to be there a few days, Mister Fletcher?”

“Where?”

“Wherever you are. Hendricks Plantation, Hendricks, Virginia.”

“Yes.”

The man in the parking lot wore a blue jeans jacket.

“Well, I figure what I’ll do is dig up a general somewhere—believe me, that’s not difficult around the P-gon—we’ve got more generals in one coffee shop than Napoleon had in his whole army—we could decorate the Statue of Liberty with ’em, and you’d never see the paint peel—and move his ass down to Hendricks, Virginia.…”

“General? I mean, Major?”

The man in the parking lot also had tight, curly gray hair.

“I figure a presentation ceremony, in front of all those journalists—decorating one of their own, so to speak, with a Bronze Star.…”

The man who had accosted Mrs. Leary in the parking lot.

“Major? I’ve got to go.”

“The Marine Corps could use some good press, these days, you know.…”

“Major. I’ve got to go. An emergency. My pants are on fire. Call me back.”

Fletch hung up, turned around, and headed down the corridor at high speed.

He found a fire door with EXIT written over it, pushed through it, and ran down the stairs.

He entered the parking area slowly, trying not to make it too obvious he was looking for someone.

No one else was in the parking lot.

The man had been walking toward the back of the area.

Fletch went to the white rail fence and walked along it, looking down the slope to his right.

He caught a glimpse of the man crossing behind two stands of rhododendrons.

He sprung over the fence and ran down the slope.

When he ran through the opening in the rhododendrons, and stopped, abruptly, to look around, he saw the man standing under some apple trees, hands in back pockets, looking at him.

Slowly, Fletch began to walk toward him.

The man took his hands out of his pockets, turned, and ran, further down the slope, toward a large stand of pine. Behind the pine trees were the stables.

Fletch noticed he was wearing sneakers.

Fletch ran after him, and when he came to the pine trees, his shoes began to slip on the slope. To brake himself from falling, he grabbed at a scrub pine, got sap on his hands, and fell.

Looking around from the ground, Fletch could neither see nor hear the man.

Fletch picked himself up and walked through the pines to the stable area, trying to scrape the sap off his hands with his thumbnails.

In the midday sun, the stables had the quiet of a long lunch hour typical of a place where people work early and late. No one was there.

For a few minutes Fletch petted the horse he had ridden that morning, asking her if she had seen a man run by (and answering for her, “He went thet-away”), and then walked back to the hotel.

Nineteen

2:00 P.M.

VARIOUS USES OF COMPUTERS IN JOURNALISM

Address by Dr. Hiram

Parlor

From TAPE

Station 1

Suite 12 (Mrs. Walter March and Walter March, Jr.)

“Bandy called from Los Angeles, Junior. Some question he can’t deal with. And Masur called asking if he should put that basketball scandal on the wires from New York.…”

There was no answer.

“Are you having lunch?” Lydia asked her son.

No answer.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Junior. Buck up! Your father’s dead, and someone has to make the decisions for the newspapers. They can’t run themselves. They never have.”

Another silence.

“I’m ordering you lunch,” she said. “You can’t Bloody Mary yourself to death.…”

From TAPE

Station 9

Room 36 (Rolly Wisham)

“If you’ll permit me a question first, Captain Neale.…”

“I don’t know. Once you journalists start asking questions, you never stop. I’ve had enough opportunity to discover that.”

“Very simply: Why are you questioning me?”

“We understand you might have had a motive to murder Walter March.”

“Oh?”

Rolly Wisham’s voice did not have great timbre, for a man nearly thirty, but there was a boy’s aggressiveness in it, mixed with an odd kindliness.

Listening to the tape, sitting on his bed, picking at the sap on his hands, Fletch kept expecting Wisham to say, “This is Rolly Wisham, with love”—as if such meant anything to anybody, especially in journalism.

“What motive do you think I would have for murdering the old bastard?”

“I know about the editorial that ran in the March newspapers calling your television feature reporting—have I the term right?—let’s see, it called it ‘sloppy, sentimental, and stupendously unprofessional.’ That’s precise. I had the editorial looked up and read to me over the phone this noon.”

“That’s what it said.”

“I also know that this editorial was just the beginning of a coast-to-coast campaign to put you in disgrace and get you fired from the network. Every March newspaper