The Blue Hammer

by Ross Macdonald

  Behind the rooftops to the west, the sun had died and suffused the sky with red. Now even that was fading, and the first gray chill of night was coming on.

  A yellow cab pulled up behind my car. Betty Siddon got out. She said as she paid the driver, "Do you mind waiting for a minute? I want to be sure my car is where I think it is."

  The driver said he would wait if she didn't take too long. Without noticing me, or looking in my direction, she started to wade through the weeds toward the back of the house. She seemed a little unsteady on her feet. So far as I knew, she hadn't slept since she had slept with me. The memory hit me like an arrow that had been in the air since then.

  I followed her around to the back of the house. She was bent over at the door of her car, trying to unlock it. The Johnson woman was watching her from the kitchen window.

  Betty stood up and leaned on the car door. She greeted me without animation: "Hello, Lew."

  "How are you, Betty?"

  "Tired. I've been writing all day, to no avail. The publisher wanted to cut my story down to nothing, for legal reasons. So I walked out."

  "Where are you going now?"

  "I'm on a mission," she said with faint irony. "But I can't seem to get this car door open."

  I took the keys from her hand and opened the door. "You were using the wrong key."

  Being able to correct her on this point made me happy, for some reason.

  It made Betty more tired. Her face was pale and heavy-eyed, half dissolved in twilight.

  "What kind of a mission?" I asked her.

  "Sorry, it's top secret, Lew."

  The Johnson woman opened the back door and stepped outside. Her voice rose like a stormy wind: "You two get out of here. You've got no right to harass me. I'm an innocent woman who took up with the wrong man. I should have left him years ago and I would have, too, if it hadn't been for the boy. I've lived with a crazy drunk for twenty-five years. If you think it's easy, try it sometime."

  Betty cut her off. "Shut up. You knew I was in your attic last night. You talked me into going up there yourself. You let me stay there all night with him, and you didn't lift a finger to help me. So shut up."

  Mrs. Johnson's face began to twist and work like some amorphous sea creature trying to dodge an enemy, perhaps evade reality itself. She turned and went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind her carefully.

  Betty yawned profoundly, her eyes streaming.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. "Are you all right?"

  "I will be in a minute." She yawned again, and waited, and yawned again. "It did me good to tell that woman off. She's one of those wives who can watch a man commit murder and feel nothing. Nothing but her own moral superiority. Her whole life's been devoted to covering up. Her motto is save the surface and you save all. But nothing got saved. The whole thing went to rot, and people got killed while she stood by and let it happen. I almost got killed myself."

  "By Chantry?"

  She nodded. "That, woman doesn't have the nerve to act out her own fantasies. She stands to one side and lets the man do it for her, so she can have her dim little sadistic orgasms."

  "You really hate her, don't you?"

  "Yes. I do. Because I'm a woman, too."

  "But you don't hate Chantry, after what he did to you?"

  She shook her head, and her short hair blurred in the twilight. "The point is that he didn't do it. He was thinking about killing me. He even talked about it. But then he changed his mind. He painted my picture instead. I'm grateful to him-for not killing me, and for painting my picture."

  "So am I."

  I tried to put both arms around her. But she wasn't ready for that.

  "Do you know why he took pity on me? Naturally you don't. Remember the time I told you about, when my father took me to visit Chantry? When I was just a little girl?"

  "I remember."

  "Well, he remembered, too. I didn't have to remind him. He actually remembered me from the time I was a child. He said my eyes hadn't changed since then."

  "I'm afraid he has."

  "Has he not. Don't worry, Lew, I'm not getting sentimental about Chantry. I'm simply glad to be alive. Very glad."

  I said that I was glad she was alive, too.

  "There's only one thing I'm sorry about," she added. "All through this thing, I've kept hoping that somehow it would turn out that he wasn't Chantry. You know? That it had all been a horrible mistake. But it wasn't. The man who painted those pictures is a murderer."

  "I know."

  XLII

  Betty's cabdriver appeared at the corner of the house, looking unhappy. "You've kept me waiting a long time, Miss, I'm going to have to charge you."

  Betty paid him off. But when she got into her own car it wouldn't start. I tried it. The engine didn't turn over for me either.

  I lifted the hood. The battery was gone.

  "What am I going to do now? I have to go on an errand."

  "I'll be glad to drive you."

  "But I have to go by myself. I promised I would."

  "Who did you promise?"

  "I can't tell you. I'm sorry."

  She seemed to be drawing away from me. I stepped closer and looked at her face. It was scarcely more than a pale oval now, dark-eyed, dark-mouthed. Night was flowing between the high old houses like a turbid river. I was afraid she would be swept away, this time beyond my reach.

  She touched my arm. "Will you lend me your car, Lew?"

  "For how long?"

  "Overnight."

  "For what purpose?"

  "You don't have to cross-question me. Just give me a yes or no."

  "All right. The answer is no."

  "Please. This is important to me."

  "The answer is still no. I'm not going through another night like last night, wondering what's happened to you."

  "All right. I'll find someone who is willing to help me."

  She started to walk toward the street, stumbling a little among the weeds. I was shaken by the idea that I might lose her and went after her.

  She turned at the sidewalk. "Are you going to lend me your car?"

  "No. I'm not letting you out of my sight. If you rent a car or borrow one, I'll follow you."

  "You can't bear to see me get ahead of you, is that it?"

  "No. You were way ahead of me last night. You put yourself in an exposed position. I don't want that to happen again. There's such a thing as having too much nerve." I took a deep breath. "Have you had any rest today?"

  She answered evasively, "I forget."

  "That means you haven't. You can't take a long night drive without any sleep. God knows what you might run into at the far end."

  "God and Archer," she said bitterly, "they know everything. Don't you and God ever make a mistake?"

  "God did. He left off Eve's testicles."

  Betty let out a cry of pure sharp female rage, which somehow diminuendoed into mirth. She finally settled for both the car and me, on condition that she be allowed to do at least half the driving. I opted for the first shift.

  "Where are we going?" I said as I started the engine.

  "Long Beach. I assume you know where that is."

  "I ought to. I was born there. What's in Long Beach?"

  "I promised not to tell anyone."

  "Promised who?" I said. "Mrs. Chantry?"

  "Since you know everything," Betty said clearly and carefully, "it would seem superfluous to answer any of your questions."

  "So it's Francine Chantry. What is she doing in Long Beach?"

  "Apparently she had a car accident."

  "Is she in the hospital?"

  "No. She's at a place called the Gilded Galleon."

  "That's a waterfront bar. What's she doing there?"

  "I think she's drinking. I've never known her to drink much, but she seems to be breaking down."

  "Why did she call you?"

  "She said she needed my advice and help. We're not really close but I suppose I'm as cl
ose to her as anyone is. She wants my advice in a public-relations capacity, she said. Which probably means that she wants me to help her out of the mess she's got herself into by running away."

  "Did she say why she did that?"

  "She simply panicked."

  I thought as I turned onto the freeway that Francine Chantry had some reason to panic. She had guilty knowledge of the death of Gerard Johnson, and possibly of the death of William Mead.

  I drove hard. Betty slept against my shoulder. The combination of the speeding car and the sleeping woman made me feel almost young, as if my life might have a new beginning after all.

  In spite of the early-evening traffic, we were in Long Beach in two hours. It was my home territory, as I had said, and the lights along the waterfront shone with remembered promise, even if all it had led to was the present.

  I remembered the Galleon from the days when my marriage had been breaking up and I was looking for ways to pass the long nights. The place had changed surprisingly little since then, much less than I had. It was what was known as a family tavern, which meant that it accommodated drunks of all ages and sexes. I stood just inside the door, washed by waves of human sound, while Betty made her way around the horseshoe-shaped bar. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, including the barmaids. I could understand why the loud factitious family atmosphere might appeal to a woman as lonely as Francine Chantry probably was.

  I saw her at the far end of the bar, sitting with her silver head drooping over an empty glass. She seemed to be slow in recognizing Betty. Then she threw her arms around her, and Betty responded. Though I felt some sympathy for Mrs. Chantry, and some pleasure in Betty's warmth, I didn't like to see the two women embracing. Betty was young and clean. Francine Chantry had been living for decades deep in the knowledge of murder.

  It was beginning to show in her face and body, reaching up for her from the earth like gravity. She stumbled before she got to me, and had to be supported by the younger woman. She had a cut on her forehead. Her jaw was slack and grim, her eyes dull. But she held on to her bag the way a plunging fullback holds the ball.

  "Where's your car, Mrs. Chantry?"

  She roused herself from her apathy. "The garageman said it was totaled. I think that means that it isn't worth repairing. I doubt that I am, either."

  "Were you in an accident?"

  "I don't really know what happened. I was trying to get off the freeway, and things went out of control all of a sudden. That seems to be the story of my life." Her laughter was like a dry compulsive cough.

  "I'm interested in the story of your life."

  "I know you are." She turned to Betty. "Why did you have to bring _him_ along? I thought we could have a constructive talk about the future. I thought you and I were good friends."

  "I hope we are," Betty said. "But I didn't think I could handle this by myself."

  "Handle what? I'm no problem."

  But there was a note of terror in Francine Chantry's voice. She sounded like a woman who had stepped off the edge of the world and discovered too late that she could never step back. When we got into my car and entered the freeway, the sense of moving through empty space stayed with me. We seemed to be flying above the rooftops of the tract houses that lined the freeway on both sides.

  Betty was driving too fast, but I was content to have her do her stint. She had had some recent sleep; and I wanted a chance to talk to Francine Chantry.

  "Speaking of your future," I said, "your husband may be hard to convict."

  "My husband?" She sounded confused.

  "Richard Chantry alias Gerard or Jerry Johnson. It may not be too easy to pin these murders on him. I gather he isn't talking. And so much of it happened so long ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the prosecutor was willing to make a deal with you. I doubt that he'll want to bring any major charges. Of course that depends on him, and on what you have to offer."

  She let out another burst of dry laughter. "My dead body? Would he accept my dead body?"

  "He'll want you alive and talking. You know more about this case than anyone."

  She was silent for a minute. "If I do, it's not by choice."

  "So you were telling me the other night. But you really made your choices long ago. When you dropped William Mead and took up with his half brother Chantry. When you left Arizona with Chantry, even though you must have known that he was a major suspect in the murder of William Mead. Seven years later, you made a final choice, when you decided to cover up the murder of Gerard Johnson."

  "Who?"

  "Gerard Johnson. The man in the brown suit. It turns out he was a friend of William Mead's. He'd just got out of five years in a veterans' hospital when he came to Santa Teresa to see your husband. I think he had evidence involving Chantry in William Mead's death."

  "How?"

  "Perhaps William Mead had been threatened by Chantry and they had quarreled over you, or over Mead's pictures, which Chantry stole. And Mead told his army buddy Gerard about it some time before Chantry killed him. When Gerard Johnson turned up in Santa Teresa with William's widow and little boy, it marked the end of Chantry's freedom. He killed Gerard in an effort to stay free, but it only made him more completely unfree. It was a final choice for Chantry as well as you."

  "I had no part in the choice," she said.

  "You went along with it. You let a man be killed in your house and buried there, and you kept quiet. It was a bad choice for you and your husband. He's been living out its consequences. The murder of Gerard Johnson put him in the hands of William Mead's widow, the woman who calls herself Mrs. Johnson. I don't know why she wanted him. There may have been something between them in the past. Or perhaps the Johnson woman was simply interested in driving a hard primitive bargain with Chantry. He'd killed her husband, now he had to take her husband's place. I don't know why Chantry accepted the bargain, do you?"

  Francine Chantry was slow in answering. Finally she said, "I don't know anything about it. I've had no idea that Richard was living in town. I didn't even know if he was alive. I didn't hear from him once in twenty-five years."

  "Have you seen him recently?"

  "No. I have no desire to see him."

  "You're going to have to. They'll be wanting you to identify him. Not that there's much doubt about who he is. He's deteriorated physically and mentally. I think he must have had an emotional breakdown after he murdered Johnson, perhaps before. But he can still paint. His paintings may not be as good as they were, but nobody else could have painted them."

  She said with some irony, "Apparently you're an art critic as well as a detective."

  "Hardly. But I do have one of his recent paintings in the trunk of my car. And I'm not the only one who thinks that it's a Chantry."

  "Are you talking about the painting of Mildred Mead?"

  "Yes. I found it this morning in Johnson's attic, where it originated. Where the whole current case originated. That picture seems to be the central thing in the case. Certainly it brought me into it. And it was the painting of it that got Chantry into his present trouble and led him to commit these new murders."

  "I don't quite follow that," Francine Chantry said. But she sounded interested, as if this talk of her husband's work had acted on her like a stimulant.

  "It's a fairly complex chain of events," I said. "The woman he's been living with on Olive Street-call her Mrs. Johnson-sold the painting to the artist-dealer Jacob Whitmore. That blew Chantry's cover. Whitmore sold the painting to Paul Grimes, and that blew it wider.

  "Grimes recognized it as Chantry's work and evidently used the knowledge to blackmail Mrs. Johnson into stealing drugs for him. And he probably demanded more new pictures from Chantry. Grimes had sold the picture of Mildred Mead to Ruth Biemeyer, who had her own reasons for being interested in Mildred. As you probably know, Mildred was Jack Biemeyer's mistress."

  "Everybody in Arizona knew it," Francine Chantry said. "What wasn't so generally known was that Ruth Biemeyer had a crush on Richard when t
hey were both young. I think that's the essential reason why she talked Jack into moving to Santa Teresa."

  "That's what he says, anyway. It made for a tight family situation which was made still tighter when Mildred Mead came to town. I think Chantry may have seen Mildred some time in the last few months and been moved to paint that memory picture of her."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "Haven't you seen him recently?"

  "No. Certainly not." She didn't look at me. She was peering through the windshield into the broken darkness. "I haven't seen Richard, or heard from him, in twenty-five years. I had no idea that he was living in town."

  "Not even when you got a phone call from the woman he was living with?"

  "She didn't mention him. She said something about the-the burial in the greenhouse, and she let me know that she needed money. She said if I would help her out she'd go on keeping the whole thing quiet. Otherwise she'd tell the world the real reason for my husband's disappearance."

  "Did you give her money?"

  "No. I wish now I had. And I very much wish he had never painted that memory portrait of Mildred. You'd almost think he was trying to be found out."

  "Perhaps he was, unconsciously," I said. "Certainly Fred was doing his best to find him out. No doubt Fred borrowed the painting from the Biemeyers partly for professional reasons. He wanted to establish whether it really could be a Chantry. But he had personal reasons, too. I think he may have connected it with pictures he had seen in the past in the Johnson house on Olive Street. But he failed to make the final conscious connection between his foster father, Johnson, and the painter Chantry. Before he could do that, Johnson-Chantry took the painting from Fred's bedroom. And the Biemeyers hired me to get it back for them."

  Betty tapped the horn. We were moving down the long inland slope behind Camarillo. There were no cars immediately ahead of us. I looked at her and she looked back. She raised her right hand from the wheel and touched her mouth. I got the message. I had talked more than enough, and I subsided.