Fletch Won

“You’re from the News-Tribune?” Stuart Childers looked young and neat in his business suit and necktie behind his wooden desk. He looked basically healthy, as well, except for bags of sleeplessness beneath his eyes. His teeth kept tearing at his lips.

“Yes. Name of Fletcher.”

“I take it you’re not here to see me about insurance?”

“No. I’m not. The doorman at your apartment house said you were here at your office.”

“You may be the answer to a prayer.” Stuart Childers took a .22 caliber revolver from the top drawer of his desk. He placed it in the center of the desk blotter in front of him. “If I’m not arrested for murder by five o’clock today, I intend to blow my brains out.”

“That’s some threat.” Fletch sat in a chair facing the desk. He quoted, ‘“When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ ”

The office was small but paneled with real wood. There was a Turkish rug on the floor.

“You want to find out who murdered Donald Habeck, is that right?” Childers asked.

“That’s the job of the police and the courts,” Fletch answered.

“The police!” Childers scoffed. “The courts! Oh, my God!”

“I want the story,” Fletch said. “I’m a journalist. My own purpose is to understand Donald Habeck, as much as possible, and why he was murdered.”

“Have you gotten far?”

“Yes. I’ve gotten some good background.”

Childers contemplated the handgun on his desk. “I murdered Donald Habeck.”

“The hell you say.”

“The police won’t listen to me.”

“You’ve confessed to everything that’s gone down in this area in the last two months.”

“I know,” Childers said. “That was a mistake.”

Fletch shrugged. “We all make mistakes.”

“Don’t you think we have a need for punishment?” Teeth tearing at his lips, Childers looked to Fletch for an answer, waited. “If we are being punished for what wrong we did, at least we can live with ourselves, die with ourselves.” He waved his fingers at the handgun. “Just going bang is not the better way.”

Still Fletch said nothing.

“What do you know of my brother’s death?”

“I know you were drunk when you confessed to the police. I know Habeck kept you drugged during the trial.”

“Yes. Tranquilizers. Habeck said he always gave them to his clients during a trial. I had no idea how strong they were. The trial went by in a blur, like a fast-moving railroad train.” Childers’s teeth worried his lips. “I murdered my brother.”

Fletch said, “I expect you did.”

“How is that forgivable?” Again, he seemed to be asking Fletch a real question. “Richard said he was going to blackmail me, for money to keep up his whacky, careless life. Even if I was paying him, he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. His need to hurt me, and my parents, was too great. My mistake was that I was horrified at the threat of the college, the world, my parents learning that I had cheated, hired an instructor to write my honors thesis. I went to Richard’s apartment. I didn’t intend to kill him. We fought like a couple of shouting, screaming, crying, angry kids. Suddenly we were on his little balcony. Suddenly the expression on his face changed. He fell backwards. Fell.”

“You confess very convincingly.”

“I woke up on the other side of the trial. I was back living in my apartment, coming to work here every day. Everybody was telling me the incident was over, closed, that I had to get on with my life. How could I get on with my life? The so-called incident wasn’t over. My parents knew I had cheated on my honors thesis. One son was dead. The other son had murdered him. And my parents knew it. I had destroyed my parents’ every dream, every reality. I might as well have killed them, too.” From the way he was looking at him, Fletch knew another unanswerable question was coming. “My parents did what they thought was best in hiring Habeck, in getting me off. But wouldn’t they feel better in their hearts if their sole remaining son took responsibility for what he had done?”

Fletch said nothing.

“You asked for a story,” Childers said.

“So you took to confessing.”

“Yeah. I’d read enough about a crime to be able to go into the police and say I committed it. They had to listen, at first. I’d make up evidence against myself. That was my mistake. The evidence wouldn’t check out. So they wouldn’t believe me at all.”

“You’re sure you just didn’t want to play a starring role in court again?” Childers gave him the look of a starlet accused of being attractive. “Some people get a kick out of that.”

Childers sighed and looked at the gun.

“Stuart, you can’t be tried again for murdering your brother.”

“I know that. So I murdered Habeck.”

“Now the story gets a little hard to swallow.”

“Why?”

“Murdering your brother was a crime of passion. Two brothers, very angry with each other, probably never having been able to talk well with each other, finding each other tussling, hitting each other, all kinds of angers at each other since you were in diapers welling up out of your eyes. And one of you got killed. That’s very different from the fairly intellectualized crime of killing the person who had prevented your receiving punishment for the first crime.”

“Is it? I suppose it is.” He looked sharply at Fletch. “Frustration is frustration though, isn’t it? Once you’ve taken a life, it becomes easier to take another life.”

“That’s a cliché. People who commit crimes of passion seldom do so again. The object of your rage was dead.”

“Couldn’t I have transferred my rage from my brother to Habeck?”

“Keep trying, Stuart. You’ll work it out.”

“Who says a person who commits a crime of passion, as you call it, isn’t capable of committing an entirely different, rational murder?”

“What’s rational about your murdering Habeck? The son of a bitch got you off!”

“Yes, he got me off!” Leaning forward on his desk, Childers spoke forcefully. “And the son of a bitch knew I was guilty! He obstructed justice!”

“In your behalf! You’re the one who is walking around free!”

Childers sat back. “I don’t know that much about the law, but I’d call Donald Habeck an accessory to murder, after the fact. Wouldn’t that be about right? Think about it.”

Fletch thought about it.

“How many times was Donald Habeck an accessory to a crime, after the fact?”

Fletch said, “Before the fact, too, I suspect.”

“What?”

Fletch remembered saying to Louise Habeck, about her son, Robert, “Shooting his father would accomplish two goals, wouldn’t it?” And her answering, “Spendidly!”

“Okay, Stuart. If you shot Habeck because you wanted to be punished so much, how come you didn’t stay there? How come you weren’t found standing over him with the gun?”

Childers smiled. “Would you believe I had to pee?”

“No.”

“Go shoot someone, and see what happens to your bladder.” Sitting behind his desk, Stuart Childers was then speaking as evenly as someone might discussing a homeowner’s fire-and-theft policy. “I did wait there. I had thought someone would hear the gun. I shot Habeck sort of far back in the lot, where he parked. I shot him as he was getting out of the car. No one was around. The guard at the gate was talking to someone entering the parking lot. I could see him. I waited. I had to pee in the worst way. I mean, really bad. I didn’t want to have to go through the whole arrest process, you know, having shit my pants. So I went into the lobby of the News-Tribune and asked the guard there if I could use the men’s room.”

“Why didn’t you come out again? There were police, reporters, photographers who would have been interested to actually see you at a scene of one of your crimes.”

“I felt sick. Jittery.”

“That would have been understood.”

Stuart Childers said something Fletch didn’t hear.

“What?”

“I wanted a drink. A few drinks before I gave myself up.”

“You wanted to get drunk before you confessed again, is that it? What did you supposedly want, Stuart?”

“I wanted to get control of myself. I went home, had a few drinks, a bath, a night’s sleep. In the morning, I had breakfast. Then I went to the police station to confess.” Childers shrugged. “A gentlemanly routine, I suppose. I was brought up that way.”

Fletch shook his head. Then he asked, “How did you know Habeck was going to be in the parking lot at the News-Tribune a few minutes before ten on Monday morning?”

“I didn’t. Murdering Habeck was something I decided over the weekend. So Monday morning, I drove to his house. Got there about seven-thirty. Waited for him. He drove out of his garage in a blue Cadillac Seville. I followed him. He drove to the News-Tribune. While he talked to the guard at the gate, I parked outside and walked in. It was the first stop he made. When he opened his car door, I shot him.”

“Then you had the irresistible need to pee.”

“I had been sitting in my car since before seven o’clock! Then, after I peed, I felt really sick in the stomach. My legs were shaking. I had a terrible neck ache.” Childers rubbed the back of his neck. “I wanted time! Isn’t that understandable?”

“I don’t know. You say you wanted to get caught, but you ran away. There is no evidence at all that you were at the scene of the crime. Everything you’ve told me so far, that Habeck drove a blue Cadillac Seville, that he was shot at the back of the lot getting out of his car, all that was reported in the press.”

“Sorry if my story conforms to the truth.”

“You didn’t confess until after you’d been able to read the details of the crime in the newspaper.”

Childers stared at the gun on his desk.

“Okay, Stuart. What did you do with the murder weapon?”

“You know what?”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what you did with the gun?”

“I don’t know. When I got home, I didn’t have the gun. I’ve tried to remember. I was upset….”

“You had to pee.”

“… Tried to reconstruct.”

“I bet.”

“I couldn’t have had the gun in my hand when I walked into the lobby of the News-Tribune. I must have thrown it into the bushes.”

Fletch watched him carefully. “You threw it into the bushes in front of the building?”

“I must have.”

“What kind of a gun was it?”

“A twenty-two-caliber target pistol.”

“Stuart, your twenty-two-caliber target pistol is on your desk in front of you.”

“I bought that last night. The one I used on Habeck I’ve had for years. My father gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday.” Childers grinned. “He never gave Richard a gun.”

“Oh, my God!”

“What?”

Fletch stood up.

Childers said, “Why didn’t the police find the gun?”

Fletch said, “Why didn’t you find the gun?”

“I tried to. I went back to look for it. It wasn’t there.”

Fletch nodded to the gun on the desk. “May I take that?”

Childers put his hand over it. “Not unless you want to get shot trying.”

“Oh, no,” said Fletch. “That would just put you to the bother of confessing again!’