“Just trying to locate a
“Hey, Fletch?” Al drawled.
“Yes, Al?”
“Do me a favor, Fletch?”
“Sure, Al. Anything, for you. Want me to use my influence with Frank? Get you a raise?”
“I wish you’d interview someone for me.” Al winked at the men sitting around his desk.
“Sure, Al. Who?”
“Dwight Eisenhower. I think ol’ Ike still might have a few things to say.”
“Sure, Al. I’ll do it before lunch.”
“Napoleon?” the photographer asked.
“Did him last month,” Fletch said. “Thanks for reading the
“Did you get any good hard quotes out of Napoleon?” Al asked.
“He really opened up on Josephine.”
“Yeah? What did he say about Josephine?”
“Said she wore hair curlers in bed. That’s why he spent so much time in the field.”
“Really, Fletch,” said a reporter named Terry. “You could get a job with one of those spooky magazines. You know? ‘What Abraham Lincoln Said To Me.’ That sort of thing.”
“Or maybe a morticians’ trade paper,” the photographer said. “You could be their Consumer Affairs Columnist.”
“Keep laughin’, guys.”
“Or you could quote Thomas Bradley again,” said an old reporter, who was not smiling.
Fletch glanced at the big wall clock. “Guess I better hurry up, if I’m going to make that interview with
“Gee, no, Fletch. We didn’t hear that,” said the photographer.
Terry said, “Ernie Pyle should get the job. Maybe H.L. Mencken.”
Al called after Fletch, as Fletch was leaving the city room. “Aren’t you cleaning out your desk?”
“Hell, no,” Fletch said. “I’ll be back.”
“Yeah,” the unsmiling reporter said. “Maybe in your next life.”
9
“G O D, I H A T E this,” Tom Jeffries said. On a high metal bed on wheels, on which he was lying on his stomach in the tiny patio behind his house, he was dressed only in shorts and, from his waist to his head, plaster casts and metal braces. His friend, Tina, was sitting on a stool spooning scrambled egg into his mouth. She was dressed in a light, loose dress. “Everything you eat sticks in your throat. Give me more orange juice, will you, Tina?”
She held a glass of orange juice up to his face and placed the flexible straw in his mouth.
“Hang-gliding sure looks pretty,” Fletch said. He was sitting on the picnic table, his bare feet on the bench.
“It’s a pretty thing to do,” Tom said. “It feels pretty. It is pretty.
Soar like a bird.”
“Birds get broken backs very often?” Fletch asked.
“Sometimes you land pretty hard,” Tina said. “This was to be Tom’s last flight before we get married next Saturday.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “I was going to give it up because Tina wanted me to. She said I might get hurt. Shows you what she knows.” Tom grinned at her.
“Wedding put off?” Fletch asked.
“No,” Tom said. “Instead of wearing a tuxedo Tina’s going to put a big red bow ribbon on my ass.”
“That’ll be nice,” Fletch said. “At least she’ll know what she’s marrying. How long you going to be wrapped up like that, in plaster and aluminum?”
“Weeks,” Tom groaned. “Months.”
“We’ll be married a long time,” Tina said quietly. “A few months won’t matter.”
She had offered Fletch breakfast, and he was hungry, but he had refused. He figured she had enough to do taking care of Tom.
“You heard what I did?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Jack Carradine called me. At first I thought he was telling me a funny story. Then I realized he doesn’t think it’s even slightly funny. Somebody ran your piece on Wagnall-Phipps on his pages while he was out of town. You quoted a dead man, Fletch.”
“And got fired.”
“And got fired. Makes me look all the better.” Tom smiled at Fletch. “Which, under the circumstances, I don’t mind at all. The only job security I’ve got. You screwed up royally on a story originally assigned to me.”
“Tom, can you tell me any reason why Charles Blaine should show me, and let me quote from recent memos he said were from Thomas Bradley?”
“Sure,” Tom said. “He’s a creep. They’re all creeps at Wagnall-Phipps. Tom Bradley was a creep.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. Bradley lived way back, down deep inside himself—somewhere near his lower spine. He never seemed very real to me, if you know what I mean. Every word, gesture seemed calculated. Very self-protective. Always gave you the feeling he was hiding something—which is why we started that investigation into the financial dealings of Wagnall-Phipps a couple of years ago. Creepy. Made us suspicious. Sure enough, there he was, doing kick-backs, pay-offs, running the ski house in Aspen neither he nor any of the other executives, employees of Wagnall-Phipps ever used. He was his own worst enemy.”
“Want some coffee, Tom?” Tina asked.
“Luke-warm decaffinated coffee through a glass straw,” Tom said. “No, thanks.”
“You, Fletch?”
“No thank you kindly, Tina.”
“Then I’ll go wash up the breakfast dishes.” She carried the dirty plates and cups into the house.
Fletch asked, “Bradley never used the Aspen ski house himself?”
“Naw. Wasn’t much of an athlete.”
“How do you know?”
“We checked pretty thoroughly on who was using that ski house and who wasn’t. Just politicians and purchasing agents. Bradley never went there. He never took his kids there. Sometimes his sales manager would go and play host for a drinking weekend. If you ski and have a ski house available, you use it, right?”
“I guess so.”
“His thing was making mosaics, you know? Putting together mosaics with tiny bits of colored tile. Sort of pretty. He had some he had made in his office.”
“How did he get to be chairman of something called Wagnall-Phipps? Family?”
“Naw. Wagnall-Phipps was a defunct supply company. Probably they’d played the game honestly and gone broke. Bradley bought it for its debts. Doubt he put very much cash into it. Then he sold off the stock from the warehouses. I’m sure he put the price of everything up, but he made sure whoever bought from him got a kick-back, something with which to line his own pocket. So he had much more cash than he had put into the company, bought more supplies, more warehouses—he was off and running.”
“When was this?”
“Oh—twenty years ago I’d guess. Then, over the years, when one of the companies that supplied him got into financial difficulty, he’d buy all of it, or part of it. So now Wagnall-Phipps is a holding company owning lots of unrelated little companies manufacturing things like rubbish barrels and sidewalk brooms and nails—stuff like that. Nobody ever said he wasn’t smart. And, of course, it’s still a general supply company. You should know all this, Fletch. You did a story on the company last week. Remember?”
