, resting against each other’s frames, against the closet walls.

He lifted two paintings out of the closet.

One was the smaller Picasso.

The other was a Modigliani.

These were the de Grassi collection. Sixteen objects, including the horse.

He took the Picasso and the Modigliani downstairs with him and left them in the kitchen.

Then he ran to the tractor shed for the truck.

He backed it against the back porch and opened its back doors.

He put the two paintings from the kitchen into it, bracing them carefully, face down, on the tarpaulin.

It took him a half-hour to load the truck.

Before he left the house, he closed the closet door and wiped his fingerprints off its handle. As he went through the house, he turned off all, the lights, giving the switches a wipe with his handkerchief as he did so.

In the kitchen, he replaced the plywood against the broken window, fitting the tacks into their original holes and pressing them firm.

Driving along the highway, back into Boston, he maintained the speed limit precisely.

Fletch continued to have a professionally jaundiced view of the police, but, under the circumstances, there was no sense in taking chances.