Fletch Won

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Fletch took the turning for Tomasito. “Does she escape from the home often?”

  “Almost every day. At first the institution staff would be alarmed and call me, I suppose call my father. Scold her when she came back. But she’s harmless. She has no money, no credit cards. I have no idea how she gets around. Have never been able to figure that out. On nice days, I guess she goes and sits in the park, walks around the stores pretending she’s buying things, goes back to her old home and sits by the pool.”

  “Yeah. That’s where she was yesterday.” “She must appear to Jasmine as sort of the Ghost of the First Wife.” Nancy laughed. “So what. She turns up at my house two or three times a week. Sits and watches the television. Sits and watches the children. Tells them absolutely crazy things, like about the time she made friends with a great black bear in the woods, and the bear taught her how to fish. The children adore her.”

  “And she loves the children?”

  “How do I know? She keeps showing up.”

  “And you don’t think this woman should have been confined?”

  Nancy’s jaw tightened. “I don’t think she should have been left in isolation for years. I don’t think she should have been socially ostracized. No. I don’t think she should have been thrown out of her home. When strange symptoms began appearing, I don’t think my father needed to continue what he was doing. They could have retired, started another life somewhere. Or, if it was too late, some sort of a paid housekeeper-nurse could have been hired to stay with her, give her some company.”

  Nancy was silent for a long moment, the muscles in her jaw working. Then she said, “My father got rid of her through some legal trickery, divorce and confinement, because he wanted to marry pea-brained Jasmine.”

  “You don’t like Jasmine, of course.”

  “Like her?” Nancy looked across the car at Fletch. “I feel sorry for her. The same thing is happening to her as happened to my mother.”

  They went down a ramp from the freeway onto a two-lane road through fairly decent farmland.

  Nancy said, “I heard on the television this morning that someone confessed to my father’s murder.”

  “Yes,” Fletch said. “Stuart Childers. A client of your father’s. Accused of murdering his brother. Acquitted two or three months ago.”

  “So?” Nancy said.

  “He was released by the police immediately. I don’t know why.”

  Nancy said, “What are you getting at, friend?”

  “I don’t think it was a gangland slaying,” Fletch said, “despite the suggestion in this morning’s News-Tribune”

  “You think I did it?”

  “Someone in the family heard your father intended, or said he intended, to dispose of all his worldly goods, for reasons sacred or profane. Incidentally, my source reported that your father said, last week, that no one gave ‘a tin whistle’ for him. His words.”

  Nancy snorted. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Someone decided to do him in before he decided to do the family out. You, your husband. Your mother, for your sake or the sake of your kids. Your father’s second wife.”

  “You don’t understand Tom.”

  “He may be the important poet, the intellectual you say he is. But where was he Monday morning?”

  “At the university.”

  “What time is his first class on Mondays?”

  Nancy hesitated. “Two in the afternoon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Poverty is important to Tom. The fact that he, his work is being scorned. It makes the sacrifice more real, the poetry,” she stuttered, “more significant, monumental.”

  “You weren’t brought up in squalor,” Fletch said. “Your daddy may not have bounced you on his knee, but you had a stocked refrigerator in a clean home, with a swimming pool in the garden. Plus a lot of washing machines.”

  “Frankly, friend, I don’t want a penny from my father. People are still getting mugged, raped, and murdered because my father took their money.”

  “Ah, the beauty of violence!” Fletch said. “You’ve got five kids crawling around the floor. You said you are headed for Starvation Lane. Not many mothers let their kids starve, if there’s an alternative.”

  After a moment, Nancy said, “Monday morning I was home alone with the kids.”

  “Great witnesses. Got any other?”

  “No.”

  Fletch slowed as they passed a sign saying THE MONASTERY OF ST. THOMAS. He turned right through the gates.

  “There’s a guard at the gates to the News-Tribune parking lot,” he said. “Checking cars. I see someone, knowing your father was going to the newspaper that morning to arrange for the announcement of his giving away his fortune, walking into the parking lot, shooting him as he was getting out of his car at the back of the lot, and walking out again, unquestioned.”

  The car was rising on the road through a well-kept forest.

  “Who, Mother?”

  “She does have her own way of coming and going,”

  Fletch said. “And her own point of view. And what does she have to lose? She’s already been committed as insane.”

  “You haven’t mentioned Jasmine.”

  “I haven’t met Jasmine. By the way, your father has a cook now.”

  “Good. Jasmine has someone to talk to. I doubt she can fry eggs.”

  “A young wife, possibly about to be left high and dry through her husband’s spiritual conversion or his legal trickery…”

  Atop a gardened knoll ahead of them was a large, stuccoed, Spanish-style building.

  “Tom’s self-image would be destroyed by our having money,” Nancy said. “My mother couldn’t focus on anything long enough to do murder. I don’t care enough about my father or his money to have murdered him.”

  “And then there’s Robert.” Fletch put the car in the gravel car park and turned off the engine.

  “Now you’re really crazy.”

  “I’ll wait here for you.”

  Her hand on the car door knob, Nancy didn’t move. Again she stared through the windshield at unmoving scenery.

  “I’m sorry for you,” Fletch said. “This will be tough on both of you. I’ll be here.”

  “No,” Nancy said. “Come with me, will you, friend? This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Have you been in a monastery before?” Robert Habeck took Fletch by the elbow and steered him toward a backless bench across the small courtyard.

  “No,” Fletch answered. “The silence is ear-splitting.”

  “I heard the noise of your car.” Robert smiled. It seemed an admonition.

  Fletch and Nancy Habeck Farliegh had been shown silently into a small, cool waiting room immediately inside the main door. They sat on a carved wooden bench.

  In a few minutes, the abbot entered. He did not greet them, or sit down. Nancy explained she had come to the monastery to tell her brother their father was dead. The abbot nodded and left without uttering a single word.

  Waiting, Nancy explained to Fletch that this room and the small, adjacent, high-walled courtyard were the only places females were allowed in the monastery. She had last visited Robert after her first baby was born, almost seven years ago. Since then she had written him once a year, at Christmas. She had never had an answer from him.

  They waited a little more than forty-five minutes.

  When Robert entered the room, he smiled and held out his hands to his sister. He did not embrace her or kiss her. He did not say anything.

  Nancy introduced Fletch as “a friend.”

  Looking down at Fletch’s shorts, Robert asked, “Are you a Quaker?”

  “What? No.”

  Robert’s ankle-length white robe was belted by a length of black rope. He wore sandals. He was scrawny and balding. His beard looked like it had been struck by a plague of locusts.

  His eyes went from the dull, inward-directed to a more lively substitute for verbal communication.

  Following them across th
e courtyard, Nancy said, “I have five children now, Robert. Tom still teaches at the university, but he’s becoming quite well known as a poet. Mother is still at the Agnes Whitaker Home. Physically, she’s quite well. We see her often.”

  Robert sat on the bench, and looked up at them with happy eyes.

  Nancy sat beside him.

  Fletch sat cross-legged on the ground-stone path in front of them.

  “Robert, I have something difficult to tell you.” Contrary to everything she had said, Nancy then began to weep. “Father is dead.” She sobbed. “He was murdered, shot to death, yesterday, in a parking lot.”

  Robert said nothing. His eyes became inward-directed. He did not look at, reach out a hand to, touch his sister in any way. He offered her neither sympathy nor empathy.

  Desperate to collect herself, Nancy wiped her eyes with the hem of her heavy skirt.

  Finally Robert sighed. “So.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening about the funeral,” Nancy said. “Jasmine… the partners… Robert, will you come to the funeral?”

  “No.” He put his hand on the bench and looked around the small courtyard as if he wanted to get up and go away. “Here we are used to death… the flowers… the farm animals…. It comes to us here. We need not go out to it.”

  Fletch asked, “Do you ever get to leave here?”

  “Who would want to?”

  “Do you ever leave here?”

  “Sometimes I go in the truck, to the markets. In the station wagon, to the dentist.”

  “Do you ever go alone?”

  “I am never alone. I carry the Savior with me in my heart.”

  Nancy put her hand on Robert’s hand. “No matter what we thought of him, Robert, it’s a shock, it’s hard to take, that he was murdered. That someone actually took a gun, and ended his life with it. Stood before him. Shot him.”

  “Ah, The Great Presumption,” Robert said, clearly speaking in capitals. “Why do people keep making The Great Presumption, that we each have the right, moral and legal, to die a natural death? When so many, many of us die by accident, violence, wars, pestilence, famine….”

  Nancy glanced at Robert, then looked at Fletch. She moved her hand.

  “Well…” Fletch said, “your father died of violence.”

  “Murder makes it seem that someone has corrected God.” Robert smiled. “We must believe someone has. But, no. One cannot really correct that which is perfect.”

  Nancy straightened the hem of her skirt over her knees with shaking hands.

  “Robert,” Fletch said, “the story is that yesterday morning, your father went to the News-Tribune to consult with the publisher, John Winters, about the announcement of your father’s intention to donate five million dollars to the art museum. He had had a meeting at the art museum, to discuss this gift. The museum was not sure that it wanted such a gift, as long as your father stipulated that the money be spent exclusively on contemporary religious art.”

  Robert looked interested.

  “Furthermore,” Fletch continued, “your father told the curator at the museum that he intended to give the rest of his wealth to a monastery, which he intended to enter, to join.”

  At first, Robert raised his eyebrows and stared at Fletch.

  Then his jaws tightened. He squeezed his eyes shut. Elbows on his knees, hands clutching each other, Robert lowered his head.

  Nancy and Fletch glanced at each other.

  Finally, Fletch asked, “Are you angry?”

  “That man,” Robert said through clenched teeth.

  Fletch asked, “Was he possibly trying to come to you? His son?”

  Looking at Fletch, Nancy’s eyes popped.

  Robert said, “That man.”

  Fletch asked, “Do you believe any of what I’ve just told you?”

  For a long moment, Robert sat on the bench silently, apparently holding himself together with effort. He breathed deeply through his nose. “Impossible,” he said. His breathing became easier. “Nancy wrote me that my father, after disposing of my mother, institutionalizing her, took a second wife….”

  “Jasmine,” Nancy said.

  Robert’s eyes opened. Much of the strain left his face. “I don’t suppose she’s dead?”

  “No,” Nancy answered.

  “One may not divorce a wife,” Robert said, as if elucidating a fine point of law, “for the sake of entering a monastery.”

  Fletch said, “Oh.”

  “So all this is not true,” Robert said. “Like the rest of my father’s life. It is some complicated lie. Even if he were free, months, if not years, of prayerful instruction and reflection would be required.”

  Fletch looked down at the ground stone between his folded legs. “He had perhaps more than another million dollars to donate to a monastery.”

  Looking at Fletch, Robert said nothing.

  Fletch turned the question. “Robert, you must believe in redemption. Is it totally inconceivable to you that your father could make such a change in his life at the age of sixty, sixty-one?”

  “My father,” Robert said with difficulty. “My father spent his life shortcutting the law. In fact, short-circuiting it. There is no shortcut to eternal paradise. One cannot short-circuit the laws of God.”

  Nancy uttered a short laugh. “Robert. You sound so unforgiving.”

  Finally, Robert turned to his sister. “And are you forgiving?”

  “No,” she said. “Not of what he did to Mother.”

  “One never knows,” Robert said. “Perhaps the man died within the grace of God. I sincerely doubt it.”

  Fletch had the impression Robert did not want his father’s company either in the monastery, or in paradise.

  “What he did to Mother,” Robert said. “What he did to all of us.”

  “What did he do to you?” Fletch asked.

  Robert’s eyes became as inflamed as the subject’s of an El Greco portrait. “He taught us the one thing that must not be taught children, that must not be taught society: that one can commit evil with impunity, if one lies about it successfully.” Robert’s voice rose. “And do you expect that a person with such a philosophy, such a practice, can ever come to God?” His voice lowered, but his hands, even his shoulders shook. “I am spending all my adult life trying to separate myself from such a wicked belief. It is the one belief which can destroy society. It is the one belief which can corrupt irretrievably a person’s soul.” Trying to smile at Fletch, Robert asked, “And do you believe a person with such a mind-set could confess, with honesty, and come to God?”

  Fletch felt he ought not answer.

  Robert modulated his voice. “What he did to us that is unforgivable is that he corrupted us beyond belief.”

  Fletch stood up from the ground-stone path.

  Robert spoke, looking at his callused fingers. “It doesn’t matter who killed him. We are all murdered by life, by our own way of life, by how we live. Of course he died a violent death. His life condoned, encouraged violence. We are all victims of ourselves.” Nancy was standing up, too. “All that matters is that he died in God’s grace. Although I can’t believe he did, and is condemned to suffer in hell through all eternity, we will not know. Such was his life; such was his death: all between his Divine Creator and himself.”

  “Despite the circumstances,” Nancy said, straightening her skirt, “it’s good seeing you, Robert.”

  Robert did not rise from the bench. Robert did not answer.

  “Right,” Fletch said. “Try to get some peace.”

  Between the waiting room and the monastery’s main door, Fletch said to Nancy, “Wait one moment for me, will you?”

  He crossed the foyer and entered a small outer office lined with filing cabinets.

  He then went through an open door into a larger, well-furnished office, where the abbot sat behind a large, wooden desk. The abbot looked up from some eye-saving pale green papers on his desk.

  “Pardon the intrusion,” Fletch said.
>
  The abbot didn’t say he did, or didn’t, pardon the intrusion.

  “Robert’s father, Donald Habeck, not only died yesterday, he was murdered.” There was no response apparent from the abbot. “It is important for us to know if Donald Habeck came and talked with you, recently.”

  The abbot pondered as if this might be a trick question from the body of scholastic philosophy.

  “Yes,” the abbot finally said slowly. “Donald Habeck came to see me recently. Yes, we talked.”

  “More than once?”

  The abbot looked at the open door behind Fletch.

  “When he came to see you,” Fletch asked, “did he also see Robert?”

  “To my best knowledge, Robert did not know he was here,” the abbot answered.

  “Was Robert here yesterday morning?”

  “Monday morning? I expect so.”

  “May I ask the nature of your conversation with Donald Habeck?”

  “No.”

  “You can be subpoenaed,” Fletch said.

  “You have my address,” the abbot answered. “I am always here.”

  Nancy awaited Fletch in the car.

  Before Fletch had the key in the ignition, she said, “I need a beer break. The odor of sanctity makes me want to puke.”

  “Cecilia’s Boutique. Cecilia speaking. Have you considered jodhpurs?”

  “Good afternoon,” Fletch said. “I ordered a pair of jodhpurs for my wife, this morning. A color you don’t have in stock?”

  “There’s a color we don’t have in stock?”

  “Special order. Green, white, and black stripes, vertical at the thighs and calves, horizontal at the knees.”

  “We certainly don’t have that in stock.”

  “It’s all right. I understand. You’re a small shop. Can’t have all the jodhpurs in the world in stock.”