Fletch and the Man Who by Gregory McDonald Page A

forward in the aisle, Fletch leaned over and whispered to Freddie, “Do you know what’s wrong with Bill Dieckmann?”
    Freddie craned her neck to see him. “He does that.”
    “Does what?”
    “Suffers terrible pain. He even whimpers. I think he blacks out sometimes. I mean, I think there are times he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
    Fletch watched him from where he stood. “Isn’t there anything we can do for him?”
    “Guess not.”
    Fletch looked forward and aft. “This bus is full of loonies.”
    “Pressures of the campaign,” Freddie said. She continued reading Jay Daly’s
Walls
.
    Fletch put his hand on Dieckmann’s shoulder. “You going to be all right, Bill?” Dieckmann looked up at him with wet eyes. “Want me to stop the bus? Get Dr. Thom?”
    With both hands, Dieckmann squeezed his head tighter. “No.”
    “I will, if you want. What’s the matter?”
    Eyes squeezed closed again, rocking forward and back in his seat, Dieckmann said in a hoarse whisper, “Leave me alone.”
    “You sure?”
    Dieckmann didn’t answer. He suffered.
    “Okay,” Fletch said. “If you say so.”
    He went back up the aisle to where Betsy was sitting. She was reading Justin Kaplan’s
Walt Whitman
.
    He bent over her and spoke quietly. “Someone said he saw you having breakfast a few days ago with the girl who was murdered last night.”
    “That’s right. I did. The breakfast room was filled. People were waiting. The hostess seated us together. Two single women.”
    “Did you talk?”
    “Sure. Civilities over toast.”
    “You’re a reporter, Betsy. I suspect you found out one or two things about her.”
    “Not really.”
    “Like not-really what?”
    “She was an ordinary, nice person. She’d been working as a sales clerk in a store in Chicago. Mason’s, I think, mostly in the bookshop.”
    “Is that all?”
    “She liked to read; said she read three or four books a week. Asked me if I’d read certain people, such as Antonia White, William Maxwell, Jean Rhys, Juan Alonzo. She said Saul Bellow once came up to her counter and asked her for something, some book they didn’t have, and he was very courteous about it. She recommended Antonia White’s
Frost in May
in particular because, she said, she had gone through parochial schools in Chicago. A Catholic high school; I think she said Saint Mary Margaret’s.”
    “That was the extent of your conversation?”
    “No.” Betsy was dredging her memory. “Her father had been killed in an accident when she was nine years old. He worked for the Chicago Waterworks or something. When he was in a ditch, a pipe landed on his head. So she could never think of going to college, you see.”
    “Oh. Anything else?”
    “Her mother never recovered from her father’s death, got stranger and stranger, and finally five years ago committed herself to a state home.”
    “Nothing else?”
    “Well, she lived alone in a studio apartment. Married sister, living in Toronto, four children. Her husband owns a gun shop. Sally—that is, Alice Elizabeth Shields; she called herself Sally—had been engaged a couple of times, once to a Chicago policeman who got another girl pregnant and decided he’d better go marry her. Sally never married.”
    “Is that all you’ve got?”
    “She had something like thirty-seven hundred dollars in a savings account. So she quit her job, sublet her apartment, packed up her Volkswagen, and came a-wandering.”
    “You didn’t get much out of her.”
    “Just civilities over toast.”
    “What was her Social Security number?”
    “You think I’m nosy?”
    “You are a reporter, after all.”
    “I wasn’t interviewing her.”
    “Why was she following the campaign?”
    “Didn’t know she was, at that point.”
    “While you were having breakfast with her, did she mention anyone who is traveling with the campaign by name?”
    Betsy thought. “No. But she did seem to know I’m a reporter.”
    “I wonder if it was something you