“How come Flash wasn’t with you last night? Isn’t he sort of your valet-bodyguard?”
“I don’t like having Flash around all the time. Sometimes I like to sneak a cigar. Also, he doesn’t get along too well with Bob.”
“Dr. Thom.”
“Yes. Bob calls Flash a cretin.”
Fletch sat more forward on the edge of the bed. “Hate to sound like a prosecutor, Governor, but did you have personal knowledge of Alice Elizabeth Shields?”
The governor looked Fletch in the eye. “No.”
“Do you know anything at all about her murder?”
Again the steady look. “No.” In an easier tone, he said, “You seem awfully worried. What should I do? Do you think I should make a statement?”
“Not if it looks like this.”
“What should I do? You say we’ve got these two crime writers attached to us. They’re going to write something, sometime …”
Fletch said, “I think it would look politically good for you to make a special request; ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to come in and investigate.”
“God, no.” The governor pressed back in his chair and then forward. He bounced. “F.B.I. crawling all around us with tape recorders and magnifying glasses? No way! Nothing else would get reported. Nothing I say or do. The story of this campaign would become the story of a crime investigation. It would overwhelm everything I’m doing.”
“I’m sure a discreet enquiry—”
“Discreet, my eye. Just one of those gumshoes comes near this campaign … The press would sniff him out before he got off the plane.”
“At some point in the campaign, you get to have Secret Service protection—”
“I’m not going to call for it before anybody else does. I’m in no more danger than any of the other candidates. What would be my excuse? I saw a man at the Chamber of Commerce dinner last night carrying a gun?”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a man named Flynn, used to this upper-level sort of thing, I think—”
“No, no, no. Aren’t my reasons for not doing so clear?”
“Two women have been murdered—”
“‘On the fringes of the campaign’—your own words.”
“It might happen again.”
“You run a big campaign like this through the country, and everything happens. Advance men fall off bridges into icy rivers—”
Flash stuck his head around the stateroom’s door again. “Coming up to that school, Governor.”
“Okay.”
Flash came in, closing the door behind him.
“You straight-arm this, Fletch. I’m sorry about the whole thing. I do not take it lightly. But we cannot let this campaign get sidetracked by something that is utterly irrelevant to it. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
The governor stood up. Flash had taken the governor’s suitcoat off a hanger on the back of the door, brushed it, and was holding it out for him. “Interesting talking to you,” the governor muttered.
“My privilege,” Fletch said quietly.
The governor had his hands in the pockets of his suit coat. “Got any money?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“I mean coins. Quarters. Nickels. Dimes. Thought I’d try something out at the school. Got any coins, Flash?”
“Sure.” Fletch gave the governor all the coins he had, except for one quarter. Flash gave the governor all his coins.
“And, Fletch, keep those two crime writers away from me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Arbuthnot and Hanrahan.” The governor was smoothing his jacket. “Sounds like a manufacturer of pneumatic drills.”
11
“Yeah, that made pictures,” Walsh was to say to his father at the end of the Conroy School visit. “Good for local consumption. Nothing compared to Robbins’s dumping himself in the Susquehanna River, though. That will lead the national news. In Winslow you’ve got to come up with something new, Dad. Say something new. You’ve got to.”
Clearly, The Man Who enjoyed his stop at Conroy Regional Primary School.
All the little kids were agog, but not, at first, at The Man Who might be the next President of the United States.
At first they were dazzled by the big buses with fancy antennas and cars and station wagons in the campaign caravan,
About Stella Kirchner:
About Fenella Baker:
About Bill Dieckmann, Roy Philby, etc.:
About the photographers, wearing more than one camera around their necks:
In the school auditorium, while Walsh kept glancing at his watch, the school band played “America” six times, the last no better than the first. The school principal made a speech of introduction, asking the students if they all knew where Washington is. “On the news programs!” The little girl with the gold star on her collar, officially called upon, answered, “There’s one in the upper left by Seattle, and one in the middle right by the District of Columbia.”
And the principal asked how long one can be President of the United States.
“Forever!”
“Six years!”
“No, four years!”
“Until you get shot!”
Governor Caxton Wheeler made a little speech, goal-orienting the children. He said the country needs good people who believe they can make a difference for the good of the world.
The Man Who was slow to leave the school. He stood among the children. He played magic with coins he took from his pocket. First he made a coin disappear somewhere between his hands. Then he found the coin in a child’s shirt pocket, her ear, his mouth. He leaned down and found a vanished coin in the sneaker of a brightly beaming black boy. Instantly the boy searched his other sneaker. To each child he fooled he gave the coin that mysteriously had disappeared from his hands and just as mysteriously reappeared in some unlikely place, such as up the child’s own sleeve.
The children quickly forgot about the cameras and the lights and the “city dudes.” They stood on chairs and piled on top of each other, tumbled over each other, begged to be the next fooled by the presidential candidate. The governor laughed as hard as the children. His eyes were as bright as theirs.
They pressed against him. “Don’t go, sir. You’re better than gym!” He hugged them to him.
The members of the press straggled every which way.
“Hey, Fletch,” Roy Filby stage-whispered. “Want to go to the boys’ room and pull on a joint?”
Fenella Baker was debating the abortion issue in a loud voice with the dry-mouthed school principal.
