opened slowly.

Gibbs’ sweaty upper lip was quivering.

Crystal said, “Hi.” She turned to Fletch. “I stayed in my room to watch Lewis Graham on the evening news show. You know what he did?”

“You tell me.”

“He did a ninety-second editorial on the theme that people should retire when they say They’re going to, regardless of how much they have to give up, using Walter March as an example.”

“We wrote that for him at lunch,” Fletch said.

“I think we can say we contributed to it.”

“Did he use the same biblical quotes?”

“Identical.”

“Well,” said Fletch, “at least one always knows Lewis Graham’s sources. May I escort you to the dining room, Ms. Faoni?”

“Oh, goody! Will we be the first ones there? I so like having a perfect record, at the things I do.”

“Ms. Faoni,” Fletch said, crossing through the cocktail party, her arm in his. “I’ve just figured something out.”

“Who murdered Walter March?”

“Something much more important than that.”

“What could be more important than that?”

“The reverse. Death in the presence of life; life in the presence of death.”

Crystal said, “Funny the way riddles have always made me hungry.”

“Crystal, darling, this afternoon you were trying to get pregnant.”

Immediately, she said, “Think we succeeded?”

“Oh, Lord.”

“If you remember, I always was very good at math.”

They were in the dining room.

“Crystal, sit down.”

“Oh, nice. He’s taking care of me already.” She sat in the chair he held out for her. “Not to worry, Fletcher.”

“I promise.”

“There’s just no way I can be unemployed nine months from now. Good heavens! I’d starve!”

He was sitting next to her, at the empty, round table. “Crystal, you lost a job before, this way. It’s an unfair world. You said yourself nothing has changed.”

“Oh, yes, it has,” she said. “Walter March is dead.”

Twenty-four

7:30 P.M. Dinner

Main Dining Room

“Frankly, I think you’re all being dreadfully unfair.” Eleanor Earles put her napkin next to her coffee cup. “I’ve never heard so many spiteful, vicious remarks about one man in all my life as I’ve heard about Walter March since coming here to Hendricks Plantation.”

Fletch was at the round table for six with three women—Eleanor Earles, Crystal Faoni, and, of course, Freddie Arbuthnot. No Robert McConnell. No Lewis Graham.

“You all act and talk like a bunch of nasty children in a reformatory, gloating because the biggest boy among you got knifed, rather than like responsible, concerned journalists and human beings.”

Crystal burped.

“What have we said?” asked Freddie.

In fact, their conversation had been fairly neutral, mostly concerning the arrival of the Vice-President of the United States the next afternoon, discussing who would play golf with him (Tom Lockhart, Richard Baldridge, and Sheldon Levi; Oscar Perlman had invited him to a strip poker party to prove he had nothing to hide) and whether his most attractive wife would accompany him.

Freddie had just mentioned the memorial service for Walter March to be held in Hendricks the next morning.

“Oh, it’s not you.” Eleanor looked resentfully around the dining room. “It’s all these other twerps.”

Eleanor Earles was a highly paid network newsperson, attractive enough, but resented by many because she had done commercials while working for another network—which most journalists refused to do—and, despite that, now had one of the best jobs in the industry.

Many felt she would not have been able to overcome her background and be so elevated if she had not been seized upon by the networks as their token woman.

Nevertheless, she was extremely able.

“Walter March,” she said, “was an extraordinary journalist, an extraordinary publisher, and an extraordinary human being.”

“He was extraordinary all right,” Crystal said into her parfait.

“He had a great sense of news, of the human story, of trends, how to handle a story. His editorial sense was almost flawless. And when March Newspapers came out for or against something, it was seldom wrong. I doubt Walter March was ever wrong.”

“Oh, come now,” Fletch said.

“What about the way he handled people?” Crystal asked. “What about the way he treated his own employees?”

“Let me tell you,” Eleanor said “I would have considered it a privilege to work for Walter March. Any time, any place, under any circumstances.”

“You never worked for him,” Crystal said.

Eleanor said, “You know about the time I was stuck in Albania—when I was working for the other network?”

Fletch remembered, vaguely, an incident several years before—one of those three-day wonder stories—concerning Eleanor Earles in a foreign land. He was a teenager when it happened. It was the first he had ever heard of Eleanor Earles.

“It was just one of those terribly frightening things.” Eleanor sat forward, her hands folded slightly