As he lay there on his face, Josephine Laurant Esterland came crawling over to him on her hands and knees. She raised her fist and popped him in the back of the skull. She shrieked and sat, hugging her fist in her lap, rocking back and forth.
“Had enough?” Kesner asked me in a breathless, hollow voice.
“I give up,” I said. The room door was ajar. I went over and closed it. I rolled Peter over, sat him up, helped him to his feet, and walked him over to the bed. He sat there, and I flexed my arms to relieve some of the pain and the numbness where he had hit muscle and bone.
Josie stood up slowly and carefully. She said, in loyal explanation, “He never marks me. I never show my thighs onscreen. They’re too short and fat. He never marks me.” She turned and glared at him. “Every cent? Every damn cent gone? What happened to the budget? What happened to that mealy little accountant person?”
“Shut up, Josie.”
“That means the house is gone too, you son of a bitch. You can’t finish without money. You’re not half through the story boards. Jesus Christ! It finishes me! Don’t you care?”
“Shut up and get out of here.”
“You are unbelievably mean and cruel. I’ll be lame for days. You impoverish me and then you beat me when I object.”
“Leave!” he yelled, pointing to the connecting door.
She hobbled to it, head high, slammed it behind her.
“You shouldn’t break in on a domestic discussion, McGee.”
I straddled a chair, facing him. “How much did you have to pay Dirty Bob?”
“What do you mean? He’s on salary.”
“Oh, I don’t mean for what he’s doing now. I mean for the long ride when he and the Senator went over to Citrus City and beat Esterland to death, so he wouldn’t outlive his daughter and leave all that good money to his foundation. I’d think he could bleed you forever for something like that.”
He peered at me. “Friend, you’ve got to be covered with needle marks.”
“Anne Renzetti knew the terms of the will, and she told Josie. Ellis had terminal cancer, and Romola was going to get all the money, and the support would stop, and Josie wouldn’t be able to support you any more. That’s when you went after Romola and set up the hideaway where you two could be together.”
He looked toward the closed door and back at me. “Lower your damn voice, you idiot! Who are you? I think Dez was right about you. What do you want?”
“Then she had the bike accident, and when you knew she was really going to die, you explained to good old buddy Dez how nice it would be for everybody if the old man went first. Then the money would come to the daughter, and on her death to Josie, and you would be able to stay in the trough.”
“Not so damn loud!”
“If you were doing the talking, you could keep your voice down.”
“I see what you mean. All right. About Esterland, it just happened to work out lucky for me. I don’t know who killed him. You have Dez all wrong too. I wouldn’t say there wasn’t a time when he might kill somebody, but that’s all behind him. He’s a good citizen. Who are you anyway?”
“A consultant, like Lysa’s letter says. Two birds with one stone. Ron Esterland told me if I ever ran into you, I should ask about his dad, about you arranging to get him killed.”
“Friend of his?”
“And of Anne Renzetti. They both think you arranged it, Peter.”
“You’re getting loud again!”
“Because you’re not saying anything interesting.”
“All right, all right. That’s a very high-strung lady beyond that door there.” He lowered his voice even further. “Don’t say anything else about Romola, please. It’s a terrible guilt load for me. I had a wonderful father-daughter relationship with that lovely child. She was the one who decided it had to turn into something else. Neither of us could stand the thought of hurting Josie. I found us a pad. It wasn’t against the law, McGee. I know just how I’m going to handle it in my autobiography. Tender, gentle, sensitive. Two people caught up in forbidden sexual obsession, secret meetings spiced with guilt and shame. Honest to God, when she ran over that dog and fractured her skull, I thought it was God’s judgment on both of us. I’ll never forget her. Never. She had the most beautiful damn body I’ve ever seen on any woman.”
“That’s very touching, Peter.”
“So get off me about that other.”
“What if Grizzel and Hanner decided on their own to do you a little favor? What if it could be practically proven?”
“Proven?” He studied me, his expression wary and dubious. “Look, I may have done some bitching about the situation, and I suppose somebody could have grabbed that ball and run with it. Would that be my fault? What kind of proven?”
“Not airtight. Ron says his dad went to Citrus City to make a buy of an illegal substance, to relieve his pain, intending to pay with Krugerrands. I don’t know the details, but it has something to do with tracing those gold pieces to Hanner or Grizzel or you.”
“Not to me! Jesus! No way can that be true.”
“There’s a rumor around that Grizzel killed Hanner.”
“You show up here pretending to be a big fan of my work, and then you hit me with all this shit. Anybody can hear rumors. I heard a rumor too. I heard he had a woman a while back who caught Dez’s eye, and Dez was always able to take Curley’s women away from him. Then she is supposed to have said something to Dez that she should not have known unless Curley had talked a lot more than he should have, about something involving the two of them. And then Dez waited until the right time. Maybe while he was waiting for the right moment, Curley ran into the sea gulls.”
“Have you thought of writing for pictures?”
“McGee, I hate a smartass, especially when he takes shots at my work. Nothing about this conversation is important. I’ll tell you what is important. I am going to finish this picture. There’s enough left to do the final flight scene early tomorrow. With the footage I’ve got, there are a lot of directions I can go in. I can use voiceover to pull it together plotwise. There are scenes in the can that really sing. On Movieola, no score, they sing. They’ve got my imprint. A hundred years from now, kiddo, people will be going to see Free Fall in the basements of museums, to see the unmistakable mark of Peter Kesner. The dynamics of each scene, unfolding, the people working in a kind of magic rhythmic counterpoint in their relationships to one another, and with the cuts underlining the tempo of the score. We fold up shop here tomorrow and head home, and in eight or ten weeks, eighty-hour weeks, I’ll put it together. That’s what’s important, not you coming here bugging me with this Esterland bullshit. What’s with this Ron? He didn’t make the will?”
“I heard on the radio that Karen Hatcher is dead in a one-car accident. She was fifteen.”
“She-who did you say-?”
“Come off it, Peter. Joya was right, wasn’t she?” He looked thoughtful. He got up and went over and picked his glasses up off the floor, put them on, nodded, and said, “She was right and she was also wrong. I wanted to know as little as possible about it. Josie knows nothing about it. I happened to know about that one, is all. She was well over fifteen. You could tell from the tits and the rug. This is depressing me. And my arms are sore. Look at the bruises coming up. I’m going to take a line to shape up. I can spare one if you want.”
“No, thanks. You go ahead.”
He went over to the bureau and put a careful pinch of white powder from a jeweled case onto the smooth bottom of an overturned dinner plate. He chopped it fine with a single-edged blade and scraped it into a thin line, bent down to it, and snuffed it up a soda straw, moving the straw along the line as he took the long slow inhalation, pressing his other nostril shut. It was quick and deft. Not a single motion lost.