much alike. He had a lot of brashness, you know. Whenever he was presented with alternatives, he always thought up some third course of action no one else had considered. That’s about what you do, isn’t it?”

Instead of saying “Yes” or “No,” Fletch said, “Maybe.”

“My point is this, Fletch. Walter is dead.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say you have my sympathy.”

“Thank you. March Newspapers will need a lot of help. Everything now falls on Junior’s shoulders. He’s every bit the man his father was, of course, even better, in many ways, but.…” She fitted her coffee cup to its saucer. “… This death, this murder.…”

“It must be a great shock to Junior.”

“He’s lived so much in his father’s.… They were great friends.”

“Mrs. March, I’m a working stiff. I’m a reporter. I know how to get a story and maybe how to write it. In a pinch I can work on a copydesk. I know a good layout when I see one. I know nothing about the publishing side of this business, how you attract advertising and what it costs per line, how you finance a newspaper, buy machinery.…”

“Junior does. He’s really very good at the back room mechanics of this business.” She poured herself more coffee. “Fletch, this is very much a horse-and-wagon sort of business. The horse has to be in front of the wagon. What a newspaper looks like and how it reads is the horse, and the wagon it pulls is the advertising and whatnot. If a newspaper isn’t exciting and important, you can have all the clever people in the world in the back room and it won’t work out as a business.”

“There’s Jake Williams.…”

“Oh, Jake.” She let her hand flop, in disparagement. “Jake is sort of old, and worn-out.”

Jake Williams was a good twenty years younger than Lydia March.

“What I’m asking you, Fletch is: would you help Junior out? He has a terribly tough row to hoe just now.…”

“I doubt he’d want me to.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I bumped into him in the bar this afternoon, and we had a little chat.”

“The bar, the bar!” Her face was annoyed and pained. “Really, Junior’s got to pull up his socks, and very soon.”

“He seems to have some ambivalent feelings toward me.”

“Junior doesn’t know what he feels at the moment. He’s keeping himself as drunk as he can. To be frank, I suppose a little bit of that is understandable, under the circumstances. But, really, becoming totally inoperable.…”

“I think he’s afraid.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Afraid?”

“I never really had a sense of how much your husband was doing—and how he was doing it—until I came to this convention and started hearing the gossip. Your husband’s death was pretty ugly.”

Lydia fitted her back into the corner of the divan and stared at the floor.

The lady had much to think about.

“Mrs. March, more than five years ago, your husband announced his retirement. Publicly. All the newspapers carried it. Why didn’t he retire?”

“Oh, you heard Lewis Graham tonight. On television,”

“I heard about it.”

“What a pompous ass. You know, he ran against my husband last year for the presidency of the A.J.A. So he takes all the resentment and hatred he has for my husband, and turns it into ninety seconds of philosophical network pablum.”

“Why didn’t your husband retire when he said he was going to?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

She was sitting up, looking uneasy. “It was because of that stupid union thing Junior did.”

Fletch said, “I still don’t know.”

“Well, a huge union negotiation was coming up, and Junior thought he’d be clever. Our board of directors had been putting pressure on him for some years, you know, saying they thought he had led too sheltered a life, was too naive. They thought all he wanted was to do his day’s work and go home at five o’clock to his wife. Of course, that was before she left him. They insisted he travel more, and, of course he did take that trip to the Far East.…”

Fletch remembered that Junior had filed a dispatch from Hong Kong which began, “There are a lot of Chinese…,” and every March newspaper printed it on the front page, faithfully, just to make the son of the publisher look ridiculous, which he did.

“… So I guess Junior wanted to show his father and the board of directors that he had some ideas of his own, could operate in what he thought was a manly manner. Even Walter, my husband, thought the negotiations were going too smoothly. Even points brought up