Росс Макдональд: The Blue Hammer

Purvis climbed out of his wagon and rattled the rusty screen door of the house with his fist. An old man answered the knock and peered out at us. The pouched and corded neck thrust up from his collarless shirt seemed to throb with suspicion.

“What is it?”

“My name is Purvis. I’m a deputy coroner.”

“Nobody died here. Not since my wife died, anyway.”

“What about Mr. William Mead? Was he a neighbor of yours?”

“That’s right, he was for a little while. He died, too. That was back during the war. Mead got himself murdered in Arizona. I heard that from his wife. I don’t take the local paper, I never have. All they ever print in it is bad news.” He squinted at us through the screen as if we were carriers of bad news, too. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“You’ve been very helpful,” Purvis said. “Do you happen to know what happened to Mead’s wife?”

“She didn’t go far. She eventually remarried and moved to a house over here on Olive Street. But her luck didn’t change.”

“How do you mean?” Purvis said.

“On her second go-round, she married a drunk. Don’t quote me. And she’s been working ever since to support his drinking habit.”

“Where does she work?”

“In the hospital. She’s a nurse.”

“Is her husband’s name Johnson?”

“That’s right. If you know, why ask?”

We drove between the dense ranks of the trees that had stood on Olive Street for a century or more. As Purvis and I moved up the walk into the afternoon shadow of the house, I felt the weight of the past like an extra atmosphere constricting my breathing.

The woman who called herself Mrs. Johnson answered the door immediately, as if she had been expecting us. I could feel her somber gaze like a tangible pressure on my face.

“What do you want?”

“May we come in? This is Deputy Coroner Purvis.”

“I know.” She said to Purvis, “I’ve seen you at the hospital. I don’t know what you want to come in for. There’s nobody home but me, and everything’s happened that’s going to happen.” It sounded less like a statement of fact than a dubious hope.

I said, “We want to talk about some of the things that happened in the past. One of them is the death of William Mead.”

She answered without blinking: “I never heard of him.”

“Let me refresh your recollection,” Purvis said quietly and formally. “According to my information, William Mead was your husband. When he was murdered in Arizona in 1943, his body was shipped back here for burial. Is my information incorrect?”

Her black gaze didn’t waver. “I guess I kind of forgot all that. I always had a pretty good forgettery. And these awful things that I’ve been living through sort of wiped out everything, you know?”

“May we come in and sit down with you,” Purvis said, “and talk about it?”

“I guess so.”

She moved to one side and let us enter the narrow hallway. There was a large worn canvas suitcase standing at the foot of the stairs. I lifted it. It was heavy.

“Leave that alone,” she said.

I set it down again. “Are you planning to leave town?”

“What if I am? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m still a free agent. I can go where I like, and I might as well. There’s nobody left here but me. My husband’s gone, and Fred’s moving out.”

“Where is Fred going?”

“He won’t even tell me. Off with that girl of his, probably. After all the work I’ve put into this house, twenty-five years of hard work, I end up all alone in it. Alone and without a nickel and owing money. Why shouldn’t I get out?”

I said, “Because you’re under suspicion. Any move you make is likely to trigger your arrest.”

“What am I under suspicion for? I didn’t kill Will Mead. It happened in Arizona. I was nursing here in Santa Teresa at the time. When they told me he was dead, it was the biggest shock of my life. I haven’t got over it yet. I’ll never get over it. And when they buried him out in the cemetery, I wanted to crawl in with him.”

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.