The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (12 page)

Sand was soft and fine under his shoes as he crossed a yard where some kind of creeping succulent tried to flower before it was buried. Two cars were in this driveway and another in the garage. He pushed the doorbell. On the door someone had mounted a carving of a bird. It was clumsy work but he guessed it was meant to be a sea eagle. That might have been a fish in its claws. The light was poor. He waited on a woven reed mat dyed with flowers, but no one came to let him in.

He wandered around the side of the house. At the back, lengths of muslin hung on lines stretched between iron clothespoles. The material had a stiff look about it and the patterns were unfinished. He touched a hanging corner. Somebody was trying batik. The sand of the yard sloped down to a sturdy wooden jetty that thrust from clumps of rushes. He walked out on it. The boards were stained with oil. The lines that lay on them were strong and used. There was a red gasoline can stenciled
LA CALETA POLICE
. Off across the inlet, a flock of ducks made a wide, quick-winged circle and came down splashing. The noise of their voices was harsh in the stillness. A human voice came thinly through, a female voice. “Hello!” Someone waved from the rowboat and it came toward him, the oars shedding drops of red and silver. For what he didn’t know, but he waited.

The pair of cameras on straps around her neck looked wrong because she wore an antique white dress with plackets and gussets, fringes and lace. It was long and the hem was wet from the bilge that sloshed in the flat bottom of the boat. She was barefoot. Dave crouched and took the painter from her and wound it around a cleat. He helped her up onto the jetty. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything under the dress. She had a lot of pale yellow hair, part of it carelessly pinned up, part hanging loose. She’d put on no makeup. He recognized, but only just, the woman who had touched Jerry Orton’s hand in the funeral film. That one had been neatly groomed and could be mistaken for a college girl. This one had to be years older than her husband.

“Did you want me?” she said. “I’m Frances Orton.”

“I wanted Jerry Orton,” Dave said. “Where is he?”

“Gone off.” She waved a hand toward the ocean. “Fishing with cormorants. In the launch. They put collars on the birds, you know, so they can’t swallow. They burn torches to attract the fish. Romantic.”

“And illegal,” Dave said.

She shrugged. “Boys will be boys.” She went off up the sand, tall for a woman and a little ghostly in the dying light and the 1905 dress. Trudging made her hips look heavy. “What did you want? Perhaps I can help.” She paused and fingered the hanging muslin. “Do you know anything about batik? It’s done with wax and dyes, a sort of stenciling. Only it’s not turning out the way it looks in the book.”

“Wait till it’s finished,” Dave said. “Is there a radio on this launch? It’s important.”

“On the launch,” she said, “but not here. It’s the police launch.” She pushed open a blue door with seagulls painted on it. “What’s it about?”

“His father’s death,” Dave said. “I’m from the insurance company.” He gave her a card. “When will he be back?”

“Oh, not for hours. He doesn’t go on duty again till midnight.” In the dark doorway, she tilted her head. “May I take a message? I look crazy but I’m not. I was a college instructor. That’s how I met Jerry. A crash course in Spanish for police and sheriff’s officers. I fight it but deep down I’m responsible.”

“It’s complicated,” Dave said.

She laughed and walked into the house. “Then explain it to me.” A pale shadow, she took off the cameras by their straps and set them somewhere out of his line of sight. “Come in.” She pushed at her hair. “If you think it’s too much for my wandering wits, I’ll write it down.”

“How well do you know his sister?” He stepped into a room that was the width of the house. The rug was big and shapeless and hand hooked—seagulls again, with clouds and waves this time. A loom, a potter’s wheel, a drawing table took up most of the space, along with a butcher-block bench heaped with lenses and tripods and light meters, yellow boxes of film and printing paper, hanks of bright yarn and earth-color twine, and brushes and paint pots. But in a corner, a Sears Roebuck couch and easy chair in tough blue plaid faced a TV set that held up a terra-cotta sculpture of a leaping porpoise, not very well done. Macrame work hung ragged on the walls. So did a blurred enlargement of a photo of what might have been a gray whale or an overturned and barnacled ship’s hull. “How much of a radical is she?”

“Oh, that’s only an act to upset her father.” Frances Orton went around a counter crowded with dying house-plants into a shadowy kitchen where beach birds were painted on cupboard doors. “I never knew a girl so desperate for a man’s love.” She bent out of sight and made kitcheny rattles. “Of course, he gave it all to Jerry.”

“And how did Jerry take it?” Dave asked.

“For granted.” Her voice echoed hollow from some low cabinet. “As the lucky ones of this world take everything.” She rose again beyond the plants and frowned at him. “Or do you mean his father’s death? That’s what you’re here about. He took that badly. Gods are not supposed to die.”

“He’s out enjoying himself tonight,” Dave said.

“With friends very like his father.” She came from the kitchen with a half-gallon glass jug of wine and a pair of lopsided clay mugs. “Men made by his father in his father’s image. Ugh.” She handed Dave one of the mugs. “From my potting period. You can see why I gave it up.” She splashed wine into the mugs and set the jug on the cluttered bench.

Dave said, “There were other periods, weren’t there? Rug making, wood carving, sculpture?”

“Stop. You couldn’t begin to name them all.”

“What did your father-in-law think of them?”

“And my funny clothes?” She walked away, dragging the wet, sandy hem of the old dress toward the couch. “He ordered me to shape up, and when I ignored him he tried to wreck my marriage.” She dropped onto the couch and tucked up her feet. “You see, when Jerry and I met, I was still reacting against my upbringing. I was the most conventional girl in the world.” She looked at Dave over her shoulder. “Come sit down.”

He took the easy chair and set the cup on the margin of vinyl tile the seagull rug didn’t cover. He didn’t want the wine. “What kind of upbringing?”

“Crazy poets and crazier musicians, colored candles stuck in Chianti bottles, suppers out of cardboard boxes from the corner taco stand, drunks and fights, rehearsals till dawn, strangers sleeping in the bathtub, unmade beds and unpaid bills, escapes down midnight freeways in hundred-dollar cars.” She smiled a crooked smile. “Any questions?”

“So you taught school,” Dave said, “and married a cop.”

“But when I’d spent a couple of years with Louise Orton and a dozen other police wives and their children”—she lifted her cup at him wryly—“you see your husband never”—she drank and her look traveled the room—“I began to miss the way I’d grown up. I started painting, making lampshades, dressing up in garage-sale rags. Ben Orton ordered Jerry to divorce me. His wife and her friends cut me dead. I don’t miss them. Especially not that fat backwoods Hitler, Ben. All I need is Jerry. I counted on his not minding, and he didn’t, he doesn’t. I have advice for women seeking husbands—with a law-enforcement officer, what you see is what you get.”

“Including indifference to laws that don’t suit him,” Dave said. “Minor ones, like fishing with cormorants or slashing the tires of an unwanted stranger in town. Or major ones, like burning down the local radical newspaper.”

She cleared her throat and gave a recitation. “The courts don’t understand the problem. The legislators don’t understand the problem. The police officer has to deal with the problem, face to face, day in, day out. It’s often a matter of his life, a split-second decision. The judgment as to what he has to do can’t wait for laws to be written and passed and a string of courts to make up their minds. He has to protect himself and the public who depend on him. Whether they like it or not.” Her mouth twitched. “End of creed.”

Dave grinned. “I can tell your belief runs deep.”

“His does,” she said grimly, “as his father’s did before him.” She sighed, shook her head. “Mine doesn’t matter. What did you want me to tell Jerry? What’s Anita done now?”

“Why wasn’t she at the funeral?” Dave asked.

“What? Why—she had the flu. That’s what Louise said. She was sick in bed. At college. Sangre de Cristo.” Frances Orton blinked. “Wasn’t she? Anyway—what does it have to do with her father’s death?”

“She was in bed but not sick and not at college. With a boy named Lester Green in his mother’s house up the canyon across the highway.”

She frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“I warned you it was complicated,” Dave said. “You don’t know who Lester Green is?”

“No. Wait.” She looked thoughtful and gulped wine. “A black boy—right? Motorcycle? Arrested for dope?”

“On one of those split-second decisions you mentioned,” Dave said. “When Anita’s father learned she and Lester had taken out a marriage license.”

She put her feet on the floor. “You’re joking.”

“You don’t really think so,” Dave said. “You’re a young female relative. She must have told you how badly her father was treating her? Not only framing and locking up her boyfriend but disowning her—taking her name off his insurance policy. I don’t know what else.”

“Nothing else,” Frances Orton said. “Not even that much. What I heard, I heard from Jerry. And it wasn’t anything about any boyfriend.” She emptied her wine cup and went to the jug. “Just that Ben was furious with Anita again and wasn’t buying her the car he’d promised.” She tilted wine into her cup again, looked at him eyebrows-up, and, when he shook his head, recapped the jug. “She kept away from me.” Frances Orton laughed briefly and without amusement. “Thought I’d betrayed my class. If only she’d known how my father twisted himself into knots inside with envy for the poets who made it, while he failed in back rooms of funky bookshops with beer cans and sleeping bags on the floor and everyone too stoned to listen while he read. What he really wanted was to write a sleazy best-seller and have sex all day long by a swimming pool in Bel Air with starlets. He was always being praised for his integrity. He’d have sold it in a minute, only no one wanted to buy.” She’d been staring out the window at the inlet. She turned to him. “Sorry. No. I didn’t know. Jerry didn’t know either, I suspect. His father was always keeping things from him.” She dropped onto the couch again, tucked up her feet again. “I thought that was strange in a man with no sensitivity whatever.”

“Keeping things such as?” Dave asked.

“His women,” she said.

“He wasn’t protecting Jerry,” Dave said, “he was protecting his image, the myth of Ben Orton, champion of law and order, the family, the flag—the things, as his wife told me this morning, that make America great. Which did not include adult movies, homosexual police officers, and most specially not an underground paper.”

“You keep coming back to that,” she said. “It burned, that’s all I know.”

“And all Jerry knew too, I’ll bet. Let me tell you why.” He told her about his day and what he’d learned. It took time. He wound up with, “And, sure enough, this afternoon Louise Orton drove up to Ophelia Green’s to warn her I was in town and asking about Anita. Mrs. Green didn’t know I knew that. She kept on lying. But those kids have been at her place right along. They’re there now. Anita’s ears must have been burning behind the door when she heard what Mrs. Green said about her.” He frowned at Frances Orton. “Her father did give her that car. A Gremlin.”

“Lately. For staying in school and not making waves.”

“I don’t think so. Have Jerry ask her when he sees her tonight. It was a bribe to keep her away from Lester Green when he got out of prison. She must have promised. Only why would he believe her?”

“She’s a female,” Frances Orton said, “and he loved her. What’s so important about the car?”

“It’s hidden in a ravine,” Dave said, “across from the house. Under vines.”

She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t make sense. Why hide the car? Why hide themselves? A man’s in jail for the murder. The case against him is open and shut. They surely can’t enjoy being huddled up in some stuffy little house. For a stupid, adolescent prank that misfired? For how long, for heaven’s sake? Forever?”

“It misfired,” Dave said, “but not the way you mean.”

“Oh, no.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, surely not.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Dave pushed to his feet. The sunset light off the water struck his eyes. They hurt. He hurt all over. He tried to count to himself how many hours it had been since he’d slept. His mind wouldn’t do the sum. “Please tell him as soon as he gets back.” Dave stepped out onto the sand.

She called after him. “Where can he find you?”

“He knows,” Dave said.

She came to the door. “What if they’ve run away? What if you scared them off?”

“That car won’t go,” Dave said.

N
OT EVEN AN EDGE
of light showed the horizon when he got back. He left the rental car up a side street. Limping toward the glow above the shake roofs of the waterfront, he passed the Ford van that had bothered him on the hilltop behind Nowell’s and again down the dusty road near Ophelia Green’s. He craned to peer through the window. Nothing lay on the seats. In the rear, the cargo was darkness. He turned away. It didn’t matter now. It was over. It was certainly over for Lester Green. He wished that made him feel good but it didn’t. Frances Orton was right—something about it didn’t add up. He shrugged. Let Jerry Orton work it out. It wasn’t Dave Brandstetter’s business anymore.

The candle flames still flickered in the colored glass chimneys on the tables outside El Pescador. The breeze was soft, steady, cool. Beyond the white railings of the deck, the masts of the moored boats tilted shiny against the blackness of the bay. Pointing at what? He squinted and made out a few stars. They weren’t his business either. He wished all the tables were empty. Instead, at the farthest one, where they’d splashed the white cloth with red wine, college boys looked pale and laughed loud but not long and not together. Celebrating what—their first adult mistake? And at the nearest table, where he’d left them, Mona Windrow and Al Franklin nursed brandy snifters.