Sarah Turner had crossed to a portable bar in the corner. She was splintering ice with a silver-handled ice pick. “May I make you one, Mr. Archer?”
“No, thanks.” I sat down in a cubistic chair designed for people with square corners, and watched her take half of her new highball in a single gulp. “What did Todd mean when he said he was in the picture business? Doesn’t he run this place?”
“He’s having to give it up. The boutique’s gone broke, and he’s going around testing shoulders to weep on.”
“Yours?” A queer kind of hostile intimacy had risen between us, and I tried to make the most of it.
“Where did you get that notion?”
“I thought he was a friend of yours.”
“Did you?” Her laugh was too loud to be pleasant. “You ask a great many questions, Mr. Archer.”
“They seem to be indicated. The cops in a town like this are pretty backward about stepping on people’s toes.”
“You’re not.”
“No. I’m just passing through. I can follow my hunches.”
“What do you hope to gain?”
“Nothing for myself. I’d like to see justice done.”
She sat down facing me, her knees almost touching mine. They were pretty knees, and uncovered. I felt crowded. Her voice, full of facile emotion, crowded me more:
“Were you terribly fond of Hugh?”
“I liked him.” My answer was automatic. I was thinking of something else: the way she sat in her chair with her knees together, her body sloping backward, sure of its firm lines. I’d seen the same pose in charcoal that morning.
“I liked him, too,” she was saying. “Very much. And I’ve been thinking—I’ve remembered something. Something that Hilary mentioned a couple of weeks ago, about Walter Hendryx wanting to buy the Chardin. It seems Hugh and Walter Hendryx were talking shop—”
She broke off suddenly. She had looked up and seen Todd leaning through the doorway, his face alive with anger. His shoulders moved slightly in her direction. She recoiled, clutching her glass. If I hadn’t been there, I guessed he would have hit her. As it was, he said in a monotone:
“How cozy. Haven’t you had quite a bit to drink, Sarah darling?”
She was afraid of him, but unwilling to admit it. “I have to do something to make present company bearable.”
“You should be thoroughly anesthetized by now.”
“If you say so, darling.”
She hurled her half-empty glass at the wall beside the door. It shattered, denting the wallboard and splashing a photograph of Nijinsky as the Faun. Some of the liquid splattered on Todd’s blue suede shoes.
“Very nice,” he said. “I love your girlish antics, Sarah. I also love the way you run at the mouth.” He turned to me: “This is the copy, Mr. Archer. Don’t mind her, she’s just a weensy bit drunky.”
He held it up for me to see, an oil painting about a yard square showing a small boy in a blue waistcoat sitting at a table. In the center of the linen tablecloth there was a blue dish containing a red apple. The boy was looking at the apple as if he intended to eat it. The copyist had included the signature and date: Chardin, 1744.
“It’s not very satisfactory,” Todd said, “if you’ve ever seen the original. But of course you haven’t?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. You probably never will now, and it’s really perfect. It’s the finest Chardin west of Chicago.”
“I haven’t given up hope of seeing it.”
“You might as well, old boy. It’ll be well on its way by now, to Europe or South America. Picture thieves move fast, before the news of the theft catches up with them and spoils the market. They’ll sell the Chardin to a private buyer in Paris or Buenos Aires, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Why ‘they’?”
“Oh, they operate in gangs. One man can’t handle the theft and the disposal of a picture by himself. Division of labor is necessary, and specialization.”
“You sound like a specialist yourself.”
“I am, in a way.” He smiled obliquely. “Not in the way you mean. I was in museum work before the war.”
He stooped and propped the picture against the wall. I glanced at Sarah Turner. She was hunched forward in her chair, still and silent, her hands spread over her face.
“And now,” he said to me, “I suppose you’d better go. I’ve done what I can for you. And I’ll give you a tip if you like. Picture thieves don’t do murder, they’re simply not the type. So I’m afraid your precious hypothesis is based on bad information.”
“Thanks very much,” I said. “I certainly appreciate that. Also your hospitality.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He raised an ironic brow, and turned to the door. I followed him out through the deserted shop. Most of the stock seemed to be in the window. Its atmosphere was sad and broken-down, the atmosphere of an empty-hearted, unprosperous, second-hand Bohemia. Todd didn’t look around like a proprietor. He had already abandoned the place in his mind, it seemed.
He unlocked the front door. The last thing he said before he shut it behind me was:
“I wouldn’t go bothering Walter Hendryx about that story of Sarah’s. She’s not a very trustworthy reporter, and Hendryx isn’t as tolerant of intruders as I am.”
So it was true.
—
I left my car where it was and crossed to a taxi stand on the opposite corner. There was a yellow cab at the stand, with a brown-faced driver reading a comic book behind the wheel. The comic book had dead women on the cover. The driver detached his hot eyes from its interior, leaned wearily over the back of the seat and opened the door for me. “Where to?”
“A man called Walter Hendryx—know where he lives?”
“Off of Foothill Drive. I been up there before. It’s a two-fifty run, outside the city limits.” His Jersey accent didn’t quite go with his Sicilian features.
“Newark?”
“Trenton.” He showed bad teeth in a good smile. “You want to make something out of it?”
“Nope. Let’s go.”
He spoke to me over his shoulder when we were out of the heavy downtown traffic. “You got your passport?”
“What kind of a place are you taking me to?”
“They don’t like visitors. You got to have a visa to get in, and a writ of habeas corpus to get out. The old man’s scared of burglars or something.”
“Why?”
“He’s got about ten million reasons, the way I hear it. Ten million bucks.” He smacked his lips.
“Where did he get it?”
“You tell me. I’ll drop everything and take off for the same place.”
“You and me both.”
“I heard he’s a big contractor in L.A.,” the driver said. “I drove a reporter up here a couple of months ago, from one of the L.A. papers. He was after an interview with the old guy, something about a tax case.”
“What about a tax case?”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s way over my head, friend, all that tax business. I have enough trouble with my own forms.”
“What happened to the reporter?”
“I drove him right back down. The old man wouldn’t see him. He likes his privacy.”
“I’m beginning to get the idea.”
“You a reporter, too, by any chance?”
“No.”
He was too polite to ask me any more questions.
We left the city limits. The mountains rose ahead, violet and unshadowed in the sun’s lengthening rays. Foothill Drive wound through a canyon, across a high-level bridge, up the side of a hill from which the sea was visible like a low blue cloud on the horizon. We turned off the road through an open gate on which a sign was posted: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
A second gate closed the road at the top of the hill. It was a double gate of wrought iron hung between a stone gatepost and a stone gatehouse. A heavy wire fence stretched out from it on both sides, foll
owing the contours of the hills as far as I could see. Hendryx’ estate was about the size of a small European country.
The driver honked his horn. A thick-waisted man in a Panama hat came out of the stone cottage. He squeezed through a narrow postern and waddled up to the cab. “Well?”
“I came to see Mr. Hendryx about a picture.”
He opened the cab door and looked me over, from eyes that were heavily shuttered with old scar tissue. “You ain’t the one that was here this morning.”
I had my first good idea of the day. “You mean the tall fellow with the sideburns?”
“Yeah.”
“I just came from him.”
He rubbed his heavy chin with his knuckles, making a rasping noise. The knuckles were jammed.
“I guess it’s all right,” he said finally. “Give me your name and I’ll phone it down to the house. You can drive down.”
He opened the gate and let us through into a shallow valley. Below, in a maze of shrubbery, a long, low house was flanked by tennis courts and stables. Sunk in the terraced lawn behind the house was an oval pool like a wide green eye staring at the sky. A short man in bathing trunks was sitting in a Thinker pose on the diving board at one end.
He and the pool dropped out of sight as the cab slid down the eucalyptus-lined road. It stopped under a portico at the side of the house. A uniformed maid was waiting at the door.
“This is further than that reporter got,” the driver said in an undertone. “Maybe you got connections?”
“The best people in town.”
“Mr. Archer?” the maid said. “Mr. Hendryx is having his bath. I’ll show you the way.”
I told the driver to wait, and followed her through the house. I saw when I stepped outside that the man on the diving board wasn’t short at all. He only seemed to be short because he was so wide. Muscle bulged out his neck, clustered on his shoulders and chest, encased his arms and legs. He looked like a graduate of Muscle Beach, a subman trying hard to be a superman.
There was another man floating in the water, the blotched brown swell of his stomach breaking the surface like the shellback of a Galapagos tortoise. Thinker stood up, accompanied by his parasitic muscles, and called to him:
“Mr. Hendryx!”
The man in the water rolled over lazily and paddled to the side of the pool. Even his head was tortoise-like, seamed and bald and impervious-looking. He stood up in the waist-deep water and raised his thin brown arms. The other man bent over him. He drew him out of the water and steadied him on his feet, rubbing him with a towel.
“Thank you, Devlin.”
“Yessir.”
Leaning far forward with his arms dangling like those of a withered, hairless ape, Hendryx shuffled towards me. The joints of his knees and ankles were knobbed and stiffened by what looked like arthritis. He peered up at me from his permanent crouch:
“You want to see me?” The voice that came out of his crippled body was surprisingly rich and deep. He wasn’t as old as he looked. “What is it?”
“A painting was stolen last night from the San Marcos gallery: Chardin’s ‘Apple on a Table.’ I’ve heard that you were interested in it.”
“You’ve been misinformed. Good afternoon.” His face closed like a fist.
“You haven’t heard the rest of it.”
Disregarding me, he called to the maid who was waiting at a distance: “Show this man out.”
Devlin came up beside me, strutting like a wrestler, his great curved hands conspicuous.
“The rest of it,” I said, “is that Hugh Western was murdered at the same time. I think you knew him?”
“I knew him, yes. His death is unfortunate. Regrettable. But so far as I know, it has nothing to do with the Chardin and nothing to do with me. Will you go now, or do I have to have you removed?”
He raised his cold eyes to mine. I stared him down, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.
“You take murder pretty lightly, Hendryx.”
“Mr. Hendryx to you,” Devlin said in my ear. “Come on now, bud. You heard what Mr. Hendryx said.”
“I don’t take orders from him.”
“I do,” he said with a lopsided grin like a heat-split in a melon. “I take orders from him.” His light small eyes shifted to Hendryx. “You want for me to throw him out?”
Hendryx nodded, backing away. His eyes were heating up, as if the prospect of violence excited him. Devlin’s hand took my wrist. His fingers closed around it and overlapped.
“What is this, Devlin?” I said. “I thought Hugh Western was a pal of yours.”
“Sure thing.”
“I’m trying to find out who killed him. Aren’t you interested? Or did you slap him down yourself?”
“The hell.” Devlin blinked stupidly, trying to hold two questions in his mind at the same time.
Hendryx said from a safe distance: “Don’t talk. Just give him a going-over and toss him out.”
Devlin looked at Hendryx. His grip was like a thick handcuff on my wrist. I jerked his arm up and ducked under it, breaking the hold, and chopped at his nape. The bulging back of his neck was hard as a redwood bole.
He wheeled, and reached for me again. The muscles in his arm moved like drugged serpents. He was slow. My right fist found his chin and snapped it back on his neck. He recovered, and swung at me. I stepped inside of the roundhouse and hammered his ridged stomach, twice, four times. It was like knocking my fists against the side of a corrugated iron building. His great arms closed on me. I slipped down and away.
When he came after me, I shifted my attack to his head, jabbing with the left until he was off balance on his heels. Then I pivoted and threw a long right hook which changed to an uppercut. An electric shock surged up my arm. Devlin lay down on the green tiles, chilled like a side of beef.
I looked across him at Hendryx. There was no fear in his eyes, only calculation. He backed into a canvas chair and sat down clumsily.
“You’re fairly tough, it seems. Perhaps you used to be a fighter? I’ve owned a few fighters in my time. You might have a future at it, if you were younger.”
“It’s a sucker’s game. So is larceny.”
“Larceny-farceny,” he said surprisingly. “What did you say you do?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Private, eh?” His mouth curved in a lipless tortoise grin. “You interest me, Mr. Archer. I could find a use for you—a place in my organization.”
“What kind of an organization?”
“I’m a builder, a mass-producer of houses. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I make enemies: cranks and bleeding hearts and psychopathic veterans who think the world owes them something. Devlin here isn’t quite the man I thought he was. But you—”
“Forget it. I’m pretty choosy about the people I work for.”
“An idealist, eh? A clean-cut young American idealist.” The smile was still on his mouth; it was saturnine. “Well, Mr. Idealist, you’re wasting your time. I know nothing about this picture or anything connected with it. You’re also wasting my time.”
“It seems to be expendable. I think you’re lying, incidentally.”
Hendryx didn’t answer me directly. He called to the maid: “Telephone the gate. Tell Shaw we’re having a little trouble with a guest. Then you can come back and look after this.” He jerked a thumb at Muscle-Boy, who was showing signs of life.
I said to the maid: “Don’t bother telephoning. I wouldn’t stick around here if I was paid to.”
She shrugged and looked at Hendryx. He nodded. I followed her out.
“You didn’t stay long,” the cab driver said.
“No. Do you know where Admiral Turner lives?”
“Curiously enough, I do. I should charge extra for the directory service.”
I didn’t encourage him to continue the conversation. “Take me there.”
—
He let me out in a street of big old houses set far back from the sidewalk behind sa
ndstone walls and high eugenia hedges. I paid him off and climbed the sloping walk to the Turner house. It was a weathered frame building, gabled and turreted in the style of the nineties. A gray-haired housekeeper who had survived from the same period answered my knock.
“The Admiral’s in the garden,” she said. “Will you come out?”
The garden was massed with many-colored begonias, and surrounded by a vine-covered wall. The Admiral, in stained and faded suntans, was chopping weeds in a flowerbed with furious concentration. When he saw me he leaned on his hoe and wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand.
“You should come in out of the sun,” the housekeeper said in a nagging way. “A man of your age—”
“Nonsense! Go away, Mrs. Harris.” She went. “What can I do for you, Mr.—?”
“Archer. I guess you’ve heard that we found Hugh Western’s body.”
“Sarah came home and told me half an hour ago. It’s a foul thing, and completely mystifying. He was to have married—”
His voice broke off. He glanced towards the stone cottage, at the rear of the garden. Alice Turner was there at an open window. She wasn’t looking in our direction. She had a tiny paintbrush in her hand, and she was working at an easel.
“It’s not as mystifying as it was. I’m starting to put the pieces together, Admiral.”
He turned back to me quickly. His eyes became hard and empty again, like gun muzzles.
“Just who are you? What’s your interest in this case?”
“I’m a friend of Hugh Western’s, from Los Angeles. I stopped off here to see him, and found him dead. I hardly think my interest is out of place.”
“No, of course not,” he grumbled. “On the other hand, I don’t believe in amateur detectives running around like chickens with their heads cut off, fouling up the authorities.”
“I’m not exactly an amateur. I used to be a cop. And any fouling up there’s been has been done by other people.”
“Are you accusing me?”
“If the shoe fits.”
He met my eyes for a time, trying to master me and the situation. But he was old and bewildered. Slowly the aggressive ego faded from his gaze. He became almost querulous.
“You’ll excuse me. I don’t know what it’s all about. I’ve been rather upset by everything that’s happened.”
The Archer Files Page 13