Fletch Won f-8 Read online

  “Expiate guilt. Maybe Habeck was trying to rid himself of his own guilt.”

  “He sounds like a man who spent his life rationalizing away guilt. Professionally. His own and others’.”

  “Yeah, but he was getting older.”

  “With a young wife. I don’t get it. His home just doesn’t look like the home of someone who can give away five million dollars. I mean, if you’ve got one hundred million dollars, giving away five can be a casual experience. It needn’t interrupt the flow of one’s life, the rhythm of one’s coming and going. But giving away five million when maybe you have six million, a young wife, probably grandchildren…”

  “Which of you gentlemen would like the bill?” the waiter asked.

  “He would,” Alston said solemnly.

  “No,” Fletch said. “Give it to him.”

  “You invited me to lunch,” Alston said.

  “You asked me to.”

  “Shall I pay it?” asked the waiter. “I had the pleasure of serving you.”

  “He’s got a point,” Fletch said.

  “It would be the ultimate service,” agreed Alston. “I mean, it would indicate this waiter did everything possible for us.”

  “It is the one possibility you haven’t considered,” concurred the waiter.

  “But what about the tip?” Fletch asked. “That presents a moral dilemma. Also practical confusion.”

  The waiter looked around the outdoor café. “Oh, to work in a grown-up restaurant,” he sighed. “One with walls.”

  “I’ll pay the bill,” Alston said to Fletch, “if you answer me a question.”

  “Anything.” Fletch watched Alston pay the bill.

  “Gee,” Alston said after the waiter went away. “Over lunch we talked about philanthropy, murder, and the law, and we didn’t get any respect even from the waiter.”

  “No one respects the young,” mourned Fletch. “Not managing editors, crime writers, society editors, liquor-store-counter help—”

  “Fiancées.”

  “Fiancées.”

  “Waiters.”

  “Now that you’ve paid the bill,” Fletch said, “I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Then why didn’t you pay the bill?”

  “Will you be my best man?”

  “You mean, better man? How many of us do you expect there to be?”

  “Saturday morning. Whenever you wake up.”

  “Did you get that suit for your wedding?”

  “Don’t you like this suit?”

  “Gray doesn’t suit you.”

  “Barbara said something about our getting married naked.”

  “Stark naked?”

  Fletch nodded. “She said it would be honest of us. Fitting. She says a marriage is the coming together of two bodies, male and female….”

  “You sure you want to marry Barbara?”

  “No.”

  “Wearing anything, or wearing nothing, would be better than wearing that dumb-looking suit.”

  “So, will you be my best man?”

  “My question is: Where did you get that suit? I want to never go there.”

  “I thought you’d recognize it.”

  “Why should I recognize it?”

  “I thought you might have seen it before.”

  “Fire hydrants don’t usually wear suits.”

  “Walking along the corridors at Habeck, Harrison and Haller.”

  Alston’s eyes widened. “Habeck? That’s Habeck’s suit?”

  “Now you’ll have respect for this suit. Habeck wasn’t screwing jurisprudence to get his suits from Goodwill.”

  “You stole a dead man’s suit?”

  “I guess you could say that. If you insist.”

  “I don’t know, Fletch. I worry about you.”

  “So, will you be my best man?”

  “Fletch, ol’ buddy: you shouldn’t go anywhere without a lawyer. Especially to your own wedding.”

  “Frank?” Fletch said.

  At the urinal, the managing editor jumped. He did not turn around. “Who wants me?”

  “That’s a different question.”

  “Different from what?”

  In the men’s room, empty except for them, Fletch stepped to his own urinal three away from Frank Jaffe’s. “Matters in hand,” Fletch said.

  “Oh, it’s you. Nice suit.” Frank flushed. “Didn’t know the tide came in already this morning.”

  “Have I invited you to my wedding yet?” Fletch asked.

  “God, no.”

  “It’s Saturday, you know.”

  “Which day is Saturday?” Frank was washing his hands.

  “End of the week. Day between Friday and Sunday.”

  “Yeah: that’s the day I try to get away from employees.”

  Fletch followed Frank to the washbasin. “I’m pleading a case, Mr. Jaffe.”

  “A case of what? Have you confessed yet to what’s-her-name you have a case of something-or-other?”

  “That’s my point, Frank. Don’t want a case. Don’t want a dose. Don’t want to go near that place.”

  “What place is that?”

  “Frank.” Fletch shook his wet hands over the basin and then held them in front of him. “I’m getting married Saturday. And you’ve got me investigating a whorehouse!”

  “Every nook and cranny.” Frank dried his hands on a paper towel.

  “Is this some kind of an office joke?”

  “Not yet,” Frank said. “But I’m sure it will be.”

  “Dump on the kid, is that it?”

  “Fletch, you need the experience. Don’t you?”

  “Not that kind, I don’t. Not to get married, I don’t.”

  “Come on. You asked for a job, a real job, so I gave you one.”

  “A whorehouse the week before I’m married?”

  “Gives you a chance to show your stuff. Let us see what you can do.”

  “Very funny.”

  “We want you to give it your all, kid. Get to the bottom of things. Really get into the crux of the matter. What we want is a penetrating report. We want everybody to get your point.”

  “You forgot something.”

  “What did I forget now?” Frank looked at his fly.

  “My expense account.”

  “We expect there to be expenses.”

  “Yeah, but I’m going to write my expense account with accuracy painful to you.”

  “That will be a novelty.”

  “In detail. I’m going to write down exactly what money I’m spending on the Ben Franklyn Friend Service, and for what services.”

  “Expense accounts are never questioned, if the story’s worth the expense.”

  “Frank, I’m gonna file a pornographic expense account.”

  Frank opened the door to the corridor. “Maybe we’ll print that, too.”

  “What will the publisher say about that?”

  Leaving the men’s room, Frank said, “Give it your best shot, kid.”

  “As I live and breathe,” said the Beauty in the Broad-brimmed Hat. “You must be Fletcher.”

  Standing in the door of her small office, Fletch frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “Your suit, darling. Your suit.” Sitting corsetless at her console, Amelia Shurcliffe, society columnist for the News-Tribune, perpetually wore the facial expression of someone who had just been invited to a party. Perpetually she had just been invited to a party. Everyone wanted dear Amelia at his or her party. For some, giving parties makes life worthwhile. For everybody, a sentence or two in Amelia’s column made giving parties worthwhile. What Amelia did not know about people on the party circuit was not worth knowing. “I’ve heard so much about you, and your exciting style of dress.”

  Fletch looked down at Donald Habeck’s suit. “Exciting?”

  “You don’t mean to tell me you don’t know what you’re doing! At fashion, you’re just an unconscious genius!”

  “I’m unconscious, all right.”
/>   “Look how you’re dressed, Fletcher darling.” Although Amelia was staring at Fletch, head to toe and back again, she nevertheless kept glancing at her telephone. “That gray businessman’s suit is miles too small for you. Surely you know that?”

  “One or two have mentioned it.”

  “Your trousers are up to your shins, your sleeves nearly up to your elbows, and you have yards of extra material around your waist.”

  “Pretty cool, uh?”

  “I’ll say. The point of fashion, my dear, if you’ll listen to old Amelia, not that you need to, clearly, is to wear clothes which make other people want to get them off you.”

  “Have I succeeded at that?”

  “Brilliantly. You look lost and uncomfortable in that suit.”

  “I am.”

  “Anyone, seeing you, would want to tear those clothes off you.”

  “Would they turn down the air-conditioning first?”

  “And you encourage that impulse, you see. The jacket and shirt are much too narrow across your chest and shoulders. Your shirt buttons are straining. Why, you’re just ready to burst out of those clothes.”

  “I’m a fashion plate, am I?”

  “So original. What do you call that style?”

  Fletch shrugged. “Borrowed.”

  “‘Borrowed,’ ” Amelia said with great satisfaction. She typed a few words on her console. “I’ll use that.”

  “Have you heard about jodhpurs?”

  “What about jodhpurs?”

  “They’re going to be all the rage in a month. Cecilia’s Boutique is fully stocked with them.”

  “Jodhpurs, darling, were all the rage months ago.”

  “Oops.”

  Amelia glanced at her telephone. “Now, darling, other than your presenting me with a vision of brilliant, new, young fashions, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “Habeck, Donald Edwin. Haven’t done my homework on him yet, but I was hoping you’d point me in the right direction.”

  Amelia’s eyelids lowered. “You mean that sleazy criminal lawyer who was shot in our parking lot this morning?”

  “The same.”

  “Not Society, darling. A creature like Donald Edwin Habeck could be shot just anywhere. And was.”

  “But supposedly he was giving five million dollars to the art museum.”

  Slowly, Amelia Shurcliffe said, “I should think Biff Wilson would have the exclusive on that story for this newspaper.”

  “Oh, right,” said Fletch. “I’m just tracing down the social aspects of it.”

  “The social aspects of murder? Are there any other?”

  “You know, the five million dollars.”

  “Did he actually give the five million dollars to the museum?”

  “I believe he was just about to announce it.”

  “Well,” Amelia sighed. “People do give money to charities.”

  “You say Habeck was not socially prominent?”

  “People like Habeck exist in a very peculiar way,” Amelia said. “One knows them, of course, but, at best at the other end of a telephone. You know, if one shoots one’s husband in the middle of the night, having once mistaken him as one’s lover and now wanting to have mistaken him as a burglar, one must have someone to call, mustn’t one?”

  “I guess.”

  “One must know people of that sort well enough to be able to call them, but have them to dinner as a regular thing? No. Their presence might give one’s husbands ideas.”

  “I guess you’re serious about all this.”

  “The Habecks of this world are not to be trusted. After all, when we hire someone like Habeck we’re hiring someone to lie for us. Isn’t that what we’re doing? That’s what people like Habeck do for a living. They’re professional liars. We don’t mind hiring them to lie for us. But do we want them to lie to us, at our own dinner tables? Of far more importance, do we want them lying to other people about what happened and what was said at our dinner tables?”

  “Generally, aren’t lawyers trained to follow rules of evidence?”

  Amelia Shurcliffe stared at Fletch a long moment. “Lawyers, my dear, are trained to follow rules of gullibility.”

  “Okay. How rich was Habeck? Was he rich enough to give away five million dollars?”

  “I have no idea. Probably. He’s always in the news over some sensational case, or other. Although how criminal lawyers get criminals to pay their law bills has always been a puzzle to me. There must be some trick to it.”

  “I think there is.”

  “His partner, Harrison, does all the divorces worth doing. These chaps aren’t in the law business to serve justice or just make a living, you know.”

  “What about Mrs. Habeck? I’m a bit puzzled—”

  “Have no idea. Don’t even know if there is a Mrs.

  Habeck. I’ll have to read Biff Wilson in the morning. As I said, the Habecks of this world do not shine socially.”

  “Amelia, I was in Habeck’s house this morning, very briefly, I admit, but I didn’t notice any paintings or other art works that caused me to pause.”

  “Do you know about paintings?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Of course you do. Foolish of me to ask. Look at the clever way you’ve dressed yourself.”

  “Why would a person, especially, as you say, not socially prominent, and who does not have an immediately obvious interest in art, be giving five million dollars to an art museum?”

  “I find the generous impulse generally inexplicable.”

  “What was he buying?”

  “Respectability? That’s as good an answer as any I can give, in this case. Here’s this man, Habeck, whom society has been using like a tissue, employed only when one has sneezed, or, to mix metaphors, like a high-priced prostitute, picked up, used, and dropped off, without ever an invitation to visit hearth and home. He’s getting older. Or, he was, when his aging was concluded this morning. Wouldn’t such a person, at the age of sixty, have the instinct to do something that says, ‘Eh! I’m as good as you are! I can give away five million bucks, too!’ ”

  “Would society then accept him?”

  “No. Especially if society knows there isn’t another five million bucks to be gotten from him. But it might make him feel better.”

  “That’s very interesting.”

  “I’m always very interesting. That’s my job, you see.” Amelia glanced at her phone again. Clearly, Amelia’s phone not ringing made her nervous.

  “So.” Fletch took a step backward toward the door.

  “Ann McGarrahan and Biff Wilson were married once.”

  “I forgot that,” Amelia answered. “Yes. Years ago.

  One of the greater mismatches in my experience. They were married for about three weeks perhaps as many as twenty years ago. Why do you ask?”

  “What happened?”

  “Who ever knows what happens in someone else’s marriage, let alone one’s own? My opinion would be, if I were rudely asked, that Ann is a strong, intelligent, good, and decent woman who found herself married to a violent, nasty scumbag.”

  “Phew! I’m glad I didn’t ask.”

  “But you did. You and I are in a rude business, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Did Ann ever marry again?”

  “To someone who died. She’s not now married. If you’re interested in Ann McGarrahan, who’s old enough to be your mother, dare I cherish hope for me?”

  “And Biff Wilson?”

  “I shudder to think. Somewhere in Biffs background there lurks a succubus he calls wife. Named Aurora, or some such dim thing. Now, unless you have more social notes regarding sleazy lawyers, or fashion notes regarding jodhpurs—”

  “I do, in fact.”

  “Out with it.”

  “I’m getting married Saturday.”

  “To whom?”

  “Barbara Ralton.”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “She sells jodhpurs. At Cecilia’s.” />
  “I should have figured that. Now, darling, the Stanwyks are giving their annual bash for Symphony next week, and I’m absolutely desperate to find out which colors Joan’s using for her table settings. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you?”

  “Me? I don’t even know what Stanwyks are.”

  “Hey, what are you doing at my desk?”

  “All right if I use your computer terminal?”

  “You’re probably screwing it up.” Clifton Wolf, religion editor, looked over Fletch’s shoulder at the screen.

  “ ‘Habeck,’ ” he read. “You doing research for Biff Wilson now?”

  “We all work for the same newspaper.”

  “Like hell we do. I work for my inch of space, you work for your inch. Biff Wilson works for his foot and a half. If you’re not on the story, buddy, you’d better get off it.”

  Fletch turned off the terminal. “Just curious.”

  “Curious will turn you into dog food. Also, get off my chair.”

  “I don’t have a terminal of my own.” Fletch stood up, picking up a sheaf of notes he had made.

  “We always wondered why you were hired. Now we know: to cover whorehouses. I don’t want anyone who spends his time in whorehouses sitting in my chair.”

  “Haven’t gone to the whorehouse yet. Haven’t got my mother’s permission.”

  “No tellin ‘what you might be givin’ out. Al!” Clifton Wolf yelled across the city room to the city editor. “Call the disinfectant guys! Fletcher’s been using my stuff!”

  “I bet you’d like this assignment,” Fletch said. “Only place they send you is church.”

  “Scat!”

  “Do you know of a poet named Tom Farliegh?” Fletch asked.

  Fletch suspected that, without much deliberation, people who wrote for the various sections of the newspaper dressed like the people about whom they wrote. People in the business section wore business suits; in the society section they always seemed dressed for a lawn party; in the sports section, white socks and checkered jackets seemed to be the style.

  Mentally they identified with their subjects, too. Business writers thought in terms of power, profit and loss; society writers cherished an incredible web of lines of the acceptable rudeness of old money versus the crudeness of new money, attractiveness versus beauty, style versus ostentation; sportswriters thought in terms of winners and losers, new talent versus has-beens, and the end-of-life standings.