Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“He’ll be sick.” She looked sick herself.

They were getting nowhere, and I cut in: “When did you see it last?”

Silliman answered me. “Yesterday afternoon, about five-thirty. I showed it to a visitor just before we closed. We check the visitors very closely from the office, since we have no guards.”

“Who was the visitor?”

“A lady – an elderly lady from Pasadena. She’s above suspicion, of course. I escorted her out myself, and she was the last one in, I know for a fact.”

“Aren’t you forgetting Hugh?”

“By George, I was. He was here until eight last night. But you surely don’t suggest that Western took it? He’s our resident painter, he’s devoted to the gallery.”

“He might have been careless. If he was working on the mezzanine and left the door unlocked–”

“He always kept it locked,” Alice said coldly. “Hugh isn’t careless about the things that matter.”

“Is there another entrance?”

“No,” Silliman said. “The building was planned for security. There’s only one window in my office, and it’s heavily barred. We do have an air-conditioning system, but the inlets are much too small for anyone to get through.”

“Let’s have a look at the window.”

The old man was too upset to question my authority. He led me through a storeroom stacked with old gilt-framed pictures whose painters deserved to be hung, if the pictures didn’t. The single casement in the office was shut and bolted behind a Venetian blind. I pulled the cord and peered out through the dusty glass. The vertical bars outside the window were no more than three inches apart. None of them looked as if it had been tampered with. Across the alley, I could see a few tourists obliviously eating breakfast behind the restaurant hedge.

Silliman was leaning on the desk, one hand on the cradle phone. Indecision was twisting his face out of shape. “I do hate to call the police in a matter like this. I suppose I must, though, mustn’t I?”

Alice covered his hand with hers, the line of her back a taut curve across the desk. “Hadn’t you better talk to Father first? He was here with Hugh last night – I should have remembered before. It’s barely possible he took the Chardin home with him.”

“Really? You really think so?” Silliman let go of the telephone and clasped his hands hopefully under his chin.

“It wouldn’t be like Father to do that without letting you know. But the month is nearly up, isn’t it?”

“Three more days.” His hand returned to the phone. “Is the Admiral at home?”

“He’ll be down at the club by now. Do you have your car?”

“Not this morning.”

I made one of my famous quick decisions, the kind you wake up in the middle of the night reconsidering five years later. San Francisco could wait. My curiosity was touched, and something deeper than curiosity. Something of the responsibility I’d felt for Hugh in the Philippines, when I was the practical one and he was the evergreen adolescent who thought the jungle was as safe as a scene by Le Douanier Rousseau. Though we were nearly the same age, I’d felt like his elder brother. I still did.

“My car’s around the corner,” I said. “I’ll be glad to drive you.”

The San Marcos Beach Club was a long low building painted an unobtrusive green and standing well back from the road. Everything about it was unobtrusive, including the private policeman who stood inside the plate-glass doors and watched us come up the walk.

“Looking for the Admiral, Miss Turner? I think he’s up on the north deck.”

We crossed a tiled lanai shaded with potted palms, and climbed a flight of stairs to a sun deck lined with cabanas. I could see the mountains that walled the city off from the desert in the northeast, and the sea below with its waves glinting like blue fish scales. The swimming pool on the lee side of the deck was still and clear.

Admiral Turner was taking the sun in a canvas chair. He stood up when he saw us, a big old man in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. Sun and wind had reddened his face and crinkled the flesh around his eyes. Age had slackened his body, but there was nothing aged or infirm about his voice. It still held the brazen echo of command.

“What’s this, Alice? I thought you were at work.”

“We came to ask you a question, Admiral.” Silliman hesitated, coughing behind his hand. He looked at Alice.

“Speak out, man. Why is everybody looking so green around the gills?”

Silliman forced the words out: “Did you take the Chardin home with you last night?”

“I did not. Is it gone?”

“It’s missing from the gallery,” Alice said. She held herself uncertainly, as though the old man frightened her a little. “We thought you might have taken it.”

“Me take it? That’s absurd! Absolutely absurd and preposterous!” The short white hair bristled on his head. “When was it taken?”

“We don’t know. It was gone when we opened the gallery. We discovered it just now.”

“God damn it, what goes on?” He glared at her and then he glared at me, from eyes like round blue gun muzzles. “And who the hell are you?”

He was only a retired admiral, and I’d been out of uniform for years, but he gave me a qualm. Alice put in:

“A friend of Hugh’s, Father. Mr. Archer.”

He didn’t offer his hand. I looked away. A woman in a white bathing suit was poised on the ten-foot board at the end of the pool. She took three quick steps and a bounce. Her body hung jack-knifed in the air, straightened and dropped, cut the water with hardly a splash.

“Where is Hugh?” the Admiral said petulantly. “If this is some of his carelessness, I’ll ream the bastard.”

“Father!”

“Don’t father me. Where is he, Allie? You ought to know if anyone does.”

“But I don’t.” She added in a small voice: “He’s been gone all night.”

“He has?” The old man sat down suddenly, as if his legs were too weak to bear the weight of his feelings. “He didn’t say anything to me about going away.”

The woman in the white bathing suit came up the steps behind him. “Who’s gone away?” she said.

The Admiral craned his wattled neck to look at her. She was worth the effort from anyone, though she wouldn’t see thirty again. Her dripping body was tanned and disciplined, full in the right places and narrow in others. I didn’t remember her face, but her shape seemed familiar. Silliman introduced her as Admiral Turner’s wife. When she pulled off her rubber cap, her red hair flared like a minor conflagration.

“You won’t believe what they’ve been telling me, Sarah. My Chardin’s been stolen.”

“Which one?”

“I’ve only the one. The ‘Apple on a Table.’ ”

She turned on Silliman like a pouncing cat. “Is it insured?”

“For twenty-five thousand dollars. But I’m afraid it’s irreplaceable.”

“And who’s gone away?”

“Hugh has,” Alice said. “Of course it’s nothing to do with the picture.”

“You’re sure?” She turned to her husband with an intensity that made her almost ungainly. “Hugh was at the gallery when you dropped in there last night. You told me so yourself. And hasn’t he been trying to buy the Chardin?”

“I don’t believe it,” Alice said flatly. “He didn’t have the money.”

“I know that perfectly well. He was acting as agent for someone. Wasn’t he, Johnston?”

“Yes,” the old man admitted. “He wouldn’t tell me who his principal was, which is one of the reasons I wouldn’t listen to the offer. Still, it’s foolish to jump to conclusions about Hugh. I was with him when he left the gallery, and I know for a fact he didn’t have the Chardin. It was the last thing I looked at.”