The Blue Hammer

X

I went out to the big front room. The art expert Arthur Planter was standing with his back to the room, in front of one of the paintings on the wall. When I spoke to him, he didn't turn or answer me, but his tall narrow body stiffened a little.

I repeated his name. "Mr. Planter?"

He turned unwillingly from the picture, which was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a man. "What can I do for you, sir?"

"I'm a private detective-"

"Really?" The pale narrow eyes in his thin face were looking at me without interest.

"Did you know Paul Grimes?"

"I wouldn't say I _know_ him. I've done some business with him, a very little." He pursed his lips as if the memory had a bitter taste.

"You won't do any more," I said, hoping to shock him into communication. "He was murdered earlier this evening."

"Am I a suspect?" His voice was dry and bored.

"Hardly. Some paintings were found in his car. Would you be willing to look at one of them?"

"With what end in view?"

"Identification, maybe."

"I suppose so," he said wearily. "Though I'd much rather look at this." He indicated the picture of the man on the wall.

"Who is it?"

"You mean you don't know? It's Richard Chantry-his only major self-portrait."

I gave the picture a closer look. The head was a little like a lion's head, with rumpled tawny hair, a full beard partly masking an almost feminine mouth, deep eyes the color of emeralds. It seemed to radiate force.

"Did you know him?" I said to Planter.

"Indeed I did. I was one of his discoverers, in a sense."

"Do you believe he's still alive?"

"I don't know. I earnestly hope he is. But if he is alive, and if he's painting, he's keeping his work to himself."

"Why would he take off the way he did?"

"I don't know," Planter repeated. "I think he was a man who lived in phases, like the moon. Perhaps he came to the end of this phase." Planter looked around a little contemptuously at the other people in the crowded room. "This painting you want me to look at, is it a Chantry?"

"I wouldn't know. Maybe you can tell me."

I led him out to my car and showed him in my headlights the small seascape I had taken from Paul Grimes's convertible. He lifted it out of my hands with delicate care, as if he were showing me how to handle a painting.

But what he said was, "I'm afraid it's pretty bad. It's certainly not a Chantry, if that's your question."

"Do you have any idea who might have painted it?"

He considered the question. "It could be the work of Jacob Whitmore. If so, it's very early Whitmore-purely and clumsily representational. I'm afraid poor Jacob's career recapitulated the history of modern art a generation or so late. He'd worked his way up to surrealism and was beginning to discover symbolism, when he died."

"When did he die?"

"Yesterday." Planter seemed to take pleasure in giving me this mild shock. "I understood he went for a dip in the sea off Sycamore Point and had a heart attack." He looked down musingly at the picture in his hands. "I wonder what Paul Grimes thought he could do with this. A good painter's prices will often go up at his death. But Jacob Whitmore was not a good painter."

"Does his work resemble Chantry's?"

"No. It does not." Planter's eyes probed at my face. "Why?"

"I've heard that Paul Grimes may not have been above selling fake Chantrys."

"I see. Well, he'd have had a difficult time selling this as a Chantry. It isn't even a passable Whitmore. As you can see for yourself, it's no more than half finished." Planter added with elaborate cruel wit, "He took his revenge on the sea in advance by painting it badly."

I looked at the blurred and swirling blues and greens in the unfinished seascape. However bad the painting was, it seemed to be given some depth and meaning by the fact that the painter had died in that sea.

"Did you say he lived at Sycamore Point?"

"Yes. That's on the beach north of the campus."

"Did he have any family?"

"He had a girl," Planter said. "As a matter of fact, she called me up today. She wanted me to come and look at the paintings he left behind. She's selling them off cheap, I understand. Frankly I wouldn't buy them at any price."

He handed the picture back to me and told me how to find the place. I got into my car and drove northward past the university to Sycamore Point.

The girl that Jacob Whitmore had left behind was a mournful blonde in a rather late stage of girlhood. She lived in one of half a dozen cottages and cabins that sprawled across the sandy base of the point. She held her door almost completely closed and peered at me through the crack as if I might be bringing a second disaster.

"What do you want?"

"I'm interested in pictures."

"A lot of them are gone. I've been selling them off. Jake drowned yesterday-I suppose you know that. He left me without a sou."

Her voice was dark with sorrow and resentment. The darkness appeared to have seeped up from her mind into the roots of her hair. She looked past me out to sea where the barely visible waves were rolling in like measured installments of eternity.

"May I come in and look?"

"I guess so. Sure."

She opened the door and swung it shut behind me against the wind. The room smelled of the sea, of wine and pot and mildew. The furniture was sparse and broken-down. It looked like a house that had barely survived a battle-an earlier stage of the same desultory battle against poverty and failure that had passed through the Johnson house on Olive Street.

The woman went into an inner room and emerged with a stack of unframed paintings in her arms. She set them down on the warped rattan table.

"These'll cost you ten apiece, or forty-five for five of them. Jake used to get more for his paintings at the Saturday art show on Santa Teresa beach. A while ago, he sold one of them to a dealer for a good price. But I can't afford to wait."

"Was Paul Grimes the dealer?"

"That's right." She looked at me with some suspicion. "Are you a dealer, too?"

"No."

"But you know Paul Grimes?"

"Slightly."

"Is he honest?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"I don't think he is. He put on quite an act about how much he liked Jake's work. He was going to publicize it on a big scale and make our fortune. I thought that Jake's big dream had come true at last. The dealers would be knocking on our door, Jake's prices would skyrocket. But Grimes bought two measly pictures and that was that. One of them wasn't even Jake's-it was somebody else's."

"Who painted the other picture?"

"I don't know. Jake didn't discuss his business with me. I think he took the picture on consignment from one of his friends on the beach."

"Can you describe the picture?"

"It was a picture of a woman-maybe a portrait, maybe imaginary. She was a beautiful woman, with hair the same color as mine." She touched her own bleached hair; the action seemed to arouse her fear or suspicion. "Why is everybody so interested in that picture? Was it worth a lot?"

"I don't know."

"I think it was. Jake wouldn't tell me what he got for it, but I know we've been living on the money for the last couple of months. The money ran out yesterday. And so," she added in a toneless voice, "did Jake."

She turned away and spread out the unframed paintings on the table. Most of them were unfinished-looking small seascapes like the one in my car that I'd shown to Arthur Planter. The drowned man had clearly been obsessed by the sea, and I couldn't help wondering if his drowning had been entirely accidental.

I said, "Were you suggesting that Jake drowned himself?"

"No, I was not." She changed the subject abruptly: "I'll give you all five of them for forty dollars. The canvases alone are worth that much. You know that if you're a painter."

"I'm not a painter."

"I sometimes wonder if Jake was. He painted for over thirty years and ended up with nothing to show for it but this." The gesture of her hand took in the paintings on the table, the house and its history, Jake's death. "Nothing but this and me."

She smiled, or grimaced with half of her face. Her eyes remained cold as a sea bird's, peering down into the roiled and cloudy past.

She caught me watching her and recoiled from the look on my face. "I'm not as bad as you think I am," she said. "If you want to know why I'm selling these things, I want to buy him a coffin. I don't want the county to bury him in one of those pine boxes. And I don't want to leave him lying in the basement of the county hospital."

"Okay, I'll take the five pictures."

I handed her two twenties, wondering if I'd ever get the money back from Biemeyer.

She took it with some distaste and held it. "That wasn't a sales pitch. You don't have to buy them just because you know why I need the money."

"I need the pictures."

"What for? _Are_ you a dealer?"

"Not exactly."

"That means you are. I knew you weren't a painter."

"How did you know?"

"I've lived with a painter for the last ten years." She moved the position of her hips, resting her weight against the corner of the table. "You don't look like a painter or talk like one. You don't have a painter's eyes. You don't smell like a painter."

"What do I smell like?"

"A cop, maybe. I thought when Paul Grimes bought those two pictures from Jake that maybe there was something funny about them. Is there?"

"I don't know."

"Then why are you buying these?"

"Because Paul Grimes bought the others."

"You mean if he put out money for them, they must be worth something?"

"I'd certainly like to know why he wanted them."

"So would I," she said. "Why do _you_ want the pictures?"

"Because Paul Grimes wanted them."

"You mean you do everything he does?"

"I hope not everything."

She gave me her cold half-smile and nodded. "Yeah, I heard he's slightly crooked on occasion. I shouldn't say that, though. I've got nothing against him. And his daughter's kind of a friend of mine."

"Paola? Is she his daughter?"

"Yeah. You know her?"

"We've met. How do you happen to know her?"

"I met her at a party in the barrio. She told me her mother was part Spanish and part Indian. Paola's a beautiful woman, don't you think? I love those Spanish types."

She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her palms together as if she were warming herself at Paola's heat.

I drove back to Santa Teresa and paid a visit to the morgue in the basement of the hospital. A young deputy coroner named Henry Purvis, whom I knew, told me that Jacob Whitmore had drowned while swimming. He pulled out a drawer and showed me the blue body with its massive hairy head and shrunken sex. I walked out of the cold room shivering.