Росс Макдональд - The Blue Hammer

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“About Jerry, you mean? Yeah, I’m sorry, too. He used to be a fine strong man. But he had a nervous breakdown a while ago – it all goes back to the war – and he’s never been the same since. And of course he has a drinking problem, too. So many of them do,” she added meditatively.

I liked the woman’s candor, even though it sounded slightly carnivorous. I wondered idly how it was that nurses so often ended up with invalid husbands.

“So what’s your problem?” she said in a different tone.

“No problem. I’d simply like to talk to Fred.”

“What about?”

“A picture.”

“That’s his field, all right. Fred can tell you anything you want to know about pictures.” But she dropped the subject suddenly, as though it frightened her, and said in still a third voice, hesitant and low, “Is Fred in some kind of trouble?”

“I hope not, Mrs. Johnson.”

“So do I. Fred is a good boy. He always has been. I ought to know, I’m his mother.” She gave me a long dubious look. “Are you a policeman?”

I had been when I was younger, and apparently it still showed to a cop-sensitive eye. But I had my story ready: “I’m a journalist. I’m thinking of doing a magazine piece on the artist Richard Chantry.”

Her face and body tightened as if in response to a threat. “I see.”

“I understand your son is an expert on Chantry.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Fred is interested in a lot of different artists. He’s going to make that his career.”

“As a dealer?”

“That’s what he’d like to be. But it takes capital. And we don’t even own the house we live in.”

She looked up at the tall gray house as if it were the source of all her trouble. From a window high up under the roof, her husband was watching us like a prisoner in a tower. She made a pushing gesture with her open hand, as if she were putting the shot. Johnson receded into the dimness.

“I’m haunted by the thought,” she said, “that he’ll tumble out of one of those windows. The poor man never got over his war injuries. Sometimes, when it takes him really bad, he falls right down on the floor. I keep wondering if I ought to put him back in the veterans’ hospital. But I don’t have the heart to. He’s so much happier here with us. Fred and I would really miss him. And Fred is the kind of boy who needs a father.”

Her words were full of feeling, but the voice in which she said them was emotionless. Her eyes were peering coldly into mine, assessing my reaction. I guessed that she was afraid for her son, trying in a hurry to put together a protective family nest.

“Where can I find Fred, do you know?”

“I don’t know. He may be out on campus, or he could be down at the art museum, or anyplace in town. He’s a very busy young man, and he keeps moving. He’ll be taking his degree next spring, if all goes well. And it will.”

She nodded emphatically several times. But there seemed to be a stubborn hopelessness in the gesture, like a woman knocking her head against a wall.

As if in response, an old blue Ford sedan came down the street past the hospital. It slowed as it approached us, turning in toward the curb behind my car. The young man behind the wheel had long hair and a mustache, both reddish blond.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Johnson shake her head, once, in such a short arc that she hardly seemed to have moved. The young man’s eyes flickered. Without having brought it to a full stop, he turned the Ford back in to the road, barely missing my left rear fender. The car accelerated sluggishly, leaving a trail of oil smoke on the air.

“Is that Fred, Mrs. Johnson?”

She answered after a brief hesitation: “That’s Fred. I wonder where he thinks he’s going.”

“You signaled him not to stop.”

“I did? You must be seeing things.”

I left her standing there and followed the blue Ford. It caught a yellow light at the entrance to the freeway and turned off to the right in the direction of the university. I sat behind a long red light and watched the spoor of oil smoke dissipating, mixing with the general smog that overlay this part of the city.

When the light changed, I drove on out to the campus, where Fred’s friend Doris Biemeyer lived.

The university had been built on an elevated spur of land that jutted into the sea and was narrowed at its base by a tidal slough. Almost surrounded by water and softened by blue haze, it looked from the distance like a medieval fortress town.

Close up, the buildings shed this romantic aspect. They were half-heartedly modern, cubes and oblongs and slabs that looked as if their architect had spent his life designing business buildings. The parking attendant at the entrance told me that the student village was on the north side.

I followed a winding road along the edge of the campus, looking for Fred Johnson. There weren’t many students in sight. Still the place seemed crowded and jumbled, like something thrown at a map in the hope that it would stick there.

Academia Village was even more haphazard than the campus proper. Loose dogs and loose students roamed the narrow streets in about equal numbers. The buildings ranged from hamburger stands and tiny cottages and duplexes to giant apartment buildings. The Sherbourne, where Doris Biemeyer lived, was one of the big ones. It was six stories high and occupied most of a block.

I found a parking place behind a camper painted to simulate a log cabin on wheels. No sign of the old blue Ford. I went into the Sherbourne and took an elevator to the third floor.

The building was fairly new but its interior smelled old and used. It was crowded with the odors of rapid generations, sweat and perfume and pot and spices. If there were human voices, they were drowned out by the music from several competing sources along the third-floor hallway, which sounded like the voices of the building’s own multiple personality.

I had to knock several times on the door of Apartment 304. The girl who opened the door looked like a smaller version of her mother, prettier but vaguer and less sure of herself.

“Miss Biemeyer?”

“Yes?”

Her eyes looked past me at something just beyond my left shoulder. I sidestepped and looked behind me, half expecting to be hit. But there was nobody there.

“May I come in and talk to you for a minute?”

“I’m sorry. I’m meditating.”

“What are you meditating about?”

“I don’t really know.” She giggled softly and touched the side of her head, where her light hair hung straight like raw silk. “It hasn’t come together yet. It hasn’t materialized, you know?”

She looked as though she hadn’t quite materialized, herself. She had the kind of blondness you can almost see through. She swayed gently like a curtain at a window. Then she lost her balance and fell quite hard against the doorframe.

I took hold of both her arms and pulled her upright. Her hands were cold, and she seemed slightly dazed. I wondered what she had swallowed or sipped or imbibed.

With one arm around her shoulders, I propelled her into her living room. On its far side a screen door opened on a balcony. The room was almost as bare as a coolie’s hut: a few plain chairs, a pallet on a metal frame, a card table, fiber mats. The only decoration was a large butterfly made of spangled red tissue paper on a wire skeleton. It was almost as big as she was, and it hung on a string from the central ceiling fixture and very slowly rotated.

She sat on one of the floor mats and looked up at the paper butterfly. Under the long cotton gown that seemed to be her only garment, she tried to arrange her legs and feet in the lotus position, and failed.