The Blue Hammer

XLII

Betty's cabdriver appeared at the corner of the house, looking unhappy. "You've kept me waiting a long time, Miss, I'm going to have to charge you."

Betty paid him off. But when she got into her own car it wouldn't start. I tried it. The engine didn't turn over for me either.

I lifted the hood. The battery was gone.

"What am I going to do now? I have to go on an errand."

"I'll be glad to drive you."

"But I have to go by myself. I promised I would."

"Who did you promise?"

"I can't tell you. I'm sorry."

She seemed to be drawing away from me. I stepped closer and looked at her face. It was scarcely more than a pale oval now, dark-eyed, dark-mouthed. Night was flowing between the high old houses like a turbid river. I was afraid she would be swept away, this time beyond my reach.

She touched my arm. "Will you lend me your car, Lew?"

"For how long?"

"Overnight."

"For what purpose?"

"You don't have to cross-question me. Just give me a yes or no."

"All right. The answer is no."

"Please. This is important to me."

"The answer is still no. I'm not going through another night like last night, wondering what's happened to you."

"All right. I'll find someone who is willing to help me."

She started to walk toward the street, stumbling a little among the weeds. I was shaken by the idea that I might lose her and went after her.

She turned at the sidewalk. "Are you going to lend me your car?"

"No. I'm not letting you out of my sight. If you rent a car or borrow one, I'll follow you."

"You can't bear to see me get ahead of you, is that it?"

"No. You were way ahead of me last night. You put yourself in an exposed position. I don't want that to happen again. There's such a thing as having too much nerve." I took a deep breath. "Have you had any rest today?"

She answered evasively, "I forget."

"That means you haven't. You can't take a long night drive without any sleep. God knows what you might run into at the far end."

"God and Archer," she said bitterly, "they know everything. Don't you and God ever make a mistake?"

"God did. He left off Eve's testicles."

Betty let out a cry of pure sharp female rage, which somehow diminuendoed into mirth. She finally settled for both the car and me, on condition that she be allowed to do at least half the driving. I opted for the first shift.

"Where are we going?" I said as I started the engine.

"Long Beach. I assume you know where that is."

"I ought to. I was born there. What's in Long Beach?"

"I promised not to tell anyone."

"Promised who?" I said. "Mrs. Chantry?"

"Since you know everything," Betty said clearly and carefully, "it would seem superfluous to answer any of your questions."

"So it's Francine Chantry. What is she doing in Long Beach?"

"Apparently she had a car accident."

"Is she in the hospital?"

"No. She's at a place called the Gilded Galleon."

"That's a waterfront bar. What's she doing there?"

"I think she's drinking. I've never known her to drink much, but she seems to be breaking down."

"Why did she call you?"

"She said she needed my advice and help. We're not really close but I suppose I'm as close to her as anyone is. She wants my advice in a public-relations capacity, she said. Which probably means that she wants me to help her out of the mess she's got herself into by running away."

"Did she say why she did that?"

"She simply panicked."

I thought as I turned onto the freeway that Francine Chantry had some reason to panic. She had guilty knowledge of the death of Gerard Johnson, and possibly of the death of William Mead.

I drove hard. Betty slept against my shoulder. The combination of the speeding car and the sleeping woman made me feel almost young, as if my life might have a new beginning after all.

In spite of the early-evening traffic, we were in Long Beach in two hours. It was my home territory, as I had said, and the lights along the waterfront shone with remembered promise, even if all it had led to was the present.

I remembered the Galleon from the days when my marriage had been breaking up and I was looking for ways to pass the long nights. The place had changed surprisingly little since then, much less than I had. It was what was known as a family tavern, which meant that it accommodated drunks of all ages and sexes. I stood just inside the door, washed by waves of human sound, while Betty made her way around the horseshoe-shaped bar. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, including the barmaids. I could understand why the loud factitious family atmosphere might appeal to a woman as lonely as Francine Chantry probably was.

I saw her at the far end of the bar, sitting with her silver head drooping over an empty glass. She seemed to be slow in recognizing Betty. Then she threw her arms around her, and Betty responded. Though I felt some sympathy for Mrs. Chantry, and some pleasure in Betty's warmth, I didn't like to see the two women embracing. Betty was young and clean. Francine Chantry had been living for decades deep in the knowledge of murder.

It was beginning to show in her face and body, reaching up for her from the earth like gravity. She stumbled before she got to me, and had to be supported by the younger woman. She had a cut on her forehead. Her jaw was slack and grim, her eyes dull. But she held on to her bag the way a plunging fullback holds the ball.

"Where's your car, Mrs. Chantry?"

She roused herself from her apathy. "The garageman said it was totaled. I think that means that it isn't worth repairing. I doubt that I am, either."

"Were you in an accident?"

"I don't really know what happened. I was trying to get off the freeway, and things went out of control all of a sudden. That seems to be the story of my life." Her laughter was like a dry compulsive cough.

"I'm interested in the story of your life."

"I know you are." She turned to Betty. "Why did you have to bring _him_ along? I thought we could have a constructive talk about the future. I thought you and I were good friends."

"I hope we are," Betty said. "But I didn't think I could handle this by myself."

"Handle what? I'm no problem."

But there was a note of terror in Francine Chantry's voice. She sounded like a woman who had stepped off the edge of the world and discovered too late that she could never step back. When we got into my car and entered the freeway, the sense of moving through empty space stayed with me. We seemed to be flying above the rooftops of the tract houses that lined the freeway on both sides.

Betty was driving too fast, but I was content to have her do her stint. She had had some recent sleep; and I wanted a chance to talk to Francine Chantry.

"Speaking of your future," I said, "your husband may be hard to convict."

"My husband?" She sounded confused.

"Richard Chantry alias Gerard or Jerry Johnson. It may not be too easy to pin these murders on him. I gather he isn't talking. And so much of it happened so long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the prosecutor was willing to make a deal with you. I doubt that he'll want to bring any major charges. Of course that depends on him, and on what you have to offer."

She let out another burst of dry laughter. "My dead body? Would he accept my dead body?"

"He'll want you alive and talking. You know more about this case than anyone."

She was silent for a minute. "If I do, it's not by choice."

"So you were telling me the other night. But you really made your choices long ago. When you dropped William Mead and took up with his half brother Chantry. When you left Arizona with Chantry, even though you must have known that he was a major suspect in the murder of William Mead. Seven years later, you made a final choice, when you decided to cover up the murder of Gerard Johnson."

"Who?"

"Gerard Johnson. The man in the brown suit. It turns out he was a friend of William Mead's. He'd just got out of five years in a veterans' hospital when he came to Santa Teresa to see your husband. I think he had evidence involving Chantry in William Mead's death."

"How?"

"Perhaps William Mead had been threatened by Chantry and they had quarreled over you, or over Mead's pictures, which Chantry stole. And Mead told his army buddy Gerard about it some time before Chantry killed him. When Gerard Johnson turned up in Santa Teresa with William's widow and little boy, it marked the end of Chantry's freedom. He killed Gerard in an effort to stay free, but it only made him more completely unfree. It was a final choice for Chantry as well as you."

"I had no part in the choice," she said.

"You went along with it. You let a man be killed in your house and buried there, and you kept quiet. It was a bad choice for you and your husband. He's been living out its consequences. The murder of Gerard Johnson put him in the hands of William Mead's widow, the woman who calls herself Mrs. Johnson. I don't know why she wanted him. There may have been something between them in the past. Or perhaps the Johnson woman was simply interested in driving a hard primitive bargain with Chantry. He'd killed her husband, now he had to take her husband's place. I don't know why Chantry accepted the bargain, do you?"

Francine Chantry was slow in answering. Finally she said, "I don't know anything about it. I've had no idea that Richard was living in town. I didn't even know if he was alive. I didn't hear from him once in twenty-five years."

"Have you seen him recently?"

"No. I have no desire to see him."

"You're going to have to. They'll be wanting you to identify him. Not that there's much doubt about who he is. He's deteriorated physically and mentally. I think he must have had an emotional breakdown after he murdered Johnson, perhaps before. But he can still paint. His paintings may not be as good as they were, but nobody else could have painted them."

She said with some irony, "Apparently you're an art critic as well as a detective."

"Hardly. But I do have one of his recent paintings in the trunk of my car. And I'm not the only one who thinks that it's a Chantry."

"Are you talking about the painting of Mildred Mead?"

"Yes. I found it this morning in Johnson's attic, where it originated. Where the whole current case originated. That picture seems to be the central thing in the case. Certainly it brought me into it. And it was the painting of it that got Chantry into his present trouble and led him to commit these new murders."

"I don't quite follow that," Francine Chantry said. But she sounded interested, as if this talk of her husband's work had acted on her like a stimulant.

"It's a fairly complex chain of events," I said. "The woman he's been living with on Olive Street-call her Mrs. Johnson-sold the painting to the artist-dealer Jacob Whitmore. That blew Chantry's cover. Whitmore sold the painting to Paul Grimes, and that blew it wider.

"Grimes recognized it as Chantry's work and evidently used the knowledge to blackmail Mrs. Johnson into stealing drugs for him. And he probably demanded more new pictures from Chantry. Grimes had sold the picture of Mildred Mead to Ruth Biemeyer, who had her own reasons for being interested in Mildred. As you probably know, Mildred was Jack Biemeyer's mistress."

"Everybody in Arizona knew it," Francine Chantry said. "What wasn't so generally known was that Ruth Biemeyer had a crush on Richard when they were both young. I think that's the essential reason why she talked Jack into moving to Santa Teresa."

"That's what he says, anyway. It made for a tight family situation which was made still tighter when Mildred Mead came to town. I think Chantry may have seen Mildred some time in the last few months and been moved to paint that memory picture of her."

"I wouldn't know."

"Haven't you seen him recently?"

"No. Certainly not." She didn't look at me. She was peering through the windshield into the broken darkness. "I haven't seen Richard, or heard from him, in twenty-five years. I had no idea that he was living in town."

"Not even when you got a phone call from the woman he was living with?"

"She didn't mention him. She said something about the-the burial in the greenhouse, and she let me know that she needed money. She said if I would help her out she'd go on keeping the whole thing quiet. Otherwise she'd tell the world the real reason for my husband's disappearance."

"Did you give her money?"

"No. I wish now I had. And I very much wish he had never painted that memory portrait of Mildred. You'd almost think he was trying to be found out."

"Perhaps he was, unconsciously," I said. "Certainly Fred was doing his best to find him out. No doubt Fred borrowed the painting from the Biemeyers partly for professional reasons. He wanted to establish whether it really could be a Chantry. But he had personal reasons, too. I think he may have connected it with pictures he had seen in the past in the Johnson house on Olive Street. But he failed to make the final conscious connection between his foster father, Johnson, and the painter Chantry. Before he could do that, Johnson-Chantry took the painting from Fred's bedroom. And the Biemeyers hired me to get it back for them."

Betty tapped the horn. We were moving down the long inland slope behind Camarillo. There were no cars immediately ahead of us. I looked at her and she looked back. She raised her right hand from the wheel and touched her mouth. I got the message. I had talked more than enough, and I subsided.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Chantry said, "It wasn't his first memory picture of Mildred. He painted several others, long ago, in our days together. One of them was a pieta."

She was silent for a long time, until we were on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. Then I heard her crying softly. There was no way to tell if she was crying for Chantry or herself, or perhaps for the long-dead partnership that had held their young lives together and spawned his work. When I looked sideways at her face, I could see the bright tears on it.

"Where do we go from here?" Betty said.

"The police station."

Francine Chantry let out a cry that subsided into a groan. "Can't I even spend the night in my own house?"

"You can go back there and pack a bag if you want to. Then I think you should go to the police, with your lawyer."

Much later, in the pre-dawn chill, I woke in a dark bed. I could feel Betty's heart and hear her breathing like the quiet susurrus of a summer ocean.

A harsher bedroom scene came into my mind. I had last seen Francine Chantry in a hospital room with specially screened windows and an armed guard outside the door. And just outside the half-open door of my partly sleeping mind another woman seemed to be waiting, a short lame white-haired woman who had been beautiful.

The word "pietà" came back into my mind. I woke Betty up with my hand on the curve of her hip. She sighed and turned over.

"Lew?"

"What's a pietà?"

She yawned deeply. "You ask the darnedest questions at the darnedest times."

"Does that mean you don't know?"

"Of course I know what a pietà is. It's a traditional picture of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of her son. Why?"

"Francine Chantry said her husband painted one of Mildred Mead. I assume she was Mary."

"Yes. I've seen the picture. They have it in the local gallery, but they don't exhibit it publicly. It's slightly embarrassing, or so some people think. Chantry painted the dead man as a self-portrait."

Betty yawned and went to sleep again. I lay awake and watched her face emerging in the slow dawn. After a while I could see the steady blue pulse in her temple, the beating of the silent hammer that meant that she was alive. I hoped that the blue hammer would never stop.