The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

by Joseph Hansen

  “Keyhole Bookshop,” Dave said.

  “Right. And he’s got horses where he lives, in Topanga Canyon. That’s why they arrested him. Don’t you know anything?”

  “I read the police report,” Dave said. “That’s why I’m here. It doesn’t satisfy me.”

  “You? What difference does that make?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars’ difference,” Dave said.

  Under the soot that smeared his face, he turned a pasty color. “You mean you could hold back his life insurance? That’s to put me through college. That’s to keep my mom. She can’t work. She’s handicapped.”

  “I don’t want to hold it back,” Dave said, “but a couple of things are wrong and I have to find out why.”

  “The only thing that’s wrong is he’s dead,” Bucky said. The tears came back. “How could God do that? He was God’s servant He was doing God’s will.”

  “Lon Tooker was in his shop till midnight.”

  The fur boy scoffed. “The creep who works for him says. Anybody who’d work in a place like that—what would they care about lying?”

  “The shop hours are posted on the door,” Dave said. “Noon till midnight weekdays. And if he kept those hours, then he couldn’t have been home to his horses till two or after. Topanga’s a long drive from here.”

  “What’s that mean?” Bucky began shredding another magazine. “My mom didn’t find my dad’s body till she went out to get the Times in the morning.”

  “But the medical examiner says he died between ten P.M. and midnight.”

  “I got home at midnight,” Bucky said, “from basketball practice at the church. He wasn’t there. I would have seen him.” Another wad of glossy paper went into the fire. For a second, a naked fifth-grader looked seductively over a skinny shoulder at Dave, then blackened and vanished. “Lieutenant Barker says the medical examiner could be wrong.”

  “‘Could be’ doesn’t mean ‘is,’” Dave said.

  “He got home, got out of the car to unlock the garage, and Lon Tooker jumped him,” Bucky said. “The stuff from the horses rubbed off Tooker onto him.”

  “Nifty,” Dave said. “Did you hear the struggle? Where do you sleep?”

  Bucky jerked his head at corner windows. “There. I didn’t hear anything. I was tired. I slept hard.” He ripped at another set of pages. “Anyway, what kind of struggle do you think there was? Tooker got him from behind and snapped his neck. You learn how to do that in the Marines. Tooker was a Marine in World War II.”

  “It looks easy in the movies,” Dave said.

  “It happened,” Bucky said.

  “Tooker would have to be fifty-five,” Dave said. “Your father was ten years younger.”

  “He didn’t know anything about fighting,” Bucky said. He poked at the burnt paper and big loose fragments sailed up through the heat like sick bats. They settled up above on the ivy-covered slope. “He was a Christian.”

  “Not a soldier of the Lord?” Dave said.

  “Are you laughing at him?” Bucky turned with the poker in his hand. “What are you? An atheist or a Jew or something? Is that why you don’t want my mom and me to have his insurance money? Because we’re born again?”

  “If he was trying to open the garage door,” Dave said, “where were his keys? They weren’t in his pocket. They weren’t on the ground.”

  “Tooker must have taken them,” Bucky said.

  “He was searched,” Dave said. “So was his shop. His home. His car. They didn’t find those keys.”

  Bucky shrugged and turned back to jab at the fire. “Tooker threw them away someplace. What good would they be to him?”

  “Exactly,” Dave said. “So why take them at all?”

  “Why don’t you get off my case?” Bucky said. “Don’t you think we’ve got enough trouble, my mom and me, without you coming around and—” Down on the street, a car door slammed. The poker clanked again. Bucky turned pasty again. He stared alarm at Dave. “There’s my mom, now. Oh, look, listen—don’t tell her about the magazines. Please.”

  “Maybe you should quit for now,” Dave said. “Put them away. Wait for another chance.”

  “If you don’t say anything”—Bucky retrieved the poker—“it’ll be okay. She won’t come up here. It’s too hard.”

  “Then I’ll go down there,” Dave said.

  The smoke hung caustic in the slanting street. No wind stirred to take it away. It kept crawling down the hillside. It lodged in the shrubbery. A tall, wide-hipped woman came out of the garage where a tan Aspen showed an I FOUND IT bumper sticker. The woman dragged her right foot; a cane hung over her arm. She wore a new tan double-knit pantsuit over a new cocoa-color synthetic shirt. She’d had her hair done. It was iron gray. Effortfully she stretched up for the garage door and dragged it down, clumsily shifting aside just in time for it to miss her. She turned toward Dave and stopped. An eyelid drooped. So did a corner of her mouth. But she got her words out sharply.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  He went to her, spoke his name, handed her his card. “When a policyholder dies by misadventure, we investigate.”

  “Where’s my son?” She looked up. “What’s that smoke?”

  “He’s burning trash,” Dave said. “I’ve talked to him.”

  “He’s only a child,” she said. “You had no right.”

  “I’m not a police officer,” Dave said.

  “What did you talk to him about? What did he say?”

  “That he thinks Lon Tooker killed his father,” Dave said. Across the street, window-fastenings snapped. French doors opened beyond shaggy treetops. “Maybe it would be better if we talked inside.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. “The police have arrested the man. I guess that means the district attorney must have been satisfied he was the right one. Why is it unusual that Bucky should think so?”

  “It’s not unusual,” Dave said. She had to be close to sixty. It wasn’t just that a stroke had left her half paralyzed. Flesh sagged loose beneath her jaw. Her skin was a web of wrinkles. There were liver spots on her hands. Gerald Dawson had married a woman almost old enough to be his mother. Bucky had been a last-chance baby. He said, “But it’s too easy.”

  She gave her head a shake that made the loose lip quiver. “There’s nothing easy about it. Everything about it is hard. Death is hard. Loss is hard. Even for Christians, Mr.”—she glanced at the card—“Brandstetter. God sends these things to test us. But knowing that doesn’t make the tests any easier to bear.” She narrowed the eye whose lid she could control. “What are you doing here? You haven’t brought a check from the insurance company. Have you brought another test?”

  “Where was he that night, Mrs. Dawson?”

  “On the Lord’s business,” she said. “I don’t know the particulars.”

  “Who would know? Someone at the church?”

  She started toward the door, using the cane, dragging the foot “They’ve already said not. Maybe Reverend Shumate.” Keys rattled in her free hand. She clutched at a cypress to haul herself up the short doorstep. She poked the key at the door. “It seems very hard that he should have been killed, going about his Father’s business.”

  Dave said, “At the bank, his statements show he wrote a couple of large checks lately. Do you know why? Are his canceled checks here?”

  “At his office,” she said. “The girl there paid all the bills. It was simpler.” The door swung inward. There was a breath of lemon-scented furniture polish.

  Dave asked: “Why did he have birth-control pills in his pocket?”

  She stopped moving, hand on the door latch. Slowly, painfully, she turned. She twisted her mouth in a wince of disbelief. “What? What did you say?”

  “Among the items the police found in your husband’s pockets—wallet, credit cards, the usual—was an envelope from a pharmacy on the Sunset Strip. And in the envelope was a folder of birth-control pills. The prescription was written to Mrs. Ger
ald Dawson. Would that be right?”

  “The Sunset Strip.” It was only six or eight miles west, across town. But she said it blankly, the way she might name someplace in Afghanistan. Then she didn’t say anything more. She simply kept her gaze on Dave’s face. She seemed stunned.

  He said, “The doctor’s name is Encey. Is he your doctor?”

  Her face twitched. “What? Encey?” Then suddenly answers chattered out of her. “Dr. Encey.” She nodded. “Yes, yes, of course he’s my doctor. That’s right. The pills,” she said. “Yes, of course. Gerald promised to pick them up for me. I’d forgotten. In all the terrible things that happened, I’d forgotten about the pills.”

  “I can understand that,” Dave said.

  “I have a headache,” she said. “It’s this dreadful heat. Excuse me.”

  And the living half of her dragged the dead half inside and shut the door.

  2

  HE DROPPED OUT OF the expensive Hillcrest neighborhood down twisting streets past old apartment courts where doors were enameled bright colors and sported new brass knockers, where windbells hung in the trees, and where lissome young men in swim trunks clipped hedges or soaped down little sports cars at the curbs. Then, another level lower, he passed rickety wood-frame houses in need of paint, where radios blared mariachi music through rusty window screens, and little brown Mexican kids swarmed in yards where no grass grew.

  He braked the Electra at Sunset for a red light. Across the broad curving stream of traffic lay the park with the little lake, the ducks in the rushes, the muggers in the bushes, the sunburned tourists rowing battered little skiffs and peering through Instamatics at the glass skyscrapers beyond the tops of palms. When the light turned green, he swung left, making for Bethel Evangelical Church. But he changed his mind because the door of Lon Tooker’s shop hung open under a red-and-white tin sign, KEYHOLE BOOKS. It took a while to find a tilted street he could swing into and back up out of, but at least there was no parking problem. Except for a corner Mexican grocery, the rest of the flat-roof one-story brown-brick store buildings along this stretch held businesses that flourished only after dark.

  The carpet inside Tooker’s place was thick enough to make it dangerous for anybody with weak ankles. It was gold color. Flocked gold-color wallpaper rose above the bookshelves. Gold-color paint was new on a ceiling from which hung fake crystal chandeliers. Plastic-wrapped magazines lay back at forty-five-degree angles on low shelves. The color printing was sharp but the subjects were monotonous. Spread legs, lace underwear, girls lifting massive breasts while they leered and coaxed. Or youths displaying bulky penises. No little girls. But then, this wasn’t all the stock. A few feet farther on, stairs carried the thick, gold carpet upward between frail wrought-iron railings. Thumps seemed to be coming from there. Dave went up.

  Fake fur covered deep square chairs. On wood-grain Formica coffee tables glistened green bubble-glass ashtrays. Here the shelves were packed—except for those already stripped by the youngster with knobby elbows who was dumping magazines, big picture books, and paperbacks into cartons. He was sweating so hard his shoulder-length blond hair looked as if he’d just brought it out of a swimming pool. He didn’t wear a shirt. Pimples the size of boils flamed across his coat-hanger shoulders. He winced at Dave for a second before turning away again for more books.

  “Ah, Christ, did she leave that door open? Look, dad, we’re closed.”

  “Forever?” Dave asked.

  “You got it.” The boy dumped a stack of magazines into a carton and worked at the carton flaps, tucking one under another, to keep it shut. “No more Keyhole Books.”

  “Not even a going-out-of-business sale?”

  “Mort Weiskopf over on Western’s taking the stock.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Dave dropped into one of the fur chairs. “Money for lawyers?”

  The skinny boy hitched at his pants. “What do you know about it? Where do you come from?”

  “The company that insured Gerald Dawson’s life.”

  “Yeah, the money’s for lawyers. That son of a bitch goes right on making trouble even when he’s dead. You know he came in here with a bunch of potbelly bastards from that church one night and tossed the place? Threw books all over. Dumped paint on the rugs.”

  “That was the time to get the lawyer,” Dave said.

  “We couldn’t prove who it was. They wore masks. I mean, we knew but the lawyer said they had alibis—they got this club at the church, right? They were all there. On their fat knees. Praying. For us sinners.”

  “It could have been six other people,” Dave said.

  “Except Dawson was yapping orders,” the kid said. “Quoting the Bible. Sodom and What’s-its-name? All that shit. It had to be Dawson. Nobody else had a voice like that. High and gravelly, and cracking all the time.”

  “But the lawyer said you couldn’t get him?”

  “Dash, across the street, tried it.” The kid grunted, squatting, heaping up magazines. “The guy who owns the Oh Boy! Lives halfway up the hill. Sees a funny light outside in the middle of the night. Comes out. His VW is on fire. Sitting there in his driveway. On fire all over. He knew it was Dawson and his vigilantes. But no, they were having a meeting, singing hymns. Shit.” He heaved tottering to his feet under a load of coated paper and dropped the load into another carton. “And the cops don’t care, you know? Fag-bar owner’s car burns up. That’s funny. To them that’s funny, right?”

  A young woman in a man’s white shirt that she’d tied under her breasts, and in very small white shorts, stopped at the head of the stairs. She was honey color.

  “We’re closed for business,” she said. She tried to lift the carton the kid had closed, squatting for it, trying to rise up. “Jesus. What’s inside—bricks? We’re not taking the building, are we?”

  The skinny kid didn’t look at her. “You want the cartons half full, say so.”

  “I don’t want them at all,” she said. “This is Lonny’s idea. He gets so panicky.”

  “They lock you up for murder,” the kid said, “it’s probably hard to stay calm. Are you going to load the car or not? You want me to carry, you fill the cartons?”

  She picked up the carton without seeming effort. Her thighs were boyish and hard-muscled. “If he didn’t buy horses, he wouldn’t need money.” She turned with the carton and saw Dave again. “You look like you could afford a couple of overpriced palominos. How about half a dozen? Come on, beautiful. It’s for a good cause.”

  “The seat’s too high off the ground,” Dave said. He got up. “Here. I’ll carry that.” She started to protest and he told her, “It’s for a good cause, right?” Her car was two doors off in a weedy vacant lot between brick walls spray-painted with street-gang graffiti. The car was one of those eighteen-thousand-dollar Mercedes sports models with the roof that dips. The trunk space was limited. She was going to have to make a lot of trips to Western. “The kid says Dawson is the vigilante chief.”

  “We all say so,” she said, “but we can’t prove it. The straights went after the vigilantes when they ripped down the bushes in the park. Pensioners. Housewives with kiddies. They ruined their park to keep the fags out of the shrubbery at two in the morning. At two in the morning, who cares what’s in the shrubbery? And they couldn’t nail them. So what can us pre-verts and smut peddlers expect?” She slammed down the trunk lid.

  “Did your friend Lonny take the short route?”

  She stared. Her eyes were flecked with gold. “What does that mean?”

  “Get fed up waiting for justice?” Dave said. “Eliminate Dawson before Dawson eliminated him? Replacing that kind of carpeting could run into money if you had to do it very often.”

  “You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird’s wings.”

  “Hitler loved dogs and babies,” Dave said.

  “He’s a big, strong guy. He could kill anything alive with his bare hands. A bull, an elephant.”

  Dav
e put a hand over her mouth. “You didn’t say that.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh God. No. I didn’t say it. What I meant was—he’s gentle. A big, soft gentle dreamer. A lover. He loves everything that moves and breathes. He’s dumb as hell but he wouldn’t hurt anybody, let alone kill.” She looked at her watch. “Come on. I have to hurry.”

  Dave trotted after her. It was too hot for that but he did it anyway, shedding his jacket as he ran. At the top of the stairs, he asked the skinny kid, “Was Dawson in here the night he was killed?”

  “Nobody was in. It was a dead night. About five stragglers. But nobody was here after ten. Just Lon and me. We played gin.”

  “Who won?” Dave laid his coat on the stair rail.

  “I can answer that.” The girl had another carton and was halfway down the steps with it. “Lon won. He wins any game you win by getting low points.”

  “She’s right,” the skinny kid said. He patted stacks of paperbacks inside a carton. He stood, and treated himself to a look at a magazine, flapping the sleek, flesh-tone pages over, but not, Dave thought, really seeing the tangles of bodies in the photographs. The kid slapped the magazine shut and tossed it into a carton at his feet. He reached for the cigarette Dave had lighted. Dave passed it to him. The kid blew the smoke out appreciatively. He took another deep inhalation and handed the cigarette back. “You know,” he said, “those creeps are hypocrites, you know?” He tipped his head, frowning. “Is that the right word? Anyway—what I mean—they cream themselves over this crap. They pretend it shocks them, but you can see from the way they lick their lips, they’re practically coming in their pants.”

  “What kind of masks?” Dave asked.

  “Ski masks. I kid you not. They were drooling. They want to look at this stuff like anybody. Only they didn’t have the nerve to walk in and ask for it and pay for it and like that. Oh, no. They toss the place, wreck it, make out all they want is Lon to get out of the neighborhood, see?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “Do I?”

  “Sure you do. We put the stock back on the shelves. And guess what? Some magazines are missing.” The kid snorted a cynical little laugh and reached for Dave’s cigarette again. “Somebody couldn’t control theirself.”