Free Fall in Crimson (21 page)

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
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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!"

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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
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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.