Free Fall in Crimson (16 page)

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 need
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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 hollowcheeked 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
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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 twentysixth 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."

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"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 your 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 backstabbing 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 exsecretary 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 out law bikers based on those two movies he made several years ago."

"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
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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.