“Yeah.”
“Sure.”
Judy Nadich burst off the elevator.
“Hey!” Fletch said to her.
She turned around, her tote bag swinging against her leg. She was crying.
“What’s the matter?” Fletch asked.
“That bitch!” Judy said.
“Who?”
“Your Ms Sullivan.” She stepped closer to Fletch. “And your Doris Wheeler!”
“What did they do?”
“Nothing. Threw me out. Called me a squirrel.”
Fletch couldn’t help smiling.
“Told me to go cover the flower show!” Fresh tears poured from her eyes. “That’s not for a month yet!”
“So screw ’em,” Fletch said.
Judy tried to collect herself in front of Freddie. “How?”
“Screw ’em in what you write.” Fletch realized James had been right: Mrs. Presidential Candidate Doris Wheeler badly needed a lesson in manners. The realization made him hot.
“I don’t have anything to write!” Judy almost wailed. “I didn’t even see what the inside of her suite looked like!”
“Oh,” he said lamely.
“This story was important to me.” Judy Nadich walked away, head down, her tote bag banging against her knees, back to do stories about flower shows and cracked teacups and the funds needed to clean the statues in the park.
“Poor local press,” Freddie sighed. “I was one once.”
Fletch pressed the elevator button. “Where?”
“New York City.”
“New York City is not local. Even in New York City, New York City is not local.”
“On a national campaign like this,” Freddie said, stepping into the elevator, “local press is seduced with a weak drink, and granted a kiss on the cheek.”
“So this is how you live.” Freddie looked around his hotel room. “Your suitcase is dark brown. Mine is light blue.”
“Yeah,” Fletch said. “That’s the difference between boys and girls.” He went into the bathroom to collect his shaving gear. “You know anything in particular about the woman who was murdered this morning?”
“Mary Cantor, age thirty-four, widowed, mother of three. Her husband was a Navy navigator killed in an accident over Lake Erie three years ago.”
Fletch tried to visualize the three children, then decided not to. “Has the woman in Chicago been identified yet? The one found in a closet off the press room?”
“Wife of an obstetrician. Member of the League of Women Voters. Highly respectable. Just not carrying identification that night. Maybe she left her purse somewhere and someone walked off with it.”
Fletch came back into the bedroom. Freddie was stretched out on the unmade bed. “I don’t see what the women have in common,” he said. “A society woman in Chicago—”
“A socially useful woman, you mean.”
“Alice Elizabeth Shields, a bookish woman with her own mind, two nights ago. And last night, a mother, Air Force widow, a night chambermaid.”
“They all have something in common.”
“What?”
“They’re all women.”
“Was the woman found last night raped?”
“Haven’t talked with the coroner himself yet. A lab assistant says she believes the woman was not raped. There’s something very rape-like about these murders, though.”
Fletch was rolling up his dirty shirts. He hadn’t been in any hotel long enough to get his laundry done. “What do you mean?”
“Rape isn’t a sexual thing,” Freddie said. “Not really. The main element in rape is to dominate a woman, subject her, mortify her. Degrade her. Sexually victimizing her is secondary to victimizing her.”
“I understand that. But without the element of actual rape, Freddie, there is no absolute proof that the murderer is a male. The murderer could be a strong woman.”
“Yeah,” Freddie said from the bed. “Fenella Baker. She tears off her blouse and turns into a muscle-bulging Amazon.”
“How was the woman last night murdered?”
“Strangled with some kind of a soft cord, the police say. Like a drapery tie, or a bathrobe sash. They haven’t found whatever it was.”
“The lack of sexual rape bothers me.” Fletch took a jacket from the closet, folded it quickly, and put it in the suitcase. “A strong woman …”
“Terrible.” Freddie got up, took the jacket out of the suitcase, and folded it properly. “Got to make clothes last on a trip like this.”
“I never wear that jacket.”
“Then why do you carry it?”
“That’s the jacket I carry.” He pointed to one on the unmade bed. “That’s the jacket I wear.”
Freddie tossed the clothes in his suitcase like someone tossing a salad with her fingers. “Fletcher, this suitcase is full of nothing but laundry.”
“I know.”
“You’ve got to do something about that.”
“Where? When?”
“Or we’ll put you off the press bus. There are enough stinkers on the press bus as it is. You notice no one will sit next to Hanrahan?”
“I notice he’s always stretched out over two seats.”
“He smells bad.” She resettled his shaving kit so the suitcase could close.
“Will you leave my damned laundry alone?”
She dropped the suitcase lid and stared at it. “Relationships between men and women can be nice. I guess.”
He watched her from the chair where he was sitting. “Can’t say you never had one, Freddie.”
“I live out of a suitcase, Fletcher. All the time. Anything that doesn’t fit in the suitcase can’t come with me.”
“Why? Why do you live this way?”
She was running the tips of her fingers along the top edge of Fletch’s suitcase. “Why am I Fredericka Arbuthnot? Because I have the chance to be. I’d be a fool to pass it up. Enough women get the chance to be girl friends, wives, and mothers.” She sat in the hotel room’s other chair. “Where would the world be without my sterling reporting?”
“Want me to order up coffee?”
“We’d never get it.”
Not giving any neighborhood snail a good race, Flash driving, Fletch had gone to the television studio and sat through the governor’s taped interview. Deftly, The Man Who had turned the interview to the high incidence of crime in this country. He even referred to having heard about the chambermaid murdered in his hotel that morning. The interview with the candidate was to be shown on the noon news.
“You saw Hanrahan’s shit this morning?” Fletch asked.
“Sure.”
“So now you’ll have to write something.”
“Already have,” Freddie answered. “I was fair. Reported that the murders have happened on the fringe of the campaign, no connection with the campaign has been made, the police so far don’t even think the murders are
