The Blue Hammer

"The girl is. And the picture is the key to the whole bloody case."

Mackendrick leaned heavily forward across his desk. "She's your girl, right?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you're interested in her?"

"Very interested," I said.

"And the picture is the one you were hired to reclaim?"

"I guess so."

"And that makes it the key to the case, right?"

"I didn't say that, Captain. My personal co

"You may not think so. I want you to go into my washroom and take a good look at your face in the mirror. Incidentally, while you're in there, you can use my electric razor. It's in the cabinet behind the mirror. The light switch is to the left inside the door."

I went into the little room and looked at my face. It was drawn and pale. I grimaced to bring it to life but my eyes didn't change. They were at the same time dull and glaring.

I shaved and washed. It made some improvement in my looks. But it didn't touch the anxiety and fatigue that I was carrying inside my head and body.

When I came back into Mackendrick's office, he gave me a hard stare.

"Are you feeling any better?"

"Some."

"How long is it since you've eaten?" I looked at my watch. It was ten to seven. "About nine or ten hours."

"No sleep?"

"No."

"Okay, let's get some breakfast. Joe's opens at seven."

Joe's was a workingman's restaurant whose booths and bar were already filling up with customers. There was a low-key half-kidding kind of hopefulness in the smoky atmosphere, as if the day might turn out to be not so bad after all.

Mackendrick and I sat across from each other in one of the booths. We discussed the case over coffee while we waited for our breakfasts to arrive. I was becoming painfully aware that I hadn't told Mackendrick about my interview with Mrs. Chantry. I was going to have to tell him before he found out for himself, if he hadn't already. I was going to have to tell him very soon. But I put it off until I had fortified myself with some solid food.

Both Mackendrick and I had ham and eggs and fried potatoes and toast. On top of that, he ordered a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream on the side.

When he had eaten it and ordered a fresh cup of coffee, I said, "I went to see Mrs. Chantry last night."

His face hardened, cracking at the corners of the mouth and eyes. "I asked you not to."

"It seemed necessary. We work under different rules, Captain."

"You can say that again."

I had meant that he had to work under special political constraints. He was the iron fist of the city, embodying all its crushing force, but he had to listen to what the city told him to do with it. He seemed to be listening now to the city's multitudinous voices, some of which were speaking in the big smoky room where we sat.

Gradually his face smoothed out and lost its cracked-cement look. His eyes remained impassive.

"What did you find out from Mrs. Chantry?"

I told him in some detail, with special emphasis on the man in the brown suit whose bones Mrs. Chantry and Rico had dug up. By this time, Mackendrick's face was flushed with interest.

"Did she tell you where the man came from?"

"Apparently he'd been in a veterans' hospital."

Mackendrick hit the table once with his hand. The dishes jumped and rattled. Everyone at our end of the restaurant was probably aware of this, but nobody turned to look.

"I wish to hell," he said, "that you'd told me about this earlier. If the man was ever in a veterans' hospital, we should be able to trace him through his bones."

Mackendrick laid three dollar bills on the table and got up and walked out.

I put down my own money and went outside. It was past eight, and the city was coming to life. I walked down the main street, hoping that I would come to life along with it, and ended up at the newspaper building.

She hadn't been seen or heard from.

I walked back to the parking lot and reclaimed my car and drove it down to the waterfront. I was guided by a half-admitted half-unconscious fantasy: if I went back to the room where Betty and I had started, she would be there.

She wasn't. I threw myself down on the bed and tried to turn my mind off. But it was invaded by dreams of the angry dead.

I woke up clear-minded in strong daylight. It was nearly twelve by my watch. I looked out the window at the harbor, sliced into long bright sizzling strips by the partly closed Venetian blinds. A few sailors were taking their boats out in the light noon wind. And my mind released the memory I needed.

When I was in Arizona, Sheriff Brotherton had told me about a soldier whose name was "something like Wilson or Jackson," and who had been a friend of Mildred Mead's murdered son, William. The sheriff had had a postcard from the soldier after the war, sent from a veterans' hospital in California.

I picked up the room phone and placed a call to Sheriff Brotherton's office in Copper City. After a period of waiting, Brotherton himself came on the line.

"I'm glad you caught me, Archer. I was just going out to lunch. How's everything with the little Biemeyer girl? I take it she's home safe with her family."

"She's home. I don't know how safe she is."

"Isn't she safe with her own family?" Brotherton seemed to resent the implication that his rescue of Doris had not been permanent, like an ascent into heaven.

"She's a troubled girl, and she isn't too happy with her father. Speaking of whom, and forgive me if I've asked you this before, did Biemeyer have anything to do with shutting off the investigation of William Mead's death?"

"You have asked me that before. I said I didn't know."

"What are the probabilities?"

"It wouldn't make sense for Biemeyer to do that. He was very close to William Mead's mother at that time. I'm not telling you anything that isn't generally known."

"Did Mildred Mead want the investigation pressed?"

"I don't know whether she did or not. She did her talking to the higher echelons." Brotherton's voice was stiff, on the point of freezing up completely.

"Did Mildred want Richard Chantry brought back from California for questioning?"

"I don't remember that she did. What are you looking for, Archer?"

"I may not know till I see it. But one of the things you told me about the Mead case may be important. You mentioned that an army friend of Mead's came out to Arizona and talked to you about his death."

"That's correct. As a matter of fact, I've been thinking about him. I heard from him after the war, you know. He sent me a postcard from a veterans' hospital in L.A. He wanted to know if there were any further developments in the Mead case. I wrote him back that there weren't."

"Do you remember how he signed his postcard?"

The sheriff hesitated, and then said, "Jackson, I think. Jerry Jackson. His writing wasn't too clear."

"Could the name have been Jerry Johnson?"

The sheriff was silent for a while. I could hear faint voices talking somewhere on the line, like half-forgotten memories coming home to roost.

"It could have been," he said. "The postcard may still be in my files. I hoped that someday I could write and give that poor buddy of Mead's a positive answer. But I never did."

"You may be able to do it yet."

"I keep hoping, anyway."

"Do you have a suspect, Sheriff?"

"Do you?"

"No. But it wasn't my case."

I had touched a nerve. "It wasn't mine either," he said with some bitterness. "It was taken out of my hands."

"Who did that?"

"The powers that be. I'm not naming any names."

"Was Richard Chantry a suspect in his half brother's death?"

"That's no secret. I told you how they hustled Richard out of the state. He never came back, to my knowledge."