Fletch’s Fortune

Nine

8:00 P.M. Dinner

Main Dining Room

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.’”