Fletch’s Moxie

station. He was not on location.”

“He rigged the set.”

“The set was not rigged,” said Nachman. “So say the experts.”

“God,” said Fletch.

Nachman fully recited Moxie Mooney her rights. To Fletch, it sounded like the mumblings over a grave. Staring at Nachman, Moxie’s eyes were glazed. Mrs Lopez’ face was long. In the living room doorway Mooney swayed stupidly. Down the corridor, McKensie was leaning against a table.

“What evidence?” Fletch asked lamely.

“Cut it out, Fletcher,” Nachman said, as if admonishing a child. “All the evidence in the world. Motive: we’ve had a report on her financial records. Whatever swindles Moxie and Peterman were pulling, it had certainly gone sour for Moxie. Opportunity: she was on the stage with him; she was wearing a bulky bathrobe in which a knife could be easily concealed; she crossed behind him just as he was stabbed. Dan Buckley was also on the stage, but there was no way he could have concealed that knife in his clothes, and he never left his chair. Motive and opportunity make the case.”

Silently, looking as if he were going someplace to be sick, Frederick Mooney crossed the front hall to the stairs. His fingers just barely touched Moxie’s sleeve.

Her eyes watched him climb the stairs.

Sergeant Hennings released handcuffs from his belt. He said to Fletch: “Okay if I arrest her? She’s talented and famous.”

“It’s not okay!” Fletch shouted. “No handcuffs!”

“Sorry, Miss,” Hennings said to Moxie. “Police department rules.”

“Don’t I get to get my toothbrush?” Moxie asked.

“We supply toothbrushes now,” Nachman said. “Especially for capital offenses.”

Moxie held out her wrists. Moxie Mooney was looking drawn and haggard.

She smiled at Fletch. “What’s your line about bravery?”

Fletch answered numbly, “Bravery is something you have to think you have to have it.”

“Yeah,” Moxie said. “I’ll think on that.”

“I’m going with you,” Fletch said.

Roz Nachman said, “Sorry, earwig, you’re not. Not enough room in the helicopter.”

Sergeant Hennings was guiding Moxie through the front door, gently, by her elbow.

Moxie was looking back at Fletch. “Hey, Fletch?” she asked. “You’ve never told me. Here’s your chance. Why is this house called The Blue House?”

Nachman put her nose up at the corners of the ceilings. “Used to be a whore house,” she said.

“Really?” Fletch said. “I never knew that.”

In the front hall, Fletch turned in a complete circle.

McKensie approached. Bitterly he said to Fletch, “Thanks, mate.”

Then he went up the stairs.

From the front porch of The Blue House Fletch watched them put Moxie in the police car. Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman got in the back seat with her.

He watched the car drive off.

He stared at where the car had been. Moxie… fun and games…so many images of Moxie…on this beach and that beach…in the street…in the classroom …in little theaters…in this room and that…getting into the back of a police car in handcuffs.

Behind him, Mrs Lopez said, “Can I get you something, Mister Fletcher? Maybe a drink…?”

He said: “Apple juice.”

She said, “We don’t have apple juice.”

“You don’t?” He turned to her.

“We never have apple juice. Why have apple juice in the land of orange juice?”

Fletch stared at her.

“I can make you a nice rum drink with orange juice.”

“Excuse me.”

Fletch went by her and up the stairs.

37

Fletch knocked on Frederick Mooney’s bedroom door and entered without waiting to be invited.

Mooney was sitting in a Morris chair, his hands in his lap. Silently, he watched Fletch.

“How long you been sober?” Fletch asked.

“Over three years.”

The airlines flight bag was on the floor beside the bed. Fletch hunkered down next to it. He lifted one of the bottles from it. He uncapped the bottle and sniffed the contents.

“You can’t get apple juice in most bars,” Mooney said.

Fletch left the bottle on the bureau. “You’re one hell of an actor.”

“I thought you knew that.” Mooney shifted in his chair. “Of course I had the advantage. Once people think of you as a drunk, they see you as a drunk.”

“Moxie said you were drunk when she arrived at her apartment in New York.”

“I had set the stage, knowing she’d show up sometime. Empty bottles around, dirty smelly glasses…”

“But why?”

“I wanted to see her, as it were, without being seen. She would have shut off the reformed Frederick Mooney. I had shut her off too many years. Her behavior would have been cool and proper in front of the great man, her father. I decided the best way to see her, to really see her, get to know her, was as a dependent. In front of a helpless old man, blind drunk, Marilyn was herself. I’ve really gotten to know her, the last few weeks. She’s really quite marvelous.”

“But she hasn’t gotten to know you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Frederick Mooney. “It’s all on film.”

“So at the apartment in New York you heard everything. Everything about Peterman—”

“Of course. I even read Midsummer Night’s Mad-ness one afternoon while she was out. I knew the fiddle was on. You see, Fletch…” Fletch, in continued shock, glanced at the man. He could not get his mind around the dimensions of this man’s acting genius. All that Peterman-Peterkin-Peterson-Patterson routine had been consciously created. “…in my twenties, I was virtually ruined by one of these charlatan friend-managers, the word friend italicised. I was dragged through courts for five years. Someone I had trusted. It virtually ruined my work, my sleep, my health. One is made to feel so vulnerable, so weak. And doing creative work while being made to feel weak and vulnerable is immensely hard. Mind breaking. Creative people should receive some protection by law. There really aren’t that many of us, and our time is short, our energies limited. Our energies should not be drained by lawyers playing at their paper games. Something similiar happened to me again in my late thirties. If I had known then what I know now—that energies do not last forever—I would have killed anyone who so assaulted me.”

“Instead you killed Steve Peterman.”

“I haven’t been able to do much for Moxie, as a father. I didn’t want her to be dragged through the courts for years, humiliated, made a fool, her life and work laid out in little boxes, her every privacy invaded. Preventing all that was something I could do for her.”

“How did you do it?”

“I’m an actor. A well-trained actor.”

“You know how to ride a horse like a guards-man and an Indian, how to handle a gun as if it were a natural extention of your hand…”

“You heard that little sermon I gave at Durty Harry’s.” Mooney’s eyes wandered over the palm trees outside the windows. “Always used to go over well at colleges.”

“Downstairs just now,” Fletch said, “when they were carting Moxie away, I remembered her telling me, years ago, that as a kid in the carnivals, whatever, small-town travelling shows, you were even a part of a knife throwing