There he had found a woman sitting alone on a canvas chair watching her husband on a television monitor.
Now they were sitting together behind a trailer at the edge of a parking lot.
She had sipped her coffee cup dry and then picked the Styrofoam cup to little pieces. Bits of Styrofoam were in her lap and on the sand around her feet like crumbs.
“When are they going to tell me what happened?” she asked.
She could have rebelled from Fletch’s ministrations and found out for herself. She didn’t. She had understood enough of what she had seen to prefer acute anxiety to dead certainty.
“Breathe deeply,” Fletch said.
She took a deep breath and choked off a sob.
The Rescue Squad ambulance was the first to arrive. Blue lights flashing on the gray day, it threaded its way slowly and carefully down onto the beach. A police car arrived next, its siren and lights on, but seemingly in no great hurry. Some local police had already been assigned to the film location. Then two more police cars came screaming, skidding in as if their drivers hoped the cameras were on. Out of the passenger seat of one emerged a middle-aged woman in uniform.
Marge Peterman said, “If they take Steve to the hospital, I want to go with him.”
Fletch nodded. The ambulance had not returned from the beach, as it would have if there were any necessity to go to the hospital.
“I mean, I want to go with him in the ambulance.”
Fletch nodded again.
Most of the people, the film crew, the television crew, the press, had gone down to the beach like pieces of metal being drawn by a magnet. Now a few were returning. As they returned, they walked with their chins down. Their shoulders seemed higher than normal. And the skin beneath their tans seemed touched by bleach. None was talking.
Fletch could not hear the murmur of the Gulf or even the chatter of the birds among the palm trees.
An airplane taking off from Fort Myers passed overhead.
A young woman in shorts, a halter, and sandals appeared around the corner of the trailer and stopped. She looked back toward the beach, wondering what to do, looking for support. A man with a large stomach extending a dark blue T-shirt, with dark curly hair, a light meter dangling from a string around his neck arrived and stood next to the young woman. He kept looking at Marge Peterman’s back. A young policeman joined them. He shoved his hat back off his sweaty forehead and looked toward the road, probably wishing there were traffic to direct. One or two other people came to stand with them.
Dan Buckley came around the corner of the trailer and looked at each of the people standing there. He, too, hesitated. Then he slowly came forward and put his hand on Marge Peterman’s shoulder.
She looked up at him.
“Dan…”
Fletch gave Buckley his chair and stood aside. “Mrs. Peterman…” Dan Buckley said. “Marge, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Marge.” He leaned forward in the chair, forearms on his thighs. “It seems your husband… It seems Steve is dead. I’m sorry, but…”
Buckley’s face lost none of its confident amiability in its seriousness, its sadness. Watching him, Fletch wished that if he ever had to take such bad news, it be broken to him by such a professional face as Dan Buckley’s. In Buckley’s face there was the built-in assurance that no matter how bad the present facts, there would be a world tomorrow, a show tomorrow, a laugh tomorrow.
Marge Peterman stared at Buckley. “What do you mean ‘seems to be’?” Her chin quivered. “‘Seems to be dead’?”
Buckley’s hands cupped hers. “Is dead. Steve is dead, uh, Marge.”
Her face rejected the news, then crumpled in tears. She took her hands from him and put them to her face. “What happened?” she choked. “What happened to Steve?”
Buckley looked up at Fletch. Then he sat back in the chair. His eyes ran along a heavy-duty cable strung over the parking lot.
He said nothing.
The young woman in the halter came forward and put both her hands on Marge Peterman’s shoulders. “Come on,” she said.
Marge stood up and staggered on the flat ground.
The man in the blue T-shirt took her arm.
Together, the man and the young woman walked Marge Peterman through the trailers to the front of the parking lot.
“What did happen?” Fletch asked Buckley.
Buckley focused on Fletch. “Who are you?” he asked. Fletch was wearing sailcloth shorts, a tennis shirt, and no shoes. “The Ambassador from Bermuda?”
“Sometimes I get coffee for people,” Fletch said.
Buckley looked over the bits of Styrofoam on the sand. “He got stabbed.” He shook his head. “He got a knife stuck in his back. Right on the set. Right on camera.”
“He was quiet about it,” Fletch commented.
Buckley was looking at his fingers in his lap as if he had never seen them before. “It could not have happened. It absolutely could not have happened.”
“But it did though, huh?”
Buckley looked up. “Get me a cup of coffee, willya, kid? Black, no sugar.”
“Black no sugar,” Fletch repeated.
Fletch walked toward the canteen, past it, through the security gate, got into his rented car and drove off.
3
The first phone call Fletch made was to Global Cable News in Washington, D.C. His call got through to that hour’s producer quickly. It was, ‘Yes, sir, Mister Fletcher’, ‘Yes, sir, Mister Fletcher’ all the way through the switchboard and production staff.
Recently Fletch had bought a block of stock in Global Cable News. Just ten days before he had toured their offices and studios in Washington.
He had allowed everyone to know he was a journalist and they might be hearing from him from time to time.
“Yes, sir, Mister Fletcher,” said that hour’s producer.
Fletch looked down at his bare feet on the rotten, sand-studded floorboards of the porch outside the mini-mart. When he was working full time as a journalist, no one in power had ever called him sir. They had called him many other things. He had always known, of course, that behind the power of the free press was the power of the buck. He had never felt the sensation of the power of the buck before. He decided he liked the sensation and that he must work to deprive himself, and others, of any such sensation. A barefoot boy with cheek should be listened to because he’s got a story, not because he was able to buy a few shares in the company.
“‘Sir’?” Fletch said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”
“Jim Fennelli, Mister Fletcher. We met last week when you were here. I’m the bald guy with the big side whiskers.”
“Oh, yeah,” Fletch said. Jim Fennelli looked like a stepped-on cotton pod. “The gumdrop fetishist.”
“That’s me,” Fennelli chuckled. “A box a day keeps the dentist healthy, wealthy, and sadistic.”
“You know The Dan Buckley Show?”
“Sure. My mother-in-law fantasizes she’s married to the creep.”
“They were taping down here on Bonita Beach this afternoon. On location for a movie called Midsummer Night’s Madness.”
“Cute. Prospero’s Island in Florida.”
Fletch said nothing. No matter how long he lived, he would be amazed at the great mish-mash of information, and misinformation, all journalists carry around in their heads.
“Have I got it right?” Fennelli asked.