The Blue Hammer

XXXII

I told myself that it was time I talked to Fred again. It was Mrs. Chantry I really wanted to talk to. But Mackendrick had placed her off-limits and I didn't want to cross him just as he was beginning to cooperate.

I drove across town and parked on Olive Street. The shadows under the trees were as thick and dark as old blood. The tall gray gabled house looked cheerful by comparison, with lights on all three stories. There was an interplay of voices behind the front door.

My knocking silenced the voices. Mrs. Johnson came to the door in her white uniform. Her eyes were bright with emotions I couldn't read. Her face was gray and slack. She looked like a woman who had been pushed to her limit and might break down under further pressure.

"What is it?" she said.

"I thought I'd come by and see how Fred is doing. I just found out that he'd been released."

"Thanks to Mr. Lackner." Her voice had risen, as if I weren't the only one she was talking to. "Do you know Mr. Lackner? He's in the front room with Fred."

The long-haired young lawyer gave me a grip that seemed to have become more powerful in the course of the day. He smiled and called me by name and said that it was nice to see me again. I smiled and congratulated him on his quick work.

Even Fred was smiling for a change, but rather dubiously, as if he had no established right to feel good. The room itself had a tentative air, like a stage set for a play that had closed down soon after opening, a long time ago. The old chesterfield and matching chairs sagged almost to the floor. The curtains at the windows were slightly tattered. There were threadbare places in the carpet where the wooden floor almost showed through.

Like a ghost who haunted the ruined house, Mr. Johnson appeared at the doorway. His face-including his eyes-was red and moist. His breath was like an inconstant wind that had lost its way in a winery. He looked at me without recognition but with dislike, as if I had done him a bad turn in his unremembered past.

"Do I know you?"

"Of course you do," Mrs. Johnson said. "Certainly you know him. This is Mr. Archer."

"I thought so. You're the man who put my boy in jail."

Fred jumped up white and shaking. "That isn't so, Dad. Please don't say things like that."

"I'll say them when they're true. Are you calling me a liar?"

Lackner stepped between the father and son. "This is no time for family quarrels," he said. "We're all happy here-all together and all happy, isn't that right?"

"I'm not happy," Johnson said. "I'm miserable, and you want to know why? Because this sneaking bastard here"-he pointed a wavering forefinger at me-"is lousing up the atmosphere in my front room. And I want it clearly understood that if he stays one minute longer I'll bloody well kill him." He lurched toward me. "Do you understand that, you bastard? You bastard that brought my son home and put him in jail."

"I brought him home," I said. "I didn't put him in jail. That was somebody else's idea."

"But you masterminded it. I know that. You know that."

I turned to Mrs. Johnson. "I think I better leave."

"No. Please." She pressed her doughy face with her fingers. "He isn't himself tonight. He's been drinking heavily all day. He's terribly sensitive; he can't stand all these pressures. Can you, dear?"

"Stop sniveling," he said. "You've been sneaking and sniveling all your life, and that's all right when there's no one around but us chickens. Just don't let down your guard when this man is in the house. He means us no good, you know that. And if he doesn't get out of here while I count to ten, I'll throw him out bodily."

I almost laughed in his face. He was a stout unsteady man whose speech was fed by synthetic energy. Perhaps there had been a time, many years ago, when he was capable of carrying out his threats. But he was fat and flaccid, prematurely aged by alcohol. His face and frame were so draped with adipose tissue that I couldn't imagine what he had looked like as a young man.

Johnson began to count. Lackner and I looked at each other and left the room together. Johnson came stumbling after us, still counting, and slammed the front door behind us.

"Gosh," Lackner said. "What makes a man act that way?"

"Too much to drink. He's a far-gone alcoholic."

"I can see that for myself. But why does he drink like that?"

"Pain," I said. "The pain of being himself. He's been cooped up in that run-down house for God knows how many years. Probably since Fred was a boy. Trying to drink himself to death and not succeeding."

"I still don't understand it."

"Neither do I, really. Every drunk has his own reason. But all of them tend to end up the same, with a soft brain and a diseased liver."

As if we were both looking for someone to blame, Lackner and I glanced up at the sky. Above the dark olive trees that marched in single file along this side of the street, the sky was clouded and the stars were hidden.

"The fact is," Lackner said, "I don't know what to make of the boy, either."

"Do you mean Fred?"

"Yes. I realize I shouldn't call him a boy. He must be almost as old as I am."

"I believe he's thirty-two."

"Really? Then he's a year older than I am. He seems terribly immature for his age."

"His mental growth has been stunted, too, living in this house."

"What's so much the matter with this house? Actually, if it were fixed up, it could be quite elegant. It probably was at one time."

"The people in it are the matter," I said. "There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns-different states, if possible-and write each other letters once a year. You might suggest that to Fred, provided you can keep him out of jail."

"I think I can do that. Mrs. Biemeyer isn't feeling vindictive. In fact, she's a pretty nice woman when you talk to her outside of the family circle."

"It's another one of those families that should write letters once a year," I said. "And forget to mail them. It's really no accident that Fred and Doris got together. Neither of their homes is broken, exactly, but they're both badly bent. So are Fred and Doris."

Lackner wagged his coiffed and bearded head. In the dim clouded moonlight, I felt for a moment that some ancient story was being repeated, that we had all been here before. I couldn't remember exactly what the story was or how it ended. But I felt that the ending somehow depended on me.

I said to Lackner, "Did Fred ever explain to you why he took that picture in the first place?"

"Not in any satisfactory way, no. Has he talked to you about it?"

"He wanted to demonstrate his expertise," I said. "Prove to the Biemeyers that he was good for something. Those were his conscious reasons, anyway."

"What were his unconscious reasons?"

"I don't really know. It would take a panel of psychiatrists to answer that, and they won't tell. But, like a lot of other people in this town, Fred seems to have a fixation on Richard Chantry."

"Do you think the painting was really Chantry's work?"

"Fred thinks so, and he's the expert."

"He doesn't claim to be," Lackner said. "He's just a student."

"Fred's entitled to an opinion, though. And I think it's his opinion that Chantry painted the picture recently, maybe sometime this year."

"How could he know?"

"By the condition of the paint. He says."

"Do you believe that, Mr. Archer?"

"I didn't until tonight. I was pretty well taking it for granted that Richard Chantry was long dead."

"But now you don't."

"Now I don't. I think Chantry is alive and kicking."

"Where?"

"Possibly here in town," I said. "I don't go in much for hunches. But I've got a funny feeling tonight, as if Chantry was breathing on the back of my neck and looking over my shoulder."

I was on the verge of telling Lackner about the human remains that Mrs. Chantry and Rico had dug up in her greenhouse. It wasn't public knowledge yet, and it would have been a violation of my basic rule. Never tell anyone more than he needs to know, because he'll tell somebody else.

At this point, Gerard Johnson came out onto the porch and staggered down the uneven steps. He looked like a dead man walking blind, but his eyes or his nose or his alcoholic's radar picked me up and dragged him through the weeds in my direction.

"Are you still here, you bastard?"

"I'm still here, Mr. Johnson."

"Don't 'mister' me. I know how you feel. You treat me with disrespect. You think I'm a stinking old drunk. But I'm here to tell you with my last breath that I'm a better man-right here as I stand, I'm a better man than you ever were and I'm ready to prove it."

I didn't ask him how. I didn't have to. He thrust his right hand into the sagging pocket of his pants and brought it out holding a nickel-plated revolver, the kind cops like to call a "Saturday-night special." I heard the click of the hammer, and dived for Johnson's legs. He went down.

I climbed rapidly up his recumbent body and took the gun away from him. It was empty. My hands were shaking.

Gerard Johnson struggled to his feet and began to shout. He shouted at me and at his wife and son as they came out on the porch. The words he used were mostly scatological. He raised his voice and shouted at his house. He shouted at the houses across the road and down the street.

More lights came on in those houses, but no one appeared at the windows or opened the doors. Perhaps if someone had appeared, Johnson might have felt less lonely.

It was his son, Fred, who took pity on him. Fred came down off the porch and put his arms around Johnson from behind, encircling his laboring chest.

"Please act like a human being, Dad."

Johnson struggled and surged and swore, and gradually left off shouting. Fred's face was wet with tears. The sky tore like a net and the moon swam out.

Suddenly the night had changed its weather. It was higher and brighter and stranger. Holding Johnson around the shoulders, Fred walked him up the steps and into the house. It was a sad and touching thing to see the lost son fathering his father. There was no real hope for Johnson, but there was still hope for Fred. Lackner agreed. I turned the gun over to him before he drove away in his Toyota.

Fred had left the front door open, and after a moment Mrs. Johnson came out and down the steps. Her body moved aimlessly, like a stray animal. The light from the sky silvered her uniform.

"I want to apologize."

"For what?"

"Everything."

She flung out her arm in an awkward sideways gesture, as much a brushing away as an embracing. It seemed to take in the gabled house and everyone and everything in it, her family and the neighbors, and the street, the thick dark olive trees and their darker shadows, the moon that drenched her in its cold light and deeply scored her face.

"Don't apologize to me," I said. "I chose this job, or it chose me. There's a lot of human pain involved in it, but I'm not looking for another job."

"I know what you mean. I'm a nurse. I may be an unemployed nurse by tomorrow. I just had to come home on account of Fred getting out, and I walked off my shift. It's about time I walked back on."

"Can I offer you a lift?"

She gave me a quick suspicious look, as if I might have designs on her heavy middle-aged body. But she said, "You're very kind, sir. Fred left our car someplace in Arizona. I don't know if it's even worth bringing back."

I opened the door for her. She reacted as if this hadn't happened to her for some time.

When we were both in the car, I said, "There's a question I'd like to ask you. You don't have to answer it. But if you do, I don't plan to pass your answer on to anybody."

She stirred in her seat and turned toward me. "Has somebody been bad-mouthing me?"

"About those drugs that were missing at the hospital, do you want to discuss it some more?"

She said, "I admit I took a few sample pills. But I didn't take them for myself, or for any wrong purpose. I wanted to try them out on Gerard, and see if I could get him to cut down on his drinking. I guess they could get me on a technical charge of prescribing medicine without being a doctor. But nearly every nurse I ever knew does that." She gave me an anxious look. "Are they thinking about bringing charges?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Then how did the subject come up?"

"One of the nurses at the hospital mentioned it. She was explaining why you'd been fired."

"That was the excuse they used. But I'll tell you why I was fired. There were people in that institution that didn't like me." We were passing the hospital, and she pointed an accusing finger at the great lighted building. "I may not be the easiest person to get along with. But I am a good nurse, and they had no right to fire me. You had no right to bring it up with them, either."

"I think I had, Mrs. Johnson."

"What gives you the right?"

"I'm investigating a couple of murders, as well as the missing picture. You know that."

"You think I know where the picture is? I don't. Fred doesn't either. We're not thieves. We may have problems in the family, but we're not that kind of people."

"I never said you were. People can change, though, if they get involved with drugs. It gives other people a handle to use on them."

"Nobody's got that kind of a handle on me. I took a few pills, I admit it. I gave them to Gerard. And now I'm paying for it. I'll be spending the rest of my working days in understaffed nursing homes. That is, if I'm lucky enough to hold any job at all."

She fell into a glum silence that lasted most of the way to the La Paloma. Before she left the car, I told her about the women I was looking for, Mildred Mead and Betty Siddon.

She listened gravely. "I'll do what I can. I won't have much time for phoning on _this_ night shift. But I'll pass the word along to some nurses I know in the other nursing homes." She added haltingly, as if it cost her a moral effort to acknowledge any debt: "Fred told me how you treated him in Arizona. I appreciate that. After all, I'm his mother," she said in something like surprise.

She stepped out onto the asphalt and moved heavily toward the half-lighted building. Beyond the wall that enclosed the parking lot, cars went by in unceasing flight and pursuit on mourning tires. Mrs. Johnson turned as she reached the doorway and lifted her hand to me.

A moment after she entered, Mrs. Johnson backed out of the doorway. She was closely followed by two cops. One was in uniform. The other was Captain Mackendrick. I heard her complaining as I approached that they had no right to jump on her in the dark, she was an innocent woman on her way to work.

Mackendrick scanned her angry frightened face. "You're Mrs. Johnson, aren't you? Fred Johnson's mother?"

"That is correct," she said coldly. "It doesn't give you any license to scare me out of my wits."

"I didn't mean to do that, ma'am. I'm sorry."

"You ought to be sorry." Mrs. Johnson was pressing her advantage. "You have no right to harry me and harass me. We've got a good lawyer working on our behalf, and you'll be hearing from him if you don't look out."

Mackendrick gazed helplessly at the sky and then at me. "Look, did I do anything wrong? I bumped into a woman accidentally in the dark. I apologized. Do I have to get down on my knees?"

"Mrs. Johnson is a little nervous tonight."

She nodded approvingly in my direction. "You bet I am. What are you doing here, anyway, Captain?"

"We're making a search for a woman."

"Miss Siddon?"

"That's correct, ma'am." Mackendrick gave her a sharp inquiring look. "Who told you about Miss Siddon?"

"Mr. Archer here. He asked me to phone some of my friends in the other nursing homes. I said I would if I got the time, and I will. May I go now?"

"Please do," Mackendrick said. "Nobody's interfering with your movements in any way, shape, or form. But it may not be a good idea to call the other nursing homes. We'd rather surprise 'em."

Mrs. Johnson went into the building for a second time, and didn't reappear.

"She's a tough old babe," Mackendrick said.

"She's had a tough couple of days. Could you and I have a word in private, Captain?"

He jerked his head at the man in uniform, who climbed into the police car. We walked to the far corner of the lot, as far as possible from the building and the highway. A native oak that had somehow kept itself alive in this waste of pavement extended its faint moon-shadow to us. I said, "What brought you here?"

"We got a tip. Someone phoned in and said we should look here for Miss Siddon. That's why I came over myself. We went through the place with a fine-toothed comb and found no trace of her or anybody like her."

"Who provided the tip?"

"It was anonymous-evidently some woman trying to stir up trouble. Mrs. Johnson's the kind who makes enemies. She got herself fired from the hospital, you know."

"So she was telling me. You don't need my opinion, Captain, but I'll give it to you anyway. I think I gave you a bum steer on this search of the nursing homes. I'm not suggesting you call it off entirely. But I think it's time to concentrate your own energies on something else."

Mackendrick was slow to answer. "You mean Mrs. Chantry, don't you?"

"She seems to be at the center of this case."

"We don't know that."

"I think we do."

"What you think isn't good enough, Archer. I can't move against that woman without enough evidence to sink her."