The Blue Hammer

by Ross Macdonald

  I didn't mention Leonardo for fear of confusing the issue. "I'm fairly certain. You could ask around."

  Mackendrick shook his head abruptly. "Not in this town I couldn't. He's Santa Teresa's claim to fame-gone for twenty-five years, and still our leading citizen. And _you_ be careful what you say about him."

  "Is that a threat?"

  "It's a warning. I'm doing you a favor giving it. Mrs. Chantry could sue you, and don't think she wouldn't. She's got the local paper so bulldozed that they let her read it ahead of time whenever they mention her husband. Especially when they mention his disappearance, it has to be handled with kid gloves."

  "What do you think happened to him, Captain? I've told you what I know."

  "And I appreciate it. If he was a homo, as you say he was, then there's your answer right there. He stayed with his wife for seven years and couldn't stick it any longer. It's one thing I've often noticed about homos. Their lives run in cycles; they can't stay the course. And they have a tougher course to run than most of us."

  Mackendrick had succeeded in surprising me. There was a vein of tolerance in his granite after all.

  I said, "Is that the official theory, Captain? That Chantry simply took off of his own accord. No murder? No suicide? No blackmailing pressure?"

  Mackendrick took in a deep whistling breath through his nose, and blew it out through his lips. "I wouldn't attempt to tell you how many times I've been asked that question. It's just about my favorite question by now," he said with irony. "And I always give the same answer. We never came up with any evidence at all that Chantry had been killed, or forced to leave. As far as we were able to establish the facts, Chantry left here because he wanted to start a new life. And what you tell me about his sexual background only confirms it."

  "I assume his farewell letter was checked out in every way."

  "Every way possible. Handwriting, fingerprints, source of stationery-everything. The writing and the prints and the stationery were all Chantry's. There was no evidence that the letter was written under duress, either. And no new evidence has come up in the twenty-five years since then. I've had a special interest in the case from the beginning, because I knew Chantry, and you can take my word for all this. For some reason, he got sick and tired of his life here in Santa Teresa, and he dropped out."

  "He may have dropped in again, Captain. Fred Johnson seems to think that the stolen picture is a Chantry, and a fairly recent one."

  Mackendrick made an impatient flinging gesture with his left hand. "I'd want a better opinion than Fred Johnson's. And I don't buy his story that the picture was stolen from the museum. I think he's got it stashed someplace. If it is a genuine Chantry, it's worth real money. And in case you don't know it, Fred Johnson's family is on the rocks financially. His father's a hopeless drunk who hasn't worked for years; his mother lost her job at the hospital under suspicion of stealing drugs. And no matter whether he lost it or sold it or gave it away, Fred is criminally responsible for the loss of that picture."

  "Not until he's proved responsible."

  "Don't give me that, Archer. Are you a lawyer?"

  "No."

  "Then stop trying to act the part of one. Fred is where he belongs. You're not. And I have an appointment with the deputy coroner."

  I thanked Mackendrick for his patience, without irony. He had told me a number of things I needed to know.

  Leaving the police station, I passed my friend Purvis coming in. The young deputy coroner had the bright glazed look of a dedicated public servant on his way to get his picture in the paper. He didn't even break stride as he went by.

  I waited beside his official station wagon. Squad cars came and went. A flock of starlings flew over in a twittering cloud, and the first early shadow of evening followed them across the sky. I was worried about what might happen to Fred in jail, and regretful that I hadn't been able to spring him.

  Purvis came out of the station eventually, walking more slowly, with a certain weight of confidence.

  I said, "What's the word?"

  "Remember the cadaver I showed you the night before last in the morgue?"

  "I'm not likely to forget him. Jacob Whitmore, the painter."

  Purvis nodded. "He wasn't drowned in the ocean after all.

  We completed a very careful autopsy this afternoon. Whitmore was drowned in fresh water."

  "Does that mean he was murdered?"

  "Probably. Mackendrick seems to think so. Drowned in somebody's bathtub and chucked into the ocean afterwards."

  XXVII

  I drove out to Sycamore Point and knocked on the door of Jacob Whitmore's cottage. It was opened by the girl he had left behind. The low sun touched her face with a rosy glow and made her narrow her eyes. She didn't appear to recognize me.

  I had to remind her who I was. "I was here the night before last. I bought some of Jake's pictures from you."

  She shaded her eyes and studied my face. Hers was pale and unfocused. Her blond hair was uncombed, and it was lifted by the sundown wind pouring down the draw.

  She said, "Are the pictures okay?"

  "They're okay."

  "I have some more if you want them."

  "We'll talk about it."

  She let me into her front room. Nothing in it had changed essentially, but it had lapsed into more extreme disorder. A chair was lying on its back. There were bottles on the floor, fragments of enchilada on the table.

  She sat at the table. I picked up the fallen chair and sat facing her. "Have you heard from the coroner this afternoon?"

  She shook her head. "I haven't heard from anybody; not that I remember, anyway. Excuse the condition of the room, will you, please? I drank too much wine last night and I must have had a tantrum. It seemed-it seems so unfair that Jake had to drown." She was silent for a time, and then said, "They asked my permission to do an autopsy yesterday."

  "They did it today. Jake drowned in fresh water."

  She shook her bleached head again. "No, he didn't. He drowned in the ocean."

  "His body was found in the ocean, but the water that killed him was fresh water. You can take the coroner's word for it."

  She looked at me dimly through her half-closed eyes. "I don't understand. Does that mean he drowned in a creek and his body was washed down into the sea?"

  "That isn't likely. The creeks are low in the summer. It probably means that he was drowned in a bathtub or a swimming pool, and whoever did it dumped his body here in the ocean."

  "I don't believe it." She looked around the room as if the murderer might be lurking behind the furniture. "Who would do that to Jake?"

  "You tell me, Mrs. Whitmore."

  She shook her head. "We weren't married. My name is Jessie Gable." The sound of her name brought tears to her eyes. She blinked and the tears ran down her cheeks. "You're telling me that Jake was murdered, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't understand. He never hurt a living soul. Except me. But I forgave him."

  "Murder victims don't usually deserve it."

  "But he had nothing worth stealing."

  "Maybe he had. Didn't Paul Grimes buy some of his pictures?"

  She nodded. "That's true, he did. But it wasn't really the pictures that he wanted. I was here in the room when Grimes was talking to Jake. He was trying to get some information out of him, and he bought Jake's pictures just to get him talking."

  "Talking about what?"

  "The other picture. The picture that Jake had sold him at the beach art show, the day before."

  "And did Jake tell him what he wanted to know?"

  "I don't know. They went outside to talk about it. They didn't want me to hear what they were saying."

  I got out my photograph of the Biemeyers' stolen painting and showed it to her in the light from the window. "Is this the picture that Jake sold to Grimes the day before?"

  She took the picture and nodded. "It certainly looks like it. It's a really good picture and Jake got a lot of money for it
. He didn't tell me how much, but it must have been several hundred, anyway."

  "And Grimes probably sold it for several thousand."

  "Really?"

  "I'm not fooling, Jessie. The people who bought the picture from Grimes had it stolen from them. I was hired to recover it."

  She sat up straight and crossed her legs. "You don't think _I_ stole it, do you?"

  "No. I doubt you ever stole anything."

  "I didn't," she said firmly. "I never did. Except Jake from his wife."

  "That isn't a felony."

  "I don't know," she said. "I'm being punished like it was. And so was Jake punished."

  "Everybody dies, Jessie."

  "I hope that I die soon."

  I waited. "Before you do," I said, "I want you to do Jake a favor."

  "How can I? He's already dead."

  "You can help me find the person or persons who killed him." I took the photograph from her limp hands. "I think he was killed over this."

  "But why?"

  "Because he knew or figured out who painted it. I'm winging, you understand. I don't know for certain that that's true. But I think it is. This picture was the connecting link between the two men who were killed, Jake and Paul Grimes."

  I remembered as I said it that a third man had been killed: William Mead, whose body was found in the Arizona desert in 1943, and whose mother was the subject of the picture. These facts coming together in my mind gave me a kind of subterranean jolt, like an earthquake fault beginning to make its first tentative move. I was breathing quickly and my head was pounding.

  I leaned across the littered table. "Jessie, do you have any idea where Jake got this picture?"

  "He bought it."

  "How much did he pay for it?"

  "Fifty dollars at least-probably more. He wouldn't tell me how much more. He took the fifty dollars I had in my safety fund-that's money I kept in case we couldn't pay the rent. I told him he was crazy to put out cash for the picture, that he should take it on consignment. But he said he had a chance to make a profit. And I guess he did."

  "Did you ever see the person he bought it from?"

  "No, but it was a woman. He let that slip."

  "How old a woman?"

  Jessie spread her hands like someone feeling for rain. "Jake didn't tell me, not really. He said that it was an older woman but that doesn't mean it was. She could be seventeen and he'd still tell me she was an older woman. He knew that I was jealous of the chicks. And I had reason to be."

  Tears rose in her eyes. I didn't know whether they stood for anger or grief. Her feelings seemed to be fluctuating between those two emotions. So did mine. I was weary of questioning the widows of murdered men. But I still had questions to ask.

  "Did the woman bring the picture here to the house?"

  "No. I never saw her. I told you that. She took it down to the waterfront on a Saturday. These last years, Jake had a sideline buying and selling pictures at the Saturday art show. He bought the picture there."

  "How long ago was that?"

  She was slow in answering, perhaps looking back over a flickering passage of days that seemed all the same: sun and sea, wine and pot and grief and poverty.

  "It must have been a couple of months ago. It's at least that long since he took my safety fund. And when he sold the picture to Paul Grimes he didn't replace my fund. He kept the money himself. He didn't want me to know how much it was. But we've been living on it ever since." She scanned the room. "If you can call this living."

  I got a twenty out of my wallet and dropped it on the table. She scowled at it and then at me.

  "What's that for?"

  "Information."

  "I couldn't give you much. Jake was secretive about this deal. He seemed to think he was on to something big."

  "I think he was, too, or trying to get on to it. Do you want to try and dig up some more information for me?"

  "What kind of information?"

  "Where this picture came from." I showed her the portrait of Mildred Mead again. "Who Jake bought it from. Anything else that you can find out about it."

  "Can I keep that photo?"

  "No. It's the only one I have. You'll have to describe it."

  "Who to?"

  "The dealers at the Saturday art show. You know them, don't you?"

  "Most of them."

  "Okay. If you come up with anything usable, I'll give you another twenty. If you can give me the name or address of the woman who sold Jake this picture, I'll give you a hundred."

  "I could use a hundred." But she looked at me as if she didn't expect to see it in this life. "Jake and I had bad luck. He's had nothing but bad luck since he joined up with me." Her voice was harsh. "I wish I could of died instead of him."

  "Don't wish it," I said. "We all die soon enough."

  "It can't come too soon for me."

  "Just wait awhile. Your life will start again. You're a young woman, Jessie."

  "I feel as old as the hills."

  Outside, the sun had just gone down. The sunset spread across the sea like a conflagration so intense that it fed on water.

  XXVIII

  The red sky was darkening when I got downtown. The stores were full of light and almost empty of customers. I parked near the newspaper building and climbed the stairs to the newsroom. There was nobody there at all.

  A woman in the hall behind me spoke in a husky tentative voice: "Can I help you, sir?"

  "I hope so. I'm looking for Betty."

  She was a small gray-haired woman wearing strong glasses that magnified her eyes. She looked at me with sharp friendly curiosity.

  "You must be Mr. Archer."

  I said I was.

  The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Fay Brighton, the librarian of the paper. "Betty Jo asked me to relay a message to you. She said she'd be back here by half past seven at the latest." She looked at the small gold watch on her wrist, holding it close to her eyes. "It's almost that now. You shouldn't have long to wait."

  Mrs. Brighton went back behind the counter of the room that housed her files. I waited for half an hour, listening to the evening sounds of the emptying city. Then I tapped on her door.

  "Betty may have given up on me and gone home. Do you know where she lives?"

  "As a matter of fact, I don't. Not since her divorce. But I'll be glad to look it up for you."

  She opened a directory and transcribed Betty's number and address onto a slip of paper: "Seabrae Apartments, number 8, phone 967-9152." Then she brought out a phone from under the counter. Her eyes clung to my face as I dialed and listened. Betty's phone rang twelve times before I hung up.

  "Did she give you any idea where she was going?"

  "No, but she made a number of calls. She used this phone for some of them, so that I couldn't help hearing. Betty was calling various nursing homes in town, trying to locate a relative of hers. Or so she said."

  "Did she mention the name?"

  "Mildred Mead, I think it was. In fact, I'm sure of it. I think she found her, too. She took off in a hurry, and she had that light in her eyes-you know?-a young news hen on a breaking story." She let out a sighing breath. "I used to be one myself."

  "Did she tell you where she was going?"

  "Not Betty Jo." The woman smiled with shrewd pleasure. "When she's on a story, she wouldn't give her best friend the time of day. She started late in the game, you know, and the virus really got to her. But you probably know all that if you're a friend of hers."

  The unspoken question hung in the air between us.

  "Yes," I said. "I am a friend of hers. How long ago did she leave here?"

  "It must have been two hours ago, or more." She looked at her watch. "I think she took off about five-thirty."

  "By car?"

  "I wouldn't know that. And she didn't give me any hint at all as to where she was heading."

  "Where does she eat dinner?"

  "Various places. Sometimes I see her in the Tea Kettle. That's a fairly
good cafeteria just down the street." Mrs. Brighton pointed with her thumb in the direction of the sea.

  "If she comes back here," I said, "will you give her a message for me?"

  "I'd be glad to. But I'm not staying. I haven't eaten all day, and I really only waited for you to give you Betty's message. If you want to write one to her, I'll put it on her desk."

  She slid a small pad of blank paper across the counter to me.

  I wrote: "Sorry I missed you. I'll check back in the course of the evening. Later you can get me at the motel."

  I signed the message "Lew." Then, after a moment's indecision, I wrote the word "Love" above my "name. I folded the note and gave it to Mrs. Brighton. She took it into the newsroom.

  When she came back, she gave me a slightly flushed and conscious look that made me wonder if she had read my message. I had a sudden cold urge to recall it and cross out the word I had added. So far as I could remember, I hadn't written the word, or spoken it to a woman, in some years. But now it was in my mind, like a twinge of pain or hope.

  I walked down the block to the Tea Kettle's red neon sign and went in under it. It was nearly eight o'clock, which was late for cafeteria patrons, and the place looked rather desolate. There was no line at the serving counter, and only a few scattered elderly patrons at the tables.

  I remembered that I hadn't eaten since morning. I picked up a plate, had it filled with roast beef and vegetables, and carried it to a table from which I could watch the whole place. I seemed to have entered another city, a convalescent city where the wars of love were over and I was merely one of the aging survivors.

  I didn't like the feeling. When Mrs. Brighton came in, she did nothing to relieve it. But when she brought her tray into the dining room, I stood up and asked her to share my table.

  "Thank you. I hate eating alone. I spend so much time alone as it is, since my husband died." She gave me an anxious half-smile as if in apology for mentioning her loss. "Do you live alone?"

  "I'm afraid I do. My wife and I were divorced some years ago."