She smiled at me over the rim of the iced-tea glass, green eyes as frosty as the glass.
It took her three phone calls to locate a home videotape of Chopper Heaven. A boy on a bicycle delivered it. Her little projection area was an alcove off the bedroom. Two double chaises faced the oversized screen on which the television image was projected. The set and projector were between the two double chaises. The sound came out of two speakers, one on either side of the screen. There was no window in the alcove. Daylight filtered in through the drawn draperies in the bedroom.
I watched the eighty-minute show with total attention. Peter Kesner was given the writing credit, directing credit, producing credit. The sound track was old-fashioned hard rock. And loud. Hand-held cameras, grainy film, unadjusted color values from scene to scene. But it moved. It was saying that this biker world was quick, brutal, and curiously indifferent to its own brutality, almost unaware of it.
The characters seemed to want things very badly and, when they got them, discarded them. The dialogue was primitive but had an authentic ring. The bikers’ girls were sullen and slutty. After death and bombings, Dirty Bob and the Senator rode off down the highway toward the dawn, bawling a dirty song in their hoarse untrained voices, over the rumble of the two big machines.
She got up and turned it off and pushed the rewind key. “Interesting,” she said. “It doesn’t hold up. At the time it was more daring than it is now. It cost a million and a half and grossed maybe fifteen to twenty.”
“Would Kesner have made a lot of money?”
“Darling! This is the Industry! The really creative people are the accountants. A big studio got over half the profit, after setting breakeven at about three times the cost, taking twenty-five percent of income as an overhead charge, and taking thirty percent of income as a distribution charge, plus rental fees, and prime interest on what they advanced. If he had made a million, including fees for his services, I’d be surprised. Peter lives very well. I’m surprised Josie could afford him. Anyway I remembered the picture as being better. Some of my old ones seem to be much better than I remembered. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Did you ever meet those two? Grizzel and Hanner?”
“On a talk show several years ago. They were a disaster. They came stoned to the eyeballs. Big noisy smelly fellows, thrashing around and saying things that had to be beeped off the air, thinking they were hilarious, apparently. One of them grabbed me by the behind and actually left big dingy fingermarks on my yellow skirt. I told him if he touched me again, I’d cut his heart out and fry it. I meant it and he knew I meant it. I didn’t know their names. They were just Dirty Bob and the Senator.”
I knew I would recognize them if I saw them again anywhere. Dirty Bob, a.k.a. Desmin Grizzel, had a full black beard and a moon face with high cheekbones and such narrow eyes it gave him an Asiatic look, like a Mongol warlord. The full beard was a fringe beard, growing thick around the perimeter but not very lush around the mouth. It looked to me as if he had done his own tricks in the motion picture. If so, he was very quick and spry for a man of his considerable bulk.
The Senator, a.k.a. Curley Hanner, had a long narrow face, a long narrow nose, a tight little slot of a mouth. His eyes were so close together it gave him a half-mad, half-comedic look. His little slot mouth turned into a crazy little V when he smiled. On the right side of his forehead there was a deep, sickening crevasse, as though he had stove it in on the corner of something. Black thinning hair, and a black thin mustache that hung below his chin, like an oldtime gunfighter. Throughout the movie they had both worn thin red sweat bands just above the eyebrows. They were ham actors and could have spoiled the picture if the director had let them. “Where did Kesner find that pair?”
“No idea, Travis. The story was that he’d auditioned some very hard-case types from the Bandidos and Hell’s Angels, picked a half dozen, and then let them fight it out for the two parts. But that was probably some studio flack’s idea of exciting copy. I heard that Kesner got a motorcycle and went riding with one of the outlaw clubs, and that’s where he got the idea for the picture and found the people to play in it. You saw how many there were altogether. Fifteen or twenty.”
“And Kesner is on location now?”
“Out in farm country somewhere. With Josie. Making‘ a balloon picture. Hot-air balloons.”
“How do I find out where they are?”
“You have me, dear. Girl guide to the wonders of the Industry. Let me phone. You stay put.” She gave me a pretty good rap on the skull with her knuckles when she went behind the chaise. She went to the bedroom phone, sat small on the side of her big bed, her back to me, as she hunched over her phone list. I got up and roamed over to a wall rack which seemed to hold scores of videotapes. It was too dark to read the titles. There was a little gallery light over the rack and I pulled the chain. The titles were visible. They ranged from X to XXX. With a very few R-rated here and there. I could hear her on the phone. There was a shallow drawer under the middle shelf of the rack and on nosey impulse I pulled it open. And there was the little white Prelude 3 System massager, fitted with what I believe is called the Come Again tip. Beside it a small vial of lubricant. I slid the drawer shut and went back to the chaise, then remembered the light, went and turned it off, and stretched out again.
Scenario for a lonely lady. With frequent insomnia. Slip in here from the bedroom, put on a dirty tape with the sound turned low or off, and surrender to the throbbing hum of electrical ecstasy.
No obligation for dull conversation before or after. No awkward emotional entanglements. No jealousies. No involvements. Just an interwoven pattern of as many climaxes as she cared to endure, and then turn off all the machinery and go back to bed, to a sleep like death itself. The modern female, making out with no help from any male. I had never felt more superfluous-which in itself is a comment.
She came back in and sat on my chaise near my knees, facing me. “Well, I know where they are, almost. In Iowa, at a place called Rosedale Station. It’s northwest of Des Moines and southwest of Fort Dodge, somewhere off U.S. Route Thirty. What you have to do is fly to Des Moines and get a car there, and it would be maybe sixty miles.”
“Now I have to come up with an approach.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody there in Rosedale Station, neither Josie nor Kesner nor those two bikers-if they’re there would have any idea who I am or what I want. And I can’t exactly go up to Josephine Laurant and say ‘Honey, your stepson Ron hired me to find out who beat old Ellis to death.’ What I am talking about is some kind of a cover story. People making motion pictures keep a good guard up to keep the local hams and autograph hounds away. I can’t exactly start cold and ingratiate myself.”
“What is it you want to do when you get there?”
“I don’t know. Mill around. Make friends. Trade secrets back and forth. Beat heads. Lie a lot. I don’t know. I improvise. If you have made some good guesses about something that happened in the past, you can usually stick the pry bar into the right crack. If nothing much happens, you know you guessed wrong.”
She tilted her pretty head and studied me. “Who should you be? I’ll have to think about that. Let me see. You should have some authority of some kind, so they’ll have to be nice to you.”
“I know nothing about their line of work. Or about hot-air balloons.”
“Hush. I’m thinking.” With doubled fist she struck me gently on the knee, again and again. Lips pursed, eyes almost closed. “Got it!” she cried.