The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “What about magazines?” Dave asked. “With words clipped out of them to make up an authentic-looking kidnap ransom note just like on TV?”

  “I told you—Ophelia Green is an old-fashioned black lady. She can’t read. What would she want with magazines?”

  “Didn’t your father tell you,” Dave asked, “tampering with evidence is wrong? Wrecking motel rooms? Slashing tires?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I can produce film of one of your officers slashing the tires of my car. Early this afternoon. At the Bayfront Motel. He was wearing shades but I think it was the one in the trailer.”

  Orton turned and shouted “Thomson” into the dark.

  The boy with the flashlight appeared in the doorway of the trailer. Orton motioned to him. He came down the bent steps, shut the trailer door, and crossed the rough ground. “Jesus, what a pigpen,” he said. “There’s no point in going through that junk. Just shovel it out, is all.”

  “Would you explain to this man about those slashed tires this afternoon? He owns the car.”

  “You should have reported that, sir,” Thomson said gravely. “I was sure you would or I’d have looked you up right then. What happened was, I saw someone acting suspicious in the motel garage. I parked my car and got out to investigate. He saw me coming and ran. I chased him and lost him. I went back to the car where I’d seen him. I inspected it for damage or signs of attempted break-in.”

  “What make of car was it?” Orton asked.

  “A new Electra. Silver. The tires were slashed. I took the license number. I filed a report.”

  “I believe every word,” Dave said.

  Thomson struggled to keep a straight face. “Is that all?” he asked Orton. Orton said it was, and Thomson grinned at Dave the way he’d grinned from his patrol car that afternoon and went back to the trailer. Orton turned to Dave.

  “I told you this morning,” he said, “your only business in La Caleta was to get my mother her insurance check.”

  “I can’t do that,” Dave said. “Not if she conspired in your father’s death, and I think she did.”

  “You broke into her house. I can lock you up for that.”

  “You can’t prove it,” Dave said.

  “You can sit in jail a long time while I try,” Orton said. “Only I don’t want you in jail. I don’t want you anyplace around here. Where I want you is back in Los Angeles. You go now, tonight. If you don’t you’re going to hate yourself in the morning.”

  “Goodbye,” Dave said, and walked toward the trees.

  The plastic glasses of wine glinted dimly on the pale rectangle of the chest under the splintered mirror. So did the wine bottle. So did the drop-jeweled glass that had held the water with which he’d washed down the pills. The torn loaf of bread squatted there on its flattened paper sack. But the manila envelope with the retouched photo of Ben Orton was gone. And so was the Gremlin distributor head. From the closet, where curved fragments of the broken lamp base lay white and sharp in the dark, Dave took his suitcase, opened it on the tousled bed, and began to empty the drawer where Cecil had neatly folded his clothes.

  “I hope,” he said, “you weren’t planning on entering the film you took today in the Cannes festival. Because I don’t think it’s going to be around even long enough for a reshowing on the morning news.”

  Cecil brought Dave’s shaving kit from the bathroom. “If you expect me to ask you what you’re talking about, forget it.” He laid the kit on the bed and got the suit from the closet where he’d hung it. “Where you going?”

  “If you’ll drive.” Dave said, “to Los Angeles.”

  “Whither thou goest,” Cecil said, “there go I.”

  “It will be boring,” Dave said. “I’ll be asleep.”

  “It won’t be boring when you wake up,” Cecil said.

  14

  THE STREETLIGHTS DIED AS they drove up Robertson. To the north, hills bulked dark against a smudgy sky. In the empty parking lot, Dave unfolded stiffly from the cramped back seat and crawled out of the little car. The air was cool and moist. There was a hush. Cecil wore black and yellow wet-look shoes with two-inch heels. The noise of the heels echoed off the shopfronts. Garden furniture for sale waited behind wrought-iron fences. Chiffoniers loomed in dusky show windows. A huddle of Victorian dolls in a bowed-glass cabinet blankly witnessed their thirty-thousandth dawn.

  Here were the tall, carved doors of Doug Sawyer’s gallery. Cecil stopped in front of the arched window and gazed at the single painting there, a portrait of Dave. Dave went to the building corner and turned a key in a door. He led Cecil up narrow, walled stairs that he hated, to the yawning, half-furnished rooms over the gallery. His bedroom had French doors that opened on a roof deck jungly with large tropical plants. The room was wide, long, high ceilinged. The bare floor was cold when they stripped and fell into the bed he’d bought big to try to fill up some of the emptiness.

  When the sun came through the French doors it came hot and woke him. Cecil lay far off at the edge of the mattress, face down, an arm hanging limp to the floor. Dave left the bed quietly. He wanted the bathroom. But when he opened the door, there were perfumed steam and Christian Jacques in skimpy red underpants. He stood at the washbasin. Shaving cream was on his face. The hand that held the razor stopped moving. He looked at Dave in the foggy mirror. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Excuse me.” Dave shut the door and went to his room again. Cecil had rolled onto his back. One long, lean, black leg was out of the sheets. Dave sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone from the floor, and dialed the hospital. When Amanda came on, he said, “I’m back in L.A. The doctor was waiting for morning. Did Dad wait too?”

  “He’s fine,” she said. “I mean, not fine, but they’re letting him out of intensive care. He’s over the worst part. He’s going to get better, Dave.” She made a thin sound that wasn’t words. “God—isn’t this a hell of a time to cry?”

  “It’s better than most,” Dave said. “I want to be there but I don’t know how soon I can make it.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” she said. “We both will.”

  “I hope so,” Dave said, and hung up. When he’d undressed, he’d dropped wallet, keys, change, cigarettes, lighter, by the phone. He looked at his watch. He lit a cigarette. Behind him, Cecil made a small, protesting noise. The bed moved. Dave half turned. The sun had beaten on the boy as he slept. He was shiny with sweat. He blinked at Dave, smiled a little, ran a lazy fingertip down Dave’s ribs. “Go back to sleep,” Dave told him. “You’ve hardly started.”

  “You want me to find that woman,” Cecil said.

  “It’s too early yet,” Dave said. “When you’re ready, help yourself to a shower and breakfast. I’ll leave the car. Key’s right here. And a key to this place.” He worked them off their clips. “Do you need money?”

  “No.” Cecil’s eyes fell shut. “Give us a kiss.”

  Dave kissed him. Cecil smiled satisfaction and rolled over again. “Thelma Green,” he said into the pillow. “Registered nurse. Find her home address. Go see it but don’t be conspicuous. Look around for a new lavender Montego.” He recited the license number.

  “Or a red Kawasaki.” Dave patted the hard bump in the sheet made by Cecil’s butt. He went to the closet for a short terrycloth robe. “Sleep well,” he said, and followed coffee smells down awkward halls to the kitchen. Doug was already dressed, complete with tie. He was laying bacon strips in a skillet. “Add three more, please,” Dave said.

  Doug turned. “What did you do—drive all night?”

  “I can meet those appointments for you at the pet shop,” Dave said, “while you take her to the rest home.”

  “Everything’s sold,” Doug said. “Only truck drivers will be coming today. The bike-shop man will let them in. What about your father?”

  “It looks like he may make it,” Dave said. “I didn’t drive. I slept. Somebody else drove. Now he’s sleeping.”

&nb
sp; Jacques came into the kitchen in a jumpsuit of crushed gold velvet open to the navel. A thin gold chain was around his smooth, brown throat. His feet were in sandals. They were handsome feet but he looked wrong without an armload of menus. He said to Dave, “You have a new lover?”

  “A chauffeur.” Doug opened the fridge, put in the bacon package, and took out a box of eggs. “Dave is monogamous.” The toaster bell said ding. “Aren’t you, Dave?”

  “Monogamous?” Jacques took a papaya from a basket, a knife from a drawer, sliced the papaya in two. “Has that to do with black people?”

  “Not quite yet,” Dave said.

  He went back to the bathroom. He showered quickly. He’d shave later. He wanted to sit out there under the rubber trees with them at breakfast. Not to make them uncomfortable. To see how uncomfortable it would make him. Yesterday morning he’d have bet he already knew. Cecil asleep now in his bed suggested he could still surprise himself. Did that ever stop?

  Carl Brandstetter wore new blue pajamas, but this time the color let him down. It made his eyes look faded, and accented the bad blue color of his mouth. Against the hospital pillows and sheets he looked leached out. The silver sheen was gone from his hair—it was just white and old now. A razor had nicked his jawline. He’d never have done that to himself. He had the voice that actors give board chairmen of multimillion-dollar corporations. And managing directors. He was both. But this morning his voice wasn’t like that. The force had gone out of it.

  He said, “If Mrs. Orton covered up for those kids, and then young what’s-his-name, Jerry, covered up for her—Medallion’s off the hook.”

  “If we can prove it.” Dave leaned on the foot of the bed next to a little color TV mounted there. He was gloomy. “But that ransom note is ashes now.”

  “You booted that,” his father said.

  “You were dying,” Dave said. “It distracted me.”

  “Excuses, excuses,” his father said.

  “Carl!” Amanda stood beside the bed in a mock 1927 dress, raspberry color, sash around the hips, loops of long beads, very short skirt. “Dave was with you all night after your attack. He never slept. Then he drove halfway to San Francisco. If he made a mistake—”

  “Take it easy,” Carl Brandstetter said. “He doesn’t make mistakes—not the kind he can’t straighten out. But if I didn’t criticize, he’d think I was sick.” He worked up a smile for Dave. It wasn’t the old mocking grin but it was meant to be. “Forget about the ransom note,” he said. “You aren’t licensed to steal. Breaking and entering was bad enough. Young Orton was right about that. You don’t need the note. Not if you can find those kids.”

  “I’m working on it,” Dave said, “but it’s a long shot.”

  “You’ve made those before,” his father said.

  Across the sunny room, Doug, neat in his suit and tie, leaned on the sill with his back to the wide window that showed the tops of locust trees dense with yellow blossom. He divided his attention between his shoetops and his watch. He said, “Those are the only kind he likes. Two hundred fifty miles or more.” His look at Dave was brief and bleak.

  Dave said to his father, “This is a big city to cover alone. I can’t get police help. L.A. won’t move unless La Caleta asks them to. And La Caleta isn’t about to ask.”

  “Do they think you’ve left for good up there?”

  “My car’s still at the motel,” Dave said, “and I didn’t check out of my room. That may bother them enough to give me time. But once they send for them, those kids won’t open their mouths. We can bring on ten lawyers. The district attorney there belongs to the Ortons—which means the grand jury. No one in Madrone County is going to indict an Orton for anything.”

  Amanda said, “But it was an Orton who was killed.”

  “And they’ve got a suspect they can’t wait to hang. The dead man’s own blue-eyed little girl? Never.”

  “Insular,” Carl Brandstetter said. “I met them, years ago. Homer Nowell and that bunch. When I was married to Helena. We dragged a two-horse trailer all the way to Sangre de Cristo for some palomino show. Ranchers, growers, Cadillacs, Cessnas, five-hundred-dollar cowboy boots. They can get ugly with each other about who has the most silver mounting on a saddle, but I’d judge that if anything threatened any one of them, they’d close ranks.”

  “Was that where we went?” Dave said.

  “That’s right—you were along. Insisted on stopping to look at the fish cannery. Helena didn’t like it. Didn’t like much that wasn’t a horse. She called you The Colt. I’d forgotten that.”

  Dave grinned. “I wondered if she called you Stallion.”

  Carl Brandstetter snorted. “She called me a lot of things toward the end. But never Stallion. No.” Alarm widened his eyes suddenly and he began groping frantically at the side of the bed. Dave knew what for—the oxygen tube he’d torn off when the nurse had left. Now the nurse was back, stout and angry.

  “This has gone on far too long,” she snapped. “Mrs. Brandstetter, I’m surprised at you.” She fished up the waxy tube and taped it firmly across Carl Brandstetter’s upper lip. “This is a sick man with a very tired heart.” She glared at Amanda, at Dave, even at Doug. “Out, please.”

  Dave touched his father’s shoulder. His father caught his wrist, pulled him close. “A thermos of martinis,” he hissed, “and a carton of Benson Hedges.”

  “And in case those don’t do it,” Dave asked, “a gun?”

  “You wouldn’t refuse a dying man’s last request.”

  “Only to keep him alive.” Dave went to the door the nurse was holding open. She was Japanese and her scowl made her look like a demon guarding a Kyoto temple.

  Amanda and Doug were already in the hall. “Don’t do anything reckless,” Carl Brandstetter said.

  “It’s only money, you know. Go carefully with that black boy.”

  “What?” Dave turned. “Who?”

  “The one who killed Orton. Green, isn’t it?”

  “Oh—that black boy,” Dave said. “I will.”

  A wire-mesh fence flared with wine-bright bougainvillea outside one window. Outside the other, a wisteria vine with a twisted trunk thick as a tree’s shaded a patio. On one of the room’s white walls, Doug had hung a big color plate of dogs of the world that used to hang in Sawyer’s Pet Shop. He’d given it a new frame and a new glass. Curtains, bedspread, carpet, the covers on the chairs, were cheerful oranges and yellows. The room still looked institutional. In a new cotton print dress and a white button sweater, Belle Sawyer stood small by the door and blinked at the room through a thick lens with her one bright eye. The other lens was pasted over with cloth. She’d lost an eye to a hawk’s claw years ago. Her hair had always been frizzy. Today it was neatly set and that added to the strangeness. The thing that took away from the strangeness a Utile was that she held a cage with birds in it—two small green parrots with rosy faces and blue rumps. They shrieked and whistled. She looked at Doug and Dave over the cage and said: “I do have my rational times, you know. When I know who I am and where I am. I’m not going to like this place. I want my animals.”

  Doug took the cage from her. “I don’t like it any better than you do.” He set the cage by a window. “But it was the only place where they’d even let the birds in.”

  “Never mind,” she said. “They’re lively.”

  Doug gazed out the window. “You can see the hills.”

  “‘I will lift up mine eyes,’” she said.

  The stout woman with brassy hair who ran the place came out of her office as they passed. “I hope the other guests don’t complain,” she said. “Those birds are terribly noisy.” Inside the office in back of her were artificial flowers and a big artificial portrait of Jesus. Doug looked at it and then up at the hot blue sky. A mockingbird shouted from a television antenna. In the ferny leafage of the wisteria a gang of sparrows quarreled. Doug said to the woman, “Just like the ones out here.” He gave her a smile and turned for the patio entry way. �
��They’re praising God,” he said. In the car he twisted the ignition key and revved the engine angrily. “There’s an instinct in people. Barnyard. One of them begins to bleed, they can’t wait to attack it.” He kicked the brake and jerked the car into traffic. “God damn it—I should have closed the gallery and kept the pet shop running. For her. Till she dies.”

  “This can drag on for years,” Dave said. “The doctor told you. She knows it. She wouldn’t let you.”

  “How could she stop me?” Doug drove two blocks in grim silence and stopped for a light. Shrill little kids in bright colors swarmed over the blacktop of the school playground. Doug said, “The gallery’s nothing but a faggot game. Even if it was making money. The pet shop was her life.”

  The signal light changed to green and he swung the car sharply down a side street.

  “Where are you going?” Dave asked.

  “Back to get her out of there,” Doug said.

  “The pet shop’s gone,” Dave said. “So is the house—remember? Look, Doug, this is old age, illness. Nothing you can fight—not and win. In this kind of bind there are no heroes, no villains. There are only victims.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Doug said dully.

  “You haven’t seen many endings,” Dave said. “In my line of work I’ve seen hundreds. They’re never neat. That place looks decent. It’s nearby. You can visit her.”

  “I’ll be the only one,” Doug said. “A shop like that—your friends come during business hours. Friends? They’ve already forgotten her.” He glanced at Dave. There were tears in his eyes. “You’re a sententious jerk. There are too villains. And I don’t like the role.”

  “Don’t accept it,” Dave said. “It’s miscasting.”

  Doug dodged a bicycle. “And what I hate about it most is that tomorrow I won’t hate it as much. And next week or next month, I’ll hardly remember.” He was crying now.

  “Pull over,” Dave said. “I’ll drive.”

  When they reached the parking lot on Robertson it was nearly full. The rental car was there—still or again. Dave checked his watch. Ten past noon. He walked with Doug up the street past shops now open for business, with peacock chairs, knitted afghans, Franklin stoves set out on the sidewalks in the sun. Music drifted from an open door.