Fletch Reflected Page 4

  “Phew. Why doesn’t old Radliegh run the estate with robots?”

  “I think he would if he could. You’ll live in half of a divided cottage, your own room, bath and kitchenette. It is expected you will do all your food shopping at the estate general store in the village of Vindemia.”

  “I’m expected to sell my soul to the company store?”

  “It’s not a bad deal, really. The store on the estate is nonprofit. You buy retail at wholesale prices. Plus, Doctor Radliegh himself has checked the nutritional value of all the food sold, for example. It’s the best.”

  “No junk food?”

  “Potato chips. He likes potato chips himself. You may use the gymnasium, pool, etc., but not while a member of the family or guest is using them. Unless you have an explicit reason for being someplace, if a member of the family or a guest appears, you are to disappear. You have a car?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you arrive, you will park it in the locked compound, and turn over your keys. Radliegh doesn’t want unnecessary traffic on the estate. Bicycles are available. You’ll have from midnight Wednesday until midnight Thursday off. If you choose to leave the estate during that time, of course your car will be made available to you.”

  “This is Thursday.”

  “So it is.” Downes told Jack the rate of pay. He began to hand Jack a closely printed sheet of paper. “Is all this agreeable to you?”

  “Where do I sign?”

  After a little more paperwork with Clarence Downes, Jack drove to the estate.

  The erections holding the wrought iron gates to the estate were thirty five meters high. Stucco walls ten meters high extended out of sight in each direction. The gatehouse itself was as big as a suburban executive mansion.

  “Is this The Magic Kingdom?” Jack asked the blue-and-white uniformed guard.

  “You almost got it right,” the guard said. “You got a pass?”

  “Yeah.” Jack handed the guard his laminated pass. “Winnie the Pooh dropped his.”

  Jack’s pass was pink, Downes had told him, to identify him as an employee.

  At least a mile ahead of him, on a rise, the roofs and other parts of the main house were visible. The roofs were blue tile. In the sunlight, the white walls of the house gleamed like an actor’s teeth. Several huge blue-and-white flags, visible even from that distance, flew in the breeze above the roofs.

  The guard gave him directions to the car compound. “Go directly there,” he said. “I’m phoning ahead. They’ll expect you within six minutes. Do not drive over thirty miles an hour.”

  “What do I do about the car’s exhaust?”

  The guard grinned. “Bag it.”

  Driving the smooth road, landscaped both sides, Jack remembered his conversation with Global Cable News’ Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer, Alex Blair. Jack had said he was not married or otherwise entangled and was free to go abroad.

  Entering Vindemia he felt as if he had entered a foreign country. Very foreign.

  He had entered the sort of world God might have created if He had money, to use an old wheeze.

  A car the likes of which Jack had never seen before passed him coming from the main house. It was a chauffeur driven extended Infiniti.

  An older woman in a picture hat sat alone in the back seat. She held a handkerchief to her nose. Was she weeping?

  The limousine oozed along silently at exactly thirty miles an hour.

  “Woo,” Jack said to himself. “’Round here, I’d better not accept any apples from women, or I just might end up somewhere well east of here.”

  Having finished her laps in the pool, the girl in the black bikini swam to the pool edge near Jack. She folded her arms on the pool edge. She rested her chin on her forearms.

  She had coal-black hair, very wide-set coal black eyes.

  Standing on the edge of the pool, Jack was vacuuming the pool’s bottom with a wide, long hose.

  Already he was tired of hearing the huge flags over the main house cracking in the wind.

  There was no one else in the pool area.

  She said, “Hi.”

  “Hello, Miss.”

  “Let me see the back of your leg.”

  “Do I have to do that, too?”

  “Turn around.”

  He turned around.

  He knew she was looking for the small blue eye tattooed on the calf of his left leg just below the knee.

  “I thought you look familiar.”

  “I am, Miss. Some people say, Much too.”

  After watching him another minute, she lifted herself out of the pool.

  She said, “Fletch.”

  “Jack Faoni, Miss. Nice of you to remember me, Miss.”

  Her low, warm voice said, “Who’d ever forget?”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “We had fun that night.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “Great fun. I mean, it was really nice. Did you bring your guitar?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “Do you work here?”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “When did you arrive?”

  “Last night, Miss.”

  Standing a meter away from him on the pool edge, she looked up at part of the main house. “I thought you were going to be my cousin.”

  Jack lowered his voice’s register. “It would never have worked. I would have had to meet with you, learn everything about your family, who I would be in that family …”

  “You’d rather work here than be a guest here?”

  “I’m freer this way. Anyway, who wants to be all that polite all the time? Occasionally, I’m given to flatulence.”

  “That would never do,” she said.

  Shana Staufel sat in a long chair two meters behind him. His back to her, he continued working.

  They continued talking softly, conversationally.

  “Nice of you to come,” she said.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “As stated,” Shana said. “Weird things are happening. The people here have everything anybody could possibly want, looks, brains, health, prestige, every toy in the world, and yet the tension is so thick I don’t think you could cut it with a chain saw.”

  “Aren’t the spoiled always discontented?”

  “I’m talking about resentment, cruelty, hatred, Jack, all aimed at a specific person.”

  “Who?”

  “Chester Radliegh.”

  “The captain of the ship.”

  “I’m afraid the tension is bubbling over into violence. Covert violence.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Ten days. At first, I thought what I was hearing from everybody was just a general, loving, humorous ribbing of the old man. Whenever he was out of earshot, everyone would begin muttering. Then I realized there was no humor intended. These comments were not being made with love, but with hatred. To them, Chester can say nothing right, do nothing right. If he says it’s Tuesday, everyone complains and says it’s Monday, or Wednesday, when, in fact, it is Tuesday, if you understand me. It’s all rather unfair.”

  “Who is ‘everybody’?”

  “His wife. His children. He has his home office here, over by the golf course, airport. His chief executives, such as his chief executive officer, Eric Beauville, seem to be the same way: very nice to Chester’s face, hateful toward him as soon as he turns his back.”

  “So Doctor Radliegh is a genius. You don’t expect people around a genius to understand him. Of course there are misunderstandings.”

  “I tell you, it’s dangerous. You know how it is when you’re boiling eggs, or spaghetti, and there’s too much water in the pot, too much heat, and the water bubbles up to the rim of the pot?”

  “Yeah, I’ve burned spaghetti.”

  “If you don’t turn down the heat, it spills over, scalds the stove, douses the flame, whatever. That’s the way it is here. The pot is just beginning to bubble over.”

  “What do you
mean by ‘covert violence’? Got any specifics?”

  “Yes.”

  He heard her take a deep breath. “You going to make me ask?”

  “Every morning a few minutes after dawn Chester rides his huge stallion madly over the hills, jumping the fences. I guess he does it to rid himself of tensions. The morning of the day I called you, while he was riding out of the stable yard, his horse keeled over dead. They say it died of a heart attack.”

  “Horses die of heart attacks.”

  “A three year old horse? I think he was drugged.”

  “Any proof?”

  “Chester refuses to have a blood test done on the horse. I think he doesn’t want to know.”

  Jack felt Georgia’s summer sun crisping his shoulders. “That’s not much.”

  “Chester has a one-room cabin in the woods up in the hills. He calls it his ‘think house.’ Every afternoon he goes there at four o’clock, and spends an hour by himself, unwinding, I guess, listening to Haydn. Yesterday afternoon shortly after four o’clock the cabin blew up. It exploded into matchsticks. They say the heater must have exploded.”

  “The heater?” Sweating, Jack squinted up at the sun. “Why would the heater be on in this weather?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Was someone working on it?”

  “Got me.”

  “I take it Doctor Radliegh was not in the cabin when it blew.”

  “On his way there, the front axle of the Jeep he was driving broke.”

  “Hum. If the front axle on the Jeep had broken when he was coming down from the cabin, would he have gotten hurt?”

  “Probably killed. The road is unpaved, twisting, right on the edge of the hill much of the way. It was muddy yesterday afternoon.”

  “You count that as three possible attempts on his life.”

  “There was a fourth, this morning. Every morning before dawn, Chester makes his own coffee in his dressing room. This morning, he found the coffeepot unplugged. The plug was wet. The natural place he would have held on to the wire to plug it in had been scraped bare.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He complained of not having his morning coffee.”

  “These are a lot of coincidences.”

  “Too many, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I notice you call him ‘Chester.’”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the daughter-in-law-to-be. Wouldn’t Doctor Radliegh, Professor Radliegh be more appropriate?”

  “I knew Chester before I met Chet.”

  “Oh?”

  “I worked as translator, interpreter for his interests in Europe.”

  “You traveled with him?”

  “With his retinue. Acting as his interpreter at social functions, I was told to call him Chester. He said calling him Doctor, Professor was offputting for his other guests.”

  “I see.”

  “I came here to Vindemia in the spring to back up his home team while he was negotiating around the clock with some German and Scandinavian industrialists, members of governments. It was then I met Chet.”

  “Love at first sight?”

  “I saw you were making a name for yourself as an investigative reporter, so I thought I’d give you a call. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m worried.” She paused. “Sorry to take advantage of such a short acquaintance, however intense.”

  Jack said, “I don’t see what I can do. I can’t walk around in front of him checking his horse’s pulse and plugging in his coffeepot for him.”

  “Don’t investigative reporters investigate?”

  “Now I’m sorry I didn’t come here as a guest. I’m too far removed from him, the family.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Doctor Radliegh was a professor of physics. He must have studied the Laws of Probability. What does he think of all these coincidences?”

  “I think he’s in some kind of denial. Is that the right expression? I’ve been abroad since I graduated. He is growing quieter.”

  “He seems a man of most regular habits.”

  “He lives by the clock. He has his own schedule and keeps to it, minute by minute. It’s a part of his perfect self-discipline.”

  “That’s dangerous. Seeing you talk to him, you might suggest he begin varying his schedule, become a little less predictable.”

  “That would be like asking a zebra to take off those silly looking pajamas.”

  “Or you might suggest he go away for a while, leave Vindemia altogether.”

  “His home is here. His laboratory. His home office. All his toys. Getting him to leave here is like taking a chocolate chip out of a cookie.”

  “He must know something is wrong. He’s got to do something about it. He needs someone more than me.”

  “He is very protective of his family.”

  “I see that.”

  “I don’t think he would accuse them of anything, have them suspected by anybody.”

  “But you, being the outsider, are alarmed.”

  Shana said, “Obviously, I’m just here to let the family get to know me, let me know them, test life here at Vindemia—”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” She paused at length. “My own family is a mess. My father has been married four times, my mother, three. He’s a lawyer in Albany. He gets away with anything he wants, drunken driving, fiddling documents, putting bought and paid for people on a jury. My mother has taken to sitting on a couch and eating a handkerchief a day. My sister is scarfing up all the drugs in South America, however she can get them. My brother is in prison. For rape. There’s never been any discipline in my family at all. Except for me. I’m the rebel, I guess.”

  “And you admire discipline.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And you admire Doctor Radliegh.”

  “Who wouldn’t? He’s everything a man should be.”

  “And you love Chet?”

  “Just by watching, listening, can’t you figure out who is doing these things, why, put a stop to it?”

  “I doubt it. Everyone here knows this place better than I. Everyone knows him, and his disciplined routine better than I.” Jack looked up at what he could see of the huge house. “This place is a lot bigger than I ever could have imagined. I heard it was big, but this is ridiculous. I have an appointment with Doctor Radliegh’s secretary in a few minutes, and I don’t even know how to begin to find her. There doesn’t even seem to be anyone around to ask.”

  “She’s over in the office building, by the airport. Take a bike.”

  “Is there a map?”

  “They didn’t give you one?”

  “I think they don’t want me exploring.”

  “Will you try?”

  “I’ll watch,” Jack said. “I’ll listen. I’ll think.”

  A man in his mid-twenties dressed only in tank trunks entered the pool area. He was heavily muscled. He waved at Shana.

  Jack said, “I doubt I’ll accomplish anything.”

  The young man climbed to the highest diving platform. Without hesitation, he dove, did a double back flip and entered the water hardly rippling the surface.

  “Is that Chet?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. Class valedictorian and All-American quarterback.”

  “Not what I was expecting.”

  “The National Football League made him an offer to play. He could buy his own team, of course. Oxford offered him a full fellowship.”

  “Can he buy Oxford?”

  “If his Daddy cosigned the note.”

  In one smooth movement as if continuing his swimming stroke, Chet popped out of the pool and landed on his feet on the deck. Dripping, he stood on the pool deck arms akimbo. He said to Shana, “Time to go.”

  He did not appear to realize she and Jack had been talking to each other.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “You’ve had enough sun.”

  “Just resting after doing my laps. I’ve only been here a f
ew minutes.”

  Although Chet put his hand out to Shana, he was looking at Jack.

  Slowly he looked Jack up and down as if wondering how much he cost.

  “All right.” Lazily, Shana got up from the long chair.

  When they left the pool area, Shana and Chet were walking a meter apart. He was chattering about some dance step. Twirling on the flagstone, he showed her how it was done.

  At the gate, Chet looked back at Jack.

  Frowning, Jack continued vacuuming the pool. The way Chet had looked at him made Jack uneasy.

  6

  Instead of answering the phone in the front seat of the van with a simple “hello” when it buzzed, Fletch sang to it, “‘Hello, America, how’s by you …?’”

  “Mister Fletcher? This is Andy Cyst.”

  “How’re you doin’, Andy?”

  “I’m fine, Mister Fletcher. How’re you doin’?”

  “Just gettin’ by,” Fletch sang, “Dancin’ side by side …”

  “You sound pretty relaxed, Mister Fletcher.”

  “Is modern man ever more relaxed than when whizzing along a highway at the speed of a hurricane?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mister Fletcher.”

  “Terrifying, isn’t it?”

  “I never heard you sing before, Mister Fletcher.”

  “Now you know what you’ve missed.”

  “I have the information you requested on Chester Radliegh. Aren’t you in the northwest somewhere?”

  “Headed for Wyoming, Andy. Shall I sing ‘Git Along Little Dogies’?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Chester Radliegh lives in Georgia.”

  “Ah, the state that originally banned lawyers. And slavery. First came the lawyers. Then slavery. Things haven’t changed much since.”

  “On an estate called Vindemia. Very large, I gather. It has its own golf course, employees’ village—it’s near a town called Ronckton. Are you on vacation or something, Mister Fletcher?”

  “From what?”

  “I mean, you’re nowhere near Georgia.”

  “Just transporting a friend who once transported me.” Fletch heard Crystal laugh on her bed in the back of the handicap van. Through the dashboard speaker she could hear the whole conversation.

  “Okay.” Andy took a big breath and began reading. “Chester Radliegh, aged fifty eight, second son of Randolph and Melissa Radliegh, born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, to a well-off, established American family.”