Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

  “Try to nail down the violations. Interstate transportation of obscene materials. There’s a corrupt organizations statute that might fit.”

  “Will they go to prison for a long time?”

  “Probably not.”

  “One of those girls was fifteen.”

  “If she would testify against them, it would be a big help. Lots of nice charges there, with the locals in the driver’s seat.”

  “She probably wouldn’t ever testify.”

  “Well, we’re very grateful for the help of any citizen.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ve got to get back anyway. I’ve taken too much time off work. I’m from Ottumwa. All four of us are. We’re shares on the balloon. It’s a Cameron. We’ve got about four thousand total in it. We really wanted to see it flying in a movie. But I don’t think there’ll be any movie. I tried to read that script. It doesn’t make any sense at all. I think Peter Kesner is crazy.”

  “What do you work at?”

  “Oh, I’m a systems analyst, and I do some computer programming. It’s kind of a slack time right now, so they let me off work. I think we better come down, and I think I see a good place. And there’s the search car.” She pointed it out to me, the Subaru with a yellow and green target painted on the roof, running along a road that paralleled our course.

  She took the CB out of the straps, extended the aerial, and spoke into it. “Breaker Thirty-eight, this is Joytime, calling Little Sue. Come in, Little Sue.”

  “Little Sue sees you, Joytime.”

  “Take your second left and go in about two hundred yards, and that should be about right, Little Sue.”

  “Got you. See you there.”

  She made a face at me as she packed the CB away. “Not what you’d call good radio discipline. But it gets the job done.”

  She turned her attention to the descent, checking the stowage of loose equipment, checking on helmets, reading the surface wind, telling me where to stand and what to hold on to. She worked the maneuvering port line, bringing us down at a steady angle, clear of any obstructions. We passed the parked Subaru, twenty feet in front of it and a few feet higher than its roof. Ground speed seemed to increase. At the instant the bottom of the basket bumped the earth, she yanked the red line to empty the envelope and turned the fuel tank valve off. We bumped along for perhaps a dozen feet and stopped.

  She scrambled to keep any part of the nylon skirt from touching the hot burner. Dave, round, red-headed, and heavily freckled, came trotting up, saying, “Great work, Joya. Real nice. You like it, Mr. McGee?”

  “It’s fantastic.”

  A pack of farm children arrived on bicycles and hung back at a shy distance until Dave and Joya gave them chores. She bled off the fuel pressure, and then we emptied the envelope by holding the mouth closed and squeezing the air out toward the apex. Dave disconnected the pyrometer, and we packed the envelope in the bag, inspecting it as it was accordion-folded in. Everything fitted on or in the Subaru. As I helped fold, lift, and carry, I wrestled with my conscience and with my liking for guile. Guile won. So I was not going to walk her a little way down the road and confess. I walked her a little way down the road and asked for the name of the fifteen-year-old, knowing what a useful lever I might make of it.

  “Karen,” she said. “Thatcher? Or Fletcher? Hatcher! That’s it. Karen Hatcher. Blond. With some baby fat.”

  “Thank you for the balloon ride, Joya.”

  “It was a good private place to talk. I … I’ll be watching the newspapers. I hope you smash them flat. I really do.”

  So we said goodbye to the farm kids, and Dave made a rendezvous with the truck, let Joya off there, and we moved the basket and the rest of the gear into the truck. Then Dave drove me back to Rosedale Station. The last of the breeze was gone. The late afternoon was utterly still.

  There was no one behind the desk at the Rosedale Lodge. I was tall enough to bend over the counter and lift my key out of the box. I went up the stairs, walked silently down the corridor to rooms 25 and 26, listened at both doors, and heard no sound. I went up the next flight to my fifty-dollar room and sat on the edge of my narrow sagging bed.

  There could not, I realized, be any clean resolution of this whole thing. Ellis Esterland had been killed twenty-one months ago. And what he had been killed for was long since down the drain, flushed down by an erratic and talented middle-aged woman, misled by her parasitic friend, Peter Kesner. Circumstances changed for the folks in the black hats, just as they did for the white hats. And the gray. Their universe continued to unfold. The Senator flew over the cliff with a sea gull in his face. Up until now I had not been able to feel any particular personal imperative at work. Annie Renzetti had dropped delightfully and unexpectedly into my arms, but possessing her did not act as a spur to action, to learning what really did happen to Esterland.

  In my blundering about, with my dull uncomprehending smile, my earnest clumsiness, I had inherited half a motorcycle haven and tattoo parlor. And now I had joined the FBI, or the equivalent. I had begun to feel a little bit like Sellers in his immortal Being There. I felt no urge to enrich either Ron Esterland or myself. And no urge to punish Josie Laurant any more than she was going to be punished by the gods of stupidity at some time in that future which was getting ready to crash down on her. I was a fake consultant in the employ of Lysa Dean, queen of the game shows. I represented, to Kesner, a chance for free promotion of a motion picture that would probably never be shown in the unlikely event it was ever completed.

  I had zigged and zagged until, finally, I had completely confused myself. I had spent some of Ron’s money and had myself a nice balloon ride, and I wished heartily that Meyer would happen along, listen, and tell me what to do next.

  At least, now, there was a sense of personal involvement. The misdeeds of the vague past seemed unlikely. What is the penalty for killing a dying man? But I had seen Freaky Jean, Joya’s ex-friend, and I could visualize blond Karen in her baby fat as, under the lights of the improvised little studio, she came to the horrid and ultimate realization that the creature of her nightmares, Dirty Bob himself, was going to jam that incredible ugliness right up into her while the women watched and the wizened little man came closer with the camera and the hi-fi rock masked her yelps and hollers, her pleas for mercy.

  The fracture line was, of course, somewhere between Peter Kesner and Desmin Grizzel. And I could improvise a pry bar of sorts. Perhaps there was another vulnerable area between Josie and Kesner, labeled Romola. Daughter lost and gone. Twenty months gone.

  Time to try to close the store.

  Fifteen

  I drove my rental buick back to the pasture five miles out of town. Kesner’s car was there. Clouds were bulging up to interfere with the last of the sunlight. There was the usual amount of milling about, but there appeared to be fewer vehicles.

  After asking three people where I could find Kesner, I finally located him in Josie’s trailer. She was not there. He let me in, went back to the couch where his drink was, and continued his conversation with a thick-bodied man of about fifty who sat bolt upright in a chair and had no drink at hand.

  “What’s your name again?” Kesner asked him.

  “Forgan.”

  “Forgan, this is Travis McGee. He is here as a consultant for Take Five Productions. He is representing one of the owners, the famous actress Lysa Dean. I ask you, Forgan, would they be interested in doing a network feature on this operation here if we were some kind of scumbag ripoff?”

  Forgan gave me a single brief glance, his brown eyes as still and dull and dead as the glass orbs in a stuffed bear.

  “I want to talk to a woman named Jean Norman,” he said.

  “I told you, they’re looking for her. They’re looking for her. Jesus!”

  “Where’s Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler?”

  “Forgan, why do you keep asking me the same shit over and over? I told you before, she was on flight today. We did one of the big scenes. They’re coming back in no
w, one at a time. Eight balloons.” I saw Kesner stiffen with sudden realization. “Hey, you flew with her, McGee! She back?”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to tell you, Peter. They were all packed up to take off after the flight, so they wouldn’t have to come back here. She has to get back to work, she said. Back in Ottumwa.”

  He smacked his fist into his palm. “Goddamn! That makes three who broke away today. Those bastards have got me down to five balloons. They’re trying to kill me. They’ve been getting free chow, free propane, and a hundred bucks a day per balloon. What do they want?”

  “So Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler isn’t returning here?” Forgan asked.

  I could see interesting complications if he got to Joya and she told him about me. But I couldn’t see anything I could do about it. This man Forgan was official. He had all the rich warm charm of a tax collector. Or of J. Edgar Hoover.

  “I told you before, Forgan. Feel free. You and your skinny buddy. Poke around. Ask anybody anything. But get it over with, because this is a working set and we got work to do, and delay costs money.”

  I tried to look at Peter Kesner out of Forgan’s eyes. The bald tan head, long white ropy body, big flat dirty white feet, lots of dangling gold jewelry, graying chest hair poking out of the pink Gucci shirt, crotch-tight blue jeans, faded, frayed, threadbare, half glasses perched halfway down his generous nose, thick fingers saffroned by the ever-present cigarette. Forgan would second a motion of no confidence.

  Forgan stood up slowly and turned toward the door. He stopped and gave me a long official look, memorizing me. Apparently I failed to meet his standards, too.

  At the door he turned back toward Kesner and said, “Besides this Grizzel clown, how many more people you got working here with records?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea. Most of them are hired by my office in Burbank. They have the personnel records there. Major Productions. They’re in the book. The production people here on location are all trade union people, guild people. The payroll is killing me.”

  Forgan stared into space. “I never go to movies,” he said softly, and went out and pulled the door shut. The trailer moved a little on its spring as his weight left the step.

  Peter Kesner sprawled on the couch, leaned his head back, sighed, took off his little glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Sit down, McGee. Sit down and relax. How was it?”

  “The flight? A great experience. I appreciate your making it possible.”

  “I went up with Joya once, and with Mercer, and we took a hell of a lot of footage of going across country in a good breeze at about zero altitude. That lady was scraping the gondola on the tops of the cows and chickens. Like a fun ride at the park as a kid. What I can’t understand, why would Joya turn me in on some kind of weird rap about making dirty tapes? She say anything to you?”

  I handled that one with care. “Just that she was worried about what was happening to Jeanie Norman.”

  He hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Shit, yes! Sure. They used to be friends. Old Freaky Jean. God only knows what Jeanie thinks is happening around here. She’s around the bend, way around. If anybody hooked her, Linda did. Linda had good sources, and she likes big brunettes. It’s easy to see how Joya might get the wrong idea from things Jean might tell her. There’s videotape equipment around, portable recorders, and Jap cameras. The kids fool with it. It’s a professional tool, the way a photographer will use a test shot on Polaroid film before going ahead with the real stuff. A bit player can improvise a death scene or whatever, erase the tape, and try again. You can look at the scene in living color the minute you’ve finished it. They probably got Jeanie involved with some of their horsing around, and she got the wrong impression, or Joya got the wrong impression of what Jeanie was trying to tell her. I can’t afford all this hassling!”

  He got up and paced the small area, walking back and forth behind my chair, appearing and reappearing in the mirror over the couch.

  “I’ve got special things to say, McGee. I have special visions to reveal to the world. I can compose scenes within scenes, dialogue behind dialogue. When realities are composed in a certain way, a scene becomes referrent to a Jungian symbolism, and millions of people will be moved and disturbed in a way they cannot understand.”

  He came around in front of me to stand looking down at me.

  “There is such a thing as an artistic imperative. Genius demands the communicative medium. It’s my mission to change the world in a way you can’t even comprehend, McGee. And I will sacrifice anything at all to that mission. Right in the midst of the bad dialogue in this turkey script I am working with, I can project an instant of magic so precious I will lie, cheat, steal, kill, torture, in order to have the chance to do it. I am beyond any law, any concept of morality, McGee, because I have this gift which has to come out. I have to use everything and everyone around me, for my own ends. A little bureaucratic turd like Forgan can’t comprehend the necessity of the mission. The mission is bigger than all of us. So I do what I have to do. When the money gets thin, I have to make more somehow, to keep this project alive. Do you understand that?”

  “Not exactly. Maybe I do.”

  “I can always tell when the chance is there,” he said, his voice animated, his expression full of excitement. “I get a big rush, a really stupendous flowing feeling, and I can see all the symbols and relationships as if a fog lifted. I can then move the camera just so much, change the lighting a little bit more, get the people in a different postural relationship to each other. And it doesn’t matter what they say. The symbols are speaking and the words mean nothing. This is my chance to do it perfectly and change the world!”

  “Now I understand,” I said.

  He reached and clapped me on the shoulder. “Good! Good! Right from the start I had the feeling you could catch on, Travis. You have sensitivity. Your inputs are open. Desmin thinks you’re some kind of fake. It got me worried, and I called Lee Dean and she vouched for you. Are you sore at me for checking you out?”

  “Not at all, Peter. Not at all.”

  The windows had darkened. He turned on two lamps and stretched out on the couch again. There was the sound of a key in the door and Josephine Laurant came in, wearing a white safari suit, with a leopard band holding her hair back and a white silk scarf knotted at her throat.

  She nodded at me and said to Kesner, “It’s raining again, hon.”

  “Jesus jumping H. Christ!” he yelled. “What are they trying to do to me?”

  She knelt on the couch beside him and patted his cheek. “It’s all going to be all right.”

  He pushed her arm away roughly, got up, and walked out without a word. She looked at me and managed a weak smile. “Peter gets very tense when he’s working. There’s been a lot of rain.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “It will really help us if Take Five will give us some advance publicity.”

  “When is it going to be released?”

  “That isn’t firm yet. There’s an awful lot of editing and dubbing to do yet. Peter always does the film editing personally. It’s an art, you know.”

  “I guess you both have a lot of reasons for wanting it to succeed.”

  She tilted her head. Her eyes looked old. “Exactly what do you mean by that, Mr. McGee?”

  “I guess I meant that you’ve both invested money in it. And you’ve been sidelined for quite a long time. And Peter bombed out on his last two tries. I mean it must be very important to both—”

  “I don’t need that. I don’t need any part of it. I didn’t ask you in here. Get the hell out! Move!”

  She had snatched up a heavy glass ashtray. I moved. I walked through light rain to the cook tent. Desmin Grizzel sat at a corner table for four with Jean Norman. He and I stared at each other until he beckoned me over. I sat across from Jean, with Dirty Bob on my right. He had been in the rain. The corona of gray-black beard was matted. He smelled like an old wet dog. Jean was in
dirty white pants and a yellow top. She was hunched low over her plate, eating her stew with her hands. Her mouth was smeared, and gravy ran up her wrists.

  “Hearty eater, ain’t she?”

  “Did Forgan get to talk to her?”

  He took his unlit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and stared at me. “What would you know about that?”

  “Only what Peter told me. Joya phoned the FBI about you people here making porno tapes before she took off for good.”

  “Peter told you that?”

  “I was there in Josie’s dressing room with him when he was talking to Forgan.”

  “Oh. Nobody here knows anything about any tapes. Jeanie here didn’t know a thing, did you?” She ignored him. He pinched the flesh of her upper arm. She winced and looked at him. “You didn’t know a thing, did you?”

  Her expression was one of intense alarm. “No, Dez. Nothing at all. Nothing.”

  “Keep eating, princess.”

  She dipped down again, her chin inches from the pile of stew.

  Grizzel smiled at me. He popped a kitchen match with a thumbnail and lit his sodden third of a cigar. There was a curious flavor of latent energy about him. I felt as if I were sitting next to one of the big jungle cats, and neither it nor I had any good idea of what it might do next.

  I said, “Peter was giving me some of his ideas about his work.”

  “So?”

  “I couldn’t make a lot of sense out of what he was telling me.”

  “Why should you?”

  “Frankly, it sounded spacey. It sounded unwrapped.”

  He studied the end of his cigar. “I think you should keep your mouth shut.”

  “I just meant that if there isn’t going to be any motion picture, I’m wasting my time here.”

  “Peter Kesner turned me into somebody, pal. From dirt nothing to somebody. I’ve got a beach house, pal. I’ve got great machines, and a Mercedes convertible, a batch of bonds, and a lawyer working on getting me a pardon on a felony I did once. I owe him.”