The Blue Hammer (31 page)

Mackendrick turned to me. “I don’t understand what makes the picture so important.”

“It seems to be a Chantry, Captain. And Johnson painted it.”

Mackendrick got the message by degrees, like a man becoming aware that he has an illness. He turned and looked at Gerard Johnson and his eyes gradually widened.

Gerard returned the captain’s look in dim fear and dejection. I tried to penetrate the puffed discolored flesh that overlay the original contours of his face. It was hard to imagine that he had ever been handsome, or that the mind behind his dull reddened eyes had created the world of his paintings. It occurred to me that his essential life might have gone into that world and left him empty.

Still there must have been vestiges of his younger self in his face, because Mackendrick said, “You’re Richard Chantry, aren’t you? I recognize you.”

“No. My name is Gerard Johnson.”

That was all he would say. He stood silent while Mackendrick advised him of his rights and put him under arrest.

Fred and Mrs. Johnson were not arrested but Mackendrick asked them to come to the station for questioning. They crowded into his official car under the eyes of a young detective-sergeant who kept his hand on his gun butt.

Betty and I were left standing on the sidewalk in front of the empty house. I put the Biemeyers’ picture in the trunk of my car and opened the front door for her.

She hung back. “Do you know where my car is?”

“Behind the house. Just leave it there for now. I’ll drive you home.”

“I’m not going home. I have to write my story.”

I looked closely into her face. It seemed unnaturally bright, like an electric light that was about to burn out.

“Let’s go for a little walk. I’ve got work to do, too, but it can wait.”

She came along with me under the trees, leaning with carefully controlled lightness on my arm. The old street seemed beautiful and formal in the morning light.

I told her a story that I remembered from childhood. There had been a time, it said, when men and women were closer than twins and shared the same mortal body. I told her that when the two of us came together in my motel room, I felt that close to her. And when she dropped out of sight, I felt the loss of part of myself.

She pressed my arm. “I knew you’d find me.”

We walked slowly around the block, as if we had inherited the morning and were looking for a place to spend it. Later I drove her downtown and we had lunch together at the Tea Kettle. We were contented and grave, like two people performing a ceremony. I could see the life flowing back into her face and body.

I dropped her off at the newspaper office. She ran up the stairs toward her typewriter.

^chapter
40

I went back to the police station. There was a coroner’s wagon in the parking lot, and I ran into Purvis coming out of Mackendrick’s office. The young deputy coroner was flushed with excitement.

“I got a positive identification on those bones.”

“Where?”

“Skyhill Veterans’ Hospital, in the Valley. He was a patient there for several years after the war. His name was Gerard Johnson.”

“Please repeat that.”

“Gerard Johnson. He was badly wounded in the Pacific. They practically had to rebuild him from the ground up. He was released from Skyhill about twenty-five years ago. He was supposed to go back for regular checks on his condition, but he never did. Now we know why.” Purvis drew in a deep satisfied breath. “Incidentally, I have to thank you for helping me with the lead. Remind me to do something for you someday.”

“You can do something for me now.”

Purvis looked slightly startled. “Okay. Just name it.”

“You better write this down.”

He got out an official pad and a ball-point pen. “Shoot.”

I shot, at a distant target. “Gerard Johnson had a friend in the army named William Mead. Mead was murdered in Arizona in the summer of 1943. Sheriff Brotherton of Copper City is familiar with the case. He was the one who found Mead’s body in the desert and shipped it home to California for burial. I’d like to know where it was shipped to, and where it was buried. It might be a good idea to dig it up and examine it.”

Purvis looked up from his pad and squinted into the sun. “Examine it for what?”

“Cause of death. Identity. The works. Also, Mead had a wife. It would help if we could trace her.”

“That’s a big order.”

“It’s a big case.”

I found Mackendrick alone in his office, looking glum and shaken.

“Where’s your prisoner, Captain?”

“The D.A. took him over to the courthouse. Lackner advised him to stand mute. The rest of the family isn’t talking either. I was hoping to wrap this up today.”

“Maybe we still can. Where are Fred and his mother?”

“I had to let them go home. The D.A. didn’t want to bring charges against them, at least not yet. He’s fairly new on the job, and still feeling his way. According to him, all we have against the Johnson woman is that she’s been living with Richard Chantry and passing him off as her husband, which isn’t a felony.”

“It is if she was helping him to cover up a murder.”

“You mean the murder of the real Gerard Johnson?”

“That’s right, Captain. As you know, Purvis has established that the real Johnson was the man in the brown suit whose body was buried in the Chantry greenhouse. It looks as though Chantry murdered Johnson and stole his identity and moved in with Johnson’s wife and son.”

Mackendrick shook his head ponderously and sadly. “That’s what I thought. But I’ve just got through checking Johnson out with the V.A. and the people at Skyhill Hospital. Johnson wasn’t married, and had no son. The whole bloody family is a fake.”

“Including Fred?”

“Including Fred.” Mackendrick must have seen the pain in my face, because he added, “I know you made an emotional investment in Fred. It’ll give you some idea of how I feel about Chantry. I really looked up to that man when I was a young patrolman. The whole town did, even if they never saw him. Now I have to tell them that he’s a half-crazy drunk and a killer into the bargain.”

“You’re absolutely certain that Johnson is Chantry?”

“Absolutely. I knew him personally, remember. I was one of the few who did. He’s changed, of course, changed a hell of a lot. But he’s the same man. I know him, and he knows I know him. But he isn’t admitting anything at all.”

“Have you thought of confronting him with his real wife?”

“Naturally I have. I went to her house to talk to her first thing this morning. She’d already flown the coop, probably for keeps. She’d emptied her safe-deposit box and she was last seen headed south on the freeway.” Mackendrick gave me a grim look. “You’re partly to blame for that, when you took it on yourself to question her prematurely.”

“Maybe. I’m also partly to blame for solving your case.”

“It isn’t solved. Sure, we’ve got Chantry. But there’s a lot left unexplained. Why did he take the name Johnson, the name of the man he killed?”

“To cover up the fact that the real Johnson was missing.”

Mackendrick shook his head. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Neither did the murder of Johnson. But he committed it, and the woman knew it. She used the knowledge to take him over completely. He was virtually a prisoner in that house on Olive Street.”

“But why did she want him?”

I admitted I didn’t know. “There may have been a previous
connection between them. We should look into the possibility.”

“That’s easier said than done. Johnson’s been dead for twenty-five years. The woman isn’t talking. Neither is Chantry.”

“May I have a try at him?”

“It’s out of my hands, Archer. It’s a big case, and the D.A. wants all of it. Chantry’s the most famous man we ever had in this town.” He struck his desk-top with his fist, heavily and repeatedly and slowly, like a dead march. “Jesus, what a comedown that man has had.”

I went out to my car and drove the few blocks to the county courthouse. Its square white clock tower was the tallest structure in the downtown area. Above the giant four-sided clock was an observation platform surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence.

There was a family of tourists on the platform, and a little boy chinned himself on the wrought-iron fence and smiled down at me. I smiled back.

That was just about my last smile of the afternoon. I waited for nearly two hours in the outer reaches of the D.A.’s wing. I finally got to see him, but not to talk to. He went out through the waiting room, a bold-eyed young man with dark sweeping mustaches that seemed to bear him along like the wings of his ambition.

I tried to talk my way in to see one of his assistants. They were all busy. I never got past the outer circle of assistant assistants. I finally gave up and went downstairs to the coroner’s office.

Purvis was still waiting for a return phone call from Copper City. I sat and helped him wait. Toward the end of the afternoon, he got his call.

He took it at his desk and made notes as he listened. I tried to read them over his shoulder but they were indecipherable.

“Well?” I said when he finally hung up.

“The army assumed the responsibility and expense of shipping Mead’s body home from Arizona in 1943. The cadaver was transported in a sealed coffin because it was in bad shape,
unfit for viewing. They buried it in a local cemetery.”

“A local cemetery where?”

“Right here in Santa Teresa,” Purvis said. “This is where Mead lived with his wife. Their address when the army took him was 2136 Los Bagnos Street. She could still be living there, if we’re really lucky.”

As I followed Purvis’s wagon across town into the hospital area, I felt that the thirty-two-year case was completing a long curve back to its source. We drove up Olive Street past the Johnson house, then past the place where I had found Paul Grimes dying.

Los Bagnos Street ran parallel to Olive, a block farther north of the highway. The old stucco house at 2136 had long since been denatured, converted into doctors’ offices. On the east it was overshadowed by a tall new medical complex. But on the west there was a prewar frame house with a cardboard “Room to Let” sign in one of the front windows.

Purvis climbed out of his wagon and rattled the rusty screen door of the house with his fist. An old man answered the knock and peered out at us. The pouched and corded neck thrust up from his collarless shirt seemed to throb with suspicion.

“What is it?”

“My name is Purvis. I’m a deputy coroner.”

“Nobody died here. Not since my wife died, anyway.”

“What about Mr. William Mead? Was he a neighbor of yours?”

“That’s right, he was for a little while. He died, too. That was back during the war. Mead got himself murdered in Arizona. I heard that from his wife. I don’t take the local paper, I never have. All they ever print in it is bad news.” He squinted at us through the screen as if we were carriers of bad news, too. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“You’ve been very helpful,” Purvis said. “Do you happen to know what happened to Mead’s wife?”

“She didn’t go far. She eventually remarried and moved to a house over here on Olive Street. But her luck didn’t change.”

“How do you mean?” Purvis said.

“On her second go-round, she married a drunk. Don’t quote me. And she’s been working ever since to support his drinking habit.”

“Where does she work?”

“In the hospital. She’s a nurse.”

“Is her husband’s name Johnson?”

“That’s right. If you know, why ask?”

^chapter
41

We drove between the dense ranks of the trees that had stood on Olive Street for a century or more. As Purvis and I moved up the walk into the afternoon shadow of the house, I felt the weight of the past like an extra atmosphere constricting my breathing.

The woman who called herself Mrs. Johnson answered the door immediately, as if she had been expecting us. I could feel her somber gaze like a tangible pressure on my face.

“What do you want?”

“May we come in? This is Deputy Coroner Purvis.”

“I know.” She said to Purvis, “I’ve seen you at the hospital. I don’t know what you want to come in for. There’s nobody home but me, and everything’s happened that’s going to happen.” It sounded less like a statement of fact than a dubious hope.

I said, “We want to talk about some of the things that happened in the past. One of them is the death of William Mead.”

She answered without blinking: “I never heard of him.”

“Let me refresh your recollection,” Purvis said quietly and
formally. “According to my information, William Mead was your husband. When he was murdered in Arizona in 1943, his body was shipped back here for burial. Is my information incorrect?”

Her black gaze didn’t waver. “I guess I kind of forgot all that. I always had a pretty good forgettery. And these awful things that I’ve been living through sort of wiped out everything, you know?”

“May we come in and sit down with you,” Purvis said, “and talk about it?”

“I guess so.”

She moved to one side and let us enter the narrow hallway. There was a large worn canvas suitcase standing at the foot of the stairs. I lifted it. It was heavy.

“Leave that alone,” she said.

I set it down again. “Are you planning to leave town?”

“What if I am? I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m still a free agent. I can go where I like, and I might as well. There’s nobody left here but me. My husband’s gone, and Fred’s moving out.”

“Where is Fred going?”

“He won’t even tell me. Off with that girl of his, probably. After all the work I’ve put into this house, twenty-five years of hard work, I end up all alone in it. Alone and without a nickel and owing money. Why shouldn’t I get out?”

I said, “Because you’re under suspicion. Any move you make is likely to trigger your arrest.”

“What am I under suspicion for? I didn’t kill Will Mead. It happened in Arizona. I was nursing here in Santa Teresa at the time. When they told me he was dead, it was the biggest shock of my life. I haven’t got over it yet. I’ll never get over it. And when they buried him out in the cemetery, I wanted to crawl in with him.”