The Blue Hammer (10 page)

There were lights on the second floor of the newspaper
building. It faced on a grassy square fringed with tall palms. The trees stood still and silent in the calm post-midnight air.

I parked my car by the square and climbed the stairs to the lighted newsroom. A clacking typewriter led me across the large unpeopled room to a partitioned space where Betty Jo Siddon was working. She looked up with a start when I spoke her first two names.

“You shouldn’t
do
that. You scared me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. As a matter of fact, I’m glad you came by. I’m trying to make some kind of sense out of this murder story.”

“May I read it?”

“In tomorrow’s paper, if they use it. They don’t always print my stuff. The news editor is a male chauvinist and he tries to keep me segregated in the women’s pages.” She was smiling but her dark eyes were rebellious.

“You can tell me what your theory is.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have a theory. I’m trying to build a story around the question of who the woman in the painting was, and who painted the picture, and of course who stole it. Actually it’s a triple mystery, isn’t it? Do you know who stole it?”

“I think so, but I wouldn’t want to be quoted.”

“I won’t quote you,” she said. “This is just for background.”

“Okay. According to my witnesses, who frankly aren’t worth much, the picture was stolen twice in quick succession. An art student by the name of Fred Johnson took it from the Biemeyers’ house—”

“Fred Johnson from the museum? I wouldn’t have thought he was the type.”

“He may not be. He claims he took it to make some tests on it and try to authenticate it as a Chantry. But somebody stole it from his parents’ house, or from the art museum—there are two versions.”

Betty Jo was making penciled notes on a sheet of typewriter paper. “Where’s Fred now? Do you think I can talk to him?”

“If you can find him. He’s taken off for parts unknown with the Biemeyer girl. As for your other questions, I don’t know who painted the picture. It may be a Chantry and it may not. Maybe Fred Johnson knows. I did get a partial identification of the woman in the picture. Her name is Mildred.”

“Is she in town here?”

“I doubt it. She was a model in Tucson a generation ago. Paul Grimes, the man who was killed, knew her. He thought the painting of her had probably been done from memory. She was much younger in it than she could be in real life.”

“Does that mean it was painted recently?”

“That’s one of the questions Fred was trying to answer, apparently. He was trying to date the picture to determine if Chantry could have painted it.”

Betty Jo looked up brightly from her notes. “Do you think Chantry could have?”

“My opinion isn’t worth anything. I haven’t seen the picture or the photograph of it.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I’ll get it.”

She rose quickly and disappeared through the door marked “Photography Department.” Her passage left vibrations on the air. The vibrations lingered in my body.

I was feeling lonely and late but I felt dubious about jumping the generation gap. It could open up like a chasm and swallow you, or close on you like pincers. I tried to focus my excitement on the woman in the picture that I hadn’t seen yet.

Betty Jo brought it and laid it down on her desk. It was a colored photograph of a painting, measuring about four by six inches. I held it up in the fluorescent light. The pictured woman was beautiful, as Paola had said. She had classical features, delicate blond coloring. The whole painting held a sense of distance that centered in her ice-blue eyes and seemed to suggest that she was watching me, or I was watching her, from a long way off. Perhaps the suggestion came from what Paola had relayed from her father, that the woman who sat for the picture would be old or dead, her beauty only remembered.

But it seemed to have the power to focus the case for me. I wanted to reclaim the picture, meet the woman if she was alive. I wanted to find out where and when and by whom she had been painted.

“Will you be running this in tomorrow’s paper?”

“I doubt it,” Betty Jo said. “The photographer said the picture he took wouldn’t reproduce too well.”

“Even a bad print of it would be useful to me. The original has to go back to the police.”

“I suppose you could ask Carlos for a copy.”

“You ask him, will you? You know him. It could help me to track down Fred and the Biemeyer girl.”

“And if you do you’ll give me the details, right?”

“I won’t forget you.” The words held a double meaning for my inner ear.

Betty Jo took the picture back into the photography department. I sat down in her chair and rested my arms on her desk and my head on my arms, and slid off into sleep. I must have dreamed about violence, or the expectation of violence. When the girl’s hand touched my shoulder, I lunged to my feet reaching for a gun in a shoulder holster that I wasn’t wearing.

Betty Jo backed away from me with her hands half raised and fingers spread. “You frightened me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Carlos is making you a picture. In the meantime, I’m afraid I have to use my typewriter. I want to have my story ready for the noon edition. Incidentally, is it all right if I mention you in it?”

“Not by name, please.”

“You’re modest.”

“Hardly. I’m a private detective. I want to stay private.”

I retreated to the City Editor’s desk and put my head down on my arms again. It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course the room was large and reasonably well lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.

This time she woke me by voice, standing well back. “Mr. Archer?”

She had a young black with her. He showed me the black-and-white copy that he had made. It was rather blurred and grimy, as if the blond woman had slipped away still further into time, out of sight of the sun. Still her features were identifiable.

I thanked the photographer and offered to pay him for the copy. He deplored the suggestion, pushing air toward me with his hands. He retreated into his workroom, and the girl sat down at her typewriter again. She typed a few words and stopped, withdrawing her hands from the keys and dropping them in her lap.

“I don’t know whether I can do this piece after all. I can’t name Fred Johnson or the girl. It doesn’t really make for much of a story, does it?”

“It will.”

“But when? I don’t really know enough about the people. If the woman in the picture is alive and reachable, that would make all the difference. I could hang the whole story on her.”

“You can anyway.”

“It would be so much better if I could say definitely who and where she is. And that she’s alive if she is alive. I might even do a follow-up interview.”

“The Biemeyers might know,” I said. “They may have had a personal reason for buying that picture of her.”

She looked at her watch. “It’s after midnight. I wouldn’t dare to call them at this time of night. Anyway, the chances are that they don’t know anything. Ruth Biemeyer does a lot of talking about her relationship with Richard Chantry, yet I doubt that she was ever very close to him.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t want to talk to my clients right now. The case had enlarged enormously since they had hired me, and I had no immediate hope of being able to explain it to them. But I did want another crack at Mrs. Chantry.

“Chantry’s wife was very close to him,” I said.

“You think Francine Chantry would be willing to talk to me?”

“She can hardly refuse, since there’s a murder involved. Which she’s taking pretty hard. She may know all about the woman in the picture. Didn’t she used to model for her husband herself?”

“How do you know that?” Betty Jo said.

“She told me.”

“She never told
me.”

“You’re not a man.”

“You noticed.”

^chapter
14

I drove Betty Jo along the deserted waterfront to the Chantry house. It was dark and silent. The parking area was empty. The party was over.

Perhaps not entirely over. I could hear a faint sound, the sound of a woman moaning in pain or pleasure, which ended abruptly as we approached the front door. Betty Jo turned to me.

“Who was that?”

“It could have been Mrs. Chantry. But women all sound the same under certain circumstances.”

She let out her breath, making a small impatient angry noise, and knocked on the door. A light went on above it.

After what seemed a long wait, the door was opened and Rico looked out at us. Lipstick was smeared on one side of his mouth. He saw me looking at it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It dragged the red smear down across his chin. His black eyes were unfriendly.

“What do you want?”

“We have a couple of questions to ask Mrs. Chantry,” I said.

“She’s in bed asleep.”

“You better wake her up.”

“I can’t do that. She’s had a big day. A big day and a big night.” The lipstick smear on Rico’s face touched his words with comic lewdness.

“Ask her if she’ll see us. We’re investigating a murder, as you possibly know.”

“Mr. Archer and Miss Siddon,” Betty Jo said.

“I know who you are.”

Rico let us into the long front room and turned on the light. With his dark bald-eagle head jutting out of his long brown dressing gown, he looked like some kind of wild medieval monk. There was stale smoke in the deserted room. Through it I could almost hear the remembered buzzing hum of party conversation. Empty and half-empty glasses stood on most of the horizontal surfaces, including the keyboard of the grand piano. Except for the paintings on the walls—quiet windows into a more orderly world, which even murder didn’t seem to have changed—the room was like a visible hangover.

I moved around the room inspecting the portraits and trying in an amateurish way to tell if the same hand had painted the Biemeyers’ picture. I couldn’t tell, and neither, she said, could Betty Jo.

But I found that the murder of Grimes, and the possible murder of Whitmore, had after all subtly changed the portraits or my perceptions of them. Their eyes seemed to regard me with suspicion and a kind of fearful resignation. Some looked at me like prisoners, some like jurors, and some like quiet animals in a cage. I wondered which, if any, reflected the mind of the man who had painted them.

“Did you know Chantry, Betty Jo?”

“Not really. He was before my time. Actually I did see him once.”

“When?”

“Right here in this room. My father, who was a writer, brought me to meet him. It was a very special occasion. He hardly saw anybody, you know. All he did was work.”

“How did he strike you?”

She considered the question. “He was very remote and shy, as shy as I was. He held me on his knee but he didn’t really want to. He got rid of me as soon as he could, I think. And that suited me. Either he didn’t like little girls at all, or he liked them too much.”

“Did you really think that at the time?”

“I believe I did. Little girls are quite aware of such things, at least I was.”

“How old were you?”

“I must have been four or five.”

“How old are you now?”

“I’m not saying.” She said it with a slightly defensive smile.

“Under thirty?”

“Barely. It was roughly twenty-five years ago, if that’s what you’re getting at. Chantry disappeared soon after I visited him. I often seem to have that effect on men.”

“Not on me.”

A little color invaded her cheeks and made her prettier. “Just don’t try to hold me on your knee. You could disappear.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Don’t mention it. Seriously,” she added, “it gives me a funny feeling to be in this same room prying into Richard Chantry’s life. It makes me wonder if certain things aren’t fated. Do you think they are?”

“Of course. By the place and the time and the family you’re born into. Those are the things that fate most people.”

“I’m sorry I asked. I don’t really like my family. I don’t like the place and time too well, either.”

“So react against them.”

“Is that what you do?”

“I try.”

Betty Jo’s eyes shifted to a point behind me. Mrs. Chantry had quietly entered the room. Her hair was brushed, her face looked newly washed. She was wearing a white robe that molded her figure from neck to knee and swept the floor.

“I do wish you’d find another place to react, Mr. Archer. And by all means another time. It’s dreadfully late.” She gave
me a long-suffering smile, which hardened when she turned to Betty Jo. “What is this all about, dear?”

The younger woman was embarrassed. Her mouth moved, trying to find the right words.

I got out my black-and-white photograph of the stolen painting. “Do you mind taking a look at this, Mrs. Chantry? It’s a photograph of the Biemeyers’ picture.”

“I have nothing to add to what I told you earlier. I’m sure it’s a fake. I’m familiar with all of my husband’s paintings, I believe, and this isn’t one of them.”

“Look at it anyway, will you?”

“I’ve already seen the painting itself, as I told you.”

“Did you recognize the model who sat for it?”

Her eyes met mine in an instant of shared knowledge. She had recognized the model.

“No,” she said.

“Will you take a look at this photo and try again?”

“I don’t see the point.”

“Try anyway, Mrs. Chantry. It may be important.”

“Not to me.”

“You can’t be sure,” I said.

“Oh, very well.”

She took the photograph from my hand and studied it. Her hand was shaking, and the picture fluttered like something in a high wind from the past. She handed it back to me as if she were glad to get rid of it.

“It does bear some resemblance to a woman I knew when I was a young girl.”

“When did you know her?”

“I didn’t really
know
her. I met her at a party in Santa Fe before the war.”

“What was her name?”