The Blue Hammer

XIII

I followed the freeway into the center of town, which was almost deserted. A cruising police car overtook me. Its driver gave me a quick once-over as he passed, and went on.

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."