Free Fall in Crimson

“I never heard of any at all.”

“What will happen to the place out there?” I asked as I started up, heading north.

“He said he had it all worked out, but he never said how. His lawyer has the papers on it, he said. Man name of Grudd up in West Palm.”

We rode in silence. She sighed heavily. “Oh, God, somebody’s got to go through all his stuff and decide what should happen to it.”

“Maybe Mr. Grudd has instructions. Better contact him first.”

“First thing.”

“Hungry?”

“Like some kind of wolf.”

So I pulled into 24 HOUR CHICKEN and she ate one of the big breast baskets all by herself, with fries and a chocolate shake. I told her I was going to be given a kind of associate-type pin that put me under the protection of the Fantasies, that Cal was going to get it for me.

She studied me for long moments as she sucked up the shake, cheeks hollowed by the effort. “What could save your life and save your ass, you shouldn’t try to be funny about, okay?”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“There isn’t anything funny about that Knucks. He is genuine through and through crazy. Someday they are going to put him away.”

“Cal is going to get the badge to me. I’ve been voted in.”

“I know. Because it got the message to Knucks about not messing with me any more. At least I hope it did. I hate being grabbed like that. And he’s so rough, he hurts a lot.”

“Have you got people close by?”

“Not close by. They’re all down near Monroe Station on the Trail. Lots of brothers. When this thing is settled, I might go down there awhile, sew up some tourist skirts, get a good rest, go frogging.”

“It would probably be good for you.”

“What the hell would you know about what’s good for me?”

“Excuse me all to hell, lady.”

She came sliding over and put her hand on my arm., “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Look, I’m hurting and I want to hurt back, but I shouldn’t be hurting you.”

“Forget it. No harm done.”

She had nothing to say the rest of the way. She got out with helmet and shoulder bag and thanked me. I waited until she got the door unlocked and turned and waved.

By the time I tucked Miss Agnes away and biked from the garage back to the Flush, there was a faint pallor across the eastern sky, close to the horizon line. I chained the bike up and went walking on the empty beach, not too healthy a night activity of late. Some of the jackals cruise our area from time to time, and have shot an innocent man in the head, raped a woman on the beach, cut a man up while removing his wallet and watch. Sub-human freaks, looking for laughs.

I stashed my sandals where I could find them, rolled up the pants legs, walked the water line. The sea thumped in and slid up the sand, pale suds in starlight.

I walked and thought about the lieutenant. I could never feel easy about his gratitude toward me. If I hadn’t helped carry him down the hill in the rain, somebody else would have. And maybe he would have been better off not being carried at all, being left there. But he didn’t think so. I had run into him again by accident, fifteen years after he was wounded. It had been up to him to recognize me. He was fifty pounds lighter and a hundred years older than I remembered.

Okay. Okay. Okay. But, by God, it seemed that an awful lot of people were into dying. The “in” thing this year, apparently. No chance for practice. You had to do it right the first and only time you got to do it. And you were never quite certain when your chance was coming. Stay braced at all times.

Eleven

THE BYLINE did not come hulking into the marina until midmorning on Thursday the twenty-third. Meyer and Aggie were standing up in the bow. I went along with the yacht, keeping up easily at a walking pace. They both looked several shades darker and very content.

“Lovely cruise,” Aggie called. “Just lovely.”

I helped with the lines and went aboard when the crew had rigged the gangway. They greeted me. I kissed Aggie on the cheek and asked them how far they had been.

“Just up to Jupiter Inlet,” Meyer said. “We anchored in a very secluded cove. And we had a nice time. And then we came back.”

“I admire the way you seafarers put up with the rigors of the deep dark ocean blue.”

“Don’t be snide, darling,” Aggie said. “No one needs to be bounced about on a lot of angry ugly waves in order to enjoy a cruise. Don’t you agree, Meyer dear?”

“Aggie, I always agree with everything you say.”

“Mary time?” she asked. “Below or up here? It does seem nice up here, don’t you think, Travis? Raul, tres marias picartes, por favor.”

She sorted herself out on a sun chaise on the upper deck, crossing her long tanned elegant ageless gleaming legs, arching her magnificent back just a little, tossing that rich ruff of hair back, favoring me with a slow and sardonic wink. It was not invitation. It was confirming our mutual approval of the effort that had made the tight pink bikini feasible, with only the smallest roll around the middle. She was a big glorious engine, and a very smart tough lady who, a bit belatedly, had come into her own in every way and was enjoying every moment of it.

“Aggie is flying out from here at one o’clock,” Meyer said, “instead of cruising back to Miami.”

“I was going to be a day late,” she said, “but after two phone calls, I learned better. One of the media monsters is nibbling at my poor little string of papers, salivating. Wants to stick us in with all their magazines and television stations and bulk carriers and tampon factories and give me a fat consultant contract.”

Meyer spread his hands apart and said, “Aggie, it depends on what you want. If you take the cash, put it in tax-frees after paying capital-gains taxes, you could have over half a mil a year with very small tax to pay on it. You could spend a lot more time aboard this vessel.”

“What I want, dear man, is to run my world better than anybody ever ran it before, or will again. A business person, making business moves all day.”

“So you shouldn’t sell.”

“I seem to have a business I can’t sell,” I said. They both stared at me and Aggie Sloane said, “You have a business? How quaint, dear boy! Of what sort?”

The drinks arrived, and I took a swallow before I turned to Meyer. “You heard me talk about Ted Blaylock.”

“Yes, of course. The crippled lieutenant.”

“He died Monday night.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“An attorney named Daviss Grudd, two’s‘s, two d’s, phoned me and told me about it Tuesday afternoon. That whole enterprise of his, Ted Blaylock’s Oasis, Inc., was in a closely held corporation. Very closely held. One hundred shares of stock outstanding. So he left fifty to me and he left fifty to a skinny little half-Seminole woman named Millicent Waterhawk, called Mits, one of the famous Fantasy Foxes. And I can’t sell that damn stock or give it away until there has been an appraisal of the value of the whole damn thing, and God only knows how long that is going to take. Grudd says the thing has got to keep operating or the value of the shares left to Miss Waterhawk will go down, and Grudd said that there is a note in his office to me from Blaylock, saying that it was the only way he could think of to protect Mits’s interest and he was sure I would make sure she didn’t get a tossing.”

I jumped up so quickly I splashed some of my drink on the back of my hand. In a higher than normal voice, I said, “I don’t like all this! My God, when it got so you couldn’t rent a car or check into a good hotel without a credit card, I had to sign up. I had to have a bank account to get the credit cards. I keep getting into more and more computers all the time. Boat papers, city taxes, bank records, credit records, IRS, army records, census records, phone company records… God damn it, I feel like I’m getting more and more entangled Like walking down a dark corridor into cobweb after cobweb. I didn’t sign up for this kind of lousy regimentation! I don’t want to be a damn shareholder, owner, manager, or what the hell ever. I’m getting smothered.”

They were both staring at me. “There, there,” said Aggie. “Poor baby.” She turned to Meyer, “Poor baby doesn’t comprehend the modern way of guaranteeing anonymity and privacy, does he?”

“Tell him, dear,” Meyer said, looking fatuous.

“Sit down, Travis. The computer age, my rebellious friend, is strangling on its own data. As the government and industry and the financial institutions buy and lease more and more lovely computers, generation after generation of them, they have to fill them, they have to use lots and lots of programs, lots of softwear to utilize capacity. How am I doing, Meyer?”

“Very nicely.”

“Meyer taught me this. What you should do from now on, Travis, is to make sure you get into as many computers as possible. Lots of tiny bank accounts, lots of credit cards, lots of memberships. Have your attorney set up some partnerships and little corporations and get you some additional tax numbers. Move bits of money around often. Buy and sell odd lots of this and that. Feed all the information you can into all their computers.”

“And spend my life keeping track of what the hell I’m doing?”

“Who said anything about keeping track? If you can get so complicated you confuse yourself, imagine how confused the poor computers are going to be.”

“Is she putting me on, Meyer?”

“She’s giving you good advice. If you try to hide, you are easy to find. You are leaving only one trail in the jungle, and the hounds can follow that one. Leave forty trails, crossing and recrossing. The computers are strangling on data. The courts are strangling on caseload. Billions of pieces of paper are floating around each month, clogging the inputs, confusing the outputs. A nice little old lady in Duluth had twelve post office boxes under twelve different names, and had twelve social security cards and numbers, and drew checks on all twelve for eight years before they caught up with her. And they wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t signed the wrong name on the wrong check five years ago. The government seeks restitution. She says she lost it all at bingo. Think of it this way, Travis. With each new computer that goes into service, your identity becomes more and more diffuse and unreal. Right now today, if every man, woman, and child were put to work ten hours a day reading computer printouts, just scanning the alphabetical and numerical output of the printers, they could cover about one third of what is being produced. Recycling of computer printout paper is a giant industry. We’re all sinking into the oblivion of profusion, and one day soon we will all be gone, with no way to trace us.”

Aggie began to giggle and gasp. “Millicent Waterhawk,” she said in a strangled voice. “Your business partner.”

“What’s so damn funny?” I asked.

Meyer started laughing, and pretty soon I had to join in. It was such a dreadful blow to my selfimage that it took me a while to see any humor in it. But there was a lot, I guess.

The funeral service was on Friday noon in the little Everglades settlement of Bonahatchee. There was a better turnout of the Fantasies than Mits had expected. She was obviously pleased that almost a hundred and fifty machines had assembled at the Oasis and had rumbled at slow funeral pace to Snead’s Funeral Home in Bonahatchee and, subsequent to the eulogy and service, had followed the hearse out to where the flowers covered the raw dirt mound of the pre-dug grave.

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.”

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.”

“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 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 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. 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 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 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.”

“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 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 phone. 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 twentyeighth 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 my 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.

Maybe what I was saying to myself by sidestepping a quantum bang was that I wanted but one lady at a time. Regardless of what Annie’s reaction would have been, it would not have been anything I would have wanted to tell her. That did not improve my image. I wanted the free ride and I wanted to be paid in my own coin-meaningfulness or sacrament, or some kind of spiritual dedication-something that would give Hefner the hiccups. What gave me pause was the thought that for a fellow of my hesitations, I had sure cut myself a wide swath through a wall of female flesh, dragging my canoe behind me. Cheap apologist is the phrase that comes to mind.

I put on a fresh shirt and went down the stairs and found rooms 25 and 26. I could hear murmurous voices in there, which stopped when I knocked. A tall, strong, dark-haired young girl with a glassy look in her wide eyes opened the door and said, “Yeh?” She was wearing a very faded purple T-shirt with a drawing of Miss Piggy on the front of it and, as near as I could judge, nothing else.

“Peter Kesner in, please?”

“Whaddaya want with him?”

“I’ve got a letter here for him.”

She whipped it out of my hand, said, “Stick aroun‘,” and closed the door smartly. I waited at least five minutes until she opened the door and beckoned me in with a motion of her head, a lift of her shoulder.

Peter Kesner was sitting on an unmade bed, folding the letter into a paper airplane. “How is that old bag, Lee Dean, holding up?” he asked.

I didn’t answer because my attention was riveted on Purple Piggy. She was putting one foot carefully in front of the other as though walking an invisible tightrope. She made a right-angle corner and went six feet, made a right angle in the other direction, and walked until she came to a low solid oak table against the wall that apparently was intended for use as a luggage rack. She swiveled onto it and assumed the lotus position. She rested her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, her hands, palm upward, resting on her thighs, which looked uncommonly meaty and heavy for the rest of her.

“Don’t mind Freaky Jean,” Kesner said. “She’s having one of her ninety-degree square-corner days.” He glided the airplane toward her, and it hit the wall beside her and fell to the bench.

“What’s she on?”

“She is into Qs. Like they were popcorn. How’s Lee? I haven’t seen her in a year. She’s a money head. Pieces of this and pieces of that, and she puts them together nice. She’s going to own as much of California as Bob Hope.”

“She looks fine. She looks great.”

He yawned and picked up a bound mimeographed script and riffled the pages. “I shouldn’t tell you this because maybe you can come up with some pesos which we sure God need, but I think this thing is becoming a turkey. I should never have farmed out the script. Should have done it all myself. When you start with a piece of shit, no matter which way you turn it, form it, shape it, revise it, you end up with the same piece of shit. But the pictorials are great, when they happen. Jesus Christ, we are either getting rain or we are getting winds over nine miles an hour. And over nine, those balloon-club freaks won’t fire them up. Can you imagine? And if the weatherman says a front is fifty miles away and moving in on us at fifteen miles an hour, they won’t even take the gondolas out of the trucks. And if we get an absolutely beautiful day, say five-mile-an-hour wind, bright sun, warm and pretty, they will fly in the early morning or the late afternoon. And that is all, period, fini. Everything by FAA regulations, and they have saddled us with a resident FAA spook to make sure about getting every i dotted and’t crossed. What we are doing here, McGee, is running too fast through the money and too slow through the film. And pretty soon I am going to have to take Free Fall back to LA, do the studio shots, and try to fake the rest from what we’ve gotten so far.”

I swiveled a straight chair and sat there astride, arms crossed on the back of it, staring at him with an attentive questioning look, waiting for more. He wore jogging shorts and ragged blue canvas shoes. I guessed his age at fifty. Once upon a time he had been in shape. He had long ropy muscles, blurred by fat. He had dead-white skin and a lot of curly black hair on his body, even on the tops of his shoulders and down the backs of the shoulder blades. His face and forearms and the top of his bald head were deep tan. His trimmed beard was speckled with white hairs. He wore two heavy gold chains around his neck, one with some kind of a tooth hanging from it, and a thick gold chain around his wrist. His eyes were deep-set, and he wore Ben Franklin half glasses with little gold rims. “I admire your early work, Mr. Kesner.”

“Make it Peter, please. What have you seen, Travis?”

“Chopper Heaven, of course. And Bike Park Ramble. Very significant contributions to popular culture, Peter. I was very impressed with the quality of the performance you got out of those amateur actors, Grizzel and Hanner particularly.”

He beamed at me. “It was long years ago, Travis. When I was young and hungry. They were existentialist films, both of them, tied into the significance of the immediate moment. Desmin Grizzel is still with me, by the way. He’s working on this picture. Not in front of the camera. He’s sort of a personal gofer. The Senator, Curley Hanner, is dead, of course.”

“Dead? I didn’t know that.”

“It was covered in the trades and on the wire services. Accidental death. A year ago. He was coming down the coast road, working out a new machine, a Moto Guzzi Le Mans One Thousand. They were just north of Point Sur, really winding it up, very early in the morning. Desmin estimates a hundred and twenty-five to thirty miles an hour. The Senator was out front by fifty or sixty yards when without warning he ran into a cloud of sea gulls, just as he was starting to lean into a curve to the left. Dirty Bob thinks one of them took him right in the face shield. He straightened and went out over the edge. Low tide and it was three hundred feet down to a shale beach. That was his fourth crackup and his last. Over two thousand bikers came to the funeral, some of them all the way from across the country. There was TV news coverage. Where were you?”

“I have to travel outside the country often.”

“Consultant. That’s the way to go. What do you want to see? What do you want to know?”

“Is everybody staying here in this hotel?”

“God, no! We’d be out of money already. We leased some pasture five miles north of town when we first got here. Nearly everybody else is out there, with the mobile units, vans, house trailers, campers, pickup trucks, and so on, sitting out the rain, bitching, gambling, freaking out. Oh, we were real big when we came to town. We were going to put Rosedale Station on the map. They were all smiles. But, you know, the crew likes a little fun, and there are some townie girls who’ve learned how funloving they are, and there are some townie dudes who got broken up in little arguments about this and that. Now things are very cool, and they talk about us from the pulpits. And overcharge us.”

“I’ve got an eighteen-dollar room upstairs for fifty dollars.”

“And the old bat behind the desk was happy to see you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Okay, for Lee’s bad idea for a program, what are you looking for?”

“Behind the scenes, how problems are solved. What goes wrong with the balloon scenes until you get it right.”

“We are up to here in what goes wrong. We can show you lots of that, McGee. One trouble, we’re down to eight balloon teams now. The rest of them got sick of waiting around and took off. We had thirty teams here at one time. Freaky Jean here, she dropped out of one of the teams that took off. Right, Jeanie? Hey, you! Jeanie!”

She opened her eyes slowly and took long seconds to focus. “Wha?”

“Where’d the buddies on your team go?”

“Wha?”

“Forget it. Look, I got some more script work here. Afterwards, I can take you out and introduce you to the kids. About noon or a little after. So kill some time and I’ll get back to you. If you want, pal, you can take Jeanie here along with you. She’s a real workout.”

“Not right now, thanks.”

“Feel free, any time. Courtesy of the house.”

“Thanks. What’s the theme of the picture?” His face changed, and he looked demented. “The free flight in the hot-air balloon is the symbol of the yearning for freedom, like any dream of flying. We see the life-worn female, trying to reenter the freedom of her youth, seeking it in blue skies, searching and yearning, but the dream of flying contains implicit within it the dream of falling. Age is a falling away, a manner of dying.”

“Oh.”

“Gallantry in the face of disaster will underline the symbols of her life, the young lover deserting her, her child dying, the man who wants to take her on this last splendid voyage.”

“Lysa Dean said that Josephine Laurant is starring in the picture.”

The demented look vanished and the odd face scowled. “She will by God win awards with this role if she will for Christ’s sake keep saying the lines the way they are written, not the way she thinks they should have been written.”

“She’s an investor?”

He stared at me. “Why do you ask?”

“Lysa said there was a rumor around.”

“There are always rumors around. Yes, we are both investors, friend. We are both betting our asses and all we own in this world on a fine artistic venture which will, because of its message, be a commercial success. I know how to combine those two elements. I bombed out on two films because they wouldn’t let, me go my own way. They controlled me. They turned those two films sour. Now it’s like the old days. Complete artistic control, casting control, direction, production, writing, everything. Because we staked everything, the two of us, the distributor and the banks came into the picture for nine mil, and wished upon me a godawful little ferret-faced money man to watch every cent spent, checking every scene against the story boards, setting limits on the number of takes, cutting down the camera angles on both units. So all my wonderful control doesn’t mean shit. And it keeps raining. Look, let me get to work here.”

So I left, taking with me the memory of Freaky Jean’s placid young freckled face, of the dazed mind riding atop the ripe maturity of the animal body.

At a little before one o’clock I rode out to the rented pasture in Kesner’s rented car. He was a ragged driver, accelerating too soon, braking too late, wandering over the center line, talking with his hands. The rain was dwindling. Sunshine was predicted for afternoon. Kesner was full of optimism.

The thirty or so vehicles were parked in random order under a long roadside row of big maples. The pastureland had been trampled into mud paths that followed the traffic pattern. They had wangled a hookup to the power line, and the wires led down to a temporary meter on a pole. There were camera booms and camera trucks standing in the drizzle, their vital parts shrouded in plastic. There were lights shining through the windows of some of the trailers. People wandered around in rain gear. Kesner led me to the cook tent, to a large helping of excellent beef stew on a paper plate, served with a big tin spoon and a cup of india-ink coffee. He settled for just the coffee and a banana.

He introduced me as “A television person who can maybe set us up for some exposure on a network show, so be nice to him.”

I couldn’t retain the names. They came too fast. Chief cameraman, second unit director, script girl, lighting technician, some actors, some balloon people. Everybody seemed very cordial. And then Dirty Bob came in, in a shiny orange jump suit with water droplets on the shoulders and chest. Unmistakable bland moon face, the fringe of beard now flecked with gray, the small Mongolian eyes, slitted and slanted.

“Hey Desmin. Meet one of your fans. This is Travis McGee.”

I stood up and shook hands with him. His hand was thick, dry, warm, and so slack it felt lifeless. As Kesner explained why I was there, Desmin Grizzel stared out at me through those little blueberry eyes set back behind the squinty lids. And I looked back at him. There was something going on behind those eyes. He was perhaps adding something up, something he had heard, measuring me in all the ways I didn’t fit the present role. Or maybe it was some primitive awareness of a special danger.

I sat down, and he sat down with us.

Kesner said, “I gave Kitty the changes for the pink sheets. Did they get that goddam duplicator fixed?”

“Early this morning. She’s caught up on back stuff.”

“What’s with Josie?”

“She come in here for lunch today. Now she’s doing backgammon with Tiger in her trailer.”

“What about the fellow from Joya’s balloon?”

“It turned out it was pneumonia, and they run him on down to Des Moines in Jake’s wagon.”

“Jesus Christ! It’s clearing and I want to do number eighty-one. Jesus Christ, is he in that one?”

“No. I checked it out with Kitty. No scene, no lines, nothing. That’s why I didn’t call in.”

“How did the special project go after I left last night?”

“Mercer thinks it’s pretty much okay. He just doesn’t like the Mickey Mouse equipment and no chance to make cuts.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“Linda’s looking after her.”

“Good thinking. McGee, if you’re through, I’ll go introduce you to Josie. Dez, what you do is get people going on makeup and have Kitty get the pages distributed for number eighty-one, and get those balloon crews ready to go out there to the takeoff area soon as the sun comes out.”

I followed Kesner through the mud to Josie’s big dressing-room trailer, stepping with care. She let us in, and he kissed her on the cheek and said, “We’ll be able to roll this afternoon. Here’s what we’ll be doing, if we stay lucky.”

When he introduced me, she gave a vacant nod and began skimming through the script pages. I found it hard to believe she was as old as she had to be. A small woman, dainty, dark, fragile, with a lot of energy and vitality in her expression, in the way she moved.

She moved her lips as she turned the pages. Suddenly she threw her head back, dashing the dark hair away from her forehead. She threw the pages at Kesner’s face.

“I told you! I will not do that. I will not!”

“Not do what?”

“I will not go up in that goddam wicker basket!”

“And I told you fifty times, damn it, that you will go up to eight feet off the ground. The damn balloon will be anchored! I want you up there with Tyler for your scene, the big one. The lines that are going to break hearts.” He picked up the pages. “Look. Right here. Where it’s marked. That’s where we take you out of the basket and put Linda in. We back off for a low angle and get Linda when she jumps out of the basket into the net. Then it goes on-up and we pick up the fall after they throw out the dummy, and all the rest is process. Eight feet in the air, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t like the height. It could get away somehow. It would kill me. It would stop my heart. No.”

“I’m telling you, there will be three ropes this big around tied to that basket and tied to three trucks on the ground.”

“The propane will blow up.”

“It is safe! Absolutely safe! I know what I am doing.”

She switched emotions instantaneously, from indignation and fury to cool sardonic query. Posture, expression, voice quality-all changed.

“Do you now, darling? Do you really know what you are doing? Do you really understand the extra risks you’re running?”

“What would you rather have me do, mouse? Wind it all down or try to keep it going?” It seemed to me that he gave her some look of warning, some sign to be careful.

After a moment of hesitation, she said, “it makes me nervous.”

“You don’t have to know anything about it. Or even think about it. Okay? Maybe you don’t even have to think about being in the basket way up there in the air, eight feet. Maybe Linda would be better all the way through. Go back and do your scenes over with her. Her skin tones are better by daylight.”

“You son of a bitch! She’s a stuntwoman. She’s no actress.”

“Listen! You were run out of the industry because nobody could trust you not to fuck up and spoil scenes and cost big money. For God’s sake, it’s your money you’re wasting!”

“So I’ll waste it if I want to!”

“I’ll use Linda for the whole thing. I need a picture in the can more than I need your famous face, lady.”

She hesitated. “Three real strong ropes?”

“Big ropes. This big around.”

“I better start to get ready.”

I followed him back out into the mud and along the row of vehicles to a yellow four-wheel-drive Subaru parked next to a big cargo trailer and a small house trailer. A woman sat in the doorway of the house trailer, mending the toe of a red wool, sock. She wore bib overalls over a beige turtleneck. She looked lean and husky, with big shoulders and a plain, intelligent face, red-brown hair combed back and tied.

“Hey Joya,” Kesner said. “This here is Travis McGee, who is a consultant, and he’ll get us some prime-time exposure for free, if we’re lucky. Joya is the boss lady of the balloons we got left.”

She had a muscular handshake, a direct, crinkled smile, a pleasantly rusty voice.

Kesner said, “I’d like to get them off the ground in maybe two hours. The weather looks okay.”

“The forecast looks good,” she said.

He drew in the dirt with a stick. “The wind is going to keep coming out of the southwest. Did I say wind? The breeze. Five knots and fairly steady, they tell me: So right here we do a tethered scene with Josie in the number-one balloon. Then we get her out, then Linda jumps into the net, then you balloon people take it up, and I want about five hundred feet on it when the dummy gets tossed out. We’ll cut from Linda jumping to the free fall at five hundred feet. Now when we take the low angle on the dummy coming out, I want to see balloons up there, not placed so they’ll get in the way of the cameras. I want enough of them in the scene so in the editing, we can go back to where we had them all going nice that day, remember?”

“Sure.”

“So the closer together and the closer to the number-one balloon, the better. So what you do is establish the placement and the order of takeoff, and when you get the gear spread out, I’ll set up the camera stations. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“I want to put Simmy with a camera in the number-three balloon, so that better be the one to come off last, so he can get wide-angle stuff of the other balloons and the fall. I want him back in the basket and low, so the other cameras don’t pick him up.”

“Upwind, then, about two hundred feet from number one, with a simultaneous takeoff, and Red has such a nice touch on that burner, he can hold it anywhere you say in relation to number one.”

“I’d say a little higher, but not so high the envelope gets in the way of his camera angle. With the set of the wind, he should get the kind of landscape we want to show below number one. Joya, please, honey, it has to go right the first time.”

“Do everything I can.”

“Sorry to hear about Walter.”

“He’ll be okay. We thought it was some sort of flu, and then he began to have trouble breathing. They’ve got him on oxygen and full of antibiotics.”

“Leaves you shorthanded.”

“We were already shorthanded. There’s just me, Ed, and Dave.”

“So here is your new man. Travis McGee. Consultants are supposed to be able to do anything. Give him the speedy balloonist course. Okay with you, McGee?”

“Fine with me.”

There was something in her quick glance which I could not identify. It seemed like some kind of recognition. It gave me the strange feeling that she knew I was an impostor, here for some private purpose. It made me wonder if I had seen the woman before, known her in some other context. But I am good about faces, and I knew she was a stranger. I knew I had not misinterpreted some kind of flirtatious awareness. It gave me a feeling of strangeness, wariness, distrust. Proceed with caution. She either knew something about me she had no right to know, or she was making some kind of very poor guess about me. In the glance, in her body language, in her voice, there was the sense of a secret shared, a private conspiracy.

Fourteen

THE MIST was gone, the sky brightening, and the encampment came alive, with people trotting back and forth from chore to chore, engines grinding as they moved vehicles into position.

Joya told me where to wait for her, and after she had organized the positions and told people the timing she came back to me.

“McGee, I hope you are a quick listener, because I don’t have much time. Stop me any time you have a question, any time anything is unclear, okay? We like to fly in the early morning before the thermals begin to kick up, but this should be a similar situation. The air is cool enough to give a nice lift. We’ve got a nice launch site here. The direction of the breeze will hold, and the first thing in the way is that line of trees at least a half mile off.”

A truck pulled up to us, and two men hopped out and started to wrestle the wicker basket out of the back. Joya introduced them. I helped them with the basket. They lifted a big canvas sack out of the basket, set it on the ground, and began pulling the seventy feet of canopy out of it. It was very brightly patterned in wide vertical yellow and green stripes.

“It’s ripstop nylon,” Joya said. “We stow it into the bag in accordion folds, inspect it when we fold it in, inspect again when we spread it out. We check the deflation port and the maneuvering vent.”

“Whoa.”

“The maneuvering vent is a slit on the side, up beyond the equator, ten or twelve feet long. You pull a cord and let hot air out to descend. When you are just about on the ground, you pull the red line for the deflation port, and that opens the top of the balloon and collapses it. It has a Velcro seal. They are checking the numbered gores and the vertical and horizontal load tapes. As owners, we’re authorized to fix little melt holes with patches. And the places where damn fools walk on the canopy. Bigger damage has to have FAA-authorized repair.”

When they had the big bright envelope spread out, downwind, Joya and the two men brought the propane tanks from the truck and slipped them into the stowage cylinders in the corners of the basket. They bolted together the support frame for the burners, hooked up the fuel lines from the tengallon tanks to the burners, then tilted the basket onto its side with the frame and burners toward the spread-out envelope.

At the other locations Joya had selected, the teams were doing the same things, getting set for a coordinated launch. They seemed to be trim and attractive people in their late twenties and early thirties. There was an earnestness about them, a cooperative efficiency, that reminded me of the sailing crowd, of preparations for a regatta. About half of them were women.

As the men were hooking the load cables to the tie blocks, Joya showed me the small instrument panel and explained it to me: variometer for rate of ascent and descent, pyrometer for temperature up in the crown of the balloon, compass-which she said was not very meaningful because there was no way to steer once you were aloft. There were gauges on the top of each propane tank. She showed me the sparker used to ignite the propane and to reignite it quickly should the flame go out. There was a small hand-held CS radio strapped to the side of the basket, which she said they used for contact with the chase vehicle.

She showed me the red line for deflation and the line to the maneuvering vent. She ran through a checklist with her ground crew and then turned to me, shrugged, and said, “Now we wait until it’s time to inflate. Nothing else we can do at the moment, Mr. McGee.”

When I asked her how that was arranged, she said we could walk over and watch them at the number-one balloon. They brought out a poweroperated fan, and two crew members held the mouth of the balloon wide open as the fan blew air into it. One crew member held a line fastened to the crown of the balloon and kept watch to see that it didn’t roll in any kind of side wind that would twist the steel cables at the mouth. When the balloon seemed about three quarters inflated, they started the burner, and it made a monstrous ripping, roaring sound as it gouted flame into the open mouth of the balloon.

She leaned close to me to holler over the burner sound, “Flying, you use over twelve gallons of propane an hour, enough to heat ten houses. George is working the blast valve. See. Now there’s a lift.”

The roaring stopped. The balloon lifted free of the ground and slowly swung up, righting the basket as it did so, and another man climbed into the basket. The basket was tethered to a truck and to a smaller vehicle. George pulled on the blast valve, giving it a three-second shot of flame up into the balloon, waited, and then did it again.

“Short blasts are the way to do it,” Joya explained. “You don’t get any reaction for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, and then you get the lifting effect of the new heat.”

She took me closer to where we could look up into the balloon. It was blue and white and crimson, segmented like an orange, and there was enough daylight coming through the fabric to dim the long blue flame of the burners. The sun broke through. Kesner was walking around, arguing, waving his arms. Josie Laurant arrived, leading her small entourage, and Kesner picked her up and put her in the basket. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was visibly angry. They brought the camera boom close and wanted the area cleared. I went back to the number-two balloon with Joya.

There was no diminution in my awareness of her special attitude toward me. She carried on a second conversation at a nonverbal level. She was telling me that she and I had some sort of arrangement. And, in addition, she was curious about me.

It seemed an unemotional curiosity, speculative and slightly anxious, expressed by the quick sidelong glances, the set of the mouth.

The number-one balloon lifted to the limit of its tether. The breeze kept it canted toward the northeast. Kesner yelled through his bullhorn. They seemed to be having trouble over there, doing the scene in between the blasts of the burner needed to keep the balloon aloft at the end of the tethers.

“You want to take this flight with me, Mr. McGee?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t be in the way?”

“I like the extra weight. Dave was going to come along. Let me ask him.”

She went over to the truck and in a little while she came back with leather gloves and a helmet. “He says sure. See if these are okay. If you lose balance or something, you might touch the burner or the coils that preheat the propane. Helmet is standard for landings. They can get rough. The thing is to face the direction of flight, hang on, and don’t leave the basket. That’s important. Without your weight it could take right off again and get in trouble. Look, do you want to try it or not?”

“I’d like to try it, but not very much.”

She studied me and smiled. “That’s an honest reaction. This should be a routine flight. What do people call you?”

“Travis. Or McGee. Or whatever, Joya.”

“Joya Murphy-Wheeler. With a hyphen, Travis. Mostly what you have to do is keep out of my way which isn’t easy, and admire the view.”

We killed time for an hour, and finally they took Josie down to ground level and let her out, and put another propane tank aboard and another smallish dark-haired woman dressed like Josie.

“That’s the stunt woman,” Joya said. “Linda.” She said the name the way she might say “snake.” They took the number-one balloon back up again to twenty feet above the ground. Linda held the burner support, straddled the side of the basket. The man with her, who had been in the long scene with Josie, grabbed for her and missed as she toppled over the side. She fell neatly into the safety net, bounced up, clasped her hands over her head, duck-walked to the edge of the net, grasped it, and swung down. George stood up out of his concealment in the basket and hit the blast valve for a few seconds. The balloon sagged down anyway, and the crew grabbed the edge of the basket. The actor climbed out and then was told to climb back in. The dummy was brought aboard and stowed. After a small conference, Linda climbed aboard, too, and Kesner yelled through his bullhorn, “Joya, get your people ready to go.”

It took about thirty minutes to get all seven balloons inflated. They seemed to come growing up out of the field like a crop of huge poisonous puffballs. The gas blasts were almost constant. Joya had arranged the signals. When number one took off, number three followed almost immediately, staying near it, gaining a little height on it. Joya’s crew people, Dave and Ed, held the basket down and made bad jokes about what I might expect of the flight.

“Weight off?” Joya ordered. They removed their hands. We had positive buoyancy, and she blasted for eight or ten seconds. A little while after the blast ended, we began to lift more rapidly, following the first two in their mated ascent.

“I’ll have to try to stay close, for the sake of the cameras, but then we’ll peel off.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t steer these things.”

“You’ll see.” She worked the blaster valve, ripping the silence with that startling bray, a snorting sound that shot the blue flame high into the envelope. Without that noise, there was a strange silence. We were moving with the wind, so there was no wind sound. I heard the other balloons blasting in short staccato sequences, then heard the wicker of the basket creak as she rested her hip against the edge. The ground had dropped away. Behind us I could see the pattern of vehicles, of the muddy paths, the trailers and trucks.

“There!” Joya said.

I looked where she pointed and saw the lifelike dummy ejected from the number-one balloon, about seventy feet above us and ahead of us. I heard the rattle of the clothing as the dummy fell, turning slowly. It seemed to pause and then pick up a terrible speed as it dwindled below us to smack into the tough pastureland.

We held position for a little while until Joya said, “I think they have enough.” She pulled the line to the maneuvering vent and bent to watch the variometer scale, explaining that we were too high to use visual reference points to indicate altitude. She let us sag downward until it seemed to me that our descent accelerated. At just that point she began feeding it short intermittent blasts. The harsh sound startled me each time until I learned to watch her gloved hand on the lever.

The others were far ahead of us, much higher and leaving us well behind. “Higher wind speeds aloft,” she explained. “They’ll be coming down soon, to fly close to the ground. That’s when it’s best. You’ll see.”

She gave all her attention to stabilizing the balloon at the height she wanted, explaining that as we came down we were pushing cooler air up into the envelope, thus decreasing lift. She leveled it out at about twenty feet above the ground. The breeze carried us along at I would guess ten miles an hour. Now and again she would pull the blast lever for a short sequence of that ungodly racket, and in a little while I began to comprehend the rhythm of it. If there was a tree line ahead she would give a two-second blast which, thirty seconds later, would lift us up over the trees.

We moved in silence, looking at the flat rich country. We heard the birdsongs, heard a chain saw in a woodlot, heard horses whinny. Children ran and waved at us. We crossed small country roads and once saw our reflection in a farm pond. “What do you think?” she asked.

“There aren’t any words,” I said. There weren’t. In incredible silence between her infrequent short blasts for control, we moved across the afternoon land, steady as a cathedral, moving through the land scents, barn scents, the summery sounds. It was a sensation unlike anything else in the world. It was a placid excitement, with the quality of an extended dream.

We beamed at each other, sharing pleasure. It made her strong plain face quite lovely. It was the instant of becoming friends.

At last she bumped it up to two hundred feet, where her exquisite coordination was not as imperative. We used the wrench to cut an almost empty tank out of the line and tie in another full one. She explained that we had wasted gas by using the maneuvering vent to drop us down, but she had wanted to get down quickly and get away from the others. From our altitude I scanned the horizon and could see but two of the others, little round pieces of hard candy way off to the west of us. “Divergent winds at different altitudes,” she explained.

She perched a hip on the edge of the basket again, one hand overhead on the blast lever. She glanced at the control panel, then looked at me with the questing look she had concealed before.

“Travis, I can’t add anything to what I told them on the phone.”

Moment of decision. The proper thing to do would be to express all the confusion I felt, to take her off the hook, to correct her misapprehension. But there was a flavor of conspiracy, and I did not want to sidestep anything that might become of use to me. Apparently she and I were having a clandestine meeting, hanging up there in a wicker basket under a seventy-foot bulge of rainbow nylon, moving northeasterly across middle America.

I took my time with the response, knowing it was make or break. “They said they felt it would be better if I got it from you, rather than secondhand from them.”

“I thought they were taping it. There was that little beep every few seconds.”

“Listening to a tape and listening directly to a person are two quite different experiences, Joya. So if you don’t mind…”

She shrugged, sighed. She pointed out a small deer, bounding toward a woodlot. And then she told me the story.

They had been going to leave when a lot of the others left. But she had been concerned about what had happened to her friend, Jean Norman, who was staying at the hotel with Kesner. There was a large trailer at the far end of the leased pastureland, fixed up like a bedroom set. There the withered little technician named Mercer used a video camera setup with a video-recorder, and with Dirty Bob and Jean and Linda, who was gay, they made cassettes, masters, which were flown to Las Vegas, where a distributor paid three thousand apiece for them and could then duplicate a thousand copies a day, title them, package them, and send them out. They kept Jeanie on pills and paid so little attention to her that she heard more than they realized. She signed releases every time, and they gave her a little money every time. Lately they had been bringing local girls into the action, making them think it was going to be some sort of screen test. The girls got some false reassurance from the presence of Linda and Jeanie, but the fake rape turned out to be real rape, and the screams were real as well. With enough Valium in them to quiet them down, they would take the money later on and sign the release and never dare reveal what had actually happened, hoping only that no collector in Rosedale Station ever bought one of those X tapes and recognized his neighbor’s daughter or granddaughter in the jolly tattooed clutch of Desmin Grizzel.

“I haven’t got any proof at all,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten involved. But I think it is rotten. And they should pay somehow for what they did to Jeanie, if for nothing else. She told me bits and pieces when she was sort of lucid. And I put it together. I don’t think Josie Laurant knows about it. I like her. Kesner and Dirty Bob are monsters. Like I told your people on the phone, we’re cutting out. Dave is driving the chase car and Ed is driving the truck with all our gear. I don’t even want to take you back to where we left from. It’s going to get very dangerous around there. The people around there hate the movie people and us too. If any one of those girls talks about what happened to her, it could start a shooting war. It’s almost a shooting war now. One balloon came in with three rifle bullet holes right through it, but little holes won’t bring a balloon down. From now on it’s up to you people.”

“How did you know I was the one?”

“They said somebody would be here today, somebody with a cover story, to look around and decide whether it is worth further investigation.” She looked up into the envelope and down at the variometer dial, gave a five- or six-second blast, frowned at me, and said, “Anyway, you look like the sort of person I expected them to send. What will you do?”

“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, redheaded, 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 fiftydollar 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 middleaged 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 now, 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, chin inches from her 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 un-wrapped.”

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.”

“You can see the reason for my concern.”

“It isn’t scheduled to rain tomorrow. We’ll get going early, with the flying, and we’ll wrap up the last location shots, and we’ll go back home, and he’ll put it all together. It’ll be great. So don’t sweat it, Ace.

He stood up, slowly, heavily, inspected the red end of his cigar again, took another drag on it, then leaned and hissed it into the little pile of stew remaining on Jeanie’s plate and walked out.

She sat there staring at the upright butt in glum confusion and then stared at me. “Am I gonna be with you?” she asked. “I thought I was gonna be with Dez.”

The little dark-haired stunt woman came striding in, directly to the table, directly to Jeanie, ignoring me. She was wearing boots, jeans, a red shirt, a suede vest. She clucked in dismay, scooped up the dirty plate, and went off to scrape it into the garbage can over near the coffee machine. She came back with a damp towel and sat beside Jeanie. Jeanie tilted her face up, eyes closed, as Linda mopped her clean. Jeanie’s face was immature, with a spray of freckles across the unemphatic nose, dark soot of lashes lying against the cheek. Linda swabbed the girl’s hands and wrists clean, gave her a little pat on the shoulder, a little kiss on the forehead, and took the towel back to the counter. She came back and sat where Desmin had been, braced her chin on broad brown little fists, and looked at me with flinty eyes.

“You want pieces of this turkey for some kind of television?”

“Just to show how things like this are done.” Her laugh was abrupt and humorless. “Things like this are not done like this, fellow. I have busted fifteen bones in this line of work, which comes out to one a year since my first stunt where I fell off a cliff onto the roof of a stagecoach. I know good from bad. These people here are nuts. Peter, Josie, Mercer, Tyler, all of them. The money is almost gone and they keep making up new story lines. Peter calls it free association. How did you get mixed up in this?”

“Lysa Dean sent me here, for Take Five Productions.”

“Now there is one hard-case lady. I doubled for her three times. No. Four. Drove a convertible into a culvert. Red wig. Broke my collarbone when the safety belt snapped. Can’t remember the name of the film. It was very big at the time. When she was very big. She has-like they say-carved out a new career.”

“Linnnnda?”

“Shut up, sweetie. We’re talking. I saw you go up with Joya. How’d you like it?”

“Very very much. Not like I thought it would be.”

“Me too. I hear Joya cut out, after turning us in for something she made up. She and I never got along at all. She’ll be lucky Peter don’t send Dirty Bob down to Ottumwa to slap her loose from her shoes.”

“Something about tapes, wasn’t it? Videotapes?”

“This is no kindergarten, and the people Kesner brought here are not churchgoers. When you have toys around, people will play with them. When you have candy around, people will eat it. If Joya didn’t like it, she could have left any time. She didn’t have to try to make trouble. She didn’t as it turned out. The two they sent here looked around and took off. If they were after like controlled substances, it might have been something else.”

“Linnnnda?”

“Hush, baby. You could get to fly again tomorrow, or at least help out with the ground crews, because we’re shorthanded again. Make it out here early, like practically dawn.” She leaned toward Jeanie and snuffed at her and frowned and said, “You smell musty, sweetie. Linda’s going to take you in to the Lodge and give you a nice hot bath.” She got up and pulled Jeanie to her feet and led her out, looking back to wave and smile at me.

The babble of conversation and the clatter of spoons in the coffee cups died for a few moments as they left and-then picked up again. There was a smell of burning grease, and a drifting odor of garbage. I went back through the night to my car and drove back to town. I stopped at the Burger Boy microphone, put in my order, and drove around to the window. A plump girl gave me the paper bag and took my money. I drove over to a parking slot, turned off the lights, and let the radio seek out a strong signal.

It was an FM station in Ames, Iowa. When it began on the local news, I was reaching to turn it off when the announcer said, “The two teenagers who died in a one-car accident this evening on State Road One Seventy-five just west of Stafford have been identified as Karen Hatcher, fifteen, and James Revere, seventeen, both of Rosedale Station. The vehicle, a late-model pickup truck, was headed east at a high rate of speed when it failed to make a curve five miles west of Stafford, traveled two hundred feet in the ditch, and then became airborne for another hundred and ninety feet, ending upright in a field. Both passengers received multiple injuries. The Revere boy was pronounced dead at the scene, and Karen Hatcher died while en route to the hospital… Legislators today issued a statement that the anticipated bond issue will not be validated-”

I punched it off. I felt a little curl of visceral dread which slowly, slowly faded away.

It was, I told myself, no part of my ball game. If a plump little girl had gotten herself into more emotional trauma than she and her boyfriend could handle without spilling themselves all over an evening landscape, that was too bad. And this year three hundred and eighty-six thousand people would die as a result of lung damage and heart damage from cigarettes. And that was too bad too. Death and despair and misery were all unfortunate. There were a lot of Peter Kesners and Desmin Grizzels and Lindas and Jeanies and Josephines at large in the world, and my only function was to use some of Ron Esterland’s money from his paintings to ease his curiosity about the death of his father. And get back as soon as possible to the pliant pleasures of my executive hotel-manager woman. And figure out what to do with my motorcycle business.

Lecturing oneself does not cure the megrims. It does not create the indifference one seeks.

When I parked and went into the lodge, the old dragon was behind the desk. She said, “You’ll have to be out of Thirty-nine by tomorrow morning.”

“How about the others?”

“They’ve been told. All the rooms are reserved. All you people have to be out.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way I want it. That’s the way the town wants it. The best thing you can all do is get out of town and stay out, all of you. It might be the healthiest thing you can do.”

“Like the Old West, huh? Don’t let the sun set on yuh, stranger?”

“Nobody is in any mood for jokes tonight.”

“Anything to do with the Hatcher girl?”

She froze for a moment. “I bet you’d even joke about that too. Jamie was my sister’s only grandson. You people are vile. You are wicked. You are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord God. Drugs and rapine and fornication and a bunch of preverts!”

“Now wait a minute!”

“I don’t have to wait on you, mister.”

And there was nothing else to say, because there was no one to say it to. She had ducked out of sight back somewhere behind the counter. It is possible to feel the guilt that is assessed only by association. Maybe each one of us has enough leftover unspecified guilt so that it is always available in case of need.

I plodded up the creaking staircase, through a smell of dust and carpet cleaner, belching an echo of Burger Boy onions. Before I reached the second floor I heard the yelling and the thumping. The noise was coming from 25. There was a thud, a grunt, a curse, a heartbreaking moan of anguish. I tried the knob. It was locked. I backed off, raised my leg, and stamped my heel against the door just above the knob. It ripped the bolt out of the old wood and swung open just in time to reveal Peter Kesner, in his underwear shorts, holding Josie Laurant against the wall, his left hand at her throat, while he landed a big swinging blow against her left thigh with his balled fist. They both stared at me, Josie through streaming tears.

After only slight hesitation, he went back to the task at hand. His splayed left hand held her flat against the wall. She tried to writhe her hips and legs out of the way, but he kept on thumping her with those big swings.

I took three steps and caught his wrist as he wound up to swing again. “Hey! Enough already, Peter!”

Sixteen

“THIS IS a private domestic argument, McGee!” Kesner yelled. When he took his hand away from her throat, she sagged to the floor. She was wearing a pale yellow terry robe, floor length, with a big white plastic zipper from throat to hem. Her face was bloated and streaked.

“It’s too noisy to keep private,” I said.

He came at me, grunting and swinging. He looked insane. He swung at my head, and I had time to get my fists up by my ears, elbows sharply bent and angled toward him. He was very slow, but those fists were hard and he swung them with all his might. I can move very quickly, and so, as soon as I had read his timing, I was able to let him waste his punches by getting my elbows and forearms in the way of his wrists. His little gold glasses fell off. It was my earnest ambition to pick the right moment, step quickly inside, and chop-chop-left in the gullet and a right hand deep into the soft white gut. But I realized how badly he was wheezing and gasping. The blows were softening. His mouth was sagging open. He was in that peak of physical conditioning which would cause him to get winded by changing his socks. So I let him flail away, and when he took an exceptionally hard, high swing at my head, I ducked below it. He went all the way around, got his legs tangled, and went thumping down like the dummy tossed from aloft.

As he lay there on his face, Josephine Laurant Esterland came crawling over to him on her hands and knees. She raised her fist and popped him in the back of the skull. She shrieked and sat, hugging her fist in her lap, rocking back and forth.

“Had enough?” Kesner asked me in a breathless, hollow voice.

“I give up,” I said. The room door was ajar. I went over and closed it. I rolled Peter over, sat him up, helped him to his feet, and walked him over to the bed. He sat there, and I flexed my arms to relieve some of the pain and the numbness where he had hit muscle and bone.

Josie stood up slowly and carefully. She said, in loyal explanation, “He never marks me. I never show my thighs onscreen. They’re too short and fat. He never marks me.” She turned and glared at him. “Every cent? Every damn cent gone? What happened to the budget? What happened to that mealy little accountant person?”

“Shut up, Josie.”

“That means the house is gone too, you son of a bitch. You can’t finish without money. You’re not half through the story boards. Jesus Christ! It finishes me! Don’t you care?”

“Shut up and get out of here.”

“You are unbelievably mean and cruel. I’ll be lame for days. You impoverish me and then you beat me when I object.”

“Leave!” he yelled, pointing to the connecting door.

She hobbled to it, head high, slammed it behind her.

“You shouldn’t break in on a domestic discussion, McGee.”

I straddled a chair, facing him. “How much did you have to pay Dirty Bob?”

“What do you mean? He’s on salary.”

“Oh, I don’t mean for what he’s doing now. I mean for the long ride when he and the Senator went over to Citrus City and beat Esterland to death, so he wouldn’t outlive his daughter and leave all that good money to his foundation. I’d think he could bleed you forever for something like that.”

He peered at me. “Friend, you’ve got to be covered with needle marks.”

“Anne Renzetti knew the terms of the will, and she told Josie. Ellis had terminal cancer, and Romola was going to get all the money, and the support would stop, and Josie wouldn’t be able to support you any more. That’s when you went after Romola and set up the hideaway where you two could be together.”

He looked toward the closed door and back at me. “Lower your damn voice, you idiot! Who are you? I think Dez was right about you. What do you want?”

“Then she had the bike accident, and when you knew she was really going to die, you explained to good old buddy Dez how nice it would be for everybody if the old man went first. Then the money would come to the daughter, and on her death to Josie, and you would be able to stay in the trough.”

“Not so damn loud!”

“If you were doing the talking, you could keep your voice down.”

“I see what you mean. All right. About Esterland, it just happened to work out lucky for me. I don’t know who killed him. You have Dez all wrong too. I wouldn’t say there wasn’t a time when he might kill somebody, but that’s all behind him. He’s a good citizen. Who are you anyway?”

“A consultant, like Lysa’s letter says. Two birds with one stone. Ron Esterland told me if I ever ran into you, I should ask about his dad, about you arranging to get him killed.”

“Friend of his?”

“And of Anne Renzetti. They both think you arranged it, Peter.”

“You’re getting loud again!”

“Because you’re not saying anything interesting.”

“All right, all right. That’s a very high-strung lady beyond that door there.” He lowered his voice even further. “Don’t say anything else about Romola, please. It’s a terrible guilt load for me. I had a wonderful father-daughter relationship with that lovely child. She was the one who decided it had to turn into something else. Neither of us could stand the thought of hurting Josie. I found us a pad. It wasn’t against the law, McGee. I know just how I’m going to handle it in my autobiography. Tender, gentle, sensitive. Two people caught up in forbidden sexual obsession, secret meetings spiced with guilt and shame. Honest to God, when she ran over that dog and fractured her skull, I thought it was God’s judgment on both of us. I’ll never forget her. Never. She had the most beautiful damn body I’ve ever seen on any woman.”

“That’s very touching, Peter.”

“So get off me about that other.”

“What if Grizzel and Hanner decided on their own to do you a little favor? What if it could be practically proven?”

“Proven?” He studied me, his expression wary and dubious. “Look, I may have done some bitching about the situation, and I suppose somebody could have grabbed that ball and run with it. Would that be my fault? What kind of proven?”

“Not airtight. Ron says his dad went to Citrus City to make a buy of an illegal substance, to relieve his pain, intending to pay with Krugerrands. I don’t know the details, but it has something to do with tracing those gold pieces to Hanner or Grizzel or you.”

“Not to me! Jesus! No way can that be true.”

“There’s a rumor around that Grizzel killed Hanner.”

“You show up here pretending to be a big fan of my work, and then you hit me with all this shit. Anybody can hear rumors. I heard a rumor too. I heard he had a woman a while back who caught Dez’s eye, and Dez was always able to take Curley’s women away from him. Then she is supposed to have said something to Dez that she should not have known unless Curley had talked a lot more than he should have, about something involving the two of them. And then Dez waited until the right time. Maybe while he was waiting for the right moment, Curley ran into the sea gulls.”

“Have you thought of writing for pictures?”

“McGee, I hate a smartass, especially when he takes shots at my work. Nothing about this conversation is important. I’ll tell you what is important. I am going to finish this picture. There’s enough left to do the final flight scene early tomorrow. With the footage I’ve got, there are a lot of directions I can go in. I can use voiceover to pull it together plotwise. There are scenes in the can that really sing. On Movieola, no score, they sing. They’ve got my imprint. A hundred years from now, kiddo, people will be going to see Free Fall in the basements of museums, to see the unmistakable mark of Peter Kesner. The dynamics of each scene, unfolding, the people working in a kind of magic rhythmic counterpoint in their relationships to one another, and with the cuts underlining the tempo of the score. We fold up shop here tomorrow and head home, and in eight or ten weeks, eighty-hour weeks, I’ll put it together. That’s what’s important, not you coming here bugging me with this Esterland bullshit. What’s with this Ron? He didn’t make the will?”

“I heard on the radio that Karen Hatcher is dead in a one-car accident. She was fifteen.”

“She-who did you say-?”

“Come off it, Peter. Joya was right, wasn’t she?” He looked thoughtful. He got up and went over and picked his glasses up off the floor, put them on, nodded, and said, “She was right and she was also wrong. I wanted to know as little as possible about it. Josie knows nothing about it. I happened to know about that one, is all. She was well over fifteen. You could tell from the tits and the rug. This is depressing me. And my arms are sore. Look at the bruises coming up. I’m going to take a line to shape up. I can spare one if you want.”

“No, thanks. You go ahead.”

He went over to the bureau and put a careful pinch of white powder from a jeweled case onto the smooth bottom of an overturned dinner plate. He chopped it fine with a single-edged blade and scraped it into a thin line, bent down to it, and snuffed it up a soda straw, moving the straw along the line as he took the long slow inhalation, pressing his other nostril shut. It was quick and deft. Not a single motion lost.

He straightened, flexed his arms, worked his shoulders, slapped himself on the belly, and turned and smiled warmly at me. “You did con me, you son of a bitch. You know that, don’t you?”

“Two birds with one stone. The Take Five situation is legitimate.”

“I know. I checked with Lysa. Tell you what, you bring her to the lab in Burbank in about two weeks, and I’ll show you a sequence that will knock your ass right off. That lady in there, let me tell you, that lady in there is giving one hell of a performance. She’s hard to handle, but she’s a classic talent. Bergman, with a whiff of Taylor. When they are very very good in bed, it shows on the screen. It shimmers under all the lines they say. You see it in the backs of their eyes.”

“The Hatcher girl and her boyfriend were both killed.”

“Do you realize how much you’re boring me?”

“There could be some very real trouble about that, if anybody knows she starred in one of your dirty tapes, Peter.”

“Screw her and screw this town. We’ll be out of here by lunch. We’ve only got one of the big location rigs left. And what we do, we have to do it right the first time.”

He sat back on the bed.

“What you can do, you can do me a favor by being out there real bright and early. We’re down to five balloons and we’re short on ground crew to handle them. I’ve got that Tyler sequence to shoot, where the balloon comes wobbling down with him stretched out dead in the basket, and all frosty from being so high he froze to death. Mercer invented some kind of crystal stuff he can spray him with. I wanted to have the other balloons settling down too, like the way animals gather around a wounded member of the herd, but you can’t control the damned things that way, so the way we work it tomorrow, we have them take off from a close formation and then later I splice it in to run backward, so it will look like they are coming in, gathering from far off. I wanted it to be a big scene, but with only five balloons left, what can you do? I think I can work in some of the stuff when we had thirty of them taking off, and some bits of that could be run backward too. Will you be out there to help out? Listen, I would really really appreciate it, McGee.”

What was there to say? There was no way to tell him what he was, even had I been entirely certain. I had the feeling that neither my vision of him nor his image of himself was particularly close to reality.

I said yes and went up the stairs to my overpriced room. Choice was still open. I could get up in a couple of hours and take off for Des Moines. Or I could go out there in the morning and help out and see what was happening.

I had as much as I was ever going to get out of Peter Kesner. I was personally convinced that Dez had taken Curley along and taken care of that little matter for Kesner, as a favor. Bravado. Help out your friends. It would probably be enough to satisfy Ron Esterland. He had performed the filial duty. Time to head home.

Yet on the very edge of sleep I realized that I was going out there in the morning on the slender chance that I could get some sort of confirmation out of Desmin Grizzel. It was a narrow chance and a big risk to try to trick him into some sort of partial confirmation. He might well want to throw me to the sea gulls, off some inconceivable cliff in the flatness of Iowa.

And also, of course, there was the slender chance I might get to ride in the gondola again, and that would give me a chance to find out if the second ride could possibly be as elegant and hypnotic as the first, moving in that sweet silence across the scents, the folds, the textures of the soft green April country.

Seventeen

WITH THE oncoming sunrise a broad gold band along the eastern horizon, the area was coming awake. There was a smell of coffee, truck engines starting, balloonists breaking out the bags, baskets, tanks, spreading the big colorful envelopes downwind, ready for inflation. I was pressed into service on number five as a member of the ground crew, taking the place of a member of that team who had broken his hand landing the previous day. He had a cast and a sling, and he trotted along a half step behind me, telling me over and over everything I was supposed to do. He was very fussy, and he had a high nervous voice.

“The envelope bag has to be stowed on board, stowed in the basket. Fold it up. No, not like that. Open it up again. Bring in the sides and fold them flat onto the bottom. Start on that side, and fold the whole thing over. Now fold it again. See. Now put it in the basket. Not underfoot. Shove it behind that brace. Right there. Now we have to check the connecting pins and rings. And then the sparker. And then the safety line. If you always check everything twice or three times, Mr. McGee, you will not have those accidents which arise out of carelessness.”

The sun appeared and the balloon colors turned vivid as the warmth struck us. Kesner, in feverish energy, was moving camera positions back and forth with orders over his portable horn. Linda and Tyler, fresh from makeup, were sitting on folding chairs, waiting.

“Blow them up! Blow them up, you people!” Kesner brayed.

“He means inflate,” said my interpreter. “Put those gloves back on. And fasten the buckle on your helmet, please.”

They positioned me out beyond the crown of the balloon, holding a line that was fastened to it, with instructions to counter any movement during inflation if it should show a tendency to roll in any side wind. Rolling would entangle the cables at the mouth and damage the burners.

By the time the sun was up above the horizon, all five balloons were upright, fully inflated, swaying in the morning breeze, estimated at five knots, coming out of the northwest. Number five was vertically striped in broad alternating segments of crimson and light blue.

I was put to work picking up the tools and equipment used during inflation, along with the inflator, and stowing them in the box in the big rugged pickup used by this team. It became clear to me that I was not going to get another ride. They were all waiting for the take-off signal. The tether rope had been untied from the pickup truck bumper. Linda came over and vaulted briskly into the basket. The pilot was a lean man with a deeply grooved face, an outdoor squint. He looked like a cowboy in a cigarette ad. One of the team was on one side of the basket, holding the rim, and I was on the other. Every time the pilot gave the blast handle a twitch, I could feel the sense of life and lift in the basket long seconds later.

The balloons were in a pentagon formation, about a hundred and fifty feet apart. Kesner decided he did not like that. He had one walked to the middle of the area and ordered enough deflation so it would look tired and flabby. He had the other four walked in closer, so that the flabby one was in the middle of the hollow square.

The breeze was freshening slightly, and at that point a caravan of perhaps twenty pickups and vans came roaring down the road. The lead pickup turned directly into the big field, smashing aside the barricade of two-by-fours. They came closer, spread out, came to spinning, skidding stops, and fifty or so young men came piling out. They wore jeans and T-shirts, and they carried tire irons, ball bats, and short lengths of two-by-four. They came toward us in a dead, silent run; and there was no mistaking the dedication and the intent. There was going to be no measured appraisal of guilt or innocence. We were all-balloonists and grips, cameramen and drivers, script girls and lighting experts-going to take a physical beating that would maim and might even kill. This was a mob. They had whipped themselves up. The fact that they looked young, clean-cut, and middle-American did not alter their deadliness.

In the silence of their rush toward us, I heard the prolonged ripping, roaring sound of the burners on one of the balloons. Everyone seemed to realize at the same moment that this was the best chance of escape.

“Peter!” Linda screamed. “Peter! Here!” He came on a wild scrambling run, and as she began the long continuous blast of heat into the bag, he dived over the wicker rim, hitting the pilot with his shoulder. The pilot bent forward over the rim, and Peter snatched his ankles and fumbled him out. I swarmed over the rim as it began to lift. The other ground crew member let go. It moved with a painful slowness. Two beefy blond young men came running after us, too late. We lifted just out of reach. Something pinged off the round side of one of the propane tanks and went screeching off in ricochet.

We lifted more rapidly. I looked at the pyrometer and saw it moving close to the red line, and I knocked Linda’s hand off the blast valve.

“What are you doing!”

“Melt the top of this thing open, and we’ll drop.” She understood and watched the gauge with me. It went on up right to the edge of the red and then began to fade back. The inclinometer needle held steady. I guessed we were at about eight hundred feet. I looked back and down and could see the knots of people, flailing away and struggling and falling. The other balloons were airborne, both at a lower altitude, one ahead of us and one behind us. The flabby one was half deflated on the ground. People were fighting close to the basket of the other one, and it seemed to be deflating. Bodies lay silent in the grass. The cook tent was aflame, as was Josie’s trailer-dressing room. As I watched, three of them caught up with a running man and beat him to the ground and kept on beating him.

“They’ve gone crazy!” Linda said. “Look! There’s two cop cars. They’re parked down the road there. They’re not going to even try to stop it!”

“You people didn’t make many friends.”

“We brought a lot of money into this hick town,” she said. “What the hell has happened to everybody?”

“I can guess. I think the little Hatcher girl told her best girl friend what you wonderful moviemakers did to her, and after the two kids were killed in that accident, the girl friend decided she didn’t have to keep quiet any more. She didn’t have to keep her word.”

“Oh.” She turned on Kesner. He was sitting with his back against the wicker, his arms wrapped around his upraised knees, his face quite blank. “I told you that girl was too damned young.”

“I didn’t ask for a driver’s license. She said nineteen.” He pulled himself up. He looked back and saw the fires, pallid in morning sunlight. “They don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re destroying.”

“Hey, we’re coming down!” she said.

“We better try to fly low,” I said. “Take a look.” The pickups and vans were streaming away from the pastureland, taking the roads that led southeast, that followed our drifting pattern.

“Why don’t we go high?” Kesner asked.

“Because these things won’t go all that high. The higher you go, the less efficient they are and the more gas they use up. And we’d stay in clear sight even at ten thousand feet, and they could follow us until we come down. If we go low enough, maybe we can lose them.”

When we were at fifty feet and descending ever more rapidly, she opened the valve. It continued to sink. The basket brushed the top of low bushes. A red barn was rushing toward us. Kesner pointed at it and screamed. The lift finally took effect, and we rose above the crest of the barn roof, missed the silo, and then, because of the long blast, went right on up to five hundred feet.

“Short blasts, dammit,” I said. “You have to use short blasts.”

“Run it yourself!” she said.

And so I did, badly at first. The response always came so late, it was difficult to time. When I had the hang of it, I gained some altitude, found the wrench, and changed to fresh tanks. I could see chase cars a mile away on a parallel road, kicking up dust. I took it back down, and soon we came to a big agribusiness installation, a line of tractors, in offset pattern, working a giant expanse. They waved to us.

It was Kesner who pointed out the balloon that was spoiling our strategy. It was above us, in a fresher breeze than ours, well behind us and gaining on us. It was pumpkin and green, with bands of white. The chase cars could follow him easily. I took us up to where we could yell at him to fly low, as we were.

Linda recognized him first. “Hey, it’s Dirty Bob. All alone! Wouldn’t he be alone, though?” She yelled at him. “If you fly lower, they might lose you. Hey! Fly low, Dez. Low!”

He ignored us. I worked our balloon back down again. He was even with us for a time and then moved a little ahead and a little farther off, to the left of our line of drift.

I kept glancing at him too often. I didn’t see the power lines in time. The big ones, the high structural towers, the spiderweb look of the thick cables swooping from tower to tower. Even with a constant blast I did not think we could lift over them. “Get ready to land!” I said.

“No!” Kesner yelled. “I saw them following us, right over there, past those trees.”

“We’ve got to come down right now!”

I yanked on the line that opened the maneuvering port just as Linda sprang and opened the blast valve. We were too high to risk opening the deflation port at the top by pulling the red line. I jumped at Linda to pry her hand free, but she was too wiry and strong. We started to lift, and I made the almost mortal decision that we were as low as we were going to get. So I went over the side, hung, kicked free, and dropped, facing the direction of flight.

If I had to swear on all the books, I would say it was a forty-five-foot drop, at ten to twelve miles an hour. I went down toward the cultivated browndark earth. I dropped, pinwheeling my arms for balance, trying to remember everything I knew about falling, relaxing, rolling. The laws of motion state that a body falls at thirty-two feet per second, but it did seem to take a lot longer. One doesn’t get much practice at stepping off the roof of four-story buildings.

I landed on the balls of my feet, inclining slightly forward, and as I hit I hugged my chest, tucked my chin down, and turned my right shoulder forward and down. I felt the right knee go, and the forward momentum took me into a shoulder roll. I went over and right back up onto my feet, where I didn’t especially want to be, and then tried to take some big running steps to stay there. But the knee bugged out, and my body got ahead of my legs, and I took a long diving fall onto my belly that huffed the wind out of me and chopped my teeth into the dirt of a corn row.

I pushed myself up, gagging for air, spitting dirt, and saw the balloon angling up toward the wires. Relieved of my weight all of a sudden, it had taken a good upward surge. But it was still going toward the power lines. In retrospect I decided that the upward bounce had not been lost on Peter Kesner. The racket of the gas blast stopped abruptly, and an instant later a figure came tumbling down, falling away from the basket. She had, I would say, seventy feet to fall. She was a tough little woman, athletic and nervy. I learned later that she had done some sky diving, and I think that she spread-eagled her arms and legs in an attempt to stop the tumbling caused by her being thrown out of the basket by Kesner. Maybe the tumbling would have stopped if she’d had more falling room. A lot more room. She made a single lazy turn and landed at a head-down angle that snapped her neck a microsecond before the heavy thud of her body into the soil.

Kesner was higher. The blast was ripping away, jacking that long blue flame up into the envelope. He was going to make it over the power lines. From my angle of sight he was already clear when the basket and cables struck the power lines. There was a stunning crack, loud as an antitank gun, a condensed flash of blue lightning, and then a big orange ball as the propane tanks blew up. The orange and crimson ball melted the striped crimson and blue envelope almost instantly, and a stream of debris came tumbling down in free fall, one morsel of it the flame-shrouded mannikin which had been Peter Kesner, landing under the power lines, thumping down beside the shredded and blackened basket with an impact that blew the flames out and left him smoking for a moment before the flames began again.

Beyond the lines, high and off to the left, the pumpkin and green balloon floated in the breeze, moving away from me. Outlined against the blue sky beyond, I could see the silhouette of Desmin Grizzel from the waist up, standing there in the hard weave of the wicker basket, looking back down at us, motionless and intent. I stood up, favoring the right leg. I was dazed, and I was sickened by the pale and dying dance of flame on Kesner’s body and the small silence of Linda. Out of some vague impulse I raised an arm to Desmin Grizzel as he dwindled against the morning sky and saw him wave in response.

I heard the hard whine of the engines of the chase cars and looked for a place to hide. I could not run to the, distant row of trees. I hobbled over closer to Linda’s body, stretched out face down, dug with two paws like a dog, wormed myself against the soil, lay with my face wedged into the breathing hole. As a final act of guile, I pulled the wallet out of my pocket and pushed it down into the dirt at the bottom of the hole under my face. The earth smelled rich and moist.

They came running, feet thudding, breathing hard.

“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Look at that one, Ted!” There was a coughing sound, a gagging sound, and then a gush, coughing, and another voice saying weakly, “I’m sorry, guys. It was the smell.”

I took a deep slow breath and held it. Somebody put a foot against my hip and shoved. “Maybe this one’s alive.” I felt hands poking at my pockets.

The hands went away. A deeper voice said, in exasperation, “What are you doing, Benny?”

“Nothing.”

“Get your hands off her.”

“She’s got something here on a chain around her neck.”

“I said get away from her!”

“Okay, okay, okay. What’s the matter with you?”

“Ted, come over here. Look, guys. I think we ought to go back to town and split and keep our mouths shut.”

“What about that balloon still in the air?”

“There’ll be guys after it. This thing got out of hand. Right? Everybody got too excited. I saw Wicker kill a little old guy. I saw him do it on purpose. Nobody agreed to anything like that. Nobody said anything about setting fires. I saw Davis go down, and it looked as if he was hurt bad. There was a lot of blood on his face. Here we got two more dead people and one maybe dying. It got too big. There’ll be television guys and newspaper guys from Des Moines all over the place.”

“You remember what we all agreed, Len. It was for Karen and Jamie. It was in their memory. These are evil people.”

“ ‘Justice is mine, saith the Lord.’ I think we ought to cut out right now, guys.”

They seemed to reach an agreement. When I heard voices again, they were too far away for me to hear what they said. I knew the explosion wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Others would be arriving. I retrieved the wallet. Somebody had scooped dirt onto Kesner and put out his fire. I brushed dirt off me as I walked out of the big field. The knee had popped back in, leaving the tendons stretched and sore, okay for limited and careful use. When I reached the tree line, I found that they were planted alongside a narrow asphalt road. I looked back and saw a glinting of vehicles back near the power lines and some tiny figures moving about in the field.

There was no traffic. I walked and rested, walked and rested, and finally reached a crossroad. Bagley and Perry were off to the east, Coon Rapids and Manning off to the west. A rumpled old man with a harelip and a lot of opinions about that mess in Washington gave me a ride to another crossroads, where a very fat woman in a van upholstered in sheepskin gave me a ride through Rosedale Station and on out to the location. When she stopped, the cops tried to wave her on, but I got out. She drove on. A young officer said, “This area is closed.”

I pointed out my rental Buick and showed him the keys. He took the keys and made certain they worked. He wanted to see the rental agreement, and I took it out of the glove compartment. Then he asked for identification.

“What’s going on here anyway, officer?”

“All hell has been going on here. How come your car is here and you weren’t?”

“I left it here last night when I rode into town with someone else. I meant to come back and get it, but I didn’t get around to it.”

“Where did you stay last night?”

“The Rosedale Lodge.”

“Are you with this movie company?”

“No way.” I said, and from the back compartment of the wallet I slid the folded machine copy of Lysa Dean’s letter to Kesner. He read it carefully, his lips moving. He was broad and young and plump, and he had high color in his cheeks, a thick chestnut mustache.

“That Lysa Dean, she is a really quick-witty person,” he said. “She’s been around. When I was maybe fourteen, I had a terrible case of the hots for her. And, you know, she still looks damned good. What’s she really like, McGee?”

“She’s a very shy and retiring person, officer. All that sex-pot front is just an act.”

He sighed and said, “You’d never know it,” and gave me back the letter. “I’m sorry you told me that.”

“What did go on here?”

“Were you going to use some of the balloon stuff on the TV?”

“I’m going to recommend against it. Was there a fire here?”

We stood and looked out across the field. A lot of the trucks and private cars were gone. There were two television news teams at work, interviewing people out on the field, taking shots of the bright empty envelope on the ground, the overturned basket.

“What they were doing here, on the sly Mr. McGee, they were making dirty videotapes, conning some of the young people around here to appear on those tapes, paying them for it, making them sign releases. It didn’t all come out until one of the young girls they made perform for them got killed yesterday, and her girl friend broke down and told what had been going on. This is a Christian, Godfearing community, Mr. McGee, and a big bunch of the friends of Karen Hatcher came out here early this morning to bust everybody up. And they pretty much did. We’ve got twelve high-school seniors locked up, and three in the hospital, and warrants for the rest of them. There were two dead right here on the field, two of the movie crew, and another that will probably die. A lot of expensive equipment was destroyed and burned, and from what we can find out, a lot of the movie film was burned up too. A report came in a while back that two or three more got killed running into hightension lines way southeast of here. Some of them got away, in time in balloons, apparently. It’s just one of those things that happen. It’s a godawful mess. It’s hard to say who’s to blame in a thing like this. It really is. One of the ones in jail is my kid brother.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Billy would never in this world set out to kill anybody. His dog fell out of the loft one time and broke his back. Dad said it was Billy’s responsibility to shoot old Boomer. He plain couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him. Of course, he was only twelve. I had to do it for him.”

“It all got out of hand, probably.” I said.

“That’s exactly it, mister. That’s exactly it. They don’t want people who don’t belong here hanging around here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, wait a second. If you know anything about that sideline of making those tapes, maybe they’d want to talk to you some.”

“Officer, I got here yesterday morning. All I’ve seen are balloons.”

He nodded. “Okay. You can take off.”

Eighteen

THE WORLD turned further toward summer. Vennerman scheduled my knee in May, and by early June I was walking at a reasonable pace, but only for a mile at a time, and I worked with the weight Velcroed around my ankle every evening-swing the leg up straight and hold it, and let it down very slowly.

In mid-June there were a few unusual days when Florida became almost too hot to touch. Annie Renzetti came over from Naples, and while she was there, making lists of what she’d bring on the promised cruise aboard the Busted Flush, Ron Esterland came to town for our long-delayed accounting. He had been out in Seattle making additions and changes in a big show of his paintings which were about to go on the museum circuit, all of them on loan from museums and collectors. Meyer came over in the morning and got his big pot of Italian meat sauce started, checked it out at noon, and came back at drinking time, toting a sufficient amount of Bardolino.

It made a very good group. Ron and Annie were obviously fond of each other. He said to her at one point, “You were maybe the luckiest thing that ever happened to that crusty old bastard.”

She said, “I’ll always owe him. He taught me to do my work as perfectly as I was capable of doing it, and to think about better and easier ways of doing the chores as I was doing them-not to take my mind off them and drift. He used to say-”

“I know,” Ron said. “He used to say ditchdiggers are the ones who can design the best shovels.” After we were all bloated with more pasta than anyone had intended to eat, I went and got my expense sheet and presented it to Ron Esterland. His eyebrows went up. “This is all?”

“I tried. First-class air fare. Car rentals. Steaks. It just didn’t last long enough.”

“When I saw Josie last week I didn’t see any point in telling her you were looking into the old man’s death as a favor to me.”

“How did she seem?” Annie asked.

“Okay. She misses Peter terribly. She told me there had been some vicious gossip about Peter and Romola, but neither of them had been capable of betraying her that way. She was very busy. She and somebody from one of the agencies were working out a lecture schedule for her and going over her materials.”

“Lectures!” Annie exclaimed. “Josephine Laurant?”

“It seems that Peter is becoming a cult figure,” Ron said.

Meyer went to his old cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, came back with a clipping he had taken from a small literary journal, and read it to us, with feeling.

“ ‘Perhaps it is too early to attempt an appraisal of the lasting value of the contributions of Peter Gerard Kesner to the art of the cinema. At the heart of the pathetically small body of work he leaves us are the two gritty little epics about the outlaw bikers, vital, sardonic, earthy, using experimental cuts and angles that soon became cliches overused by the directors of far less solid action films. The harddriving scores, the daring uses of silence, the existential interrelationships of victims and predators gave us all that odd twist of deja vu which is our response to a contrived reality which, through art, seems more real than life itself.’

“More?” Meyer asked.

“Don’t stop now,” said Annie.

“‘In the two big-budget films which he directed, and which failed commercially, we see only infrequent flashes of his brilliance, of his unmistakable signature on scenes noted otherwise only for their banality of plot and situation. The truth of Kesner, the artist, was stifled by the cumbersome considerations of the money men, the little minds who believe that if a film is not an imitation of a successful film then it cannot possibly be a success.

“‘We can but dream of what a triumph Free Fall would have been had it not been destroyed in that tragic confrontation in the heartland of Iowa. Those who were privileged to see the rushes say that it was Kesner at his peak of power and conviction, dealing with mature themes in a mature manner, in a rhapsody of form and motion. A lot of footage survived, and we understand that it is being assembled as merely a collection of sequences of visuals, of flight and color, with score by Anthony Allen and narration by Kesner’s great and good friend, Josephine Laurant, who will, during her narration, deliver one of the scenes written for her by Kesner. The people behind this project, who include of course the backers of Free Fall, whose losses were recouped by the usual production insurance, hope to enter this memorial to the great art of Peter Gerard Kesner in the Film Festival at Cannes.’”

“Wow!” Annie said. “Was he that good? Was I dumb about him?”

Meyer smiled and folded the clipping away. “My dear, you have put your finger on the artistic conundrum we all struggle with. How, in these days of intensive communication on all levels, can you tell talent from bullshit? Everybody is as good, and as bad, as anybody wants to think they are.”

Ron said, “Josie is taking the film on the road, doing the university circuit, adding remarks and a question-and-answer period. Expenses plus fifteen hundred dollars a shot. Which comes, of course, from federal grants to higher education. She says she owes it to Peter’s memory.”

“I don’t think that movie would ever have been released,” I said.

“The legend now is that it would have been an epic,” Meyer said. “And there are all the funny little sidebar bits of immortality too. They’ve updated and released that old book ghost-written for Linda Harrigan, Stunts and Tricks: The Autobiography of a Stuntwoman in Hollywood. And then, of course, there is that girl from that team of balloonists, the one from Shenandoah. What was her name, Travis?”

“Diana Fossi. I never met her. She’s the one who got smashed across the base of the spine with a tire iron. They’ve named one of the events in the big international meet for her. The Diana Fossi Cross Country Marathon. She’ll be there in her wheelchair, to present the cup to the winning team.”

“What happened to the boys who did all that?” Ron asked.

“Nothing much,” I told him. “Except for the death of Mercer, the cameraman, they couldn’t pin down who did what to who. They indicted a boy named Wicker for that. They haven’t tried him yet, but I think he’ll get a term in prison. They’ve negotiated probation for the others. And one town boy died weeks later of brain damage he received during the fracas, which tended to make it a little easier to get the others off.”

I remembered my knee treatment and went and got the weighted canvas anklet and sat on the couch beside Annie.

Meyer said, “What is interesting, at least to me, is the production of myth and legend. Look at that situation, for example. Hundreds of professional news people, law officers, investigators descended on that little city. It was a story that had everything. Dramatic deaths of celebrities, a pornography ring, a murderous riot, innocence corrupted. From what you told me, Travis, I gathered that in his scrambling around for funds to keep going, Kesner came up with a sideline. Using a trailer studio and Mercer, Linda, Jean Norman, Desmin Grizzel, and local young people, he was making pornographic video cassettes and Linda Harrigan was flying them over to Las Vegas and peddling them for cash on the line.”

“That was the picture Joya Murphy-Wheeler, the balloon lady, gave me, information she’d gotten from Jean Norman, who apparently wasn’t as totally zonked out all the time as the others thought. It turned out that Linda had Jeanie on Quaaludes, hash, Dexedrine, and Valium, which should have turned her brain to porridge.”

“What happened to her?” Annie asked. “To Jeanie?”

“I have to backtrack,” I said, “to tell you how I know. Driving to Des Moines that afternoon, I knew I had to square things with Joya. So I kept on going, on down to Ottumwa, looked her up, found her, and confessed I’d faked her out and that the real, the genuine, the true blue F B and I would no doubt track her down, probably in the person of one Forgan. She was one of the maddest women I’ve ever seen. She was furious. She had heard some of the news on her lunch hour. She knew there’d been trouble but didn’t know how much. Yes, she’d heard of the death of Karen Hatcher and her boyfriend, and I told her how that had been the incident that ignited the whole thing. She had been shocked to hear that Kesner and Linda Harrigan were dead. She was fascinated by the story of my final balloon trip, and she shuddered when I told her what happened when the gondola hit the power lines. Finally she halfway understood what my mission had been, and why I had let her believe I was something I wasn’t. We parted friends. I phoned her from here in May, the day before I went in for the knee operation, and she said that she had never been contacted at all, probably because the people she had implicated in her phone call as being the ringleaders were either dead or missing: Kesner, Harrigan, Mercer, and Grizzel. She understood that Jean Norman had been institutionalized in Omaha, near her home. Through her contacts in the balloonist groups, she had heard that they had taken several statements from her to be used in prosecuting Desmin Grizzel, and they were confident that she was making a good enough recovery so that she would be able to testify against him in court.”

“And here is the legend,” Meyer said, “growing to full flower. Unbeknownst to the cinematic genius, Peter Kesner, his creature-Dirty Bob-had corrupted Mercer and the stunt lady. And the stunt lady had recruited Jean Norman. They used a portable set after hours, when Kesner and Josie and Tyler were not on location, made the tapes, and peddled them through Linda’s contacts. And the word is out that the distribution of the porno tapes, under the X-Lips label, had Grizzel killed in order to save them a lot of time and trouble and possible legal action. Grizzel, with monumental idiocy, did not hide his face when he performed on those tapes. He enjoyed being on camera. Miss Norman is also identifiable, I understand. Miss Harrigan wore a silver mask. And the amateur talents they recruited in Rosedale Station are of course identifiable. So the chain of evidence is clear enough. By the way, having a recognizable Dirty Bob play the heavy made the tapes more valuable and more salable. The prosecution has picked up over a dozen of the tapes made there in Rosedale Station. The distributor, in a single public statement made before the lawyers muzzled him, claimed the tapes were acquired from an intermediary, a third party, who had represented them as being simulated rapes, which is apparently very big with what they call the hard-core audience. A very dirty business indeed. The victims contributed to their own disasters by being hungry for the glamorous life, an appetite that made them vulnerable. And then, like victims the world over, they helped rope new victims because that made them feel their own humiliation was diluted thereby.”

Annie said, “My God, Meyer, where do you get all this stuff?”

“He buys those strange newspapers they sell at checkout counters,” I told her.

“Only to recheck my grasp on reality,” he said. “Reality tells me that Desmin Grizzel is alive and well.”

Ron frowned. “But wouldn’t they have a reason to have him killed?”

“What for?” Meyer asked. “They act as corporate entities. Incoming cash is distributed. If problems arise, collapse the corporation and move to the next floor and start a new one. It is a lot cheaper and safer and easier than arranging a murder. Pornography is all mob-connected, of course. If somebody consistently pirated the product, I suppose they would arrange a little demonstration of how unhealthy that sort of thing is. But Grizzel is a celebrity. Somewhere in the world tonight those two early motion pictures are playing, probably in three or four countries, with the Japanese or Italian or Arabic or Portuguese dubbed in. A known face is a very risky kill, as those who did away with Jimmy Hoffa would agree. From everything I have read about Desmin Grizzel, I think he is a survivor. Some children found that downed balloon in the woods, three days later, miles south of Interstate Eighty.”

Ron frowned and said, “Back to topic one, Travis. Did Grizzel kill my father?”

“My gut feeling is that he did. Alone or with Curley Hanner. No strong evidence. Just little bits and pieces. Kesner aimed them at Ellis Esterland. Maybe indirectly. Maybe he just said that things would be fine if only Esterland died before Romola. We’ll never know what hook they used to get Esterland up to Citrus City alone. Probably to buy something from someone for the pain. He didn’t want to admit to Annie here that it was getting too bad to endure any longer. Once the murder was done, Grizzel owned a slightly larger share of Kesner. And so did Hanner. All I got out of Kesner was that hint about how maybe Grizzel had gotten rid of him. Or maybe it was the sea gulls.”

“So,” said Ron, “can we assume that Dirty Bob, the California biker, has disappeared back into the roaring stream of camaraderie, the helmeted knights of the road, protectors of their own?”

“Not very damn likely,” I said. “He hasn’t got a face you’d call forgettable. That moon face with the corona fringe of beard and the big high cheekbones and the little Mongolian eyes. He became the role model for too many imitation hard-case types.” Meyer said, “Let’s consider the problem from his point of view. It might be constructive. Travis, he told you he had a beach house, motorcycles, a convertible Mercedes, a portfolio of bonds, and an attorney working on a pardon for an earlier felony. Suddenly he is on the run, and his toys are gone. But is the offense serious enough, from his point of view, to keep him on the run? Can’t he hide behind Kesner and say he was following orders? Travis, after your confrontation, or whatever you want to call it, with Kesner at the Lodge, wouldn’t he have had time to talk to Grizzel the next morning?”

“Of course.”

“And if Grizzel had been exploiting his relationship to Kesner, using it in every way he could think of to benefit himself, and if Kesner wanted to pry him loose a little, what would he say?”

I thought it over. “I think he’d tell Grizzel that the killing of Esterland hadn’t been so clean after all. That I was looking into it, and that I was curious about how Hanner had died.”

And then,“ Meyer said, ”he was on the scene when you disposed of Kesner. His meal ticket. His hero. The man who made him a celebrity.“

“But I didn’t!”

“How would he know that? You dropped, the woman dropped, and Kesner went up into the power lines. And then you waved at him.”

“Look. There’s just a vague suspicion that he killed Esterland.”

“How does he know how vague it is? How does he know he didn’t make some kind of terrible mistake, that somebody wasn’t watching?”

“Somebody was watching,” Annie said. “Curley Hanner.”

In the silence I began exercising the knee again.

They all watched in mild autohypnosis. “He’d change his appearance,” Ron suggested.

“Heavy eyebrows?” Meyer asked.

“Very. Big and black and bushy, speckled with gray. Why?”

“If he shaved his head, beard, and eyebrows, the eyes might still look familiar to people. Mirrored sunglasses could cure that. And if he changed his mode of dress completely-”

“Hide forever?” Annie asked.

“Possibly. Or maybe long enough to take care of the problem of the Norman girl. And then find you, Travis, and see what you know or don’t know. Or maybe not even bother to ask.”

“Oh, fine! And just how would he find me?”

“Through Lysa Dean, of course.”

I stopped flexing the knee. Annie looked out at the dark night and hunched her shoulders slightly. Ron frowned at the floor.

Meyer said with hearty cheer, “We’re just playing games. The ancient and honorable game of what-if.”

Long after they had gone, Annie Renzetti made me turn on the light and try once again to reach Lysa Dean on the bedside phone. She nestled close to me and we both listened to the sound of ringing. I let it ring fifteen times and then hung up.

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Annie said. “Those people have answering services. They have to.”

“Maybe not on the private, private line. When friends call long distance, if there is no answer, she’s out. It saves toll charges.”

“Do you believe that?”

I reached and turned the light out. “Certainly.”

“If you really did, you wouldn’t sound so overconfident. Was Meyer trying to scare us?”

“He likes to make guesses about people. He’s pretty good at it, but he’d be the first to tell you he strikes out a lot.”

“You’ve known Lysa Dean a long time?”

“I helped her out of a jam a long time ago.”

“Did you sleep with her when you went out there in April? That’s not a jealous question, really. I don’t have any claims on you. You’re free to do whatever you want. You know that. I just wondered. It’s such a dumb question, you don’t even have to answer it. I mean, the years go by and she just seems to get lovelier.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you want to?”

“The possibility did occur to me.”

“Could you have?”

“I wouldn’t even want to guess.”

“You know, you don’t have to lie. Not with me.”

“I know that, Annie love.”

“Could you just hold me a little bit tighter?”

“My pleasure.”

“I have the feeling something is going wrong in the world, something involving us in some terrible way.”

“Nothing bad will happen.”

“Why did her phone keep ringing and ringing? You said she has a live-in staff.”

“It probably doesn’t ring in their quarters. It’s her special private line. Go to sleep, Annie.”

“I’ll try.”

“Think about your hotel. Count the silver.”

“One, two, three, four, five…

“Silently.”

“Oh.”

Nineteen

THAT was Sunday night, of course, the twenty-first day of June. On Monday morning Annie showered and dressed early because she had to get back to her hotel chores. She stirred me awake and then went to the galley to fix the waffles and sausage. While doing so, she turned on the tiny Sony machine she had given me: AM, FM, cassette tape, and a fierce sharp little black-and-white screen. She turned the television to Good Morning, America, and in a few moments she came running in to get me. I was just shouldering into a robe and heard only the last part of the news item.

I tried CBS and NBC and, minutes later, got the item in its entirety-or at least the entirety granted it by those blithe morning people who twinkle and sparkle as they speak of horrors beyond belief.

“Mystery surrounds the disappearance from the drug rehabilitation center of Jean Norman, the voluptuous brunette balloonist whose testimony was crucial in the indictment of Desmin Grizzel, a.k.a. Dirty Bob, still at large after the Iowa riot on the location of Free Fall, where porno videotapes were being made while Kesner’s lost epic was in production. She had been given the freedom of the grounds and was due to be released in the custody of her parents in another two weeks. When her parents visited her yesterday, she could not be found. Police joined in the search. Another patient saw her at approximately two P.M., talking across a low stone wall to a tall man. A fresh smear of blood on the edge of the stone at that location proved to be of the same type as Miss Norman’s. The patient could not identify pictures of Grizzel as being the man she had seen by the wall.”

“Meyer is a witch,” Annie said. “Call Lysa Dean.”

“It’s four thirty in the morning out there. Later.”

“Okay. Later, but then will you please call me and tell me if you talked to her?”

“I promise.”

“Would you like your waffle black or charred? Don’t look so abused, Trav. There’s more batter. That one was supposed to be mine. I’ll start yours when you come out of the shower.”

I tried Lysa at three that afternoon, and she answered on the second ring.

“Hi. It’s me. McGee.”

“You damn thankless bastard! Did you forget I got you that ‘in’ with Peter Kesner? I didn’t know if you got killed and buried, or you sailed off in a balloon, or what. Where the hell are you?”

“Fort Lauderdale.”

“Were you in Iowa when it hit the fan?”

“I was indeed. It got a lot of coverage in the press. I didn’t think you’d need a play-by-play from me. I’m grateful you thought up the idea that got me through the door.”

“You weren’t as grateful at the time as I wanted you to be.”

“I thought I thanked you very nicely.”

“Sure.”

“Let me tell you why I called. Have you got a minute?”

“Three, maybe four.”

“All right, then. Dirty Bob is still at large. It looks as if he got to that girl who was going to testify against him and took her off somewhere. Without going into details, he has, or thinks he has, some very pressing reasons to find me and beat the top of my head in.”

“I’d even help him.”

“The only way he can trace me is through you. He saw that letter from you. I think he holed up for a while, and now he is moving again. He might pay you a visit.”

“So?”

“He might ask questions in a very ugly way, Lee.”

“I am not afraid of that big dreary ass-grabbing motorcycle bum, darling. I have no reason to love you, or even like you, but also I have no reason to hand out information about you, so don’t fret. Momma won’t let big bad bully come after poor wittle McGee baby.”

“Dammit, Lee, think about it. He killed Ellis Esterland, and he killed Curley Hanner, and he has probably killed Jean Norman.”

“Oh,” she said in a smaller voice.

“I called you because it’s my fault you’re in the line of fire. I’m sorry. I didn’t think far enough ahead.” I have lost some very great ladies because I was too slow, too stupid, and too careless. This time I was giving warning. “Can you go away for a while?”

“I’m better off here. I’ve got the Korean couple and a damned good security alarm system. I’ll be careful.”

“If he shows up, tell him where to find me. I’d like to see him again.”

“You sure of that?”

“It would be a lot easier than losing you.”

She started laughing, and when I finally got her to explain what was so funny, she said, “Sweetie, you can’t really lose something you’ve never really had.”

“Tell whoever patrols that area to check you out oftener than usual. Tell them you had a nut call.”

“This is a nut call. I wouldn’t be lying.”

“Take me seriously, will you?”

“Honey I’ve tried that twice already, and it didn’t work,” and still laughing, she hung up.

I phoned Annie at the Eden Beach immediately and held while they ran her down.

“Yes? Anne Aenzetti speaking.”

“Just hung up after a talk with Lysa.”

“Wow! I’m always so glad when one of those bad feelings doesn’t work out. Will she go away? I could hide her out here-well-until somebody recognized her, which would be in about eleven minutes. Bad idea. It would be fun to get to know her. I feel as if I already do know her.”

“She was impressed. She’s going to be careful.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

I locked up and wandered down the dock to Meyer’s cruiser. He wasn’t aboard. Then I saw him coming, evidently from the beach, trudging along, smiling to himself.

“Back a winner?” I asked.

“Oh, good afternoon! A winner? In a sense, yes. There was a gaggle of lanky young pubescent lassies on the beach, one of the early invasions of summer, all of them from Dayton, Ohio, all of them earnest, sunburnt, and inquisitive. They were huddled around a beached sea slug, decrying its exceptional ugliness, and I took a hand in the discussion, told them its life pattern, defensive equipment, normal habitat, natural enemies, and so on. And I discovered to my great pleasure that this batch was literate! They had read books. Actual books. They had all read Lives of a Cell and are willing to read for the rest of their lives. They’d all been exposed to the same teacher in the public school system there, and he must be a fellow of great conviction. In a nation floundering in functional illiteracy, sinking into the pre-chewed pulp of television, it heartens me to know that here and there are little groups of young-uns who know what an original idea tastes like, who know that the written word is the only possible vehicle for transmitting a complex concept from mind to mind, who constantly flex the muscles in their heads and make them stronger. They will run the world one day, Travis. And they won’t have to go about breaking plate glass and skulls and burning automobiles to express themselves, to air their frustrations. Nor will these children be victimized by the blurry nonsense of the so-called social sciences. The muscular mind is a cutting tool, and contemporary education seeks to take the edge off it.”

“As you have said before.”

“What? Sorry about that. Lecture Eighty-six C.”

“Did you hear about the Norman girl in Omaha?” We settled into deep canvas chairs in the cockpit of the John Maynard Keynes. “I heard on the noon news,” he said, and got up and unlocked the hatch to below-decks, went down, and came back with two icy bottles of Dos Equis, drank deeply from his, wiped his mouth on the back of a heavy and hairy hand, and said, “The body will turn up, perhaps, sooner or later.”

“Lysa Dean is okay. I talked to her a little while ago. Alerted her. I think she’ll keep her guard up. I told her that if he gets to her, to tell him where to find me.”

In a little while I noticed how motionless he was, how he was staring into the distance. When a lady stalked by wearing a string bikini, a big pink straw hat, and high-heeled white sandals, Meyer didn’t even give her the glance she had earned. She went off into the dazzle of white hot afternoon.

Finally he stirred, sighed, finished his beer. “There is certain standard information about Desmin Grizzel. Raised in Riverside, California, out on the edge of the desert, a one-parent family, with the children divided among foster homes when the mother was killed in a midnight brawl in a parking lot. Desmin went from foster home to reformatory to penitentiary, emerged into the close fellowship of the outlaw biker. A passable mechanic. A brawler. A skilled rider. And so there he was, riding toward his very limited destiny, when Peter Kesner came into his life and told Grizzel, Hanner, and their associates he wanted to use them in a motion picture. Probably they thought it some kind of joke. They became Dirty Bob and the Senator, lived the parts, made production suggestions, and so forth and so forth. It’s all in the fan magazines. So they became celebrities, cult heroes to a limited segment of America. Two movies. And the consequent talk shows, endorsements, public appearances at biker meets, races, and rallies. And some bit parts in TV series and B movies.

“Desmin Grizzel read the press releases about how, by accident, his life had been changed. He had been pulled up out of the great swamp of common folk and placed on a hilltop, where he vowed that he had seen the light, that he would never return to the wicked ways of his prior life. This is always a popular theme. I think that Desmin Grizzel began to enjoy security, if not respectability. He was closing in on forty. He had done a dirty little chore for Kesner, and he had worked Kesner for as much of Josie’s money as he could grab, put it into the security of a beach house, vehicles, bonds, and the lawyer working on his pardon.

“He had made it possible for Kesner to get seed money for the new motion picture project. He had bunted his old friend Hanner over a cliff, removing an irritant and a possible danger. He was Kesner’s gofer, taking orders perhaps slightly demeaning for a man who had once been a star in his own right. Then, in the matter of the tapes, he had a chance to indulge simultaneously his yearning to be on camera and also his sadistic appetites, apparently not realizing the danger involved in not hiding his identity.

“And it all went to hell. He saw Kesner die and saw you survive. He hid out somewhere, somehow, for nearly two months. Wanted. Pictured in all post offices. Federal indictment and local indictments in Iowa. Now what is his concept of his future? There is no possible way he can fit himself back into any area of security and respectability. No way at all. The myth of redemption is shattered. The fans of past years are gone. The onetime outlaw biker is once again an outlaw. Back to his origins. Society raised him up and then smacked him down, leaving him no out. He’s not the sort of creature who’d turn himself in. He’s a predatory animal. Big, heavy, nimble, and cruel. The fact he was tamed for a little while makes him more dangerous. He’s on the move because he has somehow acquired a safe identity that gives him mobility. I would say that he probably thinks of himself in some strongly dramatic context, as a betrayed man who will take out the betrayers before the pack brings him down. The betrayers are the Norman girl, Joya Murphy-Wheeler, Lysa Dean, you, and possibly some others. He can take a lot of pleasure in the hunt, sharpened and sweetened by the knowledge that these are the last acts of his life.”

“Meyer, you can’t climb inside his skull.”

“I know that. I can try to come close.”

“He could be into a lot of heavy things that could addle his wits. He could just be thrashing around.”

“True.”

“But I might as well try to reach Joya.”

“It shouldn’t hurt,” he said.

I couldn’t find the number I had written down for her. I got it from information and then waited until she would be likely to be home from work. I went over what I wanted to tell her. She had seemed very forthright and direct. I remembered how she smiled when I finally experienced that strange pleasure of the balloon journey at low altitude across the land.

The voice that answered was frail and tentative. “Hello?”

“Is Joya there?”

“No. Who is calling?”

“This is Travis McGee. In Florida.”

“Were you a friend?” The past tense froze my heart.

“Who are you?”

“Alpha. I’m her sister. What was it you wanted with her, Mr. McGee?”

“Is it possible to speak to her?” I knew instincively how dumb that question was.

“No, sir. It is not possible. We had the services for her yesterday. She is… she has passed on.”

“What happened to her?”

“You aren’t another newspaper person, are you?”

“No. I went ballooning with your sister.”

“She was crazy about that. She loved it. She always said it was worth it, but I couldn’t see it. That’s another thing I got to sell of hers, I guess, her share in that stupid balloon.”

“You’re the executor?”

“Sort of. She was divorced a long time ago and there weren’t any children. She came back here to stay at the home place all alone. I mean I’ve got a husband and children and a life of my own. I told Joya that she shouldn’t live here alone. It’s on just a farm road, you know. Like two trucks a day go by.”

“What happened to her?”

“Well, it happened last Thursday, the eighteenth. What she always did, except when the weather was bad, she’d get up and put on her running clothes and take a long hard run and come back and shower and eat breakfast and go to work. She kept herself in wonderful shape. Bruno always ran with her. He’s part Airedale, and practically human. They never have found Bruno. When she didn’t show up at work and didn’t phone in, finally a girl friend of hers that works there phoned me, and I phoned Alan at the store, and we drove out there, and I used my key to get in. The burner was turned low under the coffeepot and it had boiled dry. The clothes she planned to wear to work were laid out on the bed. By then it was noon. Well, by late afternoon there must have been fifty people hunting for her, and they found her body finally in tall grass a quarter mile from the house. She had been beaten. Her poor face was a mess. Somebody had raped her and then knotted one of the pant legs of the jogging suit around her neck, very tight. The grass was all matted, like animals had been fighting there. Practically everybody in the whole area has been questioned about whether they saw strangers around. Whoever it was, they had a long time to get out of the area. It seems like such a terrible waste. I’m almost glad Momma died last year so she wasn’t alive to know what happened to Joya.”

“Are there any suspects?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. After the funeral yesterday, we-Alan and me-we talked to a fellow Alan went to school with. He has something to do with the law. He said it could have something to do with all that trouble over at Rosedale Station, but of course Joya left there before anything happened. Everybody thinks it was just some bum, some vagrant, some kind of drifter. There’s so much crazy violence around these days. Well… I’m here trying to pack up, her things. What is your name again? McGee. Oh, God, I was about to say that I’d tell Joya you called. I’ve got to hang up now. I’m going to cry again.”

I talked to Meyer again in the evening, aboard my houseboat.

I explained to him my reservations about the professionalism of one Forgan. “From the conversation I had with Kesner after Forgan left, I know that Forgan told Kesner that Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler had put in a complaint about their making the dirty tapes on location. A citizen who complains to the authorities should be protected, unless he or she is willing to make sworn statements.”

“Maybe she was. Or maybe Mr. Forgan didn’t take it all that seriously. Maybe he thought he was dealing with somebody who’d been released or fired, trying to get even.”

“Okay. But I was the idiot who told Grizzel about it when I sat with him and with Jean Norman later.”

“If you hadn’t mentioned it to him, certainly Kesner would have, Travis. And probably long before you saw Grizzel. Kesner would have wanted to warn him about Forgan and his partner looking around the area. You pick up imaginary guilt the way serge picks up lint.”

“Joya was a very able and happy lady. She was outraged about how they had turned Jean Norman around. She wanted people punished. And I think it got her killed.”

“But you didn’t get her killed.”

“Okay Meyer. All right. I didn’t.”

The midnight news told us that the nude battered body of Jean Norman had been taken out of the Missouri River by a police launch after having been reported by a tug captain. It said that authorities believed there was a possible connection between the murder of Miss Norman on Sunday night and the brutal rape murder of Mrs. Murphy-Wheeler near Ottumwa the previous Thursday morning. Law enforcement units all over the Midwest were on the alert for any information as to the whereabouts of Desmin Grizzel. Bikers in nine states were being stopped and interrogated.

“And that is the one way he would not travel,” Meyer said.

“I don’t see how he can risk any kind of traveling, not with that well-known face.”

“He’s found something that works,” Meyer said. “Think about Jean Norman. Would she have walked over to a wall to talk across it to Desmin Grizzel? To talk to something out of her nightmares? I’ll bet she had no idea until he grabbed her and yanked her across and took her into the bushes. Would Joya, dressed for running, let Grizzel catch up with her?”

“He can’t disguise his dimensions. He’s the size of an offensive guard. Six two, two sixty or seventy, great big gut.”

After I thought about it a while, I phoned Lysa Dean. It was a little after ten in the evening her time.

“You again?” she said. “Look, I’ve got guests.”

“I can hear them. I won’t take up much time, okay?”

“What is it?”

“Dirty Bob managed to get very close to two people who had every reason to be very wary of him.”

“The woman in Omaha and the one in Iowa?”

“You’ve been keeping track. Good. I’m trying not to be boring about this, Lee. I don’t know if there’s any chance of him coming after you. I don’t know if he wants to get to me that much. I don’t know how much risk he’s willing to accept, how crazy he is. But you know the dimensions of him.”

“Big big old boy.”

“Just don’t put any trust at all in any stranger who comes in that size, man or woman. He can disguise everything but his size.”

“I shall consider myself warned.”

“I could come out there. A live-in guard.”

“Well, you do tempt me, but no, thanks.”

Twenty

THE THURSDAY newspapers carried diagrams of the floor plan of the Lysa Dean house, with those Germanic-looking crosses newspapers use to indicate where bodies are found.

A person or persons unknown had snapped the gardener’s neck and flung him into the pool. The slender Korean woman who had served us the salad and tea had been chopped across the nape of the neck with a kitchen cleaver wielded with such force it was clear that she had been dead before her body hit the kitchen floor. Lysa Dean had evidently been caught a few feet from the panic button of her alarm system, in the corner of her bedroom near the bed.

It had happened, as near as could be judged, at eleven in the. morning on Wednesday, the twenty-fourth. Miss Dean had not been on call that day. The dotted line showed that the intruder had been admitted to the grounds by the gardener, through the front gate. He, or they, had killed the gardener near the rear entrance to the kitchen area. He or they had then slain the maid, who had been fixing Miss Dean’s breakfast of tomato juice, dry toast, and tea, and gone through the house to find Miss Dean just leaving her dressing room. There she had been chased, caught, taken to her custom bed, and brutalized. Broken fingers, chipped teeth, and bruises, which were said to have happened at least an hour before death, indicated that she had been kept alive for a considerable amount of time before she was finally smothered by being jammed face down into her pillows.