“Any kids?”
“Grown. They were devastated. Who was their mother to get stabbed? A nice little person.”
“Did they ever catch the guy who did it?”
“A man was seen running away carrying a purse. Maybe she had fifty dollars in the purse. I doubt that much. He didn’t steal the new tablecloth she had just bought. The whole thing was unnecessary. We already had a tablecloth.”
“I dunno,” Fletch said. “I’m real sorry for you, man.”
“It’s not that.” Ira waved his hand in front of his face. “It’s just that every time I hear of one of these murders—women getting killed—just stirs the whole thing up again.”
“Sure.”
“Jeez. You can’t come down to breakfast without hearing about some woman getting killed down the corridor.”
“What do you mean?” Fletch asked.
“You didn’t hear? Some reporter you must have been. A chambermaid got killed last night. Strangled.”
“In this hotel?”
“Yeah. The kitchen help found her when they came in this morning. At four o’clock. In a service elevator. Two nights ago was it?—a woman gets pushed off the roof of the motel we were in. I don’t know. We go through this whole election process as if we were civilized human beings. What good does it do? It’s just a big pretense that we’re civilized.”
Fletch wanted to say, Wait a minute….
“What’s the matter with you?” Ira asked. “Now you look sick. What happened to your tan? Didn’t know it was the kind you could rub off. Better take some of my coffee.”
“No. Thanks.”
“Take it. You look like your heart just sat down and took off its shoes.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. Have some coffee. No good for me anyway. My doctor says it makes me nervous.”
24
“You all right, Fletch?” Betsy Ginsberg asked. She was standing in the hotel lobby outside the coffee shop.
“Sure.”
“You look white.”
“Just saw Paul Szep’s editorial cartoon.” In fact, he had. Roy Filby had showed it to him at the coffee shop’s cash register. “So how do you like Walsh,” Fletch tried to ask easily, “now that you know him?”
Michael J. Hanrahan went by into the coffee shop. He grinned/grimaced at Fletch and held up three fingers.
Fletch ignored him.
Betsy returned the question. “What do you really think of Walsh?”
“He’s a cool guy,” Fletch answered. “Forgiving, reassuring, absolutely competent. Totally in control.”
“I don’t know,” Betsy said.
“So he didn’t fall all over you,” Fletch said. “Think of the position he’s in.”
The Man Who was getting off the elevator. The eyes of everyone in the lobby were attracted to him. He was smiling.
People intercepted him as he crossed the lobby. Several had children by the hands. A few snapped pictures of The Man Who, as if the world were not being nearly saturated with pictures of him. The Man Who was shaking hands, listening briefly, speaking briefly, as he came across the lobby. He patted some of the children on their heads. He did not take coins from their ears.
Fletch walked close beside him. Quietly he said, “We’ve got to talk. Privately. Soon.”
“Sure,” the governor said. “What’s up?”
Into the governor’s ear, Fletch said, “Ira Lapin tells me another young woman has been murdered.”
The governor reached through the mob, went out of his way to shake a bellman’s hand.
With his public grin on his face, the governor spoke almost through his teeth. “Two people in the United States are murdered every hour, Fletch. Didn’t you know that?”
“Talk,” Fletch said.
“Sure, sure.”
25
“I’m glad you asked me that question.” Sitting behind Flash in the rented black sedan, Governor Wheeler’s eyes twinkled at Fletch sitting in the front passenger seat. Sitting behind Fletch, Lansing Sayer had just asked some general question about the “New Reality” speech The Man Who had delivered in Winslow the day before. Sayer had a tape recorder going and also was working a pen and notebook. “I guess I made a rather sweeping statement.”
It was a raw, bone-chilling day with a heavy sky. Flash had the car heater on high.
“Senator Upton says you’re proposing a technocracy,” Lansing said.
“I’m not proposing anything,” the governor said. “I’m simply making an observation.”
Fletch remembered James’s advice that when he thought the candidate was about to say something profound and statesmanlike he ought to stick a glove in his mouth.
“Just observe,” the governor said slowly, thoughtfully, “what technology is getting the major share of the governments’ attention. Advanced weaponry. Machines of death and destruction. Do you realize what a single tank costs these days? A fighter aircraft? An aircraft carrier? I don’t just mean our government. I mean all governments. Some governments are exporting weaponry at a high rate; others are importing at a high rate; some do both. The technology upon which almost all governments concentrate is the technology of weaponry. Advanced bows and arrows.”
It was true: Flash drove slowly. He hugged the right lane of the city’s main street and proceeded at only slightly better than a pedestrian’s pace. Fletch had been in funeral processions that went faster.
“At the same time,” the governor continued, at about the same pace as the car, “over the earth has been spreading a communications system that does or can reach into every hovel, capable of collecting and dispersing information instantaneously. An amazing technology, for the most part developed by free enterprise, private business— particularly the entertainment business.
“Through this technology, the people of this earth are beginning to recognize each other, know each other, and realize their commonality of interest.
“This technology is far more powerful, and far more positive I might add, than the thermonuclear bomb.”
It was hardly noticeable when the car came to a full stop, but, indeed, they were stopped at a red light. The people crossing the street in front of the car had no idea they were so close to a leading presidential candidate. They were all hurrying someplace, to work, to shop. None looked in the car. And none knew what was being discussed in that black sedan.
“Governments lie now, and all the people know it. A government runs a phony election, and all the people of the world witness it. Governments put on brushfire wars now for some diplomatic or ideologic reason, and all the world see themselves being maimed and killed.”
Lansing Sayer dropped his hands, his pen and notebook in his lap, and said, “I don’t know what all this is about.”
Flash had taken off his gloves and dropped them on the seat beside Fletch.
The car oozed forward again.
“I’m talking about the gathering and dissemination of information,” the governor said, “instead of weapons.”
Lansing said, “Graves stated that in your speech yesterday, you seemed to be disparaging—among other ideologies—Christianity, Judaism, and democracy.”
“I don’t disparage ideas at all,” the governor said. “I’m having one, am I not?”