Ross Macdonald - The Blue Hammer

"Maybe I will at that."

He was watching her face. She looked at him in surprise and sudden fear.

Biemeyer stood up slowly, as if he was lifting a great weight on his shoulders. "Will you drive me down there, Archer? I'm feeling a bit shaky."

I said I would. Biemeyer started out of the room ahead of me. He turned at the open door and faced his wife.

"There's something you need to know, Ruth. William is my son, too. My illegitimate son by Mildred. I was just a kid in my teens when he was born."

Desolation crept over her face. "Why didn't you tell me before? It's too late now."

She looked at her husband as if she was seeing him for the last time. He took me out through the empty echoing spaces of the house. He walked uncertainly, staggering a little. I helped him into my car and started down the hill.

"It was an accident," he said, "just one of those accidents that happen to people. I met Mildred after a high-school football game. Old Felix Chantry threw a party in his mountain house. I was invited because my mother was his cousin. You know, a poor relation."

He sat for a while with his head down, then spoke in a stronger voice. "I scored three touchdowns that day, four if you count Mildred. I was seventeen when William was conceived, eighteen when he was born. There wasn't much I could do for him. I had no money. I was trying to make it through college. Mildred told Felix Chantry that the child was his, and he believed her. He gave her money for the boy's support until she broke with him and went to Simon Lashman.

"She did what she could for me, too. She helped me get a football scholarship and when I graduated she saw that Felix gave me a job at the smelter. She helped me up the ladder. I owe her a great deal."

But there was no warmth of gratitude in his voice. Perhaps he sensed that his life had been mislaid when he was young, and even in his age was still loose in his grasp. He peered out at the city we were driving through as though its shadowed streets were alien.

I felt the strangeness, too. The halls of the courthouse were like catacombs. After an elaborate proceeding that reminded me of the initiation rite into a tribe of aborigines, the D.A.'s men ushered us into the presence of the man I had taken.

He didn't look like a mass murderer, in spite of the armed guards who stood one on each side of him. He looked pale and weak and worried, as violent men so often do after the event.

"William?" I said.

He nodded once. Tears had begun to form in his eyes and run down his cheeks, slowly, like the sparse blood from stiletto wounds.

Jack Biemeyer stepped forward and touched his son's wet face.