The Blue Hammer

XXXVII

The high old house was completely dark. It seemed to hang over me like a dismal past piled generation on generation against the stars. I knocked on the front door, knocked repeatedly and got no answer.

I felt like shouting at the house as Gerard Johnson had done, and I wondered if I was going crazy, too. I leaned on the wall and looked out at the quiet street. I had parked my car around the corner, and the road was empty. Above the dense masses of the olive trees, a pallor was slowly spreading up the sky.

The dawn chill made my bones ache. I threw off my lethargy and pounded on the door and skinned my knuckles and stood in the gray dark sucking them.

Gerard Johnson spoke through the door: "What is it?"

"Archer. Open the door."

"I can't. She went away and locked me in." His voice was a hoarse whine.

"Where did she go?"

"Probably the La Paloma-that's the nursing home. She's supposed to be on night duty."

"I just came from there. Mrs. Johnson walked off the job again."

"She shouldn't do that. She'll lose that job, too. We'll have to go on welfare. I don't know what will happen to us."

"Where's Fred?"

"I don't know."

There were other questions I wanted to ask him, about his wife and the missing picture, but I despaired of getting useful answers. I gave Johnson a curt good night through the door and drove to the police station.

Mackendrick was in his office, looking not much different from the way he had looked seven or eight hours before. There were tender-looking blue patches under his eyes, but the eyes themselves were stern and steady, and he was freshly shaven.

"You look as if you didn't get much sleep," he said.

"I didn't get any. I've been trying to catch up with Betty Siddon."

Mackendrick drew in a long breath that made the chair creak under him. He let it out with a sigh.

"Why is it so important? We can't keep twenty-four-hour tabs on every reporter in town."

"I know that. This is a special case. I think the Johnson house ought to be searched."

"Do you have any reason to think Miss Siddon's in there?"

"Nothing definite, no. But there's a possibility, more than a possibility, that the missing picture is hidden in that house. It passed through Mrs. Johnson's hands once before, and then through her son Fred's."

I reminded Mackendrick of the facts of the case: Fred Johnson's theft or borrowing of the picture from the Biemeyer house; its subsequent theft from the art museum or, according to Fred's original story, from the Johnson house. I added what Jessie Gable had told me, that Whitmore had bought the picture from Mrs. Johnson in the first place.

"All this is very interesting," Mackendrick said in a flat voice. "But I haven't got time to look for Miss Siddon right now. And I haven't got time to look for a lost or stolen or mislaid picture which probably isn't worth very much anyway."

"The girl is. And the picture is the key to the whole bloody case."

Mackendrick leaned heavily forward across his desk. "She's your girl, right?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you're interested in her?"

"Very interested," I said.

"And the picture is the one you were hired to reclaim?"

"I guess so."

"And that makes it the key to the case, right?"

"I didn't say that, Captain. My personal connection with the girl and the picture aren't the reasons they're important."

"You may not think so. I want you to go into my washroom and take a good look at your face in the mirror. Incidentally, while you're in there, you can use my electric razor. It's in the cabinet behind the mirror. The light switch is to the left inside the door."

I went into the little room and looked at my face. It was drawn and pale. I grimaced to bring it to life but my eyes didn't change. They were at the same time dull and glaring.

I shaved and washed. It made some improvement in my looks. But it didn't touch the anxiety and fatigue that I was carrying inside my head and body.

When I came back into Mackendrick's office, he gave me a hard stare.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"Some."

"How long is it since you've eaten?" I looked at my watch. It was ten to seven. "About nine or ten hours."

"No sleep?"

"No."

"Okay, let's get some breakfast. Joe's opens at seven."

Joe's was a workingman's restaurant whose booths and bar were already filling up with customers. There was a low-key half-kidding kind of hopefulness in the smoky atmosphere, as if the day might turn out to be not so bad after all.

Mackendrick and I sat across from each other in one of the booths. We discussed the case over coffee while we waited for our breakfasts to arrive. I was becoming painfully aware that I hadn't told Mackendrick about my interview with Mrs. Chantry. I was going to have to tell him before he found out for himself, if he hadn't already. I was going to have to tell him very soon. But I put it off until I had fortified myself with some solid food.

Both Mackendrick and I had ham and eggs and fried potatoes and toast. On top of that, he ordered a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream on the side.

When he had eaten it and ordered a fresh cup of coffee, I said, "I went to see Mrs. Chantry last night."

His face hardened, cracking at the corners of the mouth and eyes. "I asked you not to."

"It seemed necessary. We work under different rules, Captain."

"You can say that again."

I had meant that he had to work under special political constraints. He was the iron fist of the city, embodying all its crushing force, but he had to listen to what the city told him to do with it. He seemed to be listening now to the city's multitudinous voices, some of which were speaking in the big smoky room where we sat.

Gradually his face smoothed out and lost its cracked-cement look. His eyes remained impassive.

"What did you find out from Mrs. Chantry?"

I told him in some detail, with special emphasis on the man in the brown suit whose bones Mrs. Chantry and Rico had dug up. By this time, Mackendrick's face was flushed with interest.

"Did she tell you where the man came from?"

"Apparently he'd been in a veterans' hospital."

Mackendrick hit the table once with his hand. The dishes jumped and rattled. Everyone at our end of the restaurant was probably aware of this, but nobody turned to look.

"I wish to hell," he said, "that you'd told me about this earlier. If the man was ever in a veterans' hospital, we should be able to trace him through his bones."

Mackendrick laid three dollar bills on the table and got up and walked out.

I put down my own money and went outside. It was past eight, and the city was coming to life. I walked down the main street, hoping that I would come to life along with it, and ended up at the newspaper building.

She hadn't been seen or heard from.

I walked back to the parking lot and reclaimed my car and drove it down to the waterfront. I was guided by a half-admitted half-unconscious fantasy: if I went back to the room where Betty and I had started, she would be there.

She wasn't. I threw myself down on the bed and tried to turn my mind off. But it was invaded by dreams of the angry dead.

I woke up clear-minded in strong daylight. It was nearly twelve by my watch. I looked out the window at the harbor, sliced into long bright sizzling strips by the partly closed Venetian blinds. A few sailors were taking their boats out in the light noon wind. And my mind released the memory I needed.

When I was in Arizona, Sheriff Brotherton had told me about a soldier whose name was "something like Wilson or Jackson," and who had been a friend of Mildred Mead's murdered son, William. The sheriff had had a postcard from the soldier after the war, sent from a veterans' hospital in California.

I picked up the room phone and placed a call to Sheriff Brotherton's office in Copper City. After a period of waiting, Brotherton himself came on the line.

"I'm glad you caught me, Archer. I was just going out to lunch. How's everything with the little Biemeyer girl? I take it she's home safe with her family."

"She's home. I don't know how safe she is."

"Isn't she safe with her own family?" Brotherton seemed to resent the implication that his rescue of Doris had not been permanent, like an ascent into heaven.

"She's a troubled girl, and she isn't too happy with her father. Speaking of whom, and forgive me if I've asked you this before, did Biemeyer have anything to do with shutting off the investigation of William Mead's death?"

"You have asked me that before. I said I didn't know."

"What are the probabilities?"

"It wouldn't make sense for Biemeyer to do that. He was very close to William Mead's mother at that time. I'm not telling you anything that isn't generally known."

"Did Mildred Mead want the investigation pressed?"

"I don't know whether she did or not. She did her talking to the higher echelons." Brotherton's voice was stiff, on the point of freezing up completely.

"Did Mildred want Richard Chantry brought back from California for questioning?"

"I don't remember that she did. What are you looking for, Archer?"

"I may not know till I see it. But one of the things you told me about the Mead case may be important. You mentioned that an army friend of Mead's came out to Arizona and talked to you about his death."

"That's correct. As a matter of fact, I've been thinking about him. I heard from him after the war, you know. He sent me a postcard from a veterans' hospital in L.A. He wanted to know if there were any further developments in the Mead case. I wrote him back that there weren't."

"Do you remember how he signed his postcard?"

The sheriff hesitated, and then said, "Jackson, I think. Jerry Jackson. His writing wasn't too clear."

"Could the name have been Jerry Johnson?"

The sheriff was silent for a while. I could hear faint voices talking somewhere on the line, like half-forgotten memories coming home to roost.

"It could have been," he said. "The postcard may still be in my files. I hoped that someday I could write and give that poor buddy of Mead's a positive answer. But I never did."

"You may be able to do it yet."

"I keep hoping, anyway."

"Do you have a suspect, Sheriff?"

"Do you?"

"No. But it wasn't my case."

I had touched a nerve. "It wasn't mine either," he said with some bitterness. "It was taken out of my hands."

"Who did that?"

"The powers that be. I'm not naming any names."

"Was Richard Chantry a suspect in his half brother's death?"

"That's no secret. I told you how they hustled Richard out of the state. He never came back, to my knowledge."

"Was there trouble between the two brothers?"

"I don't know if you could call it trouble. Healthy rivalry, anyway. Competition. They both wanted to be painters. They both wanted to marry the same girl. I guess you could say that Richard won on both counts. He even ended up with the family money."

"But his luck only lasted seven years."

"So I heard."

"Do you have any idea what happened to him?"

"No, I don't. It's away outside my territory. And incidentally I have to talk to some people and you're making me late. Goodbye."

The sheriff hung up abruptly. I went down the hall and tapped on the door of Paola's room. I heard her moving quietly inside.

She said through the door, "Who is it?"

I told her. She opened the door. She looked as though she'd been having bad dreams like mine, and hadn't fully awakened.

"What do you want?"

"A little more information."

"I've already told you everything."

"I doubt that."

She made an effort to close the door. I held it open. Each of us could feel the other's weight and the presence of an opposing will.

"Aren't you interested in who killed your father, Paola?" Her dark eyes searched my face, not very hopefully. "Do you know for certain?"

"I'm working on it. But I need your help. May I come in?"

"I'll come out."

We sat in a pair of basket chairs beside a window at the end of the hall. Paola moved her chair away from the window. "What are you afraid of, Paola?"

"That's a stupid question. My father was killed the other night. And I'm still here in this same lousy town."

"Who are you afraid of?"

"Richard Chantry. Who else? He seems to be a hero around here. That's because people don't know what an s.o.b. he was."

"Did you know him?"

"Not really. He was before my time. But my father knew him very well; so did my mother. There were some queer stories floating around about him in Copper City. About him and his half brother, William Mead."

"What stories?"

Two deep clefts formed between her black eyebrows. "The way I heard it, Richard Chantry stole his brother's work. They were both serious painters, but William Mead was the one with the real talent. Richard imitated him, and after William was drafted Richard grabbed his drawings and some of his paintings, and passed them off as his own. He grabbed William's girl, too."

"Is that the present Mrs. Chantry?"

"I guess so."

Gradually she had leaned toward the window, like a heliotropic plant that loved the light. Her eyes remained sullen and fearful. She pulled back her head as if she had spotted snipers in the street.

She followed me into my room and stood just inside the door while I called Mackendrick. I told him the two main facts that I had learned that morning: Richard Chantry had stolen and misrepresented as his own some of his half brother William's work; and after William's death an army buddy of his who called himself Jerry Johnson had turned up in Arizona.

Mackendrick stopped me. "Johnson's a common name. But I wouldn't be surprised if that's our Gerard Johnson on Olive Street."

"Neither would I. If Gerard was injured in the war and spent time in a hospital, it could explain some of his peculiarities."

"Some of them, anyway. All we can do is ask him. First I want to put out an additional query to the vets' hospitals."

"An additional query?"

"That's right. Your friend Purvis has been examining those bones you brought in last night. He found traces of what looked like shrapnel wounds, and apparently they were given expert treatment. So Purvis has been getting in touch with the hospitals on his own hook."

"What are you doing about Betty Siddon?"

"Hasn't she turned up yet?"

Mackendrick sounded bored. I slammed the receiver down. Then I sat regretting my show of anger and wondering what to do next.