Fletch Won

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “You were ready with a towel,” Fletch guessed.

  “I’m always ready with a towel. Men are always spilling one fluid or another.”

  Barbara took a gulp of her drink.

  “Did you tell Marta, or not?” Fletch asked.

  “I decided either I had to tell Marta who you are and screw you,” Cindy said, “or tell Barbara who I am, and screw Marta.”

  “A tough decision.” Fletch watched Barbara. “So you’ve told Barbara, your old friend, who you are, what you do for a living … et cetera?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fletch asked Barbara, “How do you feel about that?”

  Barbara didn’t answer immediately. “I guess I understand. I’m more surprised at myself, than anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I could have a friend and really know so little about her. It makes me doubt myself, my own sensitivity, my own perceptions.” For a moment Barbara looked into the glass she held in her lap. “This is difficult to explain. I mean, now I’m wondering who the hell you are, Fletch, the guy I’m going to marry in three days. What don’t I know about you? How good are my perceptions?”

  “Jitters,” Cindy said.

  “Today,” Fletch said, “I discovered things about a few people I would never have guessed. I added some real interesting people to my collection.”

  “I mean, here we go along in life assuming everybody is more or less as he or she appears to be, as he or she say they are. Forgive my bad grammar. Enough of that he-or-she shit. And, wham-o, in one minute over a drink or something you discover they’ve been living this whole life, having thoughts, doing things, being someone you never knew about, never even dreamed possible.”

  Cindy said, “I think with orthodontics and psychiatry, health care, clothing fashions, too, with the great American idealization of normalcy, which doesn’t exist, people think they want to love people similar to themselves.”

  “All that’s the mother of prejudice,” said Barbara. “Economics is the father.”

  “It’s the differences between people that we ought to love,” said Cindy.

  “If we were just exactly what people think we are,” Fletch said, “we wouldn’t have much of ourselves to ourselves, would we?”

  “Yeah,” Cindy giggled. “Hypocrisy is our last bastion of privacy.”

  “My.” Barbara waved her glass in front of her mouth. “Pour a little booze into this trio and we pick up a philosophical text fast enough, don’t we?”

  “It wasn’t much of a decision,” Cindy said. “I’m leaving Ben Franklyn Friday. I don’t mind letting the Ben Franklyn Friend Service know I have a sting in my tail.”

  Fletch said, “And there’s Marta’s fondness for Carla….”

  Cindy smiled at him. There was light coming through the window from the living room. “The human element is in everything we do. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” She plopped two ice cubes into her glass. “Anyway, that’s no way to run a business. People should not be allowed to win career advancement in bed.”

  Barbara giggled into her glass. “You’re talking about a whorehouse here, Cindy! I’m sorry, old pal, but that’s funny.”

  “My business has less to do with sex than you think,” Cindy said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “So what have you really decided?” Fletch asked.

  “I’ve decided to help you get your story,” Cindy said. “Let’s expose Ben Franklyn.”

  “Great!”

  “It will be my wedding present to you and Barbara. I was going to give you a collie when you come back from your honeymoon….”

  “A collie!” Barbara exclaimed. “If Fletch doesn’t keep his job, we won’t be able to feed ourselves!”

  “Tell me what you need,” Cindy said to Fletch.

  “I need to know who owns the Ben Franklyn Friend Service.”

  “Something called Wood Nymph, Incorporated.”

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “Nymphs would,” Barbara giggled.

  “Who owns Wood Nymphs?” Fletch asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Nymphomaniacs always would,” Barbara said. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “I need to know that. I need to know specifically and graphically what services you provide, and the specific fees for those services.”

  “I can tell you that right now.”

  “Please don’t,” Barbara said. “Not while I’m drinking.”

  “I’ll need some sort of a deposition from you regarding the performances you put on for voyeurs. And that the man frequently doesn’t know he’s being watched, that his ass is being sold.”

  “Oh, charming!” said Barbara.

  “Also, a description of the whole escort service, that you’re really operating as call girls, call people. The parties at which you have performed, how that works, how much it costs. The whole blackmail thing, the cameras—”

  “Cameras!” clucked Barbara. “Hypocrisy is the last bastion of privacy.”

  “Listen,” Fletch said to Barbara, “a week ago you suggested you and I get married naked in front of everybody.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Were you?”

  “I thought I could lose eight pounds.”

  “Can you get all that by tomorrow?” Fletch asked Cindy.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Pizza,” Barbara said. “I am feeling a distinct need for pizza.”

  Cindy looked fully at Fletch and asked, “What about a list of our clients?” She watched him closely as she waited for his answer.

  “Sure,” he said evenly. “Prostitution can’t exist without the Johns.”

  “Will you publish their names?” Cindy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fletch said. “I honestly don’t know. I will present their names for publication.”

  “Uh!” Cindy said. “It’s still a man’s world, Master!”

  “Will you please go get some pizza, Fletch?” Barbara asked. “Better make mine pepperoni. Right now I don’t think I could look an anchovy in the eye.”

  “We called ahead,” Fletch said to the counterman. “Three pizzas in the name of Ralton.”

  The sweating counterman did not smile at him. “It will be a few minutes.”

  The counterman then picked up a phone between two ovens. He dialed a number, and turned his back.

  There were six other people waiting for pizzas. Four men, two in shorts, one in work clothes, one in a business suit. A teenaged boy in a tuxedo. A young teenaged girl in shorts, a halter, and purple high-heeled shoes. She also wore lipstick and eye shadow.

  “Aren’t you afraid of spilling pizza on your dinner jacket?” the man in running shorts asked the teenaged boy.

  The boy answered him, apparently courteously, in rapid French.

  “Oh,” the man said.

  Fletch opened the door to the vertical refrigerator and took out a six-pack of 7-Up. He put it on the counter.

  “Schwartz?” the counterman called.

  The boy in the tuxedo paid for his pizza and left.

  The man in working clothes got his pizza next. Then one of the men in shorts. A woman in tennis whites entered and gave the name Ramirez. The young girl clicked out of the store on her high heels carrying her pizza like a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  “We must have called a half-hour ago,” Fletch said to the counterman. “Name of Ralton?”

  Again the counterman did not smile at him. “It will be a few minutes.”

  The man in the business suit picked up his pizza.

  Two policemen strolled in. Their car was parked just outside the front door. They didn’t give a name.

  They looked at the counterman.

  The counterman nodded at Fletch.

  The cops jumped at Fletch, spun him around, pushed him.

  Fletch found himself leaning against the counter, his hands spread, his feet spread. One cop had his hand on the back of Fletch’s neck, forcing his h
ead down. The other’s fingers felt through Fletch’s T-shirt, his shorts, checked the tops of his atheltic socks.

  “What did he do?” the man in running shorts asked.

  The eyes of the woman in tennis whites widened. She stepped back.

  “He was robbing the store,” a cop answered.

  “He was not!” the man said. “He’s been standing here fifteen minutes!”

  “He was about to rob the store.”

  “He gave a name! He was waiting for pizza!”

  They pulled Fletch’s arms behind his back.

  He felt the cool metal of the handcuffs around his wrists, heard the click as they locked.

  “He’s robbed lots of stores,” the cop said. “Liquor stores, convenience stores. Once he got his pizza, he’d rob this store.”

  “Oh,” the man said.

  The other cop said, “Even a robber’s got to eat, you know.”

  “He doesn’t look like a bad guy,” the man in running shorts said. “Fast. You’d never catch him, once he started runnin’.”

  “Well,” a cop said. “We caught him.”

  The man said to Fletch, “Your name Ralton?”

  “No.”

  “That does it for me,” the man said. “He gave the name Ralton. Phony name.”

  “His name’s Liddicoat,” said a cop. “Alexander Liddicoat.”

  “That’s probably phony, too,” said the man.

  “Ramirez?” the counterman called.

  The woman in tennis whites paid for her pizza.

  “Let’s go,” the cop said.

  Both hanging on to Fletch, they waited for the woman to go through the door with her pizza.

  “Can we take my pizza with me?” Fletch asked. “I’ll let you have some.”

  “Thanks anyway,” a cop answered. “We just had Chinese take-out.”

  Outside they put him in the back of the police car carefully and slammed the door.

  As they settled in the front seat, the cop in the passenger seat looked at his watch. “Eleven-forty. We take him all the way downtown, we’ll never get back in time to go off duty at twelve.”

  “What’s so special about him?”

  “Dispatch said take him straight downtown to headquarters.”

  “Yeah.” The driver started the car. “We run a taxi service.”

  “I could save you the trip,” Fletch said. He was trying to fit his handcuffed hands into the small of his back against the car seat. “My name’s not Liddi-whatever. I’ve got identification in my wallet.”

  “Sure. I bet you have. Might as well get goin’, Alf.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” Fletch said.

  The cop in the passenger seat said, “Twelve years on the force and I’ve never yet arrested the right guy.”

  The car started forward. “We didn’t read him his rights.”

  The other cop looked through the grille at Fletch.

  “You know your rights?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s good. He knows his rights, Alf.”

  “Cruel and unusual punishment already,” Fletch said. “Lettin’ a guy smell pizza for fifteen minutes, then not lettin’ him have any.”

  “Tell your lawyer.”

  The police car bumped over the curb from the pizza store’s parking lot onto the road.

  Fletch said, “Next stop, the guillotine.”

  “Fletcher?”

  On the cell bunk that reeked of disinfectant, Fletch sighed with relief. The guard opening the cell door had called him Fletcher. Confusion regarding who he was was over. Now he could go to his apartment and get some sleep.

  He stood up. He figured it must be about four in the morning.

  For about three hours he had lain on his bunk listening to two men, not synchronized, vomiting, one old man whimpering, another singing, for more than an hour, over and over again, the refrain I’ll be Mowed, Lucy, if you will…. In the cell next to him, two male streetwalkers argued endlessly and passionately about barbers. One had asked Fletch how to get a job with the Ben Franklyn Friend Service. Fletch answered he didn’t know, he was just a bouncer there. Fletch’s cellmate was a portly, middle-aged man in white trousers and sandals who said he was a schoolteacher. The afternoon before, he said, he had stabbed one of his students. There was blood on his trousers. After telling Fletch this, he curled on his bunk and fell asleep.

  “Come on,” the guard said. “Move it.”

  “Am I free to go?”

  He followed the guard between the cells to the steel door.

  While he was being booked as Alexander Liddicoat, for more than twenty incidents of armed robbery, Fletch’s wallet and watch had been taken from him. Photographs of Alexander Liddicoat were with the warrants. Looking at them upside down, Fletch saw a remote resemblance. While handing it over, Fletch showed the booking officer identification in his wallet, his driver’s license and press card, proving who he was. Without really looking at the identification photographs, the booking officer charged him with stealing the wallet of Irwin Maurice Fletcher, as well.

  The other side of the steel door, Fletch turned right, toward the stairs to the booking desk and the lobby.

  The guard grabbed him by the elbow. “This way, please.”

  They went to the left, past offices. Most of the doors were open. Lights were on, people working in the offices.

  At the end of the corridor, they came to a closed door. The guard opened it with a key. He snapped on the inside light.

  Six chairs were around a long conference table. Nothing else was in the room. High up on the far wall was a barred window.

  “Wait here,” the guard said.

  “Why are you holding me?”

  The guard closed the door behind him.

  Fletch snapped off the light, crawled onto the table in the dark, and fell asleep.

  The light snapped on. The door was open.

  Lieutenant Gomez was standing over Fletch.

  “You make yourself at home wherever you are, don’t you?”

  Fletch sat up. “What time is it?”

  He was cold.

  “Five-thirty A.M. The jailhouse swimming pool doesn’t open for another half-hour. The mayor and his top aides are down there cleaning it for you now. They know you like to go skinny-dipping every morning.”

  “Glad to see you.” Fletch remained sitting on the table. “You get to work early.”

  “Working on an important case,” Gomez said. “The murder of Donald Edwin Habeck. You know anything about it?”

  “Yeah. Read something about it in the newspapers.” Fletch yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Did you get the gun?”

  “What gun?”

  “The gun I left for you last night. I left it upstairs at the desk for you, with a note.”

  Gomez repeated: “What gun?”

  “I think it’s the gun used to kill Habeck. I found—”

  Gomez looked at the door.

  Biff Wilson stood in the door, shaved and suited as well as ever, wrinkled and rumpled.

  “Oh, hi, Biff,” Fletch said. “Did you bring the coffee?”

  Biff snorted. “I guess I was a wise guy once. Was I ever this much of a wise guy, Gomez?”

  “You were never a wise guy,” Gomez said. “Always the altar boy.”

  “I thought so.” Biff closed the door. “I’m not even sure I remember precisely what it is one does to a wise guy.”

  “On the police, we break his balls,” Gomez offered. “Do all the guys in journalism have balls?”

  Biff stood closer to Fletch. “Hi, kid. I heard you were incarcerated.”

  “Case of mistaken identity,” Fletch said. “Robber named Liddicoat. Apparently his picture had been circulated to all the liquor stores, pizza parlors—”

  Biff said to Gomez, “Can we make the charge stick awhile?”

  “Awhile,” said Gomez.

  “You can’t,” Fletch said. “Booking desk has already checked the identity in my wallet. That�
�s how you know I’m here, right?”

  “Wallet?” Biff asked Gomez.

  “He didn’t have a wallet,” Gomez said. “Just a stolen wristwatch.”

  Biff nodded at Fletch.

  “We were talking about a gun,” Fletch said.

  Biff looked at Gomez. “What gun?”

  “A gun I found,” Fletch said. “Outside the News-Tribune. I turned it in to Sergeant Wilhelm Rohm last night, with instructions to give it to Gomez.”

  “I don’t know about a gun,” Gomez said.

  “You’re a good boy.” Biff stroked Fletch’s leg with the palm of his hand. “A real good boy.”

  Fletch moved his leg.

  “Muscle.” Biff dug his fingers into Fletch’s thigh. “Look at that muscle, Gomez.”

  Fletch got off the table and moved away.

  “And what do those shorts say?” Biff squinted. “I can’t quite read it, can you, Gomez? Some high-school track team?”

  “Ben Franklyn Friend Service,” said Gomez.

  “Football,” said Biff. “I think that means a football team.”

  “That’s another story,” Fletch said.

  “I sure would like to know what you’ve found out,” Biff said.

  “Lots,” Fletch said. “You write lousy obituaries, Biff.”

  “Why do you say that, Liddicoat?”

  “For one thing, Jasmine and Donald Habeck never married. He never divorced Louise.”

  “Yeah? What else?”

  Fletch looked from Gomez to Wilson and shook his head.

  “What else?” Biff asked.

  “Have you talked with Gabais yet?”

  “Who?”

  “Felix Gabais. Child molester. An ex-client of Habeck. Served eleven hard years. Released from prison last week.”

  “Have you talked with him yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’ve been bird-doggin’ me all week, kid. Talked with everybody in the Habeck family, as far as I know, even the brother in the monastery. You’re stealin’ our thunder. What for, Liddicoat?”

  Again, Fletch shook his head. “This was no gangland slaying, Biff. You’re on the wrong track.”

  “You know better than we do, uh? The newspaper assign you to this story?”

  “The museum angle.”

  “Oh. The museum angle. That make sense to you, Gomez?”

  “No sense whatever, Biff.”