Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

“I know. Because it got the message to Knucks about not messing with me any more. At least I hope it did. I hate being grabbed like that. And he’s so rough, he hurts a lot.”

  “Have you got people close by?”

  “Not close by. They’re all down near Monroe Station on the Trail. Lots of brothers. When this thing is settled, I might go down there awhile, sew up some tourist skirts, get a good rest, go frogging.”

  “It would probably be good for you.”

  “What the hell would you know about what’s good for me?”

  “Excuse me all to hell, lady.”

  She came sliding over and put her hand on my arm. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Look, I’m hurting and I want to hurt back, but I shouldn’t be hurting you.”

  “Forget it. No harm done.”

  She had nothing to say the rest of the way. She got out with helmet and shoulder bag and thanked me. I waited until she got the door unlocked and turned and waved.

  By the time I tucked Miss Agnes away and biked from the garage back to the Flush, there was a faint pallor across the eastern sky, close to the horizon line. I chained the bike up and went walking on the empty beach, not too healthy a night activity of late. Some of the jackals cruise our area from time to time, and have shot an innocent man in the head, raped a woman on the beach, cut a man up while removing his wallet and watch. Sub-human freaks, looking for laughs.

  I stashed my sandals where I could find them, rolled up the pants legs, walked the water line. The sea thumped in and slid up the sand, pale suds in starlight.

  I walked and thought about the lieutenant. I could never feel easy about his gratitude toward me. If I hadn’t helped carry him down the hill in the rain, somebody else would have. And maybe he would have been better off not being carried at all, being left there. But he didn’t think so. I had run into him again by accident, fifteen years after he was wounded. It had been up to him to recognize me. He was fifty pounds lighter and a hundred years older than I remembered.

  Okay. Okay. Okay. But, by God, it seemed that an awful lot of people were into dying. The “in” thing this year, apparently. No chance for practice. You had to do it right the first and only time you got to do it. And you were never quite certain when your chance was coming. Stay braced at all times.

  Eleven

  The Byline did not come hulking into the marina until midmorning on Thursday the twenty-third. Meyer and Aggie were standing up in the bow. I went along with the yacht, keeping up easily at a walking pace. They both looked several shades darker and very content.

  “Lovely cruise,” Aggie called. “Just lovely.”

  I helped with the lines and went aboard when the crew had rigged the gangway. They greeted me. I kissed Aggie on the cheek and asked them how far they had been.

  “Just up to Jupiter Inlet,” Meyer said. “We anchored in a very secluded cove. And we had a nice time. And then we came back.”

  “I admire the way you seafarers put up with the rigors of the deep dark ocean blue.”

  “Don’t be snide, darling,” Aggie said. “No one needs to be bounced about on a lot of angry ugly waves in order to enjoy a cruise. Don’t you agree, Meyer dear?”

  “Aggie, I always agree with everything you say.”

  “Mary time?” she asked. “Below or up here? It does seem nice up here, don’t you think, Travis? Raul, tres marías picantes, por favor.”

  She sorted herself out on a sun chaise on the upper deck, crossing her long tanned elegant ageless gleaming legs, arching her magnificent back just a little, tossing that rich ruff of hair back, favoring me with a slow and sardonic wink. It was not invitation. It was confirming our mutual approval of the effort that had made the tight pink bikini feasible, with only the smallest roll around the middle. She was a big glorious engine, and a very smart tough lady who, a bit belatedly, had come into her own in every way and was enjoying every moment of it.

  “Aggie is flying out from here at one o’clock,” Meyer said, “instead of cruising back to Miami.”

  “I was going to be a day late,” she said, “but after two phone calls, I learned better. One of the media monsters is nibbling at my poor little string of papers, salivating. Wants to stick us in with all their magazines and television stations and bulk carriers and tampon factories and give me a fat consultant contract.”

  Meyer spread his hands apart and said, “Aggie, it depends on what you want. If you take the cash, put it in tax-frees after paying capital-gains taxes, you could have over half a mil a year with very small tax to pay on it. You could spend a lot more time aboard this vessel.”

  “What I want, dear man, is to run my world better than anybody ever ran it before, or will again. A business person, making business moves all day.”

  “So you shouldn’t sell.”

  “I seem to have a business I can’t sell,” I said.

  They both stared at me and Aggie Sloane said, “You have a business? How quaint, dear boy! Of what sort?”

  The drinks arrived, and I took a swallow before I turned to Meyer. “You heard me talk about Ted Blaylock.”

  “Yes, of course. The crippled lieutenant.”

  “He died Monday night.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “An attorney named Daviss Grudd, two s’s, two d’s, phoned me and told me about it Tuesday afternoon. That whole enterprise of his, Ted Blaylock’s Oasis, Inc., was in a closely held corporation. Very closely held. One hundred shares of stock outstanding. So he left fifty to me and he left fifty to a skinny little half-Seminole woman named Millicent Waterhawk, called Mits, one of the famous Fantasy Foxes. And I can’t sell that damn stock or give it away until there has been an appraisal of the value of the whole damn thing, and God only knows how long that is going to take. Grudd says the thing has got to keep operating or the value of the shares left to Miss Waterhawk will go down, and Grudd said that there is a note in his office to me from Blaylock, saying that it was the only way he could think of to protect Mits’s interest and he was sure I would make sure she didn’t get a tossing.”

  I jumped up so quickly I splashed some of my drink on the back of my hand. In a higher than normal voice, I said, “I don’t like all this! My God, when it got so you couldn’t rent a car or check into a good hotel without a credit card, I had to sign up. I had to have a bank account to get the credit cards. I keep getting into more and more computers all the time. Boat papers, city taxes, bank records, credit records, IRS, army records, census records, phone company records.… God damn it, I feel like I’m getting more and more entangled. Like walking down a dark corridor into cobweb after cobweb. I didn’t sign up for this kind of lousy regimentation! I don’t want to be a damn shareholder, owner, manager, or what the hell ever. I’m getting smothered.”

  They were both staring at me. “There, there,” said Aggie. “Poor baby.” She turned to Meyer. “Poor baby doesn’t comprehend the modern way of guaranteeing anonymity and privacy, does he?”

  “Tell him, dear,” Meyer said, looking fatuous.

  “Sit down, Travis. The computer age, my rebellious friend, is strangling on its own data. As the government and industry and the financial institutions buy and lease more and more lovely computers, generation after generation of them, they have to fill them, they have to use lots and lots of programs, lots of softwear to utilize capacity. How am I doing, Meyer?”

  “Very nicely.”

  “Meyer taught me this. What you should do from now on, Travis, is to make sure you get into as many computers as possible. Lots of tiny bank accounts, lots of credit cards, lots of memberships. Have your attorney set up some partnerships and little corporations and get you some additional tax numbers. Move bits of money around often. Buy and sell odd lots of this and that. Feed all the information you can into all their computers.”

  “And spend my life keeping track of what the hell I’m doing?”

  “Who said anything about keeping track? If you can get so complicated you confuse yourself, im
agine how confused the poor computers are going to be.”

  “Is she putting me on, Meyer?”

  “She’s giving you good advice. If you try to hide, you are easy to find. You are leaving only one trail in the jungle, and the hounds can follow that one. Leave forty trails, crossing and re-crossing. The computers are strangling on data. The courts are strangling on caseload. Billions of pieces of paper are floating around each month, clogging the inputs, confusing the outputs. A nice little old lady in Duluth had twelve post office boxes under twelve different names, and had twelve social security cards and numbers, and drew checks on all twelve for eight years before they caught up with her. And they wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t signed the wrong name on the wrong check five years ago. The government seeks restitution. She says she lost it all at bingo. Think of it this way, Travis. With each new computer that goes into service, your identity becomes more and more diffuse and unreal. Right now today, if every man, woman, and child were put to work ten hours a day reading computer printouts, just scanning the alphabetical and numerical output of the printers, they could cover about one third of what is being produced. Recycling of computer printout paper is a giant industry. We’re all sinking into the oblivion of profusion, and one day soon we will all be gone, with no way to trace us.”

  Aggie began to giggle and gasp. “Millicent Waterhawk,” she said in a strangled voice. “Your business partner.”

  “What’s so damn funny?” I asked.

  Meyer started laughing, and pretty soon I had to join in. It was such a dreadful blow to my self-image that it took me a while to see any humor in it. But there was a lot, I guess.

  • • •

  The funeral service was on Friday noon in the little Everglades settlement of Bonahatchee. There was a better turnout of the Fantasies than Mits had expected. She was obviously pleased that almost a hundred and fifty machines had assembled at the Oasis and had rumbled at slow funeral pace to Snead’s Funeral Home in Bonahatchee and, subsequent to the eulogy and service, had followed the hearse out to where the flowers covered the raw dirt mound of the pre-dug grave.

  All the brothers and sisters wore black arm bands. After the graveside service things began to break up, and they milled around for a time, talking to people they hadn’t seen since the last biker funeral, then peeled off in twos and threes, roaring past the two state trooper cars which had apparently been summoned just in case, no doubt by nervous residents of the town, unstrung by the bearded, burly, helmeted visions which made such a powerful and flatulent sound as they moved through the town slowly in columns of four.

  Daviss Grudd came over and introduced himself after the service. Mits had pointed him out to me and said he rode a 900cc Suzuki with a new Windjammer fairing for touring. She had to explain what she meant. He was a smallish man with big shoulders and a big drooping mustache and a voice like something in the bottom of a barrel. I introduced him to Meyer. He followed us back to the Oasis, which was closed for the day. He brought in the portfolio he took out of a saddlebag, and the four of us sat at one of the tables in front of the bar.

  “Meyer,” I explained, “is my adviser in business matters.”

  Mits said, “I can’t believe I’m gonna own half this place. I never owned anything in my life.”

  “The cash situation is pretty good,” Grudd said. “What you’ve got to have here is management. Ted, for all his kidding around, was a good manager. It has always looked messy around here, but it does turn a dollar.”

  “I wouldn’t want to manage it even if I could,” I said quickly.

  “Who kept the books?” Meyer asked.

  “Ted did,” Mits answered. “They’re in his desk drawer. You want them?” Grudd nodded, and she went and brought them back. Checkbook, journal, ledger, inventory sheets, payroll, withholding, state sales tax, ad valorem tax records.

  “I’ve got the corporate books, minute book, and so on.”

  Meyer flipped pages, ran his thumbnail down columns of figures, went backwards through the checkbook. Then he said, “I can make a couple of preliminary judgments.”

  “Hey, I like how he talks,” Mits said.

  “Pay a good manager what he would be worth, a manager who can get along with and attract the kind of trade the place caters to, and there’ll be damn little left over for dividends. If there is anything left over, it should go into replacing equipment and maintaining the buildings. At first glance I see a very clean debt situation. There are nine acres of land with a seven-hundred-foot frontage on a not-very-busy tertiary road. Land value, twenty-five to thirty thousand. Liquor inventory, fifteen hundred. Motorcycle and parts inventory, about ten thousand to twelve thousand at cost. Liquor license, how much?”

  “Maybe twenty thousand if we can move it somewhere else,” Grudd said.

  “Shop equipment and tools, say five thousand. Let me see, that would come to about sixty-five to sixty-eight thousand. My advice would be to liquidate.”

  Mits glared at him. “Now I don’t like the way you talk. No damn way do we liquidate. No way!”

  I don’t know whether or not he was going to try to talk her into it. Two big machines came in, popping and grumbling. Mits jumped up and looked out and said, “Hey, it’s Preach and Magoo.”

  “Top officers of the Fantasies,” Grudd explained. “Let ’em in, Mits.”

  Preach was tall and thin and wore a gray jump suit with a lot of silver coin buttons. He had long blond hair and a long thin blond beard. Except for the little gold wire glasses he was wearing, he looked like folk art depicting Jesus. Magoo was five and a half feet high, and about four broad, none of it fat. If he could have straightened his bandy legs, he would have been a lot closer to six feet. His arms were long, large, sinewy, and bare, with a pale blue tracery of dragons, fu dogs, and Chinese gardens under the tan. His head was half again normal size, with a brute shelf of acromegalic jaw. The expression was at once merry and sardonic, happy and skeptical.

  Preach put his hands on Mits’s shoulders and looked down into her small brown face with warmth and compassion. “Mits, Mits, Mits,” he said. “A bad thing, eh? Couldn’t make it in time, kid. We’re sorry. We were in Baja when we heard. Flew back.”

  “I wondered,” she said. “It’s okay. You know Daviss Grudd. This is Mr. Meyer and this here is Travis McGee.”

  “Preach,” he said, and stuck his hand out to me, ignoring Meyer. His hand was thin and cool, the handshake slack. I saw his eyes flick down to take in the metal badge Cal had slipped to me, and I saw a trace of amusement. “McGee, meet Magoo.” His was a hot beefy grasp. “Heard about you,” Preach said. He turned to Grudd. “What did Teddy do with it?”

  “Half and half. Mits and McGee. An even split.”

  “Interesting,” Preach said.

  Mits broke in. “Mr. Meyer thinks we ought to sell it off.”

  Preach studied Meyer. “What would give you thoughts like that, book man?”

  Meyer smiled at him. “Common sense. Blaylock didn’t draw salary. And he slacked off on maintenance and repair. Some of the cycle inventory has been around a long time. Once you start paying a manager and picking the place up, there won’t be enough left over.”

  “Whose friend is he?” Preach asked Grudd.

  “He’s with me,” I said.

  Preach wheeled around and studied me again. “You tell your friend Meyer that management will be provided.”

  “He says management will be provided, Meyer,” I said.

  “Are you being a little bit smartass, McGee?” Preach asked.

  “Just enough so you’d notice.”

  “I notice you,” he said. “Grudd, you folks deal the cards or something. I’m going walking with the McGiggle twins here.”

  We went out in back where the cabins were, the brush tangled around them. Magoo’s big arms hung down to his knees. He hopped up and sat on the trunk of an ancient red Mustang convertible, top long gone, rusting in the grass, dreaming of hot moonlight nights in the sixties. Preach
leaned against a cabin, arms crossed, smiling at me, the Jesus eyes blue and mild. I perched my rump on the edge of a concrete birdbath with sea-shells stuck into the top of it in a design.

  “What’s your action?” Preach asked.

  “Favors for friends, when I have to. This and that.”

  “Big old bastard, aren’t you?” It didn’t need an answer. He continued, “It doesn’t take too much to handle a pair of fat dummies. Maybe there’s a couple more fat dummies you could bust for me. I mean not just as a favor. Cash in hand.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What if you’ve got no choice?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that if you don’t want to do me a favor, Magoo here and some of his friends will do me a favor by breaking your elbows. It’s known to sting a little.”

  I smiled at him and shook my head. “If you give the orders, friend, tell them to kill me. You’ll sleep better.”

  “You think so?”

  “Whatever gets broken will mend, one way or another. And I would not come back at you from the front, Preach. Something would fall on your head, maybe. Or something you picked up might blow up. Or you could be in a room that catches fire and the door is locked. If I came at you from the front, I might not get you. And I would want to be absolutely sure. So, as far as taking orders are concerned, do you want me to tell you what you can go do in your helmet?”

  He pushed himself away from the cabin, stretched and winced, and said to Magoo, “We better do more riding, you know that?”

  “I know it,” he said. “The last fifty miles my ass was getting sore. I mean, how much chance do we get lately?” Preach studied me. “Testing, testing. Blaylock told me about you one time. Said you don’t push. Neither do I, so I understand you. I’ve got an idea or two about this place. But I want to know something. Are you fixing to make any moves on Mits?”

  “No.”

  “What ideas have you got about this place?”

  “Once the legal estate thing is settled, I want to see how quick I can unload my half in any way I can unload it.”