Free Fall in Crimson (5 page)

"Social Security paying for it? With the Medicare?"

"They pay shit. They pay eighty percent of what it used to cost to have it done eight years ago.

With the four kids, we can't help out as much as Debbie thinks we should. The oldest girl, Debbie's sister Karen, lives in Atlanta, and she sends what she can. Now they say she should have it twice a week instead of once, and that's how come she looks so bad. I don't see how the hell. we're going to swing it. I really don't."

"I'm sorry to hear about it."

"Well, come on in and I'll get you the file, and you can set and go through it in one of the interroga tion rooms. Then when you get done with it, take it back to Records and ask them to ask Dispatch to tell me to come in and pick you up."

The file was thick. There was a sheaf of glossy black-and-white photographs of the body still in the car, and the body on the stretcher. Closeups of left profile, right profile, and full face.

Sickening brutality. To hit a man once that hard is brutal. To keep hitting him is sickness.

Fingerprinting got nothing, as usual. There were lab reports on blood samples. Trace of alcohol.

Contents of stomach. Decedent had eaten approximately two hours before death, give or take a half hour. There was a long technical report on the physical findings dictated during the autopsy procedure. Cause of death was massive trauma to the brain causing a pressure from internal bleeding that suppressed the functions of breathing and heartbeat. Five broken ribs, all on the left side, indicating a right-handed assailant. Incisions from operations noted. Decedent had
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multiple areas of evident malignancy affecting the liver, spleen, lymph glands; and soft tissue areas, adjudged terminal.

All the local newspaper coverage had been Xeroxed and put in the file. The Citrus Banner had given it a pretty good play. The rest of the file was taken up with signed statements, depositions, and reports made by the officers assigned. Rick Tate had signed most of the reports.

I read the reports and interviews and statements with care and I made notes of the things I had not known before.

"I would guess he sat there in the chair in the lobby for nearly three quarters of an hour, reading that newspaper. I did notice that every little once in a while he would look at his watch, as if he was waiting for somebody or had to be somewhere at a certain time. I didn't see him leave. I guess I was busy when he left."

"It was one hot day in July, and I remember I was hoping it would rain some. But it didn't. That Lincoln car was parked right out in the sun all closed up tight and locked, and I saw the man come from the hotel, shucking his coat off as he walked. I was just standing in the store, over here by the window, looking out, wishing somebody would come the hell in and buy something.

He was parked in that space second from the corner. The second meter. And I saw the red flag was up in the meter, but they don't check it real careful in the summertime like they do in the tourist season. He unlocked the driver's side and he pushed on something in there, and all those windows all went down like at once, and I thought how handy that was. He threw his coat into the back, and he got in and started it up, but he yanked his hands back when he touched that wheel. So he got out again and stood around, and I guess what he was doing was letting the air conditioning cool it off in there for him. I'm always watching people, trying to figure out what they are doing and why they do it. Pretty soon he got in and all those four windows came sliding up, nice as you please, and then he turned out of the parking place and headed east on Central. I guess from what I read, he went all the way out Central to where it becomes Seven Sixty-five and takes you right to the interchange. Got on it and went six mile south to get beat to death.

Wouldn't have had an inkling any nasty thing was going to happen to him. Comes to dying, money don't help you a damn."

"What I do when I start getting the nods, I pull off soon as I can, make sure I'm locked in good, and I climb into the bunk behind the seat and set this little alarm for twenty minutes and put on my sleep mask and put everything out of my mind. Then when I wake up I get out of the cab and walk around for ten minutes or so to get the blood stirred up, and I'm good for another five or six hours. So yes, I noticed, or half noticed, that Continental when I first stopped. It was parked a hundred feet in front of me, angled in toward those logs they've got that mark the edge. I remember wondering what kind of gas mileage they get on those things now with that automatic shift-overdrive deal. There was a big orange moving van parked behind me. I had passed him and pulled into a parking area ahead of him. I think there was maybe a camper van pulled in way beyond the Continental. So I corked off and the alarm went off and I climbed down out of the cab and stretched and started walking around. The Continental was still there, and it seemed strange because that sun was coming down hot, and it wasn't in any shade. I couldn't see anybody in it. First I thought maybe somebody had gone off sick into the bushes. They don't do much business at that rest area. There's no shade where you have to park and no crapper. There are bushes and trees between it and the turnpike so it's quieter than most, a good place to nap. I walked on over to it and looked in and seen him on the floor in the back, kind of kneeling and slumped, blood on the side of his face and neck.. I ran back to my rig and got onto Channel 9

and told my story and waited until the patrol car came screaming in."

"He ordered a drink and I went out to the bar and Harry made it right away and I took it back.

He was very careful about what he wanted to eat. A green salad with our creamy Italian dressing, and the baby lamb chops, asparagus, boiled potatoes, iced tea, no dessert. It's not hard to remember about yesterday, because we had a slow day. And he was the kind of man you remember. How do we make our house dressing, and exactly how big are the lamb chops, and is
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it canned or fresh asparagus. Like I said, he was very careful and serious about ordering. It came to six something and he left me a dollar tip along with the dime and some pennies that was in his change. He seemed, you know, cold. Knew what he wanted and was used to getting it. He certainly didn't look like any happy kind of person. He wasn't somebody you'd kid around with when you're taking their order or anything. He was real tan, but he didn't have good color under the tan. Yellowish, kinda. What I keep thinking, he wasn't the sort of person you hit. Not for any reason at all. I know that doesn't make sense, but I can't help it. I just can't imagine somebody hitting that man in the face. It's a terrible thing to happen. But lots of terrible things are happening everywhere, I guess. Why is everybody getting so angry?"

"I'd say he pulled up to the pump about eleven thirty or quarter to noon. You can see from the ticket he took six and four-tenths gallons of unleaded, which come to eight sixty-four. I did his windshield and he asked me was there a good place to eat and I told him the fast food places were further along, and he said he meant a real good place and I told him to go on into town to the Palmer Hotel, that I couldn't afford to eat there but it was supposed to be the best. I said it got awards every year for being good. He showed me a bug smear on the windshield I'd missed.

Then he signed, and I gave him back his card and his. copy, and away he went."

When I'd finished the whole file, I took it back to Records. Dispatch called Rick Tate, and he told them to tell me he would pick me up out in front of the building in five or six minutes. It was almost six thirty. He came ghosting up to the curb and I got in. Daylight was dying, and I had heard distant booms of thunder as I waited.

"Like the file?" he asked.

"You sort of took it right out to a dead end."

"What do you make of it, McGee?"

"He got a long-distance call in Fort Lauderdale, aboard his motor-sailer, telling him to meet somebody at that specific rest stop on the turnpike six miles southbound out of Citrus City, at a specific time. It was important to him to be there, and he either decided to be alone or it was requested that he be alone. It had to be in reference to something important to him: his illness, his money, his dying child, or the woman he was living with. So he drove on up in plenty of time, got gas, found a good place to eat, waited in the lobby out of the heat until it was time to go to the appointment. He kept it and they killed him."

"Anything else?"

"It isn't as bad a place for a killing as I thought. I'm going down the road and take a look at it tomorrow. Apparently, it is screened from the highway traffic. And it is not a high-use facility, especially in the heat of a late July afternoon. A planned killing taking place there would look unplanned, I think. Kind of coincidental. Spur-of-the-moment. And no problem getting away clean, back into traffic."

"Any more?"

"Not much. Vague stuff. Somebody had to decide on the place. Why up here, all this way from Lauderdale? Did they come and scout it out first? Or is it just a kind of cleverness-that when a wellto-do traveler is killed far from home, it always sounds like a coincidental killing, a robbery with assault. Kill a man close to home and the choices are broader."

"Ever a lawman?"

"Not quite."

"I put it together pretty much the same. Except the appointment and the killing could be two different people. If he was early, he could have been killed, and then when the person who called him showed up, they took one look and took off like a rabbit. A few years, back in Florida and Georgia we had an M.O. of somebody sneaking up on sleeping truck drivers, shooting them in the head with a twenty-two long-rifle hollow-point, and taking whatever money they had. A long-haul trucker tends to carry a fair piece of cash for emergencies, especially an independent owner. As I remember there were eight or ten incidents. Never solved. They just all of a sudden stopped. My guess is that whoever was working it got picked up for something else. Maybe he's
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in Raiford and it'll start again when he gets out. He had the truckers real jumpy all over the area, believe me."

"I remember reading about that."

He started up and cruised toward the center of the city, moving up and down the side streets, looking at the dark warehouses and old apartment buildings as he talked.

"That murderous little bastard had to have some kind of transportation. We gave a lot of thought to that. A report came back from south Georgia, where he killed a driver in a rest stop on Interstate Seventy-five, just up past Valdosta, that a driver turning in had seen a motorsickle taking off like a scalded bat, and the rider didn't hit the lights until he was back out onto the interstate. The way they think he worked it, he'd sneak in and trundle his machine back into the bushes and hide and keep watch on the night traffic in and out of the rest stop. He might have to wait two or three nights until he got the right setup, a single driver in a truck, the truck parked well away from any others, and enough waiting time to be sure the driver was sacked out. But the killings stopped soon after that, before they could set anything up to try to trap him."

"What are you getting at, Rick?"

"That old M.O. that never got proved out stuck in my mind, and I woke up before dawn the day after the Esterland killing and went on out there and looked around back in the bushes. You won't find this in the file because I didn't put it in the file. We were getting the July rains. The ground was pretty soft. I poked around until I found where somebody had run a real heavy machine back through the bushes and made a half circle and brought it back to the place where it had been driven in. Okay, so it was a brute. It made a deep track, so I'd guess about a five-hundred-pound bike, and where the tread was clear in one place in the mud I saw that funny Y pattern of that rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, like those BMW Nine-seventy-two cc come through with. You pay six or seven thousand for one of those, for just the bare-bones machine. I would like to think no biker had anything to do with it."

He parked in shadows and turned toward me. "Listen, we got a group of nice people here.

Maybe close to thirty couples in our club. The C.C. Roamers. Me and Debbie, we got a Suzuki GS-550-ET I bought used. We don't get a chance to go as much as we used to, but we still go when we can. We take tours. Guys and their wives or girlfriends. There's real estate salesmen, and a dentist and his wife, store managers, computer programmers, a couple of builders, a guy in the landscaping business. People like that. It's great. We lay out a tour so we can take the back roads, ride along there in the wind. Have a picnic in a nice grove. You can hear the birds and all, those engines are so quieted down these days. I like it. So does Debbie. A lot. We've got our own special matching jackets and insignia. But the outlaw clubs give the whole thing a bad name.

Like those damn Bandidos out west, and those Fantasies down in south Florida. Some of their officers are into every dirty thing going. Maybe, like they say, most of the troops are pretty much okay, just blue-collar guys from body shops and so on, who like to go roaring around with their women and drink a lot of beer and get tattooed and let all their hair grow and scare the civilians.

Little recreation clubs like ours draw a lot of flack, McGee. And when there is biker violence, it reflects on us too, and people look at you funny and make smart remarks. That's why I hope whoever was on that machine, he just pulled off to adjust something, or get out of the sun, or eat his lunch, or some damn thing. But he could have been an outlaw biker riding alone, and he could have run short of cash money, and so he hid there behind the bushes waiting for somebody to stop who looked worth robbing."

"And if that's how it was?"

"He's away clean. No ID, no witnesses. I couldn't even get a mold of the tire track. The rain washed it out before I could get back with the kit."

"What do you really think?"

"I've got the gut feeling that whoever was on that machine beat Esterland to death. How long would it take him, a man powerful enough to hit that hard? You saw the autopsy report. They guessed he was hit six or seven times. Pull him out of the driver's seat, brace him against the car;
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