Fletch Reflected by Gregory Mcdonald

Author:Gregory Mcdonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Hard-Boiled, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307523877
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

13

"You have a cut on your back."

"Yes." While Jack was raking the Japanese garden, Radliegh's secretary, Nancy Dunbar, had come into the garden with a cup of coffee. She sat on the bench she and Jack had used the day before and lit a cigarette.

"Don't let it get sunburned," she said, "or you'll have a scar there forever."

"I know."

It was early Saturday morning. Jack was in the shade of the garden's wall.

"Do you have anything to tell me?" Nancy Dunbar asked.

His first time doing such a thing, Jack was trying to make an interesting design on the garden's sand with his rake.

Did he have anything to tell her? In Nancy Dunbar's words, "Any plans you hear anybody make; if you see people together you think don't belong together; comments you hear people make about each other, Mr. Beauville, me, Doctor Radliegh...."

Only a few hours before, in the dark of his bedroom, he had found himself sucking his own blood from the tits of Doctor Radliegh's younger daughter.

Jack had heard that same daughter say she didn't care if her father was murdered; had heard Duncan Radliegh admit he had cheated to graduate from college, lied about applying to any business school, considered disobeying and selling stock in Radliegh Mirror to support his car racing interest and, Jack surmised, his drug habit.

He had seen the elder son, Chet, All-American quarter back, betrothed to Shana Staufel, demand sexual attention from the stableboy.

He knew there was a duffel bag full of beer under Peppy's bed.

He had seen Doctor Radliegh himself and Shana Staufel sitting on a bench in a rose garden at dusk talking quietly while holding hands.

He had heard local people mock Nancy Dunbar.

"No," Jack said. "Nothing."

"You've heard, seen nothing which might be of interest to us?" Nancy Dunbar asked.

"Nothing."

"You're making the design in the sand too tight," Nancy said. "Loosen up."

"Loosen up?"

"Yes. Relax with the rake. Use it as a paintbrush."

"I've never used a paintbrush," Jack said, "except to paint a garage."

"Think of an abstract painting," Nancy said. "Make big swirls, curves, straight lines at odd angles."

"Oh."

"You're too tight."

He started over. He didn't know what to do with the sand around the big, jagged rocks in the garden. He sensed the lines made by the rake's tines ought not dead-end at the rocks, but flow around them somehow.

"It's Saturday morning," Jack said. "Not even eight o'clock."

"Yes." Nancy lit another cigarette.

"You work every day of the week?"

"I'm supposed to have Saturday afternoons and Sundays off."

"Do you?"

"Maybe once a month. This isn't a job, it's a living. Doctor Radliegh's mind never stops. And when he wants something, he wants it right away. He himself keeps a very tight schedule, but he never really knows, or cares, what time of day it is, or even what day it is. It's a little hard to understand that, at first. It seems contradictory, doesn't it?"

"Is that all right with you?"

"That's fine with me. I am going to be able to leave here someday reasonably young, and very rich.

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