Power, The by Frank M. Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

dresser scarf on it. A desk by one side of the window, a half-open closet door showing a few hangers with a drab gray suit, a gray topcoat, and a rack of small-figured, dullties.
    There was a blue blanket tacked on the wall over the desk. In the middle of it was a large gold felt “B,” with “Basketball” embroidered on it in small blue script.
    It didn’t fit.
    “I never knew John went in for sports. He never seemed like the type.”
    “I don’t think he was, either. He never talked about them and never seemed to have any interest in them.”
    “But he still won a letter in basketball.”
    She was standing by the window looking out into the back yard. She was watching her two boys play in the yard, he guessed. Already John Olson was fading when compared to the really important things in her life.
    “It doesn’t add up, does it?” she said absently.
    Tanner walked over to the desk. It was a plain desk, varnished a dark, almost black, color. A photograph on top caught his eye. It was a picture of Olson and Petey at a faculty picnic earlier in the spring. Petey was, as usual, a little too carefully dressed for a picnic. But at least she was smiling at the camera and with what seemed like a genuine smile.
    Her brother wasn’t smiling. But then John Olson never had, as long as he could remember. A plump, serious face with strands of blond hair hanging limply over his high forehead. A suggestion of a slouch in his shoulders and he could even tell from the photo that Olson was pale and soft under his sport shirt. He guessed that John had been worried about getting sunburned and was getting ready to give Petey hell for having dragged him out there.
    “Do you know much about him, Sue? Much about his background?”
    She tore herself away from the window and walked over to the chair to sit down, the robe swaying against her flanks and her slippers making small slapping sounds against the rug.
    “Give me a cigarette, Bill.” He gave her one and lighted it. “He came from a small town in South Dakota. Brockton, I think. His people were farmers. He lived there until he was eighteen when he went away to college.”
    “That doesn’t tell me much about him.”
    She spread her hands. “That’s all I know. He never talked much about himself.”
    “He had a pretty cold personality. Any reason why?”
    She closed her eyes and frowned, as if trying to remember were hard work and she wasn’t quite up to it. “Who knows? I think maybe somebody hurt him when he was young. I always got the impression that the only real emotion he felt for anybody was hatred for somebody back in his home town.”
    “Did he ever talk much about it?”
    “I told you he never talked about himself at all.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Nothing moved him very much,” she said finally. “Other people’s problems didn’t interest him at all, probably because he was so wrapped up in his own. He was … cold … and he had no sense of humor. And I think he was frightened of something.”
    “Any idea what of?”
    “No, except it was some person. Maybe the same person in his home town that he hated. And I could be wrong on that score, too.”
    He looked around the room again. Dusty little room. The bed, the bureau, and the bookcase, shelves jammed with textbooks. If you went away for a day and let the dust settle you wouldn’t think anybody had lived in it for years.
    “Was he pretty much the intellectual?”
    “Yes and no. He was interested in psychology, but then that was his field. I would say he was more interested in the offbeat side, though. Hypnotism, things like that.” She walked over to the window again and ran her fingers slowly down the curtains. “I’m sorry that he’s dead.”
    It was the thing to say, Tanner realized. But he hoped when he died and somebody said it, that they would say it with more emotion.
    The doorbell rang downstairs and Susan turned away from the window and started for the stairs.
    “The detective—he was