Free Fall in Crimson (15 page)

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."

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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."

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"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 seashells 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."

"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
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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
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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.