Fletch(11)
“Jesus. I’ll never confess to anything again.”
“Fletcher, we have to talk.”
“Are you up to it?”
“That’s why I thought we should have lunch. In the cafeteria. Put your shoes on.”
“You’re not taking me out?”
“I wouldn’t be seen in public with you. Even a drugstore lunch counter wouldn’t let us in, the way you dress.”
“If I had Frank’s income …”
“Upstairs in the cafeteria, at least people will understand I’m eating with you because I have to.”
“You don’t have to. I have work to do.”
“I have several things to talk to you about, Fletcher. Might as well get it over with. Including your Bronze Star.”
“My Bronze Star?”
“See you upstairs. Put your shoes on.”
5
Clara Snow had ordered an uncut bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich on toast. When she bit into it the two edges of toast nearer Fletch gaped as if about to bite him.
“Tell me what I’ve always wanted to know, Clara, and somehow never expected to find out: how is our editor-in-chief, Frank Jaffe, in bed?”
“Fletch, why don’t you like me?”
“Because you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know anything about this business.”
“I’ve been employed in this business a lot longer than you have.”
“As a cooking writer. You know nothing about hard news. You know nothing about features. You know nothing about the mechanics of this business.”
Speaking like a schoolmarm trying to coax a boy full of puberty toward the periodic tables, she said, “Are you sure you don’t resent me just because I’m a woman?”
“I don’t resent women. I rather like women.”
“You haven’t had much luck with them.”
“My only mistake is that I keep marrying them.”
“And they keep divorcing you.”
“I don’t even mind your going to bed with the editor-in-chief. What I do mind is your being made an editor—my editor—solely because you are going to bed with the editor-in-chief, when you are totally unqualified and, I might add, totally incompetent. Go to bed with Frank if you like. Anything to keep the bastard reasonably sober and relaxed. But your accepting an editorship in bed when you are unqualified is thoroughly dishonest of you.”
Even in the cafeteria light, the skin over Clara’s cheekbones as she stared at him was purple.
She bit into the sandwich, and the toast yawned at Fletch.
He chewed his calves’ liver open-mouthed.
“Such principle,” she said, sucking Coke from a straw. “You can’t tell me you haven’t made every strung-out little girl on the beach.”
“That’s different. That’s for a story. I will do anything for a story. That’s why I put penicillin on my expense account.”
“You do?”
“Under Telephones’.”
“What Frank and I do together, and what our personal relationship is, is none of your damned business, Fletcher.”
“Fine. I’ll buy that. Just leave me alone, and leave my goddamned copy alone. You chopped hell out of my divorce equity story and made me look like a raving idiot.”
“I had to make changes in it, and you were away on a story. I couldn’t get in touch with you.”
• “It came out totally imbalanced, thanks to you, bitch editor. If I were a divorce lawyer in our circulation area, I would have sued the hell out of me by now. You opened me and the newspaper wide for suit, besides making me look like an incompetent.”
“I tried to get in touch with you.”
“Leave my copy alone. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Want coffee?”
“I never take stimulants.”
“For now, Fletch, we have to work together.”
“Until you build enough of a case against me to get me fired, right?”
“Maybe. Now please tell me how you are doing on the drugs-on-the-beach story.”
“There are drugs on the beach.”
“Lots?”
“On that particular stretch of beach, lots.”
“Hard drugs?”
“Very.”
“Who are the people there?”
“The so-called kids on the beach are divided into two groups. The first group are drifters, kids on the road, alienated, homeless wanderers, usually incapable of permanent relationships. Some of them are just sun-worshippers, but if they are, they case this particular stretch of beach and move on. The kids who stay are there for the drugs. Because there is a source there, somewhere, of good, clean junk. Some of these so-called kids are forty years old. Although others aren’t, like Bobbi.”