Carioca Fletch by Gregory McDonald Read Free Book Online

them.”
    “I think we’re being told something.”
    “Have you gone Brazilian? In just a month?”
    “Naw. I won’t be
carioca
until I can walk across the
avenida
in bare feet at high noon.”
    She turned to go back to the table. “Sounds to me like you’re giving some fantastic intellectual, political rationale for their out-and-out thievery.” She sat down at the table. “But I guess you have every reason to.”
    “To what?”
    “To understand.”
    “This lady I know …” Fletch too sat down at the table. “She writes novels. I doubt I’ve got it straight, but she told me there is some ancient ritual here, a religious ritual, for which the food, in order to be acceptable by the ritual-masters, must be stolen.”
    Joan Collins Stanwyk sighed. “Enough of this. I’ve been robbed. I need help. If I weren’t desperate, I wouldn’t have come to you.”
    “I guess so.”
    “Will you please come to the police station with me?”
    “If that’s what you want.”
    “I must report this.”
    “It won’t do any good.”
    “Fletcher, I’ve been robbed, of thousands of dollars—”
    “You have to pay a fee.”
    “What?”
    “To report a robbery to the police, you have to pay a fee.”
    “You have to pay the police money to tell them you were robbed?”
    “It’s a lot of paperwork for them.”
    She swallowed. “Is that all it is? Paperwork?”
    “Yes. I think so. In most cases.” He scraped his chairlegs on the stone pavement. “You are warned, you see. Robbery here is not uncommon. No one can deny that. It is also common in New York, Mexico City, and Paris.”
    She was beginning to have to squint into the sunlight to see him. A beam of sunlight was coming through a break in the hedge. “But here, you say, they’re doing you a favour to rob you.”
    “You might as well think that.”
    “They rob you with philosophy.”
    “It’s not considered such a bad thing to relieve you of your possessions, your identity, your past. What is yours is theirs is mine is ours…”
    Her white face was stonelike. Her jaw was tight.
    He said, “I’m just trying to make you feel better.”
    “Fletcher, are you going to let me have some money? Right away?” Her fingers gripped her temples. Her whole head shivered. “At the moment, we won’t go into the source of that money.”
    “Of course. I’ll bring some to your hotel. I have to get out of these wet shorts and shower and get them to open the hotel safe.”
    “Very well.”
    When she stood, she looked very pale and she seemed to sway on her feet. She closed her eyes a moment.
    “You all right?”
    “I’ll be all right.”
    “What hotel are you in?”
    “The Jangada.”
    “Very posh.”
    “Bring lots of money.”
    “We’ll have breakfast together. At your hotel.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Come straight to my room with the money. Room nine-twelve.”
    “Right.” He had been in a bedroom of hers before.
    He walked with her to the break in the hedge.
    “I’d send you back in a taxi,” he chuckled, “but I’m not wearing shoes.”
    Distantly, she said, “I’d rather walk.”

Eight
    There was no answer when he tapped at the door of Room 912.
    He knocked louder.
    Still the door did not open.
    He knocked again and then placed his ear against the door. He could hear nothing.
    As quietly as possible, in his own room at The Hotel Yellow Parrot, Fletch had showered and changed into fresh shorts, a shirt, sweat socks and sneakers. Laura was still sleeping. He left a note for her,
I have gone to the Hotel Jangada to have breakfast with someone I know
.
    He had driven the short distance between the hotels in his MP.
    After knocking on Joan Collins Stanwyk’s door at The Hotel Jangada, he went back down to the lobby and called the room on the house phone.
    No answer.
    At the hotel desk, he asked the clerk, “Please, what is the number of Joan Collins Stanwyk’s room? Mrs Alan Stanwyk?”
    The clerk consulted his plastic-tabbed file.