“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.”