Fletch's Fortune (14 page)

He caught a glimpse of the man crossing behind two stands of rhododendrons.

He sprung over the fence and ran down the slope.

When he ran through the opening in the rhododendrons, and stopped, abruptly, to look around, he saw the man standing under some apple trees, hands in back pockets, looking at him.

Slowly, Fletch began to walk toward him.

The man took his hands out of his pockets, turned, and ran, further down the slope, toward a large stand of pine. Behind the pine trees were the stables.

Fletch noticed he was wearing sneakers.

Fletch ran after him, and when he came to the pine trees, his shoes began to slip on the slope. To brake himself from falling, he grabbed at a scrub pine, got sap on his hands, and fell.

Looking around from the ground, Fletch could neither see nor hear the man.

Fletch picked himself up and walked through the pines to the stable area, trying to scrape the sap off his hands with his thumbnails.

In the midday sun, the stables had the quiet of a long lunch hour typical of a place where people work early and late. No one was there.

For a few minutes Fletch petted the horse he had ridden that morning, asking her if she had seen a man run by (and answering for her, “He went thet-away”), and then walked back to the hotel.

From TAPE

Station 1

Suite 12
(Mrs. Walter March and Walter March, Jr.)

“Bandy called from Los Angeles, Junior. Some question he can’t deal with. And Masur called asking if he should put that basketball scandal on the wires from New York.…”

There was no answer.

“Are you having lunch?” Lydia asked her son.

No answer.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Junior. Buck up! Your father’s dead, and someone has to make the decisions for the newspapers. They can’t run themselves. They never have.”

Another silence.

“I’m ordering you lunch,” she said. “You can’t Bloody Mary yourself to death.…”

From TAPE

Station 9

Room 36
(Rolly Wisham)

“If you’ll permit me a question first, Captain Neale.…”

“I don’t know. Once you journalists start asking questions, you never stop. I’ve had enough opportunity to discover that.”

“Very simply: Why are you questioning me?”

“We understand you might have had a motive to murder Walter March.”

“Oh?”

Rolly Wisham’s voice did not have great timbre, for a man nearly thirty, but there was a boy’s aggressiveness in it, mixed with an odd kindliness.

Listening to the tape, sitting on his bed, picking at the sap on his hands, Fletch kept expecting Wisham to say, “This is Rolly Wisham, with love”—as if such meant anything to anybody, especially in journalism.

“What motive do you think I would have for murdering the old bastard?”

“I know about the editorial that ran in the March newspapers calling your television feature reporting—have I the term right?—let’s see, it called it ‘sloppy, sentimental, and stupendously unprofessional.’ That’s precise. I had the editorial looked up and read to me over the phone this noon.”

“That’s what it said.”

“I also know that this editorial was just the beginning of a coast-to-coast campaign to put you in disgrace and get you fired from the network. Every March newspaper was to follow up with articles punching holes in your every statement, every report, day by day.”

“I didn’t know that, but I guessed it.”

“Walter March had begun a smear campaign against you. Frankly, Mister Wisham, I didn’t know such things happen nowadays.”

“Call me Rolly.”

“I think of that kind of smear campaign as being from back in the old days. Dirty journalism. Yellow journalism. What do you call it?”

“It still happens.”

“On this assignment,” Captain Neale said, “I’m learning a lot of things I didn’t particularly want to know.”

“Is the campaign against me going to continue? Are the March newspapers going to continue to smear me now that Walter March is dead?”

“I understand it’s been called off. Mister Williams—Jake Williams—has called it off.”

“Good.”

“Not for your sake. He thinks it might hurt the image of the recently departed. Leave a bad taste in the mouths of people regarding Walter March.”

“If that’s their reasoning, I wish they’d continue with it. Walter March tasted like piss and vinegar.”

“Interesting to see how decisions are made in the media. You people are feeding a thousand facts and ideas into human minds a day and, I see, sometimes for some pretty wrong reasons.”

“Very seldom. It’s just that in every woodpile there’s a Walter March.”

“Anyway, Mister Wisham, Walter March had begun a campaign to destroy you; he was murdered; the campaign was called off.”

“Captain Neale, who tipped you?”

“I don’t get you.”

“Who told you about the editorial, and the campaign?”

“I’m not a journalist, Mister Wisham. I don’t have to give my sources—except in a court of law.”

“I’ll have to wait, uh?”

“I intend to bring this case into court, Mister Wisham. And get a conviction.”

“Why did you say that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Seems a funny thing for you to say. I mean, of course you intend to bring it into court. There was a murder. You’re a cop.”

“Well.…”

“Could it be that you’ve heard some not-very-nice things about Walter March?”

“I’ve been on the case only twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours investigating Walter March would be enough to make anyone puke.”

“Mrs. March assures me he hadn’t an enemy in the world. And there is the fact that Walter March was the elected President of the American Journalism Alliance.”

“Yeah. And Attila led the Huns.”

“Mister Wisham, any man with that much power.…”

“… has to have a few enemies. Right. Everyone loved Walter March except anyone who ever had anything to do with him.”

“Mister Wisham.…”

“I have one more question.”

“Mister Wisham, I.… I’ll ask the questions.”

“Have you ever seen me on television?”

“Of course.”

“Often?”

“Yes, I guess so. My working hours.… I don’t have any regular television-viewing hours.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of my work?”

“Well. I’m not a journalist.”

“I don’t work for journalists. I work for people. You’re a people.”

“I’m not a critic.”

“I don’t work for critics, either.”

“I find your work very good.”

“‘Very good’?”

“Well, I haven’t made a study of it, of course. Somehow or other I never thought I’d be asked by Rolly
Wisham what I think of his television reporting. Mostly, of course, I look at the sports.…”

“Nevertheless. Tell me what you think of my work.”

“I think it’s very good. I like it. What you do is different from what the others do. Let me see. I have more of a sense of people from your stories. You don’t just sit back in a studio and report something. You’re in your shirtsleeves, and you’re in the street. Whatever you’re talking about, dope addicts, petty criminals, you make us see them as people—with their own problems, and fears. I don’t know how to judge it as journalism.…”

“I wish you were a critic. You just gave me a good review.”

“Well, I have no way to judge such things.”

“Next question is.…”

“No more questions, Mister Wisham.”

“If I’m good enough at my job to please you, the network, and a hell of a lot of viewers—how come Walter March was out to screw me?”

“That’s a question.”

“Got an answer?”

“No. But I’ve got some questions.”

“I’m asking them for you.”

“Okay, Mister Wisham. You’re more experienced at asking questions than I am. I’ve got the point.”

“That’s not the point. I’m not trying to put you down, Captain Neale. I’m trying to tell you something.”

“What? What are you trying to tell me?”

“You look at television. There are a lot of television reporters. Most of us have our own style. What’s the difference between me and the others? I’m younger than most of them. My hair is a little longer. I don’t work in a studio in a jacket and tie. My reports are usually feature stories. They’re supposed to be softer than so-called hard news. Most of my stories have to
do with people’s attitudes, and feelings, more than just hard facts. That’s my job, and you just said I do it pretty well.”

“Mister Wisham.…”

“So, why me? Why would Walter March, or anyone else, raise a national campaign to get me off the air?”

“Okay, Mister Wisham. Rolly. You asked the question. You could wear an elephant down to a mouse.”

“Because he was afraid of me.”

“Walter March? Afraid of you?”

“I was becoming an enormous threat to him.”

“Ah.… Someone told me last night—I think it was that Nettie Horn woman—all you journalists have identity problems. ‘Delusions of grandeur,’ she said. Rolly, a few minutes of network television time a week—I mean, against Walter March and all those newspapers coast-to-coast, coming out every day, edition after edition.…”

“Potentially I was an enormous threat to him.”

“Okay, Rolly. I’m supposed to ask ‘Why?’ now. Is that right?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

“I have more reason to murder that bastard than anyone you can think of.”

“Uh.…”

“Don’t tell me I need a lawyer. I know my rights. I came to this convention because the network forced me to. I came with such hatred for that bastard.… Frankly, I was afraid to cross his path, to see him, or even hear him, or be in a room with him—for fear of what I might do to him.”

“Wait.”

“My Dad owned a newspaper in Denver. I was brought up skiing, horsing around, loving journalism, my Dad, happy to be the son of a newspaper publisher.
Once a newspaper starts to decline in popularity, it’s almost impossible to reverse the trend. I didn’t know it, but when I was about ten, Dad’s newspaper began to go into a decline. By the time I was fourteen, he had mortgaged everything, including his desk, Goddamn it, the desk he had inherited from his father, to keep the paper running. These were straight bank loans—but unfortunately Dad had made the mistake of using only one bank. He wasn’t the sharpest businessman in the world.”

“Neither am I. I.…”

“Just when Dad thought he was turning the paper around—it had taken five years—this one bank called all the loans.”

“Could they do that? I mean, legally?”

“Sure. Dad never thought they would. They were friends. He went to see them. They wouldn’t even speak to him. They called all the loans at once, and that was it.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither did Dad. Why would the bank want to take over a newspaper, especially when there was hope for its doing well? They wouldn’t know how to run it. Dad lost the newspaper. He gave up as decently as he could. He wandered around the house for weeks, trying to figure out what had happened. I was fifteen. There was a rumor around that the bank had sold the newspaper to Walter March, of March Newspapers.”

“Okay, it seems like an ordinary.…”

“Not a bit ordinary. These bankers were old friends of my father. Huntin’, fishin’, cussin’ and drinkin’ friends.”

“He was hurt.”

“He was curious. He was also a hell of a journalist. In time, he found out what happened. People always
talk. Walter March had bought up Dad’s loans, lock, stock, and barrel—to get control of the newspaper.”

“Why did the bankers let him? They were friends.…”

“Blackmail, Captain Neale. Sheer, unadulterated blackmail. He had blackmailed the bankers, individually, as persons. So far, in your twenty-four hours of investigation, have you heard about Walter March and his flotilla of private detectives?”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“When I was sixteen, Dad died of a gunshot wound, in the temple, fired at close range.”

The recording tape reel revolved three times before Rolly Wisham said, “I never could understand why Dad didn’t shoot Walter March instead.”

“Mister Wisham, I really think you should have a lawyer present.…”

“No lawyer.”

Captain Neale sighed audibly. “Where were you at eight o’clock Monday morning?”

“I had driven into Hendricks to get the newspapers and have breakfast in a drugstore, or whatever I could find.”

“You have a car here?”

“A rented car.”

“You could have had breakfast and gotten your newspapers here at the hotel.”

“I wanted to get out of the hotel. Night before, I had seen Walter March with Jake Williams in the elevator. They were laughing. Something about the President and golf … catfish. I hadn’t slept all night.”

“Did you drive into Hendricks alone?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Mister Wisham, I don’t see any problem. Your face is famous. We can just ask people down in the village. I’m sure they saw you, and recognized you. Where did you have breakfast?”