The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (7 page)

“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.

“Around 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.”

“I’m not sure, myself,” Dave said. The taste of the beer was dark as its color. “What did you want me for?”

“You don’t think Cliff killed him.” Rodriguez had to stretch to reach cigarettes on the table. He tossed the pack to Dave. “I know Cliff didn’t kill him.”

“He was here with you, right?” They were Mexican cigarettes. The paper was brown. Dave took one and tossed back the pack. “Never left the place all day?”

“We were trying to fix up this house.” Rodriguez lit a cigarette with a paper match. “We done quite a bit at nights. But you get tired, you know? When we got this nursery nobody had had it for a long time. It took a lot of work to get it nice again so people would come. For many weeks we slept in sleeping bags on the floor in here.”

Dave grinned. “Under a crystal chandelier.”

“That is what you call the gay life-style,” Rodriguez said, but his smile didn’t amount to much. “It didn’t matter. We were at peace. For a while.”

“What happened to it?” Dave used the steel lighter on his cigarette. The sweet taste of the smoke took him back to boyhood trips down Baja with his father. In lost, sun-cracked
cantinas
behind dusty gas pumps, the unshaven barkeeps would sell cigarettes to kids. He used to hoard them in his blanket roll to smuggle home. He looked at his watch—not for
la hora de cenar,
when he could talk to Ophelia Green, but for six o’clock, when he could call the hospital again. It would be a while yet. “I saw the city-hall demonstration on film today. Your friend Kerlee didn’t look peaceable.”

“He hates injustice,” Rodriguez said. “It makes him crazy. I told him to stay out of it. Why we came up here from L.A. was to leave all that activist shit behind. Ten years was enough. It never did no good. It only made him old. And poor. He gave it all his time, every penny he could get. Phone ringing at two in the morning. There’s always some flit in trouble. There always will be till the straights change, and you can’t change them. I told Cliff, they got to hate somebody. What have they got? Fat-ass wives that whine all the time, bills and payments, kids that turn out to be junkies and whores and car thieves. They got to think somebody is more miserable than they are. Or happier. That’s worse. Gays can’t do nothing right. Come out or hide—it don’t change nothing. They’ll always hate us. Or envy us. Or pity us. Take your choice.”

“Every penny from where?” Dave asked.

“
Qué?
Oh—a boutique. Potted plants. Near a big hospital, so it did good. But if I didn’t hide half what we took in—put it in a separate bank Cliff didn’t know nothing about—we’d have been out on our
nalgas.
Then I heard about this place—for sale cheap because it was run down. I drove up. Last July, weekend of the parade. It looked great to me. I told Cliff, ‘Either we take it or it’s over between us.’” Gloomily Rodriguez dumped the rest of the beer from his bottle into the fancy glass. “So, it’s all my fault. I should never have—”

“It’s someone else’s fault,” Dave said. “What parade?”

“You know, man. Gay Pride Week? Every year. To celebrate 1969 when those drag queens threw their purses at the New York police. Cliff was always in that parade up to his
ano.
But why celebrate drag queens? They spend their whole life celebrating. They don’t do nothing but make the rest of us look bad.” Rodriguez shook his head and smiled scornfully. “Gay pride! What does that mean, man?”

“Two strips of flocked wallpaper?” Dave said.

“Yeah. Shit.” Surprisingly, Rodriguez started to laugh. “He had the bucket of paste. The paper was rolled out on the floor facedown. He was on his knees, brushing paste on the back when they came in. No knock, no nothing. Three big ones. He jumped up and said what is this or something. And they said he killed Ben Orton, and Cliff slopped the brush in the paste and painted the first cop. Right from the top down.” Rodriguez wiped his eyes. “Wow, that cop looked funny. Like some old movie, you know? One big, long stroke of the brush.”

“Getting on their good side from the start,” Dave said.

“Man, there is no way to get on their good side.” Leftover laughter jerked the smooth brown chest, made the shoulders jump. Rodriguez hiccupped but he meant what he said and he said it grimly. “I told them he was here all day with me. Told them and told them. They don’t care.”

“You’re going to have to tell them something better.”

“I did. They don’t care about that neither. The district attorney—he don’t care about it. Even dead, this is still Ben Orton’s town. Everyone is in his pocket. Judges too. You don’t think Cliff can get a fair trial, do you?” Mouth clamped in bitterness, Rodriguez reached to twist out his cigarette in an abalone-shell ashtray on the table. “Daisy Flynn knew Cliff, interviewed him twice on TV. I told her. She don’t care, neither.
Puta
.”

“Told her what?” Dave got out of the canvas chair to use the ashtray. “That you know who killed Orton?”

“Why do you care?” Rodriguez asked suddenly.

“It’s a matter of seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“Money.” Rodriguez looked pained. “Don’t you care about justice? Don’t you care about Cliff?”

“I care that he didn’t kill Ben Orton. I care that he was set up for it. I’d care to know who set him up because the odds are good that if I knew that I’d know who killed Ben Orton. If it was his wife or his son, I’d care deeply. Was it his wife or his son?”

“It was Richard T. Nowell,” Rodriguez said.

R
ICHARD T. NOWELL SAID
, “They get overexcited.” The hand-loomed jacket he’d worn in that snatch of film Dave had seen at
KSDC-TV
hung in some closet now. He had on only swim trunks. His spare, tanned body didn’t show his age. Neither did his hair, which had been to that high-priced barber again. It was gray but it grew thick and healthy. What showed his age were his eyes, hard, bright, and wary—eyes that had seen too much and doubted most of it. “Hispanos—as alike as jumping beans. There is no reality, only romance. Cervantes knew it in 1605. Nothing’s changed.”

He lay with a silvery drink in his hand on a chaise of aluminum tubing and bright yellow flowered fabric on a
terraza
in back of a hillside house like Ben Orton’s—rough white stucco, grilled windows, red-tile roofs. It looked as if repair work was underway on the roofs. Stacks of new tiles occupied a corner of the
terraza,
along with trowels, buckets, ladders. An ornamental iron gate opened into the property from above. There was a tennis court where youths in shorts batted a yellow ball over a green net. Long stairs led down here. Another long flight dropped to a blue pool where young men laughed and splashed. Below the pool, a brushy fold in the fall-off of land put the highway out of sight. Beyond lay the small roofs of La Caleta, the bay with its tiny white boats, the rusty jut of the old cannery, the sparkling ocean.

Dave said, “He told me you and Kerlee were enemies. Hated each other’s guts. Always had.”

“Cliff didn’t need enemies,” Nowell said. “He had himself.” A blond youth with long, smooth swimmer’s muscles came out French doors onto the terrace. Maybe his trunks weren’t as small as possible but they looked it. Nowell fluttered fingers at him. “Get Mr. Brandstetter a drink, will you?” He looked at Dave. “What shall it be?”

“It has been Mexican beer.” Dave smiled at the youth. That was easy. “Whatever’s in the fridge.”

The boy smiled back, said “Löwenbräu” firmly, and took Nowell’s empty glass into the house.

“Winning child,” Nowell said, looking after him. “He was slated for the Olympics. Did nothing but train. From the age of eight. Isn’t it insane? His father says he’d have made the team. But there were locker-room problems.”