Текст книги "The Blue Hammer"

Автор книги: Ross MacDonald

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

^chapter

4

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.”

“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.

^chapter

5

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.

“Did you make the butterfly, Doris?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t make things. It was one of the decorations at the dance when I got out of boarding school. It was my mother’s idea to hang it in here. I hate it.” Her soft little voice seemed out of sync with the movements of her mouth. “I don’t feel very well.”

I went down on one knee beside her. “What have you been taking?”

“Just some pills to calm my nerves. They help me meditate.” She began to struggle again with her feet and knees, trying to force them into position. The soles of her feet were dirty.

“What kind of pills?”

“The red ones. Just a couple. The trouble with me is I haven’t eaten, not since sometime yesterday. Fred said he’d bring me something to eat from home, but I guess his mother won’t let him. She doesn’t like me—she wants Fred all to herself.” The girl added in her gentle sibilant voice, “She can go to hell and copulate with spiders.”

“What about your own mother, Doris?”

She let go of her feet. Her legs straightened out in front of her. She pulled her long dress down over them.

“What about her?” she said.

“If you need food or any kind of help, can’t you get it from her?”

She shook her head with sudden startling violence. Her hair streamed over her eyes and mouth. She flung it back in an angry two-handed movement, like someone peeling off a rubber mask.

“I don’t want her kind of help. She wants to take away my freedom—lock me up in a nursing home and throw away the key.” She got up clumsily onto her knees, so that her blue eyes were on a level with mine. “Are you a shrink?”

“Not me.”

“Are you sure? She threatened to turn the shrinks loose on me. I almost wish she would—I could tell them a thing or two.” She nodded vengefully, chopping at the air with her soft chin.

“Like what?”

“Like the only thing they ever did in their lives was fight and argue. They built themselves that great big hideous house and all they ever did was fight in it. When they weren’t giving each other the silent treatment.”

“What were they fighting about?”

“A woman named Mildred—that was one of the things. But the basic thing was they didn’t—they don’t love each other, and they blamed each other for that. Also they blamed me, at least they acted that way. I don’t remember much of what happened when I was a little girl. But one of the things I do remember is their yelling at each other over my head—yelling like crazy giants without any clothes on, with me in between them. And he was sticking out about a foot. She picked me up and took me into the bathroom and locked the door. He broke the door down with his shoulder. He went around with his arm in a sling for a long time after that. And,” she added softly, “I’ve been going around with my mind in a sling.”

“Downers won’t cure that.”

She narrowed her eyes and stuck out her lower lip like a stubborn child on the verge of tears. “Nobody asked you for your advice. You are a shrink, aren’t you?” She sniffed. “I can smell the dirt on you, from people’s dirty secrets.”

I produced what felt from the inside like a lopsided smile. The girl was young and foolish, perhaps a little addled, by her own admission drugged. But she was young, and had clean hair. I hated to smell dirty to her.

I stood up and lightly hit my head on the paper butterfly. I went to the screen door and looked out across the balcony. Through the narrow gap between two apartment buildings I could see a strip of bright sea. A trimaran crossed it, running before a light wind.

The room seemed dim when I turned back to it, a transparent cube of shadow full of obscure life. The paper butterfly seemed to move in some sort of actual flight. The girl rose and stood swaying under it.

“Did my mother send you here?”

“Not exactly. I’ve talked to your mother.”

“And I suppose she told you all the terrible things I’ve done. What a rotten egg I am. What a rotten ego.” She giggled nervously.

“No. She is worried about you, though.”

“About me and Fred?”

“I think so.”

She nodded, and her head stayed down. “I’m worried about us, too, but not for the same reason. She thinks that Fred and I are lovers or something. But I don’t seem to be able to relate to people. The closer I get to them, the colder I feel.”

“Why?”

“They scare me. When he—when my father broke down the bathroom door, I climbed into the laundry hamper and pulled the lid down on top of me. I’ll never forget the feeling it gave me, like I was dead and buried and safe forever.”

“Safe?”

“They can’t kill you after you’re dead.”

“What are you so afraid of, Doris?”

She looked up at me from under her light brows. “People.”

“Do you feel that way about Fred?”

“No, I’m not afraid of him. He makes me terribly mad sometimes. He makes me want to—” She bit off the sentence. I could hear her teeth grind together.

“Makes you want to what?”

She hesitated, her face taut, listening to the secret life behind it. “Kill him, I was going to say. But I didn’t really mean it. Anyway, what would be the use? Poor old Fred is dead and buried already, the way I am.”

I felt an angry desire to disagree, to tell her that she was too pretty and young to be talking in that way. But she was a witness, and it was best not to argue with her.

“What happened to Fred?”

“A lot of things. He comes from a poor family and it took him half his life just to get where he is now, which is practically nowhere. His mother’s some kind of a nurse, but she’s fixated on her husband. He was crippled in the war and doesn’t do much of anything. Fred was meant to be an artist or something like that, but I’m afraid he’s never going to make it.”

“Has Fred been in trouble?”

Her face closed. “I didn’t say that.”

“I thought you implied it.”

“Maybe I did. Everybody’s been in some kind of trouble.”

“What kind has Fred been in?”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you. You’d go back to my mother with it.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would.”

“You care about Fred, don’t you?”

“I’ve got a right to care about somebody in this world. He’s a nice boy—a nice man.”

“Sure he is. Did the nice man steal the nice picture from your nice parents?”

“You don’t have to get sarcastic.”

“But I do sometimes. It comes from everybody being so nice. You haven’t answered my question, Doris. Did Fred steal the picture?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t stolen.”

“You mean it climbed down off the wall and walked away?”

“No. I don’t mean that.” Tears overflowed her eyes and ran down her face. “I took it.”

“Why?”

“Fred told me—Fred asked me to.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“He had a good reason.”

“What reason?”

“He told me not to tell anybody.”

“Did Fred keep the picture?”

“I guess he did. He hasn’t brought it back yet.”

“Did he say he was going to bring it back?”

“Yes, and he will, too. He wanted to make an examination of it, he said.”

“An examination for what?”

“To see if it was genuine.”

“Did he think it was a fake?”

“He wanted to find out.”

“Did he have to steal it to do that?”

“He didn’t steal it. I let him take it. And you’re not very nice.”

^chapter

6

I was beginning to agree with her. I left her and walked down the stairs and out to my car. For over an hour, while the afternoon shadows of the buildings lengthened across me, I sat and watched the main entrance of the Sherbourne.

There was a natureburger place in a geodesic dome up the block, and now and then the uncertain wind brought me the smell of food. Eventually I went and had a nature-burger. The atmosphere in the place was dim and inert. The bearded young customers made me think of early cave men waiting for the ice age to end.

I was back in my car when Fred Johnson finally came. He parked his blue Ford directly behind me and looked up and down the street. He went into the Sherbourne and took the elevator up. I took the stairs, fast. We met in the third-floor hallway. He was wearing a green suit and a wide yellow tie.

He tried to retreat into the elevator, but its door closed in his face and it started down. He turned to face me. He was pale and wide-eyed.

“What do you want?”

“The picture you took from the Biemeyers.”

“What picture?”

“You know what picture. The Chantry.”

“I didn’t take it.”

“Maybe not. But it came into your hands.”

He looked past me down the hall toward the girl’s room. “Did Doris tell you that?”

“We could leave Doris out of this. She’s in enough trouble now, with her parents and with herself.”

He nodded as if he understood and agreed. But his eyes had a separate life of their own, and were searching for a way out. He looked to me like one of those tired boys who go from youth to middle age without passing through manhood.

“Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m a private detective.” I told him my name. “The Biemeyers hired me to reclaim their picture. Where is it, Fred?”

“I don’t know.”

He wagged his head despondently. As if I had taken hold of his head and squeezed it with my hands, clear drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“What happened to it, Fred?”

“I took it home, I admit that. I had no intention of stealing it. I only wanted to study it.”

“When did you take it home?”

“Yesterday.”

“Where is it now?”

“I don’t know. Honestly. Somebody must have stolen it from my room.”

“From the house on Olive Street?”

“Yes, sir. Somebody broke into the house and stole it while I was sleeping. It was there when I went to bed and when I woke up it was gone.”

“You must be a heavy sleeper.”

“I guess I am.”

“Or a heavy liar.”

His slender body was shaken by a flurry of shame or anger. I thought he was going to take a swing at me, and I set myself for that. But he made a dash for the stairs. I was too slow to head him off. By the time I got down to the street, he was driving away in his old blue Ford.

I bought a natureburger in a paper bag and took the elevator back up to the third floor. Doris let me into her apartment, looking disappointed that it was me.

I handed her the sandwich. “Here’s something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry. Fred promised to bring me something, anyway.”

“You better eat that. Fred may not be coming today.”

“But he said he would.”

“He may be in trouble, Doris, about that picture.”

Her hand closed, squeezing the sandwich in the bag. “Are my parents trying to get him?”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly.”

“You don’t know my parents. They’ll make him lose his job at the museum. He’ll never become a college graduate. And all because he tried to do them a favor.”

“I don’t quite follow that.”

She nodded her head emphatically. “He was trying to authenticate their painting. He wanted to examine the paint for age. If it was fresh paint, it would probably mean that it wasn’t genuine.”

“Wasn’t a genuine Chantry?”

“That’s correct. Fred thought when he first looked at it that it wasn’t genuine. At least he wasn’t sure. And he doesn’t trust the man my parents bought it from.”

“Grimes?”

“That’s right. Fred said he has a bad reputation in art circles.”

I wondered what kind of a reputation Fred was going to have, now that the picture had been stolen. But there was no use worrying the girl about it. The meaning of her face was still as diffuse as a cloud. I left her with her dilapidated sandwich and drove back down along the freeway to the lower town.

The door of Paul Grimes’s shop was locked. I knocked and got no answer. I rattled the knob and raised my voice. No answer. Peering into the dim interior, I could see nothing but emptiness and shadows.

I went into the liquor store and asked the black man if he had seen Paola.

“She was out in front an hour or so ago, loading some pictures into her van. As a matter of fact, I helped her.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“Framed pictures. Weird junk, gobs of color. I like a picture to look like something real. No wonder they couldn’t sell ’em.”

“How do you know they couldn’t sell ’em?”

“It stands to reason. She said they were giving up on the shop.”

“Was Paul Grimes with her—the man with the beard?”

“Nope, he didn’t show. I haven’t seen him since I saw you.”

“Did Paola say where she was going?”

“I didn’t ask. She took off in the direction of Montevista.” He pointed southwest with his thumb.

“What kind of a van is she driving?”

“Old yellow Volkswagen. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“No. I wanted to talk to her about a picture.”

“To buy?”

“Maybe.”

He looked at me incredulously. “you like that kind of stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“Too bad. If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.”

“They might. Will you sell me two half-pints of Tennessee whisky?”

“Why not a whole pint? It’s cheaper that way.”

“Two half-pints are better.”