Carioca Fletch Read Online Free PDF Page B

you?”
    “What do you mean?” Mostly the room was full of young Brazilians, a few older Argentinians, the foreign lady with her large bouffant and small escort.
    “Other newspapermen from California who ‘had an airplane ticket’ and came here ‘sort of by accident’?”
    “Tito…”
    “No. You are here.”
    “Why was I born?”
    “Maybe that too.” Tito sat back. “Now that you know what you must do, you will never rest until you do it.”
    “What must I do?”
    “Tell us who murdered you. Murder is the most serious crime.”
    “Tito…”
    A conspiracy of girls yanked Tito dancing.
    Fletch finally poured himself a Scotch and water and sat back.
    Then he and Laura danced awhile.
    When it was very late in the night he found himself sitting at the end of the table with Norival, who was having difficulty keeping his eyes open and his tongue straight, being told, even being asked, about various kinds of fish available in the South Atlantic.
    Slowly it occurred to Fletch that Norival was talking to him as Janio Barreto, who had fished these waters fifty years ago.
    Fletch decided it was time to leave.
    As he stood up, he said to Norival, “Much has changed in these waters in fifty years.”
    He went to the dance floor and cut in on Orlando and asked Laura if they could leave.
    Outside the nightclub, on the sidewalk, Toninho called after him.
    Fletch turned around.
    Again, Toninho said, “Fletch,” but he did not approach. He stayed near the door of 706.
    Laura sat in the MP.
    Fletch went back to Toninho.
    It would be dawn soon.
    “Fletch.” Toninho cupped his hands around Fletch’s left ear and put his lips in his cupped hands. “A woman puts a frog under their bed to keep her lover from leaving her.”
    Fletch stood back. “It wasn’t the maid?”
    “Are you the maid’s lover?’ Toninho laughed. He slapped his thigh with his hand. “Oh, Fletch!” He put his hand on Fletch’s shoulder and shook him. “Be glad.” Then he laughed again. “Also because traditionally it is a live frog!”

Six
    “Restless.”
    “Of course,” she said.
    This was the third time he had gotten out of bed in a half hour.
    The first time, he went to the bathroom and drank from the bottle of mineral water. Then he tried snuggling up next to Laura so that all of his front touched all of her back. She breathed deeply, asleep. The second time he put his head through the drapes and saw the daylight of another morning. No electric lights were on. In bed again, he tried lying straight on his back, his hands folded across his chest as if he were in a coffin, and breathing deeply. Even at that hour, from somewhere in the city he could hear the samba drums.
    Now he put on his light running shorts.
    Laura raised her head from the pillows and looked at him.
    “I’m going for a run on the beach,” he said. “Before the sand gets too hot.”
    “Okay.”
    “I can’t get to sleep.”
    “I know,” she said. “Poor Fletch.”
    She put her head back down on the pillows.

Seven
    “Can you buy me a cup of coffee?”
    Joan Collins Stanwyk.
    She was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette, at a little table in the forecourt of The Hotel Yellow Parrot when he came back from his run. There were three crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray on the table.
    Her eyes ran over the sweat gleaming on his shoulders, chest, stomach, even on his legs.
    Having finished his run with a sprint, he was breathing heavily.
    “That’s the least I can do for you,” he said.
    Two miles up the beach there had been a crew of men dressed in orange jackets fanned out like a search party cleaning the beach, and Fletch had run to them, and back. As he ran barefoot, he avoided several
macumba
fires smoldering from the night before. And he passed many dead wallets, purloined, stripped and dropped. Even at that hour, many other people were running on the beach. And a group of Brazilian men easily in their sixties were playing a full game of soccer barefooted in