The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (18 page)

She came to a stop on the packed open ground beyond the cars that angled in a row against the blank wall of the building, whose gray the dropping sun turned copper color. There was silence. The sky was beginning to go green. The hawk hung in it again, high and almost motionless.

“Now, what’s this about?” She tried to be defiant.

“You came out here,” Dave said. “You tell me.”

“I came out here,” she snapped, “because you are talking dangerous nonsense and I want it to stop.”

“What was dangerous,” Dave said, “was your being at Ben Orton’s the day and hour he was killed.”

“You’re out of your mind.” She said it with energy and contempt but her long red nails were digging into her palms. “What would I be doing there?”

“I’ve got a couple of answers,” Dave said, “but I’d rather have them from you.”

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Who told you I was?”

“You know that,” Dave said. “Lester Green.”

“Lester—” Her voice failed. She wavered on her legs. A bony hand groped out for support. It was Cecil’s arm she found. “But Lester Green is in prison.”

“He was out that day,” Dave said. “He wanted to see Ben Orton but he got there too late. Orton was dead. Lester lost his head and ran. But at the top of the hill he looked back. And saw you in the patio. With a charred gasoline can in your hand. You know he saw you. You saw him.”

She looked away at the shadows gathering in the folds of the hills. She breathed in deeply, shoulders rising and dropping. She turned Dave a weary, defenseless look. She nodded. “I saw him.” Her smile was thin and ironic. “I thought he was a workman clearing brush. The way they do when it gets dry like this. Against fires.”

“Because he was black,” Cecil said. “Well, you’re wrong. Around here, it’s white middle-class boys get the nigger jobs.”

“I forgot.” She let go of him, crossed the hardpan on wobbly heels, and leaned back against a very small car. The sun struck into her eyes. She shaded them with a hand. “Do you know,” she asked Dave, “who Eddie Suchak was?”

“He published an underground paper in La Caleta,” Dave said, “until it got burned out. Which is where the gasoline can fits in—right?”

“I was on vacation that month,” she said, “but the police told our crew it was the wiring. His printing equipment was too much for it. The building was old and run down.”

“You wrote for him,” Dave said.

“Not for long,” she answered grimly. “But it did feel nice—freedom.” She smiled to herself a second, then squinted up at him. “May I have a cigarette?”

Dave held out his pack. Her hand shook but she managed to slip a cigarette out. Then she dropped it. Cecil picked it up and handed it to her, and Dave lit it for her. The air was still and the smoke hung in it. She said, “I believed it—about the wiring. Until two weeks ago. Two weeks? Yes.”

“When Suchak died,” Dave said, “in a veterans’ hospital up the coast.”

“Things go wrong with the kidneys,” she said, “when they’re confined to wheelchairs. Kidneys? I don’t know. Something inside. Unless they get regular therapy. And he wouldn’t stay still for it. But it wasn’t only that. He was angry all the time. Stupid wars, greedy corporations, corrupt politics—everything out there.” She nodded vaguely toward the town below in its bowl of brown hills. “It depends on who you are but he was a very delicate mechanism. Not put together to stand it. And then there was—” She broke off. The fingers of a hanging hand had strayed to the car’s license plate and were uselessly tracing the numbers. She looked down at them. Her voice held pity and rage. “He wanted to make love. He couldn’t. Which was pathetic, and he couldn’t bear being pathetic.” She looked up again, tears in her eyes. “It wasn’t paralysis that killed him. It was bitterness.”

“And you don’t think anymore that it was faulty wiring that burned down his paper,” Dave said.

“He brought me the can, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. And an envelope. Not here. To my apartment. He left them on the service porch. I suppose it was that same night. ‘To be opened in the event of my death’—that’s what he’d written on them. I didn’t know what it meant, why he’d left whatever they were with me. We hadn’t spoken in months.” She looked at Dave with winter in her face. “I expect you know why. He said he wasn’t a man.” Her soundless laugh was tender and derisive. “He was ten times the man Ben Orton ever was.”

“But he ran from Ben Orton,” Dave said.

“Didn’t we all?” She shrugged, dropped the cigarette, stepped on it. “Anyway—it was a day or two after he died that I remembered the package and the envelope.”

“And in the package,” Dave said, “was the gasoline can left behind by whichever of Ben Orton’s boys likes to play with matches, so there’d be no mistake in Suchak’s mind about who burned him out and why. And in the envelope was a Xerox of the marriage license made out to Anita Orton and Lester Green. Along with Suchak’s story of the tie between the license and Lester’s arrest.”

“And the fire.” She nodded. “Written in pencil. His typewriter was at the paper.” She sighed, pushed away from the little car, dusted her hands together. “So I took the can and the envelope and a lot of rage, and drove up to Ben Orton’s. I was going to put the story on the air but I wanted to confront him with it first. To see his face. Only when I saw it, it was surprised at something else—the last thing that would ever surprise it.”

“You went in through the patio,” Dave said.

“It was wet,” she said. “I had an old habit of going in that way—from years before.” Her glance flickered away, flickered back. “And there he lay in his own pig blood with his little pig gun in his hand. I was too angry to be sick. I stood over him and gave the speech I’d worked up on my way there in the car.” Her laugh at herself was harsh and despairing. “As if he could hear me dead when he never once heard me alive. I started to leave the study the way I’d come, and the patio gate squeaked. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Someone came into the study and I just stood there trembling, praying for them to go away, whoever they were. And they did.”

“You should have given him more time,” Dave said. “Look—there was a phone there. You knew what to do.”

She sucked in her cheeks and shook her head at him. “Not a chance. Louise Orton’s deepest longing for twenty-five years has been to punish me. I thought she’d killed him. I still think so. For flaunting that art-gallery woman, Windrow, in her face—bringing her right into La Caleta.”

“What about Kerlee? Lester says his tote bag wasn’t by the body. You knew that. And you still said nothing.”

“That was why I was pleased when you showed up. You might be able to save him. I couldn’t. Not without taking his place. I was seen.”

“That didn’t worry you,” Dave said. “That was only some workman burning weeds.”

“I don’t mean by him,” she said. “When I got to the foot of Orton’s road in my car, another car was standing there. A 1928 Rolls-Royce, the only one of its kind in this part of the world. Richard T. Nowell’s. And he was in it.”

I
T WAITED, ALMOST HIDDEN
by big boulders, off the Coast Road. It stood high, and erect on its big wheels in grassy sand. Its paint was pearl gray with neat coachwork striping in red. Its hood was nickel plated, without a scratch, without so much as a thumb smudge. It had been cared for every day of its life and showed it. Cecil shook his head in awe.

“How much?” he said.

“Thirty-five thousand,” Dave said. “But it isn’t happiness. Come on.” He followed footprints between tall rocks. He had to use his hands in order to keep upright. Then the width was easy only for children. Dave edged through. Behind him, it sounded as if Cecil were in trouble with his heels. The cove was small. The rocks dropped to a space of sand maybe ten feet square. Richard T. Nowell sat on the sand, his back against a boulder. He clutched his knees and watched the surf slide in among rocks, reach for him, and back off again. He wore corduroys and a heavy turtleneck sweater. Dave told him, “It wasn’t Kerlee.”

He looked up. Distance was in his eyes. It took him a minute to remember where he was. “I always think,” he said, “that when I’m in Sangre de Cristo next, I’ll stop into a bookstore and buy an atlas. I’ll look at a map of the world and put my finger on this spot and run it straight out along whichever parallel it is and know what I’m looking at and not seeing.”

“It’s the thirty-fifth,” Dave said. “You’re looking at Yokohama. Ben Orton was seen dead by two witnesses before that tote bag appeared.”

Nowell tossed a pebble into the surf. “Do the police know that?”

“Not here,” Dave said. “Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first. One of those witnesses also saw you.”

“She must be out of her mind with lust,” Nowell said. “You’re beautiful—but worth risking a life sentence for?”

“She’s boxed in,” Dave said, “or thinks she is. Someone else saw her. And not just at the foot of Orton’s road. Coming out of his study.”

Nowell smiled his tight little smile. “I like the inevitability of it. A woman—of course. It had to be.”

Dave shook his head. “Her motive is feeble. Sentimentality—what takes the place of real feelings when there aren’t any.”

“Sentimentality? Our Daisy? Over whom?”

Dave told him about Suchak. “It called for more than a gesture but that was all she had to give it. Which brings us to the other reason she’s not a suspect. It wasn’t any gasoline can that smashed in Ben Orton’s skull.”

“It was a flowerpot,” Nowell said. “And that means only one person—Cliff Kerlee.”

“What they found in Orton’s brain were fragments of terra-cotta,” Dave said, “but those roof tiles stacked on your terrace are also terra-cotta.”

Nowell got to his feet. He did it slowly, stiff and middle-aged. “You shouldn’t have come here alone,” he said. And lunged. Dave stepped aside, stuck out a foot, Nowell sprawled on the sand. He scrambled up, tensed in a crouch, and stopped moving. Because Cecil had come out of the rocks. He stood watching, blank faced, the shiny shoes in his hand. Nowell sighed, relaxed, and began brushing sand off the corduroys and sweater. “And you didn’t,” he said.

“Mr. Nowell,” Cecil said. “Hi.”

“You’re Daisy’s minion,” Nowell said.

“Used to be.” Cecil rubbed dust off the shoes with a hand and set them carefully side by side on a tall rock. He sat down on the sand, pulled off his socks, and turned up the wide cuffs of the yellow pants. “Way back yesterday.”

“Way back yesterday,” Dave told Nowell, “I’d have said you didn’t go to Ben Orton’s to kill him. You went to negotiate. With Kerlee’s petitions as a bargaining tool. Orton could have them if he’d give you points.”

“I thought they’d start a nice blaze,” Nowell said, “in his fireplace.”

“And while it burned, you could sit down like gentlemen and resume the discussion you’d begun that night at your house over brandy and cigars.”

“Calmly and”—Nowell eyed Cecil, who eased a long foot into the surf—“in private.” He looked at Dave again. “You were right, yesterday.”

“I guess not. Yesterday I also thought Lester Green killed him. Probably with a brick—there are bricks lying around loose across from his mother’s house. He didn’t use a brick. He didn’t use anything.”

“Who is Lester Green?” Nowell asked.

Dave told him. He finished, “It would have been an answer for my company. Not the neatest one. That would have been if Louise Orton had killed him.” Cecil was up to his ankles in the moving water now, and he bent to roll the pant legs higher. Dave said, “That woman you saw at Nirvana with him that night—she did own an art gallery. Mona Windrow. And one day, Louise Orton marched in there with a gun and told Orton she’d kill him if he didn’t stay away from ‘that woman.’ His answer was to move the woman and the gallery both right into the middle of La Caleta.”

“Louise was at home that afternoon,” Nowell said. “That was why I went in through the patio. I saw her car in the garage. So why bother me? I didn’t get his life-insurance money. I’m not the answer for your company.”

“She wasn’t strong enough to bash his head in,” Dave said. “You are and you did. It wasn’t the petitions you wanted from Kerlee’s truck, it was the bag. You didn’t want to kill Ben Orton. You simply wanted Kerlee convicted for it. And you bet he would be, right after he told the world on television he was going to do it.”

“It’s warm,” Cecil called. He waded out of the surf, stripped and tossed away the yellow jacket, pulled the jersey over his head, kicked out of the yellow pants. Little white knit shorts divided his darkness. He ran back into the surf, splashes arching away from him, glossy with sunset reds. Beyond the tide rocks, he fell forward. His dark head bobbed, his long and shiny arms stretched, disappeared, stretched again. He laughed. “It’s warm,” he shouted.

“You saw the chance of a lifetime and jumped at it,” Dave told Nowell. “Up in the state assembly that time, Kerlee turned twenty-five years of your work and hope to nothing. It was irresistible. If I could admire murder, I’d admire your presence of mind, remembering to drag along that roof tile.”

“Save your admiration,” Nowell said. “You forget that when Daisy Flynn saw me on the road past the cannery, I was only on my way up there and he was already dead.”

“Maybe it happened another way,” Dave said. “You went to talk, he got nasty, pulled a gun, and you killed him. Then you went to get Kerlee’s bag. He had a gun in his hand.”

“What?” Nowell’s face twisted in disbelief. “Who says so? All right, I dropped that tote bag beside the body. Is that a crime? I don’t think so. I don’t know. But one thing I do know. There was no gun in Ben Orton’s hand.”

The house had its back to the sun this time but the curtains were still drawn at the windows in the wide arches. The garage was empty. There wasn’t enough breeze up here to move the leaves of the lacy eucalyptus trees. There was no sound from the shifting water of the blue bay below. A bird cried across the sundown hills—
killdee, killdee!
Dave pushed the wrought-iron patio gate. Daisy Flynn had been right—the hinges squeaked. The cold leaves of the big tropical plants flapped at him as he went among them, shucking his jacket. He handed it to Cecil and stood at the mossy tile fountain, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He bent and slid his arms into the murky green water where shadow fish arrowed away out of sight. He groped in the coldness. It was deeper than he’d hoped. He took off the shirt and handed it to Cecil.