The Blue Hammer

XLIII

When I woke up a second time, Betty had gone out. She had left four things for me on the kitchenette table: a carton of granola, a bottle of milk, a safety razor, and a cryptic note, which said: "Had funny dream-Mildred Mead Chantry's mother-is this possible "

I ate my breakfast food and drove across town to Magnolia Court. Mildred Mead failed to answer my repeated knocking on her door. An old man came out of the next cottage and looked me over from the distance of a generation. Eventually he volunteered the information that Mrs. Mead, as he called her, had gone out.

"Do you know where she went?"

"She told the taxi-driver to take her to the courthouse."

I followed Mildred there, but she wasn't easy to find. The courthouse and its landscaped grounds occupied a city block. I soon decided that I was wasting my time walking up and down its graveled paths and tiled corridors looking for a small old limping woman.

I checked in at the coroner's suite of offices and found Henry Purvis there. Mildred had come to his office within the past half-hour.

"What did she want from you?"

"Information about William Mead. He was her natural son, apparently. I told her he was buried in the Santa Teresa cemetery, and I offered to take her out to visit his grave. She didn't seem interested in that. She got off on the subject of Richard Chantry. She claimed she had been his model at one time, and she wanted to get in to see him. I told her it simply wasn't possible."

"Where is Chantry being held?"

"District Attorney Lansing has him here in a special cell with round-the-clock guards. I couldn't even get in there myself-not that I particularly want to. Apparently he's gone completely off the rails. They have to sedate him to keep him quiet."

"What happened to Mildred?"

"She walked out. I sort of hated to let her go. She seemed pretty upset, and she'd been drinking. But I had no reason to hold her."

I went outside and made another circuit of the grounds and courtyards. No Mildred. I was getting nervous. Whether or not there was truth in Betty's dream, I felt that Mildred was in some way central to the case. But I was losing her, and losing the morning.

I looked up at the four-sided clock on the courthouse tower. It was ten. There was only one person visible on the observation platform, a white-headed woman whose rather clumsy movements caught my eye. Mildred. She paused and turned and gripped the black iron fence. It was almost up to her chin. She peered over it, down into the stone-paved courtyard.

She was extraordinarily still. She looked like a woman staring down into her grave. The life of the city seemed to freeze in widening circles around her.

I was nearly a hundred yards away and a hundred feet below. If I raised an alarm, it might only trigger the action she seemed to have in mind. I walked to the nearest door and took the tower elevator up.

When I stepped out on the observation platform, she had turned to face me, her back against the iron fence. She turned again and tried to clamber over the fence into empty space. Her lame old body failed in the attempt.

I put my arms around her and held her securely. She was breathing as if she had climbed the tower hand over hand. The frozen life of the city resumed, and I began to hear its sounds again.

She struggled in my arms. "Let me go."

"I don't think so, Mildred. Those flagstones are a long way down and I wouldn't want you to take a fall on them. You're too pretty."

"I'm the hag of the universe." But she gave me an up-from-under look, the automatic mannerism of a woman who had once been small and beautiful and was still handsome. "Will you give me a break?"

"If I can."

"Just take me down and turn me loose. I won't do anything-not to myself or anybody else."

"I can't take a chance on that."

I could feel the heat of her body through her clothes. Sweat gathered on her upper lip and in the blued hollows of her eyes.

"Tell me about your son William."

She didn't answer me. Her makeup was eroding, and her gray face peered at me through it like a death mask.

"Did you trade in your son's dead body on that big house in Chantry Canyon? Or was it somebody else's dead body?"

She spat in my face. Then she went into a fit of passionate weeping. Then she was still. She didn't speak as I took her down in the elevator, or when I handed her over to the D.A.'s men and women.

I told them that she should be carefully searched and kept under observation as a determined potential suicide. It was just as well I did. District Attorney Lansing told me later that the woman who searched her found a brightly honed stiletto wrapped in a silk stocking and tucked under her girdle.

"Did they find out what she was carrying it for?"

The D.A. shook his head. "Presumably," he said, "she intended to use it on Chantry."

"What was her motive?"

Lansing pulled alternately at the ends of his handlebar mustaches, as if he were using them to steer his mind through the complexities of the case. "This isn't generally known, and I'll have to ask you to keep it to yourself. Chantry seems to have murdered Miss Mead's son in Arizona, thirty years ago. To give credit where credit is due, I got that from Captain Mackendrick. He's been doing some excellent spadework in this case. I think he'll be our next chief of police."

"Good for him. But how does the revenge theory fit in with her suicide attempt?"

"Are you certain it was a real attempt?"

"It looked real to me. Mildred wanted out, and the only thing that stopped her was that iron fence. That and the fact that I happened to see her up there."

"Well, it's not inconsistent with the revenge motif. She was thwarted in her attempt at revenge, so she turned her anger against herself."

"I don't quite follow that, Mr. D.A."

"No? You're probably not as familiar as some of us are with recent developments in criminal psychology." There was an edge on his smile.

I gave him a soft answer because I wanted something from him. "It's true I never went to law school."

"But you've been of real assistance in spite of that," he said reassuringly. "And we're certainly grateful for your suggestions."

His eyes went distant on me, and he stood up behind his desk. I stood up, too. I had a nightmare vision of my case moving inexorably away from me.

"Could I possibly have a minute with your prisoner, Mr. D.A.?"

"Which one?"

"Chantry. I want to ask him a couple of questions."

"He isn't answering questions. The public defender has advised him not to."

"The questions I have in mind aren't connected with these murders, at least not directly."

"What are they?" Lansing said.

"I want to ask him what his real name is, and get his reaction. And I want to ask him why Mildred Mead tried to kill herself."

"We don't really know that she did."

"I know that she did, and I want to know why."

"What makes you so sure that Chantry might possess the information?"

"I think he and Mildred are closely connected. Incidentally, I feel sure that Jack Biemeyer will be interested. Biemeyer hired me, you know."

Lansing said in a voice that seemed to be testing itself for firmness, "If Mr. Biemeyer has any suggestions, or any questions, I think he should communicate them to me directly."

"I'll tell him that."

The Biemeyer house had a deserted look, like a public building that had been emptied by a bomb scare. I got the painting of Mildred Mead out of the trunk of my car and carried it up the flagstone walk to the front door. Just before I got to it, Ruth Biemeyer came out. She put a finger to her lips.

"My husband is very tired. I've been trying to get him to rest."

"I'm afraid I have to talk to him, Mrs. Biemeyer."

She turned toward the door, but all she did was pull it closed. "You can talk freely to me. I'm really your principal in this case. The picture that was stolen belongs to me. That is my picture that you have there, isn't it?"

"Yes. I wouldn't say it was stolen, though. Let's say Fred borrowed it, for scientific and biographical purposes. He wanted to establish who painted it, and when, and who the subject was. It's true the answers to these questions had personal meaning for Fred. But that doesn't make him a criminal exactly."

She nodded. Her hair shifted in the wind and made her suddenly prettier, as if light had blown into her head.

"I can understand why Fred did what he did."

"You should be able to. You had your own personal reasons for buying the painting. Mildred Mead had moved to town, and your husband was seeing her again. Didn't that have something to do with your hanging that picture of her in your house? As a reproach to him, perhaps, or a kind of threat?"

She frowned. The light in her eyes shifted, turning inward like a flashlight exploring a dark room.

"I don't know why I bought it. I didn't even realize at the time that it was Mildred."

"Your husband must have."

There was a silence between us. I could hear the sea marking time far down at the foot of the hill.

"My husband isn't in very good shape. He's aged in the last few days. If all this got out it would destroy his reputation. And maybe destroy him."

"He assumed that risk when he did what he did a long time ago."

"Exactly what did he do?"

"I think he made the Chantry imposture possible."

"The Chantry imposture? What do you mean by that?"

"I think you know what I mean. But I'd rather discuss it with your husband."

She bit her lower lip. With her incisors bared, she looked a little like a watchdog at the door. Then she picked up the painting and led me through the house to her husband's study.

He was sitting in front of the photograph of his copper mine. His face had come apart. He pulled it together and smiled uncertainly with one side of his mouth.

"What do you want from me? More money?"

"More information. This case started in 1943. It's time it was closed."

Ruth Biemeyer turned to me. "Exactly what happened in 1943?"

"I can't tell you all of it. I think it started when William Mead went home to Arizona on leave from the army. Home isn't exactly the word. Mead had a young wife and an infant son waiting for him here in Santa Teresa. But his mother was still living in Arizona. Where exactly was Mildred living, Mr. Biemeyer?"

He pretended not to hear me. His wife answered for him. "She was living in Tucson but spending the weekends in the mountains with my husband."

Biemeyer gave her a shocked look. It made me wonder if his affair with Mildred had ever been directly spoken of till now. I said:

"That probably came as no surprise to William. His mother had lived with other men, notably the painter Lashman. Lashman had been a father to him, and taught him to paint. When William came home to Arizona on leave he found that his so-called half brother, Richard, had taken some of his work and assumed the credit for it. The Chantry imposture really started with Richard Chantry himself, when he stole William's paintings and drawings, and incidentally married William's girl Francine.

"The two young men had a fight over these matters. They fought to the death. William killed Richard and left his body in the desert, dressed in William's own army uniform. He was an illegitimate son who had probably dreamed all his life of taking Richard's place. This was his chance to do it, and incidentally to get out of the army and out of a forced marriage.

"But he couldn't have done it without the help of other people, three other people to be exact. First he had the help of Francine Chantry. She was obviously in love with him in spite of his marriage to Sarah and his killing of Francine's husband. She may even have incited that killing. In any case it didn't prevent her from coming to Santa Teresa with him and living here as his wife for seven years.

"I don't know why he took the risk of coming back here. Perhaps he had some idea of keeping an eye on his son. But so far as I can tell, he didn't see Fred in all that time. It may be that his living here, so close to his wife and son but invisible to them, was part of the game of doubleness he was playing. He may have needed that kind of tension to keep him in orbit and sustain the Chantry illusion and his art.

"The main thing was to get out of Arizona free and clear, and it was his mother who made that possible for him. What Mildred did was probably the most difficult thing of all. She looked at young Richard Chantry's dead body and identified it as the body of her own son, William. It was a bold action, and not her last. She loved her bastard son, no matter what he was guilty of. But it was a fierce and tragic love she had for him. This morning she tried to reach him with a stiletto."

"To kill him?" Ruth Biemeyer said.

"Or to let him kill himself. I don't think it would have made much difference to Mildred. Her own life is pretty well finished."

Jack Biemeyer let out an involuntary sigh. His wife turned to me. "You said William had help from three people."

"At least three."

"Who was the third?"

"I think you know. William Mead never would have gotten out of Arizona, or succeeded in staying out, without some help. Somebody had to turn off Sheriff Brotherton's investigation and see that the case was closed."

Ruth Biemeyer and I looked at her husband. He lifted his heavy arms as though our eyes were guns.

"I wouldn't do a thing like that."

"You would if she told you to," his wife said. "She's been telling you what to do ever since I can remember. You'll be going down to the county jail to ask her what to do next. And she'll tell you to spend a fortune defending her murdering son, and you'll do it for her."

"Maybe I will at that."

He was watching her face. She looked at him in surprise and sudden fear.

Biemeyer stood up slowly, as if he was lifting a great weight on his shoulders. "Will you drive me down there, Archer? I'm feeling a bit shaky."

I said I would. Biemeyer started out of the room ahead of me. He turned at the open door and faced his wife.

"There's something you need to know, Ruth. William is my son, too. My illegitimate son by Mildred. I was just a kid in my teens when he was born."

Desolation crept over her face. "Why didn't you tell me before? It's too late now."

She looked at her husband as if she was seeing him for the last time. He took me out through the empty echoing spaces of the house. He walked uncertainly, staggering a little. I helped him into my car and started down the hill.

"It was an accident," he said, "just one of those accidents that happen to people. I met Mildred after a high-school football game. Old Felix Chantry threw a party in his mountain house. I was invited because my mother was his cousin. You know, a poor relation."

He sat for a while with his head down, then spoke in a stronger voice. "I scored three touchdowns that day, four if you count Mildred. I was seventeen when William was conceived, eighteen when he was born. There wasn't much I could do for him. I had no money. I was trying to make it through college. Mildred told Felix Chantry that the child was his, and he believed her. He gave her money for the boy's support until she broke with him and went to Simon Lashman.

"She did what she could for me, too. She helped me get a football scholarship and when I graduated she saw that Felix gave me a job at the smelter. She helped me up the ladder. I owe her a great deal."

But there was no warmth of gratitude in his voice. Perhaps he sensed that his life had been mislaid when he was young, and even in his age was still loose in his grasp. He peered out at the city we were driving through as though its shadowed streets were alien.

I felt the strangeness, too. The halls of the courthouse were like catacombs. After an elaborate proceeding that reminded me of the initiation rite into a tribe of aborigines, the D.A.'s men ushered us into the presence of the man I had taken.

He didn't look like a mass murderer, in spite of the armed guards who stood one on each side of him. He looked pale and weak and worried, as violent men so often do after the event.

"William?" I said.

He nodded once. Tears had begun to form in his eyes and run down his cheeks, slowly, like the sparse blood from stiletto wounds.

Jack Biemeyer stepped forward and touched his son's wet face.