Fletch Won

“He was about to rob the store.”

“He gave a name! He was waiting for pizza!”

They pulled Fletch’s arms behind his back.

He felt the cool metal of the handcuffs around his wrists, heard the click as they locked.

“He’s robbed lots of stores,” the cop said. “Liquor stores, convenience stores. Once he got his pizza, he’d rob this store.”

“Oh,” the man said.

The other cop said, “Even a robber’s got to eat, you know.”

“He doesn’t look like a bad guy,” the man in running shorts said. “Fast. You’d never catch him, once he started runnin’.”

“Well,” a cop said. “We caught him.”

The man said to Fletch, “Your name Ralton?”

“No.”

“That does it for me,” the man said. “He gave the name Ralton. Phony name.”

“His name’s Liddicoat,” said a cop. “Alexander Liddicoat.”

“That’s probably phony, too,” said the man.

“Ramirez?” the counterman called.

The woman in tennis whites paid for her pizza.

“Let’s go,” the cop said.

Both hanging on to Fletch, they waited for the woman to go through the door with her pizza.

“Can we take my pizza with me?” Fletch asked. “I’ll let you have some.”

“Thanks anyway,” a cop answered. “We just had Chinese take-out.”

Outside they put him in the back of the police car carefully and slammed the door.

As they settled in the front seat, the cop in the passenger seat looked at his watch. “Eleven-forty. We take him all the way downtown, we’ll never get back in time to go off duty at twelve.”

“What’s so special about him?”

“Dispatch said take him straight downtown to headquarters.”

“Yeah.” The driver started the car. “We run a taxi service.”

“I could save you the trip,” Fletch said. He was trying to fit his handcuffed hands into the small of his back against the car seat. “My name’s not Liddi-whatever. I’ve got identification in my wallet.”

“Sure. I bet you have. Might as well get goin’, Alf.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Fletch said.

The cop in the passenger seat said, “Twelve years on the force and I’ve never yet arrested the right guy.”

The car started forward. “We didn’t read him his rights.”

The other cop looked through the grille at Fletch.

“You know your rights?”

“Sure.”

“That’s good. He knows his rights, Alf.”

“Cruel and unusual punishment already,” Fletch said. “Lettin’ a guy smell pizza for fifteen minutes, then not lettin’ him have any.”

“Tell your lawyer.”

The police car bumped over the curb from the pizza store’s parking lot onto the road.

Fletch said, “Next stop, the guillotine.”

“Fletcher?”

On the cell bunk that reeked of disinfectant, Fletch sighed with relief. The guard opening the cell door had called him Fletcher. Confusion regarding who he was was over. Now he could go to his apartment and get some sleep.

He stood up. He figured it must be about four in the morning.

For about three hours he had lain on his bunk listening to two men, not synchronized, vomiting, one old man whimpering, another singing, for more than an hour, over and over again, the refrain I’ll be Mowed, Lucy, if you will…. In the cell next to him, two male streetwalkers argued endlessly and passionately about barbers. One had asked Fletch how to get a job with the Ben Franklyn Friend Service. Fletch answered he didn’t know, he was just a bouncer there. Fletch’s cellmate was a portly, middle-aged man in white trousers and sandals who said he was a schoolteacher. The afternoon before, he said, he had stabbed one of his students. There was blood on his trousers. After telling Fletch this, he curled on his bunk and fell asleep.

“Come on,” the guard said. “Move it.”

“Am I free to go?”

He followed the guard between the cells to the steel door.

While he was being booked as Alexander Liddicoat, for more than twenty incidents of armed robbery, Fletch’s wallet and watch had been taken from him. Photographs of Alexander Liddicoat were with the warrants. Looking at them upside down, Fletch saw a remote resemblance. While handing it over, Fletch showed the booking officer identification in his wallet, his driver’s license and press card, proving who he was. Without really looking at the identification photographs, the booking officer charged him with stealing the wallet of Irwin Maurice Fletcher, as well.

The other side of the steel door, Fletch turned right, toward the stairs to the booking desk and the lobby.

The guard grabbed him by the elbow. “This way, please.”

They went to the left, past offices. Most of the doors were open. Lights were on, people working in the offices.

At the end of the corridor, they came to a closed door. The guard opened it with a key. He snapped on the inside light.

Six chairs were around a long conference table. Nothing else was in the room. High up on the far wall was a barred window.

“Wait here,” the guard said.

“Why are you holding me?”

The guard closed the door behind him.

Fletch snapped off the light, crawled onto the table in the dark, and fell asleep.

The light snapped on. The door was open.

Lieutenant Gomez was standing over Fletch.

“You make yourself at home wherever you are, don’t you?”

Fletch sat up. “What time is it?”

He was cold.

“Five-thirty A.M. The jailhouse swimming pool doesn’t open for another half-hour. The mayor and his top aides are down there cleaning it for you now. They know you like to go skinny-dipping every morning.”

“Glad to see you.” Fletch remained sitting on the table. “You get to work early.”

“Working on an important case,” Gomez said. “The murder of Donald Edwin Habeck. You know anything about it?”

“Yeah. Read something about it in the newspapers.” Fletch yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Did you get the gun?”

“What gun?”

“The gun I left for you last night. I left it upstairs at the desk for you, with a note.”

Gomez repeated: “What gun?”

“I think it’s the gun used to kill Habeck. I found—”

Gomez looked at the door.