Fletch and the Widow Bradley

hand.

Fletch said, “Tell me what else to think.”

“I think all this is unnecessary.” Francine got up from her chair and strode firmly across the room. She opened the door of a wall cabinet and threw a switch and the music went off. Then she turned a three-way lamp to its brightest. “I think you’ve assaulted me enough, Irwin Fletcher.”

“Assaulted?”

Across the room, standing next to the bright lamp, her dinner dress wrinkled, her hair needing a combing, for the first time in Fletch’s eyes, Francine Bradley looked small, vulnerable.

“You’ve assaulted me and Enid. Over nothing at all.”

“I wouldn’t call the evidence I’ve presented ‘nothing at all’. I’d call it pretty indicative.”

“There’s no evidence at all, Fletcher. You’re trying to save your job. That’s it—pure and simple. I really don’t know whether you’ve made all this up, but you certainly have a motivation to see facts as they aren’t. If you don’t know it by now, you will by the time you’re my age: if you look at any event closely enough, you’ll find supposed facts which conflict, contradict what you know to be the truth—memos that are unfiled, or mistakenly initialed, records lost in a bureaucracy—”

“Carpet ashes in a funeral urn?”

“God! It was six months later when we went to Switzerland! How do we know what some obscure Swiss undertaker did? He’d never expect the ashes he gave Enid to be analysed.”

“I suspect he could have supplied human ashes—if a Swiss undertaker was the source of the ashes, that is. We all have our pride.”

She turned her side to him. “Fletcher, I just can’t stand any more of this. Not tonight. I understand that something happened in my brother’s company which caused you to lose your job, and that that Charles Blaine has filled you up with all sorts of nonsense. I’ve tried to be nice, and open with you, and answer your questions.” Even with her back to the light. Fletch could see Francine was crying. “And I do appreciate your concern for young Tom, and Ta-ta, and telling me about them. I believe that part. But when you say Enid murdered Tom! I’ve never heard anything so insane in my life! It’s just too much, too … too insane!”

He stood up and put on his jacket. “Will you at least think about it?”

She looked at him through wet, blinking eyes. “Do you think I’ll be able to think about anything else?”

“I’m just asking you to think about it. You’ve underestimated another woman, Francine. You’re being had.”

She opened the apartment door. “Good night, Fletch.” Her red-rimmed eyes pleaded with him. “Would asking you to go away and leave us alone do any good?”

Fletch kissed Francine Bradley on the cheek. “Good night, Francine. Thanks for dinner.”

32

“G O O D   M O R N I N G,   M O X I E. Did I wake you up?”

“Of course you woke me up. Who is this?”

“Your landlord. Your banker.”

“Jeez, Fletcher, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to be at rehearsal until two o’clock.”

“California time or New York time?”

“Are you still in New York?”

“Yeah, but I’m leaving for Texas in a few minutes.”

“Why are you going to Texas?”

“I’m looking for a body, old dear. I keep not finding one.”

“Thomas Bradley is not alive and hiding out in New York?”

“Apparently not. Despite my best efforts to shake up his sister, she does not produce him.”

“What does she say?”

“She seems genuinely upset by everything I tell her. She’s a smart, cool, efficient lady. She has to know that sooner or later I’m going to blow a whistle, bring what evidence I have to the authorities. I really believe she would produce her brother by now—if it were possible.”

“Gee, whiz, Fletch, I have an idea—maybe Thomas Bradley died, despite that article in the News-Tribune. Did you ever think of that?”

“I’m beginning to believe in my own theories.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

“So far, Fletch, darling, your theories have been worth about as much as a grin in a wrestling match.”

“Trial and error, trial and error.”

“What’s in Texas?”

“Everything, if you ask a Texan. It’s the original home of the Bradley family.”

“So what, she said, eager to roll over and go back to sleep.”

“So when you’re looking for someone, dead or alive, don’t you look in his home?”

“Not nowadays. We don’t have homes anymore. Just places where we live. The truth is, Fletch, you have no idea what you’re doing.”

“You are correct.”

“You are spinning your wheels and going nowhere.”

“Correct again.”

“You’re dashing from Mexico to New York to Texas to God-knows-where because way down in your conceited little heart you just can’t believe you did the utterly stupid thing of publicly quoting a dead man as if he were still among the quick.”

“Your exactitude, Moxie, is doing nothing to encourage me.”

“I hope. It’s also correct you wouldn’t be zipping around the landscape like a bitch in heat if you hadn’t received a legacy from one unknowing James St. E. Crandall, and, I might add, my permission to use it.”

“Too true.”

“Foolish me.”

“I hope you’re contrite.”

“I’m not contrite. I’m cold in bed alone. A different emotion altogether.”

“You should be with me, in an overheated New York hotel room. Steam heat and mirrors everywhere.”

“Well, I hope you’re having a nice vacation with yourself. If you care, you’ve lost another job.”

“Didn’t have another job.”

“You did, too. I told you so. The male lead in In Love.”

“I’ve lost that job? Oh, woe is me! Woe! I say, woe!”

“Sam is gone. Replaced by Rick Caswell. He’s absolutely marvelous.”

“I’m so glad.”

“He’s physically beautiful, with big lashes, you know?”

“No.”

“His timing is perfect.”

“No trouble with thick thighs, eh?”

“What? Oh, no. Ran cross-country for Nebraska. He’s beautiful.”

“I think you said that.”

“Did I? Sorry. He’s beautiful.”

“Oh.”

“Really.”

“I’ve got the point. Say, Moxie—?”

“May I go back to sleep now? I mean, I only answered the phone hoping it was your ex-wife again, so I could tell her more lies.”

“How’d you like to do some spade work for me?”

“On this Bradley thing?”

“I know you don’t believe in it; you’re willing to chalk the whole thing up to my own incompetence and