Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  “For low budget, they were very good.”

  “Though I can’t prove it and probably nobody ever will be able to, I think those two bikers who were in one or both of those movies rode all the way across the country, set up a meet with Esterland, and beat him to death. In the movie or movies they were called Dirty Bob and the Senator.”

  “I remember. Very tough people. Authentic tough, you know. You can always tell authentic tough from acting tough. Bogart was acting tough, but he was also a very tough-minded man on the inside. Nothing scared him, ever. Those bikers sort of scared me a little.”

  “Would they kill people?”

  “If the price was right, yes.”

  “How do I find out what their real names are?”

  “You find out from me, right now. Be right back.” She went in and came out five minutes later with a thick, well-thumbed, paperback book. “My bible,” she said. “The basic poop on five thousand motion pictures. All the statistics.” She checked the index, found the right page. “Here we are: Chopper Heaven. The part of Dirty Bob was played by one Desmin Grizzel. My God, can that be a real name? It probably is. And the Senator by one Curley Hanner. Let me check that other one. What was the name of it?”

  “Bike Park Ramble, I think.”

  “Sounds right. Yes, here it is. Same fellows. It was a sort of Son of Chopper Heaven and not quite as successful.”

  “Any way I could get to see the movies? Just one would do. Either one.”

  “I can call around the neighborhood. People are getting big collections of movies on videotape, the home-television kind and the three-quarter-inch commercial. I can show either one. I get tapes from the shows I’m on.”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  “Why am I doing you favors anyway? Okay. After lunch?”

  “Had it on the airplane.”

  “It’ll just be a salad. Choke it down. Or the Snow Princess will snap a gusset.”

  She led me on into the terrazzo silence I remembered, where there was dark paneling transplanted from ancient churches and portraits in oil of the owner. There were white throw rugs, and sparse white furniture, and a large wall cabinet of glass and mirrors containing a collection of owls in pottery and crystal, in jade, wood, ivory, bone, and silver.

  I stopped to admire them. “Used to be elephants,” I said.

  “They’re in the bedroom.”

  She led me to an alcove off the dining area where there was a window table for two overlooking the pool, the long slope of the garden, and the city beyond. The Korean maid brought the salad in a big wooden bowl, fresh spinach, with cheese and mushrooms, some bits of bacon, a dressing of vinegar and oil with an aftertaste of garlic. Tall nubbly glasses full of iced tea with mint.

  In Lee’s casual conversation, in her expression, in her tone of voice, in the way she held herself, she seemed to be making an offer of herself, to be advertising her accessibility. And because any actress is such a mannered thing, such an arbitrary construction, I could not tell whether she was merely being her habitual self or inviting mischief.

  “Who occupies the secretarial suite these days?”

  “There’s not as much to do, of course. Not like it used to be. A darling young man comes in and works in there three days a week. The letters and cards keep coming, thank God. A lot of it from those late late late late shows, the pictures I made at the time they were filming Birth of a Nation. I had my eighteenth birthday on location. I was aching to look at least twenty. Can you imagine?”

  She smiled at me over the rim of the iced-tea glass, green eyes as frosty as the glass.

  It took her three phone calls to locate a home videotape of Chopper Heaven. A boy on a bicycle delivered it. Her little projection area was an alcove off the bedroom. Two double chaises faced the oversized screen on which the television image was projected. The set and projector were between the two double chaises. The sound came out of two speakers, one on either side of the screen. There was no window in the alcove. Daylight filtered in through the drawn draperies in the bedroom.

  I watched the eighty-minute show with total attention. Peter Kesner was given the writing credit, directing credit, producing credit. The sound track was old-fashioned hard rock. And loud. Hand-held cameras, grainy film, unadjusted color values from scene to scene. But it moved. It was saying that this biker world was quick, brutal, and curiously indifferent to its own brutality, almost unaware of it. The characters seemed to want things very badly and, when they got them, discarded them. The dialogue was primitive but had an authentic ring. The bikers’ girls were sullen and slutty. After death and bombings, Dirty Bob and the Senator rode off down the highway toward the dawn, bawling a dirty song in their hoarse untrained voices, over the rumble of the two big machines.

  She got up and turned it off and pushed the rewind key. “Interesting,” she said. “It doesn’t hold up. At the time it was more daring than it is now. It cost a million and a half and grossed maybe fifteen to twenty.”

  “Would Kesner have made a lot of money?”

  “Darling! This is the Industry! The really creative people are the accountants. A big studio got over half the profit, after setting breakeven at about three times the cost, taking twenty-five percent of income as an overhead charge, and taking thirty percent of income as a distribution charge, plus rental fees, and prime interest on what they advanced. If he had made a million, including fees for his services, I’d be surprised. Peter lives very well. I’m surprised Josie could afford him. Anyway I remembered the picture as being better. Some of my old ones seem to be much better than I remembered. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Did you ever meet those two? Grizzel and Hanner?”

  “On a talk show several years ago. They were a disaster. They came stoned to the eyeballs. Big noisy smelly fellows, thrashing around and saying things that had to be beeped off the air, thinking they were hilarious, apparently. One of them grabbed me by the behind and actually left big dingy fingermarks on my yellow skirt. I told him if he touched me again, I’d cut his heart out and fry it. I meant it and he knew I meant it. I didn’t know their names. They were just Dirty Bob and the Senator.”

  I knew I would recognize them if I saw them again anywhere. Dirty Bob, a.k.a. Desmin Grizzel, had a full black beard and a moon face with high cheekbones and such narrow eyes it gave him an Asiatic look, like a Mongol warlord. The full beard was a fringe beard, growing thick around the perimeter but not very lush around the mouth. It looked to me as if he had done his own tricks in the motion picture. If so, he was very quick and spry for a man of his considerable bulk.

  The Senator, a.k.a. Curley Hanner, had a long narrow face, a long narrow nose, a tight little slot of a mouth. His eyes were so close together it gave him a half-mad, half-comedic look. His little slot mouth turned into a crazy little V when he smiled. On the right side of his forehead there was a deep, sickening crevasse, as though he had stove it in on the corner of something. Black thinning hair, and a black thin mustache that hung below his chin, like an oldtime gunfighter. Throughout the movie they had both worn thin red sweat bands just above the eyebrows. They were ham actors and could have spoiled the picture if the director had let them.

  “Where did Kesner find that pair?”

  “No idea, Travis. The story was that he’d auditioned some very hard-case types from the Bandidos and Hell’s Angels, picked a half dozen, and then let them fight it out for the two parts. But that was probably some studio flack’s idea of exciting copy. I heard that Kesner got a motorcycle and went riding with one of the outlaw clubs, and that’s where he got the idea for the picture and found the people to play in it. You saw how many there were altogether. Fifteen or twenty.”

  “And Kesner is on location now?”

  “Out in farm country somewhere. With Josie. Making a balloon picture. Hot-air balloons.”

  “How do I find out where they are?”

  “You have me, dear. Girl guide to the wonders of the Industry. Let me phon
e. You stay put.” She gave me a pretty good rap on the skull with her knuckles when she went behind the chaise. She went to the bedroom phone, sat small on the side of her big bed, her back to me, as she hunched over her phone list. I got up and roamed over to a wall rack which seemed to hold scores of videotapes. It was too dark to read the titles. There was a little gallery light over the rack and I pulled the chain. The titles were visible. They ranged from X to XXX. With a very few R-rated here and there. I could hear her on the phone. There was a shallow drawer under the middle shelf of the rack, and on nosey impulse I pulled it open. And there was the little white Prelude 3 System massager, fitted with what I believe is called the Come Again tip. Beside it a small vial of lubricant. I slid the drawer shut and went back to the chaise, then remembered the light, went and turned it off, and stretched out again.

  Scenario for a lonely lady. With frequent insomnia. Slip in here from the bedroom, put on a dirty tape with the sound turned low or off, and surrender to the throbbing hum of electrical ecstasy.

  No obligation for dull conversation before or after. No awkward emotional entanglements. No jealousies. No involvements. Just an interwoven pattern of as many climaxes as she cared to endure, and then turn off all the machinery and go back to bed, to a sleep like death itself. The modern female, making out with no help from any male. I had never felt more superfluous—which in itself is a comment.

  She came back in and sat on my chaise near my knees, facing me. “Well, I know where they are, almost. In Iowa, at a place called Rosedale Station. It’s northwest of Des Moines and southwest of Fort Dodge, somewhere off U.S. Route Thirty. What you have to do is fly to Des Moines and get a car there, and it would be maybe sixty miles.”

  “Now I have to come up with an approach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody there in Rosedale Station, neither Josie nor Kesner nor those two bikers—if they’re there—would have any idea who I am or what I want. And I can’t exactly go up to Josephine Laurant and say, ‘Honey, your stepson Ron hired me to find out who beat old Ellis to death.’ What I am talking about is some kind of a cover story. People making motion pictures keep a good guard up to keep the local hams and autograph hounds away. I can’t exactly start cold and ingratiate myself.”

  “What is it you want to do when you get there?”

  “I don’t know. Mill around. Make friends. Trade secrets back and forth. Beat heads. Lie a lot. I don’t know. I improvise. If you have made some good guesses about something that happened in the past, you can usually stick the pry bar into the right crack. If nothing much happens, you know you guessed wrong.”

  She tilted her pretty head and studied me. “Who should you be? I’ll have to think about that. Let me see. You should have some authority of some kind, so they’ll have to be nice to you.”

  “I know nothing about their line of work. Or about hot-air balloons.”

  “Hush. I’m thinking.” With doubled fist she struck me gently on the knee, again and again. Lips pursed, eyes almost closed. “Got it!” she cried.

  “I give up. Who am I?”

  “It so happens I own a nice little piece of Take Five Productions, sweetie. And some of their nice letterhead. We do daytime game shows. So let’s go to the darling secretary’s office and compose a letter.”

  MR. PETER KESNER

  PRESIDENT, MAJOR PRODUCTIONS

  ON LOCATION

  ROSEDALE STATION, IOWA

  Dear Peter,

  This will introduce Travis McGee, one of the consultants on our new and exciting project for prime-time television, tentatively titled THE REAL STUFF.

  As you may or may not know, I have an ownership interest in Take Five Productions, and I have had the privilege of being in on the planning phase of this new program scheduled for next fall on ABC.

  It is our intent—and I know you will keep this confidential—to go behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, not only in America but around the world.

  From backstage ballet to the back lot of the carnival, to big band rehearsals, to animal training, to moviemaking. We will go for action and pictorial values, and we have no intention of skimping on the budget. Some very excited sponsors are waiting in the wings to see what we come up with as a pilot for the show.

  In discussions here, it occurred to us that the picture you are making, about hot-air balloons and the people who fly in them, out there in the lovely springtime in the heartland of America, might make a very vivid episode in our projected series THE REAL STUFF.

  I hope I am not imposing in asking you to give Mr. McGee the run of the sets and to answer his questions. I am certain he will be considerate. Should we want to use clips from your rushes, I can assure you the compensation will not disappoint you.

  I wish you all manner of luck with your picture. And please say hi to darling Josie for me.

  Affectionately,

  Lysa Dean

  She read through it again and signed Lee with a flourish, a swooping curlicue thing that went back under her name and crossed itself in a figure eight stretched out on its side.

  “Such utter crap!” she said. “But you know, it is just ridiculous enough to appeal to that freak. Especially the hint about money. Can you carry it off, do you think?”

  “Provided you tell me the kind of questions I should be asking.”

  She did not hear me. She was staring into the middle distance. Finally she said, “You know, it really might make a program. I’m going to take it up with Sam.”

  Thirteen

  I got into Des Moines late on Monday night, stayed over in a motel near the airport, and drove to Rosedale Station on Tuesday morning, the twenty-eighth of April. I drove through soft gray rain, the wipers thudding back and forth in slow steady rhythm. The flat fields and the hedgerows and the ditches beyond the shoulder of the highway were green, the bright new green of springtime.

  My road atlas said that Rosedale Station had 2,812 people. It had a railroad track, grain elevators, a central school, a dozen churches, a dozen gas stations, a new downtown shopping mall, a couple of fast food outlets, a lot of white houses and big trees, and a very few traffic lights.

  I drove around in the rain until I came upon a brick and frame structure called THE ROSEDALE LODGE. FINE FOOD. It had its own gravel parking area to the right of the entrance. I pulled the rental Buick into a slot and trotted under the dripping trees, up onto the veranda, and into the front entrance hall.

  There was a tall thin old lady behind the oak registration desk. I asked her if there was a vacancy.

  “You with that movie bunch?”

  “I’m not with them. But I have some business to transact with them.”

  “Then you’re with them, the way I see it. I’ve got a single. It’s fifty dollars a night. In advance. Food is extra.”

  “Is Mr. Kesner staying here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he in now?”

  “I wouldn’t know and I won’t ask.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong with the people around here. Do you want the room or don’t you?”

  “I’ll take it for one night. Why are you being so rude?”

  “Let’s say it’s catching.”

  She slapped my key down: Room 39. I paid and signed in, using the Burbank address of Take Five Productions.

  “Third floor, all the way to the back on the left,” she said.

  “Would it be against your house rules to tell me Kesner’s room number?”

  “Twenty-five and -six,” she said, and turned away.

  “Pretty good room rate,” I said.

  “When you people go back where you belong, it will come on back down to normal.”

  “Welcome to Rosedale Station. Nice little town.”

  “Used to be,” she said, and went into the switchboard alcove, pulled an old-fashioned plug, and let it snap down into its recess.

  I took my duffelbag on up to 39. There was a big tree outside m
y single small window. Through the leaves I could see a neighboring lumberyard. My wallpaper was a design of crossed ropes and little old sailing ships, in brown, gray, and blue. My single bed was hammocked in the middle. The toilet and shower shared a three-by-six closet. The sink was in the bedroom, beside the shower-room door. There was an oval mirror over it. I had to stoop to look at myself. The backing was coming off, so that my image was fragmented. The spit-colored eyes looked back at me with more calm than I felt. I did not look like your ordinary consultant-type person. I looked more as if I worked with a sledge out in the sunshine, turning big rocks into little rocks. I took my shirt off and scratched my chest and thought about the tragicomic inconsistencies of the emotional life of McGee. A repressed libertine. A puritanical wastrel. A lot of names rolled around in my skull. Old ones: Puss and Glory and Pidge and Heidi and Skeeter and Cindy and Cathy. New ones: Gretel and Annie and Lysa.

  Ah, the eternal compulsion to leap into a marvelous stew of boobs and butt, hungry lips and melting eyes, rolling hips and tangled hair. But I had to pause before the leap, like some kind of shy farm girl interrogating the traveling salesman after they have dug their nest in the side of a haystack: Wait, Walter! Is this for real?

  Lysa was the peach which had hung long on the tree, gone from green to ripe to overripe, bursting with the juices that had that winelike tang of early fermentation. She had made all the moves she knew, and she knew a lot of moves. But I had bicycled around the ring, keeping her off with a long cautious left jab, avoiding the corners, slipping, rolling, tying her up. I had wanted her so badly I had felt as if I was carrying paving blocks around in the bottom of my belly. But of course it wasn’t for real, and it wasn’t forever. I had the sap’s record of spurning her once before, and apparently I was out to win the world title for sapistry.

  And here I was on a rainy day in a sorry little room in a country hotel, a long long way from that lady of Sunday evening, that queen of the game shows who had wanted merely a jolly cluster of bangs in the night, topped off with steaks and a swim and a farewell bang for luck. But I had left her to the tireless throb of her Prelude 3 System and the technicolor stimulation of her blue movies.