Ross Macdonald - The Blue Hammer

I felt a twinge of compassion for the woman but kept it under control. "Mead isn't the only one who's been killed. There are also Paul Grimes and Jacob Whitmore, men that you and your husband were doing business with. Grimes was killed here in your street. Whitmore may have been drowned in your bathtub."

She gave me a sudden shocked look. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'll be glad to explain. It may take a little time. Could we go into the living room and sit down?"

"No," she said. "I don't want to. They've been firing questions at me most of the day. Mr. Lackner advised me not to do any more talking."

Purvis spoke up in a dubious voice: "I'd better give her her rights, don't you think, Archer?"

His nervousness encouraged her, and she turned on him. "I know my rights. I don't have to talk to you or anybody else. Speaking of rights, you have no right to force your way into my house like this."

"No force was employed, ma'am. You invited us in."

"I certainly did not. You invited yourself. You bullied your way in."

Purvis turned to me. He had gone pale with the bureaucratic terror of making an attributable mistake.

"We better leave it for now, Archer. Questioning witnesses isn't my field anyway. For all I know, the D.A. will want to grant her immunity. I wouldn't want to ruin the case by making a mistake at this late date."

"What case?" she said with renewed vigor. "There is no case. You have no right to come here hustling me and harrying me. Just because I'm a poor woman without any friends and a mentally ill husband who doesn't even know who he is, he's so far gone."

"Who is he?" I said.

She gave me a startled look, and fell silent.

I said, "Incidentally, why do you call yourself Mrs. Johnson? Were you ever married to Gerard Johnson? Or did Chantry simply change his name to Johnson after he murdered the real Gerard?"

"I'm not talking," she repeated. "You two get out of here now."

Purvis was already out on the porch, dissociating himself from my unorthodox questioning. I followed him out and we parted on the sidewalk.

I sat in my car in the failing afternoon and tried to straighten out the case in my mind. It had started with the trouble between two brothers, Richard Chantry and his illegitimate half brother, William Mead. It appeared that Richard had stolen William's work and William's girl and eventually murdered him, leaving his body in the Arizona desert.

Richard came to Santa Teresa with the girl and, despite the fact that murder was an extraditable offense, was never brought back to Arizona for questioning. He prospered in California and, as if his talent had fed on William's death, developed in just seven years into an important painter. Then his world collapsed. An army friend of William's, Gerard Johnson, got out of the veterans' hospital and came to visit Richard.

Gerard made two visits to Richard, the second accompanied by William's widow and son. That was Gerard's last visit to anyone. Richard killed him and buried him in his own greenhouse. Then, as if in penance, Richard stepped down from his own place in the world and took Gerald's name and William's place. He had come to this house on Olive Street and lived as a drunken recluse for twenty-five years.

In the first years, before he put on the disguises of age and alcoholism, he must have lived in close confinement, like an insane relative in a nineteenth-century attic. But he hadn't been able to stay away from painting. In the end the persistence of his talent had helped to destroy him.

Fred must have become aware of his father's secret life as a painter and taken the first unconscious steps toward identifying him with the lost painter Chantry. This would explain Fred's overpowering interest in Chantry's work, culminating in his theft or borrowing of the Biemeyers' painting. When Fred brought that painting home to study it, his father took it from Fred's room and hid it in his own-the attic where he had painted it in the first place.

The missing painting was in the trunk of my car. Chantry was in jail. I should be feeling happy and successful but I wasn't. The case hung heavy on my hands and stillborn in my mind. It kept me sitting there under the olive trees as the afternoon slowly faded.

I told myself that I was waiting for the woman to come out. But I doubted that she would as long as I was parked there. Twice I saw her face at the living-room window. The first time she looked frightened. The second time she was angry, and shook her fist at me. I smiled at her reassuringly. She pulled down the frayed blind.

I sat there trying to imagine the life of the couple who had lived in the gabled house for twenty-five years. Chantry had been a moral prisoner as well as a physical one. The woman he had been living with under the name of Johnson must have known that he had killed the original Johnson. She probably knew that he had killed her legal husband, Mead, as well. Their cohabitation was more like a prison sentence than any kind of marriage.

Their secret, their multiple guilty secret, had been guarded by further crimes. Paul Grimes had been beaten to death in the street, and Jacob Whitmore probably drowned in this house, simply in order to preserve Chantry's cover. It was hard for me to sit still with such knowledge. But I felt that I had to wait.

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?"