The Blue Hammer (5 page)

“Two half-pints are better.”

^chapter
7

On my way uptown I stopped at the art museum, intending to ask for Fred. But the place was closed for the night.

I drove on up to Olive Street. Darkness had spread like a branching tree across the lawns and yards, and lights were coming on in the old houses. The hospital was a great pierced box of light. I parked near the gabled house where the Johnsons lived and made my way up its broken steps to the front door.

Fred’s father must have been listening on the other side of the door. He spoke before I had a chance to knock: “Who is that?”

“Archer. I was here earlier today, looking for Fred.”

“That’s right. I remember.” He sounded proud of the feat.

“May I come in and talk to you for a minute, Mr. Johnson?”

“Sorry, no can do. My wife locked the door.”

“Where’s the key?”

“Sarah took it with her to the hospital. She’s afraid I’ll go out in the street and get run over. But the fact is I’m completely sober. I’m so sober that it’s making me physically sick. She’s supposed to be a nurse, but little does she care.” His voice was fogged with self-pity.

“Is there any way you can let me in? Through a window, maybe?”

“She’d crucify me.”

“How would she know? I’ve got some whisky with me. Could you use a couple of snorts?”

His tone brightened. “Could I not. But how are you going to get in?”

“I have some keys.”

It was a simple old lock, and the second key that I tried opened it. I closed the door behind me, moving into the cramped hallway with some difficulty. Johnson’s thick body crowded mine. In the light of a dim overhead bulb, I could see that his face was working with excitement.

“You said you had some whisky for me.”

“Hold on for a minute.”

“But I’m sick. You can see that I’m sick.”

I opened one of my half-pint bottles. He drained it in one continuous shuddering swallow, and licked the mouth of the empty bottle.

I felt like a pander. But the strong jolt of whisky didn’t seem to bother him at all. Instead of making him drunker, it seemed to improve his diction and delivery.

“I used to drink Tennessee whisky in my palmy days. I drank Tennessee whisky and rode a Tennessee Walking Horse. That is Tennessee whisky, is it not?”

“You’re right, Mr. Johnson.”

“Just call me Jerry. I know a friend when I see one.” He set down the empty bottle on the first step of the staircase, put his hand on my shoulder, and leaned his weight on it. “I won’t forget this. What did you say your name was?”

“Archer.”

“And what do you do for a living, Mr. Archer?”

“I’m a private investigator.” I opened my wallet and showed Johnson a photostat of my state license. “Some people in town hired me to trace a painting that they lost. It’s a portrait of a woman, probably by a well-known local painter named Richard Chantry. You’ve heard of him, I suppose.”

He scowled with concentration. “I can’t say I have. You should take it up with my son Fred. That’s his department.”

“I already have. Fred took the picture and brought it home.”

“Here?”

“So he told me this afternoon.”

“I don’t believe it. Fred wouldn’t do a thing like that. He’s a good boy, he always has been. He never stole anything in
his life. The people at the art museum trust him. Everybody trusts him.”

I interrupted Johnson’s alcoholic flow of words: “He claims he didn’t steal it. He said he brought it home to make some tests on it.”

“What kind of tests are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure. According to Fred, his idea was to find out how old the picture was. The artist who was supposed to have painted it disappeared a long time ago.”

“Who was that?”

“Richard Chantry.”

“Yeah, I guess I have heard of him. They’ve got a lot of his pictures in the museum.” He rubbed his gray scalp as if to warm his memory. “Isn’t he supposed to be dead?”

“Dead or missing. One way or the other, he’s been gone for twenty-five years. If the paint on the picture is comparatively fresh, he probably didn’t paint it.”

“Sorry, I don’t quite follow that.”

“It doesn’t matter. The point is that Fred brought the picture here, and he says it was stolen from his room last night. Do you know anything about that?”

“Hell, no.” His whole face wrinkled as if old age had fallen on him suddenly. “You think I took it?”

“I don’t mean that at all.”

“I hope not. Fred would kill me if I touched any of his sacred things. I’m not even supposed to go into his room.”

“What I’m trying to find out—did Fred say anything about a painting being stolen from his room last night?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did you see him this morning?”

“I certainly did. I dished up his porridge for him.”

“And he didn’t mention the missing painting?”

“No, sir. Not to me.”

“I’d like to take a look at Fred’s room. Would it be possible?”

The suggestion seemed to frighten him. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.
She
hates to have anybody in her house. She’d even like to get rid of me if she could.”

“Didn’t you say she’s gone to the hospital?”

“That’s right, she went to work.”

“Then how would she know?”

“I don’t know
how
she knows, but she always does. I guess she worms it out of me or something. It’s
hard
on me, hard on my nerves.” He giggled shamefacedly. “You wouldn’t have any more of that Tennessee walking whisky?”

I got out the other half-pint and showed it to him. He reached for it. I held it away from him.

“Let’s go upstairs, Jerry. Then I’ll leave this with you.” I put it back in my pocket.

“I don’t know.”

He glanced up the stairs as if his wife might be there listening. She wasn’t, of course, but her invisible presence seemed to fill the house. Johnson was trembling with fear of her, or with desire for the whisky.

The desire won out. He switched on a light and led me up the stairs. The second floor was in much poorer condition than the first. The ancient paper on the walls was discolored and peeling. The carpetless floor was splintered. A panel was missing from one of the bedroom doors, and had been replaced with the side of a cardboard carton.

I had seen worse houses in the slums and barrios, places that looked as if a full-scale infantry battle had passed through them. The Johnsons’ house was the scene of a less obvious disaster. But it suddenly seemed quite possible to me that the house had hatched a crime; perhaps Fred had stolen the picture in the hope of improving his life.

I felt a certain sympathy for Fred. It would be hard to come back to this house from the Biemeyers’ house, or from the art museum.

Johnson opened the door with the missing panel and switched on a light that hung by a cord from the ceiling.

“This is Fred’s little room.”

It contained an iron single bed covered with a U.S. Army blanket, a bureau, a torn canvas deck chair, a bookcase almost full of books, and in one corner by the blinded window an old kitchen table with various tools arranged on it, hammers and
shears and saws of varying sizes, sewing equipment, pots of glue and paint.

The light over the bed was still swinging back and forth, its reflection climbing the walls alternately. For a moment, I had the feeling that the whole house was rocking on its foundations. I reached up and held the light still. There were pictures on the walls, modern classics like Monet and Modigliani, most of them cheap reproductions that looked as though they had been clipped from magazines. I opened the closet door. It contained a jacket and a couple of shirts on hangers, and a pair of shiny black boots. For a man in his early thirties, Fred had very few possessions.

I went through the bureau drawers, which contained some underwear and handkerchiefs and socks and a high school senior class picture for the year 1961. I couldn’t find Fred in the picture.

“This is him,” Johnson said at my shoulder. He pointed out a teen-age boy’s face that from this distance in time looked touchingly hopeful.

I looked over the books in the bookcase. Most of them were paperbacks on art and culture and technology. There were a few books about psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The only ones I had read myself were
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
and
Gandhi’s Truth
—unusual background reading for a thief, if that’s what Fred was.

I turned to Johnson. “Could someone have gotten into the house and taken the picture from this room?”

He lifted his heavy shoulders and dropped them. “I guess anything is possible. I didn’t hear anybody. But then I generally sleep the sleep of the dead.”

“You didn’t take the picture yourself, Jerry?”

“No, sir.” He shook his head violently. “I know enough not to mess with Fred’s stuff. I may be an old nothing man but I wouldn’t steal from my own boy. He’s the only one of us with any future, in this house.”

“Just the three of you live here—you and Fred and Mrs. Johnson?”

“That’s correct. We had roomers at one time, but that was long ago.”

“Then what happened to the picture Fred brought home?”

Johnson lowered his head and swung it from side to side like a sick old bull. “I never saw the picture. You don’t understand how it is with me. I spent six, seven years after the war in a veterans’ hospital. Most of the time I was in a daze, most of the time I still am. The days go by, and half the time I don’t know what day it is and I don’t want to. I’m a sick man. Now why don’t you leave me alone?”

I left him alone and made a cursory search of the upstairs rooms. Only one other was occupied, a room containing a double bed that Johnson evidently shared with his wife. There was no painting under the mattress, nothing incriminating in the closet or chest of drawers, no evidence of any crime but that of poverty.

One narrow door at the end of the upstairs hallway was closed and padlocked. I stopped in front of it.

Johnson came up behind me. “That goes up to the attic. I don’t have a key for it. Sarah’s always afraid I’ll fall down the stairs. Anyway, there isn’t anything up there. Like me,” he added foolishly, tapping the side of his head. “Nobody home upstairs.”

He gave me a broad idiot smile. I gave him the other half-pint. It was an ugly transaction, and I was glad to leave him. He closed the front door behind me like a trusty shutting himself into his own prison. I locked the door.

^chapter
8

I left my car where it was and walked toward the hospital. I hoped to get some further information about Fred from Mrs. Johnson. The night was almost fully dark, the streetlights scattered sparsely among the trees. On the sidewalk ahead of me I noticed a spillage of oil drops that became more frequent as I moved along.

I dipped my finger in one of the spilled drops and held it up to the light. It had a reddish tinge. It didn’t smell like oil.

On the grass beside the sidewalk ahead of me someone was snoring. It was a man lying face down. I ran to him and got down on my knees beside him. The back of his head was dark and lustrous with blood. I moved him just enough to look at his face. It was bloody, too

He groaned and tried to raise himself in a sad and helpless parody of a push-up, then fell on his face again. I turned his head to one side so that he could breathe more freely.

He opened one eye and said, “Chantry? Leave me alone.”

Then he relapsed into his broken-faced snuffling. I could see that he was very badly hurt. I left him and ran to the emergency entrance of the hospital.

Seven or eight adults and children were waiting inside on collapsible chairs. A harassed young nurse behind a counter was manning it like a barricade.

I said, “There’s an injured man just up the street.”

“So bring him in.”

“I can’t. He needs an ambulance.”

“How far up the street?”

“Next block.”

“There’s no ambulance here. If you want to call one, that’s a public phone in the corner there. Do you have a dime?”

She gave me a number to call. In less than five minutes an ambulance pulled up outside. I got in with the driver and directed him to the bleeding man in the grass.

His snoring was less regular now, and less loud. The ambulance attendant turned a flashlight on him. I took a closer look. He was a man of sixty or so, with a pointed gray beard and a lot of bloody gray hair. He looked like a dying sea lion, and his snoring sounded like a sea lion’s distant barking.

“Do you know him, sir?”

I was thinking that he fitted the liquor-store proprietor’s description of the art dealer Paul Grimes.

I said, “No. I’ve never seen him before.”

The ambulance men lifted him gently onto a stretcher and drove him to the emergency entrance. I rode along and was there when they carried him out. He raised himself on his arms, almost overturning the stretcher, and looked at me from his blind broken glistening face.

He said, “I know you, you bastard.”

He fell back and lay still. The ambulance men rushed him into the hospital. I waited outside for the inevitable police.

They came in an unmarked car, a pair of youngish detective-sergeants wearing light summery clothes and dark wintry faces. One went into the hospital, and the other, a Sergeant Leverett, stayed with me.

“You know the injured man?”

“I never saw him before. I found him on the street.”

“How did you happen to call an ambulance for him?”

“It seemed like the logical thing to do.”

“Why didn’t you call us?”

“I knew somebody would.”

Leverett reddened slightly. “You sound like a smart bastard. Who in hell are you, anyway?”

I swallowed my anger and told him that I was a private detective doing a job for the Biemeyers. Leverett knew the name and it altered his voice and manner.

“May I see your identification?”