“How many wars did you say you were in?”
“Only one, and that wasn’t done there. That was an angry fellow with a sharp knife, and if I could have had it stitched right away, there wouldn’t be hardly any scar.”
“You should put out a pocket guidebook.”
“Some day I’ll arrange a guided tour. Meyer says there isn’t enough unblemished hide left to make a decent lampshade.”
“Are you accident-prone, darling?”
“I guess you could say that. I am prone to be where accidents are prone to happen.”
“Why do you want to ask Prescott about Ellis?”
“I haven’t really got anything specific to go on. It’s what I do, the way I go about things. If I can get enough people talking, sooner or later something comes up that might fit with something somebody else has said. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. Like finding out last night that whoever beat Esterland to death might have been a motorcyclist, a biker.”
“Why would you think that? I don’t understand.”
So I went through it for her, editing it just enough to take out things that were obviously meaningless. Her arm got tired and she snugged her face into the corner of my throat, her breath warm against my chest. I slowly stroked her smooth and splendid back as I talked, all the way from coccyx to nape and back again.
When I finished, she said, “Well, I guess it is interesting, but I don’t see what a motorcycle would have to do with anything, really. The only person I ever met who knew anything at all about motorcycles is Josie’s weird friend Peter Kesner.”
It startled me. “He rides them?”
“Oh, no! He’s what they call out there a genius. He’s a double hyphenate.”
“A what?”
“No, darling, it is not some form of perversion. He made a couple of motion pictures where he was the writer-director-producer. He made them years ago on a very small budget, and they were what is called sleepers. They made a lot of money, considering what they cost. Maybe you heard of them. One was called Chopper Heaven and the other was Bike Park Ramble. It was all a kind of realism, you know. He used real tough bike people and hand-held cameras. And they were sort of tragic movies. The critics raved. I saw one of them, I can’t really remember which. It was too loud and there were too many people getting hurt.”
She sat straight up and combed her dark hair back with her fingers and smiled down at me.
“Dear, I’m getting chilled. Can you reach the fan switch?” I turned it off. She reached down and got the end of the sheet and pulled it up over us when she stretched out again.
“You said Kesner is Josephine’s weird friend.”
“He came to Stamford with her when Ellis was in the hospital the first time. That’s when I met him. He’s big, maybe about your size, and from what I could gather from Josie, he’s been on every kind of pill and powder and shot ever invented. He was treating Josie like dirt, and she didn’t seem to mind a bit. It’s hard to carry on a conversation with him. I can’t describe it. It’s just … frustrating. And he’s weird-acting. Really weird.”
She kicked at something, then ducked under the sheet and came up with her discarded briefs. She held them to the light and said, “One of my romantic little plans for the good doctor.” They were white, with a regular pattern of bright red hearts the size of dimes.
“Glad he didn’t get a chance to appreciate them.”
“You didn’t appreciate them. I got shuffled out of them too quickly.”
“Protesting all the way?”
“Well—not really. Did you notice how fat her face is?”
“What?”
“The bride. A fat face and piggy little eyes.”
“I didn’t particularly notice because I was watching you, Annie. I lay there in my trundle bed in the Groveway Motel last night and thought about your pretty legs hiked up on that porch railing until I had to get up and take a cold shower. And then I came dashing down here in my domesticated Mitsubishi. Meyer had told me you had eyes for the doctor, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Come on! Really?”
“Cross my heart. Hope to spit.”
“You know, that makes me feel a lot better about this whole—uh—happenstance.”
“I’ve really enjoyed happenstancing with you, Miz Renzetti.”
“Always before I felt squeamish about big tall men.”
“And little dark women have not exactly figured large in my erotic fantasies, kid.”
“They might from now on?”
“Front and center.”
“You said enjoyed?”
“I did.”
“Past tense?”
“My dear lady, it is quarter past three in the morning.”
“So?”
“My ramparts are breached, my legions scattered, my empire burned to the ground, my fleet at the bottom of the sea. And you would—”
“Hush,” she said softly.
And so in time the impossible became at first probable and finally inevitable. As before, I found that through her response she led us into the way she most enjoyed. She was not, as I would have guessed, one of the twitchy ones with tricky swiveling, kinky little tricks and games, contortionist experimentations. What she wanted, and got, was to be settled into the unlauded missionary position, legs well braced, arms hanging on tight, and there exercise a deep, strong, steady, elliptical rhythm.
She lay sweat-drenched and spent, small face bloated and blurred, mouth puffed and smiling. “There!” she said. She pulled my mouth down for a sisterly kiss. “Everybody to his own bed, darling. Be sneaky, huh?”
By the time I was dressed she was snoring softly. I pulled the sheet and the thin blanket over her and turned off the light. When I went out the door, I made certain it locked behind me. I walked out to the edge of the water, where the small waves lisped and slapped against the sand. A seabird flapped up, honking, startling me.
The hours before dawn are when the spirits are supposed to be lowest. That is when most hospital deaths occur. That is when the labored breathing stops, with a final rattle in the throat. I tried to heap ashes on my head. McGee, your handy neighborhood stud. Always on call. Will provide references. I tried to summon up a smidgin of postcoital depression. But all I could tell about myself, in spite of all introspection, was that I felt content. I felt happy, satisfied, relaxed—with an overlay of a kind of sweet sadness, the feeling you get when you look at a picture of yourself taken with someone long gone on a faraway shore long ago.
Six
The dining room at Eden Beach had a wing like a small greenhouse, with an opaque roof. Broad-leafed plants in big cement pots provided the illusion of privacy for each table.
I arrived for brunch at one thirty, and while I was still examining the menu, a pair of unordered Bloody Marys arrived, complete with celery stalks for stirring. A few moments later the lady herself arrived and slid into the chair across from me. She looked shy and a bit worn. Her lips were puffy and there were bruised patches under her eyes.
We looked at each other in that moment which has to set the style for the whole relationship. I had guessed that perhaps we would have a bawdy little chat about how we had missed arranging a nooner, and how exhausted the male might be, and how badly lamed the female.
But from the look in her eyes I knew that was not the way to go, and knew that I would have relished that kind of talk as little as she. So I hoisted the glass. “To us.”
“To us,” she said, and we touched glasses. The drink was spice-hot and delicious.
“It’s going to be kind of difficult and awkward, keeping control of my staff, Travis. I really want us to be very very discreet, very careful. This job does mean an awful lot to me.”
I smiled at her and said, “You are implying, of course, that these fun and games are going to continue.”
She flushed and said, “Don’t you want to? I thought we were—”
“Hey!
I was afraid you might have second thoughts. Remember, I was sent into the game as a substitute for the doctor.”
“That’s not fair!” she said angrily. I kept smiling. Anger faded. She laughed. “Well, maybe that was the way it started. Okay. Let’s say I got lucky.”
“We both got lucky. It has to happen like that sometimes.”
She reached and touched my hand, her eyes glowing, then looked and saw a waitress coming and yanked her hand back.
“Look,” she said in her business voice, “I have to finish this and run. I really do. I am getting some kind of a short count in supplies, and as it isn’t my people, it has to be the wholesaler, and I had him hold the next truck. I have to go down there with my bookkeeper and prove to him he’s got thieves in his warehouse. I talked to Prescott Mullen this morning—by the way, he looked kind of shrunken and uninteresting—and gave him your name and told him you were checking out how Ellis got killed and said you’d find him sometime today.”
“Thank you.”
“We always put a sprig of mint in the half grapefruit. All the time Prescott was talking to me, Marcie Jean stood there smiling, with a piece of mint leaf stuck on her front tooth.”
“I’ve thought it over and decided she does have a fat face.”
She patted my hand. “Thank you, dear. You know the old joke about the ideal wife?”
“Deaf and dumb and owns a liquor store?”
“Right. Well, you’ve got an old lady now that runs a hotel, and she’s entitled to put dear friends on the cuff, so you better count on coming across the state at pretty regular intervals, hear?”
She got up, touched a fingertip to my lips, and hurried away.
I found Dr. Prescott Mullen on the beach, sitting in a sling chair under a big blue and white umbrella. The bride was face down in the shade beside him, a towel over her head, her legs and back pinked by fresh sunburn. Her new rings winked in reflected sunlight. I introduced myself and he told me to pull another chair over, but I sat on my heels, half facing him.
“I’m just doing a favor for a friend,” I told him. “Ron Esterland is suspicious of the timing. If Ellis had outlived his daughter, a lot of money would have moved in a different direction.”
“Some of it to him?” the doctor asked.
“Yes. But I don’t think that’s the primary motive.”
“So what is?”
“Anxiety. Guilt. A sense of loss. He’s sorry they didn’t get along, and he’s sorry his father didn’t live to see him make it as a painter.”
Prescott Mullen looked thoughtful. “I suppose in some sense it would be an easier murder to justify than if the man was healthy. How many months was he robbed of? If I had to guess, I’d say six at the outside. And the last six weeks would probably not have been what you’d call living.”
“What was his attitude toward his illness?”
“He seemed to think of it as a challenge. To him the cancer was an entity, an enemy, a thing that had invaded him and plotted against his life. I was no fan of Ellis Esterland. He was a highly competitive organism. I used to wonder how Anne could put up with him, why she didn’t just walk out.”
“When did you last see Esterland?”
“Mid-June. About five weeks before he was killed. He looked better than I expected him to look. But he was in pain. He wouldn’t admit it. I know he was in great pain.”
“How could you tell?”
“Observation. You see a lot of pain, you know what it looks like. Sudden sweats. Quick little intakes of breath. A sudden pallor. I think he could probably handle more pain than most, just out of arrogance and pride. He was a stubborn old man. I knew there would be more coming, and it might get to the point where he couldn’t handle it. I tried to get him to admit the pain, and I tried to tell him it would get worse. He told me not to worry about it. He said he was fine. I remember giving him a little lecture about the psychology of pain.”
“Would he have arranged to get himself killed rather than admit he was hurting?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I can’t see Esterland in that role. I gave him a lecture about the effects of the hallucinogens on pain. We know now that cannabis can quell the nausea some people feel during chemotherapy and radiology. Cannabis and hashish and LSD have an interesting effect on the subjective experiencing of pain. Intense and continuing pain seems to the patient to be a part of him, something swelling and burning inside of him, taking him over. The hallucinogens have the odd effect of making the pain seem aside and apart from the patient. The pain may be just as intense, but it is, subjectively, off to one side. Pain creates a terrible and consuming anxiety, on some very deep level of the brain. Pain is nature’s warning that something is terribly wrong. If anxiety is quelled by any hallucinogen, then pain, though still as intense, becomes less frightening and consuming. That may be the answer. I thought Ellis was fighting the pain relievers because they would dull his wits, dull his perceptions of the world. He wanted to stay just a little brighter than anybody else he knew. I urged him to find a private source for hallucinogens and experiment with them. I explained that it would leave his mind unimpaired but would enable him to handle pain better. I told him that it was the best way for him to get any enjoyment out of the time he had left.”
“Did you tell him how long he had left?”
“I told him my guess. That was our relationship from the start. Total candor.”
“Maybe the pain got worse and he took your advice and went up there to make a buy. That’s why he didn’t take Anne or tell her why he was going.”
“And somebody cheated him and killed him? Possible. I can tell you that if he did buy something, he would take it secretly, and if it helped, he would never have told Anne or me. It would have been his private solution. It would leave his macho image unimpaired.”
“Lovely guy.”
“Prince of a fellow,” Mullen said, grinning. “McGee, I like your reconstruction. It seems to fit what I read about the circumstances of his death. The news accounts implied he was keeping some kind of appointment at a highway rest stop.”
“Did you recommend any particular substance?”
“I think I told him that hashish would be easiest to manage, and probably reasonably available in the Miami area.”
“Everything you ever heard of is available in Dade County. But he couldn’t get much with two hundred dollars.”
“That’s all he had?”
“Anne gave out that figure, and she kept the accounts.”
“I have the feeling that Ellis Esterland could put his hands on money in one form or another without Anne knowing about it.”
“Okay, suppose he was carrying five thousand dollars. If Anne had known that and reported it, the local authorities would have been thinking about a buy that went wrong. There could have been contacts they could have developed. In his condition, at that point in the progression of the disease, how much pain do you think he should have been feeling?”
He thought it over. “Enough to send me running for the needle, whimpering all the way.”
The big bride rolled over, clawing the towel off her head, looking blankly and stupidly at the two of us. One nipple showed above the edge of her white bikini top. Prescott Mullen, smiling, reached down and tugged the fabric up to cover her. A few tendrils of russet hair curled out from under the bikini bottom.
“Whassa time, sweetie?” she asked in a small sweet voice.
“Three fifteen, lambikin. This is Travis McGee. My wife, Marcie Jean Mullen.”
“Oh, hi,” she said. She prodded her pink thigh with an index finger as she sat up, watching how long the white mark lasted. “Honeybun, I better get the hell off the beach. I think the sun kind of reflects in under the umbrella from the sand and sun and stuff.” She stood up, yawned, swayed, and then lost her balance when she bent to pick up her towel. She yawned again. “Marcie Jean Mullen. Still sounds strange, huh?” She beamed sleepily at me. “Used to be Marcie Jean Sensabaugh. Hated every minute
of it. Be a rotten world if you had to keep the name you were born with.” She picked up her canvas bag and looked inside. “I got a key, honeybun. See ya in the room.”
“Pretty lady,” I said when she was out of earshot. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. She’s a great girl. Absolutely perfect disposition. No neuroses. Healthy as the Green Bay Packers. And an absolutely fantastic pelvic structure. She was a delivery-room nurse.”
“That’s interesting.”
“We’ve talked it over. We want as many kids as we can have. She’s twenty-three and I’m thirty-six, and as near as we can tell, she’s two months pregnant right now. We agreed not to get married until we were sure we could have kids. I don’t want her to have them too close together. It wears a woman out too much. They should be two years apart. Okay, she’ll be twenty-four when our first one is born. Her mother had her last baby when she was forty-four. So, with a two-year spacing, we could have nine or ten. Of course, her mother had one set of twins.”
“It’s nice to see people get their lives all worked out.”
“I always wanted a big family. It was a case of finding the right girl before I got too old to enjoy the kids. As it is, if we stay on schedule, the last kid won’t get out of college until I’m about seventy-eight.”
“That’s cutting it pretty close, doctor.”
“I guess it is. But I come of long-lived stock. Both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers are still living. Late seventies and early eighties.”
“It’s something to look forward to, all right.”
“I think of it as a very precious responsibility. It’s really the only immortality we have. Did you ever think of that?”
“I guess I think of it all the time.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Then you better find a healthy woman right away, Mr. McGee. Or you won’t be young enough to enjoy your kids.”
I stood up and shook hands with him. “Thanks a lot. That’s probably a very good idea. Nice to have had this chat with you, doctor.”
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