The Blue Hammer

III

I found my circuitous way to the bridge that crossed the barranca and parked in front of the Chantry house. A large hook-nosed man in a white silk shirt opened the door before I could knock. He stepped outside and shut the door behind him.

"What can I do for you?" He had the voice and look of a spoiled servant.

"I'd like to see Mrs. Chantry."

"She isn't here. I'll take a message for her if you want."

"I'd like to speak to her personally."

"What about?"

"I'll tell her, okay? If you'll tell me where she is."

"I guess she's at the museum. This is her day for that."

I decided to call on the dealer Paul Grimes first. I drove along the waterfront toward the lower town. There were white sails on the water, and gulls and terns in the air like their small flying counterparts. I stopped on impulse and checked in at a motel that faced the harbor.

The lower town was a blighted area standing above the waterfront about ten blocks deep. There were blighted men wandering along the main street or leaning against the fronts of the secondhand stores.

Paul Grimes's shop was a block off the main street between a liquor store and a soul-food restaurant. It wasn't impressive-no more than a dingy stucco storefront with what looked like living quarters above it. Inscribed across the front window in gilt was the legend _Paul Grimes-Paintings and Decorations._ I parked at the green curb in front of it.

A bell tinkled over the door as I went in. The interior had been disguised with painted plyboard screens and gray cloth hangings. A few tentative-looking pictures had been attached to them. On one side a dark woman in a loose multicolored costume sat behind a cheap desk and tried to look busy.

She had deep black eyes, prominent cheekbones, prominent breasts. Her long hair was unflecked black. She was very handsome, and quite young.

I told her my name. "Mr. Grimes is expecting me."

"I'm sorry, he had to go out."

"When will he be back?"

"He didn't say. I think he was going out of town on business."

"Are you his secretary?"

"You could call me that." Her smile was like the flash of a half-concealed knife. "You the man that called about a picture?"

"Yes."

"I can show you some pictures." She gestured toward those on display. "Most of these are pretty abstract, but we have some representational ones in the back."

"Do you have any of Richard Chantry's paintings?"

"I don't think so. No."

"Mr. Grimes sold a Chantry painting to some people named Biemeyer. They told me he could show me a photograph of it."

"I wouldn't know about that."

She spread her hands in front of her, palms upward, and her loose sleeves fell away from her round brown arms. The light growth of hair on her arms looked like clinging smoke.

"Can you give me Mr. Grimes's home address?"

"He lives upstairs. He isn't in."

"When do you expect him back?"

"I wouldn't know. Sometimes he goes away for a week. He doesn't tell me where he's going, and I don't ask him."

I thanked her and went into the liquor store next door. The middle-aged black man behind the counter asked if he could help me.

"I hope so. Do you know Mr. Grimes?"

"Who?"

"Paul Grimes, the art dealer in the next building."

"Older man with a gray goatee?" He shaped a pointed beard with his fingers. "Wears a white sombrero?"

"That sounds like Mr. Grimes."

He shook his head. "Can't say I know him. I don't believe he drinks. Never does any business with me, anyway."

"What about his girl?"

"She came in for a six-pack once or twice. Paola, I think her name is. Has she got Indian blood, do you know?"

"I wouldn't be surprised."

"I thought so." The idea seemed to please him. "She's a sharp-looking chick. I don't know how a man his age holds on to a chick like that."

"Neither do I. I'd like to know when Mr. Grimes gets back here." I put two dollar bills on the counter between us and laid one of my cards on top of them. "Could I check back with you?"

"Why not?"

I drove up the main street to the chaste white building that housed the art museum. The young man at the turnstile said that Fred Johnson had left the building an hour or so before.

"Did you wish to see him about a personal matter? Or something connected with the museum?"

"I understand he's interested in the painter Richard Chantry."

His smile brightened. "We all are. Are you from out of town, sir?"

"Los Angeles."

"Have you seen our permanent Chantry collection?"

"Not yet."

"You came at a good time. Mrs. Chantry is here now. She gives us one afternoon a week."

He directed me through a room where a group of classical sculptures stood pale and serene, to a quite different kind of room. The first pictures I looked at resembled windows into an alternative world, like the windows that jungle travelers use to watch the animals at night. But the animals in Chantry's paintings seemed to be on the verge of becoming human. Or perhaps they were human beings devolving into animals.

A woman came into the room behind me and answered my unspoken question:

"These are known as the Creation pictures-the artist's imaginative conception of evolution. They represent his first great creative burst. He painted them in a period of six months, incredible as it may seem."

I turned to look at the woman. In spite of her conservative dark blue suit and her rather stilted patter, she gave an impression of rough strength. Her chastely trimmed graying hair seemed to glisten with vitality.

"Are you Mrs. Chantry?"

"Yes." She seemed pleased to be recognized. "I really shouldn't be here. I'm giving a party tonight. But it's hard for me to stay away from the museum on my day."

She led me to a farther wall on which was hung a series of figure studies of women. One of them stopped me. A young woman was sitting on a rock that was partly hidden, as she was, by a buffalo robe around her waist. Her fine breasts and shoulders were bare. Behind her and above her in the picture, the mounted head of a buffalo bull hung in space.

"He called it _Europa,"_ Mrs. Chantry said.

I turned to her. She was smiling. I looked again at the girl in the picture.

"Is that you?"

"In a sense. I used to model for Richard."

We looked at each other more sharply for a moment. She was about my age or a little younger, with _Europa's_ body holding firm under her blue suit. I wondered what kind of compulsion, what pride in her husband or in herself, made her serve as a museum guide to his pictures.

"Had you ever seen any of his paintings before? They seemed to take you by surprise."

"They did. They do."

"His work has that effect on most people seeing it for the first time. Tell me, what got you interested in it?"

I told her I was a private detective employed by the Biemeyers to investigate the theft of their picture. I wanted to get her reaction.

She went pale under her makeup. "The Biemeyers are ignorant people. That picture they bought from Paul Grimes is a fake. He offered it to me long before they saw it. I wouldn't touch it. It's an obvious imitation of a style that Richard abandoned long ago."

"How long ago?"

"About thirty years. It belonged to his Arizona period. Paul Grimes may have painted it himself."

"Does Grimes have that kind of a reputation?"

I'd asked her one question too many. "I can't discuss his reputation with you, or anyone. He was Richard's friend and teacher in the Arizona days."

"But not a friend of yours?"

"I prefer not to go into that. Paul was helpful to my husband when it counted. But people change over the years. Everything changes." She looked around her, scanning her husband's paintings as if even they had become unfamiliar, like half-remembered dreams. "I try to guard my husband's reputation, keep the canon pure. All sorts of people try to cash in on his work."

"Would Fred Johnson be one of them?"

The question seemed to surprise her. She shook her head, setting her hair swinging like a flexible gray bell.

"Fred is fascinated by my husband's work. But I wouldn't say he's trying to cash in on it." She was silent for a moment. "Did Ruth Biemeyer accuse him of stealing her lousy picture?"

"His name came up."

"Well, it's nonsense. Even if he were dishonest, which he shows no signs of being, Fred has too much taste to be taken in by a poor imitation like that."

"I'd still like to talk to him. Do you happen to know where he lives?"

"I can find out." She went into the front office and came out a minute later. "Fred lives with his parents at 2024 Olive Street. Be nice to him. He's a sensitive young man, and a very great Chantry enthusiast."

I thanked her for the information. She thanked me for my interest in her husband. She seemed to be playing a complex role, part salesperson and part guardian of a shrine, and part something else. I couldn't help wondering if the undefinable part was an angry widowed sexuality.