Fletch’s Moxie

26

After they sailed awhile, Moxie said, “I suppose I should ask you, seeing it wasn’t so long ago you put me on an airplane ostensibly for dinner and landed me far enough away from the scene of the crime to make me a fugitive from justice, if now you have me in a sailboat, do you mean to flee the country with me?”

“Damn,” said Fletch at the tiller. “You caught me. You penetrated my purposeful plot.”

Moxie’s eyes were full of the sunlight reflected from the sea. “I’ve always heard Cuba is a gorgeous country.”

Up to that point, they had said little to each other.

They had walked to a Cuban-American restaurant and had a quiet breakfast. Some of the people there had recognized Moxie and smiled at her in a friendly way and kept their dignity by otherwise leaving her alone. During breakfast, Moxie wondered aloud if Stella Littleford would have a scar on her forehead forever and Fletch said he thought Stella had suffered a concussion as well because there had been quite a lot of rum in the bottle that had hit her. The senora of that restaurant made a picnic lunch for them and put it in a cardboard box. Fletch also bought a six-pack of cold soft drinks.

They walked the long way around, along the water, until they came to a beach where Fletch rented a catamaran. He put the food and the drinks aboard. Boys on the beach helped them push the catamaran into the surf. Fletch boosted Moxie aboard and then climbed aboard himself.

The process of launching put enough water in the bottom of the boat to soak the cardboard picnic box. Moxie showed Fletch the soggy box as he was finding the wind and beginning to sail on it and they laughed. She rescued the sandwiches and the fruit and rolled the box into a ball and dropped it into the bottom of the boat.

Moxie was wearing her bikini and she removed the top but she kept herself more or less in the shade of the sail. She said, “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Something nice, please.”

“Edith Howell says if you’re not talking you’re dead, or something.”

“If Edith Howell ever stopped talking everyone else would die. Of shock.”

“She has her eyes on your father’s millions.”

Moxie snorted. “Millions of empty cognac bottles. She’s welcome to ’em.” She put herself on her side and trailed her fingers in the water. “Talk to me about something nice. Like how come you’re so rich.”

“You’re asking me if I’m rich?”

“Well, you’re not working. You have that nice place in Italy.”

“That’s sort of a rude question, from a girl I just met.”

“I know. Answer me anyway.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got all day.”

“It’s sort of an impossible story to tell. In detail.”

“Did you do something wrong, Fletch? Are you a crook?”

“Who, me? No. I don’t think so.”

“What happened?”

“Not much. One night I found myself alone in a room with a lot of cash. The cash was there because I had been hired to do a bad thing. I had not done the bad thing. But the bad thing had happened anyway. Coincidentally.”

“Boy, why don’t you spare me a few details?”

“I told you it’s a long story.”

“So you took the money…”

“I had to. Leaving it there would have embarrassed people. It would have raised questions.”

“Robbery as an act of kindness?”

“I thought so at the time.”

“What did you do with the money?”

“I didn’t know what to do with it. I had never been very good with money.”

“No foolin’. I remember the time…”

“What time?”

“Forget it. I’m still mad.”

“There should never be money between friends.”

“That’s it,” said Moxie. “There wasn’t any. Unfortunately, you had invited me to one of Los Angeles’ most posh eateries.”

“Oh. That time.”

“That time.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting my watch back sometime. The one the restaurant took.”

“A Piaget, wasn’t it?”

“With little diamonds.”

Fletch asked, “What time is it?”

She put herself on her stomach. “Who cares?”

Fletch said: “Exactly.”

Moxie inhaled slowly and exhaled with a great sigh. “Oh, Fletch. Oh, Fletch—you never change.”

He smiled at her, showing her all his front teeth. “I just get better.”

“Worse. So what did you do with all this money you stole?”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“It just fell into your lap.”

“Something like that. Long story. The money was on its way to South America, see, so I went with it. I’m very big on seeing actions completed. Essential to my psyche.”

“Then how come you haven’t finished writing the biography of Edgar Arthur Tharp?”

“I’m working on it. I was in South America. I didn’t know what to do with the money. Maybe I felt a little badly about having it. Maybe I was trying to get rid of it. So I bought gold with it.”

“Oh, no.”

“I did.”

“And the price of gold shot up?”

“Someone mentioned that to me. In a bar. So I felt worse. I got rid of the gold. Quick. Yuck. I hated the oil companies, thought they were given’ the world a royal screwin’, they were bound to get their comeuppance—”

“So you put your money into oil companies?”

“Yes. I did.”

“And their value shot up?”

“So I heard. That made me feel worse.”

“I can believe.”

“I got rid of that yucky stuff as quick as I could. I’ve done terribly.”

“And where’s the money now?”

“Well, I decided my investment policy wasn’t very sound. Very responsible. You know what I mean? I had been buying things I didn’t like.”

“So you decided to buy things you did like?”

“I decided to use the money to help out, instead of hinder. I heard General Motors was having such a tough time nobody was buying its stock.”

“So you bought General Motors?”

“So I bought General Motors. And the cable-electronic companies looked risky, so I put some money into them.”

“Good Lord, Fletch. God! You’re so incompetent!”

“Well, I never said I was any good with money.”

“You should have taken a course. How To Invest.”

“Yes,” Fletch said. “I suppose I should have.”

“You just never cared about money!”

“No,” said Fletch. “I don’t.”

When they got to the Gulf Stream she went overboard and he lowered the sails and, except for the light lines to the boat he tied to his ankles, he got naked, too, and went overboard and they played and made love in the water, only the light, drifting boat kept pulling him away from her by the ankles and he kept getting too much water up his nose and they both laughed so hard they ran out of breath and nearly drowned but they did succeed, but they were slow to leave the water and climb back into the boat anyway.

“As long as we’re talking about money,” he said.

“Is this still nice talk?”

“Jumping Cow Productions, Incorporated,” he said.

They had sailed back to an empty beach and run the catamaran up onto the fine sand. They took their food and drinks ashore and had a picnic. The drinks were very warm but they drank them anyway, for the sake of putting fluid into their bodies. The sandwiches had dried out. Mostly they ate the fruit.

After eating, they lay in the sand. It was late enough in the afternoon and there were enough passing clouds so the sun would not burn their tanned skin. Fletch waited a long while. Finally she put herself on her side and she put her hand on his hip and he put himself on his side as well and put his head on his hand. Her face told him he had her attention, but she did not expect to talk about money at this time.

“Tell me, Moxie,” he said. “What does the cow jump over?”

“The moon,” she answered easily. Then her face changed. She looked at him as if he had struck her. Then she rolled over onto her back. She covered her eyes with one hand. “Mooney,” she groaned.

“Right. Moxie Mooney.” She continued to lay flat on her back beside him on the sand, her hand covering her eyes from the sun. “You are sole proprietor of Jumping Cow Productions, Incorporated. Martin Satterlee called me this morning.”

“Good.” She rolled onto her stomach. “I’ll close that Goddamned movie down faster than anything you ever saw.”

“Midsummer Night’s Madness?”

“Fini to Midsummer Night’s Madness. To Edith Howell, Sy Koller, Geoff McKensie, Gerry Littleford, Talcott Cross, the whole damned bunch of ’em. Goodbye to that stupid script. Goodbye to Route 41.”

“I take it you did not know you are sole proprietor of Jumping Cow Productions?”

“I did not. I certainly did not.”

“Moxie, when you went into Peterman’s office—a couple of weeks ago—what did you actually learn? What did you actually find out that upset you so, you know, enough to cause you to ask me to meet you here?”

“I couldn’t find any real tax reports. I kept asking the staff for the tax files. They kept bringing me folder after folder with all this crazy stuff in them, loan agreements with banks in Honduras and Switzerland and Mexico. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I got madder and madder.” Her voice dropped. “Or more and more scared.”

Fletch lay back on the sand, folding his hands behind his head. “Marty couldn’t do a very thorough job of looking at your financial records. Four o’clock this morning the police came in and took them all.”

“Oh, God! The police have my financial records?”

“You knew they—”

“I didn’t know anything, Fletch!” Moxie snapped. She pounded her fist on the sand. “Damn!”

She got up and walked at an angle down the beach to the water’s edge and then kept walking along the water.

After a long while, when she didn’t come back he took their garbage back to the boat and turned it around in the light surf and otherwise prepared for departure.

Then he sat on one of the hulls and waited while Moxie walked back down the beach.

They launched the boat together.

“Moxie?” Again they were sailing, the low sun at their stern. She sat, the picture of dejection, chin on hand, elbow on knee. “You know the guy who owns The Blue House?”

“No. How could I?”

“His name is Ted Sills. You said yesterday you don’t know him.”

“I don’t.”

“Apparently you are a co-owner with Ted Sills of a Florida horse farm.”

She wrinkled her face at him. There was salt on her skin and a small dab of sand on one cheekbone. “We’re partners in something?”

“Five Aces Farm. Ocala, Florida.”

She shrugged. “News to me.”

“I guess he was a friend of Steve Peterman’s.”

“Listen, Fletch.” She sounded tired and angry and tired of being angry. “Why don’t you just give it to me in simple?”

“Wish I could. As I told you, Marty didn’t get very far into your records when the cops arrived. He seems to agree with your two main fears: that you are in tax trouble; that you do owe huge and unlikely sums of money to banks all over the world.”

Moxie Mooney looked all over the horizon. “Which way did you say Cuba is?”

He pointed. “That way.”

“You want to come with me, or should I start swimming?”

“An awful lot of inexplicable financial activity has been going on under your name.”

“Inexplicable… and you expect me to explain?”

“Marty couldn’t explain it. He couldn’t understand it.”

“Is it your friend Marty’s opinion that something crooked has been going on?”

“He was trying not to have an opinion.”

“But he had to try hard, right?”

“Right.” Fletch hitched in the main sheet. “He seemed to feel all that much activity couldn’t have been going on without your knowing about it.”

The red light from the setting sun full in her face, Moxie just stared at Fletch.

Fletch said, quietly: “In other words, Moxie, chances are pretty good your average judge is going to believe you’re lying.”

“Lying,” she said.

“About everything.”

She looked at the paper sandwich wrappers and empty soda cans on the deck of the cockpit. “The way you were lying this morning? About all your money?”

Fletch chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Come on, Fletch. Games are games. This isn’t fun.”

She studied the junk in the bottom of the boat a long time.

Then she put her hand on his knee. “Hey, Fletch. Thanks for the nice day.”

“Nice to make your acquaintance,” he said.

He was sailing for the right beach. Leaving that morning he had lined the beach up with the martello towers.

“In other words,” Moxie said, “going through my financial records, the cops are going to find I had tons of reasons for killing Steve Peterman.”

“It looks that way.”

The centerboard was up. Near the beach, Fletch was looking for the heads of late swimmers on the water.

“Fletch.” Moxie shivered. “Please find someone else to pin this murder on.”

“I’m tryin’, babe,” Fletch said. “I’m tryin’.”

* * *

It was dark and walking through the side streets in her loose beach wrap, her head down, Moxie attracted no attention.

Fletch said, “There’s one other small matter…”

“Boy, you’re really giving it to me today. I thought we were just going to talk about happy things.”

“I got you out of the house just so we could talk.”

“You took me sailing so you could beat up on me.”

“Your father told me about your going to school in England…”

Quietly, Moxie said, “You knew I went to school in England. Almost two years.”

“I never knew why.”

“Freddy was being paternal that year. Wanted me near him.”

“But he wasn’t in England that year.”

“He was supposed to be. His schedule got changed.”

“Moxie…” Fletch took her hand. “Hey,” he said. “Your father said something about your drama coach at school getting murdered.”

Her hand went limp in his. “I was only fourteen.”

“God! What does that mean?”

She pulled her hand from his. “It means Freddy didn’t think I needed all that pressure on me at the age of fourteen!”

“‘Pressure’! ‘Pressure’?”

She veered on the rough sidewalk. They were then on a dark, empty sidestreet. She was walking a meter away from him. “Do you think I murdered Mister Hodes?”

“‘Think’, I don’t think anything. I didn’t even know the guy’s name.”

“He was a little shit,” Moxie muttered.

“I think you were gotten out of town damned fast. Way out. Out of the country. And you went.”

“I was fourteen, for God’s sake.” They had stopped walking. “I didn’t mind going to school in England. It sounded cool.”

“I ask you if you murdered somebody and all you say is you were fourteen!”

“Is that what you think? You think I murdered the birdy drama coach?”

“I don’t know what to think. I hate what I think. Why don’t you answer me?”

Across the sidewalk her eyes glowered.

“Think what you want, Fletcher.”

She began to walk. She walked with her fists clenched at her sides.

She walked ahead of him all the way to the house.

They approached The Blue House from the rear.

Moxie, well ahead of him, head down, zipped through the back gate into the garden.

When Fletch got to the back gate Lopez was coming through with a rubbish barrel.

“Ah,” Fletch said. “Tomorrow’s the day the rubbish gets picked up.”

Lopez grinned at him. “A lot of broken glass, Mister Fletcher. They threw a lot of stones.”

“I know. Any real damage?”

“No. It’s all cleaned up. Tomorrow I will start replacing the windows which were broken.”

On top of the barrel that Lopez had just set down were three empty apple juice bottles.

“Sorry about this morning,” Fletch said. “All the noise. Damage. Mess. Guess I’m not a very good tenant.”

Lopez’ grin grew even broader. “It’s fun,” he said. “This house is empty so much. The excitement is good. Don’t think about it.”