18

“D R I N K? B E E R? J O I N T?”

Alston Chambers, law clerk in the District Attorney’s office, took the five steps necessary to cross his livingroom and turned off the television set.

“Sunday afternoon,” Fletch said. “Caught you sitting in front of the T.V. watching baseball and guzzling beer. Who’d ever think he’d live to see the day? Why aren’t you out working around the palace? Painting, scraping, mowing and hoeing?”

Alston gave him a sardonic sideways glance. “Crappy little house. Who cares about it?”

“It’s your mortgage, bud.”

In the hot, dark livingroom an imitation early American divan, imitation Morris chair, pine wood coffee table, single standing lamp and ancient Zenith television left almost no place to stand. There was a bedroom in the house, and a kitchen-dinette. Houses each side were only a meter or so away, and there was a back yard big enough for the rubbish barrels.

“That’s what it’s all about,” Alston said. “You don’t buy a house. You buy a mortgage. I hate this house. I need the tax deduction. I need to establish credit. Everybody our age does. You, too, buddy. Wait till you get started. We’re all waiting till you get started. Join the human race.”

Clearly, Alston Chambers had joined the human race and clearly he was paying his dues. On a Spring Sunday afternoon he was dressed in long trousers and moccasins and in his mid-twenties a beer belly made his dress shirt protrude and he was indoors drinking beer and looking at baseball on television. And since getting his law degree, he had been working nine-to-five as a clerk in the District Attorney’s office.

Fletch and he had gone through Marine Corps basic training, and a great deal more, together.

“I would join the human race, Alston, honest, but something keeps going wrong. Everytime I apply, something happens. Some doggoned thing.”

“You paying Linda her alimony like the judge told you to? Like a good boy?”

“No, sir.”

Alston said, “I wouldn’t expect anything else from you.”

“Every month I sit down to write her a check, Alston, honest, but after the rent, the car payment, the utilities, the groceries …”

“There’s nothing left. I know. I couldn’t afford to pay alimony right now, either. You at least keeping up with your credit card payments?”

“I don’t have any credit cards. I had one the office gave me for, you know, expenses, but I lost that Thursday.”

“What do you mean you lost it?”

“Well, it’s more accurate to say I lost the use of it.”

Alston looked at him incredulously. “You mean lost your job?”

“Or you could say I regained my freedom.”

Alston chuckled. He turned around in the doorway and called his wife. “Audrey! Fletch is here.”

“I’m just putting on a dress,” she said through the wall. She sounded like she was in the room with them.

“Don’t need to put on a dress for me, Audrey,” Fletch said. “Wish you wouldn’t.”

“I know that, Fletch,” she said, coming into the room and putting her arms around his neck. “But Alston’s home, and we don’t want to embarrass him, right?” She kissed him on the mouth.

“Right.”

“Right,” Alston said. “Now would you like a drink?”

He had picked up his pewter beer stein from the top of the television. Alston had bought the Austrian-style beer stein in Tokyo, Japan, when he and Fletch had been there on Rest and Recuperation.

“No, thanks.” Audrey had sat on the divan. Fletch flopped into the single chair. “Moxie’s got me going to this cocktail party at her theater tonight.”

“Moxie?” Alston smiled down at him. “Is Moxie back on the scene?”

“Yeah. I guess so. Come to think of it, she is. Bumped into her ata hot dog stand the other day. She’s doing her thing—pretending that was the first time we ever met.”

“That’s Moxie,” Alston said.

“That’s Moxie.”

“Did you say she’s pretending you two just met for the first time, the other day?” Audrey laughed.

“Yeah. Come to think of it, she is.”

“Moxie, Moxie,” Alston said into his beer.

“Maybe it is the first time we ever met,” Fletch said. “Moxie is a lot of different people, you know.”

“All of them women,” Alston said.

“Moxie’s an actor,” Fletch said, “whether she wants to be or not. She gets into an elevator and uses everybody else standing there as a captive audience. Once in a crowded elevator she turned to me and said, Really, Jake, it hain’t fair I got pregnant, when you said I wouldn’t—you bein’ my brother and all. What you go sayin’ it wasn’t possible for, when it was, alla time? You heard what the doctor just said—don’t make no difference you bein’ my brother. You tol’ me a tootin’ lie, Hank.”

Laughing, Audrey said, “What did you do, Fletch?”

“Well, the temperature in the elevator went up to about one-hundred-and-thirty degrees fahrenheit. Every one was glowering at me. I wasn’t sure I was going to get out of there alive.”

“What did you do?” Audrey asked.

“I said, Can’t be sure it was me, Stella. Might ha’ been Paw.”

Alston slopped a little beer onto his shirt laughing.

“Was that the last time you two split?” Audrey asked.

Fletch thought a moment. “Time before that, I think. Last time, her father called from Melbourne, Australia, sobbing, saying he needed her to come play Ophelia, or he had to cancel the tour. She was packed and gone within fifteen minutes.”

“I never knew Moxie played Ophelia in Australia,” Audrey said.

“She didn’t. She got there and the role had been filled. Freddy didn’t even remember telephoning her. He said, How nice of my little girl to come all this way to see her old daddy! Something like that. Old bastard didn’t even pay her way out, or back. She worked six months on a sheep ranch. Loved every minute of it. Said it was the best time of her life.”

“So now she’s pretending … what?” Audrey asked. “That you two never met before?”

“Yeah. She pretends we just met and then refers to a knowledge of me going back years. Sort of eerie.”

“You two,” Alston said. “Birds of a feather cluck together.”

“You’re both nuts,” Audrey amplified. “Why don’t you get married? I mean, neither of you should marry anyone else.”

“Moxie will never marry,” Fletch said. “She has this strange, necessary thing with being in love with whoever she’s playing at the moment. Anyhow, she blames ol’ Freddy for putting her mother in the hospital.”

“Is she afraid she’ll put you in the hospital?” Alston asked. “Fat chance.”

“Making love to her has always been interesting,” Fletch said. “You’re never sure with whom you’re making love.”

Alston cleared his throat. “I think the two of you alone in a bedroom would make for quite a crowded room.”

Fletch took the envelope out of his back pocket. “I came because I need a couple of favors.”

“You name it,” Alston said.

“There are some ashes in this envelope. I need them analysed chop-chop.”

“Sure.” Alston stepped over and took the envelope and put it in his own pocket.

“Second,” Fletch said, “are you of sufficiently august rank in the District Attorney’s office, Alston, to make a call to the United States Embassy in Geneva?”

“Never have done such a thing before,” Alston answered. “Guess that’s one of those things you do first and ask permission for second—Marine style.”

“Good. I need the particulars on the death of an American citizen named Thomas Bradley. About a year ago. He may have died in hospital, or some kind of a special sanitorium. He may have committed suicide.”

“From California?”

“Yes.”

“You say about a year ago?”

“His widow says a year ago this month. His death was not announced here, though—or so it seems—until about six months later. The operation of a family business, Wagnall-Phipps; Bradley’s wife running the company while she’s waiting for someone else to take over—it’s all mixed up somehow.”

“How?”

Fletch said, “I don’t know. I guess you could say: confusion has been caused, I suspect, deliberately.”

“Suicide,” Alston said. “You said the possibility of suicide. Isn’t

that enough of an explanation?”

“Not really.”

“You’d be amazed,” Alston said, “to know what my office still puts up with to permit people to conceal the fact of suicide. I don’t disagree,” he said. “I’m sympathetic. I go along with it.”

Audrey said, “Alston, I think Fletch is considering the possibility of murder.”

Alston looked at Fletch and Fletch continued looking at Audrey.

Alston said, “Are you, Fletch?”

“Suspicious death,” Fletch said. “The guy may have died a year ago. But I suspect his kids weren’t told until six months later. His neighbors and the president of the company he owned weren’t told until eight months later. And, I have good reason to believe, his own Vice-president and treasurer wasn’t told—really told—until last Thursday.”

“It would be nice to have a look at the probate record,” Alston said.

“Would there have to be one?”

“Sure. Property within the state …”

“Then I’d appreciate that, too.”

“My fast answer is,” Alston said, “really off the top of the head, is that somebody is trying to postpone, or evade altogether, death taxes, inheritance taxes. Was this a young guy?”

“Less than fifty.”

“Death caught him with his pants down. In what kind of financial shape is this company of his, what’s it called?”

“Wagnall-Phipps. I don’t know.”

“I suspect that’s the answer,” Alston said. “People don’t expect to die so young. He died in Switzerland. Sounds to me like the estate’s trying to take advantage of that fact to get the estate in shape, fiddle the taxes.”

“I never thought of all that,” Fletch said.

“You never went to Law School.”

“Gee,” Fletch said. “Is that why I haven’t got either a mortgage or a credit card?”

“That’s why,” Alston said.

“I do have all those people called Moxie waiting for me.” Fletch stood up. “Will tomorrow be too soon to call you, Alston?”

“Nope. I’ll put highest priority on the chemical analyses, D.A. Demands, and I’ll put in the call to Switzerland before I leave the house. Might even have the answers before noon. I’ll call probate when I get to the office.”

Audrey looked at him. “Don’t you have anything else to do? I mean, any work of your own?”

“I seem to remember once or twice in the past Fletch dropping everything to help me,” Alston said. “In case I haven’t mentioned this before, Audrey, I wasn’t a very with-it Marine.”

“Bye, Fletch.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for saving my husband’s ass.”

“Hell with his ass,” Fletch said. “It’s his sense of humor I saved.”

On the sidewalk in front of the house, Alston Chambers said, “Fletch, I’ve got a bank balance of over five hundred dollars. All or part of it are yours, any time you want it.”

“Poo!” Fletch said. “What’s money? Tissue paper! Who needs it?”

Sitting in the car, Fletch said through the window, “Thanks, Alston. Call you tomorrow.”