Fletch’s Moxie

Her friends were all around her.

Moxie said nothing. She stepped closer to Fletch and took his arm.

“You’re trying to look like Moxie Mooney,” the girl laughed.

Moxie said, “Actually, I’m not.”

The young people around the girl laughed. One said, “Oh yeah.”

The girl said, “Moxie doesn’t wear all that crap on her face.”

“She doesn’t?” Moxie asked.

“She’s natural,” the girl said. “She don’t wear no make-up at all.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Naw. But she’s stayin’ somewhere here in Key West.”

“She’s over on Stock Island,” said the boy. “In seclusion.”

“Yeah,” said another boy. “She murdered somebody.”

Moxie’s arm flexed against Fletch.

“You really think Moxie Mooney killed somebody?” she asked.

“Why not?” shrugged a boy.

“What are you—a look-alike contest?” asked another girl.

“I want to see her,” the girl in cut-offs said. “I’m gonna see her.”

“Well,” Fletch said. He tugged Moxie’s arm. “Good luck.”

The girl in cut-offs called after Moxie. “You look sorta like her.”

“Thanks,” Moxie called back. Miserably, she said, “I guess.”

They were walking back on Whitehead Street. There was some color in the sky.

“Anyway,” Fletch said in a cheery tone, “I enjoyed talking with your father this afternoon.”

“You like him, don’t you.”

“I admire him,” Fletch said. “Enormously.”

“I guess he’s a brilliant man,” Moxie admitted.

“He’s funny.”

“After all these decades of acting,” Moxie said, “he speaks as if every line were written for him. He says Good Morning and you have to believe it’s a good morning—as if nobody had ever said it before.”

“How come he’s all-of-a-sudden so attentive to you?”

“He’s not. He just landed on me. Can’t find work, I guess. Nobody else wants him.”

“Did he call you, did he write you, did he arrange to stay with you?”

“Course not. He had taken up residence in my apartment in New York. I didn’t even know it. When I went there a few weeks ago—you know, to talk to Steve Peterman—there he was at home in my apartment. His clothes and his bottles all over the place. He was nearly unconscious. Looking at cartoons on the television. I had to put him to bed.”

“Jesus,” Fletch said. “Frederick Mooney looking at cartoons on television. All the bad satires of himself.”

“I was pretty upset anyway. Yelling into the phone, trying to find Steve.”

“Had you given him a key to the apartment?”

“No. He had never been there before.”

“How did he get in?”

“The doorman gave him a key. He is Frederick Mooney, after all.”

“I heard someone else say that.”

“I mean, everyone knows he’s my father. I had never told the doormen to keep him out. What else could they do—have a legendary genius raving in their lobby?”

“Different rules,” said Fletch. “This may seem strange to you, Moxie, put me down with those kids on the dock, but I’m proud and pleased to know your father. I find him damned interesting. I mean, for me to really see him and talk with him and know him. Even though he keeps confusing me with a corpse.”

“You’re not a corpse, Fletcher.” Moxie stroked his arm. “Not yet, anyway. Of course, if you get me to sign any more papers in the dark…”

“Think of all he’s done.”

“I had to bring him down here with me. What else could I do with him? Couldn’t leave him sitting there in New York.”

“So you packed him up and poured him onto the plane.”

“He entertained everybody in the first-class section. He had a few drinks, of course. There was a little girl, about twelve years old, sitting across the aisle from him. He started telling her the story of Pygmalion. He got everybody’s attention by making all Eliza Doolittle’s mouth noises. Began playing all the parts at once. Henry Higgins, the father. Then he began singing all the songs from My Fair Lady. People were standing in aisles. Get me to the church, get me to the church, get me to the church on time…” Moxie sawed out flat and guttural. “People crowded up from the coach section.”

“Marvelous,” Fletch said.

“It’s nuts!” she exclaimed.

“Yeah, nuts. But the little girl will never forget it. No one aboard will. Frederick Mooney doing Shaw at thirty thousand feet.”

“Nuts!” she said. “Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!”

“I think it’s nice.”

“Against safety regulations,” Moxie said. “Have that many people in the aisles. Utterly nuts.”

“The obligations of talent,” Fletch said. “Different rules.”

“He’s a drunk,” Moxie said easily. “He’s a mad, raving drunk.”

“But you love him.”

“Hell,” she said. “I love him about as much as I love Los Angeles. He’s just very big on my landscape.”

18

Dinner at the Blue House was conch chowder, red snapper and Key lime pie. Mrs. Lopez provided the best Key West dining.

Before dinner, Lopez told Fletch Global Cable News had called several times and would like him to return the call. Fletch thanked him and did not return the call.

During dinner Frederick Mooney said to Moxie, “But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—or rather a disease that is in my flesh, which I must needs call mine.”

“Oh, no,” Moxie said. “More Lear.” Edith Howell said,

“Freddy’s a learing old man.”

“And you, Madame,” said Frederick Mooney, “are a bag of wind.”

And during dinner, Sy Koller said, “I knew something was going on between Dan Buckley and Steve Peterman. Buckley was not happy with Peterman…” He ran through his theory of the murder again, adding the idea this time that may-be Peterman had gotten Buckley into something illegal…

Moxie said nothing.

Stella Littleford, looking even smaller and more bedraggled than usual, said, “Marge Peterman.” As she spoke, she kept giving sad glances at her husband, who, after his swim, was still acting a little jumpy and at first kept his smiles perfunctory and his conversation to the mannerly minimum. “Wives can get to the point,” Stella said, “where divorce isn’t adequate. How long had the Petermans been married—ten years? And this was the first time I’ve ever seen Marge Peterman with her husband. I didn’t even know there was a Marge Peterman. And all this time Peterman’s been runnin’ all over the world, going to bed with people, doin’ what he wanted…”

“I don’t know,” Fletch said. “Did Peterman jump in and out of bed with people, Moxie?”

“Steve was interested in only one thing,” Moxie said, performing fine surgery on her fish. “Money. And talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. About money.”

“A wife gets tired of gettin’ shoved aside,” Stella Littleford insisted. “Of everybody tellin’ her she’s not important. Of bein’ told to do this, do that, do the other thing, and otherwise shut up and stay in the background.