The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “I’m not sure, myself,” Dave said. The taste of the beer was dark as its color. “What did you want me for?”

  “You don’t think Cliff killed him.” Rodriguez had to stretch to reach cigarettes on the table. He tossed the pack to Dave. “I know Cliff didn’t kill him.”

  “He was here with you, right?” They were Mexican cigarettes. The paper was brown. Dave took one and tossed back the pack. “Never left the place all day?”

  “We were trying to fix up this house.” Rodriguez lit a cigarette with a paper match. “We done quite a bit at nights. But you get tired, you know? When we got this nursery nobody had had it for a long time. It took a lot of work to get it nice again so people would come. For many weeks we slept in sleeping bags on the floor in here.”

  Dave grinned. “Under a crystal chandelier.”

  “That is what you call the gay life-style,” Rodriguez said, but his smile didn’t amount to much. “It didn’t matter. We were at peace. For a while.”

  “What happened to it?” Dave used the steel lighter on his cigarette. The sweet taste of the smoke took him back to boyhood trips down Baja with his father. In lost, sun-cracked cantinas behind dusty gas pumps, the unshaven barkeeps would sell cigarettes to kids. He used to hoard them in his blanket roll to smuggle home. He looked at his watch—not for la hora de cenar, when he could talk to Ophelia Green, but for six o’clock, when he could call the hospital again. It would be a while yet. “I saw the city-hall demonstration on film today. Your friend Kerlee didn’t look peaceable.”

  “He hates injustice,” Rodriguez said. “It makes him crazy. I told him to stay out of it. Why we came up here from L.A. was to leave all that activist shit behind. Ten years was enough. It never did no good. It only made him old. And poor. He gave it all his time, every penny he could get. Phone ringing at two in the morning. There’s always some flit in trouble. There always will be till the straights change, and you can’t change them. I told Cliff, they got to hate somebody. What have they got? Fat-ass wives that whine all the time, bills and payments, kids that turn out to be junkies and whores and car thieves. They got to think somebody is more miserable than they are. Or happier. That’s worse. Gays can’t do nothing right. Come out or hide—it don’t change nothing. They’ll always hate us. Or envy us. Or pity us. Take your choice.”

  “Every penny from where?” Dave asked.

  “Qué? Oh—a boutique. Potted plants. Near a big hospital, so it did good. But if I didn’t hide half what we took in—put it in a separate bank Cliff didn’t know nothing about—we’d have been out on our nalgas. Then I heard about this place—for sale cheap because it was run down. I drove up. Last July, weekend of the parade. It looked great to me. I told Cliff, ‘Either we take it or it’s over between us.’” Gloomily Rodriguez dumped the rest of the beer from his bottle into the fancy glass. “So, it’s all my fault. I should never have—”

  “It’s someone else’s fault,” Dave said. “What parade?”

  “You know, man. Gay Pride Week? Every year. To celebrate 1969 when those drag queens threw their purses at the New York police. Cliff was always in that parade up to his ano. But why celebrate drag queens? They spend their whole life celebrating. They don’t do nothing but make the rest of us look bad.” Rodriguez shook his head and smiled scornfully. “Gay pride! What does that mean, man?”

  “Two strips of flocked wallpaper?” Dave said.

  “Yeah. Shit.” Surprisingly, Rodriguez started to laugh. “He had the bucket of paste. The paper was rolled out on the floor facedown. He was on his knees, brushing paste on the back when they came in. No knock, no nothing. Three big ones. He jumped up and said what is this or something. And they said he killed Ben Orton, and Cliff slopped the brush in the paste and painted the first cop. Right from the top down.” Rodriguez wiped his eyes. “Wow, that cop looked funny. Like some old movie, you know? One big, long stroke of the brush.”

  “Getting on their good side from the start,” Dave said.

  “Man, there is no way to get on their good side.” Leftover laughter jerked the smooth brown chest, made the shoulders jump. Rodriguez hiccupped but he meant what he said and he said it grimly. “I told them he was here all day with me. Told them and told them. They don’t care.”

  “You’re going to have to tell them something better.”

  “I did. They don’t care about that neither. The district attorney—he don’t care about it. Even dead, this is still Ben Orton’s town. Everyone is in his pocket. Judges too. You don’t think Cliff can get a fair trial, do you?” Mouth clamped in bitterness, Rodriguez reached to twist out his cigarette in an abalone-shell ashtray on the table. “Daisy Flynn knew Cliff, interviewed him twice on TV. I told her. She don’t care, neither. Puta.”

  “Told her what?” Dave got out of the canvas chair to use the ashtray. “That you know who killed Orton?”

  “Why do you care?” Rodriguez asked suddenly.

  “It’s a matter of seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Money.” Rodriguez looked pained. “Don’t you care about justice? Don’t you care about Cliff?”

  “I care that he didn’t kill Ben Orton. I care that he was set up for it. I’d care to know who set him up because the odds are good that if I knew that I’d know who killed Ben Orton. If it was his wife or his son, I’d care deeply. Was it his wife or his son?”

  “It was Richard T. Nowell,” Rodriguez said.

  8

  RICHARD T. NOWELL SAID, “They get overexcited.” The hand-loomed jacket he’d worn in that snatch of film Dave had seen at KSDC-TV hung in some closet now. He had on only swim trunks. His spare, tanned body didn’t show his age. Neither did his hair, which had been to that high-priced barber again. It was gray but it grew thick and healthy. What showed his age were his eyes, hard, bright, and wary—eyes that had seen too much and doubted most of it. “Hispanos—as alike as jumping beans. There is no reality, only romance. Cervantes knew it in 1605. Nothing’s changed.”

  He lay with a silvery drink in his hand on a chaise of aluminum tubing and bright yellow flowered fabric on a terraza in back of a hillside house like Ben Orton’s—rough white stucco, grilled windows, red-tile roofs. It looked as if repair work was underway on the roofs. Stacks of new tiles occupied a corner of the terraza, along with trowels, buckets, ladders. An ornamental iron gate opened into the property from above. There was a tennis court where youths in shorts batted a yellow ball over a green net. Long stairs led down here. Another long flight dropped to a blue pool where young men laughed and splashed. Below the pool, a brushy fold in the fall-off of land put the highway out of sight. Beyond lay the small roofs of La Caleta, the bay with its tiny white boats, the rusty jut of the old cannery, the sparkling ocean.

  Dave said, “He told me you and Kerlee were enemies. Hated each other’s guts. Always had.”

  “Cliff didn’t need enemies,” Nowell said. “He had himself.” A blond youth with long, smooth swimmer’s muscles came out French doors onto the terrace. Maybe his trunks weren’t as small as possible but they looked it. Nowell fluttered fingers at him. “Get Mr. Brandstetter a drink, will you?” He looked at Dave. “What shall it be?”

  “It has been Mexican beer.” Dave smiled at the youth. That was easy. “Whatever’s in the fridge.”

  The boy smiled back, said “Löwenbräu” firmly, and took Nowell’s empty glass into the house.

  “Winning child,” Nowell said, looking after him. “He was slated for the Olympics. Did nothing but train. From the age of eight. Isn’t it insane? His father says he’d have made the team. But there were locker-room problems.”

  “Come to you in trouble, do they?” Dave asked.

  “By referral. Doctors, lawyers, agencies, juvenile authorities. Even the odd police department.”

  Dave blinked. At the noisy pool below, at the plock of balls on rackets above. “All of them?”

  “No, no.” Nowell shook his head, amused. “These are mostly just neighbor children come t
o play. You know how it is when you have a pool.”

  Dave grinned. “Awful nuisance.”

  “Hateful.” Nowell’s hard eyes twinkled. “No, the counting’s handled down at the office. Now and then I have a case who lives here. There’s plenty of room. Boys. Girls. And parents, of course.”

  As if on cue, a stocky man with a mat of gray hair on a sagging chest came around a corner of the house. He wore floppy surfer trunks, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and clogs. He carried towels. He was bald and his sunburned scalp was peeling. A woman followed him. She was burned too dark and had starved herself to keep her figure right for a bikini and had almost managed it. The smiles these people gave Nowell showed astonishing teeth. The man had to be a dentist. Self-conscious, they nudged each other down toward the hectic pool.

  “Do they pay?” Dave said.

  “We’re a nonprofit educational—”

  “You always were,” Dave said, “only I remember you in a pair of dingy offices around Third and Main in L.A. Building about to be torn down?”

  Nowell laughed. “We used to beat pans and shriek in the hall,” he said, “to warn the rats we were coming. It was nice to have them out but they never tidied up before they left. Yes, those were the bad old days. A secondhand mimeograph, three frightened faggots, and a cause. Twenty-five years ago. You came there?”

  “You were amicus curiae in the case of a friend of a friend. He didn’t have a car. I did. I picked him up at your place one day in the rain. We shook hands but I don’t expect you to remember. You must have been amicus curiae to a good many bewildered schoolteachers plucked naked out of steam baths.”

  “We were in court more hours than we slept.”

  “You had a magazine too,” Dave said. “Don’t I remember an obscenity case?”

  “Poor, pathetic little rag,” Nowell said. “By today’s standards it was tame as a Sunday-school paper. But it helped. It told thousands of sad, lonely boys and men all over this country that they weren’t the only ones. You should have seen the letters, the pitiful dollar bills. Yes, there was an obscenity case. We fought it. We fought the police, the civil service, the armed forces. There was so much to fight. There still is.”

  “But you quit,” Dave said. “Why?”

  “Quit?” Nowell said sharply. “Who says I quit?”

  “Besides Rodriguez,” Dave said, “Daisy Flynn, and Ben Orton’s widow. But mostly”—Dave looked at the place—“all this.” The swimmer brought back his tightly packaged genitals, his smile, and the drinks. He went whooping down the stairs toward the pool. Dave said, “This didn’t come out of pitiful dollar bills.”

  “They were never enough,” Nowell said. “It was my own money that kept us going. You should have seen how I had to live. A quarter century of cockroaches, crackers, and peanut butter. It wasn’t only court costs. Men were fired, boys were thrown out at home. People tried to kill themselves, mutilate themselves. They needed doctors, psychiatrists, jobs, a roof over their heads.”

  “Those two A.M. phone calls,” Dave said.

  “Someone had to answer. Someone had to come up with the money.”

  Dave looked at the house. “From here?”

  Nowell snorted. “Least of all. My father made Ben Orton look like a left-wing radical. You can imagine the rejoicing when his only son turned out to be a bird of bright plumage. The festivities went on for months. I cherish his parting words—that looking at me made him want to vomit.”

  Dave’s father said, “You’re full of surprises.”

  Dave said, “I kept waiting for you to guess.”

  “No,” Nowell said, “I had a little annuity from a great aunt. Then, four years ago, five”—with a crooked smile he tried his drink—“my father died. Happily, he was the self-made type, tall in the saddle, short in the brain. He distrusted Jew shysters—his pet term for lawyers. Ergo, he made such an incompetent will that I ended up with this house he never wanted me to set foot in, and all his money.” The smile went away. “What did Daisy Flynn say to make you think I’d quit? I’d never quit.”

  “I saw her introduction to a TV interview.” Dave tasted the German beer. American refrigeration had numbed it. “You and Kerlee. On the matter of Ben Orton’s refusal to hire homosexuals. She said the two of you disagreed. I knew how Kerlee felt. How you felt had to follow.”

  “If you’d seen the interview—” A striped beach ball, shedding bright water, flew over the balustrade. Nowell had quick reflexes. He hit it with the flat of a hand. It arced high and dropped. Cheers came from below. “—You’d have heard Cliff raving on about getting up petitions, showing that the citizens of La Caleta wanted fruity cops even if their police chief didn’t. It was an insane idea, like every other idea Cliff Kerlee ever had.”

  “He got the signatures,” Dave said. “How?”

  “You’d never guess it to look at him,” Nowell said, “but he’s a great charmer of women. The gypsy syndrome or something. Those wild eyes. You can bet nine-tenths of those signatures were written in dishwashing liquid. Can’t you just see the poor things in their curlers and damp blue jeans blushing and stammering and scorching the TV dinners while that hypersexed aging adolescent lounged in the kitchen doorway looking sullen and rubbing his crotch?”

  “You’re forgetting why he was there,” Dave said. “They’d have to know he was bent.”

  “Women never believe that,” Nowell scoffed. “Each of them harbors a secret conviction that men are only homosexual because they haven’t met the right woman—herself, of course. Cliff knows that and he uses it.”

  “It didn’t help,” Dave said. “Ben Orton wasn’t wearing curlers.”

  “I warned Cliff.” Nowell watched Dave hunch over the steel lighter to start a cigarette in the sea wind. “On that interview. And later.”

  “So Rodriguez says.” Smoke from the cigarette blew away thin and quickly. Dave pocketed the lighter. “You were there Saturday morning. Early. Telling him to cancel the demonstration. Rodriguez says you grabbed the petitions to tear them up. There was a fight. You rolled around together on the floor.”

  Nowell showed neat, feral little teeth. “I wasn’t hurt. I’m not big but I’m wiry.”

  “You’re also over forty,” Dave said.

  Nowell shrugged. “It’s not my way of solving problems. It’s Cliffs. But he’s not built for it and he’s not prepared. I was a commando in the U.S. Army. If Rodriguez hadn’t been there, his friend would have gone to the hospital.”

  “But you don’t hate him,” Dave said dryly.

  A tall, fleshy young man in a red chef’s hat and a red chef’s apron came fussily onto the terrace, wheeling a round, red enamel barbecue outfit. “Yawl gonna be ready to eat in an hour?” he asked the air. He had a loud voice but Nowell acted as if he hadn’t heard. A yellow and black sack of charcoal leaned against a stack of tiles. The aproned man picked it up. “They ever gonna finish this roof?” Maybe he didn’t expect an answer, because he made a lot of noise emptying briquettes into the belly of the grill. “Did yawl call ’em?”

  “Shut up, Harv,” Nowell said without turning.

  “Dick, I told you I’d call ’em.” Harv moved with wiggles and flounces. He set the sack back in place. “All you have to do is say for me to call ’em and I’ll call ’em.” He poured lighter fluid from a flat can onto the coals. “I declare, with all this junk piled up here, there’s just no room for a person to move.”

  “Harv, shut up,” Nowell said again.

  “How is a person supposed to cook?” Harv bent and took from under the barbecue a cardboard tube printed with kitcheny flowers. A long match came out of this. “If yawl didn’t get your ribs or steaks or chicken on the dot at six”—he struck the match, stood well back, turned away his face, and poked the flame at the coals; the lighter fluid whooshed—“it’d be me yawl would bitch at. Dick, are you listenin’ to me?”

  “I’ll call them tomorrow,” Nowell said. “Now shut up, will you?”

  “Yawl say that ev
ery night.” Harv flapped at the coals with his apron. Smoke swirled up. “Now, if yawl don’t remember tomorrow, I declare I’m just gonna call ’em myself, that’s all.”

  “If you call them, you’ll quarrel with them, and they’ll never come back.”

  “Well, just look here what they did. Spilled all that wet mortar. Dribbles of it all along here. Hard as a rock. Look how ugly that looks.” He coughed in the smoke. “Who’s gonna clean that up? Not me. I’ve got plenty to do around here already.” He fitted a grill over the coals. “And look how they stacked these tiles. They are topplin’ over, Dick.” He bumped one of the stacks hard with a well-padded hip. “One of these days, one of ’em is gonna slip right off. They are heavy. If one of ’em falls on somebody down there, it could kill ’em.”

  “If it falls on that side, it can only kill a ground squirrel,” Nowell said. “Now, as you can see, I have a guest, and I’d appreciate it if you’d shut up.”

  “I’ll get the steaks.” Harv went away.

  Nowell acted as if there’d been no interruption. He said to Dave, “No, I didn’t hate him. You don’t hate a madman. You try to keep him from hurting himself. I went to the nursery that morning to try and stop him making a laughingstock of himself and every other homosexual that walks. That demonstration was going to drop his chances of getting what he wanted to zero.”

  “Where did his troops come from?” Dave asked. “They didn’t look like they belonged here.”