Free Fall in Crimson
John D. MacDonald
Travis McGee #19 Free Fall in Crimson
John D. MacDonald
I had so often in the past seen dumb domestic animals in Africa so aware of the secret intent of the people who had bred and reared them and earned their trust that they could hardly walk, knowing they were being led to a distant place of slaughter.
Laurens Van Der Post,
The Night of the New Moon
He will wonder whether he should have told these young, handsome and clever people the few truths that sing in his bones.
These are:
(1) Nobody can ever get too much approval.
(2) No matter how much you want or need, they, whoever they are, don’t want to let you get away with it, whatever it is.
(3) Sometimes you get away with it.
John Leonard,
Private Lives in the Imperial City
One
WE TALKED past midnight, sat in the deck chairs on the sun deck of the Busted Flush with the starry April sky overhead, talked quietly, and listened to the night. Creak and sigh of hulls, slap of small waves against pilings, muted motor noises of the fans and generators and pumps aboard the work boats and the play toys:
“I don’t really know how the law works,” Ron Esterland said. “But I would think that if you arranged someone’s death, even if he were dying already, you shouldn’t inherit.”
“Where do you come in?” Meyer asked.
Esterland took a long time answering. “All right. If some money came to me, I wouldn’t turn it down. Maybe to that extent I’ve grown up a little. But I can get along without it. Years ago I would have turned down anything my father wanted to give me or leave me. If, Travis, as a result of your efforts, anything does come to me, the deal is that you get half But the chance is so remote, I pay expenses.” I got up and stretched, went to the rail, and did some push-offs against it and some deep knee bends. The night was chilly for April, and after my heavy morning workout, sitting so long had made me stiffen up.
I turned and asked Ron to straighten out the chronology of the Esterland wives for me. “I guess it is confusing,” he said. “My mother, Connie, was wife number one. She died when I was eleven. Dad married Judy Prisco when I was twelve. She was a dancer. They had no children. They were divorced in six months. It was quick and ugly, and she accepted a sizable settlement. When I was thirteen he married Josephine Laurant, the actress. She and I got along well. I was sent away to school when I was sixteen. Romola, their daughter, was almost three then. I never really went home again. There were some big scenes. My father didn’t like to be crossed by anybody, for any reason. He and Josie got a legal separation after ten years of marriage. Romola was nine. A nice little kid. Josie went out to the West Coast to live. It was what they called a friendly separation.”
“When did they find out your father had cancer?” I asked.
“A little over three years ago. He spent the first few months liquidating his holdings. That is, when he got out of the hospital after the exploratory, and when the radiology and the chemotherapy didn’t leave him too debilitated. Then he began to feel better. He had a remission. That’s when he moved down here to Fort Lauderdale and bought the motor sailer and moved aboard with the woman who had been working for him for several years. Anne Renzetti. As part of putting his affairs in order, he made a new will. As I remember, his previous one left me ten dollars. So he could mention my name, I guess. The new will set up some bequests for Josie and Anne and left the bulk of the estate to Romola. Then there was a paragraph about what should happen if Romola predeceased him, which nobody really expected her to do at that time. If that happened, then the money she would have gotten would go to the setting up of an Esterland Foundation, to make grants for research into neutralizing dangerous chemical wastes before disposal by industry. He thought that’s where he got his cancer, from working with plastics and reagents, chemicals of all kinds. That portion of the will, that contingency portion, left me a hundred thousand dollars. Which of course I didn’t get. But it was nice to know my stock had risen that much in his estimation.”
“And then Romola had her accident?” Meyer asked.
“Yes. Two years ago next month. May tenth. There was a severe skull fracture, and she never came out of the anesthetic. She was plugged into a life-support system. The brain waves were increasingly flat. Josie kept trying to believe there was hope. She died finally on August tenth. She had turned twenty. But by then my father was dead. He was beaten to death near Citrus City on the twenty-fourth of July. So Romola was his heir.”
“How much did the girl inherit?” Meyer asked. “Three and a half million after taxes, but then of course when Josie inherited from Romola, the government took a large slice. A little more than a million dollars.”
I went back and sat down. Ronald Esterland sighed audibly. He was a blond man, going bald at thirty-four, with big hands and thick shoulders, a bland face, a good smile.
“I think what is bothering me,” Meyer said, “and Travis too, is why you waited a year and a half to look into this whole thing.”
“I can’t give a good answer to that. I’m sorry. I was in London, and I had a chance to exhibit in the Sloane Gallery. I had enough work on hand for about half the space they were ready to let me have. And it was a chance to work in some bigger pieces. I kept telling myself I didn’t care what had happened to my father. He was a brutal man. He said brutal things. He tried to destroy the people around him. And somebody had the good judgment to beat him to death. I worked like hell, and I filled the good spaces in that gallery. The show was a success. The reviews were better than any of my group expected. Eight paintings were sold at the opening, and by the end of the first week there were only four left unsold, and three of those were huge. I went back one afternoon. Very few people there. I roamed the show, seeing all the little red stars they stuck on the paintings to indicate they were sold. I had a feeling of pride and satisfaction, but at the same time I felt a kind of desolation. A kind of bleakness. I realized then that my father had been dead a year and I hadn’t really understood what it meant to me. A lot of my motivation had been to show him that I had value, that I was valued by the world, and so I was worthy of his love and his respect. He had never shown me love or respect. I know how deeply I had wanted those things. I had wanted to make him come around. And I couldn’t. He was gone. He had somehow escaped, and I felt frustrated. When the show came down, I closed the studio and moved back to New York. Back home. I found that I could work, after a fashion, but not as well as I wanted to work. I kept thinking about my I’ather and Romola and the ugly fact of the murder of a dying man. So I came down here because this is where he had lived, aboard his boat, for the nuomths before he died. That’s how come I ran into tiarah Issom. I hadn’t seen her for years, since I lived in Greenwich Village. She’s doing damned fine work, and she said you bought one of her paintings.”
“A little seascape. An aerial view. Lots of blue in it. I am a junky for blue.”
“She has a lot of skill. She told me you did a favor Ior her a few years ago, and you might be the one to do a favor for me.”
“I’m not a private detective.”
“You said that before. I know.”
“I have no official standing. I don’t want to get into anything where I attract too much attention from the law, because I have no status. They don’t like people meddling. They don’t like amateurs.”