Fletch and the Widow Bradley (19 page)

Fletch kissed Francine Bradley on the cheek. “Good night, Francine. Thanks for dinner.”

“G 
O O D   M O R N I N G
,   M 
O X I E
. Did I wake you up?”

“Of course you woke me up. Who is this?”

“Your landlord. Your banker.”

“Jeez, Fletcher, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to be at rehearsal until two o’clock.”

“California time or New York time?”

“Are you still in New York?”

“Yeah, but I’m leaving for Texas in a few minutes.”

“Why are you going to Texas?”

“I’m looking for a body, old dear. I keep not finding one.”

“Thomas Bradley is not alive and hiding out in New York?”

“Apparently not. Despite my best efforts to shake up his sister, she does not produce him.”

“What does she say?”

“She seems genuinely upset by everything I tell her. She’s a smart, cool, efficient lady. She has to know that sooner or later I’m going to blow a whistle, bring what evidence I have to the authorities. I really believe she would produce her brother by now—if it were possible.”

“Gee, whiz, Fletch, I have an idea—maybe Thomas Bradley died, despite that article in the
News-Tribune
. Did you ever think of that?”

“I’m beginning to believe in my own theories.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

“So far, Fletch, darling, your theories have been worth about as much as a grin in a wrestling match.”

“Trial and error, trial and error.”

“What’s in Texas?”

“Everything, if you ask a Texan. It’s the original home of the Bradley family.”

“So what, she said, eager to roll over and go back to sleep.”

“So when you’re looking for someone, dead or alive, don’t you look in his home?”

“Not nowadays. We don’t have homes anymore. Just places where we live. The truth is, Fletch, you have no idea what you’re doing.”

“You are correct.”

“You are spinning your wheels and going nowhere.”

“Correct again.”

“You’re dashing from Mexico to New York to Texas to God-knows-where because way down in your conceited little heart you just can’t believe you did the utterly stupid thing of publicly quoting a dead man as if he were still among the quick.”

“Your exactitude, Moxie, is doing nothing to encourage me.”

“I hope. It’s also correct you wouldn’t be zipping around the landscape like a bitch in heat if you hadn’t received a legacy from one unknowing James St. E. Crandall, and, I might add, my permission to use it.”

“Too true.”

“Foolish me.”

“I hope you’re contrite.”

“I’m not contrite. I’m cold in bed alone. A different emotion altogether.”

“You should be with me, in an overheated New York hotel room. Steam heat and mirrors everywhere.”

“Well, I hope you’re having a nice vacation with yourself. If you care, you’ve lost another job.”

“Didn’t have another job.”

“You did, too. I told you so. The male lead in
In Love
.”

“I’ve lost that job? Oh, woe is me! Woe! I say, woe!”

“Sam is gone. Replaced by Rick Caswell. He’s absolutely marvelous.”

“I’m so glad.”

“He’s physically beautiful, with big lashes, you know?”

“No.”

“His timing is perfect.”

“No trouble with thick thighs, eh?”

“What? Oh, no. Ran cross-country for Nebraska. He’s beautiful.”

“I think you said that.”

“Did I? Sorry. He’s beautiful.”

“Oh.”

“Really.”

“I’ve got the point. Say, Moxie—?”

“May I go back to sleep now? I mean, I only answered the phone hoping it was your ex-wife again, so I could tell her more lies.”

“How’d you like to do some spade work for me?”

“On this Bradley thing?”

“I know you don’t believe in it; you’re willing to chalk the whole thing up to my own incompetence and stupidity …”

“I really don’t have much time, Fletch. The play is opening—”

“Just a little spade work, Moxie.”

“Anything, darling. Oh, landlord and banker.”

“Would you get a gang together—maybe your pals from the theater—and go dig up Enid Bradley’s backyard? She’s gone pretty regularly from nine-to-five.”

“What?”

“You can tell them it’s a treasure hunt, or something.”

“Is that what you mean by spade work?”

“You’ll want to bring more than one spade, to get the whole yard dug up in eight hours.”

“Now you want to help Enid Bradley do her gardening?”

“No, no. You don’t get the point. I’m looking for something.”

“What?”

“What I’m always looking for: Thomas Bradley.”

“What? Fletch, you’re not serious!”

“I think Enid planted her husband in the back yard.”

“Fletch.”

“Yes.”

“Fletch, you’re not thinking.”

“I’m not?”

“If you find Thomas Bradley under his wife’s rhododendrons,
you’d be proving that he is dead.”

“It would strongly so indicate.”

“And if Thomas Bradley is dead, you’re ruined.”

“That certainly has occurred to me.”

“So why do you, of all people, want to find his body?”

“Two reasons. It would satisfy my curiosity.”

“You have an expensive curiosity. What’s your second brilliant reason?”

“It would be a helluva story, of course.”

“Fletcher—”

“Will you do it?”

“No.”

“You all need the exercise by now. Especially that Rick fellow. Think of spending a nice day digging in the garden.”

“Rick does not need the exercise. He’s—”

“I know.”

“—beautiful.”

“Moxie, you make up the damndest, most unacceptable reasons for not doing as you’re asked.”

“You just don’t know how to take being fired gracefully! Roll over, Fletch! Play dead!”

“I’m on to something here, Moxie. I really am. Go dig up the garden. Please!”

“Bye, Fletcher. I just fell back to sleep.”

“Moxie? … Moxie? … Moxie?”

F 
I N A L L Y   A    T A X I
rolled up to the curb in front of the Dallas Registry. The driver rolled down his window.

“Three forty nine Grantchester Street,” Fletch said.

“Why would you want to go there?” The expression on the taxi driver’s face was the one taxi drivers all over the world use while talking to
damned furriners who don’t know what they’re talkin’ about
.

“Why wouldn’t I want to go there?”

“You lookin’ for somebody?”

“You might say so,” Fletch drawled.

“Well, you won’t find him.”

“I’m beginning to get that idea.”

“I’m pretty sure all that way’s a big owell.”

“A big what?”

“ ‘Course not sure of that number in particular. What’s you say the number is?”

“Three forty nine.”

“Might’s well get in. You look more like you can stand to lose the fare’n I can.”

Inside his clothes Fletch’s body was running with sweat from the dry heat. After he closed the door of the back seat he heard the air conditioner whirring high. The interior of the car was degrees colder. The driver started the car and, not interfering with anyone in Dallas who wanted to get ahead of him, followed the traffic sedately. As he drove he rolled up his window, making the interior of the car even colder.

“All that way’s up there a big owell.”

At nine o’clock Monday morning Fletch had been at the Registry of Births and Deaths in downtown Dallas, Texas. A slim, gray-haired woman had taken his simple enquiry not only as a great interest and cause of her own but also as an opportunity to be hospitable to someone clearly not native Texan. She poured Fletch coffee from the office pot, offered him a doughnut, which she insisted had been ordered by mistake, disappeared into the stacks and returned with a volume really too big for her to carry and dusty enough to make her white blouse look like it had been run over by a bus. Besides the date of birth, she established that Thomas Bradley indeed had been born in Dallas, Texas, at the Dallas Hospital, of Lucy Jane (McNamara) and John Joseph Bradley, of three forty nine Grantchester Street.

“I’m just tellin’ you it’s a big owell, sonny, so when we get that way you won’t turn on me mad for bringin’ you that way.”

“I won’t turn mad,” Fletch promised.

“ ‘Less you’re in ‘struction.”

“In what?”

“You looked like you’re in ‘struction I never would say nothin’. But you don’t.”

“Oh, yes,” Fletch said.

The sunlight reflected from a million mirrors as they drove along, from the windows of buildings, the windshields and chromium of cars. The driver was wearing sunglasses.

The sweat on Fletch’s body froze. He held his arms close to his body.

The lady at the Registry of Births and Deaths had been very kind and very helpful, dragging out volume after volume for him. He
doubted her blouse would ever be pure white again.

The taxi driver took a right turn, then another. The sign saying
Grantchester
was tipped.

Ahead of them, both sides of the street, was an enormous construction site. Chain-link fence ran along both sidewalks. An idle bulldozer dozed among the rubble. There were no workers in sight. Whatever buildings, houses, trees which had been there had been knocked down. On neither side of the road had new building commenced.

“Urban removal,” the driver said. He slowed the car and brought it nearer the dusty curb. “A big owell.”

“Oh,” Fletch said. He had never gone so far to see a hole. “A neighborhood gone.”

“No one here,” the driver said simply. “Whoever you’re lookin’ for.”

“Guess not.”

“No one even to ask after him.”

“No.”

“Lotsa ‘struction goin’ on in Dallas,” the driver said.

“Makes you proud, don’t it?” Fletch said.

He gave the driver the name of the hotel where he had spent Sunday night and would not spend Monday night.

“Francine?”

Fletch had not been sure she would pick up the phone to him. He had identified himself properly to her secretary.

Returning to the hotel he had showered, changed to trunks, played around the hotel’s roof-top pool awhile, until he felt his Puerto de Orlando sunburn beginning to sting again. Now he was sitting on the edge of his bed, wondering which way to dress before checking out.

“Yes, Mister Fletcher. I mean, Fletch.” Francine’s voice was low, sounded cautious and tired.

“Any new thoughts?” Fletch asked. He had direct-dialled station-to-station. There was no way either the secretary or Francine could know he was calling New York from Dallas.

“About what?”

“About what we talked about Friday night.”

“Well, I see that you’ve been damaged, Fletch. I understand that. Some mix-up at Wagnall-Phipps caused you to lose your job. Your profession. I’d like to talk to Enid about making it up to you.”

“How do you mean?”

“Financially. Whether it was Charles Blaine’s mistake, or some office mischief—or because of Enid’s and my decision to delay news of Tom’s death six months—the fact remains you got caught in the middle and suffered damage. It’s partly our fault—I see that—or the fault of Wagnall-Phipps. You’ve suffered damage at our hands. So much so that you’re imagining things. Wild things.”

Her throaty voice was so soft Fletch realized he was pressing the phone receiver hard against his ear.

“I’d like to recommend to Enid we make it up to you somehow—like give you half a year’s pay. Enough to let you go to Europe, or whatever, take a vacation, think out what you’re going to do next with your life.”

“That’s kind of you,” he said.

“Well, I really believe we owe it to you. I figure all this confusion happened just to protect Enid’s authority in the company, get her through a bad time. There’s no reason you should be wiped out by it.”

“Francine, where were you born?”

There was a silence before she said, “My father, you know, was an engineer. I was born on station.”

“Where was that?”

“Juneau, Alaska.”

“I see.”

“Fletch, why don’t you let me talk to Enid about all this?”

“You don’t seem to have thought much of the evidence I presented you, Francine.”

“Oh, I’ve thought about it. And I find simple explanations, for everything, incredibly obvious. The one thing I will never tell Enid about, though, is that that Swiss undertaker gave her the ashes of a burned rug, or whatever you said. That’s horrid. I trust you’ll never let Enid know, either.”

Looking at his toes, Fletch smiled.

“May I see you again?” Fletch asked.

“I wish you would. Toward the end of the week?”

“Thursday night?” Fletch asked.

“Yes. Come to the apartment Thursday evening. By then I’ll have talked with Enid at length about all this. I will know what she thinks. I’m sure she’ll agree with me. A trip abroad might be nice for you, at this point in your life. Help you sort things out.”

Fletch said, “I’ll see you Thursday night.”

After putting the telephone receiver back in its cradle, Fletch walked across his Dallas hotel room to his suitcase and pulled out his sweater.

“M 
O X I E
?”

“Fletch?”

“Hello.”

“Hey, we’re running through the last scene. Someone said I had a call from Juneau, Alaska, for Pete’s sake. I don’t know anyone in Juneau, Alaska.”

“You know me.”

“You’re in Juneau, Alaska?”

“Yup.”

“Boy, you can’t do anything right. You aim for Dallas, Texas and hit Juneau, Alaska, Fletch style. Linda warned me about you coming home from the office by way of Hawaii. At least she had a meatloaf to keep her company.”

“Stop a minute.”

“Are there dead people in Juneau, or what?”

“I was in Dallas yesterday.”

“Hey, Fletch. You’re not supposed to interrupt rehearsals, you know? I mean, suppose everybody got called to the phone. Opening night would never happen.”

“So why did you come to the phone?”

“Thought it might be dear old Freddy calling, demanding the presence of Ophelia again, or something. A lady with nerves of steel for his hard-times knife-throwing act.”

“I want to ask you something.”