Росс Макдональд - The Blue Hammer

A woman came into the room behind me and answered my unspoken question:

“These are known as the Creation pictures – the artist’s imaginative conception of evolution. They represent his first great creative burst. He painted them in a period of six months, incredible as it may seem.”

I turned to look at the woman. In spite of her conservative dark blue suit and her rather stilted patter, she gave an impression of rough strength. Her chastely trimmed graying hair seemed to glisten with vitality.

“Are you Mrs. Chantry?”

“Yes.” She seemed pleased to be recognized. “I really shouldn’t be here. I’m giving a party tonight. But it’s hard for me to stay away from the museum on my day.”

She led me to a farther wall on which was hung a series of figure studies of women. One of them stopped me. A young woman was sitting on a rock that was partly hidden, as she was, by a buffalo robe around her waist. Her fine breasts and shoulders were bare. Behind her and above her in the picture, the mounted head of a buffalo bull hung in space.

“He called it Europa,” Mrs. Chantry said.

I turned to her. She was smiling. I looked again at the girl in the picture.

“Is that you?”

“In a sense. I used to model for Richard.”

We looked at each other more sharply for a moment. She was about my age or a little younger, with Europa ’s body holding firm under her blue suit. I wondered what kind of compulsion, what pride in her husband or in herself, made her serve as a museum guide to his pictures.

“Had you ever seen any of his paintings before? They seemed to take you by surprise.”

“They did. They do.”

“His work has that effect on most people seeing it for the first time. Tell me, what got you interested in it?”

I told her I was a private detective employed by the Biemeyers to investigate the theft of their picture. I wanted to get her reaction.

She went pale under her makeup. “The Biemeyers are ignorant people. That picture they bought from Paul Grimes is a fake. He offered it to me long before they saw it. I wouldn’t touch it. It’s an obvious imitation of a style that Richard abandoned long ago.”

“How long ago?”

“About thirty years. It belonged to his Arizona period. Paul Grimes may have painted it himself.”

“Does Grimes have that kind of a reputation?”

I’d asked her one question too many. “I can’t discuss his reputation with you, or anyone. He was Richard’s friend and teacher in the Arizona days.”

“But not a friend of yours?”

“I prefer not to go into that. Paul was helpful to my husband when it counted. But people change over the years. Everything changes.” She looked around her, scanning her husband’s paintings as if even they had become unfamiliar, like half-remembered dreams. “I try to guard my husband’s reputation, keep the canon pure. All sorts of people try to cash in on his work.”

“Would Fred Johnson be one of them?”

The question seemed to surprise her. She shook her head, setting her hair swinging like a flexible gray bell.

“Fred is fascinated by my husband’s work. But I wouldn’t say he’s trying to cash in on it.” She was silent for a moment. “Did Ruth Biemeyer accuse him of stealing her lousy picture?”

“His name came up.”

“Well, it’s nonsense. Even if he were dishonest, which he shows no signs of being, Fred has too much taste to be taken in by a poor imitation like that.”

“I’d still like to talk to him. Do you happen to know where he lives?”

“I can find out.” She went into the front office and came out a minute later. “Fred lives with his parents at 2024 Olive Street. Be nice to him. He’s a sensitive young man, and a very great Chantry enthusiast.”

I thanked her for the information. She thanked me for my interest in her husband. She seemed to be playing a complex role, part salesperson and part guardian of a shrine, and part something else. I couldn’t help wondering if the undefinable part was an angry widowed sexuality.

The Johnson house was one of a block of three-story frame houses that appeared to date from the early years of the century. The olive trees that gave the street its name were even older. Their leaves looked like tarnished silver in the afternoon sunlight.

This part of the city was a mixed neighborhood of rooming houses and private residences, doctors’ offices and houses half converted into offices. A large modern hospital, whose fenestration made it look like a giant honeycomb, rose in the middle of the area and seemed to have absorbed most of its energy.

The Johnson house was particularly run-down. Some of its boards were loose, and it needed paint. It stood like a gray and gabled ghost of a house in a yard choked with yellow grass and brown weeds.

I rattled the rusty screen door with my fist. The house seemed to stir into slow, reluctant life. I could hear lagging footsteps coming down the inside stairs.

A heavy old man opened the door and peered out at me through the screen. He had dirty gray hair and a short growth of moth-eaten gray beard. His voice was querulous.

“What’s up?”

“I’d like to see Fred.”

“I don’t know if he’s home. I’ve been sacked out.” He leaned toward me, his face against the screen, and I could smell wine on his breath. “What do you want with Fred?”

“Just to talk to him.”

His red little eyes scanned me up and down. “What do you want to talk to him about?”

“I’d prefer to tell Fred.”

“You better tell me. My son is a busy young man. His time is worth money. Fred’s got expertise–” he rolled the word on his tongue “–and that’s worth more money.”

The old man was probably out of wine, I thought, and getting ready to put the bite on me. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came out from under the stairs. She carried herself with a certain clumsy authority, but her voice was small and girlish.

“I’ll talk to the man, Gerard. You don’t have to trouble your poor head with Fred’s comings and goings.”

She laid her open hand against the furred side of his face, peered sharply into his eyes like a diagnostician, and gave him a little slap of dismissal. He didn’t argue with her but made his way back up the stairs.

“I’m Mrs. Johnson,” she said to me. “Fred’s mother.”

She had gray-streaked black hair drawn back from a face whose history and meaning were obscured, like her husband’s face, by an inert layer of flesh. Her heavy body was strictly girdled, though, and her white uniform was clean.

“Is Fred here?”

“I don’t believe so.” She looked past me into the street. “I don’t see the car.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“It’s hard to say. Fred is a student at the university.” She reported the fact as if it were the one great pride of her life. “They keep shifting his class hours around, and he works part-time besides at the art museum. They really depend on him there. Was it anything I could help you with?”

“It may be. Is it all right if I come in?”

“I’ll come out, ” she said brightly. “The house isn’t fit to be seen on the inside. Since I went back to full-time nursing, I haven’t had the time to keep it up.”

She removed a heavy key from the inside keyhole and used it to lock the door as she came out. It made me wonder if she kept her husband under lock and key when he had been drinking.

She led me off the porch and looked up at the peeling façade of the house. “It isn’t fit to be seen on the outside, either. But I can’t help that. The house belongs to the clinic – all these houses do – and they’re planning to tear them down next year. This whole side of the street is going to be a parking lot.” She sighed. “I don’t know where we’re going to go from here, with rents going up the way they are, and my husband no better than an invalid.”