I landed on the balls of my feet, inclining slightly forward, and as I hit I hugged my chest, tucked my chin down, and turned my right shoulder forward and down. I felt the right knee go, and the forward momentum took me into a shoulder roll. I went over and right back up onto my feet, where I didn't especially want to be, and then tried to take some big running steps to stay there. But the knee bugged out, and my body got ahead of my legs, and I took a long diving fall onto my belly that huffed the wind out of me and chopped my teeth into the dirt of a corn row.
I pushed myself up, gagging for air, spitting dirt, and saw the balloon angling up toward the wires. Relieved of my weight all of a sudden, it had taken a good upward surge. But it was still going toward the power lines. In retrospect I decided that the upward bounce had not been lost on Peter Kesner. The racket of the gas blast stopped abruptly, and an instant later a figure came tumbling down, falling away from the basket. She had, I would say, seventy feet to fall. She was a tough little woman, athletic and nervy. I learned later that she had done some sky diving, and I think that she spread-eagled her arms and legs in an attempt to stop the tumbling caused by her being thrown out of the basket by Kesner. Maybe the tumbling would have stopped if she'd had more falling room. A lot more room. She made a single lazy turn and landed at a head-down angle that snapped her neck a microsecond before the heavy thud of her body into the soil.
Kesner was higher. The blast was ripping away, jacking that long blue flame up into the envelope. He was going to make it over the power lines. From my angle of sight he was already clear when the basket and cables struck the power lines. There was a stunning crack, loud as an antitank gun, a condensed flash of blue lightning, and then a big orange ball as the propane tanks blew up. The orange and crimson ball melted the striped crimson and blue envelope almost instantly, and a stream of debris came tumbling down in free fall, one morsel of it the flame-shrouded mannikin which had been Peter Kesner, landing under the power lines, thumping down beside the shredded and blackened basket with an impact that blew the flames out and left him smoking for a moment before the flames began again.
Beyond the lines, high and off to the left, the pumpkin and green balloon floated in the breeze, moving away from me. Outlined against the blue sky beyond, I could see the silhouette of Desmin Grizzel from the waist up, standing there in the hard weave of the wicker basket, looking back down at us, motionless and intent. I stood up, favoring the right leg. I was dazed, and I was sickened by the pale and dying dance of flame on Kesner's body and the small silence of Linda. Out of some vague impulse I raised an arm to Desmin Grizzel as he dwindled against the morning sky and saw him wave in response.
I heard the hard whine of the engines of the chase cars and looked for a place to hide. I could not run to the, distant row of trees. I hobbled over closer to Linda's body, stretched out face down, dug with two paws like a dog, wormed myself against the soil, lay with my face wedged into the breathing hole. As a final act of guile, I pulled the wallet out of my pocket and pushed it down into the dirt at the bottom of the hole under my face. The earth smelled rich and moist.
They came running, feet thudding, breathing hard.
"Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Look at that one, Ted!" There was a coughing sound, a gagging sound, and then a gush, coughing, and another voice saying weakly, "I'm sorry, guys. It was the smell."
I took a deep slow breath and held it. Somebody put a foot against my hip and shoved. "Maybe this one's alive." I felt hands poking at my pockets.
The hands went away. A deeper voice said, in exasperation, "What are you doing, Benny?"
"Nothing."
"Get your hands off her."
"She's got something here on a chain around her neck."
"I said get away from her!"
"Okay, okay, okay. What's the matter with you?"
"Ted, come over here. Look, guys. I think we ought to go back to town and split and keep our mouths shut."
"What about that balloon still in the air?"
"There'll be guys after it. This thing got out of hand. Right? Everybody got too excited. I saw Wicker kill a little old guy. I saw him do it on purpose. Nobody agreed to anything like that. Nobody said anything about setting fires. I saw Davis go down, and it looked as if he was hurt bad. There was a lot of blood on his face. Here we got two more dead people and one maybe dying. It got too big. There'll be television guys and newspaper guys from Des Moines all over the place."
"You remember what we all agreed, Len. It was for Karen and Jamie. It was in their memory. These are evil people."
" 'Justice is mine, saith the Lord.' I think we ought to cut out right now, guys."
They seemed to reach an agreement. When I heard voices again, they were too far away for me to hear what they said. I knew the explosion wouldn't have gone unnoticed. Others would be arriving. I retrieved the wallet. Somebody had scooped dirt onto Kesner and put out his fire. I brushed dirt off me as I walked out of the big field. The knee had popped back in, leaving the tendons stretched and sore, okay for limited and careful use. When I reached the tree line, I found that they were planted alongside a narrow asphalt road. I looked back and saw a glinting of vehicles back near the power lines and some tiny figures moving about in the field.
There was no traffic. I walked and rested, walked and rested, and finally reached a crossroad. Bagley and Perry were off to the east, Coon Rapids and Manning off to the west. A rumpled old man with a harelip and a lot of opinions about that mess in Washington gave me a ride to another crossroads, where a very fat woman in a van upholstered in sheepskin gave me a ride through Rosedale Station and on out to the location. When she stopped, the cops tried to wave her on, but I got out. She drove on. A young officer said, "This area is closed."
I pointed out my rental Buick and showed him the keys. He took the keys and made certain they worked. He wanted to see the rental agreement, and I took it out of the glove compartment. Then he asked for identification.
"What's going on here anyway, officer?"
"All hell has been going on here. How come your car is here and you weren't?"
"I left it here last night when I rode into town with someone else. I meant to come back and get it, but I didn't get around to it."
"Where did you stay last night?"
"The Rosedale Lodge."
"Are you with this movie company?"
"No way." I said, and from the back compartment of the wallet I slid the folded machine copy of Lysa Dean's letter to Kesner. He read it carefully, his lips moving. He was broad and young and plump, and he had high color in his cheeks, a thick chestnut mustache.
"That Lysa Dean, she is a really quick-witty person," he said. "She's been around. When I was maybe fourteen, I had a terrible case of the hots for her. And, you know, she still looks damned good. What's she really like, McGee?"
"She's a very shy and retiring person, officer. All that sex-pot front is just an act."
He sighed and said, "You'd never know it," and gave me back the letter. "I'm sorry you told me that."
"What did go on here?"
"Were you going to use some of the balloon stuff on the TV?"
"I'm going to recommend against it. Was there a fire here?"
We stood and looked out across the field. A lot of the trucks and private cars were gone. There were two television news teams at work, interviewing people out on the field, taking shots of the bright empty envelope on the ground, the overturned basket.
"What they were doing here, on the sly Mr. McGee, they were making dirty videotapes, conning some of the young people around here to appear on those tapes, paying them for it, making them sign releases. It didn't all come out until one of the young girls they made perform for them got killed yesterday, and her girl friend broke down and told what had been going on. This is a Christian, Godfearing community, Mr. McGee, and a big bunch of the friends of Karen Hatcher came out here early this morning to bust everybody up. And they pretty much did. We've got twelve high-school sen
iors locked up, and three in the hospital, and warrants for the rest of them. There were two dead right here on the field, two of the movie crew, and another that will probably die. A lot of expensive equipment was destroyed and burned, and from what we can find out, a lot of the movie film was burned up too. A report came in a while back that two or three more got killed running into hightension lines way southeast of here. Some of them got away, in time in balloons, apparently. It's just one of those things that happen. It's a godawful mess. It's hard to say who's to blame in a thing like this. It really is. One of the ones in jail is my kid brother."
"Sorry to hear that."
"Billy would never in this world set out to kill anybody. His dog fell out of the loft one time and broke his back. Dad said it was Billy's responsibility to shoot old Boomer. He plain couldn't do it. It wasn't in him. Of course, he was only twelve. I had to do it for him."
"It all got out of hand, probably." I said.
"That's exactly it, mister. That's exactly it. They don't want people who don't belong here hanging around here, okay?"
"Okay."
"Oh, wait a second. If you know anything about that sideline of making those tapes, maybe they'd want to talk to you some."
"Officer, I got here yesterday morning. All I've seen are balloons."
He nodded. "Okay. You can take off."
Eighteen
THE WORLD turned further toward summer. Vennerman scheduled my knee in May, and by early June I was walking at a reasonable pace, but only for a mile at a time, and I worked with the weight Velcroed around my ankle every evening-swing the leg up straight and hold it, and let it down very slowly.
In mid-June there were a few unusual days when Florida became almost too hot to touch. Annie Renzetti came over from Naples, and while she was there, making lists of what she'd bring on the promised cruise aboard the Busted Flush, Ron Esterland came to town for our long-delayed accounting. He had been out in Seattle making additions and changes in a big show of his paintings which were about to go on the museum circuit, all of them on loan from museums and collectors. Meyer came over in the morning and got his big pot of Italian meat sauce started, checked it out at noon, and came back at drinking time, toting a sufficient amount of Bardolino.
It made a very good group. Ron and Annie were obviously fond of each other. He said to her at one point, "You were maybe the luckiest thing that ever happened to that crusty old bastard."
She said, "I'll always owe him. He taught me to do my work as perfectly as I was capable of doing it, and to think about better and easier ways of doing the chores as I was doing them-not to take my mind off them and drift. He used to say-"
"I know," Ron said. "He used to say ditchdiggers are the ones who can design the best shovels." After we were all bloated with more pasta than anyone had intended to eat, I went and got my expense sheet and presented it to Ron Esterland. His eyebrows went up. "This is all?"
"I tried. First-class air fare. Car rentals. Steaks. It just didn't last long enough."
"When I saw Josie last week I didn't see any point in telling her you were looking into the old man's death as a favor to me."
"How did she seem?" Annie asked.
"Okay. She misses Peter terribly. She told me there had been some vicious gossip about Peter and Romola, but neither of them had been capable of betraying her that way. She was very busy. She and somebody from one of the agencies were working out a lecture schedule for her and going over her materials."
"Lectures!" Annie exclaimed. "Josephine Laurant?"
"It seems that Peter is becoming a cult figure," Ron said.
Meyer went to his old cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, came back with a clipping he had taken from a small literary journal, and read it to us, with feeling.
" 'Perhaps it is too early to attempt an appraisal of the lasting value of the contributions of Peter Gerard Kesner to the art of the cinema. At the heart of the pathetically small body of work he leaves us are the two gritty little epics about the outlaw bikers, vital, sardonic, earthy, using experimental cuts and angles that soon became cliches overused by the directors of far less solid action films. The harddriving scores, the daring uses of silence, the existential interrelationships of victims and predators gave us all that odd twist of deja vu which is our response to a contrived reality which, through art, seems more real than life itself.'
"More?" Meyer asked.
"Don't stop now," said Annie.
"'In the two big-budget films which he directed, and which failed commercially, we see only infrequent flashes of his brilliance, of his unmistakable signature on scenes noted otherwise only for their banality of plot and situation. The truth of Kesner, the artist, was stifled by the cumbersome considerations of the money men, the little minds who believe that if a film is not an imitation of a successful film then it cannot possibly be a success.
"'We can but dream of what a triumph Free Fall would have been had it not been destroyed in that tragic confrontation in the heartland of Iowa. Those who were privileged to see the rushes say that it was Kesner at his peak of power and conviction, dealing with mature themes in a mature manner, in a rhapsody of form and motion. A lot of footage survived, and we understand that it is being assembled as merely a collection of sequences of visuals, of flight and color, with score by Anthony Allen and narration by Kesner's great and good friend, Josephine 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 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."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 19 - Freefall in Crimson Page 20