The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (4 page)

“The verdict isn’t in.” Dave sat opposite her.

“Ho!” She chuckled. “You don’t know La Caleta.” Out of a drawer she brought a hand-size box of chrome and white plastic. A cassette recorder. She pressed buttons and set it on the desk. “We’ll get a camera later.”

Dave switched the thing off. “This isn’t a news story, Miss Flynn. Where a policyholder meets a violent death, every insurance company investigates. It’s routine.”

She looked at the machine. She looked at him, her mouth pursed. “Of course it is. That’s why you’re driving all over the landscape to talk to peripheral characters like me. I may be peripheral, but I’m quick.”

Dave shrugged. “Nothing in it. I like my work. It’s a handsome landscape. And you have film.”

“Yards and yards.” She messed among papers. They were all like the ones she’d brought back from the editing room—typed down half the page in capital letters. She found a pack of cigarettes and pushed it at him. “We take—took—an intense interest in Ben Orton. This is salt-of-the-earth country. Ben Orton was its hero.” She watched him take a cigarette, took one herself. The air conditioner blew hard but he managed to light them both.

“‘Mindlessly’?” He pushed the narrow steel lighter back into his shirt pocket. “Does that mean you think her faith in him was misplaced?”

“It means that’s the kind of woman she is,” Daisy Flynn said. “It also means Ben Orton wasn’t just a police chief—he was also a man.” She looked up with a mechanical smile at a skinny black youth who set down a yellow tray on which plastic holders gripped paper cups of coffee. “And that women, too, worship heroes. Thank you, Cecil. Will you pull all the recent footage on Ben Orton, please? Mr. Brandstetter here wants to look at it.” He nodded, grinned, and walked off.

Dave looked after him. He hadn’t seen another black all day. “Channel Ten’s token?” he asked.

“This isn’t exactly Tanzania,” she said. “He’s in communications arts at the college. Senior students rotate through here. For working experience. We get state funds for the program. God knows what they learn. It probably warps them for life.”

“He makes fair coffee,” Dave said. But maybe after the shrub anything would have tasted good. “His last name wouldn’t be Lester, would it?”

She was using shiny red talons to tear open little envelopes of sugar and cream substitute. The question made her stop moving for a split second. Then she said lightly, “It would be Harris.” She stirred her coffee with a plastic spoon. “Why the funeral? I mean, that’s a bit after the fact, isn’t it?”

“It can sometimes help to see who was there. You went down to interview Anita after the fact—right?”

“You have been busy!” She said it lightly but her eyes went watchful. “We have a little news bureau in La Caleta. When they learned Ben Orton had been murdered, I expect there was quite a scramble to get out of swim fins and into shoes. They had plenty to do.”

“So did the police,” Dave said. “They didn’t do it.”

Daisy Flynn twitched an eyebrow. Her hand moved to the tape recorder again but stopped when she saw him watching it. She said, “Anyway, I was up here. So was Anita.”

“Only she wasn’t,” Dave said.

Daisy Flynn found a glass ashtray and set it between them. “She’d only have made a footnote anyway.” She poked her cigarette among the lipsticked butts already there. “What do you want with her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t find her, either,” Dave said. “So … Orton had other women, did he?”

Daisy Flynn’s eyes opened wide above her paper cup. “Did I say that?” She sipped the creamy coffee. “Let’s put it this way—if he did, it was a well-kept secret.”

A bearded youth clutching a scribbled yellow pad and flapping into a jacket hurried past, trailed by a paunchy man swinging a movie camera with a padded shoulder saddle. They pushed out a door into stunning sunlight. Before the door had time to fall shut, car doors slammed, an engine thrashed into life.

Dave asked, “From them? From your viewers—the lonely ranch hands in their bunkhouses back in the hills? The wine bottlers? The tuna-fleet wives? The college kids?” He eyed her steadily. “Or from you?”

“What Ben Orton wanted kept secret was kept secret,” she said flatly. “He had what’s politely called power. There are nastier words for it.” She moved a hand to get rid of the subject. “The point is, Louise would have been the last to know.”

“Because he could destroy anyone who told her?”

“And she wouldn’t believe them anyway,” Daisy Flynn said. “You met her. You’re bright. You saw that.”

“Maybe,” Dave said. “But nobody likes to be made a fool of. Certainly not for a lifetime.”

She stared. “You can’t believe she’d kill him.”

“She was alone in the house with him.”

Daisy Flynn crushed out her cigarette. Her laugh was mournful. “That’s a real definition of ‘alone.’” She looked up quickly. “Or so I would imagine.”

“She has a little list,” Dave said. “Radicals, dope addicts, degenerates—and reporters. You in particular and by name. Why?”

“We filmed his public utterances.” She rose. “As you, lucky fellow, are about to see.” Dave stood, tossed back the last of his coffee, and followed her between the crowded desks, frantic humans, frantic phones, frantic typewriters. “He always ended up appearing ridiculous.” The hush of the hallway shocked Dave’s ears. “She couldn’t understand why people laughed. I’m sure she never laughed.” Daisy Flynn pushed a door. Back of it was a shadowy room. Up a sharp rise, nine theater seats faced a blank white screen. “It had to be someone’s fault. It must have been ours—right?”

“Film can be manipulated,” Dave said.

“It wasn’t—not here.” Light leaked from slot windows in a projection booth up short stairs and behind the seats. She called, “Cecil, baby, are you there?”

“All set up.” Cecil’s voice came muffled.

“The men who own this mountain, this building, and all that is therein also own most of the landscape you so much admired between here and La Caleta. Ranchers, growers, vintners. Rich and loud. They liked Orton.”

Light shafted from the projection booth. On the screen, numbers inside targets flickered upside down.

“So you didn’t switch Ben Orton footage around?”

“Not if I wanted to go on eating.” She tinkered with a digital watch on a bony wrist. She peered at it. “Which I won’t do if I don’t get a move on.”

“If they liked him, why didn’t they see to it he got paid? Did you know he died broke?”

Colors reflected from the screen made her frown garish. “No. I mean, twenty-five thousand a year isn’t half bad out here in the boondocks. He lived, as they say, simply. Nobody ever accused him of extravagance.” She gave her head a quick, troubled shake and opened the room door. “Enjoy,” she told him with a tight smile. “And see me before you leave—all right?”

“Wait,” he said. “Who laughed at him?”

“Anyone with an I.Q. over ninety.” She went away.

O
N THE SCREEN, LONG-HAIRED
lads in tank tops and faded bellbottom jeans carried picket signs in front of a white, sunstruck building marked
LA CALETA CITY HALL
. Dave dropped into a seat. A lot of the lads had muscles but they minced. There appeared to be chatting and laughter. At a guess, high-pitched. Someone pirouetted. A shriek would have gone with that. The camera moved in. They weren’t all lads. Thin hair stirred on a bald scalp. A beer belly bulged through a fringed leather vest.

“You want the sound, Mr. Bannister?” Cecil stood at his shoulder.

“I can imagine it, thanks,” Dave said.

“‘Five, six, seven, eight—,’” Cecil grinned.

“‘—Gay is just as good as straight,’” Dave said.

“Do they all want to be cops?” Cecil asked.

“They all want to be girls,” Dave said. “But it’s the principle of the thing.”

The screen filled with a placard lettered in orange marker pen,
NEANDERTHAL GO HOME
. It wobbled. The next frames showed a pair of sturdy youths in sand-color uniforms standing, feet apart, hands behind their backs, at the top of the city hall’s tidy front steps. A doorway was a black, rectangular hole behind them. Sun glinted off their short fair hair, their badges, their sunglasses. They wore heavy guns and nightsticks and no expression.

Not even when the picket signs surged toward them. They didn’t move. They stood blocking the door. The first of the demonstrators charged up the steps. The camera tilted. The signs waved. It was hard to read them.
GAY. LAW & ORDER. EQUALITY. GERMS.
Germs? What was that about? A blur of red and yellow doubleknit stripes blocked the camera. Then it was clear again and watching from another angle. At the top of the steps, a gaunt man, beard, mustache, yellow hair clubbed back, sweaty blue workshirt with the arms torn off, flapped long sheets of paper in front of the stoical cops. They stared straight ahead.

Behind them in the shadowed doorway a face made a pale, square blur. Ben Orton? The gaunt man lunged. The uniformed boys caught him. He seemed to be kicking. One of the officers raised a nightstick. A sign slammed him between the shoulders. It said something about
FREEDOM
. Bodies got in the camera’s way. There was a splice in the film. The cameraman had switched to telephoto. The gaunt man’s face filled the screen. Blood trickled down a forehead where a ropy vein swelled. Framed by the tobacco-stained beard, his teeth were rabbity. His eyes bulged. He raved.

Dave asked, “Could I just have the sound on this?”

Cecil went away. The screen became a streak of color. The film jerked and froze at the frame with the lifted nightstick. The film rolled. All the sound was screaming. Yes, that was Ben Orton in the doorway. What Cliff Kerlee shouted was “… legal petition from the voters, taxpayers, citizens of this community. What does he mean—refuse? Who the hell does he think he is?” He struggled in the hands of the officers. Tendons stood out in his scrawny neck. The cameraman focused on the steps where deck shoes, rubber sandals, dirty bare feet trampled the long pages of ballpoint signatures. Kerlee screamed, “Pig! Arrogant straight! I’ll kill the fat—” An electronic tone replaced the words writhing out of the beard. Kerlee went down out of sight. Signs and shaggy heads shifted. And then there were the target numbers again and the bright white blankness of the screen.

“Thanks,” Dave called.

“There’s more,” Cecil answered. “Just a second.”

It was out of chronological order. A week earlier? He’d heard of it but that was all. Microphones poked at Ben Orton’s square jaw. He wore a cap with a badge on it. The gold-braided bill cast a shadow in the harsh sunlight. He jerked slightly with surprise and took off the cap. His hair was close cropped. And his mustache. Both gray. The television people had backgrounded him with a hibiscus bush. The red flowers looked as if they were reaching for him. His voice was outdoor high with a whine to it.

“People wouldn’t sign these petitions if they knew what homosexuals are really like. Police officers know that—how these weirdos live their lives. Alleys. Public toilets. Back rows of dirty theaters. What they do—with men they never saw before. Anybody. It’s not just that they’re mentally sick. They spread germs. You get people like that in your police-department locker rooms—you could have your whole police force down with venereal disease. Is that what the people want that are signing these petitions? Well, I can tell you, it’s not what the police officers want—or their wives.”

Someone unseen interrupted with a question. The wind took it away before the microphones could catch it. Whether Orton heard it was impossible to tell. He said:

“Leave that out if you want to. The whole idea is ridiculous, any way you look at it. What man you know is going to want to be stuck in a patrol car eight hours a day with some pervert? And suppose there’s trouble—and trouble is what that patrol car is out there to stop. Can you picture some homosexual charging a house where some crazy is shooting guns out the window? I’d hate to see the face of the mother who’s signing one of these petitions today when she finds out later a homosexual police officer has been sent to find her lost six-year-old son.”

Dave unfolded from his seat, went up the short aisle and the short steps, and looked into the projection booth. Cecil was hunched on a green metal stool in the small work light of one of the projectors, reading a paperback book on electronic journalism. Out in the tinted darkness, the voice of Ben Orton went on: “That mother isn’t going to thank Sacramento for passing that bill. She isn’t going to thank the city attorney for enforcing it. She isn’t going to thank the Civil Service Commission that made me put that queer into a job where—” Dave said, “I came for the funeral. The build-up is good but it’s too long.”

Cecil laughed, tossed the book away, got off the stool, and sped up the reels of the projector. A loose end of film flapped. He knocked a switch and touched the wound-up reel with a long, pale-palmed hand until it quit spinning. He jerked the reel off the machine and dropped it noisily into a can. “One funeral, coming up,” he said, and pried the lid off another can.

Dave went back to his seat. But what came up this time was Daisy Flynn seated in a little blue armchair between Cliff Kerlee, in a jumpsuit, and a gray-haired man Dave thought he knew, who wore a hand-loomed tweed jacket and went to an expensive barber. The camera dollied in on Daisy Flynn. She said, “Today we’re talking with two leaders of the local gay community, Richard T. Nowell, who began his work in 1953, and Cliff Kerlee, founder of Gay Action.” Smile. “Gentlemen, I know your reactions to Police Chief Ben Orton’s statement that we’ve just seen differ. How and why? Dick Nowell, will you start?” Cecil yelped from the booth. The film streaked past.

Dave lit a cigarette in the dark and groped for and found the flip-up metal lid of a little ashtray in the arm of his seat. The screen took color again. The setting was as he’d remembered it—brown hump hills in the distance, in the foreground half-grown shade trees, plaques in the grass, long lines of uniformed men standing at attention, women in quiet clothes and gloves and hats, seated on metal folding chairs that faced a gunmetal coffin blanketed by a flag. Wreaths on easels. White wicker holders for tall sprays of gladiolus. A rank of rifles raised, jerking puffs of smoke. A bugler wincing into a twist of brass. The long, involved ceremonial folding of the coffin flag, its delivery into the hands of the widow. Uniformed son standing woodenly behind her chair. Tears leaking from under his dark glasses.