The Blue Hammer (32 page)

I felt a twinge of compassion for the woman but kept it under control. “Mead isn’t the only one who’s been killed. There are also Paul Grimes and Jacob Whitmore, men that you and your husband were doing business with. Grimes was
killed here in your street. Whitmore may have been drowned in your bathtub.”

She gave me a sudden shocked look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll be glad to explain. It may take a little time. Could we go into the living room and sit down?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to. They’ve been firing questions at me most of the day. Mr. Lackner advised me not to do any more talking.”

Purvis spoke up in a dubious voice: “I’d better give her her rights, don’t you think, Archer?”

His nervousness encouraged her, and she turned on him. “I know my rights. I don’t have to talk to you or anybody else. Speaking of rights, you have no right to force your way into my house like this.”

“No force was employed, ma’am. You invited us in.”

“I certainly did not. You invited yourself. You bullied your way in.”

Purvis turned to me. He had gone pale with the bureaucratic terror of making an attributable mistake.

“We better leave it for now, Archer. Questioning witnesses isn’t my field anyway. For all I know, the D.A. will want to grant her immunity. I wouldn’t want to ruin the case by making a mistake at this late date.”

“What case?” she said with renewed vigor. “There is no case. You have no right to come here hustling me and harrying me. Just because I’m a poor woman without any friends and a mentally ill husband who doesn’t even know who he is, he’s so far gone.”

“Who is he?” I said.

She gave me a startled look, and fell silent.

I said, “Incidentally, why do you call yourself Mrs. Johnson? Were you ever married to Gerard Johnson? Or did Chantry simply change his name to Johnson after he murdered the real Gerard?”

“I’m not talking,” she repeated. “You two get out of here now.”

Purvis was already out on the porch, dissociating himself
from my unorthodox questioning. I followed him out and we parted on the sidewalk.

I sat in my car in the failing afternoon and tried to straighten out the case in my mind. It had started with the trouble between two brothers, Richard Chantry and his illegitimate half brother, William Mead. It appeared that Richard had stolen William’s work and William’s girl and eventually murdered him, leaving his body in the Arizona desert.

Richard came to Santa Teresa with the girl and, despite the fact that murder was an extraditable offense, was never brought back to Arizona for questioning. He prospered in California and, as if his talent had fed on William’s death, developed in just seven years into an important painter. Then his world collapsed. An army friend of William’s, Gerard Johnson, got out of the veterans’ hospital and came to visit Richard.

Gerard made two visits to Richard, the second accompanied by William’s widow and son. That was Gerard’s last visit to anyone. Richard killed him and buried him in his own greenhouse. Then, as if in penance, Richard stepped down from his own place in the world and took Gerald’s name and William’s place. He had come to this house on Olive Street and lived as a drunken recluse for twenty-five years.

In the first years, before he put on the disguises of age and alcoholism, he must have lived in close confinement, like an insane relative in a nineteenth-century attic. But he hadn’t been able to stay away from painting. In the end the persistence of his talent had helped to destroy him.

Fred must have become aware of his father’s secret life as a painter and taken the first unconscious steps toward identifying him with the lost painter Chantry. This would explain Fred’s overpowering interest in Chantry’s work, culminating in his theft or borrowing of the Biemeyers’ painting. When Fred brought that painting home to study it, his father took it from Fred’s room and hid it in his own—the attic where he had painted it in the first place.

The missing painting was in the trunk of my car. Chantry was in jail. I should be feeling happy and successful but I
wasn’t. The case hung heavy on my hands and stillborn in my mind. It kept me sitting there under the olive trees as the afternoon slowly faded.

I told myself that I was waiting for the woman to come out. But I doubted that she would as long as I was parked there. Twice I saw her face at the living-room window. The first time she looked frightened. The second time she was angry, and shook her fist at me. I smiled at her reassuringly. She pulled down the frayed blind.

I sat there trying to imagine the life of the couple who had lived in the gabled house for twenty-five years. Chantry had been a moral prisoner as well as a physical one. The woman he had been living with under the name of Johnson must have known that he had killed the original Johnson. She probably knew that he had killed her legal husband, Mead, as well. Their cohabitation was more like a prison sentence than any kind of marriage.

Their secret, their multiple guilty secret, had been guarded by further crimes. Paul Grimes had been beaten to death in the street, and Jacob Whitmore probably drowned in this house, simply in order to preserve Chantry’s cover. It was hard for me to sit still with such knowledge. But I felt that I had to wait.

Behind the rooftops to the west, the sun had died and suffused the sky with red. Now even that was fading, and the first gray chill of night was coming on.

A yellow cab pulled up behind my car. Betty Siddon got out. She said as she paid the driver, “Do you mind waiting for a minute? I want to be sure my car is where I think it is.”

The driver said he would wait if she didn’t take too long. Without noticing me, or looking in my direction, she started to wade through the weeds toward the back of the house. She seemed a little unsteady on her feet. So far as I knew, she hadn’t slept since she had slept with me. The memory hit me like an arrow that had been in the air since then.

I followed her around to the back of the house. She was bent over at the door of her car, trying to unlock it. The Johnson woman was watching her from the kitchen window.
Betty stood up and leaned on the car door. She greeted me without animation: “Hello, Lew.”

“How are you, Betty?”

“Tired. I’ve been writing all day, to no avail. The publisher wanted to cut my story down to nothing, for legal reasons. So I walked out.”

“Where are you going now?”

“I’m on a mission,” she said with faint irony. “But I can’t seem to get this car door open.”

I took the keys from her hand and opened the door. “You were using the wrong key.”

Being able to correct her on this point made me happy, for some reason.

It made Betty more tired. Her face was pale and heavy-eyed, half dissolved in twilight.

“What kind of a mission?” I asked her.

“Sorry, it’s top secret, Lew.”

The Johnson woman opened the back door and stepped outside. Her voice rose like a stormy wind: “You two get out of here. You’ve got no right to harass me. I’m an innocent woman who took up with the wrong man. I should have left him years ago and I would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the boy. I’ve lived with a crazy drunk for twenty-five years. If you think it’s easy, try it sometime.”

Betty cut her off. “Shut up. You knew I was in your attic last night. You talked me into going up there yourself. You let me stay there all night with him, and you didn’t lift a finger to help me. So shut up.”

Mrs. Johnson’s face began to twist and work like some amorphous sea creature trying to dodge an enemy, perhaps evade reality itself. She turned and went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind her carefully.

Betty yawned profoundly, her eyes streaming.

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Are you all right?”

“I will be in a minute.” She yawned again, and waited, and yawned again. “It did me good to tell that woman off. She’s one of those wives who can watch a man commit murder and feel nothing. Nothing but her own moral superiority. Her
whole life’s been devoted to covering up. Her motto is save the surface and you save all. But nothing got saved. The whole thing went to rot, and people got killed while she stood by and let it happen. I almost got killed myself.”

“By Chantry?”

She nodded. “That woman doesn’t have the nerve to act out her own fantasies. She stands to one side and lets the man do it for her, so she can have her dim little sadistic orgasms.”

“You really hate her, don’t you?”

“Yes. I do. Because I’m a woman, too.”

“But you don’t hate Chantry, after what he did to you?”

She shook her head, and her short hair blurred in the twilight. “The point is that he didn’t do it. He was thinking about killing me. He even talked about it. But then he changed his mind. He painted my picture instead. I’m grateful to him—for not killing me, and for painting my picture.”

“So am I.”

I tried to put both arms around her. But she wasn’t ready for that.

“Do you know why he took pity on me? Naturally you don’t. Remember the time I told you about, when my father took me to visit Chantry? When I was just a little girl?”

“I remember.”

“Well, he remembered, too. I didn’t have to remind him. He actually remembered me from the time I was a child. He said my eyes hadn’t changed since then.”

“I’m afraid he has.”

“Has he not. Don’t worry, Lew, I’m not getting sentimental about Chantry. I’m simply glad to be alive. Very glad.”

I said that I was glad she was alive, too.

“There’s only one thing I’m sorry about,” she added. “All through this thing, I’ve kept hoping that somehow it would turn out that he wasn’t Chantry. You know? That it had all been a horrible mistake. But it wasn’t. The man who painted those pictures is a murderer.”

“I know.”

^chapter
42

Betty’s cabdriver appeared at the corner of the house, looking unhappy. “You’ve kept me waiting a long time, Miss, I’m going to have to charge you.”

Betty paid him off. But when she got into her own car it wouldn’t start. I tried it. The engine didn’t turn over for me either.

I lifted the hood. The battery was gone.

“What am I going to do now? I have to go on an errand.”

“I’ll be glad to drive you.”

“But I have to go by myself. I promised I would.”

“Who did you promise?”

“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”

She seemed to be drawing away from me. I stepped closer and looked at her face. It was scarcely more than a pale oval now, dark-eyed, dark-mouthed. Night was flowing between the high old houses like a turbid river. I was afraid she would be swept away, this time beyond my reach.

She touched my arm. “Will you lend me your car, Lew?”

“For how long?”

“Overnight.”

“For what purpose?”

“You don’t have to cross-question me. Just give me a yes or no.”

“All right. The answer is no.”

“Please. This is important to me.”

“The answer is still no. I’m not going through another night like last night, wondering what’s happened to you.”

“All right. I’ll find someone who is willing to help me.”

She started to walk toward the street, stumbling a little among the weeds. I was shaken by the idea that I might lose her and went after her.

She turned at the sidewalk. “Are you going to lend me your car?”

“No. I’m not letting you out of my sight. If you rent a car or borrow one, I’ll follow you.”

“You can’t bear to see me get ahead of you, is that it?”

“No. You were way ahead of me last night. You put yourself in an exposed position. I don’t want that to happen again. There’s such a thing as having too much nerve.” I took a deep breath. “Have you had any rest today?”

She answered evasively, “I forget.”

“That means you haven’t. You can’t take a long night drive without any sleep. God knows what you might run into at the far end.”

“God and Archer,” she said bitterly, “they know everything. Don’t you and God ever make a mistake?”

“God did. He left off Eve’s testicles.”

Betty let out a cry of pure sharp female rage, which somehow diminuendoed into mirth. She finally settled for both the car and me, on condition that she be allowed to do at least half the driving. I opted for the first shift.

“Where are we going?” I said as I started the engine.

“Long Beach. I assume you know where that is.”

“I ought to. I was born there. What’s in Long Beach?”

“I promised not to tell anyone.”

“Promised who?” I said. “Mrs. Chantry?”

“Since you know everything,” Betty said clearly and carefully, “it would seem superfluous to answer any of your questions.”

“So it’s Francine Chantry. What is she doing in Long Beach?”

“Apparently she had a car accident.”

“Is she in the hospital?”

“No. She’s at a place called the Gilded Galleon.”

“That’s a waterfront bar. What’s she doing there?”

“I think she’s drinking. I’ve never known her to drink much, but she seems to be breaking down.”

“Why did she call you?”

“She said she needed my advice and help. We’re not really close but I suppose I’m as close to her as anyone is. She wants my advice in a public-relations capacity, she said. Which probably means that she wants me to help her out of the mess she’s got herself into by running away.”

“Did she say why she did that?”

“She simply panicked.”

I thought as I turned onto the freeway that Francine Chantry had some reason to panic. She had guilty knowledge of the death of Gerard Johnson, and possibly of the death of William Mead.

I drove hard. Betty slept against my shoulder. The combination of the speeding car and the sleeping woman made me feel almost young, as if my life might have a new beginning after all.

In spite of the early-evening traffic, we were in Long Beach in two hours. It was my home territory, as I had said, and the lights along the waterfront shone with remembered promise, even if all it had led to was the present.