The Blue Hammer

XIX

I drove south and then east across the desert, through blowing curtains of evening. The traffic was comparatively thin and I made good time. By nine o'clock I was in Copper City, driving past Biemeyer's big hole in the ground. It looked in the fading evening light like the abandoned playground of a race of giants or their children.

I found the sheriff's station and showed my photostat to the captain in charge. He told me that Sheriff Brotherton could be found in a substation north of the city, near his mountain home. He got out a map and showed me how to get there.

I drove north toward the mountains. They had been built by bigger giants than the ones who dug Biemeyer's hole. As I approached the mountains, they took up more and more of the night sky.

I skirted their southeastern end on a winding road that ran between the mountains on my left and the desert on my right. Other traffic had dwindled away. I had begun to wonder if I was lost when I came to a cluster of buildings with lights in them.

One was the sheriff's substation. The others were a small motel and a grocery store with a gas pump in front of it. There were a number of cars, including a couple of sheriff's cars, parked on the paved area in front of the buildings.

I added my rented car to the line of parked cars and went into the substation. The deputy on duty looked me over carefully and finally admitted that the sheriff was next door in the grocery store. I went there. The back of the store was dim with cigar smoke. Several men in wide-brimmed hats were drinking beer from cans and playing pool on a table with a patched and wrinkled top. The heat in the place was oppressive.

A sweating bald man in a once-white apron came toward me. "If it's groceries you want, I'm really closed for the night."

"I could use a can of beer. And a wedge of cheese?"

"I guess I can handle that. How much cheese?"

"Half a pound."

He brought me the beer and cheese. "That will be a dollar and a half."

I paid him. "Is Chantry Canyon anywhere near here?"

He nodded. "Second turn to the left-that's about a mile north of here. Go on up about four miles until you hit a crossroads. Turn left, another couple of miles or so, and you'll be in the canyon. Are you with the people that's taken it over?"

"What people do you mean?"

"I forget what they call themselves. They're fixing up the old house, planning to make it some kind of religious settlement." He turned toward the back of the store and raised his voice: "Sheriff? What do those people call themselves that took over Chantry Canyon?"

One of the pool players leaned his cue against the wall and came toward us, his polished boots kicking his shadow ahead of him. He was a man in his late fifties, with a gray military-style mustache. A sheriff's badge glinted on his chest. His eyes had a matching glint.

"Society of Mutual Love," he said to me. "Is that who you're looking for?"

"I wasn't. I was looking for Mildred Mead." I showed him my photostat.

"You're in the wrong state, Mister. Mildred sold out about three months ago and took off for California. She told me she couldn't stand the loneliness any more. I told her she had friends here, and she has, but she wanted to spend her last days with her folks in California."

"Where in California?"

"She didn't say." The sheriff looked uneasy.

"What was the name of her folks?"

"I don't know."

"Did she mean relatives?"

"Mildred didn't tell me. She was always close-mouthed about her family. I had to tell the same thing to the young couple that came through here earlier today."

"Young man and a girl in a blue Ford sedan?"

The sheriff nodded. "That's them. Are they with you?"

"I'm hoping to join them."

"You'll probably find them up there in the canyon. They went up about sunset. I warned them they were running the risk of getting themselves converted. I don't know what those Mutual Love people believe in, but the belief they have is certainly powerful. One of the converts told me he turned over everything he had to the organization, and they work him hard besides. Looks to me like they're coining money. I know they paid Mildred over a hundred thousand for the place. Of course that includes the acreage. So hold on to your wallet with both hands."

"I'll do that, Sheriff."

"My name is Brotherton, by the way."

"Lew Archer."

We shook hands. I thanked him and turned toward the door. He followed me outside. The night was clear and high, after the smoky interior of the store. We stood in silence for a minute. I found myself liking the man's company, in spite of his rather artificial folksiness.

"I don't want to pry," he said, "but I'm kind of fond of Mildred. Quite a few of us are. She was always generous with her money _and_ her favors. Maybe too generous, I don't know. I hope she isn't in any kind of trouble in California."

"I hope not."

"You're a private detective there. Right?"

I said I was.

"Do you mind telling me what your business is with Mildred?"

"It isn't really Mildred I want to see. It's the young man and the girl who were asking for her earlier. They haven't come down the mountain again, have they?"

"I don't believe so."

"Is this the only way out?"

"They could get out the other side if they had to, towards Tombstone. But, as I told them, it's a hard road to drive at night. They on the run from something?"

"I can tell you better after I talk to them."

Brotherton's look hardened. "You're close-mouthed, Mr. Archer."

"The girl's parents hired me."

"I asked myself if she was a runaway."

"That's putting it a little strong. But I expect to take her home with me."

He let me go up the mountain by myself. I followed the storekeeper's directions, and they brought me to the head of a canyon whose open end framed the distant lights of Copper City. There were several lighted buildings in the canyon. The highest and largest was a sprawling stone house with a peaked shingled roof and a wide porch shelving out in front.

The road that led to the stone house was blocked by a wire gate. When I got out to open it, I could hear the people singing on the porch, singing a kind of song that I'd never heard before. Their refrain was something about Armageddon and the end of the world. Raising their voices on the prowlike porch, they made me think of passengers singing hymns on a sinking ship.

Fred Johnson's old blue Ford was parked in the gravel lane ahead of me. Its engine was dripping oil like something wounded. As I approached it, Fred got out and walked uncertainly into the wash of my headlights. His mustache was wet and spiky and he had a beard of blood. He didn't know me.

"Are you in some kind of trouble?"

He opened his swollen mouth. "Yeah. They've got my girl inside. They're trying to convert her."

The hymn had died in mid-phrase, as if the sinking ship had gone down abruptly. The hymn-singers were coming off the porch in our direction. From somewhere out of sight in the building, a girl's voice was raised in what sounded like fear.

Fred's head jerked. "That's her now."

I started for the gun in the trunk of my car, then remembered that I was driving a rented car. By that time, Fred and I were surrounded by half a dozen bearded men in overalls. Several long-skirted women stood to one side and watched us with cold eyes in long faces.

The oldest man was middle-aged, and he spoke to me in a monotone. "You're disturbing our evening service."

"Sorry. I want Miss Biemeyer. I'm a licensed private detective employed by her parents. The sheriff of the county knows I'm here."

"We don't recognize his authority. This is holy ground, consecrated by our leader. The only authority we bow down to is the voice of the mountains and the sky and our own consciences."

"Tell your conscience to tell you to go and get your leader."

"You must be more respectful. He's performing an important ceremony."

The girl raised her voice again. Fred started toward it, and I went along. The overalled men came together and formed a solid phalanx blocking our way.

I stood back and shouted at the top of my voice: "Hey, leader! Get the hell out here!"

He came out onto the porch, a white-haired man in a black robe who looked as if he had been dazzled or struck by lightning. He walked toward us, smiling a wide cold smile. His followers made way for him.

"Blessings," he said to them, and to me: "Who are you? I heard you reviling and cursing me. I resent it, not so much for myself as for the Power I represent."

One of the women moaned in awe and delight. She got down on her knees in the gravel and kissed the leader's hand.

I said, "I want Miss Biemeyer. I work for Miss Biemeyer's father. He used to own this house."

"I own it now," he said, and then corrected himself: _"We_ own it now. You're trespassing."

The bearded men let out an assenting growl in unison. The oldest one of them said, "We paid good money for this place. It's our refuge in time of trouble. We don't want it desecrated by cohorts of the devil."

"Then bring Miss Biemeyer out here."

"The poor child needs my help," the leader said. "She's been taking drugs. She's drowning in trouble, going down for the third time."

"I'm not leaving her here."

Fred let out a sob of frustration and grief and rage. "That's what I told them. But they beat me up."

"You gave her drugs," the leader said. "She told me you gave her drugs. It's my responsibility to purge her of the habit. Nearly all of my flock took drugs at one time. I was a sinner myself, in other ways."

"I'd say you still are," I said. "Or don't you believe that kidnapping is wrong?"

"She's here of her own free will."

"I want to hear her tell me that herself."

"Very well," he said to me, and to his followers: "Let them approach the dwelling place."

We went down the lane to the house. The bearded men crowded around Fred and me without exactly touching us. I could smell them though. They stank of curdled hopes and poisonous fears and rancid innocence and unwashed armpits.

We were kept outside on the porch. I could see through the open front door that there was reconstruction work going on inside. The central hallway was being converted into a dormitory lined with bunks two high along the walls. I wondered how large a congregation the leader hoped to gather, and how much each of them might pay him for his bunk and his overalls and his salvation.

He brought Doris out of an inner room into the hallway. His followers let me go as far as the open door, and she and I faced each other there. She looked pale and scared and sane.

She said, "Am I supposed to know you?"

"My name is Archer. We met in your apartment yesterday."

"I'm sorry, I don't remember. I think I was stoned yesterday."

"I think you were, Doris. How are you feeling now?"

"Sort of woozy," she said. "I hardly got any sleep in the car last night. And ever since we got here they've been at me." She yawned deeply.

"At you in what way?"

"Praying for me. They want me to stay with them. They won't even charge me. My father would like that, not having to pay for me." She smiled dispiritedly on one side of her mouth.

"I don't think your father feels that way about you."

"You don't know my father."

"I do, though."

She frowned at me. "Did my father send you after me?"

"No. I sort of came on my own. But your mother is paying me. She wants you back. So does he."

"I don't really think they do," the girl said. "Maybe they think they do, but they don't really."

Fred spoke up behind me. "I do, Doris."

"Maybe you do, and maybe you don't. But maybe I don't want you." She looked at him in cold unfriendly coquetry. "I wasn't what you wanted, anyway. You wanted the picture that my parents bought."

Fred looked down at the porch floor. The leader stepped between the girl and us. His face was a complex blend of exalted mystic and Yankee trader. His hands were shaking with nervousness.

"Do you believe me now?" he said to me. "Doris wants to stay with us. Her parents have neglected and rejected her. Her friend is a false friend. She knows her true friends when she sees them. She wants to live with us in the brotherhood of spiritual love."

"Is that true, Doris?"

"I guess so," she said with a dubious half-smile. "I might as well give it a try. I've been here before, you know. My father used to bring me here when I was a little girl. We used to come up and visit Mrs. Mead. They used to-" She broke off the sentence and covered her mouth with her hand.

"They used to what, Doris?"

"Nothing. I don't want to talk about my father. I want to stay here with them and get straightened out. I'm spiritually unwell." The self-diagnosis sounded like a parroting of something that she had recently been told. Unfortunately it also sounded true.

I had a strong urge to take her away from the brothers. I didn't like them or their leader. I didn't trust the girl's judgment. But she knew her own life better than I could possibly know it for her. Even I could see that it hadn't been working out.

I said, "Remember that you can always change your mind. You can change it right now."

"I don't want to change it right now. Why would I want to change it?" she asked me glumly. "This is the first time in a week that I even knew what I was doing."

"Bless you, my child," the leader said. "Don't worry, we'll take good care of you."

I wanted to break his bones. But that made very little sense. I turned and started back to my rented car. I felt very small, dwarfed by the mountains.