At three o’clock the lobby doorbell rang.
Fletch pressed the buzzer to unlock the downstairs lobby door and waited.
In a moment his own apartment doorbell rang.
He opened the door to Joan Collins Stanwyk.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Fletcher.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Stanwyk.”
“Fletcher, as I said, is a name I can remember.”
“You know who I am?”
“Thank you, I do.”
“Won’t you come in?”
She entered and sat on the divan.
“May I offer you a drink?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Fletcher. But you may offer me an explanation.”
“Ah?”
Fletch remained standing, taking a step this way, a step that. In the eleventh hour, his cover had been blown.
“Mr. Fletcher, why are you investigating my husband? Or is it I you are investigating?”
“Neither of you,” Fletch said.
Also, he found this Mr. and Mrs. business a bit cumbersome between two people who had made love both Polish and Rumanian style only two days before.
“What makes you think I am investigating you?”
“Mr. Fletcher, I have been born, bred and educated to do a job, as I gather you have, because clearly you are very good at your job. My job is to support and protect my father and my husband. And I’m rather good at it.”
“In fact, protect Collins Aviation.”
“And its investors, and the people it employs, et cetera.”
“I see.”
“One can’t have this subtle job for as many years as I’ve had it without developing certain subtle instincts. At lunch at the Racquets Club Saturday, when you and I first met, after a while my intuition told me I was being questioned. For the life of me, I could not figure what I was being questioned about. So I took your picture.”
Without looking at it, she transferred it from her purse to the coffee table. It was a three-quarter Polaroid shot of Fletch in a tennis shirt in the Racquets Club pavilion.
“While you were getting another chair for the table, after my father joined us. I turned your picture over to Collins plant security Monday morning. It was just this morning I received their report. You are I. M. Fletcher of the News-Tribune. Your identity was confirmed by a city police detective named Lupo, and has since been confirmed again by the newspaper itself.”
Fletch said, “Wow.”
Prowling the room, watching her, Fletch had the sudden, irrational desire to marry Joan Collins Stanwyk.
“Now, Mr. Fletcher, when a newspaper reporter ingratiates himself into one’s acquaintanceship—in this case, I might even say into one’s intimacy—under a false name, an entirely false identity, one can safely assume one is being investigated.”
“Right.”
“But you say you’re not investigating us.”
“Right. Your father. John Collins. I wanted some information from him.”
“Your phone is ringing.”
“I know.”
“Seeing you apparently don’t answer your phone, may I ask what information you wanted from my father?”
“Whether or not he had ever offered to subsidize a private investigation of the source of drugs at The Beach, and whether or not the chief of police, Graham Cummings, had ever refused his help.”
“Of what conceivable use could that piece of information be to
“I’ve already printed it. Have you seen this afternoon’s News-Tribune? “
“No, I haven’t.”
“I busted your local drug story wide open. Cummings is the source of the drugs. In one paragraph, I believe paragraph thirty-four, I report your father’s offers. If I had asked your father officially or directly, he would never have told me, for fear it would reflect upon the chief of police, never dreaming it is the chief himself who is guilty.”
“How very interesting. You go to that much effort for one paragraph?”
“You should see the efforts I go to sometimes for paragraphs I don’t even wite.”
“But I have the distinct impression it was my father who first brought up the topic of drugs, not you.”
“You can’t be sure, can you?”
“No, I can’t. Have you ever known my husband?”
“No.”
“How were you so able to convince us that you had known him and known him well? That you had even attended the wedding?”
‘Newspaper research. Plain old homework.”
“But you even knew that he had buzzed a house in San Antonio, Texas, years ago. We didn’t know that.”
“How do you know it’s true?”
“I asked him.”
“You asked him?”
“Yes. He was embarrassed, but he didn’t deny it.”
“That’s funny.”