Росс Макдональд - The Blue Hammer

“Who painted the other picture?”

“I don’t know. Jake didn’t discuss his business with me. I think he took the picture on consignment from one of his friends on the beach.”

“Can you describe the picture?”

“It was a picture of a woman – maybe a portrait, maybe imaginary. She was a beautiful woman, with hair the same color as mine.” She touched her own bleached hair; the action seemed to arouse her fear or suspicion. “Why is everybody so interested in that picture? Was it worth a lot?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it was. Jake wouldn’t tell me what he got for it, but I know we’ve been living on the money for the last couple of months. The money ran out yesterday. And so,” she added in a toneless voice, “did Jake.”

She turned away and spread out the unframed paintings on the table. Most of them were unfinished-looking small seascapes like the one in my car that I’d shown to Arthur Planter. The drowned man had clearly been obsessed by the sea, and I couldn’t help wondering if his drowning had been entirely accidental.

I said, “Were you suggesting that Jake drowned himself?”

“No, I was not.” She changed the subject abruptly: “I’ll give you all five of them for forty dollars. The canvases alone are worth that much. You know that if you’re a painter!”

“I’m not a painter.”

“I sometimes wonder if Jake was. He painted for over thirty years and ended up with nothing to show for it but this.” The gesture of her hand took in the paintings on the table, the house and its history, Jake’s death. “Nothing but this and me.”

She smiled, or grimaced with half of her face. Her eyes remained cold as a sea bird’s, peering down into the roiled and cloudy past.

She caught me watching her and recoiled from the look on my face. “I’m not as bad as you think I am,” she said. “If you want to know why I’m selling these things, I want to buy him a coffin. I don’t want the county to bury him in one of those pine boxes. And I don’t want to leave him lying in the basement of the county hospital.”

“Okay, I’ll take the five pictures.”

I handed her two twenties, wondering if I’d ever get the money back from Biemeyer.

She took it with some distaste and held it. “That wasn’t a sales pitch. You don’t have to buy them just because you know why I need the money.”

“I need the pictures.”

“What for? Are you a dealer?”

“Not exactly.”

“That means you are. I knew you weren’t a painter.”

“How did you know?”

“I’ve lived with a painter for the last ten years.” She moved the position of her hips, resting her weight against the corner of the table. “You don’t look like a painter or talk like one. You don’t have a painter’s eyes. You don’t smell like a painter.”

“What do I smell like?”

“A cop, maybe. I thought when Paul Grimes bought those two pictures from Jake that maybe there was something funny about them. Is there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why are you buying these?”

“Because Paul Grimes bought the others.”

“You mean if he put out money for them, they must be worth something?”

“I’d certainly like to know why he wanted them.”

“So would I,” she said. “Why do you want the pictures?”

“Because Paul Grimes wanted them.”

“You mean you do everything he does?”

“I hope not everything.”

She gave me her cold half-smile and nodded. “Yeah, I heard he’s slightly crooked on occasion. I shouldn’t say that, though. I’ve got nothing against him. And his daughter’s kind of a friend of mine.”

“Paola? Is she his daughter?”

“Yeah. You know her?”

“We’ve met. How do you happen to know her?”

“I met her at a party in the barrio. She told me her mother was part Spanish and part Indian. Paola’s a beautiful woman, don’t you think? I love those Spanish types.”

She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her palms together as if she were warming herself at Paola’s heat.

I drove back to Santa Teresa and paid a visit to the morgue in the basement of the hospital. A young deputy coroner named Henry Purvis, whom I knew, told me that Jacob Whitmore had drowned while swimming. He pulled out a drawer and showed me the blue body with its massive hairy head and shrunken sex. I walked out of the cold room shivering.

As if he were feeling lonely, the deputy coroner, Purvis, followed me into the anteroom, letting the heavy metal door swing shut behind him. He was almost as hairy as the dead man, and almost young enough to be his son.

I said, “Is there any official doubt that Whitmore died by accident?”

“I don’t think so. He was getting too old for the kind of surf they have at Sycamore Point. The coroner put it down as an accident. He hasn’t even ordered an autopsy.”

“I think he should, Henry.”

“Do you have a reason?”

“Whitmore and Grimes had a business connection. It’s probably not a coincidence that they’re in here together. Of course there’ll be an autopsy on Grimes, won’t there?”

Purvis nodded. “It’s set for first thing in the morning. But I did a preliminary examination, and I can tell them what the probable results will be. He was beaten to death with a heavy weapon, probably a tire iron.”

“The weapon hasn’t been found?”

“Not that I know of. You should ask the police. The weapon is their department.” He looked me over carefully. “Did you know Grimes?”

“Not really. I knew he was an art dealer in town.”

“Was he an addict at one time?” Purvis said.

“I didn’t know him that well. What kind of addiction do you have in mind?”

“Heroin, probably. He’s got old needle marks on his arms and thighs. I asked the woman about them, but she wouldn’t talk. The way she blew her top, she may be an addict herself. There’s a lot of it around, even right in the hospital here.”

“What woman are we talking about?”

“Dark woman – Spanish type. When I showed her the body, she did everything but climb the wall. I put her in the chapel and tried to call a priest for her but I couldn’t raise one, not at this time of night. I called the police, and they want to talk to her.”

I asked him where the chapel was. It was a narrow little room on the first floor, with a single small stained-glass window denoting its function. It was furnished with a lectern and eight or ten padded chairs. Paola was sitting on the floor head down, hugging her knees, her black hair almost covering her face. She was hiccuping. When I approached her, she raised a bent arm over her head as if I might be planning to murder her.

“Get away from me.”

“I won’t hurt you, Paola.”

She tossed back her mane of hair and stared at me narrow-eyed, without recognition. She had an aura of fierce forlorn sexuality. “You’re no priest.”

“You can say that again.”

I sat near her on the carpeted floor, which repeated the design of the stained-glass window. There were times when I almost wished I was a priest. I was growing weary of other people’s pain and wondered if a black suit and a white collar might serve as armor against it. I’d never know. My grandmother in Contra Costa County had marked me for the priesthood, but I had slipped away under the fence.

Looking into Paola’s opaque black eyes, I thought that the grief you shared with women was most always partly desire. At least sometimes you could take them to bed, I thought, and exchange a temporary kindness, which priests were denied. But not Paola. Both she and the woman at Sycamore Point belonged to dead men tonight. Chapel thoughts.