“You’re hard enough to find,” grumbled Moxie. “It took me the better part of a week to trace you down.”
“I was in Washington,” Fletch said, “trying to find The Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
“Did you find it?” She was chewing a lobster tail.
“I narrowed it down to one of three telephone booths.”
She wiped her hands on a napkin. “I seem to be in real financial trouble.”
“How is that possible?”
“You tell me.”
“Some nights you’re on two television channels simultaneously. You’re on the cables so much I should think you’d twang. Your films play the theaters. Last Christmas you did the first one hundred days of A Broadway Hit—”
“And I’m drowning in debt. Explain that to me.”
“I’d like to understand it myself. You’re smudging the American dream. The rich-and-famous dream.”
There were tears in her eyes. She ducked her head to her plate. “I work hard. I have to. So many people are counting on me. My work contributes to the income of literally thousands of people now. We’ve got my mother in this fabulously expensive sanatorium in Kansas. I’ve taken over some of the cost from Freddy.” She lowered her voice. “And I don’t have to be much of a fortune teller to say that pretty soon I’m going to have to take it all over. And everyone knows this is just a crazy business I’m in!” she said more loudly. “No security. Bankable today, a bum tomorrow. A person like me can’t get so much out of herself if she thinks that next week, next month, next year sometime she’s going to be on the sidewalk!”
“Have some shrimp.”
“I have some shrimp.”
“Have some more shrimp.”
“I don’t want any more shrimp,” she said with annoyance. Then she looked at him. “Was that your Sympathetic Routine Number 12?”
“Number 9, actually. I wish you wouldn’t see through me so quickly. It makes me blush.”
“You’ve never blushed in your life.”
“Why don’t you try to tell me in some sort of narrative form, some sequence—”
“Can’t.”
“I’m just a simple journalist, temporarily out of work—”
“The whole thing landed on me like a big bomb just a couple of weeks ago. Just before I was due on location for Midsummer Night’s Madness. Hell of a way to start a picture. Looking drawn and haggard.”
“You’ve never looked drawn and haggard in your life.” He looked at the lights in her tanned, blond skin, the lights in her blond hair. “Ashes and honey don’t mix.”
“Okay,” she said. “The story. A couple of weeks ago, I get a call from a man at the Internal Revenue Service who says he’s very sorry to bother me but…”
“With them it’s the but that counts.”
“Right away I told him to call Steve Peterman, that Steve Peterman takes care of all my business affairs, taxes, etcetera, etcetera. And he said that was why he was calling me personally because maybe Mister Peterman hadn’t told me that if I didn’t do something within a matter of days, I was going to jail. Me going to jail—not Steve Peterman.”
“Oh, Moxie, the Internal Revenue Service always talks tough. I once had a very funny experience—”
“Right now, Fletch, I’m not interested in the comic side of the Internal Revenue Service. I asked the man what he was talking about. He said I had gone way beyond my last extension, and a lot of other things I didn’t understand. I asked him to slow down and speak in a language I could understand.”
“That’s asking a bit too much of any government.”
“Well, he did. He was really very kind. I sort of understood him, after a while. Instead of paying my taxes over the last years, Steve has been asking for extensions. So I’m years behind. I asked the man how much I owe. He said they don’t know. They think it’s a considerable whack of money. But then he said something or other about all the money I’ve had going in and out of the country makes things rather confusing.”
“What money have you had going in and out of the country?”
“I have no idea.”
“Into the country I understand, maybe. Being in the film business you probably have some foreign income. Out of the country I don’t understand. Do you have any investments abroad?”
“Not that I know of. Why should I?”
“Well, it’s possible Steve had you invested in French perfumery or something.”
“He never mentioned it. You haven’t heard the worst. I was greatly upset. I called Steve, and that made me more upset. He was distinctly dodgy, Fletch. On the telephone. He said, Not to worry, Not to worry, I was about to start principal photography on a film and I should keep my mind on that, he’d take care of everything else. I was so upset I screened Being There three times and Why Shoot The Teacher? twice.”
“Say, you were upset.”
“I called Steve back and told him I was taking the next plane to New York. He squacked and gobbled. By the time I got to the apartment in New York and called him, he’d been called away to Atlanta, Georgia. On business.”
“While we’re speaking of that, Moxie…”
Her eyes widened at the interruption.
“… You do live pretty well,” Fletch said. “You have that big place in Malibu, on the beach, with a pool and screening room. You have that real nice apartment in New York—”
“Look who’s talking!” she exclaimed. “A two-bit reporter with a gorgeous place on the Italian Riviera—”
“Oh. That again.”
“—who’s spent years on a book about some artist—”
“Edgar Arthur Tharp.”
She grinned wickedly. “How’s the book coming, Fletch?”
“Slowly.”
“Slowly! Have you started Chapter Two yet?”
“There have been a lot of distractions.”
“I need the house in California, Fletch, for my work. I live there. I need the apartment in New York. For my work. I live there. Neither place is a sun-and-sport palacia in Italy!”
“Well, I’ve had my troubles with the Internal Revenue Service, too.”
“No more of your sympathy, thank you. I do believe the Internal Revenue Service, in this case, is right. In New York, I go over to Steve’s office, even though I’ve been told he’s not there. Everybody recognizes me, of course. They’ve been dealing with my stuff for years. I request a quiet office and all the books, all the figures which relate to me and my affairs.”
“They had to give them to you.”
“They did.”
“But why did you ask?”
“Why not? I had to.”
“Moxie, there is no way you can understand such books and figures, as you call them, without training. You needed a professional accountant.”
“I could understand enough.”
“You could understand nothing.”
“For years Steve has been telling me I must borrow money, I must borrow money, being in debt was good for me, paying interest greatly improved my tax situation. I hated the whole thought of being in debt. He explained to me it was just paper debt. So every time he shoved papers in front of me, I signed them. Fletch, I discovered that he had borrowed millions of dollars in my name.”
“Entirely possible. Probably right… I think. I don’t know either.”
“Fletch, what’s a tax shelter?”
“It’s a little stick house where you go to live once the Internal Revenue Service is done with you.”
“He had borrowed money in my name from foreign banks. Geneva, Paris, Mexico City.”
“That seems odd. I really don’t know.”