The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of by Joseph Hansen Read Free Book Online Page B

monstrosities. Do you know what those represent? A religion that cut the hearts out of living men. But of course you know that. That would suit you, Al. Just your style. Where do you keep that boat of yours?” He glanced around as if to find it dry-docked in one of the empty shops. “I’d like to bore a hole in it.”
    “Go sleep it off,” Franklin said. “You’re heading back to Monterey, remember? Those barroom buddies you miss so much? You can’t pull a trailer on the Coast Road drunk.” The woman had already come into the gallery. Al Franklin followed and shut the door. Tyree Smith stood teetering for a minute, staring after them with unfocused eyes. Then he staggered off. “Sorry about that,” Franklin said to Dave.
    “I’d buy that one.” Dave indicated a sketch of pitted sea rock stippled with lichen, where a crab shell lay bleaching in the sun.
    “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “They’re all sold.”
    “That’s how it sounded.” Dave held out the little paint tubes and the brush. “How much for these?”
    “Take them,” she said, and went out the door in the bookshelf wall. Dave looked at Franklin. Franklin raised the thick eyebrows again. “She’s the boss,” he said.
    Dave glanced at the terra-cottas apologetically. “I doubt that I can afford to buy one of those to make it up to you.”
    Franklin shrugged. “Forget it,” he said.
    The motel was new and hung over the marina. He stood at the glass wall, drying off after a quick shower, and watched sunbrown kids with sunbleached hair topple off little catamarans and clamber aboard again. He hung the red, white, and blue towel up and combed his hair, laid his suitcase on a red, white, and blue bedspread, and took from the suitcase blue denims, which he kicked into. A star-spangled Styrofoam tub of ice cubes had arrived while he showered. He dropped cubes into a clear plastic glass, dug a fifth of Old Crow from the suitcase, and made himself a stiff drink. He lit a cigarette, sat on the bed, and dialed a red, white, and blue telephone. While he waited for the desk nurse to fetch Amanda, he took two long swallows from the glass.
    “He’s the same,” she said. “The doctor says that’s good. It could turn around, Dave. It could.”
    “Hold the thought,” he said. She was very young. He told her where to reach him, reading the number off the dial plaque. “It looks as if I’ll be here a while. The situation is extremely phony. Unless you need me. It will be just as phony when I get back to it.”
    “Call tonight?” she said and sounded lonesome.
    “I’d planned on around six,” he said.
    “Maybe he can talk to you then,” she said. “If he’s conscious, he’ll want to talk to you.”
    “I’ll want to talk to him,” Dave said.
    After he’d hung up, he dug the brush and tubes of paint from the jacket of his sweated suit. He slipped from the brown envelope marked KDSC-TV the photo of Ben Orton and laid it on the stingy motel-room desk. He filled another plastic glass with water and sat at the desk to work on the photo, to change Ben Orton’s image, give it a curly longhair look under the slouch-brim leather hat, put mirror goggles on it, paint out the necktie and open the collar. The desk top was white Formica. He mixed his shades of gray on it. When he’d finished, it wiped off easily. He dropped brush and paints into the drawer. He let the photo lie on the desk to dry. And he used the phone again.
    “Pets,” Doug Sawyer’s voice said. He was the neat, gray-haired man Dave lived with in big, awkward, sunny rooms above Doug’s new art gallery on Robertson. But today, as for many days past, he was at his mother’s shop in a gritty, run-down corner of Los Angeles between a bicycle store and a beauty shop. He was selling off the stock to other dealers. Food, bags of kibble, bins of birdseed. Fixtures—cages, fish tanks, counters, racks, refrigerators. While his plump, beaky little mother sat blankly, hands in lap, in