The Blue Hammer

by Ross Macdonald

  "She would have been welcome to stay with us."

  "For a price?"

  "We all contribute as we can. We practice tithing, each paying according to his ability. My own contribution is largely spiritual. Some of us earn our keep at humbler tasks."

  "Where did you study theology?"

  "In the world," he said. "Benares, Camarillo, Lompoc. I admit I don't have a degree. But I've done a great deal of counseling. I find myself able to help people. I could have helped Miss Biemeyer. I doubt that the sheriff can." He reached out and touched my arm with his long thin hand. "I believe I could help you."

  "Help me do what?"

  "Do nothing, perhaps." He spread his arms wide in an actorish gesture. "You seem to be a man engaged in an endless battle, an endless search. Has it ever occurred to you that the search may be for yourself? And that the way to find yourself is to be still and silent, silent and still?" He dropped his arms to his sides.

  I was tired enough to be taken by his questions, and to find myself repeating them in my mind. They were questions I had asked myself, though never in just those terms. Perhaps, after all, the truth I was looking for couldn't be found in the world. You had to go up on a mountain and wait for it, or find it in yourself.

  But even as I was taking a short-term lease on a piece of this thought, I was watching the lights of Copper City framed in the canyon mouth, and planning what I would do there in the morning.

  "I don't have any money."

  "Neither do I," he said. "But there seems to be enough for everyone. Money is the least of our worries."

  "You're lucky."

  He disregarded my irony. "I'm glad you see that. We're very lucky indeed."

  "Where did you get the money to buy this place?"

  "Some of our people have income." The idea seemed to please him, and he smiled. "We may not go in for worldly show, but this isn't exactly a poorhouse. Of course it isn't all paid for."

  "I'm not surprised. I understand it cost you over a hundred thousand dollars."

  His smile faded. "Are you investigating us?"

  "I have no interest in you at all, now that the girl is out of here."

  "We did her no harm," he said quickly. "I'm not suggesting you did."

  "But I suppose the sheriff will be bothering us now. Simply because we gave shelter to Biemeyer's daughter."

  "I hope not. I'll put in a word with him, if you like."

  "I would like, very much." He relaxed visibly and then audibly, letting out a long sighing breath.

  "In return for which," I said, "you can do something for me."

  "What is it?" He was suspicious of me again.

  "Help me to get in touch with Mildred Mead."

  He spread his hands, palms up. "I wouldn't know how. I don't have her address."

  "Aren't you making payments to her for this house?"

  "Not directly. Through the bank. I haven't seen her since she went to California. That was several months ago."

  "Which bank is handling the account?"

  "The Copper City branch of Southwestern Savings. They'll tell you I'm not a swindler. I'm not, you know."

  I believed him, provisionally. But he had two voices. One of them belonged to a man who was reaching for a foothold in the spiritual world. The other voice, which I had just been listening to, belonged to a man who was buying a place in the actual world with other people's money.

  It was an unstable combination. He could end as a con man, or a radio preacher with a million listeners, or a bartender with a cure of souls in Fresno. Perhaps he had already been some of those things.

  But I trusted him up to a point. I gave him the keys to the blue Ford and asked him to keep it for Fred, just in case Fred ever came back that way.

  XXII

  We drove back down the mountain to the substation and found Fred sitting inside with the deputy. I couldn't tell at first glance whether he was a prisoner or a patient. He had an adhesive bandage across the bridge of his nose and cotton stuffed up his nostrils. He looked like a permanent loser.

  The sheriff, who was a small winner, went into the inner office to make a phone call. His voice was a smooth blend of confidence and respect. He was making arrangements to fly Doris home in a copper-company jet.

  He lifted his head, flushed and bright-eyed, and offered me the receiver. "Mr. Biemeyer wants to talk to you."

  I didn't really want to talk to Biemeyer, now or ever. But I took the receiver and said into it, "This is Archer."

  "I've been expecting to hear from you," he said. "After all, I'm paying you good money."

  I didn't remind him that his wife had paid me. "You're hearing from me now."

  "Thanks to Sheriff Brotherton. I know how you private dicks operate. You let the men in uniform do the work and then you step in and take the credit."

  For a hotheaded instant, I was close to hanging up on Biemeyer. I had to remind myself that the case was far from over. The stolen painting was still missing. There were two unsolved murders, Paul Grimes's and now William Mead's.

  "There's credit enough for everybody," I said. "We have your daughter and she's in reasonably good shape. I gather she'll be flying home tomorrow in one of your planes."

  "First thing in the morning. I was just finalizing the arrangement with Sheriff Brotherton."

  "Could you hold that plane until late morning or so? I have some things to do in Copper City, and I don't think your daughter should travel unaccompanied."

  "I don't like the delay," he said. "Mrs. Biemeyer and I are very eager to see Doris."

  "May I speak to Mrs. Biemeyer?"

  "I suppose you can," he said reluctantly. "She's right here."

  There was some indistinct palaver at the other end, and then Ruth Biemeyer's voice came over the line. "Mr. Archer? I'm relieved to hear from you. Doris hasn't been arrested, has she?"

  "No. Neither has Fred. I want to bring them both home with me tomorrow on the company plane. But I may not be able to get out of here much before noon. Is that all right with you?"

  "Yes."

  "Thanks very much. Good night, Mrs. Biemeyer."

  I hung up and told the sheriff that the plane would leave at noon tomorrow with me and Doris and Fred. Brotherton didn't argue. My telephone conversation had invested me with some of the Biemeyer charisma.

  On the strength of this, I put in a word for the people in Chantry Canyon, as I had promised, and offered to assume responsibility for Fred. The sheriff agreed. Doris, he said, would be spending the night at his house.

  Fred and I checked into a double room in the motel. I needed a drink, but the store was closed and not even beer was available. I had no razor or toothbrush. I was as tired as sin.

  But I sat on my bed and felt surprisingly good. The girl was safe. The boy was in my hands.

  Fred had stretched out on his bed with his back to me. His shoulders moved spasmodically, and he-made a repeated noise that sounded like hiccuping. I realized he was crying.

  "What's the matter, Fred?"

  "You know what's the matter. My career is over and done with. It never even started. I'll lose my job at the museum. They'll probably put me in jail, and you know what will happen to me then." His voice was dulled by the cotton in his nose.

  "Do you have a record?"

  "No. Of course I don't." The idea seemed to shock him. "I've never been in trouble."

  "Then you should be able to stay out of jail."

  "Really?" He sat up and looked at me with wet red eyes.

  "Unless there's something that I don't know about. I still don't understand why you took the picture from the Biemeyer house."

  "I wanted to test it. I told you about that. Doris even suggested that I should take it. She was just as interested as I was."

  "Interested in what, exactly?"

  "In whether it was a Chantry. I thought I could put my expertise to work on it." He added in a muffled voice, "I wanted to show them that I was good for something."

  He sat
up on the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. He was young for his age, in his thirties and still a boy, and foolish for a person of his intelligence. It seemed that the sad house on Olive Street hadn't taught him much about the ways of the world.

  Then I reminded myself that I mustn't buy too much of Fred's queer little story. After all, he was a self-admitted liar.

  I said, "I'd like your expert opinion on that picture."

  "I'm not really an expert."

  "But you're entitled to an informed opinion. As a close student of Chantry, do you think he painted the Biemeyer picture?"

  "Yes, sir. I do. But my statement has to be qualified."

  "Go ahead and qualify it."

  "Well. It certainly doesn't go back any twenty-five years. The paint is much too new, applied maybe as recently as this year. And the style has changed, of course. It naturally would. I think it's Chantry's style, his _developed_ style, but I couldn't swear to it unless I saw other late examples. You can't base a theory or an opinion on a single work."

  Fred seemed to be talking as an expert, or at least an informed student. He sounded honest and for once forgetful of himself. I decided to ask him a harder question.

  "Why did you say in the first place that the painting had been stolen from your house?"

  "I don't know. I must have been crazy." He sat looking down at his dusty shoes. "I guess I was afraid to involve the museum."

  "In what way?"

  "In any way. They'd fire me if they knew I'd taken the picture myself the way I did. Now they'll fire me for sure. I have no future."

  "Everybody has a future, Fred."

  The words didn't sound too encouraging, even to me. A lot of futures were disastrous, and Fred's was beginning to look like one of those. He hung his head under the threat of it.

  "The most foolish thing you did was to bring Doris with you."

  "I know. But she wanted to come along."

  "Why?"

  "To see Mildred Mead if I found her. She was the main source of the trouble in Doris's family, you know. I thought it might be a good idea if Doris could talk to her. You know?"

  I knew. Like other lost and foolish souls, Fred had an urge to help people, to give them psychotherapy even if it wrecked them. When he was probably the one who needed it most. Watch it, I said to myself, or you'll be trying to help Fred in that way. Take a look at your own life, Archer.

  But I preferred not to. My chosen study was other men, hunted men in rented rooms, aging boys clutching at manhood before night fell and they grew suddenly old. If you were the therapist, how could you need therapy? If you were the hunter, you couldn't be hunted. Or could you?

  "Doris is having a hard time maintaining," Fred said. "I've been trying to help her out of it."

  "By taking her on a long drive to nowhere?"

  "She wanted to come. She insisted. I thought it was better than leaving her where she was, sitting in an apartment by herself and gobbling drugs."

  "You have a point."

  He managed to give me a quick shy smile that twitched and cowered in the shadow of his mustache. "Besides, you have to remember that this isn't nowhere for Doris. She was born in Copper City and spent at least half of her life here in Arizona. This is home for her."

  "It hasn't been a very happy homecoming."

  "No. She was terribly disappointed. I guess you can't go home again, as Thomas Wolfe says."

  Remembering the gabled house where Fred lived with his father and mother, I wondered who would want to.

  "Have you always lived in Santa Teresa?"

  He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, "Since I was a little boy, we've lived in the same house on Olive Street. It wasn't always the wreck that it is now. Mother kept it up much better-I used to help her-and we had roomers, nurses from the hospital and such." He spoke as if having roomers was a privilege. "The best times were before my father came home from Canada." Fred looked past me at my hunched shadow on the wall.

  "What was your father doing in Canada?"

  "Working at various jobs, mostly in British Columbia. He liked it then. I don't think he and Mother got along too well, even in those days. I've realized since that he probably stayed away from her for that reason. But it was a bit rough on me. I don't remember ever seeing my father until I was six or seven."

  "How old are you now, Fred?"

  "Thirty-two," he said reluctantly.

  "You've had long enough to get over your father's absence."

  "That isn't what I meant at all." He was flustered and angry, and disappointed in me. "I wasn't offering him as an excuse."

  "I didn't say you were."

  "As a matter of fact, he's been a good father to me." He thought this statement over, and amended it. "At least he was in those early days when he came back from Canada. Before he started drinking so hard. I really loved him in those days. Sometimes I think I still do, in spite of all the awful things he does."

  "What awful things?"

  "He rants and roars and threatens Mother and smashes things and cries. He never does a stroke of work. He sits up there with his crazy hobbies and drinks cheap wine, and it's all he's good for." His voice had coarsened, and rose and fell like an angry wife's ululation. I wondered if Fred was unconsciously imitating his mother.

  "Who brings him the wine?"

  "Mother does. I don't know why she does it, but she keeps on doing it. Sometimes," he added in a voice that was almost too low to hear, "sometimes I think she does it in revenge."

  "Revenge for what?"

  "For ruining himself and his life, and ruining _her_ life. I've seen her stand and watch him staggering from wall to wall as if she took pleasure in seeing him degraded. At the same time, she's his willing slave and buys him liquor. That's another form of revenge-a subtle form. She's a woman who refuses to be a full woman."

  Fred had surprised me. As he reached deeper into the life behind his present trouble, he lost his air of self-deprecating foolishness. His voice deepened. His thin and long-nosed boyish face almost supported his mustache. I began to feel faint stirrings of respect for him, and even hope.

  "She's a troubled woman," I said.

  "I know. They're both troubled people. It's really too bad they ever got together. Too bad for both of them. I believe my father once had the makings of a brilliant man, before he turned into a lush. Mother isn't up to him mentally, of course, and I suppose she resents it, but she isn't a negligible person. She's a registered nurse and she's kept up her profession and looked after my father, both at the same time. That took some doing."

  "Most people do what they have to."

  "She's done a bit more than that. She's been helping me through college. I don't know how she makes the money stretch."

  "Does she have any extracurricular income?"

  "Not since the last roomer left. That was some time ago."

  "And I heard last night that she lost her job at the hospital."

  "Not exactly. She gave it up." Fred's voice had risen, and lost its masculine timbre. "They made her a much better offer at the La Paloma nursing home."

  "That doesn't sound very likely, Fred."

  "It's true." His voice rose higher, his eyes were too bright, his mustache was ragged. "Are you calling my mother a liar?"

  "People make mistakes."

  "You're making one now, running down my mother like that. I want you to take it back."

  "Take what back?"

  "What you said about my mother. She doesn't peddle drugs."

  "I never said she did, Fred."

  "But you implied it. You implied that the hospital let her go because she was stealing drugs and peddling them."

  "Is that what the hospital people said?"

  "Yes. They're a bunch of sadistic liars. My mother would never do a thing like that. She's always been a good woman." Tears formed in his eyes and left snail-tracks on his cheeks. "I haven't been a good man," he said. "I've been living out a fantasy, I see that now."

 
; "What do you mean, Fred?"

  "I was hoping to pull off a coup that would make me famous in art circles. I thought if I could get to Miss Mead, she could help me find the painter Chantry. But all I've done is make an ass of myself and get the whole family into deeper trouble."

  "It was a fair try, Fred."

  "It wasn't. I'm a fool!"

  He turned his back on me. Gradually his breathing slowed down. I felt mine slowing down with it. I realized just before I fell asleep that I was beginning to like him.

  I woke up once in the middle of the night and felt the weight of the mountains squatting over me. I turned on the light at the head of my bed. There were old watermarks on the walls like the indistinct traces of bad dreams.

  I didn't try to read them. I turned off the light and fell back into sleep, breathing in unison with my foolish pseudo-son.

  XXIII

  When I got up in the morning, Fred was still sleeping. One arm was over his eyes as if he dreaded the new day and its light. I asked the deputy on duty in the substation to keep track of Fred. Then I drove my rented car into Copper City, guided by the plume of smoke over the smelter.

  A barber sold me a shave for three dollars. For a similar amount, I got a small breakfast and directions on how to find my way to Southwestern Savings.

  It was in a downtown shopping center, which looked like a piece of Southern California that had broken loose and blown across the desert. The little city that surrounded it seemed to have been drained of energy by the huge wound of the copper mine in its side, the endless suspiration of the smelter. The smoke blew over the city like a great ironic flag.

  The sign on the glass front door of Southwestern Savings said that the building didn't open until ten. It was not quite nine by my watch. It was getting hotter.

  I found a phone booth and looked for Paul Grimes in the directory. His name wasn't listed but there were two listings for Mrs. Paul Grimes, one for a residence and the other for Grimes Art & School Supplies. The latter turned out to be in the downtown area, within easy walking distance.