Free Fall in Crimson

by John D. MacDonald

“Let me see. You are a Salvage Consultant. Anne called us a couple of con men. From now until tomorrow what do we do?”

  “We can check out the Palmer Hotel. Where Esterland was last seen alive. You did nicely with Barney Odum, friend.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Most of the old hotels in the central cities of Florida, in the cities of less than a hundred thousand, have gone downhill, decaying with the neighborhoods. Some of them have turned into office buildings, or parking lots, or low-cost storage bins for elderly indigents.

  Though the neighborhood had evidently decayed, the Palmer was a pleasant surprise. A clean roomy lobby, pleasant lighting, trim and tidy ladies behind the desk and the newsstand. Walnut and polished brass.

  The dark bar off the lobby was called The Office. Prism spots gleamed down on the bald pate of the bearded bartender, on shining glassware, on good brands on the back bar, on the padded bar rim, on black Naugahyde stools with brass nailheads. A young couple off in a corner held hands across the small table.

  The bartender said, “Gentlemen,” and put coasters in front of us. I ordered Boodles over ice with a twist, and Meyer selected a white wine. After serving us he moved off to that precise distance good bartenders maintain: far enough to give us privacy if we wanted it, close enough to join in should we speak to him.

  “Good-looking place,” I said to him.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Do much business?”

  “Not much on weekends. Big noon and cocktail-time business during the week.”

  “This is a very generous shot of gin.”

  “Thank you, sir. This is not really a commercial place, I mean in the sense that there is a lot of cost control. It’s owned by National Citrus Associates. The cooperatives and some of the big growers maintain suites here. There’s a lot of convention and meeting business, a lot of businessmen from overseas, a lot of government people, state and federal. It’s something like a club. The number of available rooms is quite limited.”

  Meyer said, “A friend of ours from Fort Lauderdale had lunch here the day he was killed at a rest stop over on the turnpike. A year and nine months ago. Ellis Esterland.”

  “A tragic thing,” the bartender said. “Beaten to death and robbed. There is so much mindless violence in the world. I’ve been here five years, and I can see the difference in just that short time. Mr. Esterland had a drink here at the bar before he went to the grill room for his lunch. He sat right where you are sitting, sir. He had a very dry vodka Gibson, straight up, and soon after he left there was an order for another one from the grill room. Of course, I did not know his name at that time. They showed me his Florida driver’s license, the police did, and I recognized the little color photograph as the man who was in here.”

  “What did they ask you about him?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If we had any conversation beyond his ordering his drink, and I said we didn’t. I had a dozen customers at the bar, and I was quite busy. I had no chance to notice him, really, to guess at his state of mind. That’s what they asked. Was he nervous? Was he elated? I just couldn’t help them at all. From his manner I judged him to be a businessman of some importance, used to good service. He spoke to no one else, and no one joined him. They questioned his waitress and the people at the desk and the girl at the newsstand. I don’t think they learned anything useful. At least they’ve never arrested anyone.”

  “It’s puzzling,” I said. “Why would a man pull into a rest stop on the turnpike after he had been driving only six miles?”

  “Car trouble?” the bartender said.

  “He had a new Lincoln Continental with just over two thousand miles on it,” Meyer said.

  “Perhaps he felt unwell,” the bartender said. “He didn’t look like a really healthy person. His color was bad.”

  Three new customers arrived, laughing and hearty, dressed like Dallas businessmen, ranch hats and stitched boots. Juice moguls, maybe. They called the bartender Harry, and he greeted them by name. Two bourbons and a scotch.

  We had a second drink and then went to the dining room for better than adequate steaks, green salad, and baked potatoes, served efficiently by a glum heavy woman who knew nothing about anybody who’d been a customer over a year ago, because she had not been there a year.

  Back at the motel, Meyer went to bed with a book called Contrary Investment Strategy. I told him to be sure to let me know how it came out. I tried to think about Esterland’s misfortune, but my mind kept veering into trivia, to a memory of the fine matte finish on the slender Renzetti legs, and the tiny beads of sweat along her forehead at the dark hairline as she sat in silhouette against the white glare of beach. Meyer, in bright yellow pajamas, frowned into his strategy book.

  I slipped away into nightmare. I was running after a comedy airplane. Gretel was the pilot, very dashing in her Red Baron helmet, goggles, white silk scarf, white smile as she turned to look back at me. The little biplane bounded over the lumps in the broad pasture. I was trying to warn her. If she took off, she would fly into the trees. She couldn’t hear me because of the noise of the engine. She thought I was making jokes, chasing her. I could not catch her. The engine sound grew louder and the tail skid lifted and she took off toward the pines.

  As I ran, still yelling, I saw her tilt the plane to try to slide through a gap in the trees, saw the wings come off, heard the long grinding, sliding, clattering crash into the stones. I climbed down the slope. The whole gully was cluttered with large pieces of airplane, but strangely old, stained by time and weather, grass growing up through rents in the aluminum. I couldn’t understand. I kept hunting for her. I flipped over what seemed to be a small piece of wing, big as the top of a card table, and there was a skull in the skull-sized stones, helmet in place, the goggle lenses starred by old fractures, a bundle of soiled gray silk bunched under the bones of the jaw.

  Meyer shook me out of it, and I came up gasping, sweat-soaked.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Thanks.”

  “A lot of moaning and twitching going on.”

  I wiped my face on a corner of the sheet. “Gretel again. She doesn’t seem to want to stay dead.”

  He went back over to his bed and covered himself and picked up his book. He looked over at me, thoughtful and concerned.

  “How is the book coming?” I asked.

  “The bad guys are winning, I think.”

  “Sometimes they do. Sometimes you can’t tell the bad guys unless you buy a program at the door.”

  And when my heart slowed back to normal, I was able to go back to sleep.

  At breakfast Meyer said, “I’d hoped to be back by early evening. In fact I would very much like to be back.”

  It took me a few moments to understand the urgency. Then I remembered that Aggie Sloane was due in on her big Trumpy again, called the Byline. Aggie, an ex-news hen who had married a publisher and assumed the management of the chain of papers when he died, had first come to Meyer as the friend of a friend, with a delicate international money problem. Their friendship had blossomed during and after Meyer’s deft solution to her problem.

  Though Meyer loves to look upon the lively young beach girls and is often surrounded by little chittering platoons of them, running errands for him and laughing at his wise jokes, when it comes to any kind of personal involvement, Meyer feels most at ease with—and is usually attracted to—mature capable independent women, the sort who run magazines, newspapers, art galleries, travel agencies, and branch banks. For them, Meyer is a sometime interlude, reassuring, undemanding, supportive, and gentle. They return, refreshed, to their spheres of combat. They are women who take great good care of themselves and are not inclined toward any permanent attachment. Meyer smiles a lot.

  Aggie Sloane makes an annual pilgrimage. She flies down and boards her big Trumpy in Miami, cruises up to Lauderdale to pick up Meyer, and takes him along on the one-week vacation she allows herself every spring.

  “Aggie arrives today?”


  “I suppose there’d be pretty good air service back.”

  “Would you mind driving Miss Agnes?”

  “Not at all. Of course, when I drive that thing, I always feel as if I’m hurrying to catch up with the antique classic car parade. But why?”

  “I think a nice inconspicuous rental would be more useful somehow. And—I might go back to Naples and have a chat with that doctor.”

  “Just for the hell of it?”

  “I’ll give your regards to Anne.”

  “I think she might be too involved with that doctor to hear much of what you say. She had that look when she brought him up.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “I think you’d better get back in the habit of noticing everything, Travis. That trait has kept you alive up until now.”

  “I’ve noticed one thing I should mention. Whenever you feel a bit guilty about anything, you give these little stern warnings to people, usually me.”

  His bright blue eyes looked quite fierce for a few moments. Then he smiled. “All right. The guilt isn’t about Aggie, of course. It’s about leaving you alone with this Esterland thing.”

  “I managed everything alone for quite a few years, professor.”

  “Always happy to leave you to your own resources. The things you get into make me highly nervous.”

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Give my love and admiration to the lady Sloane. I might be back late tomorrow or the day after. But you won’t be there, will you?”

  His smile spread wide under the potato nose, wide and fatuous and tenderly reminiscent. “With any luck, I won’t.”

  Four

  Rick Tate was a lean, dusty, bitter-looking man with eyes deep set under shaggy brows, narrow nose, heavy jaw—a slow, lazy-moving man who looked competent in his pale blue cotton, black leather, and departmental hardware. I guessed his age at forty.

  He took the card and held it by one corner, looking at it with suspicion and distaste as he read it. “Says men,” he said.

  “My boss had to get back.”

  “Why you got to know this stuff?”

  “My boss explained it to Barney Odum. It’s a legal and tax thing.”

  He slammed the door of his gray steel locker and twirled the combination dial. We went out the back door into the lot and stood in the shade of the building waiting for the cars to come back in from their shifts. There were only three out, he told me.

  “Look,” he said, “instead of your riding around with me, the best way is I give you the file so you read it and then we talk, but I don’t damn well know you at all, McGee, and I don’t feel right about not being with anybody when they are reading a file I put together.”

  “Dave Banks could have told you I was all right.”

  He shoved his hat back off his forehead and stared at me. “Hell, I married Dave’s middle girl.”

  “That would be Debbie?”

  “Sure would.”

  “How’s Mrs. Banks these days?”

  “Not good. Not good at all. She’s up in Eustis, living with her sister. We was up to see her yesterday. Looking terrible. It cut Debbie all up to see her mom looking so poorly. What she’s got is kidney trouble, and they put her on a machine up there once a week. They drive her over to Orlando. Costly.”

  “Social Security paying for it? With the Medicare?”

  “They pay shit. They pay eighty percent of what it used to cost to have it done eight years ago. With the four kids, we can’t help out as much as Debbie thinks we should. The oldest girl, Debbie’s sister Karen, lives in Atlanta, and she sends what she can. Now they say she should have it twice a week instead of once, and that’s how come she looks so bad. I don’t see how the hell we’re going to swing it. I really don’t.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about it.”

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

  • • •

  The file was thick. There was a sheaf of glossy black-and-white photographs of the body still in the car, and the body on the stretcher. Closeups of left profile, right profile, and full face. Sickening brutality. To hit a man once that hard is brutal. To keep hitting him is sickness.

  Fingerprinting got nothing, as usual. There were lab reports on blood samples. Trace of alcohol. Contents of stomach. Decedent had eaten approximately two hours before death, give or take a half hour. There was a long technical report on the physical findings dictated during the autopsy procedure. Cause of death was massive trauma to the brain causing a pressure from internal bleeding that suppressed the functions of breathing and heartbeat. Five broken ribs, all on the left side, indicating a right-handed assailant. Incisions from operations noted. Decedent had multiple areas of evident malignancy affecting the liver, spleen, lymph glands, and soft tissue areas, adjudged terminal.

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

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

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

  ——“It was one hot day in July, and I remember I was hoping it would rain some. But it didn’t. That Lincoln car was parked right out in the sun all closed up tight and locked, and I saw the man come from the hotel, shucking his coat off as he walked. I was just standing in the store, over here by the window, looking out, wishing somebody would come the hell in and buy something. He was parked in that space second from the corner. The second meter. And I saw the red flag was up in the meter, but they don’t check it real careful in the summertime like they do in the tourist season. He unlocked the driver’s side and he pushed on something in there, and all those windows all went down like at once, and I thought how handy that was. He threw his coat into the back, and he got in and started it up, but he yanked his hands back when he touched that wheel. So he got out again and stood around, and I guess what he was doing was letting the air conditioning cool it off in there for him. I’m always watching people, trying to figure out what they are doing and why they do it. Pretty soon he got in and all those four windows came sliding up, nice as you please, and then he turned out of the parking place and headed east on Central. I guess from what I read, he went all the way out Central to where it becomes Seven Sixty-five and takes you right to the interchange. Got on it and went six mile south to get beat to death. Wouldn’t have had an inkling any nasty thing was going to happen to him. Comes to dying, money don’t help you a damn.”

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

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

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