Росс Макдональд: The Blue Hammer

“What did she want from you?”

“Information about William Mead. He was her natural son, apparently. I told her he was buried in the Santa Teresa cemetery, and I offered to take her out to visit his grave. She didn’t seem interested in that. She got off on the subject of Richard Chantry. She claimed she had been his model at one time, and she wanted to get in to see him. I told her it simply wasn’t possible.”

“Where is Chantry being held?”

“District Attorney Lansing has him here in a special cell with round-the-clock guards. I couldn’t even get in there myself – not that I particularly want to. Apparently he’s gone completely off the rails. They have to sedate him to keep him quiet.”

“What happened to Mildred?”

“She walked out. I sort of hated to let her go. She seemed pretty upset, and she’d been drinking. But I had no reason to hold her.”

I went outside and made another circuit of the grounds and courtyards. No Mildred. I was getting nervous. Whether or not there was truth in Betty’s dream, I felt that Mildred was in some way central to the case. But I was losing her, and losing the morning.

I looked up at the four-sided clock on the courthouse tower. It was ten. There was only one person visible on the observation platform, a white-headed woman whose rather clumsy movements caught my eye. Mildred. She paused and turned and gripped the black iron fence. It was almost up to her chin. She peered over it, down into the stone-paved courtyard.

She was extraordinarily still. She looked like a woman staring down into her grave. The life of the city seemed to freeze in widening circles around her.

I was nearly a hundred yards away and a hundred feet below. If I raised an alarm, it might only trigger the action she seemed to have in mind. I walked to the nearest door and took the tower elevator up.

When I stepped out on the observation platform, she had turned to face me, her back against the iron fence. She turned again and tried to clamber over the fence into empty space. Her lame old body failed in the attempt.

I put my arms around her and held her securely. She was breathing as if she had climbed the tower hand over hand. The frozen life of the city resumed, and I began to hear its sounds again.

She struggled in my arms. “Let me go.”

“I don’t think so, Mildred. Those flagstones are a long way down and I wouldn’t want you to take a fall on them. You’re too pretty.”

“I’m the hag of the universe.” But she gave me an up-from-under look, the automatic mannerism of a woman who had once been small and beautiful and was still handsome. “Will you give me a break?”

“If I can.”

“Just take me down and turn me loose. I won’t do anything – not to myself or anybody else.”

“I can’t take a chance on that.”

I could feel the heat of her body through her clothes. Sweat gathered on her upper lip and in the blued hollows of her eyes.

“Tell me about your son William.”

She didn’t answer me. Her makeup was eroding, and her gray face peered at me through it like a death mask.

“Did you trade in your son’s dead body on that big house in Chantry Canyon? Or was it somebody else’s dead body?”

She spat in my face. Then she went into a fit of passionate weeping. Then she was still. She didn’t speak as I took her down in the elevator, or when I handed her over to the D.A.’s men and women.

I told them that she should be carefully searched and kept under observation as a determined potential suicide. It was just as well I did. District Attorney Lansing told me later that the woman who searched her found a brightly honed stiletto wrapped in a silk stocking and tucked under her girdle.

“Did they find out what she was carrying it for?”

The D.A. shook his head. “Presumably,” he said, “she intended to use it on Chantry.”

“What was her motive?”

Lansing pulled alternately at the ends of his handlebar mustaches, as if he were using them to steer his mind through the complexities of the case. “This isn’t generally known, and I’ll have to ask you to keep it to yourself. Chantry seems to have murdered Miss Mead’s son in Arizona, thirty years ago. To give credit where credit is due, I got that from Captain Mackendrick. He’s been doing some excellent spadework in this case. I think he’ll be our next chief of police.”

“Good for him. But how does the revenge theory fit in with her suicide attempt?”

“Are you certain it was a real attempt?”

“It looked real to me. Mildred wanted out, and the only thing that stopped her was that iron fence. That and the fact that I happened to see her up there.”

“Well, it’s not inconsistent with the revenge motif. She was thwarted in her attempt at revenge, so she turned her anger against herself.”

“I don’t quite follow that, Mr. D.A.”

“No? You’re probably not as familiar as some of us are with recent developments in criminal psychology.” There was an edge on his smile.

I gave him a soft answer because I wanted something from him. “It’s true I never went to law school.”

“But you’ve been of real assistance in spite of that,” he said reassuringly. “And we’re certainly grateful for your suggestions.”

His eyes went distant on me, and he stood up behind his desk. I stood up, too. I had a nightmare vision of my case moving inexorably away from me.

“Could I possibly have a minute with your prisoner, Mr. D.A.?”

“Which one?”

“Chantry. I want to ask him a couple of questions.”

“He isn’t answering questions. The public defender has advised him not to.”

“The questions I have in mind aren’t connected with these murders, at least not directly.”

“What are they?” Lansing said.

“I want to ask him what his real name is, and get his reaction. And I want to ask him why Mildred Mead tried to kill herself.”

“We don’t really know that she did.”

“I know that she did, and I want to know why.”

“What makes you so sure that Chantry might possess the information?”

“I think he and Mildred are closely connected. Incidentally, I feel sure that Jack Biemeyer will be interested. Biemeyer hired me, you know.”

Lansing said in a voice that seemed to be testing itself for firmness, “If Mr. Biemeyer has any suggestions, or any questions, I think he should communicate them to me directly.”

“I’ll tell him that.”

The Biemeyer house had a deserted look, like a public building that had been emptied by a bomb scare. I got the painting of Mildred Mead out of the trunk of my car and carried it up the flagstone walk to the front door. Just before I got to it, Ruth Biemeyer came out. She put a finger to her lips.

“My husband is very tired. I’ve been trying to get him to rest.”

“I’m afraid I have to talk to him, Mrs. Biemeyer.”

She turned toward the door, but all she did was pull it closed. “You can talk freely to me. I’m really your principal in this case. The picture that was stolen belongs to me. That is my picture that you have there, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t say it was stolen, though. Let’s say Fred borrowed it, for scientific and biographical purposes. He wanted to establish who painted it, and when, and who the subject was. It’s true the answers to these questions had personal meaning for Fred. But that doesn’t make him a criminal exactly.”

She nodded. Her hair shifted in the wind and made her suddenly prettier, as if light had blown into her head.

“I can understand why Fred did what he did.”

“You should be able to. You had your own personal reasons for buying the painting. Mildred Mead had moved to town, and your husband was seeing her again. Didn’t that have something to do with your hanging that picture of her in your house? As a reproach to him, perhaps, or a kind of threat?”