Fletch's Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page B

their affiliations.
    On the list were Mr. and Mrs. Walter March, Walter March, Junior, Leona Hatch, Robert McConnell, Rolly Wisham, Lewis Graham, Hy Litwack, Sheldon Levi, Mr. and Mrs. Jake Williams, Nettie Horn, Frank Gillis,Tom Lockhart, Richard Baldrige, Stuart Poynton, Eleanor Earles, and Oscar Perlman.
    “Sonsabitches,” Fletch said. “Sonsabitches.”
    There was no signature, of course—just the words, in tiny print at the very bottom of the letter, “ WE USE RECYCLED PAPER .”

Six

    Fletch picked up the ringing telephone and said, “Thank you for calling.”
    “Is this Ronald Albemarle Blodgett Islington Dim-witty Fletcher?” a woman’s voice asked.
    “Why, no,” Fletch answered. “It isn’t.”
    Who would be calling him
rabid?
    He remembered vaguely an old joke someone had once told about Fletch biting a dog on a slow news night.
    Who else?
    “Crystal!” he said. “My pal, my ass! How the hell are you?”
    Giggling. Per usual. In her throat. Per usual. Sardonically silly old Crystal.
    “Are you here?” he asked. “Has the Crystal Palace shivered and shimmied into my very own purview?”
    She began to sing the words, “All of me.…” He joined in halfway through the first bar.
    “Still heavily concerned with your tonnage, eh, old girl? Still down in the chins?”
    Crystal Faoni was not pellucid. She, too, had been cursed by her parents when it had come time to delete “Baby Girl Faoni” from the birth register and substitute something more specific.
    Crystal was dark, with black hair which could have been straight, or could have been curly, but wasn’teither; blessedly, basically heavy, with monumental bones, each demanding its kilogram of flesh; the appetite of a bear just after the first snowfall.
    She also had huge, wide-set brown eyes, the world’s most gorgeous skin, and a mind so sprightly and entertaining apparently it had never felt the need to cause her body to do anything but the sedentary.
    She and Fletch had worked together on a newspaper in Chicago.
    “Are you well?” he asked.
    “I thought we could meet in the bar before the Welcoming Cocktail Party, and have too much to drink.”
    “I plan to go sit in the sauna and have a rub.” Skimming the hotel’s brochure on the bedside table, Fletch had noticed there were an exercise room, a sauna, and a massage room open from ten to seven.
    “Oh, Fletch,” she said. “Why do you always have to be doing such healthy things?”
    “I’ve been on airplanes and in airports the last twenty-four hours. I’m stiff.”
    “You’ve already had too much to drink? You don’t sound it.”
    “Not that way. Are you still working in Chicago?”
    “Why,” she asked rhetorically, “do people go to conventions?”
    “To wear funny hats and blow raspberry noise-makers?”
    “No.”
    “I don’t know, Crystal. I’ve never been to a convention before.”
    “Why are you here, I. M. Fletcher?”
    Lord love a duck
, he said to himself. Everyone who knew him would know that convention-going was not his thing.
    Neither was dues-paying.
    He said, “Ah.…”
    “Let me guess. You’re unemployed, right?”
    “Between jobs.”
    “Right. Let’s return to our original question: Why do people go to conventions?”
    “To get jobs?”
    “About half. Either to get jobs, if they are unemployed, or to get better jobs, if they are employed.”
    “Yes.”
    “About a third of the people at conventions are looking for people to hire. A convention, dear Mister Fletcher, as you well know, is one great meat market. And, as I don’t need to remind you, I am one great piece of meat.”
    “If memory serves, you do help fill up a room.”
    “It is not possible to overlook me.”
    “What about the other sixteen-point-seven percent?”
    “What?”
    “You said half the people are here to get jobs and a third are here to give jobs. That leaves sixteen-point-seven percent. Almost. What are they doing here?”
    “Oh. Those are the people who will drop