The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “Call tonight?” she said and sounded lonesome.

  “I’d planned on around six,” he said.

  “Maybe he can talk to you then,” she said. “If he’s conscious, he’ll want to talk to you.”

  “I’ll want to talk to him,” Dave said.

  After he’d hung up, he dug the brush and tubes of paint from the jacket of his sweated suit. He slipped from the brown envelope marked KDSC-TV the photo of Ben Orton and laid it on the stingy motel-room desk. He filled another plastic glass with water and sat at the desk to work on the photo, to change Ben Orton’s image, give it a curly longhair look under the slouch-brim leather hat, put mirror goggles on it, paint out the necktie and open the collar. The desk top was white Formica. He mixed his shades of gray on it. When he’d finished, it wiped off easily. He dropped brush and paints into the drawer. He let the photo lie on the desk to dry. And he used the phone again.

  “Pets,” Doug Sawyer’s voice said. He was the neat, gray-haired man Dave lived with in big, awkward, sunny rooms above Doug’s new art gallery on Robertson. But today, as for many days past, he was at his mother’s shop in a gritty, run-down corner of Los Angeles between a bicycle store and a beauty shop. He was selling off the stock to other dealers. Food, bags of kibble, bins of birdseed. Fixtures—cages, fish tanks, counters, racks, refrigerators. While his plump, beaky little mother sat blankly, hands in lap, in the small house in back of the shop where Doug had grown up. Her mind was failing. It was a blood-circulation problem medicine couldn’t do anything about. She’d tried to keep going with the shop, but animals, birds, fish were nothing you could be absentminded about. Or crazy. Doug had his own business to run, but unless he checked on her every day, food and water might not be supplied to the cages. Small lives could go out like matches in a wind. It was far to travel—Los Angeles is wide. And now she’d begun to neglect herself—forgetting to eat, to wash, to go to bed. Twice she’d lost her way on little trips to the supermarket and to the bank. Police had brought her home. On lucid days she tried to be cheerful, but it had begun to frighten her. It had frightened Doug for quite a while.

  “Are you all right?” Dave asked.

  “She set bacon grease on fire this morning,” Doug said. “If I hadn’t got here when I did, the house would have burned. It’s ninety-four degrees in L.A. and people aren’t keeping appointments, and tomorrow I’ll be tied up getting her into the rest home. Where are you?”

  Dave told him and read him the phone number.

  “What does it look like? Will you be gone forever?”

  “Not if a lady keeps lying who has no talent for it,” Dave said. “I saw some pre-Columbian pieces today that would make you drool.”

  “You’re joking. Where? They’re impossible to get, you know that. Since the Mexican government cracked down.”

  “Little gallery here. Big ones. Beauties.”

  “You’re sure? For sale? Not just on exhibit?”

  “I didn’t ask. I’ll check if I have time.”

  “Sure you will,” Doug said. “How’s your father?” And when Dave told him, he asked, “Do you want me to go to the hospital?”

  “If I were there, I’d take Amanda to dinner,” Dave said. “But you’ve got enough problems.”

  “Yours you can run away from,” Doug said.

  “I can’t help him,” Dave said. “Look—I asked you this morning—did you want me to stay?”

  “Forget it,” Doug said. “It’s nerves, it’s the heat.”

  “I’m better off working,” Dave said. “That’s all.”

  “Work, already,” Doug said, and hung up.

  Dave pushed his feet into rope-soled shoes and pulled over his head a denim tunic with white rope laces. He locked the numbered door and carried the photo in its envelope along the deck and down to street level. The silver Electra waited in its numbered slot beneath the building with a half-dozen other cars, but it sat too low. He frowned at the tires. Flat. He stepped to the other side of the car. Again flat. He crouched and ran a hand over the near one. Slashed.

  He stood, turned. Youths passed in baggy, flowered trunks, portering surfboards on their heads. A fat man in a cloth hat led a small girl by the hand. Both of them licked ice-cream cones. Sun flared off cars crowding the curbs. Across the street, one car had a police badge painted on its door. Raising a hand, Dave started for it. And it pulled out. Fast, tires shrieking. In five seconds, it had skidded out of sight around a corner. But Dave’s mind kept a picture. Under his badged cap and dark glasses, the driver had been grinning. Straight at him.

  7

  THE RENTAL CAR WAS small. Each crack in the street jarred his spine. He left the bayfront, looking for and finding side streets of stingy stucco cottages, long unpainted, of dying trees sheltering rusty house trailers deep in brown weeds; business streets of corrugated-iron sheds; shops that dealt in secondhand ship’s tackle or secondhand clothes; a pawnshop; a shop whose doorway loudspeaker laced the sunny air with rock music and in whose dirty windows record albums curled and faded. Two-by-fours were nailed across the doors of the Keyhole Theatre Adult Movies and someone had thrown a rock through the white plastic of the marquee.

  A leathery old woman in a green transparent sunvisor dragged a wire shopping cart filled with sandy soft-drink bottles. A youth with bushy red hair sat with his back against a grapestake fence that enclosed a shrubby green nursery. He was playing a concertina. A girl in a granny dress slept with her head on his shoulder. Beside them leaned a sign in orange marker pen—BERKELRY. A weather-beaten man in a grimy yachting cap clutched a bottle in a paper sack at a round cement table beside a shiny glass-and-Formica hamburger stand that made the neighborhood look even sadder.

  In a corner lot across from it, ribbed boat hulls hove up on warping scaffolds. Beyond them, smoke had blackened a storefront. Plywood with spray-can graffiti had been nailed over the window holes. Above them, a smoked and blistered sign read UNDERWATER PRESS. Next door, gingham cottage curtains hung behind a window lettered NATURAL FOODS CAFE & BAKERY. The little car made a U-turn with a briskness that surprised him. He parked it in front of the café.

  A spring bell jingled when he opened the door. Flowers drawn in colored chalk brightened the walls. There was a good smell of baking. On the gingham-patterned Formica of the square tables lay soiled dishes. Lunch must have been a busy time. Bread was heaped inside an old-fashioned glass showcase at the back of the room. Through the doorway beyond it came a fresh-faced blond girl wrapped in a big white apron. She looked as merry as the chalked flowers. She seemed cheered to see him.

  “Can I help you?”

  “What’s your best bread?” he asked.

  “The seven-grain’s great. Sprouted wheat—that’s like you never tasted. I mean. And our best seller’s carrot bread. See? The orange-colored ones.”

  “I’ll have one of those,” Dave said, and when she rattled open the slide door and took out the loaf and turned to drop it into a sack, he slipped the picture out of its envelope and laid it on the coin-scratched green glass of the counter top. When she saw it the merriment went out of her. She frowned at the picture, frowned at him. He asked, “Ever see that man? Say a week ago Saturday?”

  “Why?” She turned her head, watched him from the corners of her eyes. “Who are you?”

  He laid his business card beside the picture. She read it without touching it. It didn’t make her smile. Dave said, “He had life insurance with us. I need to know who he saw, what he was doing the day he died. He did come in here, didn’t he?”

  “He came in.” A young male with a shaved head and little blue wire-frame glasses stood next to the girl. “He was asking questions. Did we know Lester Green. Did we know where Lester Green was.”

  The girl giggled. “Now you come asking do we know who he was—the man in the picture. And then somebody will come asking about you.”

  Dave glanced at the window. No police car showed itself on the sun-sad street, but he said, “It’s possible,” bec
ause it was. He asked blue glasses, “Did he tell you who he was?”

  “He didn’t want anybody to know. He wore a wig. He wore those mirror shades you can’t see through.”

  The girl smiled wryly. “Hippie threads.”

  “He doesn’t know there aren’t any hippies anymore,” the boy said. “He showed me grass. In a plastic folder. Pouch. Must’ve been six, eight ounces, maybe more. He said to pass the word to my customers—he’d give it all to whoever led him to Lester Green.”

  “To Lester Green for what?” Dave wondered.

  “The bread’s a dollar and a half, please,” the girl said. Dave paid her. She rang the cash register and went into the back. A record began to play quietly from speakers hung in corners. Guitar, a sweet, simple soprano—“You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever…” Ten years ago, wasn’t it? These kids would have been in grammar school. What did it mean to them? Only that there were no hippies anymore?

  “He said he’d heard Lester was out of jail.” Blue glasses brought a yellow molded-plastic bin from behind the counter and began to dump into it the soiled plates and glasses from the tables. “He said Lester used to have good Mexican connections. Laughable.”

  “With dealers in marijuana?”

  “Lester wouldn’t go near it or anybody that had it on them if he knew they had it. He was very righteous.”

  “But he came in here?” Dave cocked an eyebrow.

  “He wouldn’t have. Somebody brought him.”

  “What did this man call himself?” Dave asked.

  “‘Doc,’ but that wasn’t his name.”

  “No,” Dave said. “Do you know his name?”

  The bin was loaded. The boy carried it, jolting and clinking, into the back, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t you?” Water began to splash hard in what sounded like a metal tub. There was a dusty smell of soap powder. The girl sneezed. Blue glasses came out with the empty bin.

  Dave said, “So you didn’t do what he wanted.”

  “Be serious.” The boy was at the front tables now and his voice came back hardened and flattened from the window glass. “I could get what Lester got.” A fork hit the floor and skittered away. He retrieved it. “Wow. It’s hard to get used to. How different life around here is going to be without Ben Orton.”

  “There’s his son,” Dave said.

  Blue glasses snorted. “Without his old man to tell him, he won’t wipe his ass.” He blinked at Dave. “I wonder what it feels like. Having everybody scared to death of you?”

  “Except Anita?” Dave said.

  “Yeah, well, Anita.” The boy dumped more dishes into the bin, frowning to himself. “She wasn’t exactly bright, either. Thought she could get away with anything. It didn’t cost her. It cost Lester. And other people. Let me show you something.” He left the bin on a table and opened the jingle-bell door. He went out into the sunlight. Dave followed. The boy pointed at the smoke-blackened storefront next door. “That was La Caleta’s counterculture paper. We needed it. Have you seen the La Caleta Tide? The Sangre de Cristo Bulletin? You’d think Harding was still president. Oh, we’ve got Daisy Flynn. She can be sarcastic sometimes. The rednecks and the golden-agers hate her. But she can’t really say much. The silver-saddle bastards that own the station won’t let her. When it first started, she wrote a column for Underwater.” He nodded at the smoked storefront. “About twice. They told her, give it up or lose your job. She gave it up.”

  “How long did the paper last?” Dave said.

  “Not long. Maybe a year. Then it was going to print what happened to Lester Green. The real story. And that night the place burned up.”

  “So the story never came out?” Dave said.

  “The guy was a paraplegic. Vietnam. Eddie Suchak. Hell, able-bodied people couldn’t fight Orton. Eddie must have figured he was lucky not to have burned up with his press. He split. Never heard of him again till they had it on the news. Ten days, two weeks ago maybe. He died. Some VA hospital up in the Bay area.”

  “What was the real story?” Dave asked.

  “All he told me was, he had documentary proof.” Blue glasses went back into the café and began clearing the last tables while Dave watched. “He was in here for supper, like always, and he said he’d gotten this Xerox. From Sacramento. Some state office. He was laughing and rubbing his hands, you know? He was going to wipe out Ben Orton with one column of print. Shit.”

  “Who did you tell?” Dave asked.

  The boy swung around and stared at him. “What?”

  “You don’t think that fire was an accident. You think Ben Orton was back of it. You have steady customers. You talk freely to me. I expect you talk freely to them. Somebody had to tell Ben Orton. How else would he know?”

  “Jesus,” the boy whispered.

  “That must have been quite a document,” Dave said.

  The boy looked sulky and went off with the bin of dirty dishes. When he came out, he said, “Nobody that hangs out here would go to Ben Orton. Ben Orton was feared, man. It made everybody very nervous when Anita started coming around all the time. When that car of hers would pull up at the curb, there’d be groans, you know? She was into revolution, right? Like a lot of rich kids. We didn’t lay back till she went off to join Cesar Chavez, the farm workers. Only it didn’t last. Her old man dragged her home. Then she started coming in with Lester.”

  “Did that relax anyone?” Dave asked.

  “Like something ticking in a briefcase. By luck, it didn’t go off here. It went off when they stopped Lester’s Kawasaki and untaped that lid of grass from under the fender.”

  “Did she come back after that?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think La Caleta is a small town,” Dave said, “and Sangre de Cristo isn’t that far off and isn’t that much bigger. Ben Orton had to know his daughter was going with a black boy. What suddenly made him interfere? What was it your editor friend next door had?”

  “You want me to guess?” blue glasses asked.

  “I don’t see how you can miss,” Dave said.

  The boy drew a breath. “Marriage license,” he said. “But nobody gets married anymore. That’s crazy.”

  “That’s why it fits so well,” Dave said.

  Inside the grapestake fence, the humidity climbed. Long ribbons of flat green plastic, shiny as new snakes, hung in lazy swags across redwood beams and dripped water on boxed trees and shrubs below. The smell of earth was thick. Farther on, high yardages of cheesecloth bellied white above flats of seedlings. In a wide gravel square, cacti soaked up sun. In a wheelbarrow, cropped rose canes stuck thornily out of burlap-bundled root clumps.

  Dave came to a neat, flat-roofed shed building with big new front windows. Planter boxes, fresh and empty, were piled around it, big heavy terra-cotta pots, glazed pots, garden figurines. Inside, canaries sang among hanging ferns. Shelves held bottled plant food and insect killer, bright colored watering cans, bundles of cotton gardening gloves. New trowels, rakes, hoes hung against the wooden walls. Sacked potting soil and fertilizer banked a counter. But nobody tended the store.

  The acre grew jungly toward the back. He passed a battered pickup truck without side window-glass and found, almost hidden by bamboo that rustled high and sunlit in a breeze he couldn’t feel, a shingle-sided cottage with deep eaves and a low porch. The door stood open and inside a slim brown kid in ragged shorts lay on his stomach on the floor using a telephone. Beyond him, a silent color television set showed tear-glossy soap-opera faces. It was a big set and looked new.

  “That is the most fucked-up way to run a business I ever heard of,” ragged shorts said, and slammed down the receiver. He rolled over and sat up. He was one of those pretty boys who grow old fast. His skin was toughening. His jaw hinges were developing knobs. His eyes had begun to back off under too much brow ridge. They saw Dave. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Does something have to be the matter?” Dave asked.

  “Ar
ound here it does.” He stood up. “You want some help? See the old man.”

  “The old man is across the street at Jack in the Box, drinking Thunderbird out of a paper sack,” Dave said.

  Ragged shorts muttered, “Cabrón.”

  “There aren’t any customers,” Dave said. “I didn’t come to buy. I came to talk to Hector Rodriguez.”

  Light flickered in the shadowed eyes. “What about?”

  “Cliff Kerlee. Why he’s in jail. Are you Rodriguez?”

  “Who wants to know?” He had work-hardened hands. They made fists like clubs. Dave told him who he was. The fists relaxed. With an amazed shake of his head and a sad laugh, he left off blocking the door. “Come in. Man, you are a hard man to find, you know?” He bent for the phone and set it on a low white wrought-iron table whose glass top was strewn with gaudy seed catalogues. “Come in, sit down, Mr. Brandstetter.” There was a beanbag chair. There were two chairs of green canvas slung in iron frames. With the table and television set, they were all the furniture there was. Against a wall where two strips of flocked crimson paper had been pasted up lay a big roll of carpet that looked new. Unopened gallon cans of paint waited beside it. In the center of a ceiling where cracks had lately been patched, a bright little crystal chandelier tinkled in the same impalpable breeze that moved the bamboo. Rodriguez switched off the television set. “Hay mucho calor,” he said. “Hot. Will you join me in a beer?”

  “Sounds good, thanks.” Dave sat in one of the sling chairs. Rodriguez went through an empty dining room where a built-in sideboard had diamond-shaped glass panes. He pushed out of sight through lumberyard-bargain louver doors that hadn’t been painted. Dave called after him, “It had to be television. You heard about me on the news—right?”

  “I telephoned Channel Ten.” Rodriguez appeared with sweaty brown bottles and slender glasses with too much gold filigree. “Soon as I could. People came, and the old man is no use. It was perhaps half an hour. You had been there but you had gone.” He handed Dave one of the flossy glasses and filled it. The beer was dark, the label Mexican. He set the bottle on the floor by Dave’s chair and folded into the beanbag chair and filled his own glass. He said, “I telephoned your company in Los Angeles. It was a hassle getting the number from the operator and all that. You dial and dial. And then”—he drank from his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand—“they didn’t know where you were. They said they would call me back. That’s why I am here.” He gestured with the glass. “Out there is much work to do. Without Cliff, twice as much. But I waited here for them to call. And they did. Just now. They still don’t know where you are.”