Fletch’s Moxie

someone will, I expect. Consider the possibility that she was in this financial razzle-dazzle with Steve Peterman, and that she murdered him only when she discovered she was being swindled, too. My early judgment would be—if I were making a judgment—that your friend, Moxie Mooney, is either awfully guilty or awfully stupid.”

“She’s just in trouble.”

“And she knew it, right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Why else would you have asked me to go look at Peterman’s books?”

“Moxie-the-murderess is a concept I’m having difficulty wrapping my mind around.”

Martin Satterlee said: “I’m pretty sure most people who commit murder have a friend somewhere.”

25

“You don’t look like you slept well,” Moxie said. She was looking up at him from a hammock on the second storey of The Blue House.

“Up to a point, I did.” Fletch had gone back to bed at a quarter to six, but he had not slept. He listened to the quiet house. He got out of bed again at eight-thirty only because he heard the Lopezes come into the house. He also heard the grinding gears and squeaking brakes of trucks and buses.

In the hammock, Moxie stretched and yawned.

“Thought we’d go sailing today,” Fletch said. “We can rent a catamaran on one of the beaches.”

“That would be nice.”

Somewhere in the house, a window smashed. In the street in front of the house, someone was yelling.

“Stay here,” Fletch said.

On the balcony, he walked around the corner to the front of the house. Gerry and Stella Littleford were already there. They were looking out onto the street. As Fletch approached, they looked at him. On their faces were shock, confusion, anger, hurt, amazement. They said nothing.

In the street in front of The Blue House were two old, rickety yellow school buses, three trucks big enough to carry cattle, a few vans, and some old cars. On the sides of the yellow schoolbuses in big black letters was written SAVE AMERICA.

People from these vehicles were milling in the street. And some of these people wore white hooded robes with eye and nose holes cut in their faces. And others wore brown shirts and brown riding britches and black jackboots and black neckties and black arm bands with red swastikas on them. And some of these people were women in cheap house dresses. And some were children.

“Look at the children,” Stella said.

Some men were passing demonstration signs down from the trucks. The signs were passed along from hand to hand. The signs said KEEP AMERICA WHITE, HOLLYWOOD SELLS U.S. SOUL, NO RACIAL MIX. One sign, carefully handprinted, read NO MONGURILIZATION! And these signs came to be held by the men in white hooded robes, and by the women, and by the children.

“I guess they mean me,” Gerry Littleford said.

“No,” Stella Littleford said. “They mean me.”

To the left, the thirty Neo-Nazis were trying to appear military. A man with a red band around his hat was yelling at them as they were lining up. They all had beer bellies they were sucking in while tucking their chins in to show they all had dewlaps.

Moxie was standing beside Fletch and she put her hand on his on the railing.

“These people must have driven all night,” Fletch said.

“These aren’t people,” Moxie said.

In the street someone said, There’s Moxie Mooney, and Cunt!, Whore! were shouted in both men’s and women’s voices and a voice said, Isn’t that ol’ Gerry Littleford up there? and a rock bounced off the wall of the house behind where they were standing and fell to the floor near their feet.

From one of the trucks, My country ‘tis of thee began to blare.

Fletch said to Moxie, “You don’t think people care about such things anymore? You think there came a moment in history when everyone wised up and love and understanding pervaded the world? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, babe. Maybe on television, but not in real life.”

Moxie said, “The sick, the stupid, and the scared.”

With two rows of uniformed plodgies standing behind him, the man distinguished by a red band around his hat began to shout a speech over the sound of music: “We all know what this is about! We all know what is happening! We all know what is happening to the world! Who runs Hollywood which makes the movies? The Jews! Who runs the newspapers which sell the movies? The Jews! Who owns the movie theaters which show the movies? The Jews! Who owns the television networks which push the movies into our homes, spoiling the minds of our children? The Jews! And who pays the Jews? The Communists! The Jewish people do not mix. Oh, no—they do not marry outside their race! They marry outside their race and their families say they’re dead! The Russians do not marry outside their race! Oh, no—they send the Jews out of their country…

Moxie giggled. “This is getting confusing.”

Along Duval Street, from the houses, guest houses, and coffee shops, and from the side streets ordinary citizens began to appear. They stood apart from these others, their eyes wide, their mouths open. They spoke to each other in disbelief. A large number of them were gathering. A woman shrieked: Be Nice! The fishermen began to appear in the crowd, the real fishermen and the sport fishermen and even the other kind of fishermen who always came back to Key West with a full cargo of shrimp they had bought with their other, more valuable cargo. Fletch recognized two or three people who had been at Durty Harry’s the night before, listening to Frederick Mooney.

A Cuban-American boy, a Conch, about eight or ten years old, sat cross-legged on the ground behind a man in a white robe. Fletch watched the boy take a cigarette lighter from the pocket of his shorts. It took him five or six tries to get flame from the lighter. Then he set fire to the hem of the man’s robe.

… land of liberty…

The man jumped, beat his burning robe with his arm, and kicked the kid, hard, rolling him over in the gutter. He kicked the kid again, in the head. By then, the robe was burning well. A woman was trying to grab the robe off him. He kept kicking the kid.

The crowd rushed the people who had driven all night. Rocks went through the air in all directions. Sticks appeared from nowhere. Here and there, on bare skin and on the white robes red blood began to appear. Women were screaming, in Cuban and English. The man distinguished by the red band around his hat ordered his uniformed plodgies to drive a wedge through all these screaming, hitting, kicking, yelling people and the uniformed plodgies went into the fray. They were beaten nicely.

From the center of Key West finally there came the sounds of sirens.

Fletch took Moxie’s elbow. “Let’s go.”

“Where we going?”

“Sailing,” Fletch said. “It’s a nice day for sailing.”

Edith Howell in her dressing gown was carrying a cup of coffee up the main stairs of The Blue House. “Something I’ve never understood,” she said to Moxie and Fletch, “is how one can be a Jew and a Communist at the same time. A tree and a stone cannot be the same thing. Either one is one thing, or one is another…”

“Sick people,” Moxie answered.

Lopez was waiting in the front hall. He wore a clean white jacket. He said, “Mister Fletcher, Mister Sills is on the phone. He says if I don’t put you on the phone, he fires me.”

Sy Koller came out of the dining room with his cup of coffee. He said to Moxie, “We’re a part of an international conspiracy?”

“Throw ’em a script, Sy,” Moxie answered. “Let ’em see how bad it is.”

Koller said, “I’d suspect Peterman’s hand behind this foolishness—you know, for publicity—if he weren’t dead.”

Fletch said to Lopez, “Did you tell Sills what’s going on outside?”

Outside were the sounds of sirens and hysterical screaming.