Fletch

2

“Clara?”

“Where are you, Fletcher?”

“I’m in a phone booth.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“I love you, too, bitch.

“Endearments will get you nowhere.”

“There’s nowhere I want to get with you. Listen: I’m driving up tonight.”

“To the office?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think I’m onto something interesting.”

“Does it have to do with the drugs-on-the-beach story?”

“As a matter of fact, no.”

“Then I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’m not going to tell you about it anyway.”

“Frank was asking for the drug-beach story again this afternoon.”

“Fuck Frank.”

“He wants it, Fletcher. That’s scheduled as a major magazine story, and you were supposed to be in with it three issues ago.”

“I’m doing fine with it.”

“He wants it now, Fletcher. With pictures. Frank was pretty boiled this afternoon, and you know how much I love you.”

“You’d stick up for me, wouldn’t you, Clara?”

“In a pig’s ass.”

“You can’t take me off the story now, and Frank knows it. I’ve got too much time in on it. Besides, no one else in the office has my tan.”

“What we can do is fire you for failure to complete an assignment.”

“Why don’t you stop talking, Clara? I said I’m driving up tonight.”

“There are some people who are just too goddamned obnoxious to have around.”

“Meaning me?”

“Which reminds me, Fletcher. Another sleazy lawyer was around the office again this afternoon looking for you. Something about nonpayment of alimony.”

“Which wife this time?”

“How the hell do I know? Don’t you pay either of them?”

“They both wanted to be free of me. They’re both free.”

“But the court says you’re not free of them.”

“When I want legal advice, Clara, I’ll ask.”

“Keep those bums out of the office. Your alimony problems are not our problems.”

“Right, Clara.”

“And don’t come back here until you have that goddamned story done.”

“I can miss a day with the little darlings. I sort of told the kids I was splitting anyway. For a while. I can get back here by tomorrow night. And have another wonderful weekend on the beach.”

“I said no, Fletcher. If you’ve accomplished anything at all down there, you must have caused some curiosity. Going for your car now and driving up to the office would just expose everything. You shouldn’t even be in a phone booth talking to me.”

“I want to come up to make some phone calls and do some digging.”

“On this story? The beach one?”

“No. The other one.”

“We don’t give a damn about any other story until you finish this one.”

“Clara? I’m cold. I’m still in swimming trunks.”

“I care. Get off the phone and get doin‘ what you’re supposed to be doin’. It’s seven-thirty, and I’ve had a long day.”

“Bye, Clara. Nice talking with you. Don’t get any crumbs in Frank’s bed.”

“Prick.”

Running on the beach warmed him. The setting sun made his shadow gigantic, his strides seem enormous. There were people still on the beach, as there always were these days. Taking off his shirt as he ran made his shadow on the sand look as if he were Big Bird trying to take off.

Near Fat Sam’s lean-to, he threw his shirt on the sand and sat beside it. His aim had been perfect. Under the shirt he dug up the plastic bag. His fingers told him that the camera was still inside.

With the bag wrapped in his shirt, Fletch ambled back along the beach to the residential section. The houses became more spacious and the distances between them greater.

A checkbook was on the sand. Fletch picked it up. Merchants Bank. No depositor’s name was printed on the checks, but there was an account number, and a balance of seven hundred eighty-five dollars and thirty-four cents.

Fletch stuck the checkbook into a back pocket of his sawed-off blue jeans.

A man stoking a barbecue pit yelled at him as he cut through a back yard. Fletch gestured at him in Italian.

He picked up his keys in the office and padded over the grease-packed garage floor to where his MG was parked. In the trunk were long jeans and a sweater.

“Hey, jerk!” The guy in the office was fat and bald. “You can’t change your pants in here. You can’t strip in a public place.”

“I did.”

“Wise ass. What if some ladies were around?”

“There are no ladies in California.”

He flicked on the tape recorder before he left the garage. The safety belt strapped the big tape recorder to the passenger seat. He had put the camera in the glove compartment.

The wire was draped around his neck. The microphone dangled beneath his chin.

“Alan Stanwyk,” he said, waving as he passed the man still shouting at him from the office, “after keeping me under surveillance a few days while I have been investigating the source of drugs in The Beach area for the News-Tribune, has just commissioned me to murder him in exactly one week—next Thursday night at eight-thirty. His surveillance convinced him that I am in fact a drifter and a drug addict.

“At least I think it is Alan Stanwyk who has commissioned me to murder him. I had never seen Alan Stanwyk before, but the man who commissioned me to murder him brought me to the Stanwyk residence on Berman Street, The Hills. I know there is such a person as Alan Stanwyk—as Amelia Shurcliffe of the News-Tribune doubtlessly has referred to him a thousand times: Alan Stanwyk, the wealthy young socialite.

“A quick check of the picture files at the office will establish whether or not the man who commissioned me to murder him is in fact Alan Stanwyk.

“I must follow the journalistic instinct of being skeptical of everything until I personally have proved it true.

“Stanwyk’s justification for this unique request, that I murder him, is that he is dying of cancer. I am without any diagnostic training, but I must say that to a layman’s eye he looks a well and fit man.

“On the other hand, his manner is totally convincing.

“Further justification for the request is that his life is insured for three million dollars. Direct and obvious suicide on his part would nullify the insurance.

“The man who says he is Stanwyk says he has a wife and child.

“The plan he has worked out for his murder is detailed.

“Having a passport, I am to enter the Stanwyk house through the french windows in the library next Thursday evening at eight-thirty. His wife will be at a committee meeting at the Racquets Club. The servants will be gone.

“Stanwyk will have arranged the house to make it appear a robbery has been committed. He will have opened the safe.

“I am to take a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson from the top right-hand drawer of the desk in the library and shoot Stanwyk to kill him, as painlessly as possible. He has shown me that the gun is loaded.

“I am then to drive his car, a gray Jaguar XKE, license number 440-001, to the airport and board the TWA eleven o’clock flight to Buenos Aires. A reservation in my name for that flight will be made tomorrow.

“For this service to Stanwyk, he has agreed to pay me fifty thousand dollars. He will have the cash in the house, in the opened safe, in tens and twenties when I arrive next week.

“Originally, he offered twenty thousand dollars. I pressed the price to fifty thousand dollars, in an effort to gauge his seriousness.

“He appeared serious.

“His investigation of me he believes to have been adequate. He watched me a few days and saw precisely that image I had been assigned to project: that of a drifter and a drug addict.

“He did not know my name or anything else about me.

“What Stanwyk doesn’t realize is that I am the great hotshot young reporter, I.M. Fletcher of the News-Tribune, who so dislikes his first names, Irwin Maurice, that he never signs them. I am I.M. Fletcher. Down at The Beach trying to break a drug story.

“The questions at this point appear obvious enough.

“Is the man who commissioned me to murder him Alan Stanwyk?

“Does he have terminal cancer?

“Is he insured for three million dollars?

“Does he really mean for me to murder him?

“In the answer to any one of these questions, there is probably a helluva story.

“And although I admit to having been in the killing business for a while, in Indochina, I am now back in the helluva story business.

“Any story concerning Alan Stanwyk is worth getting.

“Therefore, I have agreed to murder Alan Stanwyk.

“My agreeing to murder him gives me exactly a week, in which I can be fairly sure he will not commission anyone else to murder him.

“Dishonest of me, I know.

“But as Pappy used to say about violating virgins, ‘Son, if you’re not the first, someone else will be.’‘