The Blue Hammer

"I think I can do that. Mrs. Biemeyer isn't feeling vindictive. In fact, she's a pretty nice woman when you talk to her outside of the family circle."

"It's another one of those families that should write letters once a year," I said. "And forget to mail them. It's really no accident that Fred and Doris got together. Neither of their homes is broken, exactly, but they're both badly bent. So are Fred and Doris."

Lackner wagged his coiffed and bearded head. In the dim clouded moonlight, I felt for a moment that some ancient story was being repeated, that we had all been here before. I couldn't remember exactly what the story was or how it ended. But I felt that the ending somehow depended on me.

I said to Lackner, "Did Fred ever explain to you why he took that picture in the first place?"

"Not in any satisfactory way, no. Has he talked to you about it?"

"He wanted to demonstrate his expertise," I said. "Prove to the Biemeyers that he was good for something. Those were his conscious reasons, anyway."

"What were his unconscious reasons?"

"I don't really know. It would take a panel of psychiatrists to answer that, and they won't tell. But, like a lot of other people in this town, Fred seems to have a fixation on Richard Chantry."

"Do you think the painting was really Chantry's work?"

"Fred thinks so, and he's the expert."

"He doesn't claim to be," Lackner said. "He's just a student."

"Fred's entitled to an opinion, though. And I think it's his opinion that Chantry painted the picture recently, maybe sometime this year."

"How could he know?"

"By the condition of the paint. He says."

"Do you believe that, Mr. Archer?"

"I didn't until tonight. I was pretty well taking it for granted that Richard Chantry was long dead."

"But now you don't."

"Now I don't. I think Chantry is alive and kicking."

"Where?"

"Possibly here in town," I said. "I don't go in much for hunches. But I've got a fu

I was on the verge of telling Lackner about the human remains that Mrs. Chantry and Rico had dug up in her greenhouse. It wasn't public knowledge yet, and it would have been a violation of my basic rule. Never tell anyone more than he needs to know, because he'll tell somebody else.

At this point, Gerard Johnson came out onto the porch and staggered down the uneven steps. He looked like a dead man walking blind, but his eyes or his nose or his alcoholic's radar picked me up and dragged him through the weeds in my direction.

"Are you still here, you bastard?"

"I'm still here, Mr. Johnson."

"Don't 'mister' me. I know how you feel. You treat me with disrespect. You think I'm a stinking old drunk. But I'm here to tell you with my last breath that I'm a better man-right here as I stand, I'm a better man than you ever were and I'm ready to prove it."

I didn't ask him how. I didn't have to. He thrust his right hand into the sagging pocket of his pants and brought it out holding a nickel-plated revolver, the kind cops like to call a "Saturday-night special." I heard the click of the hammer, and dived for Johnson's legs. He went down.

I climbed rapidly up his recumbent body and took the gun away from him. It was empty. My hands were shaking.

Gerard Johnson struggled to his feet and began to shout. He shouted at me and at his wife and son as they came out on the porch. The words he used were mostly scatological. He raised his voice and shouted at his house. He shouted at the houses across the road and down the street.

More lights came on in those houses, but no one appeared at the windows or opened the doors. Perhaps if someone had appeared, Johnson might have felt less lonely.

It was his son, Fred, who took pity on him. Fred came down off the porch and put his arms around Johnson from behind, encircling his laboring chest.

"Please act like a human being, Dad."

Johnson struggled and surged and swore, and gradually left off shouting. Fred's face was wet with tears. The sky tore like a net and the moon swam out.

Suddenly the night had changed its weather. It was higher and brighter and stranger. Holding Johnson around the shoulders, Fred walked him up the steps and into the house. It was a sad and touching thing to see the lost son fathering his father. There was no real hope for Johnson, but there was still hope for Fred. Lackner agreed. I turned the gun over to him before he drove away in his Toyota.

Fred had left the front door open, and after a moment Mrs. Johnson came out and down the steps. Her body moved aimlessly, like a stray animal. The light from the sky silvered her uniform.

"I want to apologize."

"For what?"

"Everything."

She flung out her arm in an awkward sideways gesture, as much a brushing away as an embracing. It seemed to take in the gabled house and everyone and everything in it, her family and the neighbors, and the street, the thick dark olive trees and their darker shadows, the moon that drenched her in its cold light and deeply scored her face.

"Don't apologize to me," I said. "I chose this job, or it chose me. There's a lot of human pain involved in it, but I'm not looking for another job."

"I know what you mean. I'm a nurse. I may be an unemployed nurse by tomorrow. I just had to come home on account of Fred getting out, and I walked off my shift. It's about time I walked back on."

"Can I offer you a lift?"

She gave me a quick suspicious look, as if I might have designs on her heavy middle-aged body. But she said, "You're very kind, sir. Fred left our car someplace in Arizona. I don't know if it's even worth bringing back."

I opened the door for her. She reacted as if this hadn't happened to her for some time.

When we were both in the car, I said, "There's a question I'd like to ask you. You don't have to answer it. But if you do, I don't plan to pass your answer on to anybody."

She stirred in her seat and turned toward me. "Has somebody been bad-mouthing me?"

"About those drugs that were missing at the hospital, do you want to discuss it some more?"

She said, "I admit I took a few sample pills. But I didn't take them for myself, or for any wrong purpose. I wanted to try them out on Gerard, and see if I could get him to cut down on his drinking. I guess they could get me on a technical charge of prescribing medicine without being a doctor. But nearly every nurse I ever knew does that." She gave me an anxious look. "Are they thinking about bringing charges?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Then how did the subject come up?"

"One of the nurses at the hospital mentioned it. She was explaining why you'd been fired."

"That was the excuse they used. But I'll tell you why I was fired. There were people in that institution that didn't like me." We were passing the hospital, and she pointed an accusing finger at the great lighted building. "I may not be the easiest person to get along with. But I am a good nurse, and they had no right to fire me. You had no right to bring it up with them, either."

"I think I had, Mrs. Johnson."

"What gives you the right?"

"I'm investigating a couple of murders, as well as the missing picture. You know that."

"You think I know where the picture is? I don't. Fred doesn't either. We're not thieves. We may have problems in the family, but we're not that kind of people."

"I never said you were. People can change, though, if they get involved with drugs. It gives other people a handle to use on them."

"Nobody's got that kind of a handle on me. I took a few pills, I admit it. I gave them to Gerard. And now I'm paying for it. I'll be spending the rest of my working days in understaffed nursing homes. That is, if I'm lucky enough to hold any job at all."