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.”