The Blue Hammer

XXVII

I drove out to Sycamore Point and knocked on the door of Jacob Whitmore's cottage. It was opened by the girl he had left behind. The low sun touched her face with a rosy glow and made her narrow her eyes. She didn't appear to recognize me.

I had to remind her who I was. "I was here the night before last. I bought some of Jake's pictures from you."

She shaded her eyes and studied my face. Hers was pale and unfocused. Her blond hair was uncombed, and it was lifted by the sundown wind pouring down the draw.

She said, "Are the pictures okay?"

"They're okay."

"I have some more if you want them."

"We'll talk about it."

She let me into her front room. Nothing in it had changed essentially, but it had lapsed into more extreme disorder. A chair was lying on its back. There were bottles on the floor, fragments of enchilada on the table.

She sat at the table. I picked up the fallen chair and sat facing her. "Have you heard from the coroner this afternoon?"

She shook her head. "I haven't heard from anybody; not that I remember, anyway. Excuse the condition of the room, will you, please? I drank too much wine last night and I must have had a tantrum. It seemed-it seems so unfair that Jake had to drown." She was silent for a time, and then said, "They asked my permission to do an autopsy yesterday."

"They did it today. Jake drowned in fresh water."

She shook her bleached head again. "No, he didn't. He drowned in the ocean."

"His body was found in the ocean, but the water that killed him was fresh water. You can take the coroner's word for it."

She looked at me dimly through her half-closed eyes. "I don't understand. Does that mean he drowned in a creek and his body was washed down into the sea?"

"That isn't likely. The creeks are low in the summer. It probably means that he was drowned in a bathtub or a swimming pool, and whoever did it dumped his body here in the ocean."

"I don't believe it." She looked around the room as if the murderer might be lurking behind the furniture. "Who would do that to Jake?"

"You tell me, Mrs. Whitmore."

She shook her head. "We weren't married. My name is Jessie Gable." The sound of her name brought tears to her eyes. She blinked and the tears ran down her cheeks. "You're telling me that Jake was murdered, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I don't understand. He never hurt a living soul. Except me. But I forgave him."

"Murder victims don't usually deserve it."

"But he had nothing worth stealing."

"Maybe he had. Didn't Paul Grimes buy some of his pictures?"

She nodded. "That's true, he did. But it wasn't really the pictures that he wanted. I was here in the room when Grimes was talking to Jake. He was trying to get some information out of him, and he bought Jake's pictures just to get him talking."

"Talking about what?"

"The other picture. The picture that Jake had sold him at the beach art show, the day before."

"And did Jake tell him what he wanted to know?"

"I don't know. They went outside to talk about it. They didn't want me to hear what they were saying."

I got out my photograph of the Biemeyers' stolen painting and showed it to her in the light from the window. "Is this the picture that Jake sold to Grimes the day before?"

She took the picture and nodded. "It certainly looks like it. It's a really good picture and Jake got a lot of money for it. He didn't tell me how much, but it must have been several hundred, anyway."

"And Grimes probably sold it for several thousand."

"Really?"

"I'm not fooling, Jessie. The people who bought the picture from Grimes had it stolen from them. I was hired to recover it."

She sat up straight and crossed her legs. "You don't think _I_ stole it, do you?"

"No. I doubt you ever stole anything."

"I didn't," she said firmly. "I never did. Except Jake from his wife."

"That isn't a felony."

"I don't know," she said. "I'm being punished like it was. And so was Jake punished."

"Everybody dies, Jessie."

"I hope that I die soon."

I waited. "Before you do," I said, "I want you to do Jake a favor."

"How can I? He's already dead."

"You can help me find the person or persons who killed him." I took the photograph from her limp hands. "I think he was killed over this."

"But why?"

"Because he knew or figured out who painted it. I'm winging, you understand. I don't know for certain that that's true. But I think it is. This picture was the connecting link between the two men who were killed, Jake and Paul Grimes."

I remembered as I said it that a third man had been killed: William Mead, whose body was found in the Arizona desert in 1943, and whose mother was the subject of the picture. These facts coming together in my mind gave me a kind of subterranean jolt, like an earthquake fault beginning to make its first tentative move. I was breathing quickly and my head was pounding.

I leaned across the littered table. "Jessie, do you have any idea where Jake got this picture?"

"He bought it."

"How much did he pay for it?"

"Fifty dollars at least-probably more. He wouldn't tell me how much more. He took the fifty dollars I had in my safety fund-that's money I kept in case we couldn't pay the rent. I told him he was crazy to put out cash for the picture, that he should take it on consignment. But he said he had a chance to make a profit. And I guess he did."

"Did you ever see the person he bought it from?"

"No, but it was a woman. He let that slip."

"How old a woman?"

Jessie spread her hands like someone feeling for rain. "Jake didn't tell me, not really. He said that it was an older woman but that doesn't mean it was. She could be seventeen and he'd still tell me she was an older woman. He knew that I was jealous of the chicks. And I had reason to be."

Tears rose in her eyes. I didn't know whether they stood for anger or grief. Her feelings seemed to be fluctuating between those two emotions. So did mine. I was weary of questioning the widows of murdered men. But I still had questions to ask.

"Did the woman bring the picture here to the house?"

"No. I never saw her. I told you that. She took it down to the waterfront on a Saturday. These last years, Jake had a sideline buying and selling pictures at the Saturday art show. He bought the picture there."

"How long ago was that?"

She was slow in answering, perhaps looking back over a flickering passage of days that seemed all the same: sun and sea, wine and pot and grief and poverty.

"It must have been a couple of months ago. It's at least that long since he took my safety fund. And when he sold the picture to Paul Grimes he didn't replace my fund. He kept the money himself. He didn't want me to know how much it was. But we've been living on it ever since." She scanned the room. "If you can call this living."

I got a twenty out of my wallet and dropped it on the table. She scowled at it and then at me.

"What's that for?"

"Information."

"I couldn't give you much. Jake was secretive about this deal. He seemed to think he was on to something big."

"I think he was, too, or trying to get on to it. Do you want to try and dig up some more information for me?"

"What kind of information?"

"Where this picture came from." I showed her the portrait of Mildred Mead again. "Who Jake bought it from. Anything else that you can find out about it."

"Can I keep that photo?"

"No. It's the only one I have. You'll have to describe it."

"Who to?"

"The dealers at the Saturday art show. You know them, don't you?"

"Most of them."

"Okay. If you come up with anything usable, I'll give you another twenty. If you can give me the name or address of the woman who sold Jake this picture, I'll give you a hundred."

"I could use a hundred." But she looked at me as if she didn't expect to see it in this life. "Jake and I had bad luck. He's had nothing but bad luck since he joined up with me." Her voice was harsh. "I wish I could of died instead of him."

"Don't wish it," I said. "We all die soon enough."

"It can't come too soon for me."

"Just wait awhile. Your life will start again. You're a young woman, Jessie."

"I feel as old as the hills."

Outside, the sun had just gone down. The sunset spread across the sea like a conflagration so intense that it fed on water.