The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “That hillside is loose. My feet kept slipping. I balanced it on a rock. But that’s a telephoto shot. I really held it steadier than that.”

  “The whirring noise,” Dave said.

  “I thought you had me in that shed across from Mrs. Green’s house,” Cecil said. “I nearly pissed.”

  “The Ford van.” Dave stared without seeing at Dick Nowell’s tight little smile and didn’t hear the man’s words. He set his feet on the rug. “You little sneak.”

  “Come on!” Cecil said. “You told me it was my beat.”

  “No—you told me. I should have listened.” He stood up. Too fast. It made his head hurt. “There are some pills in my shaving kit,” he said. “Get them for me, please.” Grimacing, he bent to switch off the set, then changed his mind. He straightened up carefully and Cecil put a damp glass into his hand.

  “How many?” he said, and, when Dave held up fingers, shook two into his palm. “How come antihistamine?”

  “It’s a wine headache.” Dave put the pills into his mouth and washed them down with water from the glass. “Wine is rich in histamines. That’s why you get wine headaches. Easiest headaches in the world to cure.” He gave back the glass. “You, on the other hand—”

  “It’s all true,” Cecil said.

  “It would he just as true if you hadn’t taken pictures of it,” Dave said.

  He stood among the drooping branches of the old pepper tree on the stoop at Ophelia Green’s, leaning a hand on the doorframe, talking to an old black screen. Then there was the stoic, high-cheekboned face of Ophelia Green. Then came her words: “Just an insurance man, is all I know. I can’t afford any insurance. Nothing about my son. I don’t know anything about it.” And the door with the cracked pane closed.

  Daisy Flynn looked out at the naked pair of them and said something about a Channel Ten Latenews Exclusive. And there was a poorly lit shot of the little green car in its grave of green vines, and words about the car being registered to Benjamin J. Orton. “On tomorrow’s morning news, KSDC-TV expects to bring you an interview with David Brandstetter on the purpose of his—” Dave shut the set off.

  “You want to take the tape recorder out from under the bed now?” he said. “Bending makes my head hurt.”

  “Shit.” Cecil jerked his own head—so hard it made the whole slender length of him jump. “What kind of creep do you think I am?”

  “The kind that only does his job,” Dave said.

  “Like you,” Cecil jeered. “Oh, yes. Don’t try to—”

  The telephone rang. Cecil looked at it scared. Young and bare-assed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something else scared Dave. He saw the shadowy hospital room. He saw Carl Brandstetter’s big, handsome head over against the bars of the high bed. He saw a nurse untape the wires from the stilled hands, pull away the oxygen tubes from the face. He saw orderlies in rumpled white wheel in a shiny trolley. To make himself stop seeing, he went and picked up the phone.

  “I didn’t know who you were.” The words came slurred. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to see it on the news?” False teeth rattled. “Thought we were friends.”

  “Smith?” For a second, Dave held the receiver away and stared at it. “Is this Tyree Smith?”

  “I could have told you who killed the son of a bitch,” Smith said. “All you had to do was ask me.”

  “You told me,” Dave said. “Mrs. Orton—remember?”

  Something banged the phone at Smith’s end. A glass? Bottle, more likely. “You don’t want to pay”—Smith belched—“too much attention to my dramatic improv—” He backed off and tried the word again. “Improvisations.”

  “You mean she didn’t threaten him?”

  “Way I told you,” Smith said. “But, face it—she couldn’t step on an ant.” The banging happened again. He must have dropped the receiver. It swung on its wire against the glass of the lonely booth under the eucalyptus trees. Then Smith had it again. “My car’s missing. You come here.”

  “That newscast was stale,” Dave said. “I’m off the case now. The police are handling it. Phone them.”

  “You know better than that,” Smith said.

  “Look,” Dave said, “it’s late. Can’t this wait till—”

  There was a clatter and the receiver hummed in Dave’s ear. He set the phone down and picked up his pants. “You’re wrong. I never slept with anybody to get an interview.”

  “Neither did I,” Cecil cried.

  “Don’t feel bad.” Dave tottered on one leg, getting into the denims. “You’ll get niftier with more experience.”

  “No, man, please.” Cecil reached out. “Come on. It wasn’t like that.” Tears glistened in his eyes. “I would have followed you if there wasn’t any story. I would have been waiting here like I was.”

  “But there is a tape recorder.” Dave zipped his fly.

  “In the van,” Cecil said desperately, “in the van.”

  Dave untangled the denim tunic from the sheets and blankets. “In case I had anything to say.” He pulled the tunic on over his head. “In a good mood.” He sat on the bed and reached for his shoes. “In the morning.”

  “No.” Cecil dropped to his knees in front of him. “You are wrong, wrong, wrong.” He tried to work the clasp of the denims. “Let me show you.”

  Dave caught his wrists. “You’re only making it worse.”

  Cecil sat back on his heels. Crying like a child. “What can I do? You want me to say I love you? All right—I love you. Sounds like some stupid song. This is real. When I saw you up on the mountain this morning, talked to you—it had to happen, man. I had to get it on with you. Christ, can’t you understand?”

  Dave said, “You should stop talking.”

  “I can’t talk to you, I can’t touch you, what do you want?” Cecil jumped up. “Use your brains.” He flung out an arm at the dark television set. “If it was like you say, why would I turn on the news for you to see what I did? You were asleep, man. You’d never have seen it. Maybe I did wrong. Looks like it. But it never crossed my mind you’d take it like this. That’s how come I woke you up and showed you.” His hands were out, begging. “Didn’t I show you?”

  Dave stood up wearily. “Come here,” he said. Cecil trembled in his arms. He stroked the sleek, long back. He gently kissed the mouth that was salty with tears. “Put on your clothes,” he said. “I have to go someplace, and if I try to drive myself, I’ll fall asleep.”

  13

  HE WOKE WHEN THE ungiving little car began to jolt over potholes in the road through the eucalyptus grove. The crunch of peeled bark and dry seedpods under the tires was loud in the midnight silence. Twigs snapped. He straightened stiffly in the bucket seat, rubbed the back of his neck, worked his tongue around in a dry mouth. The steel and glass of the phone booth glinted in the headlights for a second. And here was the wedge of bare ground. With the dash lights in his eyes, he couldn’t make out the campers under the trees, but there in the headlight glare was Tyree Smith’s trailer on the point. Its door hung open.

  “We’re here,” Dave said. Cecil pushed the brake pedal. The car came to a halt, tilted in a rut. Cecil switched off the engine, and the thud and splash of surf reached them. Dave unbuckled his seat belt and climbed out. Cecil cut the headlights. “No,” Dave said. “Leave those.” Cecil switched the headlights on again. Dave walked off. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  He climbed bent aluminum steps and put his head in at the door. The smell was of mildewed clothes and moldy food—no change in that. But he didn’t hear snoring. He pawed around for a light switch and there didn’t seem to be one. He stepped inside and flicked his cigarette lighter. The flame showed him an empty bunk. “Smith?” he said. To nobody. He went down the steps and squinted across the acre. Nothing moved. The big trees rustled in the cold breath of the sea. He walked around the trailer. The footing was bad. He twisted an ankle. He crouched. Under the trailer the lighter showed him beer cans, blown wrappers, weeds. He put the ligh
ter away, brushed sand off his hands. “Smith?”

  Somewhere Cecil said, “Shit. Oh, shit.”

  Dave got to his feet. The headlights showed the boy’s long legs in yellow jeans. He was standing on the point. “What is that?” He sounded scared. “Down there.” Dave stumbled to him. Cecil gripped his arm. The long fingers pinched. “Man, what is that?”

  The black tide gulped and hissed around the rocks. And something floated on it, white and shifting. “That,” Dave said, “is a sad old man in a sad old linen suit. He was tired of starting over. Help me down there.”

  But when he got his rope soles planted on two rocks, Smith was still out of his reach. The headlight beams shot off to sea above his head. They only made it darker down there. The rocks were black to start with. He bent this way, that way, groping out for handholds. His legs were spread too wide. A bottle kept clinking. He couldn’t see it.

  “I better come down,” Cecil said.

  “Never mind,” Dave said. “The police will have a grappling hook. Help me back up.”

  They came without sirens but there was no way not to hear them. Rusty manifolds roared, valves clattered, a bent fan blade sang against a radiator. Their headlights flickered among the ragged tree trunks. They jounced on squeaky springs across the ruts and rocked to a halt beside Dave’s rental car, red lights blinking with sleepy menace on grimy white roofs. Four pale uniforms stepped out. The men wearing them were young. One was Jerry Orton. They hadn’t brought a grappling hook. They used ropes and they weren’t good at it. Right away, one of them fell in. He slogged disgustedly back to his car, where he wrapped himself in a blanket and sat hunched up, trading talk with a radio that hissed and crackled.

  Under the hulking blackness of the trees, lights went on in one of the campers. A gray woman and a bald man, both in new bathrobes, climbed out and stood close together, watching. From the next camper, a pair of plump young people—long-tailed plaid flannel shirts, lard-white legs—came out, peered with pinched, unbelieving faces at the shouts and movement in the headlight glare on the point, and went back inside. A small dog bolted out of the third camper, streaked across the open ground, yapped hard at the uniforms, and turned and scooted for the camper again with its ears laid back. A woman’s voice said, “Bad dog!” and a tinny door slammed.

  They emptied the water out of Smith but it didn’t help. He lay on his back now in the weeds, roped under the shoulders, his bones showing sharp through the wet, white suit. His teeth were lost. His jaw wouldn’t hold his mouth closed. His mouth was a soft black hole. His wet white hair lay all but transparent on the delicate skull. Next to it, one of the uniforms set down an almost empty vodka bottle. Dave stood out of the way as he’d been ordered to, back by the rental car. Cecil sat on the fender and shivered in a thin yellow windbreaker. And suddenly the bald man in the new bathrobe was with them.

  “He was always drunk,” he said. “Staggering around out here singing all night. Wife and me couldn’t sleep.”

  “Look at it this way,” Dave said. “Neither could he.”

  Cecil said, “Tired of starting over?”

  “He had talent,” Dave said, “and no one noticed.”

  “Not for singing,” the bald man said and walked off.

  A car arrived that was not like the police cars. It was wide and new and hardly made a sound. It was a Mark V painted dark metallic gold. A man in a white Stetson got out of it with a doctor’s bag. He wore big wire-frame glasses and bushy sideburns. His Levi’s were saddle-worn and his cowboy boots were clotted with manure and straw. He knelt by what was left of Smith. After a busy minute, he said something to Jerry Orton that made both of them laugh. Orton walked around the big car and opened the trunk. The man in the Stetson picked Smith up as if he were sticks and straw and carried him to the trunk and laid him in it. He slammed down the lid. The wind had picked up. Whatever he shouted as he got into the car was blown away. The broad back of the car had many red lights. They winked out one by one among the trees. The wet boy kept battling the static on his radio. One of the dry ones coiled the ropes, levered up the bent lids of the patrol-car trunks, and dropped the ropes inside. The third boy climbed into the trailer and used a flashlight.

  Jerry Orton came to Dave. He seemed to do fine without sleep. His childlike blue eyes were clear, his shave was close, every short golden hair on his head was in place. His uniform was crisp. “I want an explanation,” he said.

  “Years ago,” Dave said, “a friend called me at night. I went back to sleep. When I got to his place next morning, he was lying in a bathtub and all of his blood was in the water.”

  “Not about Smith,” Orton said. “He got drunk and fell off there. And he wasn’t a friend of yours. His kind don’t have friends. I don’t care about him. Crazy old drunks are always dying on the beach. I care about my wife and mother and sister.” Orton looked at Cecil. “Okay, kid, the excitement’s over. You can go now.”

  Cecil looked at Dave. Dave nodded an eighth of an inch. Cecil slid down off the fender, got behind the wheel of the rental car, started the little motor, backed the car in a half circle, and drove it away through the trees.

  Orton said, “Does Medallion Life Insurance Company know you’re out of your mind?”

  “You can ask them tomorrow at nine,” Dave said.

  “Because,” Orton said, “the things you told my wife tonight are insane. My father prowling around in hippie clothes and dark glasses with marijuana in his pocket, for God’s sake! My sister running away with a jigaboo convict, pretending to be kidnapped. A ransom note in my father’s closet. My sister’s brand-new car down in a ravine.”

  “Have you looked in that closet?” Dave asked.

  “Frances phoned my mother. She looked. There’s nothing in there but my father’s uniforms and two suits.”

  Dave listened to the sea splash on the rocks.

  “My father wouldn’t wear out shoe leather hunting for a man just released from Soledad. He’d go through channels. I’ve had the department phoning Lester Green’s parole officer. Last I heard, he wasn’t home, but we’ll keep trying.”

  “George Anderson,” Dave said. “He’ll tell you Lester is at his mother’s place. That’s what he told your father, and your father went there looking for Lester.”

  “Is that what Mrs. Green said?” Orton asked disgustedly. “Because if she did, I know exactly why. It was what you wanted to hear. That’s how she is. A very old-fashioned black lady. ‘Don’t cross the white man boss.’ You leaned on her—don’t say you didn’t.”

  “What about the marriage license?” Dave asked.

  “My father’s got friends on the Sacramento force,” Orton said. “One of them will check the state records tomorrow. But I can tell you now—there won’t be one. It’s all in your mind. Why would she want to marry Lester Green?”

  “To spite your father,” Dave said.

  Orton barked a laugh. “You don’t know Lester. I’ve known him since he was four years old. He was scared of his own shadow then. He never changed. He knew how my father felt about blacks. I don’t care what Anita would do. Lester Green wouldn’t.”

  “Then why did he end up in jail?”

  “He was caught with a stash,” Orton said.

  “What’s Anita’s car doing by his mother’s house? It’s finals week. Why isn’t she at college?”

  “We went and looked in that ravine,” Orton said. “There’s nothing down there but wild cucumber vines.” Orton squinted at Dave. “Did you really think you could get away with this kind of harassment? Is Medallion that tight for money?”

  “You had to drag that car out with a wrecker,” Dave said. “Unless you know of an auto-parts supplier open all night. The distributor head for that car is in my motel room. I not only have a witness that the car was in the ravine this afternoon, this whole area saw it there on the late news. And heard it was registered to your father.”

  “Pictures can be faked.” There was a sharp cry. A gull swooped close to th
eir heads. It beat its wings for a second in the glare of the patrol-car headlights, then vanished in the dark. “So you’ve got Daisy Flynn in your pocket. What else is new? You’re male and you’re trying to smear Ben Orton. Naturally, she’d go for that. Believe me, viewers aren’t going to take it seriously. Wait here.” Orton walked to the car where the radio was squawking. He spoke to the boy wrapped in the blanket. The boy rolled up the window. Orton came back.

  Dave said, “Your mother drove by Ophelia Green’s house this afternoon. When she saw me, she hurried off. Why?”

  “Ophelia Green doesn’t have a telephone. My mother’s housekeeper is sick. Ophelia worked for us years ago. Mom thought she might be willing to help out a few days.” Orton snorted. “Sure she hurried off. She’d had enough of you.”

  “Your father wore those hippie clothes,” Dave said. “To the natural-foods place. He offered that pouch of marijuana to anybody who could lead him to Lester Green.”

  “Don’t believe those freaks. They hated my father.”

  “He didn’t burn down the underground paper to keep Eddie Suchak from printing the truth about what happened to Lester Green and why?”

  “Be glad nobody else heard you say that,” Orton said. “And listen to me and listen to me good. My father was the law in this town. My father would never break the law. No matter what it cost him personally. You wouldn’t be able to understand this but I’m going to tell it to you anyway—Ben Orton was an honest man, decent and upright and moral. And that was how he raised me and that’s why you make me sick.”

  “While you were up in that canyon with your wrecker,” Dave said, “did you happen to stop in at Mrs. Green’s and have a chat with Anita and Lester? I left word with your wife that I thought that might be a nice idea.”

  “They’re not there,” Orton said.