Free The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of by Joseph Hansen

“Hispanos—as alike as jumping beans. There is no reality, only romance. Cervantes knew it in 1605. Nothing’s changed.”
    He lay with a silvery drink in his hand on a chaise of aluminum tubing and bright yellow flowered fabric on a terraza in back of a hillside house like Ben Orton’s—rough white stucco, grilled windows, red-tile roofs. It looked as if repair work was underway on the roofs. Stacks of new tiles occupied a corner of the terraza, along with trowels, buckets, ladders. An ornamental iron gate opened into the property from above. There was a tennis court where youths in shorts batted a yellow ball over a green net. Long stairs led down here. Another long flight dropped to a blue pool where young men laughed and splashed. Below the pool, a brushy fold in the fall-off of land put the highway out of sight. Beyond lay the small roofs of La Caleta, the bay with its tiny white boats, the rusty jut of the old cannery, the sparkling ocean.
    Dave said, “He told me you and Kerlee were enemies. Hated each other’s guts. Always had.”
    “Cliff didn’t need enemies,” Nowell said. “He had himself.” A blond youth with long, smooth swimmer’s muscles came out French doors onto the terrace. Maybe his trunks weren’t as small as possible but they looked it. Nowell fluttered fingers at him. “Get Mr. Brandstetter a drink, will you?” He looked at Dave. “What shall it be?”
    “It has been Mexican beer.” Dave smiled at the youth. That was easy. “Whatever’s in the fridge.”
    The boy smiled back, said “Löwenbräu” firmly, and took Nowell’s empty glass into the house.
    “Winning child,” Nowell said, looking after him. “He was slated for the Olympics. Did nothing but train. From the age of eight. Isn’t it insane? His father says he’d have made the team. But there were locker-room problems.”
    “Come to you in trouble, do they?” Dave asked.
    “By referral. Doctors, lawyers, agencies, juvenile authorities. Even the odd police department.”
    Dave blinked. At the noisy pool below, at the plock of balls on rackets above. “All of them?”
    “No, no.” Nowell shook his head, amused. “These are mostly just neighbor children come to play. You know how it is when you have a pool.”
    Dave grinned. “Awful nuisance.”
    “Hateful.” Nowell’s hard eyes twinkled. “No, the counting’s handled down at the office. Now and then I have a case who lives here. There’s plenty of room. Boys. Girls. And parents, of course.”
    As if on cue, a stocky man with a mat of gray hair on a sagging chest came around a corner of the house. He wore floppy surfer trunks, a loud Hawaiian shirt, and clogs. He carried towels. He was bald and his sunburned scalp was peeling. A woman followed him. She was burned too dark and had starved herself to keep her figure right for a bikini and had almost managed it. The smiles these people gave Nowell showed astonishing teeth. The man had to be a dentist. Self-conscious, they nudged each other down toward the hectic pool.
    “Do they pay?” Dave said.
    “We’re a nonprofit educational—”
    “You always were,” Dave said, “only I remember you in a pair of dingy offices around Third and Main in L.A. Building about to be torn down?”
    Nowell laughed. “We used to beat pans and shriek in the hall,” he said, “to warn the rats we were coming. It was nice to have them out but they never tidied up before they left. Yes, those were the bad old days. A secondhand mimeograph, three frightened faggots, and a cause. Twenty-five years ago. You came there?”
    “You were amicus curiae in the case of a friend of a friend. He didn’t have a car. I did. I picked him up at your place one day in the rain. We shook hands but I don’t expect you to remember. You must have been amicus curiae to a good many bewildered schoolteachers plucked naked out of steam baths.”
    “We were in court more hours than we slept.”
    “You had a magazine too,” Dave said. “Don’t