2
She was alone in the elevator when the door opened.
In the corridor, Fletch was pulling on his jacket. For a moment, he thought his eyes were playing a joke on him: the girl with the honey-colored hair and the brown eyes.
“Freddie!” he exclaimed. “As I live and breathe! The one and only Freddie Arbuthnot.”
“Fletch,” she said. “It is true.”
“Going my way?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “I’m on my way up.”
He scooted through the closing doors. In the elevator, the button had been pushed for the eighth floor.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said.
“You never have been before.”
“Listen, Freddie, about that time in Virginia. What can I say? I was wrong. That journalism convention—you know, where we met?—was full of spooks, and I had every reason to think you were one of them.”
“I’m an honest journalist, Mr. Fletcher.” Freddie tightened her nostrils. “Unlike some people I don’t care to know.”
“Honest,” he agreed. “As honest as fried chicken.”
“Well known, too.”
“Famous!” he said. “Everybody knows the superb work Fredericka Arbuthnot turns in.”
“Then, why didn’t you know who I was in Virginia?”
“Everybody knew except me. I was just stupid. I had been out of the country.”
“You don’t read Newsworld?”
“My dentist doesn’t subscribe.”
“You don’t read the Newsworld Syndicate?”
“Not on crime. Gross stuff, crime. Reports on what the coroner found in the victim’s lower intestine. I don’t even want to know what’s in my own lower intestine.”
“I make my living writing crime for Newsworld.”
“You’re the best. Everyone says so. The scourge of defense attorneys everywhere.”
“Is it true Governor Wheeler is making you his press representative?”
“Haven’t met the old wheez yet.”
The elevator door opened.
“One look at you,” she said, “and he’ll send you back to playschool.”
He followed her off the elevator onto the eighth floor. “What are you doing in whatever town we’re in, Freddie? Interesting trial going on?”
Walking down the corridor, she said, “I’ve joined the campaign.”
“Oh? Given up journalism? Become a volunteer?”
“Not likely,” she said. “I’m still a member of the honest, working press.”
“I don’t quite get that, Freddie,” Fletch said a little louder than he meant to. “You’re a crime reporter. This is a political campaign.”
She took her room key from the pocket of her skirt. “Isn’t a political campaign somewhat like a trial by jury?”
“Only somewhat. When you lose a political campaign in this country, you don’t usually go to the slammer.”
She turned the key in the lock. “Do I make you nervous, Fletcher?”
“You always have.”
“You’re going to tell me you don’t know anything about the girl who was murdered in this motel tonight.”
“Murdered?”
“You don’t know anything about it?”
“No.”
“She was naked and beaten. Brutally beaten. Don’t need a coroner to tell me that. I saw that much with my own eyes. I would guess also raped. And further, I would guess she was either thrown off a balcony of this motel, or, virtually the same, driven to jump.”
Fletch’s eyes were round. “That only happened a half hour ago, Freddie. You couldn’t have gotten here that fast from New York or Los Angeles or—or from wherever you hang your suspicions.”
“Oh, you do know something about it.”
“I know a girl fell to her death from the roof of this motel about a half hour ago.”
“Dear Fletch. Always the last with the story.”
“Not always. Just when there’s Freddie Arbuthnot around.”
“I’d invite you into my room,” Freddie said, “but times I’ve tried that in the past I’ve been wickedly rebuffed.”
“What else do you know about this girl?”
“Not as much as I will know.”
“For sure.”
“Good night, Fletcher darling.”
Fletch stood foursquare to the door which was about to close in his face.
“Freddie! What is a crime reporter doing covering a presidential primary campaign?”
Door in hand, she stood on one tiptoed foot and kissed him on the nose.
“What’s a newspaper delivery boy doing passing himself off as a presidential candidate’s press secretary?”
3
“Who is it?” The voice through the door to Suite 748 was politely curious. Fletch was used to hearing that voice making somber pronouncements about supersonic bombers and the national budget.
“I. M. Fletcher. Walsh told me to come knock on your door.”
The door opened.
Keeping his hand on the doorknob, his arm extended either to embrace or restrain, Governor Caxton Wheeler grinned at Fletch while his eyes worked Fletch over like a football coach measuring a player for the line. Fletch fingered his collar and regretted having put back on the shirt he had been wearing all day.
Governor Caxton Wheeler’s face was huge, a map of all America, his forehead as wide as the plain states, his jaw as massive as all the South, his eyes as large and set apart as New York and Los Angeles, his nose as assertive as the skyscrapers of Chicago and Houston.
“Hello,” Fletch said. “I’m your new genius press representative.”
Smile growing stiff on his face, the presidential candidate stared at Fletch.
Fletch said: “Wanna buy a broom?”
“Well,” the governor said, “I want a clean sweep.”
“And I’ll bet you want to sweep clean,” Fletch said.
“Were you ever one of them?” the governor asked.
Fletch looked around him in the motel corridor. “One of who?”
“The Press.”
“The Press is The People, sir.”
“Funny,” said The Man Who. “I thought the government is. Come in.”
The governor took his hand off the doorknob and wandered in stockinged feet into the living room of the suite.
Fletch closed the door behind him.
The living room was decorated in Super Motel. There was a bad painting on the wall, oil on canvas, of a schooner under full sail. (In Fletch’s room there was a cardboard print of the same ship under full sail.) The four corners of the coffee table surface and the hands of the chair arms had chipped gold paint on them.
There were several liquor bottles on a side table.
The governor nodded to them. “Want a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“May I get you one?”
“No.” The governor sat on the divan. “My wife doesn’t approve. She says I have to get all my energy and all my relaxation from The People. I doubt if the sweet thing knows it, but what she is describing is a megalomaniac.”
The Man Who wore an open, washed-out, worn, sagging brown bathrobe. Over the breast pocket, in green, was CW. The robe draped his big, bare, white belly.
Fletch’s eyes moved back and forth from the deep tan of the governor’s face and the lily whiteness of the governor’s belly.
“You look like you just got home from summer camp,” the governor said. “Will the press accept you?” Fletch said nothing. The governor had not asked him to sit down. “A campaign is tough, and it’s exciting, and it’s boring. Not to worry.” On the coffee table in front of the governor, papers had spilled out of a briefcase. “By the end of this campaign—if we win this primary, that is—you’ll look as dissipated as a schoolchild in March.”