“As you have said before.”
“What? Sorry about that. Lecture Eighty-six C.”
“Did you hear about the Norman girl in Omaha?” We settled into deep canvas chairs in the cockpit of the John Maynard Keynes. “I heard on the noon news,” he said, and got up and unlocked the hatch to below-decks, went down, and came back with two icy bottles of Dos Equis, drank deeply from his, wiped his mouth on the back of a heavy and hairy hand, and said, “The body will turn up, perhaps, sooner or later.”
“Lysa Dean is okay. I talked to her a little while ago. Alerted her. I think she’ll keep her guard up. I told her that if he gets to her, to tell him where to find me.”
In a little while I noticed how motionless he was, how he was staring into the distance. When a lady stalked by wearing a string bikini, a big pink straw hat, and high-heeled white sandals, Meyer didn’t even give her the glance she had earned. She went off into the dazzle of white hot afternoon.
Finally he stirred, sighed, finished his beer. “There is certain standard information about Desmin Grizzel. Raised in Riverside, California, out on the edge of the desert, a one-parent family, with the children divided among foster homes when the mother was killed in a midnight brawl in a parking lot. Desmin went from foster home to reformatory to penitentiary, emerged into the close fellowship of the outlaw biker. A passable mechanic. A brawler. A skilled rider. And so there he was, riding toward his very limited destiny, when Peter Kesner came into his life and told Grizzel, Hanner, and their associates he wanted to use them in a motion picture. Probably they thought it some kind of joke. They became Dirty Bob and the Senator, lived the parts, made production suggestions, and so forth and so forth. It’s all in the fan magazines. So they became celebrities, cult heroes to a limited segment of America. Two movies. And the consequent talk shows, endorsements, public appearances at biker meets, races, and rallies. And some bit parts in TV series and B movies.
“Desmin Grizzel read the press releases about how, by accident, his life had been changed. He had been pulled up out of the great swamp of common folk and placed on a hilltop, where he vowed that he had seen the light, that he would never return to the wicked ways of his prior life. This is always a popular theme. I think that Desmin Grizzel began to enjoy security, if not respectability. He was closing in on forty. He had done a dirty little chore for Kesner, and he had worked Kesner for as much of Josie’s money as he could grab, put it into the security of a beach house, vehicles, bonds, and the lawyer working on his pardon.
“He had made it possible for Kesner to get seed money for the new motion picture project. He had bunted his old friend Hanner over a cliff, removing an irritant and a possible danger. He was Kesner’s gofer, taking orders perhaps slightly demeaning for a man who had once been a star in his own right. Then, in the matter of the tapes, he had a chance to indulge simultaneously his yearning to be on camera and also his sadistic appetites, apparently not realizing the danger involved in not hiding his identity.
“And it all went to hell. He saw Kesner die and saw you survive. He hid out somewhere, somehow, for nearly two months. Wanted. Pictured in all post offices. Federal indictment and local indictments in Iowa. Now what is his concept of his future? There is no possible way he can fit himself back into any area of security and respectability. No way at all. The myth of redemption is shattered. The fans of past years are gone. The onetime outlaw biker is once again an outlaw. Back to his origins. Society raised him up and then smacked him down, leaving him no out. He’s not the sort of creature who’d turn himself in. He’s a predatory animal. Big, heavy, nimble, and cruel. The fact he was tamed for a little while makes him more dangerous. He’s on the move because he has somehow acquired a safe identity that gives him mobility. I would say that he probably thinks of himself in some strongly dramatic context, as a betrayed man who will take out the betrayers before the pack brings him down. The betrayers are the Norman girl, Joya Murphy-Wheeler, Lysa Dean, you, and possibly some others. He can take a lot of pleasure in the hunt, sharpened and sweetened by the knowledge that these are the last acts of his life.”
“Meyer, you can’t climb inside his skull.”
“I know that. I can try to come close.”
“He could be into a lot of heavy things that could addle his wits. He could just be thrashing around.”
“True.”
“But I might as well try to reach Joya.”
“It shouldn’t hurt,” he said.
I couldn’t find the number I had written down for her. I got it from information and then waited until she would be likely to be home from work. I went over what I wanted to tell her. She had seemed very forthright and direct. I remembered how she smiled when I finally experienced that strange pleasure of the balloon journey at low altitude across the land.
The voice that answered was frail and tentative. “Hello?”
“Is Joya there?”
“No. Who is calling?”
“This is Travis McGee. In Florida.”
“Were you a friend?” The past tense froze my heart.
“Who are you?”
“Alpha. I’m her sister. What was it you wanted with her, Mr. McGee?”
“Is it possible to speak to her?” I knew instincively how dumb that question was.
“No, sir. It is not possible. We had the services for her yesterday. She is… she has passed on.”
“What happened to her?”
“You aren’t another newspaper person, are you?”
“No. I went ballooning with your sister.”
“She was crazy about that. She loved it. She always said it was worth it, but I couldn’t see it. That’s another thing I got to sell of hers, I guess, her share in that stupid balloon.”
“You’re the executor?”
“Sort of. She was divorced a long time ago and there weren’t any children. She came back here to stay at the home place all alone. I mean I’ve got a husband and children and a life of my own. I told Joya that she shouldn’t live here alone. It’s on just a farm road, you know. Like two trucks a day go by.”
“What happened to her?”
“Well, it happened last Thursday, the eighteenth. What she always did, except when the weather was bad, she’d get up and put on her running clothes and take a long hard run and come back and shower and eat breakfast and go to work. She kept herself in wonderful shape. Bruno always ran with her. He’s part Airedale, and practically human. They never have found Bruno. When she didn’t show up at work and didn’t phone in, finally a girl friend of hers that works there phoned me, and I phoned Alan at the store, and we drove out there, and I used my key to get in. The burner was turned low under the coffeepot and it had boiled dry. The clothes she planned to wear to work were laid out on the bed. By then it was noon. Well, by late afternoon there must have been fifty people hunting for her, and they found her body finally in tall grass a quarter mile from the house. She had been beaten. Her poor face was a mess. Somebody had raped her and then knotted one of the pant legs of the jogging suit around her neck, very tight. The grass was all matted, like animals had been fighting there. Practically everybody in the whole area has been questioned about whether they saw strangers around. Whoever it was, they had a long time to get out of the area. It seems like such a terrible waste. I’m almost glad Momma died last year so she wasn’t alive to know what happened to Joya.”