“I’ll get the muffler fixed!” Fletch said. “I promise!”
“Report a robbery in progress!” the man behind the counter shouted.
“All I did was ask for directions! I didn’t even ask for change for a parking meter!”
“He ain’t got no gun,” the voice behind Fletch’s ear rumbled.
The man behind the counter looked at Fletch’s hands and then the pockets of his jeans.
“Let me point out to you,” Fletch said with great sincerity, “you can’t shoot me with that cannon without blowing away the guy behind me.”
The gun wavered. The steel bands clamping Fletch’s arms to his sides slackened just slightly.
“Workmen’s Compensation won’t cover!” Fletch yelled as he ran backward, pushing the guy holding him.
Within a meter, they crashed into a tall, wire bottle rack.
Instantly, as bottles smashed, there was the reek of bourbon.
The guy’s hands disappeared from in front of Fletch. “I’m gettin’ cut,” he yelled.
Sitting on the guy’s lap, Fletch bounced up and down once or twice, then he leaned back against his chest.
“Ow!” the guy yelled.
Bottles were raining down on them. One landed on Fletch’s left knee, causing more pain than Fletch thought possible.
The bottles that hit the floor smashed and splashed bourbon over both of them.
The guy with the gun was moving along the counter trying to get a bead on Fletch that did not include the guy Fletch was sitting on.
Fletch rolled through broken glass and bourbon puddles to the door. “Last time I’ll ask you guys for directions!”
As he stood up he grabbed the door open.
Halfway through the door the gun banged. The breakproof glass in the door shattered.
Opening his car door, Fletch shouted back at the store, “If you don’t know where Palmiera Drive is, why don’t you just say so?”
At a sedate pace, he turned right off Washington onto Twenty-third.
Sirens filled the air.
“Mrs. Habeck?”
The lady with blued hair, flower-patterned dress, and green sneakers sat in a straight chair alone by the swimming pool. There was a red purse near her feet.
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Habeck.”
Looking up at Fletch in the sunlight, her nose twitched like a rabbit’s.
“I. M. Fletcher.
“He’s not here.”
Fletch had spent a moment ringing the front doorbell of 12339 Palmiera Drive. It was a nice property, a brick house floating on rhododendrons, but not, to Fletch’s mind, the home of someone who could or would give away five million dollars without taking deep breaths.
And there was no one in the house to open the door to him on a Monday morning.
Fletch had explored through the rhododendrons until he found the blued-haired lady contemplating the clear, unruffled swimming pool.
“One never knows where he is,” Mrs. Habeck said. “Donald wanders away. That’s the only thing, for certain, that can be said for Donald. He wanders away.” She reached out her hand and closed her fingers as if grabbing something that wasn’t there. She said, “He wanders.”
“Maybe I can talk to you.”
Again her nose twitched. “Young man, are you very, very drunk?”
“No, ma’am. Do I seem drunk?”
“You smell drunk.”
Fletch held a section of his T-shirt up to his nose and sniffed it. “That’s my new deodorant. Do you like it?”
“It’s an odorant.”
“It’s called Bamn-o.”
“It’s called bourbon.” Mrs. Habeck averted her nose. “You reek of bourbon.”
Fletch sniffed his T-shirt again. “It is pretty bad, isn’t it.”
“I know bourbon when I smell it,” said Mrs. Habeck. “You’re not wearing a very good brand.”
“It was on special sale, I think.”
“Friday that bourbon did not exist.” Mrs. Habeck spoke slowly, and there was sadness in her small, gray eyes. “I’ve heard of you newspapermen. Donald once told me about a journalist he knew who filled his waterbed with bourbon. He told his friends he had refined the art of being sloshed. Lying there, he could nip from the waterbed’s valve. He said he could get the motion of his bourbonbed to match exactly the swing and sway of the world as he got drunk. Well, he sank lower and lower. Within three months he was back sleeping flat on the floor.” Mrs. Habeck resettled her hands in her lap. “It was a double bed, too.”
Fletch took a deep breath and held it. He sensed that Mrs. Habeck would be offended by laughter.
Tightening his stomach muscles to restrain himself, he looked away across the pool. Down a grassy slope, a gardener wearing a sombrero was weeding a flower bed.
“Oh, my,” he finally said, sighing. “Truth is, I had an accident.”
“You people always have an excuse for drinking. Good news. Bad news. No news.”
“No,” Fletch said. “A real accident. I stopped at the liquor store at the intersection of Washington and Twenty-third, and while I was there, a rack of bourbon got tipped over. It splashed all over an employee and me.”
Her pale, sad eyes studied Fletch.
“I haven’t been drinking. Honest. May I sit down?”
Reluctantly, she said, “All right.”
He sat in another wrought-iron straight chair. She was in the shade of the table’s umbrella, but he was not.
“About this five million dollars, Mrs. Habeck…”
“Five million dollars,” she repeated.
“… you and your husband decided to give to the art museum?”
Slowly, she said, “Yussss,” in the hiss of a deflating tire. “Tell me about it.”
“What?”
“What about it?” she asked.
Fletch hesitated. “I was hoping you’d tell me about it.”
Mrs. Habeck drew herself up slightly in the chair. “Yes, well, my husband and I decided to give five million dollars to the art museum.”
“I know that much. Your husband is a lawyer?”
“My husband,” said Mrs. Habeck, “wanders off. Away, away. He always has, you know. That’s something that can be said about him.”
“I see,” Fletch said politely. He was beginning to wonder how much vodka Mrs. Habeck had slipped into her morning coffee. “He’s senior partner in the firm of Habeck, Harrison and Haller?”
“I told him he shouldn’t do that,” Mrs. Habeck said, frowning. “Three different
“Of course,” said Fletch. “Disconcerting.”
“Gives the impression of inconsistency,” she said. “As if, you know, the partners couldn’t be counted on to get together on anything. To agree.”
