The Blue Hammer (3 page)

She led me to a farther wall on which was hung a series of figure studies of women. One of them stopped me. A young woman was sitting on a rock that was partly hidden, as she was, by a buffalo robe around her waist. Her fine breasts and shoulders were bare. Behind her and above her in the picture, the mounted head of a buffalo bull hung in space.

“He called it
Europa,”
Mrs. Chantry said.

I turned to her. She was smiling. I looked again at the girl in the picture.

“Is that you?”

“In a sense. I used to model for Richard.”

We looked at each other more sharply for a moment. She was about my age or a little younger, with
Europa
’s body holding firm under her blue suit. I wondered what kind of compulsion, what pride in her husband or in herself, made her serve as a museum guide to his pictures.

“Had you ever seen any of his paintings before? They seemed to take you by surprise.”

“They did. They do.”

“His work has that effect on most people seeing it for the first time. Tell me, what got you interested in it?”

I told her I was a private detective employed by the Biemeyers to investigate the theft of their picture. I wanted to get her reaction.

She went pale under her makeup. “The Biemeyers are ignorant people. That picture they bought from Paul Grimes is a fake. He offered it to me long before they saw it. I wouldn’t touch it. It’s an obvious imitation of a style that Richard abandoned long ago.”

“How long ago?”

“About thirty years. It belonged to his Arizona period. Paul Grimes may have painted it himself.”

“Does Grimes have that kind of a reputation?”

I’d asked her one question too many. “I can’t discuss his reputation with you, or anyone. He was Richard’s friend and teacher in the Arizona days.”

“But not a friend of yours?”

“I prefer not to go into that. Paul was helpful to my husband when it counted. But people change over the years. Everything changes.” She looked around her, scanning her husband’s paintings as if even they had become unfamiliar, like half-remembered dreams. “I try to guard my husband’s reputation, keep the canon pure. All sorts of people try to cash in on his work.”

“Would Fred Johnson be one of them?”

The question seemed to surprise her. She shook her head, setting her hair swinging like a flexible gray bell.

“Fred is fascinated by my husband’s work. But I wouldn’t say he’s trying to cash in on it.” She was silent for a moment. “Did Ruth Biemeyer accuse him of stealing her lousy picture?”

“His name came up.”

“Well, it’s nonsense. Even if he were dishonest, which he
shows no signs of being, Fred has too much taste to be taken in by a poor imitation like that.”

“I’d still like to talk to him. Do you happen to know where he lives?”

“I can find out.” She went into the front office and came out a minute later. “Fred lives with his parents at 2024 Olive Street. Be nice to him. He’s a sensitive young man, and a very great Chantry enthusiast.”

I thanked her for the information. She thanked me for my interest in her husband. She seemed to be playing a complex role, part salesperson and part guardian of a shrine, and part something else. I couldn’t help wondering if the undefinable part was an angry widowed sexuality.

^chapter
4

The Johnson house was one of a block of three-story frame houses that appeared to date from the early years of the century. The olive trees that gave the street its name were even older. Their leaves looked like tarnished silver in the afternoon sunlight.

This part of the city was a mixed neighborhood of rooming houses and private residences, doctors’ offices and houses half converted into offices. A large modern hospital, whose fenestration made it look like a giant honeycomb, rose in the middle of the area and seemed to have absorbed most of its energy.

The Johnson house was particularly run-down. Some of its boards were loose, and it needed paint. It stood like a gray and gabled ghost of a house in a yard choked with yellow grass and brown weeds.

I rattled the rusty screen door with my fist. The house seemed to stir into slow, reluctant life. I could hear lagging footsteps coming down the inside stairs.

A heavy old man opened the door and peered out at me through the screen. He had dirty gray hair and a short growth of moth-eaten gray beard. His voice was querulous.

“What’s up?”

“I’d like to see Fred.”

“I don’t know if he’s home. I’ve been sacked out.” He leaned toward me, his face against the screen, and I could smell wine on his breath. “What do you want with Fred?”

“Just to talk to him.”

His red little eyes scanned me up and down. “What do you want to talk to him about?”

“I’d prefer to tell Fred.”

“You better tell me. My son is a busy young man. His time is worth money. Fred’s got expertise”—he rolled the word on his tongue—“and that’s worth more money.”

The old man was probably out of wine, I thought, and getting ready to put the bite on me. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came out from under the stairs. She carried herself with a certain clumsy authority, but her voice was small and girlish.

“I’ll talk to the man, Gerard. You don’t have to trouble your poor head with Fred’s comings and goings.”

She laid her open hand against the furred side of his face, peered sharply into his eyes like a diagnostician, and gave him a little slap of dismissal. He didn’t argue with her but made his way back up the stairs.

“I’m Mrs. Johnson,” she said to me. “Fred’s mother.”

She had gray-streaked black hair drawn back from a face whose history and meaning were obscured, like her husband’s face, by an inert layer of flesh. Her heavy body was strictly girdled, though, and her white uniform was clean.

“Is Fred here?”

“I don’t believe so.” She looked past me into the street. “I don’t see the car.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“It’s hard to say. Fred is a student at the university.” She reported the fact as if it were the one great pride of her life. “They keep shifting his class hours around, and he works part-time besides at the art museum. They really depend on him there. Was it anything I could help you with?”

“It may be. Is it all right if I come in?”

“I’ll come
out,
” she said brightly. “The house isn’t fit to be seen on the inside. Since I went back to full-time nursing, I haven’t had the time to keep it up.”

She removed a heavy key from the inside keyhole and used it to lock the door as she came out. It made me wonder if she kept her husband under lock and key when he had been drinking.

She led me off the porch and looked up at the peeling façade of the house. “It isn’t fit to be seen on the outside, either. But I can’t help that. The house belongs to the clinic—all these houses do—and they’re planning to tear them down next year. This whole side of the street is going to be a parking lot.” She sighed. “I don’t know where we’re going to go from here, with rents going up the way they are, and my husband no better than an invalid.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“About Jerry, you mean? Yeah, I’m sorry, too. He used to be a fine strong man. But he had a nervous breakdown a while ago—it all goes back to the war—and he’s never been the same since. And of course he has a drinking problem, too. So many of them do,” she added meditatively.

I liked the woman’s candor, even though it sounded slightly carnivorous. I wondered idly how it was that nurses so often ended up with invalid husbands.

“So what’s your problem?” she said in a different tone.

“No problem. I’d simply like to talk to Fred.”

“What about?”

“A picture.”

“That’s his field, all right. Fred can tell you anything you want to know about pictures.” But she dropped the subject suddenly, as though it frightened her, and said in still a third
voice, hesitant and low, “Is Fred in some kind of trouble?”

“I hope not, Mrs. Johnson.”

“So do I. Fred is a good boy. He always has been. I ought to know, I’m his mother.” She gave me a long dubious look. “Are you a policeman?”

I had been when I was younger, and apparently it still showed to a cop-sensitive eye. But I had my story ready: “I’m a journalist. I’m thinking of doing a magazine piece on the artist Richard Chantry.”

Her face and body tightened as if in response to a threat. “I see.”

“I understand your son is an expert on Chantry.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Fred is interested in a lot of different artists. He’s going to make that his career.”

“As a dealer?”

“That’s what he’d like to be. But it takes capital. And we don’t even own the house we live in.”

She looked up at the tall gray house as if it were the source of all her trouble. From a window high up under the roof, her husband was watching us like a prisoner in a tower. She made a pushing gesture with her open hand, as if she were putting the shot. Johnson receded into the dimness.

“I’m haunted by the thought,” she said, “that he’ll tumble out of one of those windows. The poor man never got over his war injuries. Sometimes, when it takes him really bad, he falls right down on the floor. I keep wondering if I ought to put him back in the veterans’ hospital. But I don’t have the heart to. He’s so much happier here with us. Fred and I would really miss him. And Fred is the kind of boy who needs a father.”

Her words were full of feeling, but the voice in which she said them was emotionless. Her eyes were peering coldly into mine, assessing my reaction. I guessed that she was afraid for her son, trying in a hurry to put together a protective family nest.

“Where can I find Fred, do you know?”

“I
don’t
know. He may be out on campus, or he could be
down at the art museum, or anyplace in town. He’s a very busy young man, and he keeps moving. He’ll be taking his degree next spring, if all goes well. And it will.”

She nodded emphatically several times. But there seemed to be a stubborn hopelessness in the gesture, like a woman knocking her head against a wall.

As if in response, an old blue Ford sedan came down the street past the hospital. It slowed as it approached us, turning in toward the curb behind my car. The young man behind the wheel had long hair and a mustache, both reddish blond.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Johnson shake her head, once, in such a short arc that she hardly seemed to have moved. The young man’s eyes flickered. Without having brought it to a full stop, he turned the Ford back in to the road, barely missing my left rear fender. The car accelerated sluggishly, leaving a trail of oil smoke on the air.

“Is that Fred, Mrs. Johnson?”

She answered after a brief hesitation: “That’s Fred. I wonder where he thinks he’s going.”

“You signaled him not to stop.”

“I did? You must be seeing things.”

I left her standing there and followed the blue Ford. It caught a yellow light at the entrance to the freeway and turned off to the right in the direction of the university. I sat behind a long red light and watched the spoor of oil smoke dissipating, mixing with the general smog that overlay this part of the city.

When the light changed, I drove on out to the campus, where Fred’s friend Doris Biemeyer lived.

^chapter
5

The university had been built on an elevated spur of land that jutted into the sea and was narrowed at its base by a tidal slough. Almost surrounded by water and softened by blue haze, it looked from the distance like a medieval fortress town.

Close up, the buildings shed this romantic aspect. They were half-heartedly modern, cubes and oblongs and slabs that looked as if their architect had spent his life designing business buildings. The parking attendant at the entrance told me that the student village was on the north side.

I followed a winding road along the edge of the campus, looking for Fred Johnson. There weren’t many students in sight. Still the place seemed crowded and jumbled, like something thrown at a map in the hope that it would stick there.

Academia Village was even more haphazard than the campus proper. Loose dogs and loose students roamed the narrow streets in about equal numbers. The buildings ranged from hamburger stands and tiny cottages and duplexes to giant apartment buildings. The Sherbourne, where Doris Biemeyer lived, was one of the big ones. It was six stories high and occupied most of a block.

I found a parking place behind a camper painted to simulate a log cabin on wheels. No sign of the old blue Ford. I went into the Sherbourne and took an elevator to the third floor.

The building was fairly new but its interior smelled old and used. It was crowded with the odors of rapid generations, sweat and perfume and pot and spices. If there were human
voices, they were drowned out by the music from several competing sources along the third-floor hallway, which sounded like the voices of the building’s own multiple personality.

I had to knock several times on the door of Apartment 304. The girl who opened the door looked like a smaller version of her mother, prettier but vaguer and less sure of herself.

“Miss Biemeyer?”

“Yes?”

Her eyes looked past me at something just beyond my left shoulder. I sidestepped and looked behind me, half expecting to be hit. But there was nobody there.

“May I come in and talk to you for a minute?”

“I’m sorry. I’m meditating.”

“What are you meditating about?”

“I don’t really know.” She giggled softly and touched the side of her head, where her light hair hung straight like raw silk. “It hasn’t come together yet. It hasn’t materialized, you know?”

She looked as though she hadn’t quite materialized, herself. She had the kind of blondness you can almost see through. She swayed gently like a curtain at a window. Then she lost her balance and fell quite hard against the doorframe.