Free Fall in Crimson by John D. MacDonald Page A

you shouldn't feel everything is a total loss."
    "Second thoughts, eh?"
    "Definitely. I don't know what the hell I was thinking of. I mean I do know what I was thinking of, and it wasn't my very best idea. I was wondering a little while ago, what if you arrived all eager and steamy? Would she or wouldn't she?"
    "You'll never know. I guessed you'd have second thoughts."
    "Thank you. Any friend of Meyer is a friend of mine. Meyer has pretty good taste in friends.
    Open that good stuff."
    I unwound the wire and stood the glasses on the rail, where the starlit sand beyond gave enough light for me to fill them properly. Poured. We clinked glasses.
    "To all the dumb dreams that never happen," she said. "And the dumb women who dream them."
    "To all the dumb dreams that shouldn't happen, and don't," I said.
    She sipped. "You are probably right. Ellis was dying. Prescott Mullen was an authority figure.
    He was comforting. When you lean on strength, I think you can get to read too much into it."
    "I thought you seemed very very happy with your job here."
    "Oh, I am! I wouldn't think of giving it up. He was going to come down and go into practice here. Another segment of the dumb dream."
    We drank chairs close together. Silences were comfortable. I told her portions of my life, listened to parts of hers. We had some weepy chapters and some glad ones. About five minutes after she had snugged her hand into mine, I leaned over into her chair and kissed lips ripe and hot as country plums, and when that was over she got up, tugged at my wrist, and said in a small voice, "I think I , have been talked into it somehow."
    We lay sprawled in the soft peach glow of a pink towel draped around the shade of her bedside lamp, sated and peaceful and somnolent. Big wooden blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and I could smell the sea. A passel of marsh frogs were all yelling gronk in a garden pond, voices in contrapuntal chorus.
    She propped herself on an elbow and ran her fingertips along the six-inch seam of scar tissue along my right side, halfway between armpit and waist.
    "How many wars did you say you were in?"
    "Only one, and that wasn't done there. That was an angry fellow with a sharp knife, and if I could have had it stitched right away, there wouldn't be hardly any scar."
    "You should put out a pocket guidebook."
    Page 21

    "Some day I'll arrange a guided tour. Meyer says there isn't enough unblemished hide left to make a decent lampshade."
    "Are you accident-prone, darling?"
    "I guess you could say that. I am prone to be where accidents are prone to happen."
    "Why do you want to ask Prescott about Ellis?"
    "I haven't really got anything specific to go on. It's what I do, the way I go about things. If I can get enough people talking, sooner or later something comes up that might fit with something somebody else has said. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. Like finding out last night that whoever beat Esterland to death might have been a motorcyclist, a biker."
    "Why would you think that? I don't understand." So I went through it for her, editing it just enough to take out things that were obviously meaningless. Her arm got tired and she snugged her face into the corner of my throat, her breath warm against my chest. I slowly stroked her smooth and splendid back as I talked, all the way from coccyx to nape and back again.
    When I finished, she said, "Well, I guess it is interesting, but I don't see what a motorcycle would have to do with anything, really. The only person I ever met who knew anything at all about motorcycles is Josie's weird friend Peter Kesner."
    It startled me. "He rides them?"
    "Oh, no! He's what they call out there a genius. He's a double hyphenate."
    "A what?"
    "No, darling, it is not some form of perversion. He made a couple of motion pictures where he was the writer-director-producer. He made them years ago on a very small budget, and they were what is called