The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of Read Online Free PDF Page A

microphone booms and camera dollies, men in pastel shirts bunched, telling jokes. They held papers and plastic cups. One of them saw Dave and came to him, stepping over thick cables that snaked the floor. His face was brick-color. Makeup. He took Dave to Daisy Flynn.
    She wasn’t a withered hag. She just hadn’t been a college girl for a long time. She sat in a room stacked and racked with canned film. Film turned on reels in front of her, showing her images, frame by frame, on a screen tilted hopefully upward like a child’s bright face. Typed pages lay beside her and a hand bony like the rest of her crossed out sentences with a felt-tip pen. The surprised eyes she raised to him had blue paint above them. She pushed glasses up onto red-tinted hair. A disbelieving smile dug lines around her mouth. She had television teeth.
    “Louise Orton said to ask me?”
    Dave nodded. “She said ‘even’ you. Was she devoted to him?”
    “Mindlessly.” Daisy Flynn switched off the editing machine. To a man standing in a corner squinting at loops and streamers of film, she called, “Burt, love, cut this where I’ve marked it, will you?” She picked up the papers and led Dave down a hallway, then through a shadowy cavern where spotlights hung from steel rafters, where cameras stood around and microphones glinted and sleek curved desks and fake paneled walls waited for the clock, the next news slot, candidate interview, land-development commercial. She moved fast, like everyone in the flat-lighted room they ended up in—typewriters, jangling phones, stuttering teletypes. “Sit down,” she said. “Coffee?”
    “You’re working. I don’t want to keep you.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Have you got film in there of the Orton funeral?”
    “Would we have missed it?” She sat down. “You’re working too but I do want to keep you. For that very reason. What brings you around, Mr. Brandstetter? I mean—what were you doing chatting with the widow? Insurance, you said. And you wanted to know whether she really loved him or not. You aren’t happy with the verdict?”
    “The verdict isn’t in.” Dave sat opposite her.
    “Ho!” She chuckled. “You don’t know La Caleta.” Out of a drawer she brought a hand-size box of chrome and white plastic. A cassette recorder. She pressed buttons and set it on the desk. “We’ll get a camera later.”
    Dave switched the thing off. “This isn’t a news story, Miss Flynn. Where a policyholder meets a violent death, every insurance company investigates. It’s routine.”
    She looked at the machine. She looked at him, her mouth pursed. “Of course it is. That’s why you’re driving all over the landscape to talk to peripheral characters like me. I may be peripheral, but I’m quick.”
    Dave shrugged. “Nothing in it. I like my work. It’s a handsome landscape. And you have film.”
    “Yards and yards.” She messed among papers. They were all like the ones she’d brought back from the editing room—typed down half the page in capital letters. She found a pack of cigarettes and pushed it at him. “We take—took—an intense interest in Ben Orton. This is salt-of-the-earth country. Ben Orton was its hero.” She watched him take a cigarette, took one herself. The air conditioner blew hard but he managed to light them both.
    “‘Mindlessly’?” He pushed the narrow steel lighter back into his shirt pocket. “Does that mean you think her faith in him was misplaced?”
    “It means that’s the kind of woman she is,” Daisy Flynn said. “It also means Ben Orton wasn’t just a police chief—he was also a man.” She looked up with a mechanical smile at a skinny black youth who set down a yellow tray on which plastic holders gripped paper cups of coffee. “And that women, too, worship heroes. Thank you, Cecil. Will you pull all the recent footage on Ben Orton, please? Mr. Brandstetter here wants to look at it.” He nodded, grinned, and walked off.
    Dave looked