Fletch and the Man Who Read online

  And the principal asked how long one can be President of the United States.

  “Forever!”

  “Six years!”

  “No, four years!”

  “Until you get shot!”

  Governor Caxton Wheeler made a little speech, goal-orienting the children. He said the country needs good people who believe they can make a difference for the good of the world.

  The Man Who was slow to leave the school. He stood among the children. He played magic with coins he took from his pocket. First he made a coin disappear somewhere between his hands. Then he found the coin in a child’s shirt pocket, her ear, his mouth. He leaned down and found a vanished coin in the sneaker of a brightly beaming black boy. Instantly the boy searched his other sneaker. To each child he fooled he gave the coin that mysteriously had disappeared from his hands and just as mysteriously reappeared in some unlikely place, such as up the child’s own sleeve.

  The children quickly forgot about the cameras and the lights and the “city dudes.” They stood on chairs and piled on top of each other, tumbled over each other, begged to be the next fooled by the presidential candidate. The governor laughed as hard as the children. His eyes were as bright as theirs.

  They pressed against him. “Don’t go, sir. You’re better than gym!” He hugged them to him.

  The members of the press straggled every which way.

  “Hey, Fletch,” Roy Filby stage-whispered. “Want to go to the boys’ room and pull on a joint?”

  Fenella Baker was debating the abortion issue in a loud voice with the dry-mouthed school principal.

  Andrew Esty was insisting to someone who could have been a math teacher that Deuteronomy be tried as a teaching method.

  Mary Rice told Fletch that Michael J. Hanrahan was asleep on the press bus.

  A photographer terrified little girls by bringing his camera close to their faces and setting off flash bulbs rapidly. “Look at that skin! Awesome! What kind of crèmes do you use, honey?”

  Outside the school’s main office, some of the reporters bent over the low wall phones, jabbering rapidly in low voices. Other reporters waited.

  What’s the story? Fletch wondered. Today presidential candidate Caxton Wheeler urged children to continue growing up?

  Outside it had stopped snowing. But the sky was still gray and heavy.

  “That was nice,” Fletch said to Walsh on the driveway in front of the school.

  “Yeah. Dad used to play those tricks on me. It was how he gave me my allowance every week.”

  “Does he still?”

  Walsh grinned. “I still think money should come out of my own nose.” As his father approached, he said, “Yeah, that made pictures….”

  Two of the television station wagons already were leaving the school’s parking lot. The rear end of one wagon slid sideways entering the road.

  In the driveway, the governor was waving good-bye to the children through the school windows. “I’ve got an idea for the Winslow speech, Walsh,” he said. “Let me work on it.”

  “The congressman is supposed to be here.” Walsh turned around to face the compaign bus. Then he said, “My God.”

  At the steps of the campaign bus, between the two women volunteers who were to be the reception committee for the congressman, stood a petite, grandmotherly woman.

  The governor turned around.

  On the steps of the bus, volunteer coordinator Lee Allen Parke raised his hands in futility.

  “The congressman,” observed the governor, “appears to be a congressperson. You gave me the name Congressman Jack Snive.”

  “That isn’t Jack Snive,” admitted Walsh. “Somebody goofed.”

  “What is her name?” the governor asked.

  “No idea. What district are we in?” Walsh’s eyes scanned the face of the school building. “Are we at the right school?”

  “Oh, yes,” the governor said. “They couldn’t have played ‘America’ that badly without practicing it.” He sighed. “Guess I’ll have to call her ‘Member.’ Strikes me as slightly indecent, but that’s politics.”

  Putting his hand out to the congressperson, the candidate trudged through the slush. “Hi ya,” he said happily. “I was looking for you. How are you feeling? Great job you’re doing for your district.”

  He helped her aboard the bus. Smiling at his son, he said to her, “I want to hear what your plans are for the next four years.”

  12

  “Oooooo,” said Betsy Ginsberg when Fletch stopped at her aisle seat on the bus. “Is it now I get your attention?”

  The bus went over a speed bump in the school driveway. Fletch grabbed on to the backs of the seats on either side of the aisle.

  “Just wanted to ask you if you want a typewritten copy of the candidate’s profound remarks at Conroy Regional School.”

  “Sure.” She smiled puckishly. “You got ’em?”

  “No.”

  “Pity. Deathless remarks gone with the wind.”

  “What kind of a story did some of you find to phone in? I saw you at the phone.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No idea.”

  “Some press rep. you are. You ever been on a campaign before?”

  “No.”

  “You’re cute, Fletcher. But I don’t think you should be on this one, either.”

  “What happened?”

  “Tell me, what happened between you and Freddie in Virginia.”

  “Nothing. That’s the trouble.”

  “Something must have happened. She’s mentioned it.”

  “Just a case of mistaken identity. At the American Journalism Alliance Convention a year or two ago.”

  “That the one where Walter March got killed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what happened, besides the old bastard’s getting killed?”

  “I told you. Mistaken identity. Freddie thought she was Fredericka Arbuthnot, and I didn’t.”

  “But She is Fredericka Arbuthnot.”

  “So I was mistaken.”

  Andrew Esty rose from his seat at the back of the bus and came forward in a procession of one. He stood next to Fletch. “Mr. Fletcher, that stop at the school raises several issues I’d like to talk to the candidate about.”

  “Nice stuff you’re writing these days, Mr. Esty,” Fletch said. “Circulation of the Daily Gospel testifies to it.”

  “Thank you,” Andrew Esty said sincerely. “About praying in the public schools.”

  “I used to pray in school,” Roy Filby said from the seat behind Betsy. “Before every exam. Swear like hell afterward.”

  “What about it?” Fletch asked Esty.

  “Is the candidate against children being allowed to pray in school?”

  “The candidate isn’t against anyone praying anytime anywhere.”

  “You know what I mean: the teacher setting the example.”

  “My teacher was a Satanist,” Filby said. “She corrected our papers with blood.”

  Esty glared at him. “The issue of people praying together on federal property—”

  “The governor has a position paper on this issue.” Standing on the bus swaying down the highway, Fletch’s legs and back muscles were beginning to remind him he hadn’t really slept in thirty hours.

  “I’d like to point out to you, and to the candidate,” Esty said unctuously, “that prayer is led in federal prisons.”

  “Jesus!” exclaimed Filby. “Esty’s got a whole new issue. Go for it, Esty! Go, man, go!”

  “Officially sanctioned prayer,” Esty said precisely.

  “Right,” said Betsy. “What have prisoners got to pray for?”

  “Obviously,” Esty continued, “that’s a similar so-called violation of the principle of the separation of Church and State.”

  “Right on,” said Betsy. “The last person seen by the condemned man was the Sanitation Department’s Joe Schmo. Looking at the sanitation worker’s green uniform, the condemned man’s final w
ords were, ‘Please wrap my mortal remains in the Daily Gospel. Sunday edition, if possible.’”

  “It’s a matter of public prayer on government property,” Esty said. “Either you can or you can’t.”

  “Would you like an exclusive interview with the candidate?” Fletch asked.

  “Yes. There are one or two things of this nature I’d like to ask him about.”

  “Me too,” chirped Filby. “I want to ask him if he’ll permit Shubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ to be sung at the White House!”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Fletch said to Esty.

  Down a few seats, seated at a window, Solov stared bug-eyed, blankly. Behind him, Fenella Baker was beckoning at Fletch.

  To Betsy, Fletch said, “I have a question for you, okay?”

  “The answer is yes,” she said. “Anytime. You don’t even have to bring a bottle of wine.”

  Andrew Esty, fingering his Daily Gospel button, was glaring at Betsy Ginsberg. He had given up glaring at Roy Filby.

  “Later,” Fletch said to Betsy.

  Roy Filby said to Fletch, “Marvelous, the issues the press dreams up for itself, isn’t it?”

  Fletch stepped around Esty and went down the aisle to Fenella Baker.

  “Two or three questions,” she said busily. “First is, did you save the life of Walsh Wheeler while you were in the service together?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What is your relationship with Walsh Wheeler?”

  “We were in the service together. He was my lieutenant.”

  “People do make up stories,” she said.

  “Don’t they just?”

  “Have you been close friends ever since?”

  “No, ma’am. Last time I saw Walsh was at a football game more than a year ago.”

  “Were you surprised when you were asked to take on the job of press rep. on this campaign?”

  “It’s only temporary,” Fletch decided. “Until they can find someone with more experience. I’m not worth writing about.”

  “I agree,” she said. “I do hope they find someone who can spell.”

  Fletch too wondered why Fenella Baker’s face didn’t itch. Surely some of that powder had been on it since the days of Jimmy Carter.

  “Now about this Shields woman—”

  “Who?”

  “The girl who was murdered last night.”

  “Was her name Shields?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “I saw your report on it in the newspaper this morning. Great piece.”

  “I didn’t write on it this morning, mister.”

  “Oh yeah. You did a think-piece on the hockey riot.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I must be. I’m here.”

  “I wouldn’t have written on the Shields murder this morning. It isn’t a story yet.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “It’s not a national story until some connection is made between the girl and the campaign.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “What is the connection between the girl and the campaign?”

  On a seat at the rear of the bus, Michael J. Hanrahan appeared to be asleep. His head lolled back on a cushion. His jaw was slack. While Fletch watched, Hanrahan lifted a whiskey pint to his lips and poured down two swallows. He did so without opening his eyes or changing the position of his head.

  “What girl?” Fletch asked.

  “Next you’re going to ask me, ‘What campaign?’ Are you stupid as well as crazy?”

  “I’m trying to follow you, Miss Baker, Apples and bananas—”

  “Add up to fruit.”

  “—make mush.”

  “Someone said she had been traveling with someone on the campaign. Now, who was it?”

  “News to me.”

  Lansing Sayer, standing in the aisle, touched Fletch on the waist.

  Fletch stood straight and turned around. “Are you rescuing me?”

  Sayer too turned his back to Fenella Baker. “Fenella,” he said, working his mustache histrionically, “is the original eighty-pound bully.”

  “Great stuff you’re writing, Mr. Sayer,” Fletch said.

  “Want to warn you, ol’ boy. Your man is going to be attacked on the so-called welfare shambles in his state. Incidents of people committing welfare fraud.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as he gets back up over thirty percent in the national polls.”

  “Thank you.”

  In his seat forward in the bus, Bill Dieckmann was doubled over in pain. Eyes squeezed closed, he held his head in both hands. His white skin glistened with sweat.

  Going forward in the aisle, Fletch leaned over and whispered to Freddie, “Do you know what’s wrong with Bill Dieckmann?”

  Freddie craned her neck to see him. “He does that.”

  “Does what?”

  “Suffers terrible pain. He even whimpers. I think he blacks out sometimes. I mean, I think there are times he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  Fletch watched him from where he stood. “Isn’t there anything we can do for him?”

  “Guess not.”

  Fletch looked forward and aft. “This bus is full of loonies.”

  “Pressures of the campaign,” Freddie said. She continued reading Jay Daly’s Walls.

  Fletch put his hand on Dieckmann’s shoulder. “You going to be all right, Bill?” Dieckmann looked up at him with wet eyes. “Want me to stop the bus? Get Dr. Thom?”

  With both hands, Dieckmann squeezed his head tighter. “No.”

  “I will, if you want. What’s the matter?”

  Eyes squeezed closed again, rocking forward and back in his seat, Dieckmann said in a hoarse whisper, “Leave me alone.”

  “You sure?”

  Dieckmann didn’t answer. He suffered.

  “Okay,” Fletch said. “If you say so.”

  He went back up the aisle to where Betsy was sitting. She was reading Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman.

  He bent over her and spoke quietly. “Someone said he saw you having breakfast a few days ago with the girl who was murdered last night.”

  “That’s right. I did. The breakfast room was filled. People were waiting. The hostess seated us together. Two single women.”

  “Did you talk?”

  “Sure. Civilities over toast.”

  “You’re a reporter, Betsy. I suspect you found out one or two things about her.”

  “Not really.”

  “Like not-really what?”

  “She was an ordinary, nice person. She’d been working as a sales clerk in a store in Chicago. Mason’s, I think, mostly in the bookshop.”

  “Is that all?”

  “She liked to read; said she read three or four books a week. Asked me if I’d read certain people, such as Antonia White, William Maxwell, Jean Rhys, Juan Alonzo. She said Saul Bellow once came up to her counter and asked her for something, some book they didn’t have, and he was very courteous about it. She recommended Antonia White’s Frost in May in particular because, she said, she had gone through parochial schools in Chicago. A Catholic high school; I think she said Saint Mary Margaret’s.”

  “That was the extent of your conversation?”

  “No.” Betsy was dredging her memory. “Her father had been killed in an accident when she was nine years old. He worked for the Chicago Waterworks or something. When he was in a ditch, a pipe landed on his head. So she could never think of going to college, you see.”

  “Oh. Anything else?”

  “Her mother never recovered from her father’s death, got stranger and stranger, and finally five years ago committed herself to a state home.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Well, she lived alone in a studio apartment. Married sister, living in Toronto, four children. Her husband owns a gun shop. Sally—that is, Alice Elizabeth Shields; she called herself Sally—had been engaged a couple of times, once to a Chicago policeman who got another girl pregnan
t and decided he’d better go marry her. Sally never married.”

  “Is that all you’ve got?”

  “She had something like thirty-seven hundred dollars in a savings account. So she quit her job, sublet her apartment, packed up her Volkswagen, and came a-wandering.”

  “You didn’t get much out of her.”

  “Just civilities over toast.”

  “What was her Social Security number?”

  “You think I’m nosy?”

  “You are a reporter, after all.”

  “I wasn’t interviewing her.”

  “Why was she following the campaign?”

  “Didn’t know she was, at that point.”

  “While you were having breakfast with her, did she mention anyone who is traveling with the campaign by name?”

  Betsy thought. “No. But she did seem to know I’m a reporter.”

  “I wonder if it was something you said.”

  The bus, at high speed, was climbing a left-curved hill. Fletch had to push off the seat backs not to land on Betsy.

  “I mean, she didn’t ask me anything about myself.”

  “You think she had a chance?”

  “We were just talking.”

  “While you were at breakfast with her, did anyone from the campaign say hello to her, nod to her as he went by, wave from across the breakfast room?”

  “Not that I remember. She seemed a lonely person.”

  “Eager to talk.”

  “As long as she didn’t have to be assertive about it.”

  “You were in the motel bar last night.”

  “Yes. Drinking rum toffs.”

  “What’s a rum toff?”

  “Yummy.”

  “At any time did you see this girl—Sally, you called her—in the bar with anybody, or leave the bar with anybody, anything?”

  “I’m not aware of ever having seen her again since I had breakfast with her in Springfield.”

  “But you saw her Volkswagen trailing the caravan.”

  “No. I don’t know a Volkswagen from an aircraft carrier.”

  “They’re different.”

  “I expect so.”

  “Sea gulls seldom follow a Volkswagen.”

  “Oh. Well, at least I know the connection between the Shields woman and the campaign.”

  “What?”

  “There isn’t one. At least, as far as you can find out. So I won’t worry about it. As a story. Yet. Will you tell me if you discover there is a connection?”