Nachman put her nose up at the corners of the ceilings. “Used to be a whore house,” she said.
“Really?” Fletch said. “I never knew that.”
In the front hall, Fletch turned in a complete circle.
McKensie approached. Bitterly he said to Fletch, “Thanks, mate.”
Then he went up the stairs.
From the front porch of The Blue House Fletch watched them put Moxie in the police car. Chief of Detectives Roz Nachman got in the back seat with her.
He watched the car drive off.
He stared at where the car had been. Moxie… fun and games…so many images of Moxie…on this beach and that beach…in the street…in the classroom …in little theaters…in this room and that…getting into the back of a police car in handcuffs.
Behind him, Mrs Lopez said, “Can I get you something, Mister Fletcher? Maybe a drink…?”
He said: “Apple juice.”
She said, “We don’t have apple juice.”
“You don’t?” He turned to her.
“We never have apple juice. Why have apple juice in the land of orange juice?”
Fletch stared at her.
“I can make you a nice rum drink with orange juice.”
“Excuse me.”
Fletch went by her and up the stairs.
37
Fletch knocked on Frederick Mooney’s bedroom door and entered without waiting to be invited.
Mooney was sitting in a Morris chair, his hands in his lap. Silently, he watched Fletch.
“How long you been sober?” Fletch asked.
“Over three years.”
The airlines flight bag was on the floor beside the bed. Fletch hunkered down next to it. He lifted one of the bottles from it. He uncapped the bottle and sniffed the contents.
“You can’t get apple juice in most bars,” Mooney said.
Fletch left the bottle on the bureau. “You’re one hell of an actor.”
“I thought you knew that.” Mooney shifted in his chair. “Of course I had the advantage. Once people think of you as a drunk, they see you as a drunk.”
“Moxie said you were drunk when she arrived at her apartment in New York.”
“I had set the stage, knowing she’d show up sometime. Empty bottles around, dirty smelly glasses…”
“But why?”
“I wanted to see her, as it were, without being seen. She would have shut off the reformed Frederick Mooney. I had shut her off too many years. Her behavior would have been cool and proper in front of the great man, her father. I decided the best way to see her, to really see her, get to know her, was as a dependent. In front of a helpless old man, blind drunk, Marilyn was herself. I’ve really gotten to know her, the last few weeks. She’s really quite marvelous.”
“But she hasn’t gotten to know you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Frederick Mooney. “It’s all on film.”
“So at the apartment in New York you heard everything. Everything about Peterman—”
“Of course. I even read Midsummer Night’s Mad-ness one afternoon while she was out. I knew the fiddle was on. You see, Fletch…” Fletch, in continued shock, glanced at the man. He could not get his mind around the dimensions of this man’s acting genius. All that Peterman-Peterkin-Peterson-Patterson routine had been consciously created. “…in my twenties, I was virtually ruined by one of these charlatan friend-managers, the word friend italicised. I was dragged through courts for five years. Someone I had trusted. It virtually ruined my work, my sleep, my health. One is made to feel so vulnerable, so weak. And doing creative work while being made to feel weak and vulnerable is immensely hard. Mind breaking. Creative people should receive some protection by law. There really aren’t that many of us, and our time is short, our energies limited. Our energies should not be drained by lawyers playing at their paper games. Something similiar happened to me again in my late thirties. If I had known then what I know now—that energies do not last forever—I would have killed anyone who so assaulted me.”
“Instead you killed Steve Peterman.”
“I haven’t been able to do much for Moxie, as a father. I didn’t want her to be dragged through the courts for years, humiliated, made a fool, her life and work laid out in little boxes, her every privacy invaded. Preventing all that was something I could do for her.”
“How did you do it?”
“I’m an actor. A well-trained actor.”
“You know how to ride a horse like a guards-man and an Indian, how to handle a gun as if it were a natural extention of your hand…”
“You heard that little sermon I gave at Durty Harry’s.” Mooney’s eyes wandered over the palm trees outside the windows. “Always used to go over well at colleges.”
“Downstairs just now,” Fletch said, “when they were carting Moxie away, I remembered her telling me, years ago, that as a kid in the carnivals, whatever, small-town travelling shows, you were even a part of a knife throwing act. That was just after I realized I had seen three empty apple juice bottles in the rubbish.”
“You’d be surprised how your youthful physical skills come back to you after you’ve become absolutely tea-total.” Mooney smiled. “I was never the drinker I was made out to be, anyway. I cultivated the image. I could heighten the audience’s suspense by making them wonder if I was too drunk to go on, too drunk to finish the play. I believe Kean used the same trick. There’s old Mooney, drunk again. It can’t be him who’s acting so beautifully, but some god acting through him. You see, everyone had seen Hamlet before, knew the story. They had to be made unsure as to whether Mooney could play Hamlet. Again. And again and again. Believe me, friend and lover of my daughter, no one could do what I’ve done as drunk as I’m supposed to have been. Of course I didn’t make twenty or thirty pictures without knowing what I was doing. People will believe anything…”
“Mister Mooney, how did you actually commit the murder? There were cameras everywhere.”
“I made myself into a rubbish man. A few rags, more hair, more beard, a discouraged way of standing, walking, wandering around location picking up the odd candy wrapper, cigarette pack.” He chuckled. “Edith Howell asked me to move a trash barrel away from her trailer. Didn’t ask. Demanded. Called me a lazy old lout, when I moved slowly on my supposedly sore feet. Not a very nice lady, Edith Howell.”
“She has her eyes on your millions.”
“She was always looking the wrong direction onstage, too. She’d look a meter more upstage than she was supposed to be looking, a meter more downstage. That woman drove me nuts all during Time, Gentlemen, Time.”
“And have you millions of dollars?”
“Sure.”
“Many millions?”
“Why not? I’ve practiced a rewarding profession. Worked hard all my life, and been well paid for it. Never had expensive tastes. One hotel room is very much like another.”
“Oh. Moxie thinks you’re broke.”
“It’s been good for her soul to think so.”
Fletch sighed.
“So,” Mooney continued, “as an old, tolerated member of the custodial staff, I even watched them build the set for The Dan Buckley Show. You think I don’t know how to work out camera angles? I approached the slit curtain at the back of the set from all the way down the beach, from the water’s edge. I had to walk in a very carefully worked-out Z. I never showed up on film. And thankfully there wasn’t much breeze. The curtain stayed more or less still.”
“Why did you throw the knife into Peterman’s back just after Moxie walked behind him?”