The Blue Hammer

XVIII

His house was on the edge of the desert, near the base of a mountain, which had loomed up on my vision long before the plane landed. The house was one-storied and sprawling, surrounded by a natural wood fence that resembled a miniature stockade. It was late in the day but still hot.

Lashman opened a gate in the fence and came out to meet me. His face was deeply seamed, and his white hair straggled down onto his shoulders. He had on faded blue denims and flat-soled buckskin slippers. His eyes were blue, faded like his clothes by too much light.

"Are you Mr. Archer?"

"Yes. It's good of you to let me come."

Informal as he seemed to be, something about the old man imposed formality on me. The hand he gave me was knobbed with arthritis and stained with paint.

"What kind of shape is Fred Johnson in?"

"He seemed very tired," Lashman said. "But excited, too. Buoyed up by excitement."

"What about?"

"He was very eager to talk to Mildred Mead. It had to do with the attribution of a painting. He told me he works for the Santa Teresa Art Museum. Is that correct?"

"Yes. What about the girl?"

"She was very quiet. I don't remember that she said a word." Lashman gave me a questioning look, which I didn't respond to. "Come inside."

He led me through an inner courtyard into his studio. One large window looked out across the desert to the horizon. There was a painting of a woman on an easel, unfinished, perhaps hardly begun. The swirls of paint looked fresh, and the woman's half-emerging features looked like Mildred Mead's face struggling up out of the limbo of the past. On a table beside it, which was scaly with old paint, was a rectangular palette containing daubs of glistening color.

Lashman came up beside me as I examined the painting. "Yes, that's Mildred. I only just started it, after we talked on the phone. I had an urge to paint her one more time. And I'm at the age where you have to put all your sudden urges to work."

"Are you painting her from the life?"

He gave me a shrewd look. "Mildred hasn't been here, if that's what you want to know. She hasn't been here in nearly twenty years. I believe I mentioned that to you on the phone," he said precisely.

"I gather you've painted her often?"

"She was my favorite model. She lived with me off and on for a long time. Then she moved to the far end of the state. I haven't seen her since." He spoke with pride and nostalgia and regret. "Another man made her what she considered a better offer. I don't blame her. She was getting old. I have to confess I didn't treat her too well."

His words set up a vibration in my mind. I'd had a woman and lost her, but not to another man. I'd lost her on my own.

I said, "Is she still living in Arizona?"

"I think so. I had a Christmas card from her last year. That's the last I've heard from Mildred." He looked out across the desert. "Frankly, I'd like to be in touch with her again, even if we're both as old as the hills."

"Where is Mildred living now?"

"In Chantry Canyon, in the Chiricahua Mountains. That's near the New Mexico border." He drew a rough map of Arizona with a piece of charcoal and told me how to get to Chantry Canyon, which was in the state's southeastern corner. "Biemeyer bought her the Chantry house about twenty years ago, and she's been in it ever since. It was the house she always wanted-the house more than the man."

"More than Jack Biemeyer, you mean?"

"And more than Felix Chantry, who built the house and developed the copper mine. She fell in love with Felix Chantry's house and his copper mine long before she fell in love with Felix. She told me it was her lifelong dream to live in Chantry's house. She became his mistress and even bore him an illegitimate son. But he never let her live in the house in his lifetime. He stuck with his wife and the son he had by her."

"That would be Richard," I said.

Lashman nodded. "He grew up into a pretty good painter. I have to admit that, even if I hated his father. Richard Chantry had a real gift, but he didn't use it to the full. He lacked the endurance to stay the course. In this work, you really need endurance." Leaning into the afternoon light from the window, his face bunched, he looked like a metal monument to that quality.

"Do you think Richard Chantry is alive?"

"Young Fred Johnson asked me the same question. I'll give you the same answer I gave him. I think Richard is probably dead-as dead as his brother is-but it hardly matters. A painter who gives up his work in mid-career, as Richard apparently did-he might as well be dead. I expect to die myself the day that I stop working." The old man's circling mind kept returning with fascination and disgust to his own mortality. "And that will be good riddance to bad rubbish, as we used to say when I was a boy."

"What happened to Felix Chantry's other son by Mildred-the illegitimate brother?"

"William? He died young. William was the one I knew and cared about. He and his mother lived with me, off and on, for some years. He even used my name while he was going to art school here in Tucson. But he took his mother's name when he went into the army. He called himself William Mead, and that was the name he was using when he died."

"Was he killed in the war?"

Lashman said quietly, "William died in uniform, but he was on leave when it happened. He was beaten to death and his body left in the desert, not very far from where his mother lives now."

"Who killed him?"

"That was never established. If you want more information, I suggest you get in touch with Sheriff Brotherton in Copper City. He handled the case, or mishandled it. I never did get the full facts of the murder. When Mildred came back from identifying William's body, she didn't say a word for over a week. I knew how she felt. William wasn't my son, and I hadn't seen him for a long time, but he felt like a son to me."

The old man was silent for a moment, and then went on: "I was on my way to making a painter of William. As a matter of fact, his early work was better than his half brother Richard's, and Richard paid him the compliment of imitation. But it was William who became food for worms."

He swung around to face me, angrily, as if I had brought death back into his house. "I'll be food for worms myself before too long. But before I am, I intend to paint one more picture of Mildred. Tell her that, will you?"

"Why don't you tell her yourself?"

"Perhaps I will."

Lashman was showing signs of wanting to be rid of me before the afternoon light failed. He kept looking out the window. Before I left, I showed him my photograph of the picture that Fred had taken from the Biemeyers.

"Is that Mildred?"

"Yes, it is."

"Can you tell who painted it?"

"I couldn't be sure. Not from a small black-and-white photograph."

"Does it look like Richard Chantry's work?"

"I believe it does. It looks something like my early work, too, as a matter of fact." He glanced up sharply, half serious, half amused. "I didn't realize until now that I might have influenced Chantry. Certainly whoever did this painting had to have seen my early portraits of Mildred Mead." He looked at the painted head on the easel as if it would confirm his claim.

"You didn't paint it yourself, did you?"

"No. I happen to be a better painter than that."

"A better painter than Chantry?"

"I think so. I didn't disappear, of course. I've stayed here and kept at my work. I'm not as well known as the disappearance artist. But I've outstayed him, by God, and my work will outstay his. This picture I'm doing now will outstay his."

Lashman's voice was angry and young. His face was flushed. In his old age, I thought, he was still fighting the Chantrys for the possession of Mildred Mead.

He picked up a brush and, holding it in his hand as if it were a weapon, turned back to his unfinished portrait.