stupidity …”
“I really don’t have much time, Fletch. The play is opening—”
“Just a little spade work, Moxie.”
“Anything, darling. Oh, landlord and banker.”
“Would you get a gang together—maybe your pals from the theater—and go dig up Enid Bradley’s backyard? She’s gone pretty regularly from nine-to-five.”
“What?”
“You can tell them it’s a treasure hunt, or something.”
“Is that what you mean by spade work?”
“You’ll want to bring more than one spade, to get the whole yard dug up in eight hours.”
“Now you want to help Enid Bradley do her gardening?”
“No, no. You don’t get the point. I’m looking for something.”
“What?”
“What I’m always looking for: Thomas Bradley.”
“What? Fletch, you’re not serious!”
“I think Enid planted her husband in the back yard.”
“Fletch.”
“Yes.”
“Fletch, you’re not thinking.”
“I’m not?”
“If you find Thomas Bradley under his wife’s rhododendrons, you’d be proving that he is dead.”
“It would strongly so indicate.”
“And if Thomas Bradley is dead, you’re ruined.”
“That certainly has occurred to me.”
“So why do you, of all people, want to find his body?”
“Two reasons. It would satisfy my curiosity.”
“You have an expensive curiosity. What’s your second brilliant reason?”
“It would be a helluva story, of course.”
“Fletcher—”
“Will you do it?”
“No.”
“You all need the exercise by now. Especially that Rick fellow. Think of spending a nice day digging in the garden.”
“Rick does not need the exercise. He’s—”
“I know.”
“—beautiful.”
“Moxie, you make up the damndest, most unacceptable reasons for not doing as you’re asked.”
“You just don’t know how to take being fired gracefully! Roll over, Fletch! Play dead!”
“I’m on to something here, Moxie. I really am. Go dig up the garden. Please!”
“Bye, Fletcher. I just fell back to sleep.”
“Moxie? … Moxie? … Moxie?”
33
F I N A L L Y A T A X I rolled up to the curb in front of the Dallas Registry. The driver rolled down his window.
“Three forty nine Grantchester Street,” Fletch said.
“Why would you want to go there?” The expression on the taxi driver’s face was the one taxi drivers all over the world use while talking to
“Why wouldn’t I want to go there?”
“You lookin’ for somebody?”
“You might say so,” Fletch drawled.
“Well, you won’t find him.”
“I’m beginning to get that idea.”
“I’m pretty sure all that way’s a big owell.”
“A big what?”
“ ‘Course not sure of that number in particular. What’s you say the number is?”
“Three forty nine.”
“Might’s well get in. You look more like you can stand to lose the fare’n I can.”
Inside his clothes Fletch’s body was running with sweat from the dry heat. After he closed the door of the back seat he heard the air conditioner whirring high. The interior of the car was degrees colder. The driver started the car and, not interfering with anyone in Dallas who wanted to get ahead of him, followed the traffic sedately. As he drove he rolled up his window, making the interior of the car even colder.
“All that way’s up there a big owell.”
At nine o’clock Monday morning Fletch had been at the Registry of Births and Deaths in downtown Dallas, Texas. A slim, gray-haired woman had taken his simple enquiry not only as a great interest and cause of her own but also as an opportunity to be hospitable to someone clearly not native Texan. She poured Fletch coffee from the office pot, offered him a doughnut, which she insisted had been ordered by mistake, disappeared into the stacks and returned with a volume really too big for her to carry and dusty enough to make her white blouse look like it had been run over by a bus. Besides the date of birth, she established that Thomas Bradley indeed had been born in Dallas, Texas, at the Dallas Hospital, of Lucy Jane (McNamara) and John Joseph Bradley, of three forty nine Grantchester Street.
“I’m just tellin’ you it’s a big owell, sonny, so when we get that way you won’t turn on me mad for bringin’ you that way.”
“I won’t turn mad,” Fletch promised.
“ ‘Less you’re in ‘struction.”
“In what?”
“You looked like you’re in ‘struction I never would say nothin’. But you don’t.”
“Oh, yes,” Fletch said.
The sunlight reflected from a million mirrors as they drove along, from the windows of buildings, the windshields and chromium of cars. The driver was wearing sunglasses.
The sweat on Fletch’s body froze. He held his arms close to his body.
The lady at the Registry of Births and Deaths had been very kind and very helpful, dragging out volume after volume for him. He doubted her blouse would ever be pure white again.
The taxi driver took a right turn, then another. The sign saying
Ahead of them, both sides of the street, was an enormous construction site. Chain-link fence ran along both sidewalks. An idle bulldozer dozed among the rubble. There were no workers in sight. Whatever buildings, houses, trees which had been there had been knocked down. On neither side of the road had new building commenced.
“Urban removal,” the driver said. He slowed the car and brought it nearer the dusty curb. “A big owell.”
“Oh,” Fletch said. He had never gone so far to see a hole. “A neighborhood gone.”
“No one here,” the driver said simply. “Whoever you’re lookin’ for.”
“Guess not.”
“No one even to ask after him.”
“No.”
“Lotsa ‘struction goin’ on in Dallas,” the driver said.
“Makes you proud, don’t it?” Fletch said.
