The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of
A Dave Brandstetter Mystery
Joseph Hansen
For George and Patti Hodgkin and their genius loci
1
I
N 1964 A TIDAL
wave knocked down the shacks next to the abandoned fish cannery at La Caleta, and the wreckage the Pacific didn’t take, bulldozers did. The cannery itself was strong and it remained as built, one end on the beach, the rest over the water, its paint scaling under a rusty corrugated-iron roof. Boards had dropped out of its side decks but the pilings were upright and still supported a winch crusty with old salt. A chainlink fence topped by sagging barbwire enclosed the cannery grounds,
NO TRESPASSING
signs hung off the fence. Double gates fastened with a shiny chain and padlock cut off the road down to the loading bays. Weeds had broken the blacktop, and sand had half smothered it.
Dave could remember when the place functioned. Back before the war, back when he was a kid. Mexican people lived in the vanished shacks and worked in the cannery. You could see it from the highway. On trips north, ignoring the complaints of this or that young stepmother, he used to make his father stop the Marmon, the Auburn, the Lincoln Zephyr, so he could stand at the road edge and watch the wide, wallowing boats unload their cargo, slippery silver in the sun. There would be strong stinks of raw fish, of fish cooking, the rumble of the canning machines above the roar of surf, the wind-torn shouts of fishermen and dockers. It was a long time ago.
He was middle aged now. His father was an old man, maybe as old as he was going to get. He lay this morning on a high bed in a gray room whose coral-color door was marked
INTENSIVE CARE
. A triangle of foggy plastic masked his nose and mouth. Thin tubing snaked from the mask to an oxygen tank. Frail wires were taped to the bruised backs of his hands. They fed into metal boxes at the head of the bed. One of the boxes had a blue disk across which a shaky line of lavender scribbled news of his torn heart. On the other box an orange light winked, winked, stammered, winked out, winked on again.
All night, leaning on the foot of the bed, Dave had watched the lights, while girls in starchy white moved in and out of shadow, making notes, counting the sick pulse. Twice they had put Dave out in the hall to sit on a chair of coral-color molded plastic and read his watch and smoke his mouth dry. When he’d gone back in, nothing had changed. Once, his father’s head had lain against the bed’s guard bars. He’d straightened it on the alien pillows.
At six-thirty this morning, when Amanda appeared—in jeans and boots, turtleneck jersey, Navajo necklace, cowhide shirt-jacket—Dave left. If his father woke, he’d be as happy to see his new young wife as his aging homosexual son. Maybe happier. If he didn’t wake, he’d never know the difference. There was nothing Dave could do. And he hated the helplessness. He went to work.
The road he now drove skirted the cannery fence, cut into a bluff, climbed from the beach and curved off, so that the cannery went out of sight. The road was private. It led to a 1920s Spanish colonial house of white stucco with red tile roofs. The house stood alone among trees and looked down at a quiet cove of the rocky little bay that gave La Caleta its simpleminded name. The house had been built by the cannery owner. After the war finished off his business, it had stood empty for years. Ben Orton had bought it in the early fifties, lived in it, raised a son and daughter in it, died in it. By violence, of course. Orton was a rough man.
Dave left the car by the road under a big oleander drunk with pink blossom. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he climbed a curved driveway edged by whitewashed rocks and flowering ivy geranium. A double garage made a wing of the house. One of its doors was up. A pale lavender Montego waited inside. Sun glared off the house windows. They were set in wide arches and the curtains were drawn. Deep in a smaller arch he found a door with rough black iron hardware. He used the knocker. Hollowness echoed beyond it but he knew she was home. He’d telephoned ten minutes ago just to hear her say hello.
He stepped out of the doorway shadow to look between the slim trunks of lacy eucalyptus trees to the bay below. It was an assortment of blues. Tangled rafts of brown kelp floated there. Sea otters lived among these. He looked for the bob of a sleek head or for a gull darting low over the surface. Otters were sloppy feeders; a gull or two always hung around for scraps. He’d need binoculars to be sure but he doubted there were otters today. The gulls soared high and lazy in the warm blue air. He heard heel taps, the rattle of a latch, and he turned to the open door.
She was plump, blond, forty-five, with dark patches under her eyes that said she’d been sleeping badly. Television crews had filmed Orton’s funeral. Clips had made the six o’clock news even 250 miles down the coast in Los Angeles. Uniforms, flags, gun salute. Orton had once been a Marine. On the nineteen-inch diagonal screen his widow had worn this dress, black, simple, set off by a single strand of pearls. Her hair had looked newly set. It still did. Her lipstick was muted pink and matched the enamel on her nails, except she’d been picking at the enamel, chipping it. Her eyes were round and. blue and they widened at him.
He said, “Mrs. Orton? Brandstetter—Medallion Life.” He handed her a card that she didn’t look at. She kept the little girl eyes on him. They looked wary. He explained, “Your husband’s life was insured with us.”
She said bitterly, “That didn’t save it.” Her voice was childlike too, and the words it had spoken seemed to shock her. “Excuse me. I’m not myself.” She drew breath, turned up the corners of a sweet mouth. “What may I do for you?”
“In cases where a policyholder’s death is not from natural causes, we make an investigation.”
“Investigation.” Her laugh said she thought he was joking. “My husband was chief of police here. There’s been a thorough investigation.”
“I read the police reports,” Dave said, “this morning.”
“And the arrest report? The man who killed Ben is locked up, Mr.—” she glanced at the card, “Brandstetter. The case is closed.”
“It looks that way,” Dave said. “But I have to follow routine.” He gave her a half smile. “A policeman’s wife must be familiar with that word. I can’t copy reports. I have to do my own digging and come up with my own answers.”
“But it seems such a waste of time.” She folded the card, making the crease sharp with her nails. “What can one man expect to find that a whole police force couldn’t?”
“Probably nothing.” He shrugged amiably. “That’s the usual outcome of routine, isn’t it?” He coaxed her with another smile and took a step forward. “I’ll try not to take up much of your time.”
“Oh, time.” Her mouth twisted bleakly. “What have I got but time?” But she didn’t retreat and ask him in. She tilted her head and frowned. “Your accounting people need a report from you before they can send a check, is that it?”
“That’s it.” He smiled one more time.
She didn’t return the smile. “Mr. Brandstetter—Ben Orton was killed by a blow that shattered his skull. That couldn’t have been suicide.”
He didn’t tell her that other things besides suicide could get in the way of payment on a policy. He said, “I’ve been checking out death claims for twenty years, Mrs. Orton. The investigation of your husband’s murder not only wasn’t thorough—it hardly happened.”
“That can’t be true.” She folded the card back on itself. Her knuckles were white. “Those men thought the world of Ben. They’d have done anything to catch his killer.”
“They didn’t even try,” Dave said gently. “They settled for the obvious.”
“Cliff Kerlee. Well, why not? His bag—what do you call them?—that big dirty pouch thing with the leather fringes—it was lying there, right by Ben’s body.”
“Kerlee claims he wasn’t here—not then, not ever.”
“What would you expect him to say?” Her laugh was scornful. “He’d shouted at the top of his voice that he wanted to kill Ben. On television. Everybody heard him.”
“It’s a common expression, Mrs. Orton. Ugly, but not often literal. I doubt that it was the first time anyone said it about your husband. He was a controversial man. He had enemies.”
“Radicals, dope addicts, degenerates.” She thrust out a soft little chin. “He didn’t care what they said. He stood for what made this country great.”
The sun was heating up. It made Dave sleepy. He told her, “In the police report, Hector Rodriguez, who works for Kerlee and lives with him, says the man didn’t leave his place on Sunday.”
“What else would he say? You know what they are.”
“I know what he is,” Dave said dryly. “A witness. Which is something the police don’t have. Nobody can say Kerlee was here. Not even you.”
“I wasn’t feeling well. I lay down upstairs. I fell asleep. I didn’t even know Ben had come home.”
“Home?” Dave winced up at the sun. “Where had he been?”
“Why, I—” She jerked the card in two. She looked down at it, surprised. She looked at him, afraid. “At—at his office. Yes. The department was his life. He often—”
Dave shook his head. “He hadn’t been in. Not since the demonstration, Saturday morning, when Kerlee made his pretty speech. Your husband’s absence was unusual enough for his staff to notice. And talk about to a stranger.”
“I don’t know where he was.” She was watching her fingers make fragments of the card. “Can’t you”—she looked up with tears in her eyes—“can’t you leave it alone? What difference does it make? He’s dead. Dead.”
“Kerlee isn’t,” Dave said. “Look, Mrs. Orton—he can’t lock his pickup truck. The side windows are broken out. He left the bag lying on the seat. Anyone could have brought it here. Including your husband.”
“What?” She scoffed. “Why? It had that petition in it. He’d already refused to take it. That’s why Kerlee came. To try to force it on him.” Her laugh was grim. “As if Ben could be forced. By a creature like that. There’s another one, you know—Richard T. Nowell. A thorn in Ben’s side for years. But at least he belongs here. An old La Caleta family. But this maniac Kerlee! Do you know he attacked them when they tried to arrest him? Would an innocent man do that? Oh, it was him, all right. He brought that bag. He brought the flowerpot.”
“What became of the pieces?” Dave wondered.
She said, “He kept a crate of them at his place.”
“To mix with the soil for drainage,” Dave said. “The police went over those. No traces of blood or hair.”
“I thought you said they weren’t thorough.”
“Only about Kerlee,” Dave said.
“He owns a nursery. And there were”—the words came shaken, with fury at Dave, with grief for herself—“bits of broken flowerpot embedded in Ben’s brain.”
“But none in the room. Why not?”
“Why, he cleaned them up, of course. He wouldn’t dare leave them. They’d show he’d been here.”
“A man so rattled he forgot his tote bag?”
“It had to be him,” she said. “It had to.”
“That’s what the police decided. Mrs. Orton, they didn’t even take fingerprints. The only photos in that file were taken to show Kerlee’s bag beside the body. He’d threatened to kill your husband. And they went straight after him, no questions asked.”
“And who should they have gone after?” She tried for a sneer but missed. There was too much panic in her. Her fingers told about that. They dropped the scraps of card like sad confetti.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m going to find out. And I’d be grateful if you’d help me. May I look at Chief Orton’s den, please?”
“No, you may not!” She stood rigid, chin lifted, the blossom eyes narrowed. “You don’t fool me. You don’t give a damn about Cliff Kerlee. It’s me you’re after. And Jerry. We’re who your company will have to pay. Unless you can prove one of us killed him.”
“Come on, now, Mrs. Orton. You’re overexcited.”