Title:Fletch$prime;s Fortune
Author(s): Gregory Mcdonald
Publisher(s): Vintage Books
Pages: 256
Year: 2002
Format: MOBI
Language: English
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The random article:
First he heard Leona Hatch snoring in Room 42, on Station 22, then Station 21 lit and he heard Sheldon Levi’s toilet flushing in Room 48, then Station 4 lit and he heard Eleanor Earles saying in Suite 9, “… Dressed to hear Hy Litwack’s stupid speech. Ugh! But if I don’t, I suppose there’ll be three pages in TV Guide about my snubbing the pan-fried son of a bitch at the American Journalism …” and then Station 2 lit and he heard Carol and Hy Litwack talking in Suite 5.
Any noise in any room in which he had placed a lower-numbered bug had precedence over any noise in any room in which he had placed a higher-numbered bug.
Fletch studied his telephone information sheet, and the notes he had made on it regarding which bugs he had put where, and discovered he had placed bugs instinctively more or less in accordance with the machine’s priorities.
To keep himself straight at what he was doing, and, in fear of eventually being caught as he let himself into other people’s rooms, he had planted the lower-numbered bugs in the rooms of the more important people: Station 1 was Suite 12, Lydia March and Walter March, Junior; Station 2, the Litwacks, in Suite 5; Station 3, Helena and Jake Williams, in Suite 7; Station 4, Eleanor Earles, in Suite 9. In Suite 3, now empty—it being where Walter March had been murdered—he had placed bug Number 5. And, in Room 77, Fredericka Arbuthnot’s, he had placed bug Number 23.
“My, my,” Fletch said of his marvelous machine, “it walks, it talks, cries ‘Mama!’ and piddles genuine orange juice!”
Hy Litwack spent a long time gargling his famous throat—every bubble and blurp of which Fletch faithfully recorded.
Carol Litwack was saying, “Here you are, the most successful, respected journalist in the country, in the whole world, a multimillionaire on top of that, and you still feel you can’t say what you want to say, what you think is the truth.”
“Like what?” Hy Litwack’s voice sounded tired and bored.
“Well, what you just said about terrorism and television downstairs is not what you’ve said to me about terrorism and television.”
Clearly, Hy Litwack was having a bedtime conversation with his wife which did not interest him much. “I mentioned the possibility that the more publicity we give terrorists and murderers the more other kooks are apt to commit acts of terror and murder for the publicity alone. Too many people want to be on television, even with a gun in hand, or in handcuffs, or lying face down in the street with their backs riddled with police bullets… how much more of my speech would you like me to repeat to you? I admitted all that. I said I worry about it. But I don’t know what to do about it. No one does. News is news, and it’s seldom good.”