“And so Kesner was vitally interested.” There was a long long silence. “You still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I had a kind of an ugly thought.”
“Such as?”
“You remember how Romola got hurt?”
“Nobody ever told me. I assumed it was a highway accident.”
“It was a bicycle accident, yes. She was way over by Thousand Oaks, twenty tough miles from home. There were witnesses. She was going along pretty fast on a ten-speed. A dog rushed her and she tried to dodge, but she hit the dog and went over the handlebars and fractured her skull on some curbing. What she was doing out there was a big mystery. Josie thought she was in class in UCLA. It turned out—I don’t really know how they discovered it—she was using a little house out there owned by a woman who was temporarily in London, doing a screenplay over there for a British company. The neighbors had seen Romola coming and going for a couple of months. They said she rode the bike a lot. Oh, I remember how they found the house. Romola’s little car was there, some kind of an MG. And with her car keys in her pocket she had a key to the little house. There was evidence she had been staying there for some time. She had moved some of her things from the Beverly Hills house to the little house, without Josie noticing. She had not been in classes since early February. She was an exceptionally beautiful girl. I saw her just once, when she was fourteen, and she was breathtaking. The extraordinary secrecy was very strange. It was a place of assignation, apparently. But there wasn’t any real urge to find out who because she was in such critical condition.”
“And the ugly idea?”
“Maybe it’s too ugly. Peter Kesner knew that Ellis had terminal cancer. And he knew that Josie would get a lump-sum settlement that wouldn’t be enough to support him for very long. And he knew Romola would inherit. He was perfectly capable of seducing Romola. And that would have made her very very careful to keep it a secret from her mother. I’ll bet you a dime that lady screenwriter is an old pal of Peter’s. It was the screenwriter’s bike, by the way.”
“Yes, that is an ugly idea. And if the fall had killed her outright, then when Ellis died of his problem, the foundation would have gotten the money.”
“But she hung on. And suddenly Peter realizes that if Ellis should die before Romola, he will still be in clover. Or even better off than before. He can finance another chance at moviemaking, possibly. But, Travis, it is one long long shot, isn’t it, to try to connect Peter Kesner with something that happened so long ago near Citrus City?”
“Very long.”
“I didn’t call you up to talk about that!”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Do you want five hundred guesses?”
“I give up.”
“That’s sort of what I had in mind.”
“Once I get onto the Alley it is only eighty-four miles. But aren’t you a working woman on weekends?”
“All I have to do from now on is take one of my famous walks through the bar area and the dining room between seven and nine, check a couple of empty rooms at random, and take the totals off the register tapes. A grand total of—call it forty minutes. And as soon as I hang up I am going to have a nice nap, and then I am going to put little dabs of scent here and there. Park at the far right end of the lot and take the path down past that fountain with the stone benches, and you’ll come out right behind my place, and the rear door will be unlocked. Welcome, darling.”
And she hung up before I could change the plan in any way.
I stayed in her place with her Sunday night, in the queen-size bed under the fan, with a yellow towel over the lampshade and with pretty good surf thudding onto the beach in a steady rhythm all night long.
We knew a lot more about each other, the things that quickened and the things that delayed. She was joyfully diligently sensuous. She just purely enjoyed the living hell out of it. She was a kid, and bed was the big candy store, and she had the keys to every cabinet.
At one point, resting, she said, “Look, do you mind about me and Ellis?”
“In what way?”
“Him being so much older. I’m younger than his son. Did I tell you that already?”
“I think so. So what?”
“You take a younger woman who moves in with a well-to-do old man, it looks as if she’s going where the money is. I don’t give a damn what most people think, but I want you to know that it wasn’t like that. It really wasn’t. Two years before he got sick we went down to a meeting in New York when there was an industry-wide convention. He always picked me when there was work he wanted done just right. By then I was almost over a rotten affair with the man I had wanted to marry until I learned he had a boyfriend on the side. Ellis landed a huge consultant contract at the convention, and we had wine in his suite—I lived across the hall—and he managed to hustle me into bed somehow. I told him I had to quit. I wasn’t going to be a sleep-in secretary to anybody. He said if I had to quit, I had to quit. Okay. The next day I quit, and he said the fair thing to do was to stay on until he could find somebody just as competent. Later he said that inasmuch as I was quitting anyway, and as long as we had been to bed together once, it would be stupid not to continue while he looked for a new girl. I felt a little bit crawly about him being so old. But it turned out to be all right. Then on account of the chemotherapy and the radiation, he all of a sudden couldn’t. He was sorry and I was sorry, but, as I told you before, I had a moral and emotional commitment to him. He was mean, but he never cheated me. He never lied to me. And he was always pleased when I looked nice, so it was fun to dress up for him. And because I never did really quit the job when I said I would, I felt I owed him. And I had to believe it was a kind of love that kept me with him. Hey! Are you asleep?”
“No. Heard every word. Understand the whole thing.”
“And now what do you think you are doing?”
“In the immortal words of Burt Reynolds, something has come up.”
“Which, all things considered, love, is very very flattering.”
“I know.”
By twenty minutes after dawn I was on my way back across the peninsula, yawning and singing, beating time with the heel of my hand on the steering wheel. Roll me over, in the clover.… With ’is ’ead tooked underneath ’is arm, ’e ’aunts the bluiddy tower.… Never let a sailor put his hand above your kneeeee.… And other tender love songs and ballads of the years gone by.
When I awakened in my own bed at noon, I put a call through to Ted Blaylock. Mits answered in a small uncertain voice. He had lost consciousness Saturday evening and had been rushed to Broward Memorial. His condition was not good. She had just come from there. She was going back in the late afternoon.
“What is it?”
“Kidneys. That’s what he’s been afraid of. You saw how kind of yellowish he looked.”
“I noticed, yes. Can I get to see him?”
“He wants to see you. He told me how to get you by phone, but I didn’t even try on account of I don’t want to do anything to tire him out. Anyway, I don’t think they’ll let you in. I told them I’m his wife.”
“Does he have something to tell me?”
“I think so.”
“Get him to tell you, then. I don’t want to tire him. You can tell me. You got a ride in?”
“One of the guys is taking me and waiting.”
“What room is he in?”
“Why?”
“So I’ll know where to wait for you when you come out.”
“I can only be with him like five minutes. I guess if you want to come meet me, five o’clock would be okay. Across from the main entrance.”
I got there at four thirty. I looked around the area and I found a big silver and black Harley Davidson parked in the shade, a thin brown Indian-looking fellow standing by it, smoking, leaning against a tree.
“You bring Mits in?” I asked him.
“You McGee?”
“Right.”
“She told me you�
�d be around. I’m Cal. I’m her cousin. She’s really nuts about that Blaylock. You the one messed up Knucks and Mike?”
“They kept pushing me.”
“They’re like that. Be a long time before they do any more pushing. You tore up Knucks’s shoulder pretty good. And Mike is in the hospital, this one right here, for observation on account of something might be busted inside. He can’t keep food down. A lot of people are glad they got wiped out. They get too much kicks out of beating on people.”
“I have the idea those two are dumb enough and ugly enough to take another try at me when they feel up to it, but not with the bare hands.”
He nodded. “Sure. That would be the way they go. But they been given the word you’re under the protection of the Fantasies.”
I looked at his rear mudguard and saw the emblem. “That’s nice. I really appreciate it. That pair doesn’t fill me with terror, but I don’t like having to look around behind me all the time. Why the favor?”
“You did the Fantasies a favor, okay? Knucks had been told about groping Mits. He was told not to do it. It was like some kind of a joke to him. Mits is my first cousin, so she’s in like an affiliate. Fantasy Foxes, under our protection. Like the Oasis is under our protection because Blaylock has been a true friend to the club. So some people were going to get around to Knucks and maybe break his hand or something. But you worked him over. So if you want, you can wear the pin. There’s one for associates, without the red circle around it.”
The keen dark eyes stared at me, and I knew I was on very delicate and dangerous ground. Ridicule is unforgivable. But I had the feeling I’d been transported back to one of the schoolyards of my youth, where if you belonged to the right group, the big kids wouldn’t beat you up and take your lunch money.
“I’d be very honored to have the pin and wear it, Cal.”
The tension went out of his shoulders. “I’ll see you get one. What my squad captain did, he checked you out with Blaylock, and he got a good reading. Hey, here she comes. I guess things aren’t so great.”
Mits came slowly toward us. Though she was expressionless, tears were running down her brown cheeks. She was in jeans and a blue work shirt, both too big for her. Her helmet was slung on the machine, next to Cal’s.
She acknowledged my presence with a nod, went to Cal, held his forearm in her two hands, and rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “In’t gonna make it,” she said in a muffled voice. “Din’t hardly know me at first. Then he came back, like from far off, like from being dead.”
She took a deep breath and let it out, and then turned to me and said, “Other things are going bad. Inside. Like he knew they would sooner or later. But, damn it, this is sooner. It isn’t fair.”
“Can we get going now?” Cal asked.
“I can see him another five minutes at six o’clock. I think I better stay here.”
“Maybe I can get back. I don’t know, Mits. I’ll have to get off work.”
“I’ll stick around and run her home, Cal.”
She looked at me dubiously. “Sure you wouldn’t be too much put out?”
“Sure.”
Cal handed her her helmet, swung aboard, cranked up, and went droning out of the shade and into the road and away.
She looked around and saw a bus bench in the shade and headed toward it. I followed her. She took cigarettes out of her shoulder bag, offered me one which I refused, and then lit up, sucked the smoke deep, huffed it out to be pulled away by the late-afternoon breeze.
“They said I should expect him to die tonight or tomorrow.”
“Soon.”
“Everything has gone bad. They say he had to be in pain for a long time, saying nothing about it. I knew he hurt. He’d make a sniffy sound if I lifted him wrong. How old do you think I am?”
The question startled me. “Nineteen? Twenty?”
“Hah! I’m twenty-eight, man. Half Seminole. A skinny Seminole, you can’t tell the age. With the fat ones you can tell. Okay, except for my little brothers when I was growing up, nobody in my whole life has ever really needed me except Ted. I mean really. He turned that place into home for me. So now what? I have to make some kind of plans, get some kind of work. But I can’t even think about it.”
“Don’t try. There’ll be time to think about it.”
“McGee? What was he like when he was young?”
“I knew him in the service.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“He was a good officer. He didn’t showboat and draw fire. When stupid orders came down, he’d drag his feet until they were out of date. He tried to make sure everybody got shelter and rations and transport. He didn’t mind the kind of goofing off that didn’t matter, but if anybody didn’t do their job when it did matter, he’d chew them out good. He was an okay officer, and he was down in a little ravine helping a medic slide a wounded man onto a litter when he got a mortar fragment in the back, right through the spinal cord.”
“Did he ever laugh, joke, smile?”
“As much as anybody.”
“Did he have a girl?”
“I don’t recall hearing anything about her if he did.”
“It’s been a lot of work taking care of him. It makes a long day and into the night seven days a week.”
“Must have been very hard.”
“I would have done it if it was twice as hard. Oh, I asked him if there was something I should tell you. It doesn’t make sense to me. I hope it does to you. His mind seemed to be kind of wandering. Here is exactly what he said: ‘Tell Sarge there is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ Mean anything?”
“Not right off.”
“I think his head has gone all weird. I held his hand. It was like ice.”
“Say it again?”
“ ‘There is a legend about how Dirty Bob and the Senator made it all the way in fifty hours flat out, popping Dexamyls, and then faded away.’ He made me say it twice too.”
I found that interesting. It meant the message was significant in the shape and form it was told.
“Could those be biker names, Mits?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve heard about Dirty Bob, but I don’t know where or when. And when they take a long hard ride, they do it on uppers and coffee. Night and day, they really go. And it’s safer there’s two at night, riding side by side, with the two headlights showing, the two tail-lights in back.”
“Fifty hours would be how many miles?”
“All the way acrosst. I knew a cat went from Toronto to Mexico City without sleep. A while back, there was kind of a thing about setting records. But it’s dumb. People got killed. You can lose your best troops that way.” She picked up my wrist and looked at my watch. “I think I’ll head back in there. I’ll stay as long as they let me. You sure you don’t mind?”
“You go ahead. I’ll wait. Good luck.”
“There isn’t any more of that left. But thanks.”
She came back at ten after six, dry-eyed. “Look, you want to take off, it’s okay. They’re going to let me set with him. They got curtains around the bed. He doesn’t know me any more, or know anything, I guess. But everybody has to be somewhere, and I might as well be here.”
“You going to get anything to eat?”
“I couldn’t eat.”
I gave her my number again. “You call me when you want to leave. It will take me fifteen or twenty minutes to get here. Is that all right?”
“I hate to have you doing this for me.”
“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t.”
There was a nod and a fleeting smile and she turned and went back to the hospital.
The phone woke me a little after three in the morning. She was waiting by the bench where we had sat. She climbed up into the Rolls, chunked the door shut, and said, “He died at a quarter to three. He stopped breathing and then tried to kind of rise up and fell back with his eyes half
shut and his mouth open. I got his stuff here in my bag they took from him. The watch and ring and wallet and keys.”
“I’m sorry, Mits.”
“F.T.W.”
“What? Oh. Right.”
“I signed a couple of things there. I signed them Marilyn O. Blaylock. They didn’t ask for any ID. I always liked the name Marilyn. I think what they do, maybe, they get to collect from the VA somehow.”
“Probably. Did he have any living relatives?”
“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.”
Free Fall in Crimson Page 11