Read Power, The for Free Online

prove it wasn’t so.
    “Nobody ever really knows anybody else, Ed.”
    “Then I’ll tell you something. Everything I am, I’ve had to work for.”
    “Everybody …”
    DeFalco held up his hand. “I don’t mean it that way. By what I am, I mean personality and I know how tough it is even to define the word. A person’s mannerisms, the way he acts, the little expressions he gets on his face—the things that go to make up the you that people remember. Like two kids selling popcorn in a ball park. One will make a mint and the other won’t be able to move half a dozen bags. What’s the difference? The personality.”
    He pushed the plate of spaghetti away and dabbed at his face with a napkin. “I manufactured my own personality. I mean it. I made a study of what people liked in other people and tried to develop those traits myself. Hell, I even used to stand in front of a mirror and practice my winning ways. And if that makes me a hypocrite without a sincere bone in my body, I’ll admit it. But I only did consciously what every kid does unconsciously.
    “And then I met a man who was a personality. He was the most alive person I ever met—there was more life in his little finger than in my whole body.” He hesitated. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I was running after little girls when I was nine years old. But like I say, I used to pal around with this friend of mine and you know what happened one day? I wasn’t Eddy DeFalco any more. I was this other person down to the last little mannerism, down to the way he used to accent his words. His personality had run right over mine and I was a carbon copy clear down to my toenails.”
    He studiously stirred some sugar into his coffee. His voice was low. “As soon as I realized it, I hated him. But you see the same thing every day. Movie stars, athletes. People worship them, people copy them. People want to be an extension of somebody else’s personality. Now just imagine what the world would be like with your superman running around.”
    Tanner sat there and felt the fear damming up within himself again. To a lesser extent it was exactly how he had felt on the pier. Run over, flattened, an extension of somebody else’s personality. DeFalco had done an excellent job of describing it.
    DeFalco drained his coffee and made a face. “People would only come in one model then. God knows I don’t think too much of the human race sometimes but I would be willing to kill a man to avoid that.”
    Tanner studied him carefully. “Would you be willing to kill him if I told you who it was?”
    DeFalco stared at him and Tanner felt his teeth want to chatter; he gripped the table to keep his hands from shaking. The intense dark eyes and the sullen, brooding face.
    And behind it … ?
    “You know, I suppose.”
    “I think John Olson knows. I think that’s why Olson was scared to death yesterday morning.”
    DeFalco’s face showed nothing. “So all we have to do is ask John, is that what you’re driving at?”
    “That’s right. That’s all we have to do.”
    “You haven’t run into Marge or Petey or Karl or any of the others today, have you?”
    “I haven’t been around.”
    “Well, you won’t be able to ask John Olson about it. Not tonight or tomorrow or any time.”
    He suspected what was coming. “Why not?”
    DeFalco’s voice was flat.
    “Because John died at three o’clock this morning.”

4
     
    HE checked in at the neighborhood YMCA early Sunday night, when there were still people on the streets.
    The night clerk was a little too prim and uncooperative. “I don’t know, sir. We don’t ordinarily rent rooms to people without baggage.”
    “It’s only for one night. I … haven’t any other place to stay.”
    The clerk’s eyebrows arched slightly and Tanner guessed what the man was thinking. He could try to bribe him, he thought, but it would be expensive and the clerk impressed him as the type who would scream for the police.
    “My wife,” he said,