The Blue Hammer

by Ross Macdonald

  Her voice was dark with sorrow and resentment. The darkness appeared to have seeped up from her mind into the roots of her hair. She looked past me out to sea where the barely visible waves were rolling in like measured installments of eternity.

  "May I come in and look?"

  "I guess so. Sure."

  She opened the door and swung it shut behind me against the wind. The room smelled of the sea, of wine and pot and mildew. The furniture was sparse and broken-down. It looked like a house that had barely survived a battle-an earlier stage of the same desultory battle against poverty and failure that had passed through the Johnson house on Olive Street.

  The woman went into an inner room and emerged with a stack of unframed paintings in her arms. She set them down on the warped rattan table.

  "These'll cost you ten apiece, or forty-five for five of them. Jake used to get more for his paintings at the Saturday art show on Santa Teresa beach. A while ago, he sold one of them to a dealer for a good price. But I can't afford to wait."

  "Was Paul Grimes the dealer?"

  "That's right." She looked at me with some suspicion. "Are you a dealer, too?"

  "No."

  "But you know Paul Grimes?"

  "Slightly."

  "Is he honest?"

  "I don't know. Why?"

  "I don't think he is. He put on quite an act about how much he liked Jake's work. He was going to publicize it on a big scale and make our fortune. I thought that Jake's big dream had come true at last. The dealers would be knocking on our door, Jake's prices would skyrocket. But Grimes bought two measly pictures and that was that. One of them wasn't even Jake's-it was somebody else's."

  "Who painted the other picture?"

  "I don't know. Jake didn't discuss his business with me. I think he took the picture on consignment from one of his friends on the beach."

  "Can you describe the picture?"

  "It was a picture of a woman-maybe a portrait, maybe imaginary. She was a beautiful woman, with hair the same color as mine." She touched her own bleached hair; the action seemed to arouse her fear or suspicion. "Why is everybody so interested in that picture? Was it worth a lot?"

  "I don't know."

  "I think it was. Jake wouldn't tell me what he got for it, but I know we've been living on the money for the last couple of months. The money ran out yesterday. And so," she added in a toneless voice, "did Jake."

  She turned away and spread out the unframed paintings on the table. Most of them were unfinished-looking small seascapes like the one in my car that I'd shown to Arthur Planter. The drowned man had clearly been obsessed by the sea, and I couldn't help wondering if his drowning had been entirely accidental.

  I said, "Were you suggesting that Jake drowned himself?"

  "No, I was not." She changed the subject abruptly: "I'll give you all five of them for forty dollars. The canvases alone are worth that much. You know that if you're a painter."

  "I'm not a painter."

  "I sometimes wonder if Jake was. He painted for over thirty years and ended up with nothing to show for it but this." The gesture of her hand took in the paintings on the table, the house and its history, Jake's death. "Nothing but this and me."

  She smiled, or grimaced with half of her face. Her eyes remained cold as a sea bird's, peering down into the roiled and cloudy past.

  She caught me watching her and recoiled from the look on my face. "I'm not as bad as you think I am," she said. "If you want to know why I'm selling these things, I want to buy him a coffin. I don't want the county to bury him in one of those pine boxes. And I don't want to leave him lying in the basement of the county hospital."

  "Okay, I'll take the five pictures."

  I handed her two twenties, wondering if I'd ever get the money back from Biemeyer.

  She took it with some distaste and held it. "That wasn't a sales pitch. You don't have to buy them just because you know why I need the money."

  "I need the pictures."

  "What for? _Are_ you a dealer?"

  "Not exactly."

  "That means you are. I knew you weren't a painter."

  "How did you know?"

  "I've lived with a painter for the last ten years." She moved the position of her hips, resting her weight against the corner of the table. "You don't look like a painter or talk like one. You don't have a painter's eyes. You don't smell like a painter."

  "What do I smell like?"

  "A cop, maybe. I thought when Paul Grimes bought those two pictures from Jake that maybe there was something funny about them. Is there?"

  "I don't know."

  "Then why are you buying these?"

  "Because Paul Grimes bought the others."

  "You mean if he put out money for them, they must be worth something?"

  "I'd certainly like to know why he wanted them."

  "So would I," she said. "Why do _you_ want the pictures?"

  "Because Paul Grimes wanted them."

  "You mean you do everything he does?"

  "I hope not everything."

  She gave me her cold half-smile and nodded. "Yeah, I heard he's slightly crooked on occasion. I shouldn't say that, though. I've got nothing against him. And his daughter's kind of a friend of mine."

  "Paola? Is she his daughter?"

  "Yeah. You know her?"

  "We've met. How do you happen to know her?"

  "I met her at a party in the barrio. She told me her mother was part Spanish and part Indian. Paola's a beautiful woman, don't you think? I love those Spanish types."

  She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her palms together as if she were warming herself at Paola's heat.

  I drove back to Santa Teresa and paid a visit to the morgue in the basement of the hospital. A young deputy coroner named Henry Purvis, whom I knew, told me that Jacob Whitmore had drowned while swimming. He pulled out a drawer and showed me the blue body with its massive hairy head and shrunken sex. I walked out of the cold room shivering.

  XI

  As if he were feeling lonely, the deputy coroner, Purvis, followed me into the anteroom, letting the heavy metal door swing shut behind him. He was almost as hairy as the dead man, and almost young enough to be his son.

  I said, "Is there any official doubt that Whitmore died by accident?"

  "I don't think so. He was getting too old for the kind of surf they have at Sycamore Point. The coroner put it down as an accident. He hasn't even ordered an autopsy."

  "I think he should, Henry."

  "Do you have a reason?"

  "Whitmore and Grimes had a business connection. It's probably not a coincidence that they're in here together. Of course there'll be an autopsy on Grimes, won't there?"

  Purvis nodded. "It's set for first thing in the morning. But I did a preliminary examination, and I can tell them what the probable results will be. He was beaten to death with a heavy weapon, probably a tire iron."

  "The weapon hasn't been found?"

  "Not that I know of. You should ask the police. The weapon is their department." He looked me over carefully. "Did you know Grimes?"

  "Not really. I knew he was an art dealer in town."

  "Was he an addict at one time?" Purvis said.

  "I didn't know him that well. What kind of addiction do you have in mind?"

  "Heroin, probably. He's got old needle marks on his arms and thighs. I asked the woman about them, but she wouldn't talk. The way she blew her top, she may be an addict herself. There's a lot of it around, even right in the hospital here."

  "What woman are we talking about?"

  "Dark woman-Spanish type. When I showed her the body, she did everything but climb the wall. I put her in the chapel and tried to call a priest for her but I couldn't raise one, not at this time of night. I called the police, and they want to talk to her."

  I asked him where the chapel was. It was a narrow little room on the first floor, with a single small stained-glass window denoting its function. It was furnished with a lectern and e
ight or ten padded chairs. Paola was sitting on the floor head down, hugging her knees, her black hair almost covering her face. She was hiccuping. When I approached her, she raised a bent arm over her head as if I might be planning to murder her.

  "Get away from me."

  "I won't hurt you, Paola."

  She tossed back her mane of hair and stared at me narrow-eyed, without recognition. She had an aura of fierce forlorn sexuality. "You're no priest."

  "You can say that again."

  I sat near her on the carpeted floor, which repeated the design of the stained-glass window. There were times when I almost wished I was a priest. I was growing weary of other people's pain and wondered if a black suit and a white collar might serve as armor against it. I'd never know. My grandmother in Contra Costa County had marked me for the priesthood, but I had slipped away under the fence.

  Looking into Paola's opaque black eyes, I thought that the grief you shared with women was most always partly desire. At least sometimes you could take them to bed, I thought, and exchange a temporary kindness, which priests were denied. But not Paola. Both she and the woman at Sycamore Point belonged to dead men tonight. Chapel thoughts.

  "What happened to Paul?" I asked her.

  She looked at me with her chin on her shoulder, her lower lip protruding, her eyes defensive. "You haven't told me who you are. Are you a policeman?"

  "No. I run a small business." I winced at the half-lie; the chapel was getting to me. "I heard that Paul was in the market for pictures."

  "Not any more. He's dead."

  "Aren't you going to carry on the business?"

  She raised her shoulders and shook her head fiercely, as if she were being violently threatened. "Not me. You think I want to be killed like my father was?"

  "Was Paul really your father?"

  "Yes, he was."

  "Who killed him?"

  "I'm not saying. You're not saying much, either." She leaned toward me. "Didn't you come into the shop today?"

  "Yes."

  "It was something about the Biemeyers' picture, wasn't it? What kind of business are you in? Are you a dealer?"

  "I'm interested in pictures."

  "I can see that. But whose side are you on?"

  "The good guys."

  "There are no good guys. If you don't know that, you're no use to me." She rose on her knees and swept her arm between us in a gesture of angry dismissal. "So why don't you get lost?"

  "I want to help you." It wasn't entirely a lie.

  "Sure you do. You want to help me. Then you want me to help you. Then you want to take the profits and run. That's the story, isn't it?"

  "What profits? All you've got is a double handful of grief."

  She was silent for a while. Her eyes stayed on my face. Through them I could sense the movements of her mind almost as tangibly as if she were playing chess or checkers on a board, asking herself what she had to lose to me in order to take a greater amount away.

  "I admit I'm in trouble." She turned her hands palms upward on her knees, as if to offer me a share of her grief. "Only I think you're worse trouble. Who are you, anyway?"

  I told her my name and what I did for a living. Her eyes changed but she didn't speak. I told her that the Biemeyers had hired me to find their stolen painting.

  "I don't know anything about it. I told you that this afternoon at the shop."

  "I believe you," I said with a mental reservation. "The point is that the theft of the painting and the killing of your father may be connected."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I don't know it, but it seems likely. Where did that painting come from, Miss Grimes?"

  She winced. "Just call me Paola. I never use my father's name. And I can't tell you where he got the picture. He just used me for front; he never told me his business."

  "You can't tell me, or you won't?"

  "Both."

  "Was the picture genuine?"

  "I don't know." She was silent for an interval, during which she hardly seemed to breathe. "You say you want to help me, but all you do is ask questions. I'm supposed to supply the answers. How does it help me if I talk myself into jail?"

  "Your father might have been better off in jail."

  "Maybe you're right. But I don't want to end up there. Or in a hole in the ground, either." Her gaze was restless and inward, lost in the convolutions of her mind. "You think whoever painted that picture killed my father, too."

  "That may be true. I have a feeling it is."

  She said in a thin voice, "Is Richard Chantry still alive?"

  "He may be. What makes you think he is?"

  "That picture. I'm no expert like my father was, but it looked like a Chantry to me, the real McCoy."

  "What did your father say about it?"

  "I'm not telling you. And I don't want to talk about that picture any more. You're still asking all the questions, and I'm doing all the answering, and I'm tired. I want to go home."

  "Let me take you."

  "No. You don't know where I live, and I'm not telling you, either. That's my secret."

  She got up from her knees, staggering a little. I supported her with my arm. Her breast touched my side. She leaned on me, breathing deeply for a moment, then pulled away. Some of her heat migrated through my body to my groin. I felt less tired than I had.

  "I'll take you home."

  "No, thanks. I have to wait here for the police. Anyway, all I need right now is a private cop in my life."

  "You could do worse, Paola. Your father was murdered, remember, possibly by the man who painted that picture."

  She took hold of my left arm above the elbow. "So you keep telling me, but do you know it?"

  "No. I don't know it."

  "Then stop trying to scare me. I'm scared enough already."

  "I think you should be. I got to your father before he died. It happened just a couple of hundred yards from here. It was dark, and he was badly hurt, and he thought I was Chantry. In fact, he called me Chantry. And what he said implied that Chantry killed him."

  Her eyes dilated. "Why would Richard Chantry kill my father? They were good friends in Arizona. My father often talked about him. He was Chantry's first teacher."

  "That must have been a long time ago."

  "Yes. Over thirty years."

  "And people can change in thirty years."

  She nodded in assent, and her head stayed down. Her hair swung forward so that it poured like black water over her face.

  "What happened to your father in those years?"

  "I don't know much about it. I didn't see a lot of my father until recently-until he had a use for me."

  "Was he on heroin?"

  She was silent for a time. Her hair was still over her face, and she didn't push it back. She looked like a woman without a face.

  Finally she said, "You know the answer to that question, or you wouldn't ask it. He used to be an addict. They sent him to federal prison, and he licked it there, cold turkey." She separated her hair with her hands and looked at me between it, probably to see if I believed her. "I wouldn't have come here with him if he had been on drugs. I saw what it did to him when I was a kid in Tucson and Copper City."

  "What did it do to him?"

  "He used to be a good man, an important man. He even taught a course at the university once. Then he turned into something else."

  "What did he turn into?"

  "I don't know. He started running after boys. Or maybe he was always like that. I don't know."

  "Did he kick that habit, too, Paola?"

  "I guess he did." But her voice was uncertain, full of pain and doubt.

  "Was the Biemeyers' painting genuine?"

  "I don't know. _He_ thought it was, and he was the expert."

  "How do you know that?"

  "He talked to me about it the day he bought it on the beach. He said it had to be a Chantry, nobody else could have painted it. He said it was the greatest find he ever made in his life."
/>
  "Did he say this to you?"

  "Yes. Why would he lie to me? He had no reason." But she was watching my face as if my reaction might resolve the question of her father's honesty.

  She was frightened, and I was tired. I sat down on one of the padded chairs and let my mind fray out for a couple of minutes. Paola went to the door but she didn't go out. She leaned on the doorframe, watching me as if I might steal her purse, or already had.

  "I'm not your enemy," I said.

  "Then don't press me so hard. I've had a rough night." She averted her face, as if she were ashamed of what she was about to say. "I liked my father. When I saw him dead, it was a terrible thing for me."

  "I'm sorry, Paola. I hope tomorrow will be better."

  "I hope so," she said.

  "I understand your father had a photograph of the painting."

  "That's right. The coroner has it."

  "Henry Purvis?"

  "Is that his name? Anyway, he has it."

  "How do you know?"

  "He showed it to me. He said he found it in my father's clothes, and he wanted to know if I recognized the woman. I told him I didn't."

  "You recognized the painting?"

  "Yes."

  "It was the painting your father sold to the Biemeyers?"

  "Yes, it was."

  "How much did they pay him for it?"

  "My father never told me. I think he needed the money to pay off a debt, and he didn't want me to know. I can tell you something that he did say, though. He knew the woman in the painting, and that was how he authenticated it as a Chantry."

  "It is an authentic Chantry, then?"

  "Yes. My father said it was."

  "Did he tell you the woman's name?"

  "It was Mildred. She was a model in Tucson when he was young-a beautiful woman. He said it must be a memory painting, because she's an old woman now, if she's alive at all."

  "Do you remember her last name?"

  "No. I think she took the names of the men she lived with."

  I left Paola in the chapel and went back to the cold room. Purvis was in the anteroom, but he no longer had the photograph of the painting. He told me that he had given it to Betty Jo Siddon.

  "What for?"

  "She wanted to take it down to the newspaper building and have it photographed."