A woman's voice answered by repeating the last four digits of the number, on a rising intonation of question, "Three three five five?" She had a subtly Japanese way of handling the consonants.
"Lysa Dean, please."
"I will see if she is in at the moment. May I say who is calling?"
"Tell her I have a message from Walter Lowery's office."
"You may give me the message, sir."
"My instruction is to give it to her personally."
"Just a moment, please."
I sat listening to the electronic humming.
"Who are you?" demanded Lysa Dean. "What the hell does Walter want told me on a Saturday? That I'm being audited again? I already for Christsake know that." The throaty, furry, flexible voice had a steely ring behind the fur.
"I scampered out of your life in a hail of elephants, love."
"What?"
"This is Lee Schontz, isn't it? From Dayton, Ohio. Would it have been 1610 Madison Street? Was daddy a fireman? Do you photograph well in the buff, love?"
"Could it be... No! McGee? Is this you, McGee, you rotten dirty son of a bitch?"
"Lee, it's so damn wonderful to hear your voice."
"Let me sit down. Jesus! You got me out of the shower. What the hell do you mean, calling me? What a nerve! Where did you get this number? I had it changed two weeks ago. Did you get it from Walter? I'll tear him to ribbons!"
"I wouldn't put a friend on a spot like that. I got your number from another source. You remember how resourceful I am, don't you?"
"Look, let me go get a robe on and take this in the bedroom." Several minutes passed. She came back on, a half octave lower. "Now I'm comfy. Are you in Florida, dear?"
"Aren't you going to hang up on me?"
"No, dear. I shouldn't be angry at you. You did me a great favor, actually. You made me take a good close look at Lysa Dean. And I wasn't too enchanted with what I saw. I saw myself through your eyes. And I felt cheap. Yes, cheap. I thought that anything Lysa did was acceptable because it was Lysa doing it. But it wasn't, was it?"
"How much of that is bullshit, Lee?"
"Practically all of it, Travis. Nobody else ever made me that mad. I steamed for months."
"But you got over it."
"Hell, yes. My dearest hope would be that you have thought about me for years and years, and you want to come out here and pick up on what you turned down a long time ago. I would lead you on, baby, and then I would cut you right the hell off at the pockets. Or nearby."
"Wouldn't blame you a bit."
The voice softened. "You know what really hurt me? What really really hurt me? The way you said that making love with you would mean less than nothing to me. You were wrong, dear. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was infatuated with you. And it would have meant a great great deal to me. I was going to prove to you how much it meant. Oh, hell. This sounds like bullshit too, doesn't it? I guess it is."
"Heard about your bad luck with Mr. X in Hawaii. Sorry it had to come out that way."
"Thanks, dear. Louie was an okay person all the way. He couldn't leave Muriel once she got sick. It would have poisoned our marriage, building it on that kind of luck. But he was very good to me. I've sort of forgotten what the wolf looks like."
"I ran into you twice on game shows, when I was spinning the dial. You were in a little box up in the air, looking very very good."
"I'm keeping well, they tell me. I can't exactly pass for twenty. Or even twenty-seven. No mere slip of a girl. Can't get away with the cutesy stuff any more. Elfin old me. I work because I like it, dear. Are you still slipping about, doing shifty things for people?"
"It's a living. Salvage consultant."
"Boy, you sure salvaged me that time. I'm forever grateful."
"How's Dana Holtzer?"
"Great. Her husband finally died. She's Dana Maguire, and she's still making babies. She found out she's good at it. Four, and one in the oven. Darling kids."
"Say hi for me when you see her. I want to know something about a couple of people you probably know. I guess I want to know everything you might know about them."
"Who?"
"Josie Laurant Esterland and Peter Kesner."
"That's what they mean when they talk about a bucket of worms. Look, are you in town? Could you come over here?"
"I'm in Florida."
"Oh, heck, I thought you could come over and maybe we could level with each other, and I'd cancel my tennis date and we'd sort of mess around a little and get reacquainted. With no cutting off at pockets or anywhere else. Afternoons are fun. Look, it will cost you a hell of a phone bill if you listen to all of this."
"Let me ask a couple of questions, and then maybe I'll come listen in person."
"Okay."
"Are they together?"
"God only knows. That is what is called a volatile relationship. They are somewhere in Indiana or one of those states there in the middle, making a disaster movie."
"A disaster movie?"
"A financial disaster. That's what they call those around here lately. Disaster movies. Never never work in something your boyfriend is directing. Romance ends."
"What kind of a movie is it? What about?"
"It is rumored to be about balloons." 'Balloons?"
"You know. Little baskets hang under them, and they have gas burners, and they are all pretty colors, and you go sailing away over the pretty farmland, saying oh and ah. Hot-air balloons."
"It's an independent production?"
"Like practically everything else except for comicbook stuff like the Empire series at Fox. And it is pretty well established here, among those who like to snigger, that Josie is helping bankroll it. I hear they had a long long struggle with script, and finally Peter rewrote it himself, poor lamb. Then they scrounged some bank money and some money from the distributor and went out on location a few weeks ago. And they've had rotten weather. They are together in the balloon picture, but elsewhere, as in the sack, I don't know. Hey, you better come out here, McGee. I'm getting such a nice little rush out of just talking to you. Really. You're filed under Unfinished Business."
"I don't know. Bits and pieces have to come together. I'm like an old blue tick hound, running back and forth at the edge of the swamp, nose in the air, wondering if there's a trail worth following and kind of hating the idea of going into the mud and the snakes and the gators."
"Goodness, how quaint! How picturesque! I hope that when you are trotting back and forth with your tongue hanging out, you'll get downwind of me. I'll be sending out a message."
"What's happening to ladies? What's happened to buttons and bows, and shy sidelong smiles, and demure blushes?"
"You must be some kind of old-time chauvinist. What's the matter? We alarm you?"
"Sort of, I guess."
"When you were solving my little problem were you thinking of it in terms of swamp and snakes?"
"I think so. Walk into the back of anybody's skull, be they born-again, big mullah; or resident of the death house, and you'll come to the edge of a swamp that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's part of the human condition."
"How cynical!"
"Not really. Meyer says that knowing it is there is half the battle. Beware of those turkeys who really believe they are absolutely pure, decent, honest, God-fearing, hard-working, patriotic Americans. They'll slip a rusty blade into your belly, look upward, and proclaim it God's will. They'll believe they've done it for your own salvation."
"Then you have no need to beware of me, my dear. I am impure, indecent, dishonest, lazy, and permanently randy. You can trust me all the way. I've got a swamp you wouldn't hardly believe."
I thanked her for her help and broke off with cheery goodbyes. I had not known how she would react to me. I had inflicted such a deep wound in her pride, it was probably still draining. There she was at that time, Lysa Dean, a genuine celebrity, a sex symbol, a box-office draw, mobbed wherever she went, star player in the erotic fantasies of a million
men she would never meet, and when, out of gratitude, out of affection, she tried to bestow upon a nobody from Fort Lauderdale a warm morsel of all her international magic, giving him a memory that would make him vibrate for the rest of his life, the dreary ungrateful damn fool had turned it down. And, given the insecurity of the aging actress,
I could guess that the rejection haunted her in the bleak hours of the night when the sleeping pill had worn off. She wanted to get her hands on me, and there were two ways she could go. She could either build me up to an overpowering urgency and turn it all off, or she could really devote herself to proving what a hell of a deal I, in my ignorance, had turned down. Prudence said to stay the hell away from her. I remembered her slanted green eyes, very handsome, and merciless as a questing cat.
Ten
AT NOON on Sunday Annie phoned me and told me she had just had a full hour of good sun right out in front of her cabana, had come in and had her shower, and was stretched out on the bed under the fan, letting the moving air dry her off and thinking of me.
"Cut it out, Annie!"
"Saturday morning I got word that they're going to let me have the extra wing I've been asking for. Twenty more rooms over on the other side, twostory. The architect is coming down."
"That's nice."
"We've been out of balance here. When we're full, we have more bar and dining room and kitchen capacity than we're using. I hate to encourage a lot of outside business coming in, just to eat and drink. Sooner or later that creates problems. If we make it with our guests, it's more like a club. If it could possibly be done by December, I can really show them one hell of a season next year. Already we are reserved almost full for the first quarter. Are you interested at all in this kind of stuff? I have nobody else to brag to."
"Of course I'm interested, Annie."
"I bet. It's exciting to me. It is kind of like farming. I mean you have a nice harvest of tourists coming up, and all of a sudden you get a tornado, or a red tide, or a big oil spill, or the country goes on gas rationing. So it's always a little bit nervous. Or a hurricane will come and wash us away. We're pretty exposed here."
"Sooner or later one will. Just hope it's later."
"Very cheery."
"Any chance of you ever getting away, Annie? Like for a week or two. A little boat ride to no place in particular?"
"Not anytime real soon. I fired my assistant manager. He kept telling me how wonderful I am and slicing me up whenever I turned my back. Caught him at it. I've got a new guy now. And I think he is going to work out. He hasn't had a lot of experience, but he knows food and liquor service and he gets along with the guests and the employees. It looks as if by maybe sometime in July I could give him a trial run, by going where he can't ask me questions. Is July okay?"
"Great. Maybe I'll bring the Flush around and pick you up over there and we'll flip a coin for which direction we go. North or south."
"Beautiful. I wouldn't want to stay on a boat too long. I spent too much time on the Caper with Ellis. There's no place to put anything, and no real privacy. It was like the walls were closing in."
"The bulkheads."
"The walls, honey. Walls and floors. Kitchen and bathroom. Upstairs, downstairs. Inside and outside. Ellis was so damn picky about being seamanlike, I decided after he died that the whole thing is a crock. I lived aboard until it got sold, and I called everything by the civilian name for it, and it made me sort of happy."
"I want to ask you something else. You told me Josie called Ellis a couple of times. Several times, I believe you said. Early in July. At that time she must have been terribly concerned and depressed about the condition of her daughter, Romola."
"Oh, she was. Of course."
"You said that the phone calls from her made him cross."
"I see what you mean. I knew that they weren't about Romola or any change in her condition, because he always told me things like that. And news of his daughter would make him either very depressed or very jubilant. Not cross. That's why I think she must have been urging him to buy something for pain, the way Prescott had asked her to do."
"Josie was willing to do that in spite of her major worry?"
"Look, she couldn't do anything about her major worry. There was Romola all hooked up to a lifesupport system that was even breathing for her, all tubes and wires and things, and nothing to do but wait. She didn't die, legally, until August tenth. I would guess that Josie was very restless. She'd welcome anything that diverted her from her worry. I would guess that she wanted Ellis to come back to her and stay with her. Maybe she brought that up too. And that was what made him cross. He always told me she was a very nice woman, and absolutely impossible to live with."
"I might be going out there."
"What for?"
"Josie Laurant has been financing a motion picture project for Peter Kesner. She's acting in it, I think."
"Oh, God, that's terrible!"
It was a lot more reaction than I had expected. "Terrible?"
"I should have told you. Ellis, through his banking connections, arranged a personal report on Peter Kesner. An absolutely, totally unreliable person. A disaster area. He had the discipline to make those two little films that got rave reviews and made a lot of money, but it went to his head and he blew the whole thing. They gave him a big-budget film to produce and direct, and he went way over budget and it turned out to be a dog. They gave him a chance to do a little picture, like his early two, and it was so completely bad they never released it at all. By then his money was gone, of course. Tax judgments, the whole thing. It was clear that Josie was supporting him. I remember when Ellis dictated a three-page single-spaced letter to her, telling her to have as little to do with Peter as possible and saying why. Knowing Josie, I knew she'd turn it over to Kesner. I told Ellis I thought that would happen, and he said he wouldn't mind if she did. There was nothing actionable in the letter. It was all fact. He said maybe it would give Kesner a better look at himself. When I typed it I softened it a little bit, but he caught it and marked up the original and had me type it all over again. What this really means, I guess, is that the money Josie got from Romola's estate is down the drain, or soon will be."
"Ellis didn't put any strings on it?"
"He talked about it, but he never got around to doing it. He talked about setting it up as an annuity for Romola, but then when we were both certain Romola was going to die before he did, he put all his attention into refining that foundation concept of his. Which never got used."
"Important question: Would Kesner know the terms of the will?"
She thought for a moment. "I would certainly think so. Josie knew, long before we moved down here from Stamford, that Romola would get the bulk of it, and if Romola died first it would go to a foundation. Yes, she asked me and I told her about it. I think she was wondering what would happen to her support, to that fifty thousand a year, and I didn't blame her for wondering. I told her I thought she would get a hundred thousand and that would be the end of it. Yes, I told her that's what she would get. And anything Josie knows, Josie tells anybody she happens to find sitting next to her at the table."
"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 see
n 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."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 19 - Freefall in Crimson Page 10