Free Fall in Crimson (25 page)

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
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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
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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?"

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"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.