Fletch stood back. “It wasn’t the maid?”
“Are you the maid’s lover?’ Toninho laughed. He slapped his thigh with his hand. “Oh, Fletch!” He put his hand on Fletch’s shoulder and shook him. “Be glad.” Then he laughed again. “Also because traditionally it is a live frog!”
Six
“Restless.”
“Of course,” she said.
This was the third time he had gotten out of bed in a half hour.
The first time, he went to the bathroom and drank from the bottle of mineral water. Then he tried snuggling up next to Laura so that all of his front touched all of her back. She breathed deeply, asleep. The second time he put his head through the drapes and saw the daylight of another morning. No electric lights were on. In bed again, he tried lying straight on his back, his hands folded across his chest as if he were in a coffin, and breathing deeply. Even at that hour, from somewhere in the city he could hear the samba drums.
Now he put on his light running shorts.
Laura raised her head from the pillows and looked at him.
“I’m going for a run on the beach,” he said. “Before the sand gets too hot.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t get to sleep.”
“I know,” she said. “Poor Fletch.”
She put her head back down on the pillows.
Seven
“Can you buy me a cup of coffee?”
Joan Collins Stanwyk.
She was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette, at a little table in the forecourt of The Hotel Yellow Parrot when he came back from his run. There were three crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray on the table.
Her eyes ran over the sweat gleaming on his shoulders, chest, stomach, even on his legs.
Having finished his run with a sprint, he was breathing heavily.
“That’s the least I can do for you,” he said.
Two miles up the beach there had been a crew of men dressed in orange jackets fanned out like a search party cleaning the beach, and Fletch had run to them, and back. As he ran barefoot, he avoided several macumba fires smoldering from the night before. And he passed many dead wallets, purloined, stripped and dropped. Even at that hour, many other people were running on the beach. And a group of Brazilian men easily in their sixties were playing a full game of soccer barefooted in the sand.
Coming back across Avenida Atlantica, the roadway was almost unbearably hot on his bare feet, and it was not yet seven o’clock in the morning.
The bar, which was the middle door at the front of The Hotel Yellow Parrot, of course was closed. Fletch pressed the service bell beside the door.
“Let’s see if that brings someone.” He sat across from Joan at the little table.
He folded his slippery arms across his slippery chest.
The forecourt, with thick green bushes headhigh on three sides, had brilliant streaks of morning sunlight in it.
This morning Joan Collins Stanwyk looked less the California empress. She was dressed in a light, tan slacks suit, white silk shirt, and sandals. Her hair was not in its usual impeccable order. Her face looked haggard; her eyes sleepless. She might still have been suffering jet lag; she might also have been suffering from her martinis and her cigarettes and, of course, from her recent widowhood.
“How are you?” he asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“Did you come here to find me? I mean, to Rio?”
“Of course.”
“How did you work it out? Where I went?”
“Did you forget Collins Aviation has its own security personnel? Mostly retired detectives who are very good at finding out things? Although, I admit, sometimes not fast enough.” There was no humor in the irony of her statement. “And did you forget that I was born, bred, and educated to do a job? And that I’m rather good at it?”
She was the daughter of John Collins, who had built a mammoth airplane company out of his own garage in California. Wife, now widow, of Alan Stanwyk, the late chief executive officer of that company. A famous socialite, executive hostess for both her father and her husband, famous blonde, long-legged, tennis-playing Californian beauty who had known her function in that world of fast cars and slow parties and had once, shortly before, surprised Fletch at how well she had performed, or tried to perform.
“I haven’t forgotten.”
A waiter appeared.
Fletch ordered coffee for Joan and guaraná for himself.
She said, “You’re absolutely gorgeous, wet with sweat. You have the same build as Alan had, but there is so much more light in your skin.”
He tried to shave the sweat off his chest and stomach with the side of his index finger. “I don’t have a towel. I’ve been running. I—”
A slight jerk of her head stopped him. There was something smoky about her eyes. He was looking at a woman whose life, whose whole world, had been deeply violated by circumstances, probably for the first time in her life.
“If you came here for a full explanation—”
She stopped him. “I need your help.” Her hand shook before she put her fingers against her cheek and stroked the area in front of her ear. “Let’s forget for now why I came here. Ironically enough, You’re the only person I know in Rio, and I have to ask you to help me.” Her voice was very soft.
She collected herself while the waiter set coffee in front of her, the can of guaraná and a glass in front of Fletch.
“I knew you were here,” Fletch said. “I saw you yesterday on the avenida. You were wearing a green silk dress. And carrying a handbag.”
“Oh, yes,” she said bitterly.
“I hid from you.” He poured his guaraná. “I was just so surprised to see you. How did you find out where I was staying?”
“I just called all the best hotels, and asked for Mister Irwin Maurice Fletcher. I knew, of course, you could afford the very best accommodations.” Again, naturally, there was no humor in her irony. “Just went down the list of first-class hotels. When I asked for you here, at The Yellow Parrot, they rang your room. No answer. So I knew where you were staying.”
“Why are you sitting in the forecourt waiting for me at six-thirty in the morning?”
“I had no choice. It was the next thing to do, the only thing do to. After the most horrible night… I walked down from the hotel. While I was still up the block I saw you starting out for your run, going across the street. I wasn’t about to run after you up the beach.”
“No.”
“I was robbed,” she said.
“Oh.”
“You say that with such aplomb. As if you knew it.”
“I guessed it.”
“How?”
“You don’t know about Rio?”
“I guess not enough.”
“It’s a marvelous place.”
“Terrific,” she said.
“You going to give me all the details?”
“You sound like you’ve already heard them.”
“I think I have.”
“Robbed twice.”
“Not a record.”
“Robbed of everything.” A tear appeared in the corner of her eye.
“Baptized,” he said.
“Last night, after I found out which hotel you were in, I considered coming and camping out in the lobby until you showed up, but from what I’ve heard of Rio nightlife, that didn’t make much sense.”
“No.”
“At least not for such a healthy, wealthy, attractive young man.”
At first Fletch thought he would let this irony pass over him. Then he said, “I wasn’t in.”
“So I went out myself. I went for a walk. Right along here.” She indicated the avenida beyond the hedge. “Sat in a café, had a drink, watched the people, listened to the drums. Walked further, to another café, had a drink. Couldn’t pay the bill. My purse was gone.”