The Blue Hammer

"Hardly. But I do have one of his recent paintings in the trunk of my car. And I'm not the only one who thinks that it's a Chantry."

"Are you talking about the painting of Mildred Mead?"

"Yes. I found it this morning in Johnson's attic, where it originated. Where the whole current case originated. That picture seems to be the central thing in the case. Certainly it brought me into it. And it was the painting of it that got Chantry into his present trouble and led him to commit these new murders."

"I don't quite follow that," Francine Chantry said. But she sounded interested, as if this talk of her husband's work had acted on her like a stimulant.

"It's a fairly complex chain of events," I said. "The woman he's been living with on Olive Street-call her Mrs. Johnson-sold the painting to the artist-dealer Jacob Whitmore. That blew Chantry's cover. Whitmore sold the painting to Paul Grimes, and that blew it wider.

"Grimes recognized it as Chantry's work and evidently used the knowledge to blackmail Mrs. Johnson into stealing drugs for him. And he probably demanded more new pictures from Chantry. Grimes had sold the picture of Mildred Mead to Ruth Biemeyer, who had her own reasons for being interested in Mildred. As you probably know, Mildred was Jack Biemeyer's mistress."

"Everybody in Arizona knew it," Francine Chantry said. "What wasn't so generally known was that Ruth Biemeyer had a crush on Richard when they were both young. I think that's the essential reason why she talked Jack into moving to Santa Teresa."

"That's what he says, anyway. It made for a tight family situation which was made still tighter when Mildred Mead came to town. I think Chantry may have seen Mildred some time in the last few months and been moved to paint that memory picture of her."

"I wouldn't know."

"Haven't you seen him recently?"

"No. Certainly not." She didn't look at me. She was peering through the windshield into the broken darkness. "I haven't seen Richard, or heard from him, in twenty-five years. I had no idea that he was living in town."

"Not even when you got a phone call from the woman he was living with?"

"She didn't mention him. She said something about the-the burial in the greenhouse, and she let me know that she needed money. She said if I would help her out she'd go on keeping the whole thing quiet. Otherwise she'd tell the world the real reason for my husband's disappearance."

"Did you give her money?"

"No. I wish now I had. And I very much wish he had never painted that memory portrait of Mildred. You'd almost think he was trying to be found out."

"Perhaps he was, unconsciously," I said. "Certainly Fred was doing his best to find him out. No doubt Fred borrowed the painting from the Biemeyers partly for professional reasons. He wanted to establish whether it really could be a Chantry. But he had personal reasons, too. I think he may have co

Betty tapped the horn. We were moving down the long inland slope behind Camarillo. There were no cars immediately ahead of us. I looked at her and she looked back. She raised her right hand from the wheel and touched her mouth. I got the message. I had talked more than enough, and I subsided.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Chantry said, "It wasn't his first memory picture of Mildred. He painted several others, long ago, in our days together. One of them was a pieta."

She was silent for a long time, until we were on the outskirts of Santa Teresa. Then I heard her crying softly. There was no way to tell if she was crying for Chantry or herself, or perhaps for the long-dead partnership that had held their young lives together and spawned his work. When I looked sideways at her face, I could see the bright tears on it.

"Where do we go from here?" Betty said.

"The police station."

Francine Chantry let out a cry that subsided into a groan. "Can't I even spend the night in my own house?"

"You can go back there and pack a bag if you want to. Then I think you should go to the police, with your lawyer."

Much later, in the pre-dawn chill, I woke in a dark bed. I could feel Betty's heart and hear her breathing like the quiet susurrus of a summer ocean.

A harsher bedroom scene came into my mind. I had last seen Francine Chantry in a hospital room with specially screened windows and an armed guard outside the door. And just outside the half-open door of my partly sleeping mind another woman seemed to be waiting, a short lame white-haired woman who had been beautiful.

The word "pietà" came back into my mind. I woke Betty up with my hand on the curve of her hip. She sighed and turned over.

"Lew?"

"What's a pietà?"

She yawned deeply. "You ask the darnedest questions at the darnedest times."

"Does that mean you don't know?"

"Of course I know what a pietà is. It's a traditional picture of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of her son. Why?"

"Francine Chantry said her husband painted one of Mildred Mead. I assume she was Mary."

"Yes. I've seen the picture. They have it in the local gallery, but they don't exhibit it publicly. It's slightly embarrassing, or so some people think. Chantry painted the dead man as a self-portrait."

Betty yawned and went to sleep again. I lay awake and watched her face emerging in the slow dawn. After a while I could see the steady blue pulse in her temple, the beating of the silent hammer that meant that she was alive. I hoped that the blue hammer would never stop.

XLIII

When I woke up a second time, Betty had gone out. She had left four things for me on the kitchenette table: a carton of granola, a bottle of milk, a safety razor, and a cryptic note, which said: "Had fu

I ate my breakfast food and drove across town to Magnolia Court. Mildred Mead failed to answer my repeated knocking on her door. An old man came out of the next cottage and looked me over from the distance of a generation. Eventually he volunteered the information that Mrs. Mead, as he called her, had gone out.

"Do you know where she went?"

"She told the taxi-driver to take her to the courthouse."

I followed Mildred there, but she wasn't easy to find. The courthouse and its landscaped grounds occupied a city block. I soon decided that I was wasting my time walking up and down its graveled paths and tiled corridors looking for a small old limping woman.

I checked in at the coroner's suite of offices and found Henry Purvis there. Mildred had come to his office within the past half-hour.

"What did she want from you?"

"Information about William Mead. He was her natural son, apparently. I told her he was buried in the Santa Teresa cemetery, and I offered to take her out to visit his grave. She didn't seem interested in that. She got off on the subject of Richard Chantry. She claimed she had been his model at one time, and she wanted to get in to see him. I told her it simply wasn't possible."

"Where is Chantry being held?"

"District Attorney Lansing has him here in a special cell with round-the-clock guards. I couldn't even get in there myself-not that I particularly want to. Apparently he's gone completely off the rails. They have to sedate him to keep him quiet."

"What happened to Mildred?"

"She walked out. I sort of hated to let her go. She seemed pretty upset, and she'd been drinking. But I had no reason to hold her."