Fletch Won

her when she came back. But she’s harmless. She has no money, no credit cards. I have no idea how she gets around. Have never been able to figure that out. On nice days, I guess she goes and sits in the park, walks around the stores pretending she’s buying things, goes back to her old home and sits by the pool.”

“Yeah. That’s where she was yesterday.” “She must appear to Jasmine as sort of the Ghost of the First Wife.” Nancy laughed. “So what. She turns up at my house two or three times a week. Sits and watches the television. Sits and watches the children. Tells them absolutely crazy things, like about the time she made friends with a great black bear in the woods, and the bear taught her how to fish. The children adore her.”

“And she loves the children?”

“How do I know? She keeps showing up.”

“And you don’t think this woman should have been confined?”

Nancy’s jaw tightened. “I don’t think she should have been left in isolation for years. I don’t think she should have been socially ostracized. No. I don’t think she should have been thrown out of her home. When strange symptoms began appearing, I don’t think my father needed to continue what he was doing. They could have retired, started another life somewhere. Or, if it was too late, some sort of a paid housekeeper-nurse could have been hired to stay with her, give her some company.”

Nancy was silent for a long moment, the muscles in her jaw working. Then she said, “My father got rid of her through some legal trickery, divorce and confinement, because he wanted to marry pea-brained Jasmine.”

“You don’t like Jasmine, of course.”

“Like her?” Nancy looked across the car at Fletch. “I feel sorry for her. The same thing is happening to her as happened to my mother.”

They went down a ramp from the freeway onto a two-lane road through fairly decent farmland.

Nancy said, “I heard on the television this morning that someone confessed to my father’s murder.”

“Yes,” Fletch said. “Stuart Childers. A client of your father’s. Accused of murdering his brother. Acquitted two or three months ago.”

“So?” Nancy said.

“He was released by the police immediately. I don’t know why.”

Nancy said, “What are you getting at, friend?”

“I don’t think it was a gangland slaying,” Fletch said, “despite the suggestion in this morning’s News-Tribune”

“You think I did it?”

“Someone in the family heard your father intended, or said he intended, to dispose of all his worldly goods, for reasons sacred or profane. Incidentally, my source reported that your father said, last week, that no one gave ‘a tin whistle’ for him. His words.”

Nancy snorted. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Someone decided to do him in before he decided to do the family out. You, your husband. Your mother, for your sake or the sake of your kids. Your father’s second wife.”

“You don’t understand Tom.”

“He may be the important poet, the intellectual you say he is. But where was he Monday morning?”

“At the university.”

“What time is his first class on Mondays?”

Nancy hesitated. “Two in the afternoon.”

“Okay.”

“Poverty is important to Tom. The fact that he, his work is being scorned. It makes the sacrifice more real, the poetry,” she stuttered, “more significant, monumental.”

“You weren’t brought up in squalor,” Fletch said. “Your daddy may not have bounced you on his knee, but you had a stocked refrigerator in a clean home, with a swimming pool in the garden. Plus a lot of washing machines.”

“Frankly, friend, I don’t want a penny from my father. People are still getting mugged, raped, and murdered because my father took their money.”

“Ah, the beauty of violence!” Fletch said. “You’ve got five kids crawling around the floor. You said you are headed for Starvation Lane. Not many mothers let their kids starve, if there’s an alternative.”

After a moment, Nancy said, “Monday morning I was home alone with the kids.”

“Great witnesses. Got any other?”

“No.”

Fletch slowed as they passed a sign saying THE MONASTERY OF ST. THOMAS. He turned right through the gates.

“There’s a guard at the gates to the News-Tribune parking lot,” he said. “Checking cars. I see someone, knowing your father was going to the newspaper that morning to arrange for the announcement of his giving away his fortune, walking into the parking lot, shooting him as he was getting out of his car at the back of the lot, and walking out again, unquestioned.”

The car was rising on the road through a well-kept forest.

“Who, Mother?”

“She does have her own way of coming and going,”

Fletch said. “And her own point of view. And what does she have to lose? She’s already been committed as insane.”

“You haven’t mentioned Jasmine.”

“I haven’t met Jasmine. By the way, your father has a cook now.”

“Good. Jasmine has someone to talk to. I doubt she can fry eggs.”

“A young wife, possibly about to be left high and dry through her husband’s spiritual conversion or his legal trickery…”

Atop a gardened knoll ahead of them was a large, stuccoed, Spanish-style building.

“Tom’s self-image would be destroyed by our having money,” Nancy said. “My mother couldn’t focus on anything long enough to do murder. I don’t care enough about my father or his money to have murdered him.”

“And then there’s Robert.” Fletch put the car in the gravel car park and turned off the engine.

“Now you’re really crazy.”

“I’ll wait here for you.”

Her hand on the car door knob, Nancy didn’t move. Again she stared through the windshield at unmoving scenery.

“I’m sorry for you,” Fletch said. “This will be tough on both of you. I’ll be here.”

“No,” Nancy said. “Come with me, will you, friend? This place gives me the creeps.”

“Have you been in a monastery before?” Robert Habeck took Fletch by the elbow and steered him toward a backless bench across the small courtyard.

“No,” Fletch answered. “The silence is ear-splitting.”

“I heard the noise of your car.” Robert smiled. It seemed an admonition.

Fletch and Nancy Habeck Farliegh had been shown silently into a small, cool waiting room immediately inside the main door. They sat on a carved wooden bench.

In a few minutes, the abbot entered. He did not greet them, or sit down. Nancy explained she had come to the monastery to tell her brother their father was dead. The abbot nodded and left without uttering a single word.

Waiting, Nancy explained to Fletch that this room and the small, adjacent, high-walled courtyard were the only places females were allowed in the monastery. She had last visited Robert after her first baby was born, almost seven years ago. Since then she had written him once a year, at Christmas. She had never had an answer from him.

They waited a little more than forty-five minutes.

When Robert entered the room, he smiled and held out his hands to his sister. He did not embrace her or kiss