Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  “How are your civil rights, McGee?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean if you are a convicted felon, I can get you a pardon so you can vote again.”

  “That’s nice, but I’m clean.”

  “That’s nice because you should keep owning half. It could be a nice thing for you.”

  “In what way?”

  “You won’t have to come anywhere near it. You won’t know anything about it. You won’t know that we’ll have some nice little pads built back here, and a lake dug, and an airstrip, and a meeting room put in, like a little convention center. And the whole place will be wired so a rat can’t sneak in without turning on the red lights. Somebody will bring you what you have to sign, on corporation things. You and Mits will sign a management contract with somebody. I don’t know who yet. The books will show a loss, you’ll get dividends in cash you won’t have to report. They could be nice dividends.”

  “Mits gets the same deal?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Why should you care?”

  “I care.”

  He moved toward me and put his hand out. “We can get along.” We shook hands again. “You handle a bike?”

  “Not for a few years. But I can if I have to.”

  “Why were you out here the other day, McGee?”

  In the next ten silent seconds I shuffled through all my choices, all the ways I could go. “I was hoping Blaylock could give me some kind of a lead on a biker who beat a sick old man to death near Citrus City nearly two years ago.”

  “There’s been a lot of that going around. I would be very disappointed in you if this has anything to do with law enforcement.”

  “It has to do with the old man’s son taking a screwing in the will.”

  “No law?”

  “I’m helping out. A favor for a friend. My line of work.”

  “Blaylock help any?”

  “He came up with two names: Bike names. Dirty Bob and the Senator.”

  Preach turned to Magoo and said, “Anybody like that in the Corsairs you ever heard of?”

  “God’s sake, Preach, ever since that goddam movie there been Dirty Bobs sprang up all over the place.”

  “That’s where I heard it!” Preach said. “That movie, that Chopper Heaven. The name they called the boss biker was Dirty Bob.”

  “And,” said Magoo, “they called his buddy the Senator. Can’t remember what their names were, their real names.”

  “That pair was supposed to have ridden all the way from California in fifty hours, without sleep, using uppers,” I said.

  “Then hell,” said Preach, “maybe what you’re looking for is the same two that was in those movies. The originals. I heard they were both Hell’s Angels out there. Or Bandidos. I forget which. Dumb damn moving pictures. Any club goes around ripping up the civilians like in that movie, the smokeys would stake out the highway and shotgun those fuckers right out of their saddles.” He gave me the broadest smile I had yet seen and said, “There’s quieter ways of ripping off the civilians.”

  As we entered the room where the others were, Preach hung a long thin hand on my shoulder. “We’re getting along just fine,” he said to Mits and Grudd. They both looked relieved. “McGeek here decided he might just keep on owning this garden spot. Mits, you keep hanging in.”

  “Sure thing, Preach.”

  “Gruddy baby, I will be in touch anon.”

  “Fine.”

  “Come on, Magoo. Put your sore ass back to work.”

  They went booming back out onto the highway, kicking up pebbles, riding hard and fast.

  Grudd said in an uncertain voice, “He’s … a very unusual man.”

  “What does he do, actually?” Meyer asked.

  “Don’t ask. I don’t really know. He’s got an office in Miami. Karma Imports. He’s got some kind of leasing business.”

  I said to Mits, “He wants to make a lot of improvements here, bring in a manager.”

  “Anything he wants to do suits me fine,” she said. “Shall we just … open up here and keep going?”

  Grudd nodded. “Probably best. He’ll move quick, I think. Mits, you go through all Ted’s personal stuff, will you? Sort out the giveaway, and the stuff that has value, and the stuff you have questions about. Keep a list. I’ll be back Monday. No, make that Tuesday. I have to be in court on Monday.”

  We all had to be leaving. Mits walked out with us. She said, “This is going to be one rotten weekend, guys. There was a squeak in the left wheel on his chair. I oiled it three times but it didn’t go away. I’m going to be hearing that squeak coming up behind me.… Thanks for everything, guys, okay?”

  In the old blue Rolls on the way back to Bahia Mar, I told Meyer about my talk with Preach. “I don’t think I want any under-the-table dividends from an operation I have to stay away from.”

  “What will he be doing out there?”

  “God knows. Home industry, maybe. A little pharmaceutical plant. Smugglers’ haven. Wholesale distribution point. National headquarters for the outlaw bikers.”

  “Grudd is frightened of the man. Through and through.”

  “I got what I wanted from him. The back trail is very tricky, very old and cold, but if it leads where I think it is going to lead, it goes right back to Peter Kesner. Back to Josephine Esterland. Now I want to see those biker movies.”

  After I was alone aboard the Flush I could not account for my feeling of unrest, uneasiness. It had begun the instant Preach had put his hand on my shoulder. It had not been friendship or affection. It had been a symbol of possession. He and Magoo had walked me out into the weeds, raped me in some kind of deft and indescribable way, and walked me back in, announcing that I had enjoyed it. I wondered if I had been blowing smoke when I told him I would go after him if they busted me up. Testing, testing. Was pride enough? Maybe I’d spent too much of myself in too many hospitals over the years. Did Preach think I meant it when I said it? If I wasn’t really certain I meant it, then I would try to be careful to keep my elbows intact. It is the new warning system. They hold it on a concrete block, one man on the wrist, his feet braced against the block, and they give the elbow a smack with an eight-pound sledge, crushing the joint. If they do them both, you end up being unable to feed yourself. The Italians do kneecaps; the dopers do elbows.

  I looked in my little book and tried the Miami number for Matty Lamarr. It was five after five. They said he was retired and living in Guadalajara. They gave me an extension number for Lieutenant Goodbread. He was on another phone. Yes, I would hold.

  “Goodbread,” he said. The voice gave me a vivid recall of that big face, with its useful look of vapid stupidity.

  “McGee in Lauderdale.”

  “McGee? McGee. Oh, sure, the smartass that kept me out of trouble that time with that great big rich important general. You kill somebody?”

  “Not recently. But I met a biker today who seems to be trying to put some kind of arm on me. He’s boss man of a biker club, the Fantasies. And he operates down in your area, maybe even legitimately. People call him Preach.”

  “Under that arm could not be such a great place to be, McGee. There are some people around who want harm to come to him, enough to gun down anybody in the area. His name is Amos Wilson. He owns Karma Imports. Many arrests, no convictions at all. He has access to lots of bail. I thought he was pulling out of the biker scene.”

  “What is he?”

  “Believe me, I can’t nail it down. It’s easy to say what he might be into. He might be big in imported medicinals. Or he might be importing people from unpopular countries. Witnesses disappear. The feds tend to forget things. He isn’t in any known pattern.”

  “What would he want with a big tract of land out in the boonies, with lots of security, an airstrip, and so on?”

  “This is just a guess, friend. What I really think is that he and his animal pal, name of Magoo, they run a service business for people who are into untidy lines of work. Those people n
eed transport, security, communications, and muscle. I think he is once removed from the action, and it is a smarter and safer place to be than out front where we are aiming at them.”

  “Will you nail him for anything?”

  “I used to say that sooner or later we get everybody. But nowadays, that is hopeful bullshit. We don’t. We’re short on money and troops. There are too many groups on the hustle. Nobody is in charge any more. People like Preach, they jump in there, right into the confusion, develop a reputation, and take their fees to the bank in wheelbarrows, and sometimes they own the bank. I really envy Matty down there in Mexico. I told him to save room for me.”

  “Thanks for the time and the information.”

  “What have I told you? You ask me about a very smart one with a lot of moves. Times keep changing. Every month a better way to bring in the hash, the grass, and the coke. Every month people getting mashed flat by the competition, or sent out swimming with weights on, or crashing tired airplanes in empty areas zoned for tract houses, where only the roads are in. Preach runs an advisory and investment service, maybe. With a place to go when you’re too hot. Maybe he settles disputes between A and B and can arrange with C to get D killed. What I would say is unlikely is that he is out front on any of it. He can lay back and take a percentage of what nine groups are bringing in, and do better than any one of them in the long haul. I hear rumors he is buying old office buildings, little tacky ones, and fixing them up and renting them pretty good. But, like I said, I would stay way clear if I were you. There are people who’d like him dead, him and Magoo both. It’s always good to stay out of a target area.”

  “Thank you very much, lieutenant.”

  “Some day I’ll need a favor from you, McGee. I’m just building up my equity.”

  Twelve

  Saturday I visited my neighborhood travel agency, put the houseboat in shape to leave it for a time, had a long phone talk with Annie Renzetti and another with Lysa Dean. Sunday morning in Miami I boarded the L-1011 nonstop to Los Angeles, sitting up there in first with the politicians, the airline deadheads, and the rich rucksacky dopers. There is more legroom, the drinks are free, and the food is better. Also, somebody else was paying. I had the double seat to myself.

  I was aware of the flight attendant giving me sidelong speculative glances as she roved the aisles. She was a pouter-pigeon blonde with a long hollow-cheeked face which looked as if it had been designed for a more elegant body.

  Finally when she brought me a drink she said, “Excuse, me, Mr. McGee, but I feel almost certain I know you from somewhere.”

  “Maybe from another trip?”

  She looked dubious. She frowned and held a finger against her chin. They like to identify and classify all their first-class passengers. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor.… She couldn’t figure the stretch denim slacks, knit shirt, white sailcloth jacket with the big pockets and snaps, boat shoes.

  When I did not volunteer more information, she went on to the next drinker, probably convinced that I was just another doper, running Jamaican hash to the Coast. I sipped and looked down through scattered cloud cover and saw the west coast of Florida slip back under us, six miles down. We’d had our life-jacket demonstration. I’ve never been able to imagine a planeload of average passengers getting those things out from under the seats and trying to get into them while the airplane is settling down toward the sea with, as Tom Wolfe commented, about the same glide angle as a set of car keys.

  Had drinks, ate a mighty tough little steak for lunch, got into LA before lunch their time, found my reserved Hertz waiting, studied the simplified Hertz map and found my way through traffic to Coldwater Canyon Drive, found the proper turnoff on the second try, and stopped outside the pink wall, with the front of the little Fiesta two feet from the big iron gate.

  An Oriental looked inquiringly at me through the bars of the gate. “McGee,” I called out.

  “You Messer McGee, hah?”

  “Messer McGee, pal. Miss Dean expects me.”

  “I know, I know,” he said and swung the gates wide, showing a lot of gold in his Korean smile. “Drive by,” he said. “Park anyplace. Miss Dean in the pool, hah?”

  The plantings were more luxuriant than I remembered. They’d had a few years to grow. Her big pink wall was due for repainting. I remembered Dana telling me that a Mexican architect had done the house for Lysa and her third husband, in a style that could be called Cuernavaca Aztec. I walked around to the poolside. It was quiet and green in here behind the wall, and the city out there was brassy, smelly gold, vibrating in sun, heat, and traffic, already into midsummer on only the twenty-sixth of April. When I went around the corner of the house, the world opened up, and I could see the cheese-pizza structures of the city under the yellow haze, far beyond the pink wall that crossed the lower perimeter of her garden. She was swimming a slow length of her big rectangular pool, using a very tidy crawl, with no rolling or wallowing, sliding through the water with the greased ease of a seal in an amusement park. She saw me and angled over to the ladder and climbed out. She was wearing a pink bathing cap and an eggshell tank suit of a fabric so thin that, sopping wet, it fit her like skin, showing the dark areolas around the nipples and the dark pubic smudge. She yanked her cap off and shook her blond bleached hair out as she came smiling toward me. She stood on tiptoe and gave me a quick light kiss on the corner of the mouth, flavored with peppermint and chlorine. She tossed the pink cap into a chair, picked up a giant yellow towel, and began using it.

  “Well!” she said. “How about you? You look fantastic.”

  “We’re both fantastic.”

  “Look, I have to work on me. I have to think about me all day every day. Diet, exercise, massage, skin care, hair care, yoga.”

  “Whatever you’re doing, it works.”

  I followed her over to a marble table, out of the sun. And after a slender Korean maid brought a Perrier for her and a rum and juice for me, Lee went into the house and came out ten minutes later with her hair brushed to gleaming. She was wearing lipstick and a little tennis dress.

  “I really hated you, McGee.”

  “It wasn’t a really great time for either of us.”

  “These are better years, amigo. I was very hot back then, getting lots of scripts to choose from, spoiled rotten. Also I was trying for the world boffing championship. The all-American boffer. Anything that came within reach. And I seldom missed. As I did with you. Anyway, my psychiatrist pulled me out of that swamp. What I decided about you, McGee, was that if you were some sort of funny-looking little guy with pop eyes and no chin and a dumpy little body, you wouldn’t have turned me down. You wouldn’t be turning anybody down. You would take what you could get and be grateful. So, my friend, your reluctance wasn’t based on character. It was based on appearance. And that puts us both in the same line of work.”

  “Actors?”

  “Get used to it. We’re out front. I don’t need to work, dear, but I keep right on scuffling. I don’t want anybody to ever say to me, ‘Hey, didn’t you used to be Lysa Dean?’ You do your share of posing, both for yourself and other people.”

  “You’re smarter than I remember.”

  “Maybe I started thinking with my head instead of my butt.”

  “Looks good on you.”

  “And you are here to talk about Josie Laurant and Peter Kesner.”

  “I think I’m going to go at this a different way than I planned at first, Lee.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I was going to keep the bad part of this to myself and con you along a little, here and there. But I find you just enough different to let me drop the whole bundle in front of you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Before I do, let me tell you one thing. Aside from the people whose help I had to have, I have never mentioned one word about your problem with the photographs and the blackmail.”

  She nodded. “I know. I expected the worst after you walked out. I thought maybe you were justifying yo
ur own actions to come. Like hanging onto a set of prints and doing an interview for Penthouse. I held my breath for a year. You get used to back-stabbing in this business. Finally I decided you were straight, and I thank you for it.”

  “It would be nice if you would keep all this just as quiet.”

  I liked the fact there was no instant promise. She thought it over, frowning. “Well, okay. It’ll be hard for me, but okay.”

  “You know anything about Ellis Esterland?”

  “Just that he was a rich plastics tycoon, and he and Josie had the daughter with the strange name who died as a result of a bad accident. Rondola? Romola! Josie must have lived with her husband for ten years. They never did get divorced. A legal separation, though. They lived in the New York area and she did some theater work, not much, and then came back out here after the separation. Didn’t he die a couple of years ago, in some strange way?”

  “He was beaten to death. He had terminal cancer at the time. No arrests, no clues. He and his ex-secretary were living on a boat in Fort Lauderdale at the time. He drove inland alone and was killed. The reason for his trip is not known.”

  “I heard that Josie inherited a pretty good slug of money when Romola died. And that the money was from her father’s estate.” She tilted her head, took off her dark glasses, and looked at me with those vivid slanted green eyes. “Josie was involved with his death?”

  “I don’t know. Here is how it looks right now. It looks as though Josie, through her friendship with Anne Renzetti, the secretary, knew everything there was to know about Esterland’s financial setup, his will and so on. And whatever Josie knew, Peter Kesner knew. Josie was supporting Kesner. When it became evident that Romola was a hopeless case, and if she died first Esterland’s money would go to a foundation, it was in Kesner’s interest to make sure Esterland died first. A problem in elementary mathematics. A couple of million is better than a hundred thousand, and worth taking some risks for.”

  “Josie, no. Forget Josie. Peter, yes. But how would he work it?”

  “Very very carefully. He has contacts among outlaw bikers based on those two movies he made several years ago.”